Sunday November 20, 1988 2-star edition Herald Kennedy mystique and conspiracy theories thrive stop on a whirlwind tour de- By Mike Cochran signed to end the left-right Associated Press squabbling among bitterly fac- JFK tionalized Texas Democrats and DALLAS — As Air Force One secure the state for the presiden- 25 YEARS LATER began its descent into Carswell tial election the following year. Associated Press correspondent Air Force Base, President John A crowd estimated at 6,000 Mike Cochran covered the F. Kennedy glanced down greeted Kennedy and his wife. through the darkness. Amber Jacqueline, at Carswell, and of President lights silhouetted the Fort Worth thousands more lined the motor- Kennedy in Dallas and reported skyline and gave the city a cade route to the old Hotel on the slaying and burial of friendly, festive glow. Texas, where the president Lee Harvey Oswald. Here, he "Spectacular," Kennedy told would spend his final night. explores the significance of Congressman Jim Wright. A 26-year-old Associated the 25th anniversary of The date was Nov. 21, 1963, Press reporter caught his first Kennedy's death. and the presidential party had flown to Fort Worth for the third JFK, A-10 1-

Weather Fair, warmer/A2 Examiner 75 cents

AP In the final moments before shots rang out, President and Jackie Kennedy acknowledge the crowd.

could be retried. Through the years, there were interludes with Oswald's widow, JFK Marina, and turbulent, intriguing II- From A-1 bouts with his mother, Marguer- ite, whose favorite pastime was glimpse of an American president haranguing Fort Worth reporters. that .evening arid, in that era of And always the conspiracy innocence, was every bit as ex- buffs, the researchers dedicated cited as a small-town West Texan to proving the Warren Commis- should have been. sion's basic conclusion a lie, and • Hours later, that AP reporter not a very convincing one at that. joined other numbed and dis- They insisted Oswald was not mayed colleagues in covering the the killer or, at the very least, was death of his president and the not the sole triggerman. wounding of Gov. John Connally. Just :days later, he covered the In 1981, the conspiracies staying of Lee Harvey Oswald peaked with a trip to Rose Hill apd. *.draRed for the task, helped Cemetery to dig up the body carry his body to its grave. buried 18 years before in Os- Then came the 1964 murder wald's grave. A British author trial .of Jack Ruby, the Ides of had claimed we had buried an March conviction, a death sen- impostor, a Russian spy in fact. tence and an appellate court He was wrong. Forensic tests at ruling that set the verdict aside. Baylor University Medical Center Ruby died of cancer before he proved it was indeed Oswald. Although the echoes of gunfire in Dealey Plaza grow fainter with each passing autumn, the events of November 1963 continue to touch us all in mystifying ways and to different degrees. This month, there will be net- work and cable documentaries, Ballroom. That group totaled new books, an all-night Capitol 2,050, with 50 extra tickets allot- vigil and memorials by former ted at the last minute to the black Peace Corps volunteers and PT community. boat veterans. Millions of words No blacks, no breakfast speech, will be written. the White House said when told Still, members the president would be address- would prefer that remembrances ing an all-white audience. of the slain president be changed. It was Kennedy's final speech, "They have tried to get away but Jackie stole the show, looking from commemorating the day of lovely and self-assured in a two- his death and try to celebrate the piece pink suit with matching day of his birth," says Melody . Miller, an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy and his entourage Kennedy. then returned to Carswell for the What is the significance of this short flight to Dallas, where the 25th anniversary and the anniver- president was to address a lunch- saries that preceded it? Do we eon at the Trade Mart. know the legacy of Dallas? Or the In Dallas, 200,000 people, lessons of 1963? many on lunch breaks, jammed Historians might one day pin- the streets to see the 46-year-old point all this and more. president and his 34-year-old But don't bet on it. wife. Smiling and waving, Jackie sat at her husband's side as the ANYONE 01.0 ENOUGH to read motorcade rolled through the or watch television 25 years ago canyons of downtown Dallas. can recite from memory the Delighted and relieved by the events of Nov. 22. big, friendly reception, Nellie Kennedy spoke twice in Fort Connally, the governor's wife, Worth that morning, first to a turned from her seat in front of crowd of 5,000 who had gathered Kennedy and said: in the rain in the hotel parking "No one can say Dallas doesn't lot. Vice President Lyndon John- love and respect you, Mr. Presi- son and Connally joined him, but dent." • Jackie did not. "You sure can't," he replied. "It takes a little longer to put Seconds later, the motorcade herself together, that's why she's passed in front of the Texas AP prettier than we are," the presi- School Book Depository and into JFK's death and persisten dent joked with the cheering a sniper's cross hairs. allegations about conspiracies crowd. Inside, Kennedy addressed a THE FIRST YEAR after the have lett an indelible mark sold-out Chamber of Commerce assassination was difficult for on the American conscious breakfast in the hotel's Grand most Americans. It was a night- mare for Texans, particularly lion of a cultural center in Wash- "There's nothing new. My view those living in Dallas. ington to be named in Kennedy's is the same — Oswald did all the A number of publications honor, and Harvard University shooting," retired District Attor- found much to dislike about announced plans for a Kennedy ney Henry Texas and most were mightily Wade said in an Memorial Library. interview last month. "I haven't concerned with the so-called By the end of the year, it seen anything to change my mind. "mood of Dallas" and the accom- seemed certain that more Ameri- I feel like somebody might have modation granted its far-right can streets, avenues and boule- planted the seed or thought that fanatics in the conservative main- vards would be named Kennedy somebody ought to kill him (Ken- stream. than Main. nedy) while in town. But there is In an editorial headlined "A absolutely no proof of anything Year Later." the Dallas Morning THE DALLAS ceremony mark- like that." News touched on the "scathing ing the fifth anniversary of the Fifteen years ago, Wade, who and unjust criticism" of Dallas assassination was so brief and would have prosecuted Oswald and observed how the city stood simple it almost slipped past had he lived, was less certain. alone "in the spotlight of unfavor- unnoticed. "I find it hard to believe that able conspicuousness." Fifty people gathered for the Oswald didn't have help," he told The editorial did not mention prayer service near the spot the AP in 1973. "Call it a. gut the small but noisy element of where Kennedy was slain. A city feeling on my part. I don't have right-wingers whose agitation had official laid a wreath of red and any evidence to back it up. But I prompted Kennedy's visit 12 white carnations beside the believe there was a conspiracy. months before. bronze marker that tells the You just don't go downtown one Perhaps it was unimportant. assassination story. morning and kill the president." What seemed to matter to the The news was dominated by The widow of J.D. Tippit, the newspaper was that hysteria and the Vietnam War and the 1968 police officer Oswald shot after shock had subsided and the city election. Pain still lingered from fleeing the school book ware- could move ahead with new re- the slayings earlier that year of house, had remarried by the lath solve and high purpose. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. anniversary. A lawyer said the Nov. 22 that year fell on a Robert F. Kennedy. $600,000 she received from a Sunday, and a still sorrowful By the 10th anniversary in sympathetic public after Tippit's nation remembered Kennedy in 1973, reporters were getting lath- death went into a trust for their prayers and memorial services ered up over Watergate. In Dal- three children. across the country. las, 500 people gathered near the It had been a year of memori- assassination site, but the top UNLIKE THE SPARTAN fifth als. news story of the day was an 18- anniversary, the landmark 20th The U.S. Space Flight Center minute gap in a Nixon White touched all bases. at Cape Canaveral, Fla., was House tape recording. Movies, television specials, renamed Cape Kennedy, but later The JFK focus in 1973 was documentaries, books, magazine was changed back. New York shifting to conspiracy theories, articles and news stories explored changed the name of its interna- fed by books and a movie called the assassination anew. tional airport from Idlewild to "Executive Action" that laid In 1963, Marina Oswald, at age John F Kennedy. blame for the Kennedy killing on Congress authorized construe a group of greedy Texas oilmen continued on next page ► Horse-drawn caisson bearing the body of President Kennedy turns onto Memorial bridge before entering Arlington National Cemetery. OVEMB 22, 1963 ■ Continued from previous page

22, was a stranger in a foreign land, a frightened young woman with few friends, no money, no job, no future, two infant daugh- FIECOPOS ters and a dead husband accused BUILD 043 of killing the president of the . "It was horrible." she told the AP 20 years later. "For a while I thought it would all blow over, just go away. But now I accept the fact that I must live with this for the rest of my Moto ca life." route Less than two years after the assassination, Marina married Kenneth Porter, a carpenter, and they moved to a country house north of Dallas. She was then and remains today uncertain of Oswald's guilt Shooting sequen and whether he acted alone. She 4- initially agreed with the Warren 1. Car b-avelling 11 mph. Commission that Oswald was the Kennedy shot in the righlt lone assassin, but doubts crept in shoulder below the Itroat. and she later changed her mind. 2. Connally shot In the back But, she told the AP, "I don't

have any desire to waste the rest 3. Kennedy shot In the head of my life trying to prove some- thing that cannot be proven." 4. Car proceeds at high speed There are those, however, who to Parkland Memorial are obsessed with doing precisely Hospital. four miles away. that. In 1983, an AP story first, IN THE LIMO pulled together theories about. soars( the Black Dog Man, the Umbrella, SOMCG Man, the Mafia Con Man, the Tall sorts Tramp and a man called Frenchy. The article also looked at publica- tions called "The Continuing In- quiry," "Coverups!" and "Echoes of Conspiracy." President Texas Gay. THOSE ARE NAMES and news- Kennedy John Cannally letters well-known to the self- described "theorists" or "critics" who claim there is a sinister and still secret story behind the assas- Rap Guds+AP sination. They raise provocative ques- tions but provide few answers. That brings us to the 25th anniversary and the latest theo- ries. A British television documen- tary entitled "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," broadcast Oct. 25, claimed three gangsters from Marseilles, France, assassinated Kennedy on orders from U.S. organized crime. The two-hour documentary on Central Television identified the television report is reviving the .set up as the fall guy. Anderson s theory that Kennedy's assassina- special also linked Ruby to the tion was an act of revenge by Mafia plot. Lousiana mob boss Carlos Mar- cello, who was deported in 1961 BACK WHEN the echoes of by then-U.S. Attorney General gunfire were still ringing in De- Robert Kennedy. The program, aley Plaza, the media struggled to presented by reporter Jonathan define the mood of Dallas and Kwitny, was broadcast in New how the city's right-wing toler- York on Nov. 1 and will air ance might have figured in the elsewhere this month. assassination. The report said evidence indi- They apparently failed. cated that Oswald and Ruby had D Magazine, a slick Dallas connections to Marcello: Oswald monthly, unveiled its November through his uncle, who purport- purported assassins by name and 1988 issue with this cover: "25 edly worked for the Marcello Years Later: Did Dallai Kill Ken- said one was shot to death in organization, and Ruby through Mexico in 1972, a second was nedy?" drug trafficking, which would Inside, there is a story entitled working in Colombia's drug trade have been controlled by Marcello. and the third was living in Mar- "Was Dallas a City or 'Hate?" In a two-hour television special The debate goes wri. seilles after his recent release Nov. 2, columnist Jack Anderson from prison. Robert H. Johnson Jr., the argued another theory involving AP's Texas bureau chief who But the clay after the program the Mafia, that Kennedy was a aired, a Marseilles newspaper directed the news agency's assas- victim of underworld figures first sination coverage, wrote the AP's assembled records indicating that hired by the CIA to kill Fidel two of them could not have been first startling words: • Castro. Anderson's special says "BULLETIN in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963; one Santo Traflicante, mob boss in was serving on a mine sweeper "DALLAS (AP) -- President Havana before Castro took power Kennedy was shot today just as from Oct. 16. 1962, to April 16, in 1959, double-crossed the CIA his 1964, according to French navy motorcade left downtown Dallas. and informed Castro. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and headquarters, and another was in Castro then made a deal with a Marseilles jail cell that day, grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She cried, Traflicante to kill Kennedy. An- 'Oh, no!' The motorande sped on." according to the Justice Ministry. derson theorized. TrafTicante al- In addition, the newspaper Johnson, recently retired and legedly enlisted the suppport of living in New Mexico, remained in account quoted the navy veteran two other bosses, Marcello and as saying that the third man Texas for six years after the Sam Giancana, and Oswald was shootings. Never once, he said, singled out was also in jail on the • day of the assassination. The program was based on a four-year inquiry by American writer and researcher Steve Riv- ele and the program's British director, Nigel Turner. In this country, a syndicated

plain it either. But she vividly marketing at upscale Highland remembers the look on her fifth- Park Village shopping complex in grade teacher's face when he Dallas, said the whole issue is dismissed his pupils in Chicopee muddled because the case has Falls, Mass., that November after- never been solved. noon. "But to me, the way to work "Just by his expression, we out our emotions of guilt and knew something really big had regret is to discuss them openly happened," she says now. and repeatedly," she said. "They Womble, 35, now director of just don't vanish." t Sunday, November 20, 1988, Los Angeles Herald Examiner All El EARS LATER

Ai. A sailor weeps as the caisson carrying John Kennedy's body rolls by during funeral procession. Ai 0 Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Sunday, November 20, 1988 I .,.T*,,.. .,.%. -4..41,:s7 14. 1IFIKE:igSilfeiM

Lif after C t fog Jackie, Caroline and John still in limelight but privacy prevails

By Jerry Schwartz and Kiley Armstrong Associated Press

NEW YORK — In fairy tales, the beautiful princess marries the handsome prince and they live happily ever after. But Jacqueline Bouvier Ken- nedy Onassis' fairy tale short- circuited on a warm day in Dallas when her pink suit was splattered with her prince's blood. In the ensuing 25 years, she has had to write her own happy ending. The plot twists she has chosen have not been popular with the adoring multitudes who would have preferred that she remain the national widow. Her 1968 marriage to ty- coon Aristotle Onassis engen- dered outrage, and her penchant for privacy bred resentment. But once a year, she kneels alone at Arlington National Cem- etery. And once again she be- comes the stoic, black-veiled widow who stood at that spot in 1963 to bury her husband. It is important to remember what Jackie Kennedy was to America and to the world. She was the glamorous, whispery- voiced brunette whose appear- ances caused as much commotion as her husband's — so much so that he laughingly introduced himself as Jackie's escort. She was the fashion plate whose designer dresses, pillbox hats and white gloves spurred the fashion industry. Most of all, she was mistress of AP Camelot. A time to grieve: Jackie Kennedy, Caroline and John Jr. walk up She forfeited that title when steps of St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C., for the she married Onassis, the aging Greek who seemed the antithesis president's funeral Mass on Nov. 25, his son's third birthday. of the elegant Kennedy. •- . • .-» • the Kennedy family

ing producer of the office of film and television at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She married author-artist Edwin Schlossberg in July 1986. After a $1,250-a-week internship in 1987 as a summer associate at a New York law firm, she gradu- ated from Columbia University law school in May. She gave birth to a daughter, Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, on June 25. Her brother has kept a more public profile. Now an athletic 6-foot-1, with matinee-idol good looks, Kennedy recently was named by People magazine as "the sexiest man alive." Like his father, Kennedy has been described as extremely shy, although he did make a few campaign speeches when his cousin, Joseph P. Kennedy II, ran for Congress. Kennedy acted in two produc- AP tions at Brown University in A time to celebrate: Jackie Kennedy is flanked by Caroline Providence, R.I., where he gradu- and John Jr. after a pre-commencement ceremony marking ated in 1982. Caroline's graduation from the Columbia School of Law last May. In the summer of 1985, he starred in a revival of a play called "Winners." staged and di- The. marriage foundered 3-year-old boy saluting his rected by his fellow Brown gradu- quickly, and Ari and Jackie lived father's horse-drawn caisson. ates at the Irish Arts Center in separate lives. When he died in But this was no "John-John" Manhattan. 1975, he left her $120,000 in his on the stage in Atlanta. This was In 1984. he began his first job, will; she won a $26 million settle- a handsome, well-spoken law stu- in the Office of ment from the Onassis family. dent. This was a 28-year-old Business Development. He also With her millions, Jackie Onas- millionaire who had traveled the spent a summer as a $1,100-a- sis could have done absolutely world and worked with the poor. week intern at an L.A. law firm. nothing, enjoying her 14-room More than a quarter-century The young Kennedy, who lives apartment on upper Fifth Ave- has passed since John F. Kennedy in a modest apartment in Green- nue, her estate in Bernardsville, Jr. and his sister, Caroline, now wich Village, is a millionaire, N.J., and the oceanfront com- 30, charmed the nation with their thanks to a trust fund left by his pound on Martha's Vineyard. Oval Office shenanigans. father and the settlement his Instead, she entered the job They endured the assassina- mother made with the Onassis force in 1978 as an editor for tions of their father in 1963 and estate. Doubleday & Co. She works there their Uncle Bobby in 1968. They Although he has no personal 31/: days a week — producing adjusted when their mother mar- recollection of the White House ideas and acquiring books from ried Onassis. days — he was only 3 when his authors and agents, then guiding Still, by all reports John and father was killed — he majored in the writing of manuscripts. Caroline thrived — they did well American history in college, has She declines all interviews, in private schools, became profi- studied his father's administra- according to her spokeswoman, cient in sports, made lasting tion and is a member of the John Nancy Tuckerman. friendships and avoided drugs. F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Like their mother, both Ken- Despite speculation about a nedy children guard their privacy possible political future, he has WHEN HE TOOK the podium at and decline all interview re- steadfastly denied having any the Democratic National Conven- quests. definite career plans beyond New tion in July, the national memory earned a York University Law School, drifted back nearly 25 years, to fine arts degree at Harvard, then where he is completing his final the mind's image of a served as manager and coordinat- year.