Joseph Califano Jr. has written a new memoir, “Inside: A Public
and Private Life,” which makes some startling claims about the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A longtime political insider who started out as one of
Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” Califano was privvy to much that is still not
completely understood about the Kennedy years. Califano was interviewed last Sunday by Brian
Lamb on C-SPAN’s Booknotes. Here’s
the relevant exchange about the assassination:
LAMB: I want to ask you if this has ever been printed before.
“Years later when I was on the White House staff, Lyndon Johnson told me, quote, ‘Kennedy
tried to kill Castro but Castro got Kennedy first.'” Have you ever reported that
before?
CALIFANO: I think this is the first reporting of that. I may — I may have
talked to people about that.
LAMB: You go on to say you agreed with Lyndon
Johnson that Castro through Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy?
CALIFANO: I
have come to believe that, Brian. Today I — I — when I was in the Pentagon, I was — I served on
a super secret committee on Cuba, set up, set up in January of 1973 [sic, he must
have meant 1963], under President Kennedy. The objective was to overthrow Castro, to
get rid of him. What’s in the book about those events — most of that has never been published
before. I fought to get these documents declassified when I was doing the memoir.
It was
wild. And we were going — we were going to do all kinds of things. We were going to put — we
wanted sugar in their gasoline. We were going to tell the Cubans all to turn the water on at the
same time to drain their water. At one point, we considered whether we should tie incendiary
devices to the feet of bats, drop the bats over Cuba at night. They would fly into the attics of
houses and buildings; the incendiary device would go off and the island would go up in flames.
But there were clearly — Robert Kennedy was determined to assassinate Castro. It was — it was
— The Kennedys were obsessed with it, and …
LAMB: What did you do when you
were confronted with it yourself?
CALIFANO: Well, the first time — it came up
once at one of our committee meetings. The committee was the CIA, the Defense Department,
the State Department and the Justice Department. And State was not only in charge but Robert
Kennedy was in charge. And when — when it was — the only time it was discussed in a formal
way in that committee, I opposed it, and Joe Dolan (ph), who was the Justice Department, a
young Justice Department lawyer at the time, also opposed it.
The remarkable thing in
retrospect is the CIA was completely silent during that whole discussion. But if you’re Castro, just
think now about November, the fall of 1963. There had been several attempts on your life. The
mob, the poison pens, the crazy stuff. And in September, Castro told a reporter for Associated
Press, you know, the American leaders ought to be careful because if they’re going to try to kill
me, they’re not immune from — from being killed.
November 1, Diem is killed, the head of
the South Vietnam [government], is killed in a coup that we sponsored, that was approved by
President Kennedy. So you’re sitting there and you’re Castro, and you’ve got to say, these guys
are going to get me. November 22, President Kennedy is assassinated.
And I think the
paroxysms of grief — I mean — unbelievable grief of Robert Kennedy — this is a personal view,
but I really do believe the unbelievable grief is — was driven in good measure by the fact that he
thought some of the things he was doing are what may have killed his brother. …
And think
about this. When you think about commissions and the commissions we have today, the Warren
commission never talked to me or anybody else involved in the covert Cuban program in the
course of their investigation about that.
The idea that Castro had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination is not new. Given the mountain of
JFK conspiracy theories, it’s hard to conceive of any idea that would be new. But it’s striking to
hear one of the era’s insiders say that Lyndon Johnson thought it was payback, that he suspects
Robert Kennedy believed that, and that he believes it himself. Califano is not some kind of flake,
after all. He was a top domestic adviser to LBJ, the attorney who represented The Washington
Post and the Democratic Party during the Watergate years and Secretary of Health, Education
and Welfare in the Carter administration.
As I’ve mentioned before, the most persuasive book I ever read about the Cuba connection to
the sniper attack that killed JFK is Philip Kerr’s “The Shot.” It’s fiction, a first-class thriller novel, but
it shows how the killing in Dealey Plaza might have been prepared.
