"Yes! That dance scene with the bongos was fantastic! I saw that when I was at Atsugi, Japan, in Marine Air Control Squadron One. We turned I Want to Live! into a slogan when we rioted in our barracks. I got office hours once for writing it on a post with a laundry marker. An asshole corporal named Curtis reported me. I hated that guy."
"Do you know what cant is?"
I wondered if he he was talking about the German philosopher that Jack, a Marxist-Leninist who hung out with the rest of the radicals at the Ryder Coffee House, liked.
But no. "Cant is a kind of slang used by criminal groups in order to make understanding what they say to each other more difficult for outsiders," Brother-in-law took pains to explain.
"I'm planning to write a novel that deals with, among other things, organized crime in New Orleans. There's so much of it here."
"Yeah. Most people think New Orleans is a French town. Actually, it's a Dago town. Italians are clowns. Hitler never should have accepted them into the Axis. That's one of the reasons he lost the war."
"What about the Japanese?"
"Now the Japanese are clever people," he said. "Among the Asians, they are the Master Race, together with the Chinese. You know, gunpowder and paper were both Chinese inventions."
"Yeah."
"Kerry, come over here and sit next to me. I want to tell you something important." I sat on the floor next to the footstool where he was seated, hunched forward with his elbows resting on both knees.
"Now listen." He fixed a fierce glare in my direction. "If there was to be a rebellion in the intelligence community, and if a man were to find himself in the middle of that rebellion, and if he were to blow a lot of covers, then those people whose covers were blown would be very angry. And they would need a method of dealing with that anger. So I think that man who exposed them to the government should be taken to sea in a submarine, and tortured to death."
An awkward silence followed.
"Don't you agree?"
"I guess so," I answered meekly, quickly pushing the whole subject from my thoughts.
There were other subjects that I have dealt with by pushing them away, even more successfully. For example, from the time that I read in Ed Sanders' The Family about filmed ritual murders until well into 1976 when I began encountering seemingly unrelated rumors about "snuff films," I failed to remember the weird and disturbing discussion with Slim and Gary about "snuff movies."
Before recalling it clearly, I was saying in relation to the rumors, "That's just the type of thing Slim and Gary would have been into." Yet today I remember vividly the morning Gary asked me what I thought of "snuff films" and then explained to me what they were. I recall exactly where both he and I were sitting in his living room at the time. I remember my intense fear, and how I privately rationalized my pretense of agreement. And I have recollected ever since early in 1977 the exact expression in Gary's eyes as he leered at me wickedly and spoke of building "a network of blackmailed murderers."
Secret Governments
"Did it ever occur to you, Kerry, that one of the best ways to hide something is right out in plain view, under everybody's noses?"
"At the end of 1961," writes E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, "Dulles was forced to 'retire,' and Richard Bissell followed. He was succeeded, not by Tracy Barnes, but by Richard Helms, untainted by the Bay of Pigs. "After a considerable bureaucratic struggle Barnes established the Domestic Operations Division and appointed me its chief of covert action. The new division accepted both personnel and projects unwanted elsewhere within CIA, and those covert-action projects that came to me were almost entirely concerned with publishing and publications. We subsidized 'significant' books, for example, The New Class, by Milovan Djilas, one of a number of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., titles so supported; ran a couple of news services, one based in Washington's National Press Building, even subsidizing the printing and distribution of a well-known series of travel books. The work was not particularly demanding, and at the end of the day, I still had sufficient energy to write fiction at home."
As a former Marine buddy of Lee Harvey Oswald, writing a novel based on a man who may have gone to Russia at CIA, Instigation, I would have been within the field of Hunt's official attention at that time. I find it hard to believe that he would not at least have known about me, if he was not, as I'm inclined to suspect, traveling to New Orleans on an occasional weekend and giving me his personal attention, using the name of a man he wanted to implicate in the JFK assassination plot: Gary Kirstein.
Perhaps hiding something out in the open was in fact the solution to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy murder. An abundance of evidence, almost pointedly ignored by the Warren Commission, is to be found in the 26 Volumes of testimony and exhibits published by the government shortly after the Report was issued.
There we learn that people who could not have been Oswald impersonated him previous to the assassination, that eye-witness testimony indicates Oswald was on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository within seconds after the shots were fired, that the man who killed police officer Tippet made his escape in a car, when it is known that Lee had never learned to drive, and finally, that there occurred a host of suspicious activity in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza before, during and after the assassination that casts more than reasonable doubt on the lone-assassin theory.
Keeping in mind the assertion conveyed to me by Stan Jamison, that certain of the conspirators at the operational level wanted the mystery to come unraveled, so as to expose the people who had hired them (or at least to heat things up enough to make their ruling class bosses subject to blackmail) it is actually possible to surmise that the many conflicts between the Report and the evidence were intentional.
Did Brother-in-law and his accessories want to see just how far they could go in making the actual truth available to the public, confident of the probability that it would be safely ignored long enough for them to escape prosecution? Such a ploy is not as reckless as it may seem if we keep in mind that the actual assassins would have been positioned so as to take many important and powerful people with them if they went to prison. That would explain Richard Nixon's sweating in the Watergate tapes about E. Howard Hunt's power to make public further crimes, linked somehow in Nixon's mind with "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," in which Nixon obviously felt himself to be implicated.
Brother-in-law seemed to have devoted an unusual amount of thought to what "people," the membership of the general public, do and do not like. In that respect his intuition seems to have been keenly informed.
Among observations typical of his consciousness of public will was a statement he made many times: "You know, Kerry, the general public becomes very excited about things for a short interval, but it has a very brief attention span. Emotions don't run high about anything for long."
"Yeah, one of my teachers in high school used to tell us that a Greek philosopher once said, 'The wrath of the people is great, but their memory is short.'"
From that and similar comments I gathered vaguely that he was already looking forward to a day when it would be safe for the assassins to win public acceptance.
"Kerry, did you ever notice how people just love to eavesdrop?"
"That's why books about writing say it is always a good bet to open a story with dialogue."
"What about the idea of building a whole political movement on that idea, that people love to spy on the lives of others. Would it grow fast or wouldn't it?"