A newly circulating analysis of recently declassified JFK files has drawn fresh attention to two documents that raise uncomfortable questions about the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the agency's conduct in the years surrounding President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
The discussion also revisits a recorded phone call between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Jackie Kennedy that took place on December 3, 1963, less than two weeks after the assassination.
In the call, Johnson tells Jackie he wanted to visit her and says he ought to have had her arrested for leaving town without saying goodbye. He also tells her that when he tried to leave for Christmas, Congress "spanked" him and hit him "right in the face," and that he wanted to do the same to her next time she left without telling him goodbye.
Johnson also mentions that he will come get a vitamin B shot from Dr. Travell as soon as Jackie returns. The source material notes that vitamin B shots of this kind have been described as medical-grade amphetamines, and that both Jackie Kennedy and JFK were on record as having been prescribed them.
The call is presented as jarring given how soon it occurred after the assassination, and the analysis questions whether the tone reflects the severity of what had just happened to the two people most closely linked to the event.
The first declassified document discussed involves a local UPI reporter who planned to publish a story claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald had connections to the CIA during his military service in Japan. The claim was based on an interview with a retired Marine officer who said Oswald was recruited by the CIA.
According to the analysis, the CIA's reaction to the reporter's inquiry was evasive. The agency declined to comment publicly and instead referred the reporter to the National Archives, the official repository for JFK assassination records.
Internally, the CIA acknowledged that much information about Oswald had already been released through declassification. However, officials expressed concern that such stories could reignite speculation about the agency's involvement in JFK's assassination.
The analysis argues that this internal unease is itself significant, asking why the CIA would be so concerned about media perception and speculation if it had nothing to hide.
The second document is a full 15-page memo written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1961, calling for JFK to break up the CIA. Schlesinger was a historian, writer, and critic who worked with President Kennedy from 1961 until the assassination as a historical consultant.
Schlesinger was a strong advocate of JFK and was regularly confided in by the president, whose opinions he held in high regard. The memo describes the contemporary CIA as possessing "many of the characteristics of a state within a state."
Schlesinger wrote that there is no doctrine governing the conduct of clandestine operations. He rejected the idea that the CIA should fight fire with fire to defeat communism, saying that if fighting fire with fire meant contracting the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by Americans in order to give more freedom to the CIA, no one seriously wished to do that.
He also wrote that CIA operations had not been held effectively subordinate to U.S. foreign policy, and that no one knows how many potential problems for U.S. foreign policy and how much friction with friendly states were being created by CIA clandestine operations at that moment.
Schlesinger told JFK that in practice the State Department had become a "rubber stamp" for CIA clandestine operations. He argued that the concept of contingency planning had legitimized the concrete preparation of operations still presumably in a hypothetical stage.
He noted that if a group is assembled and revved up on a contingency basis, then the failure to carry the project through will invite the disappointment and alienation of the group. He added that the CIA had effectively made policy in many parts of the world, and that a number of governments still in power knew they had been targets of CIA attempts at overthrow, which he said was not a state of mind calculated to stimulate friendly feelings toward the United States.
Schlesinger also recalled the reaction of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Mann to the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Mann said he would never have favored initiating the operation, but since it had gone as far as it had, he did not think they could risk calling it off.
Schlesinger proposed decoupling the CIA's clandestine operations from its research and analysis work. He warned that if intelligence is too closely connected with operations, then those committed to a particular operation will tend to select out the intelligence which validates the operation.
In conclusion, Schlesinger proposed a drastic overhaul of the State Department to rein in CIA clandestine operations, with the State Department granted general clearance authority over all clandestine activity. He also proposed splitting the CIA into two agencies, one for clandestine and paramilitary activities and another for information collection and analysis.
One month after JFK's assassination, former President Harry Truman echoed the fears Schlesinger had outlined in the 1961 memo. Truman said there was something about the way the CIA had been functioning that was casting a shadow over America's historic position.
Truman wrote that he had set up the CIA to streamline information gathering, but that at times intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. Between his presidency and JFK's, Truman witnessed a change in the CIA.
He said he had for some time been disturbed by the way the CIA had been diverted from its original assignment, and that it had become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. Truman said he never had any thought when he set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations.
Truman called for the termination of the CIA's operational duties and the restoration of the agency to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the president.
The analysis concludes that, based on these documents, it appears abundantly clear that the CIA had direct involvement, that Oswald may have been working for or trained by the CIA, and that he was not simply a random lone gunman with a personal animus toward President Kennedy.