Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (31 page)

Oswald was caught apparently without a great plan. But that he was there at the time of the route, the president going right under that window, shows it was happenstance. Oswald had a point of view. He’d gone after Nixon at one point; he’d gone after Edwin Walker. He had a certain left-wing view of things that was pro-Communist but disillusioned with the Soviet Union. That’s all I know.

When I was writing my book on Kennedy, I came across this wonderful little bit of film of this beautiful woman chasing after a guy and a gurney. You just see the gurney, and she’s racing behind it. That last sense of life and then after all that, it was just: “Well, he died. He was killed.” But the tough thing to do is to remember him when he alive and to remember the New Frontier—not Camelot but the actual New Frontier and how bracing politics was.

Mort Sahl

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Mort Sahl was one of the hottest nightclub comedians on the circuit. While most comedians were delivering stock jokes about wives and mothers-in-law, Sahl turned to the newspapers for material. Joe Kennedy personally recruited Sahl to write jokes that his son could use in his presidential campaign. In August 1960
Time
magazine put the political satirist on its cover and called him “the patriarch of a new school of comedians,” which also included Lenny Bruce and Jonathan Winters. He was thirty-six years old when President Kennedy was killed.

I
was being managed by the same fellow who managed Peter Lawford; he managed just the two of us. Peter said his brother-in-law is going to go for it. I was very friendly with Adlai Stevenson, who was theoretically the heir apparent, and I knew Mrs. Roosevelt, who said to me, “Kennedy is going to try and get this, and he’s more profile than courage.” Then his father, the ambassador, called me at the behest of Milt Ebbins and Sinatra, who I saw every day, and he said to me, “I understand you can write political humor better than anybody and that you have the skill”—this is almost his words—“to put a stiletto between Nixon’s fifth and sixth ribs instead of bludgeoning him. I want you to work for Johnny.” That’s what he called him, by the way. So I said OK. I took that call in the cutting room at Dick Carroll’s men’s
haberdashery in Beverly Hills, so it would be confidential. There were no cell phones.

I went to work, and I can tell, as an old political scriptwriter, that Republicans pay you. They believe in business, so the old man called me without humor, without anything, and just engaged me.

JFK had a great streak of irony in the way he talked. He was very cautious. All the things people said about his recklessness—it wasn’t like that at all. He said, “You like Castro?” I said, “Oh, yeah. I’m a young guy. I love the idea of revolution.” He’d say, “You don’t find him unstable?” He was like an inquisitor. He answered questions for me. When somebody said, “Who are you after, and what are you pursuing?” Kennedy said, “Everybody.” Like that. Or he said, “You know, you can profess loyalty to me, but I know guys like you. You love Adlai Stevenson, and if you can’t get him you still won’t go to me. You’ll get Chester Bowles.”

I said, “You don’t like Chester Bowles?”

He said, “He still wears button-down shirts. Why should I like—” He switched what was at stake when you talked to him, and he had different personas. For partying, he liked Gene Kelly. Talked politics to me, and they hired me, and I wrote some jokes.

He was extremely bright and very aware that the liberals were going to be more trouble than the other, conservative, party. He got that right away. He was very smart, and he had a great sense of humor. There’s nothing I put in front of him that he couldn’t pick up and run with. He understood all the material. I wrote for a lot of people relatively, but he understood all the material, and he never objected. The old man objected on religious grounds, but he never objected. I gave him that
joke where he said, “Is it going to hamper you to run as the first Catholic candidate?” and I said, “You say to them: ‘It’s not the hereafter that concerns me, it’s November 4th is driving me out of my mind.’” He took it right away, put it on like a cloak that fit. And: “You’re going to meet the pope. Are you going to kiss his ring?” “No, we’ve made a special arrangement. I’m going to call him ‘Jack,’ he’s going to call me ‘John.’” He took all that, you know. It was playful at the beginning, and then we had some good arguments too. I asked about his friendship with Nixon and everything. He stressed to me that you can learn from everybody. He was very sharp, even gave me romantic advice. I was going out with an actress then named Phyllis Kirk, and he said to me, “Bad pick. Is a mover. You don’t pick chicks that way.” I never asked him for any romantic advice.

I was home having breakfast when I heard he had been shot. In California, in the living room, I heard it, and then of course it plays out very fast. The next day Ruby is there. I used to talk about it in the show: “He shoots Oswald while he’s being guarded by twenty-four members of the Dallas police force, or twenty-five if we count Ruby.” I was dangling the bait even then. JFK was killed by a powerful domestic force. I believe it’s such suppression that we can’t get on with the job of being America until we clean our own house. Yeah, I do believe that. It’s cost marriages and friendships and work.

I read Vince Bugliosi’s book. I know him very well, by the way. He wrote that at Hefner’s house. Hefner gave him an office. I used to see him up there all the time. You may notice that the book criticizes Garrison
quite freely and gives me a pass. He characterizes me as a fair-minded guy who tried to do his best. But I endorsed that investigation. In fact, I was in it.

I had my own show on Metromedia, and I challenged the Warren Report repeatedly. John Kluge said to me, “This is kind of redundant. You’ve got to have new evidence.” So I went to New Orleans and met Garrison, and I became an investigator in the office. We went to the trial of Clay Shaw. I was very much his champion. If he [JFK] were here, we would not have been at war in Vietnam. I don’t think there would have been a war. Our thesis in New Orleans was that he was removed because he was ending the Vietnamese War. We operated on that thesis, and we got in heavy water. It was very tough, career-wise. It was tough with your friends. They found it hard to accept.

As far as Garrison doing it to advance his career, I can think of other ways to advance yourself than saying the government killed the president. I can think of better ways to take advantage of your career moves.

We had a back channel to Bobby through one of his college roommates, and I saw Bobby. Walter Sheridan was in there with Frank McGee, taking arms against Garrison before he went to court. He might not have been that militant if he didn’t run into all that opposition. The family wasn’t much help to us, although I did run into Jackie in New York after we started the case, and she said to me that she knew. But they always thought they had the privilege of when to say they knew. They didn’t much say anything. They said clouded things to me. Sargent Shriver said, “After all you’ve done for us—” Teddy said the same thing to me, but I was operating pretty much alone in show business. They knew that the whole thing was a cover story. The lone assassin; nobody believes that, but they know that it’s unwise to say this. It’s taking on a sea of troubles. But if you don’t get justice for Kennedy, you can’t get justice for the country. I didn’t realize that when I met him. He came to be because he was a man of peace,
and the last speech, at American University, is documentation of what he was trying to do.

Who was responsible? A powerful domestic force, which has more power than ever? Oswald was an FBI informant who was used as a patsy. You know when we got him—or when they got him—in his wallet was the unlisted number of the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Dallas. No, he was just there to make noises. I mean, it’s almost insulting: passing out Communist leaflets in New Orleans, establishing an identity, trying to buy a car in New Orleans. You don’t have any credit.

But we have to look back on that time. Bobby told me that General LeMay raised his fists to President Kennedy in the arguments over Cuba. What’s happened is, in the interim, art has characterized guys like that, like LeMay, as crazy and willful rather than working toward another goal. Look where war has taken this country. Look at the lack of humanity since Kennedy and where it’s taken the country. We betrayed him. The American University speech, remember? “We breathe the same air as the Russians, and we all treasure a future for our children, to end all wars.” What are there, sixteen thousand men in Vietnam when he’s murdered? And wound up with that being our major effort. Of course the clincher is that you can’t see the material.

The president’s brain is missing in the archives. You can’t see any of this. What did Johnson say, seventy-five years? And the way the thunder came down around Garrison because he opened up—the only law enforcement officer who opened it up. I don’t know. Have people forgot what America was like, how optimistic it was?

Clay Shaw got acquitted because he perjured himself about Oswald and about David Ferrie. Who were they? Who were the Cubans? Who were the guys who drove to Dallas the night before in an ice storm? Why did they have to be there? Who was Ruby? Characterized as a patriot by the press, sent in to silence that guy. Ruby begs Warren to take him to Washington so he can tell the truth, and Warren says he doesn’t have that power. A commission to solve the death of the president that never met as a body. We owe Jack Kennedy the truth, and we owe the American people the truth. There’s going to be no future for our kids if we don’t do it. We’ve become somebody else. It’s an expensive lie.

I thought it took priority. It was a tough decision, but the money won’t do you any good, and the good-looking actress won’t do you any good if you sell your country out. You can’t do it. You come home with a different country under your arm. I became a different person because a lot of different people didn’t want to employ me. The William Morris Agency didn’t want to book me. People turned against money because that’s an expensive lie. It involves the aristocracy of this country, who took part in an unlawful act. Until we clean that up, we’ll never be who we were. But he set the tone. I wasn’t a worshiper, as you know. I kidded him pretty good too. But I brought that up because I thought it was imperative. It did cost me a lot of work. Ironically enough, the liberals made me unemployable. They didn’t want to hear that. They used to be people that would fight for their rights. They were eroded.

Garrison’s the bravest man I ever met. That they’ve continued to discredit him and haven’t looked into what he brought up only underlines to me that we were on the right track then. We were ready to go, but the people weren’t ready for it. I mean certain people in positions of power. Look what happened to the country. What happened to me, that’s minor. What happened to the country? We’re not the country that does that to other people. We bought into perpetual war and brutality and a general mediocrity. That never would have happened when he was there. He’s the guy who brought Pablo Casals to the White House.

Sixteen thousand men in Vietnam and aiming to get out. McNamara knew that too and didn’t say it. Then we have the tapes of Johnson
saying to McNamara, “Now is the time to go in and take them out, or all countries will go.” Who benefited the most from Kennedy’s death? Who suppressed the information? By the time we get to Chicago, it’s Berlin, not Washington. I think it’s very evident, or I never would have done this. You know, I’m not a Kennedy worshipper. He doubted I was even going to vote for him, and of course he was only ten years older than me—

Jim is like Jack. He stands up for what he thought was right, and the credentials of Garrison are where he came from. He was an FBI agent, a colonel in the Army. He got radicalized at forty-five because his president was murdered before his eyes and he wanted to know why. That’s why he’s genuine. The social democrats were born on the left and didn’t have to earn their way over there. They had to earn their way over to the right. That’s why they’re so careful. That’s why there are no candidates.

A lot of people thought I went crazy. But by the same token, I wondered why they don’t go crazy, why they can rationalize with whoever’s there. It’s the same thing that happens when you work at a network. If somebody’s son gets the job, you say, “Maybe it’ll work out.” You can’t do that. You can’t be a moral man and do that. Every moral man knows this. If he’s Jewish, he thinks only they know it, but everybody knows it. We are formed by our families. Bobby was the toughest guy I ever knew, and it’s because the old man made him the enforcer. He had to bring home a head on a stick, make sure it wasn’t blamed on Jack, and he never got thanked. That’s what happens. If you’re left to be free and do good things, you wind up like Sarge Shriver, one of the most heartbreaking things that ever happened.