Nixon's Secret (76 page)

Nixon knew he held many cards. Nixon knew that Operation 40, the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Castro had become the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which in turn had morphed into the murder of John F. Kennedy. Nixon knew what the American people would not learn for twenty-three years, that Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, then a congressman, purposely altered the Kennedy autopsy records. At the behest of FBI Director Hoover, Ford changed the description of the location of the wound in Kennedy’s upper back to the base of his neck to accommodate the government’s now largely discredited “single-bullet theory,” holding that JFK had been shot solely from the rear and that one of only three bullets fired hit both Kennedy and Govenor John Connally.

William C. Sullivan, the FBI’s number-two man, recounted in his book
The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI
that “Hoover was delighted when Gerald Ford was named to the Warren Commission. The director wrote in one of his internal memos that the Bureau could expect Ford to ‘look after FBI interests,’ and he did, keeping us fully advised of what was going on behind closed doors. He was our man, our informant, on the Warren Commission.”

Sullivan said that Hoover had been watching Ford from the beginning. “Our agents out in the field kept a watchful eye on local congressional races and advised Hoover whether the winners were friends or enemies. Hoover had a complete file developed on each incoming congressman. He knew their family backgrounds, where they had gone to school, whether or not they played football [Ford played football at Michigan], and any other tidbits he could weave into a subsequent conversation,” Sullivan said. “Gerald Ford was a friend of Hoover’s, and he first proved it when he made a speech not long after he came to Congress, recommending a pay raise for him. He tried to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Hoover enemy.”

Strangely enough, Sullivan himself would be killed in a “hunting accident” only days before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on November 9, 1977. Courts ruled that he had been shot accidentally by fellow hunter Robert Daniels, who was later fined $500 and stripped of his hunting license for ten years.

Conservative pundit and reporter Robert Novak said in August 2007, “[William Sullivan] told me the last time I saw him—he had lunch at my house—he had been fired by Hoover and he was going into retirement—he said that ‘Someday, you will read that I have been killed in an accident, but don’t believe it, I’ve been murdered,’ which was a shocking thing to say.”
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Sullivan was one of six top FBI officials who died in the six months before they were to testify before the House Select Committee in 1977. Others included Alan H. Belmont, special assistant to Hoover; Louis Nicholas, another special assistant and Hoover’s liaison with the Warren Commission; James Cadigan, a document expert who handled papers related to the murder of John F. Kennedy; J. M. English, former head of the FBI forensic sciences laboratory where Oswald’s rifle and pistol were both tested; and Donald Kaylor, an FBI fingerprint chemist who examined prints from the JFK case.

FBI documents declassified in 2006 detail even more about Ford’s role as the FBI informant and agent and the crucial role Ford played in doctoring the autopsy to accommodate the cover-up. Assistant FBI Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach regularly met secretly with Ford to inform the FBI on the status of the Warren Commission investigation. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” DeLoach wrote in a memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however, he thought it should be done.”

The Associated Press reported that DeLoach wrote a memo on December 17, 1963, about a meeting with Ford in which the deputy director laid out a problem. “Two members of the Commission brought up the fact that they still were not convinced that the president had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository,” DeLoach wrote. “These members failed to understand the trajectory of the slugs that had killed the president. He [Ford] stated he felt this point would be discussed further but, of course, would represent no problem.” Indeed, we shall see what Ford meant by “no problem.”

Here, more specifically, is the problem DeLoach described. The initial draft of the Warren Commission report stated, “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” This description matches that of JFK’s personal physician, Admiral Burkley, who attended the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, and noted that the wound was “in the upper posterior about even with the third thoracic vertebra.”

In fact, autopsy photographs of JFK’s back, show the wound in his back, two to three inches below the base of the neck. A diagram by Burkley included in the Warren Commission’s owns report confirms this location. The actual physical evidence demonstrates that the first draft of the Warren Commission report was indeed accurate. Photographs of bullet holes in Kennedy’s shirt and suit jacket, almost six inches below the top of the collar, place the wound in the upper right back.

As American history professor Michael L. Kurtz pointed out in
The JFK Assassination Debates
, “If a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building nearly sixty feet higher than the limousine entered the president’s back, with the president sitting in an upright position, it could hardly have exited from his throat at a point just above the Adam’s apple, then abruptly change course and drive downward into Governor Connally’s back.”

Ford did Hoover’s bidding. His handwritten edit on the classified document said, “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of his spine.” This change was later revealed in declassified papers kept by the Warren Commission’s general counsel and accepted in the final report. “A small change,” Ford told the Associated Press when it surfaced decades later in 1997.

Ford, a public supporter of the single-assassin theory, insisted that his edit had intended to clarify meaning, not change history. However, the effect of his alteration is clear. With this “small change,” he bolstered the commission’s false conclusion that a single bullet had passed through Kennedy and hit Governor Connally—thus solidifying what is now known as “The Magic Bullet Theory.” Indeed, the Associated Press stated that Ford’s “small change” became “the crucial element” to determine that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin.

All of this was unknown to the public at the time of Ford’s appointment to the vice presidency in 1973. The American public first learned of Ford’s alteration in 1997, over three decades after Kennedy’s assassination, and this information was only released as a result of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Interestingly enough, the ARRB was formed as a response to Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
. For the first time in generations, the public demanded an in-depth examination to determine what was fact and what was covered up. In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act to empower the ARRB to declassify JFK assassination records.

Richard Nixon did know of Ford’s role in the cover-up of the true details of Kennedy’s death, having learned about it from the number-three man at the FBI, William J. Sullivan, according the White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. Nixon also knew the CIA’s true role in Kennedy’s murder and how the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his conduct of the Cuban Missile Crisis had marked Kennedy for removal from office, an act facilitated by Lyndon Johnson for his own reasons. LBJ was facing criminal indictment, political ruin, and jail at the hands of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and knew that JFK intended to dump him from the 1964 ticket.

Nixon had used this knowledge successfully prior to leveraging it for a pardon as well as control of the papers and tapes from his presidential years. Indeed, when Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell Richard Helms of the CIA to order the FBI to desist in their pursuit of the Watergate break-in lest they inadvertently lay bare the whole “Bay of Pigs thing,” the response from Helms was violent but effective.

A CIA memo made clear that the agency would adhere to its request and “desist from expanding the investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.
”
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Nixon also knew by the time of his resignation that the Watergate break-in had involved a number of individuals with CIA connections, and many of them had been on the ground in Dallas on November 22, 1963. In his directions to Haldeman, he said, “Hunt . . . will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things . . . tell them we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”
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As White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman said, Nixon clearly understood the connection between the Cuban invasion and the JFK assassination. Although Nixon would struggle to obtain proof of the CIA’s involvement, Nixon knew that he could make the charge under oath with millions of American’s watching.

Years later, Haig would retire to Palm Beach, where he continued to drink and resumed his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit despite his history of heart problems. In 2013, I was contacted by Richard H. Greene, a retired sewing machine company executive who had also retired to Palm Beach. Green claimed he had been drinking with the chainsmoking retired general at the Bath and Tennis Club when the subject of the pardon came up. Haig recalled Nixon’s instructions to him. “Tell them if Dick Nixon’s going down I’m taking everyone down with me, that prick [CIA Director Richard] Helms, Lyndon, and Jerry Ford are going down with me” was the way Haig phrased it. “The Old Man knew what Ford had done for Hoover in the JFK matter,” Greene told me Haig said, “He had them by the balls.”
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Nixon’s longtime advance man Nick Ruwe told me, “Nixon knew the Dallas setup. He had Ford by the balls,” using eerily similar language to that attributed by Greene to Haig.

Using General Al Haig as his agent, Nixon let Ford know that he would expose the CIA’s involvement in the JFK assassination and Ford’s role in altering the autopsy records if he went to trial in the Watergate scandal. Thus, Nixon would use this information to avoid prosecution and jail to blackmail Gerald Ford for a full, free, and unconditional pardon. Nixon’s secret would not only destroy his presidency—it would save him from prison.

Haig presented several pardon options to Ford on August 1, 1974, a few days before Nixon eventually resigned. Woodward, in a 1998 interview with Ford, reported: “Ford said about his August 1 meeting with Haig that ‘yes, on paper,’ without action it was a deal, but it never became a deal because I never accepted.”
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This was Ford’s cover story. In fact, Haig was so confident of a Nixon pardon that he brought with him to the meeting two sheets of yellow legal paper. Once again, Woodward would be the first to learn a key element of a private meeting that involved Haig. “The first sheet contained a handwritten summary of a president’s legal authority to pardon,” wrote Woodward. “The second sheet was a draft pardon form that only needed Ford’s signature and Nixon’s name to make it legal.”
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Haig saw Ford twice on August 1. His first meeting with Ford was not sufficient because presidential assistant Robert Hartmann had inserted himself into the proceedings. “I had the impression that [Haig] didn’t feel he could be as forthright as he normally might have been,” said Hartmann. “[I]t was equally obvious that [Haig] wished I would go away.”
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Haig left and returned later, ensuring that no one witnessed the meeting.

Hartmann, Ford’s counselor, was furious when he learned that Haig had returned to the White House to discuss a pardon with Ford and immediately demanded that Ford create a “record” that no agreement on a pardon existed. Haig thought Hartmann was out of his depth. Hartmann said the pompous and imperious Haig was “an asshole.” Yet Haig secured what he went back to the White House to get—a deal that would remain secret until now.

Haig told Ford point-blank that Nixon
knew
that Ford had doctored the JFK autopsy report at the behest of Hoover and that the thirty-seventh president was prepared to lay this fact out for the American people if he went to trial over the charges against him. This would explain Ford’s resolve to deliver the pardon despite the almost unanimous opposition of his hand chosen circle of advisors.

Nixon had a one-two punch in store for Ford. Nixon told me, “We had pictures with Ford in bed with a broad,” which FBI executive Sullivan had covertly snapped for the FBI at a hotel suite in the Sheraton Carlton Hotel, where Capitol Hill wheeler-dealer Bobby Baker regularly entertained congressmen and senators with prostitutes. Hoover was among those who had copies of the photos exposing Ford in flagrante delicto. It is unlikely that Hoover needed this blackmail evidence in the Warren Commission matter, as Hoover was a patron of Ford’s who had supported his early election to congress financially and for whom Ford pushed enormous budget increases for the FBI in the Congress. Ford was also an appropriations water carrier for the CIA. Ford was inclined to do Hoover’s bidding in covering up what transpired on November 22, 1963. Nixon, Haig assured Ford, would “take everyone down with him,” presumably revealing not only Ford’s actions on the Warren Commission but the CIA’s own dark secrets regarding the Bay of Pigs and the agency’s dark ties to the plot in Dallas that included Johnson, the agency, elements of organized crime, and big Texas oil men like Clint Murchison. In fact, the
Washington Post
’s Bob Woodward would report on December 18, 1975, quoting unnamed sources, that Haig had secured a commitment from Ford that Nixon would be pardoned after Ford took office.
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In his important book
31 Days
, author Barry Werth notes that Ford seemed intent on pardoning Nixon from August 1 forward, despite vociferous opposition from his own staff, including Hartmann, lawyers Phillip Buchen, and Benton Becker, and the young Donald Rumsfeld. With Ford beginning to think about reelection, his aides told him that pardoning Nixon would bring his post-resignation popularity down and pose problems in winning a new term. Although Ford always prefaced every discussion about the pardon with the caveat “I haven’t decided yet,” it was clear that the die had been cast in the seminal Haig-Ford meeting of August 1.