-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 21, 2007 12:14:38 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Richard Nixon and the Man Who Silenced Lee Harvey Oswald
http://crimemagazine.com/03/richardnixon,1014.htm
A 1947 memo, found in 1975 by a scholar going through a pile of
recently released FBI documents, supports Giancana's contention. In
the memo, addressed to a congressional committee investigating
organized crime, an FBI assistant states: "It is my sworn testimony
that one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago ... is performing information
functions for the staff of Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican of
California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open
testimony in the aforementioned hearings." (Later in 1947,
Rubenstein moved to Dallas and shortened his last name [to JACK
RUBY].) The FBI subsequently called the memo a fake, but the
reference service Facts on File considers it authentic.
Undercover work for the young Congressman Nixon would have been in
keeping with Ruby's history as a police tipster and government
informant. In 1950, Ruby gave closed-door testimony to Estes
Kefauver's special Senate committee investigating organized crime.
Committee staffer Luis Kutner later described Ruby as "a syndicate
lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for
Chicago mobsters." In exchange for Ruby's testimony, the FBI is
said to have eased up on its probe of organized crime in Dallas.
In 1959, Ruby became an informant for the FBI.
-------------
Seared into the memories of all Americans who lived through the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy is exactly where they
were on November 22, 1963. Yet private citizen Richard Nixon, who —
believe it or not — was in Dallas, could not recall this fact in a
post-assassination interview with the FBI.
The interview dealt with an apparently false claim by Marina Oswald
that her husband —alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald — had
targeted Nixon for death during an earlier trip to Dallas. A Feb.
28, 1964 FBI report on the interview said Nixon "advised that the
only time he was in Dallas, Texas, during 1963 was two days prior
to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
While Nixon eventually came clean regarding his whereabouts on that
fateful day, he seemed touchy whenever the matter was raised. For
example, in a 1992 interview with CNN's Larry King, Nixon
interjected he was in Dallas "In the morning!" when King cited the
presumed geographical coincidence. Nixon left Dallas on a flight to
New York several hours before Kennedy's noontime arrival at Love
Field.
Not only did Nixon misremember where he was on November 22nd, he
made at least two conflicting statements about how he first learned
his arch-rival had been shot. In a 1964 Reader's Digest article, he
recalled hailing a cab after his Dallas-New York flight: "We were
waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street
corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas."
In November of 1973, however, Nixon said in Esquire that his cabbie
"missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway...a woman came
out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window
to ask what the matter was and when she saw my face she turned even
paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas."
In yet another curious twist, a November 22nd wire service photo of
Nixon indicates he might even have learned of the shooting before
his cab ride. In the photo, a glum-looking Nixon, hat in lap, is
sitting in what appears to be an airline terminal. The caption on
the United Press International photo reads: "Shocked Richard Nixon,
the former vice president who lost the presidential election to
President Kennedy in 1960, is shown Friday after he arrived at
Idlewild Airport in New York following a flight from Dallas, Tex.,
where he had been on a business trip."
In the 1992 King interview, Nixon maintained he'd never had any
interest in digging into the JFK assassination: "I don't see a
useful purpose in getting into that and I don't think it's frankly
useful for the Kennedy family to constantly raise that up again."
Nixon's professed disinterest doesn't ring true, however, for it
came from one of our snoopiest chief executives — a politician who
just relished investigations, spying, secrets, and conspiracies. As
Nixon aide John Ehrlichman once observed: "He was a conspiracy
buff. He liked intrigue, and he liked secret maneuverings of the
FBI, and he liked to hear about what the CIA did, and so on. He
just couldn't leave that stuff alone."
As for Nixon's stated compassion for the Kennedys, let's not forget
that he deeply despised them. So much so that, as president, he
ordered chief White House spy E. Howard Hunt to forge diplomatic
cables to make it look like President Kennedy ordered the murder of
South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. He sent another spy, Anthony
Ulasewicz, to Chappaquiddick, Mass., to investigate the 1969 crash
of a car driven by Edward Kennedy that killed the senator's female
companion. He placed Sen. Kennedy under a 24-hour-a-day Secret
Service surveillance in an effort, in Nixon's phrase, "to catch him
in the sack with one of his babes." And Nixon pressed aides to
plant a false story in the press linking Sen. Kennedy to the 1972
assassination attempt against Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
What did Nixon do in Dallas? He arrived on Nov. 20 to attend a
board meeting of the Pepsi Cola Company, one of his law clients.
Dallas reporter Jim Marrs says Nixon and actress Joan Crawford, a
Pepsi heiress, "made comments to the effect that they, unlike the
president, didn't need Secret Service protection, and they
intimated the nation was upset with Kennedy's policies. It has been
suggested that this taunting may have been responsible for
Kennedy's critical decision not to order the Plexiglas top placed
on his limousine on Nov. 22."
When adviser Stephen Hess saw Nixon that same afternoon at the
former vice president's New York apartment, he said Nixon was
"pretty shook up." Hess later portrayed his boss to political
reporter Jules Witcover as unusually defensive about his pre-
assassination comments in Dallas: "He had the morning paper, which
he made a great effort to show me, reporting he had held a press
conference in Dallas and made a statement that you can disagree
with a person without being discourteous to him or interfering with
him. He tried to make the point that he had tried to prevent it …
It was his way of saying, ‘Look, I didn't fuel this thing.'"
What Nixon apparently failed to tell Hess was that the major story
from his meeting with reporters in Dallas was certain to fuel the
anger of some Texans toward Kennedy. The headline in the Dallas
Morning News on November 22 said: "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop
Johnson." Vice President Lyndon Johnson was, of course, a Texan.
On the morning after the assassination, Nixon convened a meeting of
Republican leaders at his New York apartment. Those assembled were
"already assessing how this event would affect or recreate the
possibilities of Nixon running for president," according to Hess.
------------
Jimmy Hoffa hated John and Robert Kennedy as much as Richard Nixon
did. Robert Kennedy had been trying to put Hoffa in jail since
1956, when he was staff counsel for a Senate probe into the Mob's
influence on the labor movement. In 1960, Robert Kennedy said, "No
group better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than
Jimmy Hoffa and some of his lieutenants."
In the 1960 presidential election, Hoffa and his two million-member
union backed Vice President Nixon against Sen. John Kennedy. Edward
Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later government
informant, eventually revealed that Hoffa met with Marcello to
secretly fund the Nixon campaign — saying, "I was right there,
listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with
$500,000 cash which was going to Nixon ... (Another half-million
dollar contribution) was coming from Mob boys in New Jersey and
Florida." The Hoffa-Marcello meeting took place in New Orleans on
Sept. 26, 1960, and has been verified by William Sullivan, a former
top FBI official.
Nixon lost the 1960 election, and Hoffa — thanks to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy — soon wound up in prison for jury tampering
and looting the union's pension funds of almost $2 million. But the
Nixon-Hoffa connection was strong enough to last at least until
Dec. 23, 1971—when, as president, Nixon gave Hoffa an executive
grant of clemency, allowing Hoffa to serve just five years of a 13-
year prison term.
Nixon apparently sprung Hoffa in exchange for a big underworld payoff.
A recently released FBI memo backs up an earlier claim by an FBI
informant that James P. ("Junior") Hoffa — current head of the
Teamsters — and racketeer Allen Dorfman delivered $300,000 in a
black valise to a Nixon bagman at a Washington hotel to secure the
elder Hoffa's release from the pen.
Breaking from clemency custom, Nixon did not consult the judge who
had sentenced Hoffa. Nor did he pay any mind to the U.S. Parole
Board — which had been warned by the Justice Department that Hoffa
was Mob-connected. At the time, The New York Times called the
clemency a "pivotal element in the strange love affair between the
(Nixon) administration and the two-million-member truck union…"
Former Mafia bigwig Joe Bonanno recently described Nixon's clemency
for Hoffa as "a gesture — if ever there was one, of the national
power (the Mob) once enjoyed."
President Nixon did put one restriction on Hoffa's freedom: He
could never again, directly or indirectly, manage any union. The
restriction — a favor to Hoffa's successor, Frank Fitzsimmons — was
reputedly bought by a $500,000 contribution to the Nixon campaign
by New Jersey Teamster leader Anthony Provenzano.
In July 1975, Hoffa vanished in a Detroit suburb and his body has
never been found. Many federal and local investigators believe he
was shot to death after being lured to a meeting with Provenzano.
They speculate that Hoffa's body was taken away by truck, stuffed
into a fifty-gallon drum — then crushed and smelted.
Newly released FBI documents show that, in 1978, federal
investigators sought to force Nixon and Fitzsimmons to testify
about events surrounding Hoffa's disappearance. The investigators
had concluded that such testimony offered the last, best chance of
solving the Hoffa mystery. But they accused top Justice Department
officials of derailing their efforts to call the ex-president and
the Teamster boss before a Detroit grand jury.
The records also reveal that FBI agents suspected the Nixon White
House of soliciting $1 million from the Teamsters to pay hush money
to the Watergate burglars. In fact, in early 1973 — when the
Watergate cover-up was coming apart at the seams — aide John Dean
told the president that $1 million might be needed to keep the
burglary team silent. Nixon responded, "We could get that … you
could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash, I know where
it could be gotten." When Dean observed that money laundering "is
the type of thing Mafia people can do," Nixon calmly answered:
"Maybe it takes a gang to do that."
In August 1974, Nixon became the first president forced to quit the
office. He did so as Congress prepared to impeach and expel him for
a wide range of illegal activities and abuses of constitutional
power he directed or concealed during the Watergate scandal. Forty
Nixon administration officials were indicted or jailed. The
president was named by a grand jury as an unindicted co-
conspirator. In what smacked of a sweetheart deal, one month after
he stepped down, Nixon's handpicked successor — President Gerald
Ford — granted him a complete pardon for all the presidential
crimes he might have committed.
After spending more than a year brooding in self-exile at his
walled estate in San Clemente, Calif., the very first post-
resignation invitation Nixon accepted was from his Teamsters buddies.
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