Salon.com > JFK

The return of “Castro did it” theory

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:30:00 +0000

The Cuban intelligence service, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, connived in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, according to a new book by a retired CIA analyst. Coming from Brian Latell, the Agency's former national intelligence officer for Latin America, the charge is both sensational and uncorroborated, yet still important.

Latell says flatly that Castro played a role in Kennedy's murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

"Castro and a small number of Cuban intelligence officers were complicit in Kennedy's death but ... their involvement fell short of an organized assassination plot," he writes in "Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine," a well-footnoted polemic about Cuba's General Directorate of Intelligence to be published next month. Latell says accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald told Cuban diplomats in Mexico City in September 1963 that he might kill JFK. Latell also speculates, without any direct evidence, that Oswald kept the Cubans apprised of his plans as he made his way to Dallas.

How will today’s O’Reilly explain JFK’s murder?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:21:00 +0000

You may have heard that the Fox News celebrity host Bill O’Reilly has a forthcoming book on JFK, timed for release this fall. How could you have not heard? Scheduled in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death in 2013, the book has been heavily covered by the media—examples here, here and here–despite a near total lack of information as to the content. Here’s an excerpt from USA Today which is typical:

JFK: “Better red than dead”

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

In his charmed life, he seduced young women in the White House with ruthless ease. In his violent death, he plunged the American government into a crisis of confidence whose effects are still visible 50 years later.

How President John F. Kennedy lived and died still has the power to set tabloid hearts aflutter, while providing a rich lode of material for those interested in the inner workings of the American national security state.

But first, the sex. In June 1962, Mimi Alford was a 19-year old freshman from Wheaton College who had an internship at the White House. Within four days of meeting her, JFK took her on a tour of the White House, maneuvered her into a bedroom, undressed her, and made love to her "as if it was the most natural thing in the world."

Now, a half century later, Alford has written a book called "Once Upon a Secret," which the New York Post touted as a book by "JFK's teen mistress." That's a great headline for 1963, but more than a little misleading in 2012. Now 69 years old, Alford is a mother and grandmother living in New York who wants to unburden herself of a secret of which she was both proud and ashamed. She writes not to titillate but to understand her life, and her candid account is all the more credible for it.

The holy grail of the JFK story

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:20:00 +0000

Two years from today Americans will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is likely to be a moment of national introspection, as well as an opportunity to complete the historical record of one of the most painful days in American history. Yet, incredibly enough, the Central Intelligence Agency is likely to object to declassifying all of its records related to the murder of the 35th president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The question on the 48th anniversary of the tragedy is whether the CIA's extreme claims of JFK secrecy -- reiterated in federal court filings this year -- will be allowed to stand.

The tediously unresolved case of the assassinated president never quite goes away as some would wish. Stephen King's new book, "November 22, 1963," is yet another imaginative retelling of a critical day in American history, a densely layered epic that appeals to the enduring impulse to understand how the president of the United States was gunned down in broad daylight, and why no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.