SPEAKING OF CONSPIRACIES

Joseph Califano Jr. has written a new memoir, "Inside: A Public and Private Life," which makes some startling claims about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A longtime political insider who started out as one of Robert McNamara's Pentagon "whiz kids," Califano was privvy to much that is still not completely understood about the Kennedy years. Califano was interviewed last Sunday by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes. Here's the relevant exchange about the assassination:

LAMB: I want to ask you if this has ever been printed before. "Years later when I was on the White House staff, Lyndon Johnson told me, quote, 'Kennedy tried to kill Castro but Castro got Kennedy first.'" Have you ever reported that before?
CALIFANO: I think this is the first reporting of that. I may -- I may have talked to people about that.
LAMB: You go on to say you agreed with Lyndon Johnson that Castro through Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy?
CALIFANO: I have come to believe that, Brian. Today I -- I -- when I was in the Pentagon, I was -- I served on a super secret committee on Cuba, set up, set up in January of 1973 [sic, he must have meant 1963], under President Kennedy. The objective was to overthrow Castro, to get rid of him. What's in the book about those events -- most of that has never been published before. I fought to get these documents declassified when I was doing the memoir.
It was wild. And we were going -- we were going to do all kinds of things. We were going to put -- we wanted sugar in their gasoline. We were going to tell the Cubans all to turn the water on at the same time to drain their water. At one point, we considered whether we should tie incendiary devices to the feet of bats, drop the bats over Cuba at night. They would fly into the attics of houses and buildings; the incendiary device would go off and the island would go up in flames. But there were clearly -- Robert Kennedy was determined to assassinate Castro. It was --- it was -- The Kennedys were obsessed with it, and ...
LAMB: What did you do when you were confronted with it yourself?
CALIFANO: Well, the first time -- it came up once at one of our committee meetings. The committee was the CIA, the Defense Department, the State Department and the Justice Department. And State was not only in charge but Robert Kennedy was in charge. And when -- when it was -- the only time it was discussed in a formal way in that committee, I opposed it, and Joe Dolan (ph), who was the Justice Department, a young Justice Department lawyer at the time, also opposed it.
The remarkable thing in retrospect is the CIA was completely silent during that whole discussion. But if you're Castro, just think now about November, the fall of 1963. There had been several attempts on your life. The mob, the poison pens, the crazy stuff. And in September, Castro told a reporter for Associated Press, you know, the American leaders ought to be careful because if they're going to try to kill me, they're not immune from -- from being killed.
November 1, Diem is killed, the head of the South Vietnam [government], is killed in a coup that we sponsored, that was approved by President Kennedy. So you're sitting there and you're Castro, and you've got to say, these guys are going to get me. November 22, President Kennedy is assassinated.
And I think the paroxysms of grief -- I mean -- unbelievable grief of Robert Kennedy -- this is a personal view, but I really do believe the unbelievable grief is -- was driven in good measure by the fact that he thought some of the things he was doing are what may have killed his brother. ...
And think about this. When you think about commissions and the commissions we have today, the Warren commission never talked to me or anybody else involved in the covert Cuban program in the course of their investigation about that.

The idea that Castro had a hand in Kennedy's assassination is not new. Given the mountain of JFK conspiracy theories, it's hard to conceive of any idea that would be new. But it's striking to hear one of the era's insiders say that Lyndon Johnson thought it was payback, that he suspects Robert Kennedy believed that, and that he believes it himself. Califano is not some kind of flake, after all. He was a top domestic adviser to LBJ, the attorney who represented The Washington Post and the Democratic Party during the Watergate years and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Carter administration.

As I've mentioned before, the most persuasive book I ever read about the Cuba connection to the sniper attack that killed JFK is Philip Kerr's "The Shot." It's fiction, a first-class thriller novel, but it shows how the killing in Dealey Plaza might have been prepared.