The Kennedy Detail - Kelly's Review

 

The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin

– By William Kelly (Billkelly3@gmail.com)

The Kennedy Detail – JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence by Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin and a foreword by Clint Hill (Gallery/Simon & Schuster, 2010, 427 p.).

Gerald Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail (TKD) is a significant and insightful account of some of the men who were entrusted with the sacred responsibility of protecting the life of the President and failed. They failed to protect the President, failed to determine the truth as to what happened in Dallas, and now they fail to exonerate themselves and their agency for their dereliction of duty and the perversion of the truth.

The Kennedy Detail is an important new book because it’s an insider’s account of the activities of the Kennedy administration, reveals some Secret Service protocols, provides evidence of conspiracy and details how and why those agents failed to protect Kennedy. It does so while at the same time “CTA,” as former Agent Abraham Bolden puts it - covers their ass.

It is from a study of the Secret Service protocols and activities that we come to an understanding of how the assassination was allowed to occur, and from the personal interactions between the Kennedy family and the men who failed to protect his life, why it was allowed to happen.

Apparently the manuscript was not officially previewed and approved by the government censors since the book reveals Protective Research Section (PRS) protocols (See: PRS & DPD), previously unknown names behind the Secret Service codes for radio communications (1), rejects the official Warren Commission conclusion regarding the Single-Bullet-Theory (2), promotes convincing evidence of a shot from the front (3), and reveals that Agent Blaine kept copies of the advance reports that were supposed to have been intentionally destroyed and no longer exist. (4)

What I want to know is how come these issues don’t get any headlines in the mainstream media?

Instead we get the spin on how the President ordered the agents off the bumper of the limo, thus blaming the victim for his own murder (5), and Agent Blaine’s acknowledgement that he almost accidentally shot LBJ at his DC residence on the night of the assassination (6), both of which are non-issues, but the only ones that have thus far made news headlines. (7)

I would think that the agents bucking the official party line on the “Single-Bullet-Theory,” saying there is evidence of a shot from the front (“fist sized hole in back of head”), and being in possession of official records thought to have been destroyed would make much better headlines.

Some of these issues are also dealt with in the Discovery Channel documentary based on this book (8), as well as an hour long discussion Gerald Blaine, Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin had with Gary Mack at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas which was taped and aired on CSPAN, and where my suspicion that the manuscript was not previewed by the government was confirmed. (9)

But The Kennedy Detail isn’t just about the assassination of the President, it also gives a good, overall, general impression of what it was like to protect, or at least try to protect a popular president who had also irritated the most radical right wing conservatives in the country –extremists who physically threatened him, and eventually killed him, so they didn’t have an easy job.

This isn’t the first time agents have “broken their silence” and talked, as many agents talked to Vince Palamara and a few talked to Seymour Hersh and revealed how some of his bodyguards deeply despised JFK.

This book however, in its pronounced fondness for the president and his family, is in stark contrast to the Dark Side of Camelot, in which Hersh convinced four members of the Secret Service Kennedy detail to “break their silence” and reveal some of the more trashy details of Kennedy’s extra-marital dalliances, as well as their personal distain for him. (10)

So this book isn’t the first insider’s account, but it is a good addition to what is already on the public record. This book was written and published in response to three other conspiracy books that have been written about the Secret Service and the assassination, one by former SS agents Abraham Bolden’s Dealey Plaza Echoes (11), Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt (12), and From A Window With A High Powered Rifle, by former FBI agent Don Adams.

While The Kennedy Detail still maintains the fantasy that the assassination was the work of one lone, deranged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald is hardly mentioned, and is simply dismissed as fitting “the classic profile of an assassin driven by a fanatical desire for recognition,” which is clearly contradicted by the fact that Oswald denied having killed anyone. So much for the “fanatical desire for recognition.” (13)

The whole idea that the institution of the Secret Service continues to officially proclaim that the President was murdered by a lone deranged gunman, yet fail to show how Lee Harvey Oswald was psychotic, cuts to the heart of the problem, and that political assassination will remain a serious national security threat until it is recognized that their accused assassin was actually the Patsy, and that the assassination was a political act to eliminate Kennedy by killing him. That those actually responsible for the crime got away with it and escaped justice is now a sidebar to the fact that it has yet to be determined exactly how the assassination actually transpired.

If elimination was the motive for the murder at Dealey Plaza, the murder can be understood, not in following the alleged assassin, but from a study and analysis of the victim. (14)

In such elimination murders, crime scene investigators know that the killer is just a pawn who is removed from the actual sponsors of the killing by layers of “buffers,” as Joe Valachi called them, or “cut-outs,” as they are referred to by intelligence officers. Therefore, it is from a study of President Kennedy, and not Oswald the Patsy, that we discover who killed him.

Since the assassination must be viewed as part of an overall Big Picture that also includes the entire Kennedy administration, The Kennedy Detail is valuable because it encompasses it all, at least in part, and provides some colorful details of the presidential trips, including descriptions of visits to Berlin, Ireland, Italy, India and Mexico City.

Domestically, the Kennedy family spent much of its time, not only at the White House, but at Glenn Ora and Wexford, the rural weekend retreats in Middleburg, Virginia, in Palm Springs, where JFK went to play golf with the boys, Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family maintained a bayside home, and New York City, where Kennedy had a permanent residence at the Carlyle Hotel. Each destination had unique security considerations and each gave them different challenges, most successfully met, but it is the one failure for which they will be remembered.

DALLAS AND TAMPA ADVANCE REPORTS

As this book intimidates, the presidential trips planned for Chicago and Tampa earlier in November, 1963 were somehow connected to the assassination in Dallas. These were trips that were so significant and sensitive that the advance reports had to be officially destroyed by the Secret Service after the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) requested them. These are the same reports that Blaine now says he saved and still has in his possession. (15) The National Archives and Records Administration should recover them and make them available to the public as the JFK Act requires.

Since this book isn’t written in the first person, quoting the agents as their own personal narrative, it is apparent that Blaine, Hill and fellow agents told their stories to Lisa McCubbin, and she wrote the book, lacing it with assassination records released under the JFK Act. And it is to McCubbin’s credit that the book is easy to read, though it is filtered through her reporting.

Although most of what Abraham Bolden had said about the Chicago and Tampa plots to kill Kennedy has been independently confirmed (See: Jim Douglas, JFK & the Unspeakable), Blaine has a bug up his butt about Bolden, and in order to refute him, pulls out the missing and reputedly destroyed advance reports that no one else has seen.

As McCubbin puts it, “It had been a long time, but Blaine was compelled to pull out his files to make sure his memory was serving him correctly. Like any good investigator, he had kept all his personal reports for all these years. Every time they moved to a new house, with his various jobs, (his wife) Joyce had asked him why couldn’t he throw all that stuff away, but he’d insisted the boxes of files were important. He found the box from 1963 and started going through it. It was all there. Pages and pages of information that refuted all the claims this guy (former Agent Abraham Bolden) was making. He was holding in his hands the Tampa advance report that had supposedly been destroyed.”(16)

The National Archives and Records Administration and those responsible for the JFK Assassination Records Collection should be interested in knowing that Blaine has the advance reports for Chicago and Tampa that the Secret Service claims were intentionally destroyed after the ARRB requested them. And while Blaine claims these records refute the contentions of former agent Abraham Bolden that there were significant connections between the Chicago and Tampa trips and what happened in Dallas, those records should be released to the public so we can make up our own minds about what they say.

While the official records are important, it is from the personal recollections and anecdotes that make The Kennedy Detail fascinating. The book is chock full of such interesting stories about the personal interactions between the agents and the Kennedy family. For instance, there’s the time JFK beaned Blaine on the head with a golf ball [p.89]. Then the day at Hyannis Port when Kennedy sent his escort agents out sailing, knowing they would flip over and get drenched. And totally fascinating is the home movie Jackie made of the president’s assassination, complete with Secret Service agents jumping out of the car to chase the assassin, an eerie premonition of what was to come.(17)

But the two stories that seem to be getting the most attention concern whether Kennedy ordered the agents off the bumper and the time Blaine almost accidentally shot LBJ at the Elms - LBJ’s DC residence, on the evening of the assassination. From these two incidents – the president’s request for agents to stay off the bumper, and the security at the Elms, we can see the relationship between the orders given and how they were carried out.

IVY LEAGUE CHARLATINS

As related in William Manchester’s book The Death of the President, Agent Blaine claims that he was told by the head of the White House Detail, Special Agent In Charge (SAIC) Jerry Behn, that while in Tampa four days before the assassination, the president told Behn “To keep Ivy League Charlatans off the bumper, back there.” (18)

To Behn, this was taken as a request they didn’t officially enter into any report, but orally passed along (over the radio) to other agents, such as Blaine and Hill, which resulted in the agents being ordered off the bumper of the presidential limo for the Dallas motorcade from Love Field to Dealey Plaza. The order given and the result being a dead president.

Then in the hours after the assassination we hear on the extant Air Force One radio transmissions, an order from Air Force One to the White House for a new secure telephone circuit to be put in LBJ’s private residence, the Elms, where the new president will spend the night. And it is Blaine at the other end of the order who is assigned to go to the Elms and secure the premises while the WHCA puts in the secure telephone lines. (19)

One of the most useful aspects of The Kennedy Detail is the appendix, which includes the radio codes names for most of the major players (ie. JFK is Lancer and Behn is Duplex), as well as the scenes of the crimes – AF1 (Angel), Andrews AFB (Acrobat) , the White House (Crown) and the Elms (Valley), which helps us decode and make sense of the Air Force One radio conversations and transcripts that we have. [See: Transcript and link to audio at Mary Ferrell Achives.]

INCIDENT AT THE ELMS

Blaine also explains the levels of security that were set up at the Elms, with the DC Police setting the first line of defense on the street, then a military presences with a National Guard unit stationed around the perimeters of the property, while the Secret Service were responsible for the house itself. (20) According to Blaine they set four men at each corner of the residence and they rotated clockwise every half hour in order to keep sharp. This is in contrast to the White House Oval Office door guard duty, which Blaine recounts as very boring, instigating the responsible agents to spend their time counting the floor tiles.

So when the new President approaches Blaine from an unexpected direction, apparently walking around his spacious backyard, Blaine almost shoots him with his cocked and ready Thompson submachine gun. Although Blaine doesn’t speculate, one wonders where the President was coming from? I’d like to know who his neighbors were and if he was visiting a confidential confidant, as he occasionally visited his former neighbor J.E. Hoover before he moved to the Elms.

THE MONDAY MORNING MEETING

Then it does seems odd, in the circumstances that Blaine puts it, that shortly after the President has been assassinated and he almost accidentally kills the new president for sneaking up on him in the dark, Blaine is called to the office of the director on Monday morning. It’s the day of the funeral, and he expects the worse, a dressing down for the machine gun incident at the Elms. But when he gets there, he is surprised to find all of the top Secret Service officials there – except Kellerman, the agent responsible for Dallas. And the topic isn’t about him almost shooting LBJ with the machine gun at the Elms. Instead, it’s about the Tampa trip and JFK’s “Ivy League Charlatans” remark for the Secret Service to back off the bumper.

One wonders whether or not there are official records, minutes or reports of this meeting, because it sure sounds fascinating. (21)

Although played out of proportion in the mainstream press, the subject of the agents on the bumper was a rather odd topic to be discussing on the day of the funeral, rather than the more substantive issues like how the President was killed, who did it and why.

It is highly unlikely the top brass of the Secret Service would hold such a meeting just to discuss the “Ivy League Charlatans” and the agents on the bumper issue. They must have made a lot of important, strategic decisions at that meeting, including whether or not they were to accept the guilt of the now dead chief suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, and whether or not he was to be considered as part of a Cuban Commie conspiracy or branded a Lone Nut Case.

The implications of JFK ordering them off the bumper may be a good excuse as to why they failed in their responsibility, and CTA - Cover Their Ass, but it doesn’t answer the question of how and why JFK was not protected from being shot in the head by a sniper with a high powered rifle. Did JFK also tell them not to bother checking the open windows in the buildings on the parade route so he would be a sitting duck for such snipers?

You would think that they would be especially on guard for a sniper attack since the Walker shooter was still on the loose, the Chicago plot entailed a sniper and as detailed in Don Adams’ book, an FBI informant had reported that a right wing extremist (Milteer) had said the president would be killed by a sniper from a high rise building. Then there were the two kids who had been found with a rifle in an office building overlooking where the President would speak in Fort Worth that morning, and JFK’s acknowledgement to both his personal aides and Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, that if someone wanted to kill him with a rifle, nobody could stop them. (22) With so many hints of a possible sniper attack, certainly such a scenario had to be seriously considered.

KELLERMAN’S RELIEF – No Threat Suspects in Dallas?

Another significant aspect of The Kennedy Detail is the insight it gives into the Protective Research Section (PRS), the department of the Secret Service responsible for identifying threats to the president, and countering them.

When it came to Dallas, Gerry Behn - the Special Agent In Charge of the Kennedy Detail decided to take a vacation and in his place sent Special Agent Roy Kellerman (aka Digest) to lead the Texas trip.

As part of the routine, before leaving for Dallas SA Kellerman checked in with the PRS to get the files on potential threats in the area, but was told there were no identified potential threats in the Dallas area at all.

According to The Kennedy Detail, Kellerman “felt relieved” at this news. (23)

But I can assure you for certain that Kellerman most certainly didn’t feel relieved. How could Kellermen possibly feel relieved? How could he feel relieved that the PRS found no possible threats in Dallas when the media had reported that US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was physically attacked by an unruly Dallas crowd a week earlier? And if they weren’t Secret Service, then who were those guys who were reviewing the television news reels of the incident in order to try to identify those suspects? (24)

And in response to the criticism of the FBI in the aftermath of the assassination, J. E. Hoover himself wrote a memo to the Chief Rowley of the Secret Service reminding him that the FBI did tip them off about a Dallas police informant who reported on a college student who had threatened the President.(25) This informant was run by the Dallas Police unit that was composed entirely of US Army Reserve officers led by Captain Gannaway and Lt. Revill.(26)

As the late Professor Philip H. Melanson concludes in his book The Secret Service – The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, (27) the PRS depends on local police intelligence units to provide them with the basic information on potential threats and suspects, and in Dallas that would have been the responsibility of the Dallas Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Section of the Special Services Bureau, run by Gannaway and Revill. (28) [See: The SS PRS and the DPD SSBCIS]

Blaine didn’t enjoy the dry, daily grind of guarding the president and his family, but instead liked to do the advance work and run down the leads on potential threats provided by the PRS. He says he really liked working for the Secret Service, but after JFK was killed, Blaine says on his web site (but not in the book) that “LBJ was no JFK.”

And indeed he wasn’t, and he didn’t treat the Secret Service with the same respect that JFK did, despite calling them “Ivy League Charlatans.”

LBJ didn’t trust the Secret Service one bit, and personally asked J. E. Hover to provide an FBI agent to be at his side whenever he traveled aboard AFI, and requested a specific agent – Orrin Bartlett, who was the FBI’s liaison to the Secret Service at the time of the assassination. (29)

LBJ didn’t like the Secret Service agents being around all the time, and seemed to enjoy pissing on the legs of an agent. When the agent told LBJ what he was doing, LBJ reportedly replied, “That’s my perogative.” (30)

And so within a year Agent Blaine left the Secret Service and at the suggestion and recommendation of former LBJ congressional aide Jack Hight, took a job at IBM. Although Hight supposedly spoke highly of IBM, he didn’t stick around there long himself, and moved on to other companies and is now CEO of Modus Operandi. (31)

I had hoped that since he went from the Secret Service and the Kennedy Detail to IBM, Blaine might have had some answers to some outstanding questions related to IBM and the assassination. For instance, two IBM employees were with Johnny Brewer in the shoe store on Jefferson Blvd. when Tippit’s alleged assassin ducked into the shoe store alcove to avoid a police cruiser. Who were those guys and why were they never identified or questioned?(32)

And then there’s the report that there was a moving film or video of the assassination on a television in the Dallas IBM office on the afternoon of the assassination, an incident never confirmed or explained.(33)

But Blaine doesn’t get into either of those incidents.

Instead he describes how he assisted IBM in developing their top line computers that have been used by the intelligence agencies, FBI and Secret Service, yet doesn’t explain how all the information they compiled can’t seem to keep them from keeping assassins from killing important people.(34)

And as far as I can tell, they will never figure it out until they acknowledge that President Kennedy wasn’t the victim of a deranged lone nut case, and was killed in the course of a covert intelligence operation, and the perpetrators remain unknown.

The Kennedy Detail is an important book that fills in many of the blank pieces to the Dealey Plaza puzzle. It provides evidence of conspiracy and other crimes, presents new leads that can be pursued, adds a few new, living witnesses to the proceedings, and identifies important records that were supposedly destroyed.

But rather than putting an end to the nagging doubts people have about the assassination, it presents more questions than it answers.

[Bill Kelly can be reached at bkjfk3@yahoo.com]

NOTES: (Incomplete)

1) Appendix, The Kennedy Detail, p. 405-408
2) TKD, p. 214-216. First shot hit Kennedy in back, second shot hit Connally and third shot hit Kennedy in the head.
3) TKD, p. 217. “Slumped across the seat, President Kennedy lay unmoving, a bloody, gaping, fist-sized hole clearly visible in the back of his head.” Also see: TKD, p. 266. “All Clint could see was that the right rear portion of President Kennedy’s head was completely gone.” As all forensic pathologists and crime scene investigators know, entrance wounds are small and exit wounds are large.
4) TKD, p. 357. “He found the box from 1963 and started going through it all. It was there. Pages and pages of information….He was holding in is hands the Tampa advance reports that had supposedly been destroyed.”
5) TKD, p. 285-289. Monday morning meeting with SS Chief James Rowley, re: Ivy League charlatans. “Halfback, Lancer requests the Ivy League charlatans drop back to your location,” off the bumper. “We cannot say that the president’s assassination was caused by his own actions – that he was somehow at fault.”
6) TKD, p. 264. “He was on post at the rear corner of President Johnson’s large two-story French chateau-style house close to the back door…Instinctively Blaine picked up the Thompson submachine gun and activated the bolt on top….Blaine’s heart pounded, his finger firmly on the trigger. Let me see your face, you bastard. The next instant there was a face to go with the footsteps. The new President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had just rounded the corner, and Blaine had the gun pointed directly at the man’s chest. In the blackness of the night, Johnson’s face went completely white. A spit second later, Blaine would have pulled the trigger.” Although Blaine asks, “What the hell was he coming around the wrong way for?” - he doesn’t ask where LBJ was coming from, and whether or not he was just taking a piss or visiting a neighbor.
7) TKD makes news headlines: Ex-Agent Almost Shoots LBJ – CBS News [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DU8AqHpC4dwJ:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/20/national/main6974911.shtml+The+Kennedy+Detail+almost+shoots+LBJ&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
The Kennedy Detail: JFK ordered agents off the bumper. Discovery News.
[http://news.discovery.com/history/jfk-assassination-secret-service.html]
“Four days before the fateful 1963 motorcade in Dallas,…the young president had requested that his secret service agents give him some space.”
8) The Discovery Channel program based on the The Kennedy Detail.
9) The Sixth Floor program – Gary Mack interviews Lisa McCubbin, Gerald Blaine and Clint Hill.
10) Hersh, Seymore. The Dark Side of Camelot.
11) Bolden, Abraham. Echoes from Dealey Plaza.
12) Palamara, Vincent. Survivor’s Guilt.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Dk2GHxsQVgwJ:vincepalamarasurvivorsguilt.blogspot.com/+Vince+Palamara+Survivor's+Guilt&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
13) TKD, p. 255. Re: False portrait of Oswald as having “fanatical desire for recognition.”
14) Kessler, William F. and Weston, Paul, The Detection of Murder (1953 Greenberg). “Professional criminals do not usually kill for any other motive than elimination…Elimination killings…are truly difficult to unravel...In over 90 percent of these killings the persons who have the motive for the killing never handle the gun that fires the fatal shots, nor drive a car that is used in the killing. They are involved in the conspiracy and are guilty of murder because they procured the ‘trigger men’ who did the actual killing, but they have an alibi to prove they were many miles away from the scene of death at the time of the homicide….”
15) Secret Service Destroys Records. ARRB Final Report.
16) TKD, p. 357. See: Quote Note #4).
17) Film, by Knudsen. P. 130-131.
18) Manchester, William. Death of a President. (Harper & Row)
19) See: AFI Radio Transmissions; Transcript.
20) TKD, Blaine, Gerald, TKD
21) Secret Service Monday morning meeting, Nov. 25, 1963. Rowley, Blaine, et al.
22) Rowley, memo, re: JFK statement on sniper; JFK Aide O’Donnell.
23) TKD, Blaine, Gerald, (p. y) re: “Kellerman relieved” no PRS suspects.
24) Wise, Wes. Stevenson attack suspects on film; TKD, pictures in pockets of agents at Trade Mart.
25) Hover memo to Rowley, re: JBS threat suspect, w/photo.
26) Gannaway, Revill, reports on JBS threat suspect.
27) Melanson, Phil. History of Secret Service, re: DPD SSB CIU provides local information on suspects from informants.
28) Melenson, Phil. History of the Secret Service. DPD SSB CIU.
29) DeLoach, Cartha, Oral History, LBJ Library.
30) TKD, re: IBM, Jack Hight.
31) Jack Hight bio.
32) IBM employees at shoe store.
33) Film of assassination on TV at IBM office.
34) TKD; Blaine at IBM.

The Secret Service Hidden History

 

The Secret Service – The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency. By Philip H. Melanson, PH.D. (Carroll & Graf, 2002/2005)

On November 22, 1963, when the first bullet tore into JFK’s upper body and the final shot slammed into his head, everything changed – the nation and the Secret Service. The agency had lost Lancer, its codename for President John F. Kennedy, the first president under its protection to be killed.

The Secret Service immediately began a pattern of lies about its fatal missteps in Dallas that day and the days preceding it. The agency was experiencing the worst crisis it had ever faced.

At least two agents lied to the Warren Commission. Even worse, as they created the fiction about how thorough they had been, they implicitly pinned the blame on the fallen present himself, hinting that Kennedy’s recklessness or fatalism – not anything the agents had done in Dallas – ignited a tragic sequence of events.

Kennedy’s critics still chant the mantra that the president brought it on himself. These outright lies and half-truths cannot absolve the Secret Service for losing the life of a president for the first time in history.

Within hours of the assassination, Agent Roy Kellerman, who had sat in the front seat of Kennedy’s limousine, assured the FBI, “The precautions employed in Dallas were the most stringent and thorough ever employed….for the visit of a president to an American city.”

He did not related how he had frozen for those six or seven seconds after the first shot – a time span that allowed the “kill shot” to the president’s head.

Agent William Greer, the driver of Kennedy’s car, neglected to admit how he had failed to hit the gas after the first shot or swerve the vehicle to throw off the unseen sniper’s aim. The limo continued rolling at snail’s pace down Dealey Plaza. Worse, it actually slowed down almost to a complete stop.

As Greer followed the established procedures and waited for a command from Kellerman to take action, the president was a proverbial sitting duck. The agents had those six or seven seconds to do something, anything, before the president’s head was nearly blown off. They did nothing and covered up their actions – or lack of them – to the Warren Commission and others.

The Service’s advance team in Dallas chose a flawed motorcade route and failed to check such potential sniper perches as the Texas School Book Depository and other buildings, and to secure an overpass. For years, the fiction that Kennedy had refused to allow agents to place a bulletproof bubbletop on the limousine persisted. The top was not actually bulletproof.

On November 21-22, the night before the assassination, nine of Kennedy’s agents who were “on call” were out drinking. The next day, several of the agents failed to notice that the motorcycle formation surrounding Kennedy’s limo was all wrong.
Because of poor coordination among the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Dallas Police, agents had no idea that a well-armed band of Cuban exiles, the commandos of Alpha-66 (who had threatened Kennedy’s life) were in Dallas at the time of the assassination.

…The Secret Service has done little to contest these bromides, allowing much of the blame to fall squarely on the slain president……For starters, the motorcade route should never have included a dog-leg turn that would slow the limo and reduce it to the pace of a sitting duck. Kennedy didn’t take agents out drinking the night before. Greer and Kellerman’s inactions was not Kennedy’s fault….

…The assassination of John F. Kennedy traumatized the nation, and for the Secret Service, the assassination brought a maelstrom of questions from the press and legislators, all demanding answers to one crucial question: The U.S. Secret Service had failed at its most important assignment – to protect the life of the president. How could this have happened?

In no dispute is the fact that President Kennedy’s trip to Texas was purely political in purpose…Secret Service documents reveal again and again the dominance of politics over protection in planning for the trip. In a disturbing development for the agency, the president’s protectors were not informed about the trip by the White House until political planning and publicity were well underway. The idea of a presidential visit to Texas had been discussed by President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and Texas Governor John Connally in a Texas hotel room on June 5, 1963, long before the Secret Service had any inkling of the plan. On September 13, 1963, the White House confirmed the trip, and the Dallas newspapers announced it as a fact, although the dates and itinerary were not actually settled.

On October 4, Connally visited the White House to work out the basic agenda for a motorcade and luncheon. He also held a press conference in Dallas to announce the visit. Finally, three days later, on November 4, the Secret Service was first informed by the White House staff that the president would be going to Dallas; learned that the logistics of the trip had been planned before they were apprised of it.

The head of the Secret Service’s Dallas field office, Agent Forrest Sorrells, was directed on November 4, 1963, by the head of the White House protective detail, Gerald A. Behn, to check out possible luncheon sites. The two venues considered best were the Trade Mart and the Women’s Building. The Secret Service preferred the Women’s Building….However the president and his inner circle had already selected the Trade Mart,…dropping the news on the Secret Service at the last minute.

Governor Connally was given the primary responsibility for arranging the political agenda…When Governor Connally heard that the luncheon might not be held at the Trade Mart if the Secret Service had its way, he threatened to boycott the entire trip. As the host politician whose political image was on the line, Connally was not about to oversee a presidential luncheon held at an inferior facility…The Secret Service had been sent on a fool’s errand when told to look for a luncheon site that could be best secured; politically, there was only one site…

On November 14, 1963 , Agents Sorrells, of the Dallas field office, and Lawson, form the White House detail, were riding over the proposed routes when they were informed by a member of the Democratic National Committee that the luncheon would definitely be held at the Trade Mart. Given the Love Field landing and a downtown motorcade, the Trade Mart luncheon site dictated most of the motorcade route, which would logically wind through Dealey Plaza and in front of the Texas School Book Depository.

The Dallas Times Herald announced the general route two days later, stating that it “apparently will loop through the downtown area probably on Main Street en route from Dallas Love Field.” On November 19, 1963, the precise route was published by the Dallas newspapers – three days before the president’s visit.

Thus, there was no attempt to exercise any secrecy regarding the president’s itinerary or motorcade route. The closest thing to secrecy seems to have been the way in which the politically determined plans concerning the trip were made known to the Secret Service at the last possible minute…

As was usual for the Secret Service, it met with local law-enforcement authorities in advance of the trip in order to obtain their help in placing protection. On November 18, 1963, Agents Lawson and Sorrells and two representatives of the Dallas Police Department drove over the motorcade route, taking notes on crowd control, traffic patterns, and the location of intersections, overpasses, and railroad crossings. They discussed how to seal off the motorcade route from other traffic so that there would be no snarls and drew up plans to assign police to each of the overpasses along the route, to keep spectators off them and to protect the president’s open limousine from being hit by any falling objects. At all railroad crossings, police officers would control the switching mechanisms….

….Strangely, this meticulous advance work did not include checking the triple overpass that crossed Elm Street just after the soon-to-be-infamous grassy knoll. No one cleared the area of spectators or guarded it with police – as it should have been – when the presidential limousine headed directly at and under it….

Agent Lawson later testified to the Warren Commission: “I recall thinking we were coming to an overpass now, so I glanced up to see if it was clear, the way most of them had been, the way all of them had been until that time on the way downtown, and it was not and I was looking for the officer who should have been there, had been requested to be there, and made a kind of motion through the windshield trying to get his attention to move the people from over our path the way it should have been. We were just approaching this overpass when I heard a shot.”

Along with the failure to secure the overpass and the knoll, agents neglected to check the tall buildings along the motorcade route either in advance, by checking lists of employees against Secret Service files, or at the time of the motorcade, by body-searching them before the president passed by. As Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon informed the Warren Commission in a confidential memorandum:

“Except for inauguration and other parades involving foreign dignitaries accompanied by the president in Washington, it has not been the practice of the Secret Service to make surveys or checks of the buildings along the route of a presidential motorcade... With the numbers of men available to the Secret Service and with the time available, surveys of hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows are not practical…Nor is it practical to prevent people from entering such buildings…Even if it were possible with a vastly larger force of security officers to do so, many observers have felt that such a procedure would not be consistent with the nature and purpose of the motorcade to let the people see their president and welcome him to their city.”

…The two critical questions hurled by the press and public alike at the Service in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and beyond were: How had the Agents failed in Dallas? And how had the Service missed Oswald? Within days, the Service was harangued because Oswald was not in its files, either on a list of four hundred dangerous persons or in its general files on more than forty thousand U.S. citizens. The Secret Service had combed through its protective research files and found no dangerous persons in the Dallas area, although there were two in Houston.

Unfortunately, the Warren Report revealed just how limited were the resources of the protective research section, “a very small group of twelve specialists and three clerks.”

In the week before Kennedy arrived in Dallas, the Service did make a special effort to identify the individuals who had formented a near-riot by throwing rocks during the Adlai Stevenson incident. Agents worked with the Dallas police, who found an informant willing to identify the ringleaders of the demonstration by viewing a television film of the incident; then the Secret Service made still pictures of these ringleaders and distributed the images to agents and police who would be stationed at Love Field and at the Trade Mart. None of these potential troublemakers was ever spotted before or during the Kennedy visit.

Additionally, the Stevenson episode promoted the Service to pay “special attention to extremist groups known to be active in the Dallas area.”

….The real question was why Oswald was not brought to the attention of the Secret Service by the FBI, who did have a file on him and knew that he was in Dallas….The FBI’s interest in Oswald was as a potential subversive, a security risk, not as a violence-prone potential assassin…Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty had interviewed both Oswald and his wife Marina. Oswald resented these interviews and had allegedly written a note to Hosty – the contents of which are not known for certain – warning him not to annoy Marina. The note was destroyed by Agent Hosty shortly after the assassination…

Dallas police documents sitting in Warren Commission files show that despite the public attention focused on the Secret Service and the FBI’s failure to identify Oswald as a potentially dangerous person, the real failure to discover both Oswald and an extremist group in Dallas (Alpha 66) lay with the local police. Even though the Service’s protective research section had files on more than forty thousand persons, the agency depended in large part on local police for “identifying” and “neutralizing” potentially dangerous persons in the area to be visited by the president. Documents reveal that operational responsibility for identifying and investigating indigenous groups and individuals who might constitute a threat or embarrassment to President Kennedy fell to a twenty-man Dallas Police Department unit – the Criminal Intelligence Section, headed by Lt. Jack Revill.

In and around Dallas, the Criminal Intelligence Section investigated fourteen groups, including the Klu Klux Klan, the Black Muslims, and the local Nazi Party. As its name implied, the Criminal Intelligence Section had a clandestine capability. As a police memo describes: “This Section [Criminal Intelligence] had previously [before beginning to work on protective research for Kennedy’s visit] been successful infiltrating a number of these organizations; therefore, the activities, personalities and future plans of these groups were known.”

The Criminal Intelligence Section made two glaring errors in protective intelligence gathering for the president’s visit, errors that cannot be laid upon the Secret Service [BK – or JFK]. One was the omission of notice about Oswald. Unlike the FBI, whose written instructions to agents called for reporting persons who made threats against the president, the Criminal Intelligence Section had a broader mission of identifying persons who might threaten or embarrass the president. The Dallas detectives compiled a list of four hundred names, but so broadly was the net cast that four dozen persons who belonged to the Young People’s Socialists League were placed on the list simply because of the left-wing nature of their group. But Oswald, whose defection to the Soviet Union as a self-pronounced Marxist had been covered in the local press, was not included on the list.

The Criminal Intelligence Section evidently missed a specific chance to catch Oswald in its data net: He had joined one of the fourteen groups under surveillance – the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which many law-enforcement officers deemed a communist organization…

Meanwhile, Oswald, with his wife and two children, had been staying at the home of Michael and Ruth Paine. Michael Paine was a member of the ACLU and regularly attended its meetings. Oswald attended the October 25, 1963, meeting of the Dallas ACLU, with his host. During the meeting, Oswald spoke and, after it broke up, got into a heated argument with a man who defended the free-enterprise system against Oswald’s leftist remarks. The ACLU was under surveillance by police on a continuing basis, even before protective-intelligence gathering for the president’s visit had begun, meaning that they either ignored Oswald or missed him entirely.

Within a few days of the ACLU meeting, Oswald formally joined the ACLU and opened up a post office box in Dallas. On the postal form, he authorized the receipt of mail for the ACLU and also for the pro-Castro FPCC, yet another red flag revealing Oswald’s seemingly leftist or pro-communist leanings, and one missed or ignored by police intelligence.

Besides missing Oswald, the police Criminal Intelligence Section made another glaring error about a group that would have perhaps tipped off the Service to potential trouble in Dallas. The Stevenson incident had of course caught the attention of the Service, which was especially interested in “extremist groups” in the Dallas area and always seeking out intelligence on any cadre that contemplated assassination as a political weapon. Yet the police intelligence unit failed to report such a group to the agency. The group was Alpha-66.

The Dallas chapter of Alpha-66 was holding meetings in a house on Harlendale Street in Dallas for several weeks prior to the assassination. Perhaps the most militant and violent of all anti-Castro groups, Alpha-66 was composed of Cuban exiles, many of whom had fought in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Alpha-66 was basically a right-wing commando group that launched missions against Castro’s Cuba from the U.S. coast – missions involving both sabotage and assassination.

Before the Kennedy assassination, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had been investigating the owner of a Dallas gun shop regarding illegal arms sales. They discovered that Alpha-66 had attempted to purchase bazookas and machine guns. The group, according to the gun-shop owner, had a large cache of arms somewhere in Dallas, but ATF never reported the allegation to the Secret Service.

The agency would have immediately regarded the presence of a group of commandoes enraged that Kennedy had refused to provide U.S. air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion; many exiles held him personally responsible for their disastrous defeat at the hands of Castro’s army. Also, Kennedy had banned Cuban exile groups from launching raids against the island from U.S. soil and had publicly criticized Alpha-66 for violating his ban, to which the national head of Alpha-66 replied, “We are going to attack again and again.”

When the Dallas band of Alpha-66 did come to the attention of the Secret Service after the assassination, an FBI informant in Dallas reported that the head of the Dallas chapter, Manuel Rodriguez, “was known to be violently anti-President Kennedy.” According to another Warren Commission document that was accidently released in 1976 while it was still classified, Rodriguez was “apparently a survivor of the Bay of Pigs.”

Although the police Criminal Intelligence Section had missed Alpha-66 and its leader, another law enforcement unit with less intelligence gathering capacity, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, stumbled onto the group. At 8:00 A.M. on the day after the assassination, the Sheriff’s Office passed along a “hot tip” to the Secret Service: For about two months prior to the assassination, Oswald had been meeting in a house on Harlendale Street with a group that the Sheriff’s Office assumed to be the pro-Castro FPCC. The group reportedly met there for several weeks, up to either a few days before the assassination of the day of after. The group gathering at the house was actually Alpha-66.

The confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that Manuel Rodriguez, the head of the Dallas chapter, bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, a fact that was independently confirmed by the FBI. The Bureau checked into a report that Oswald had been in Oklahoma on November 17, 1963, accompanied by several Cubans, and discovered that the Oklahoma witnesses had seen Rodriguez, not Oswald. According to an FBI memorandum signed by J. Edgar Hoover, Rodriguez was five feet nine inches, 145 pounds, with brown hair; Oswald’s autopsy report listed him as five feet nine inches, 150 pounds, with brown hair.

The Dallas Police Criminal Intelligence Section’s inability to find or report on Alpha-66 is all the more inexplicable because of a tape recording that surfaced in 1978 during the reinvestigation of the John F. Kennedy case conducted by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-78.

Secretly recorded at a meeting of the Dallas John Birch Society the month before the assassination, the tape caught an anti-Castro Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs survivor – though not a member of Alpha-66 – denouncing Kennedy – “Get him out. Get him out. The quicker, the sooner the better. He’s doing all kind of deals. Mr. Kennedy is kissing Mr. Khruschev. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kissed Castro too. I wouldn’t even call him “President” Kennedy. He stinks. We are going to see him one way or the other. We’re going to give him the works when he gets to Dallas.”

As with the ACLU, the John Birch Society was being monitored by the Criminal Intelligence Section, falling into the realm of extremists meeting the scrutiny in the wake of the Stevenson episode. The “Birchers” loathed Kennedy because of his alleged softness on communism and his civil-rights policies.

The Criminal Intelligence Section’s failure to discover or report the anti-Castroite’s assertion that “we’re going to give him the works when he gets to Dallas” or to uncover or report the presence of Alpha-66 and its allegedly “violently anti-Kennedy” leader comprises a gaffe that may have well contributed to the lax or flawed protective measures for Kennedy in Dallas. If the Secret Service had received even an inkling that the local Cuban exiles were threatening the president in any way, the agency well might have tightened precautions.

Not long before the Dallas trip, the Service had received word of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy, allegedly being planned by an unspecified group of Cuban exiles, the scheme was to ram Air Force One in midair with a small plane as the president approached Miami. Kennedy’s itinerary was changed and no threat materialized. Thus, in Dallas, the Service would have been wary of any Cuban exile group, especially a commando group such as Alpha-66. Had its presence been detected and reported, the Secret Service might have been able to persuade the president to accept additional protective measures, or agents might have operated with a keener sense of looming danger.

To summarize, the copious documentary record of the Secret Service’s performance during the agency’s most tragic episode does reveal that the failure most often attributed to it- the inability to identify Oswald as a potentially dangerous person – was not a Secret Service error at all. But failure in the gathering of protective intelligence did occur. The Criminal Intelligence Section of the Dallas Police Department had the best opportunity and the best reason to discover both Oswald and Alpha-66, but neither was reported to the Service…

In terms of protective performance during the shooting, though political priorities had predetermined much of the situation – an open car with no agents allowed on the running boards – agents failed to take immediate evasive and protective action that might have saved the president’s life. The extensive post-assassination criticism and analysis produced improved protective methods and technology.

Despite the Warren Commission’s findings and government insistence on the lone-gunman/Oswald conclusion, several of the agents in the presidential detail did not accept the assertions.

Later, some of the men expressed their belief that the case was really a conspiracy, as the vast majority of the U.S. public came to believe. Researcher Vince Palamara interviewed numerous Kennedy agents and cites Agents Sam Kinney, Abraham Bolden, Maurice Martineau, Marty Underwood, and John Norris as those who “believe this [conspiracy] to be the case.” In addition, says Palamara, June Kellerman, the widow of agent Roy Kellerman, stated that both Kellerman and fellow agent Bill Greer, who were in the front seat of Kennedy’s limo, asserted that there was more to the assassination that the “official” version let on.

The assassination of a political leader has a profound political impact, no matter the motive or method of the killer or killers. In an instant, the will of the people expressed at the polling places is shattered – bullets for ballots…

Certain conspiracies have a more profound impact on a democratic political system than the lone gunman or a few men. Though the impact on policies and the political dominoes of President Kennedy’s assassination are the same whether his assassin was a disaffected loner, a team of Mafia hitmen, or a CIA executive action squad, there is a key difference. When a powerful organized interests conspire to remove those leaders who threaten them, the very core of democracy is compromised.

If it happens frequently, there is no democracy (and no standard on how often is too often). It is proudly asserted that the United States has never suffered a coup d’etat - an overthrow of a duly elected leadership. If, however, John F. Kennedy was killed by organized political interests, then there was one, even if the perpetrators were not the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Secret Service knows it.

There are lone nuts and there are conspiracies. By the legal definition of the knowing participation of more than one person, the assaults against Lincoln, Truman, and Malcolm X were undeniably conspiracies. A conspiracy of line nuts is not as politically threatening as a conspiracy involving a foreign government, a criminal organization (the Mafia, the Cali drug cartel) or elements of the U.S. intelligence community…

In contrast, if CIA case officers and anti-Castro Cuban commandos successfully plotted to kill President Kennedy and frame a patsy while they escaped, it is truly a political murder instead of a murder that happens to be political in its target and impact. (If Hinkley had decided that to really impress Jodi Foster he needed to kill Elton John, the politics would disappear).

So when is the murder of a political leader a political assassination? And when is an assassin politically motivated as opposed to being insane? History has shown there are no easy answers.


Philip H. Melanson (1944 – September 18, 2006) was a Chancellor Professor of Policy Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

An active member of COPA – the Coalition On Political Assassinations, he served as coordinator of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Archive, which is the world's largest collection on the subject, and also served as chair of the Political Science Department for 12 years.

An internationally recognized expert on political violence and governmental secrecy, Melanson wrote numerous books and articles related to these subjects. He appeared on NPR, BBC, CBS, and CNN news programs.

He made 95 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which resulted in the release of over 200,000 pages of federal government documents on topics relevant to his research.

Writings
• Knowledge, Politics, and Public Policy (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers Inc., 1973).
• Political Science and Political Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1975).
• The Politics of Protection: The U.S. Secret Service in The Terrorist Age, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984).
• The MURKIN Conspiracy: An Inquiry into the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988).(ISBN 0-275-93029-7)
• Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (New York: Prager, 1990) (ISBN 0-275-93571-X).
• The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Coverup, 1968–1991 (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1991). Paperback edition, 1994.
• The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: SPI Books, 1991). Paperback edition, 1994.
• Who Killed Martin Luther King? (Berkeley, Cal.: Odonian Press, 1991).
• Who Killed Robert Kennedy? (Berkeley, Cal Odonian Press, 1991).
• Shadow Play: The Killing of Robert Kennedy, The Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice. with William Klaber, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). Paperback edition, 1998. (ISBN 0-312-15398-8)
• Secrecy Wars: Privacy, National Security and the Public’s Right to Know (Dulles, Virginia: Brassey’s Inc., January 2002). (ISBN 1-57488-324-0)
• The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency with Peter Stevens, (New York): Carroll and Graff, 2002) (ISBN 0-7867-1617-7).

Notes and references
1. Marquard, Bryan. "Philip Melanson. Professor doggedly sought to open government", "The Boston Globe", 2006-9-22.