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PATIENCE WAS TO PROVE AN OPERATIVE WORD. MY AFFAIR WITH KITTREDGE did not commence for another six years, and then, for several years we would meet once a week, or sometimes, given the demands of circumspection, no more than once a month, until the dreadful hour when Hugh and Christopher took their tragic fall, and we were wed in the haunted ravine of that event.

All this lay ahead. I was to live for a long time with the shock of the assassination in my heart and in my bones, and it was even in the air I breathed at Langley, until time reduced at last my sense of that momentous catastrophe and it blended into the history and whispers of the halls, the weight of the fact now no greater than itself—another impost on the guilt of our lives.

Harlot, however, turned unrelenting in his powers of exaggeration. He knew the seed of consternation that now dwelt in the taproot of many an Agency dream; he memorialized The Day. He ended with a monologue I was to hear more than once, if always with different and most specially chosen associates.

“On that unique Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963,” was the way Harlot usually began, “I can tell you that we all congregated in the Director’s meeting room on the Seventh Floor for a bit of summitry, all of us, satraps, mandarins, lords paramount, padishahs, maharajahs, grand moguls, kingfish, the lot.

“And we sat there,” said Harlot. “It’s the only time in all these years that I saw so many brilliant, ambitious, resourceful men—just sitting there. Finally McCone said, ‘Who is this Oswald?’ And there was a World Series silence. The sort you hear when the visiting team has scored eight runs in the first inning.

“Let us not try to measure the gloom. We could have been bank directors just informed that a time bomb was ticking away in the vault. Everybody’s safety box has to be emptied. But you don’t even know at this point how much you have to hide. I began to think of some of the very worst of our people. Bill Harvey over in Rome. Boardman Hubbard in Paris with AM/LASH. Suppose Fidel produces Cubela? The mind runs amok at such times. Everyone was inhaling everyone else’s ghosts. We were waiting for the little details concerning Oswald to commence belaboring our wits. My God, this man Oswald went to Russia after working at Atsugi Air Base in Japan. Isn’t that where they tested the U-2? Then this Oswald dares to come back from Russia! Who debriefed him? Which one of us has been into him? Does it even matter? Our common peril may be even more embracing than our individual complicity. Cannot, oh, cannot someone do something about Oswald? No one utters the thought aloud. We are too many. We break up our meeting. It has congealed, after all, into silence. We meet all night in twos and threes. Information keeps coming in. Worse and worse. Marina Oswald, the Russian wife—that’s how new it all was, we didn’t say ‘Marina’ but ‘Marina Oswald, the Russian wife’—has an uncle who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the MVD. Then we hear that George de Mohrenschildt, whom some of us happen to know, a most cultivated contract type, has been Oswald’s closest friend in Dallas. My God, George de Mohrenschildt could be earning French money, German money, Cuban money, maybe de Mohrenschildt is earning our money. Who is paying him? Where did Oswald hang his hat? None of us goes home for the weekend. We may be enjoying our last hours at Langley. Then comes Sunday afternoon. The news rings around the corridors. Blessed relief. Dead leaves waltz in the garden. A marvelous hoodlum by the gemlike name of Jack Ruby has just killed Oswald. Stocky Jack Ruby can’t bear the thought of Jacqueline Kennedy’s sufferings at a public trial. We haven’t encountered a man so chivalrous since the War of the Roses. The mood on the Seventh Floor is now like the last reel of a film by Lubitsch. We hardly keep back the twinkles. I’ve always said since: I like Jack Ruby. The fellow who paid his debts. The only matter not settled to my absolute satisfaction is whether it was Trafficante or Marcello or Hoffa or Giancana or Roselli who sent the bill.

“In any event, we are home free. There will now be mess enough to smudge the record forever. I remember divining the outcome on that very Sunday night. I asked myself: Who has nothing to fear should the real story come out? That is a list to pursue. The Republicans have to be worried: Their right-wing Texas tycoons could be involved. The liberals must be close to primitive fright. Castro, even if he is innocent, cannot speak for all the elements in DGI. Helms has the Mafia to contemplate, plus rogue elephants, plus our malcontents at JM/WAVE. By definition, one cannot account for an enclave. Yes, CIA might have much to lose. So might the Pentagon. What if we discover that the Soviets were steering Oswald? One can’t have a nuclear war just because an Irish arriviste got bumped off by the Reds. And what if it is the anti-Castro Cubans in Miami? A damn good likelihood after all. That will bring us back to the Republicans, to Nixon, the lot. No, not quite the lot. A skilled Vietnamese gunman might be avenging his dead ruler, Diem. The Kennedy gang can’t afford exposure on that one, can they? Corrosion of the legend might work its way down to the martyr’s bier. And then there is the FBI. How can they allow any of these suppositions to be examined? Each one suggests a conspiracy. It is not to Buddha’s interest to advertise to the world that the FBI is singularly incompetent at detecting conspiracies they do not hatch themselves. No, none of this is in the interest of supposedly omniscient, wide-bottom Buddha. Oswald, as the sole killer, is, therefore, in everyone’s best service—KGB, FBI, CIA, DGI, Kennedys, Johnsons, Nixons, Mafia, Miami Cubans, Castro Cubans, even the Goldwater gang. What if a John Bircher did it? I can feel the furor in the veins of every conspirator who ever talked about killing Jack Kennedy. They can hardly trust themselves not to have done it even when they know they didn’t; after all, how can any one of them vouch for all their friends? A broth of disinformation has been on the stove ever since. I knew that we would enter upon a most prestigious investigation that would prove a model of sludge. So, I decided to save myself much untold watching of the pots, and moved right back to serious work where one can make a perceptible dent.”

Whether Harlot was actually calling upon his powers of detachment that Sunday night sixty hours after the assassination, or summarizing what he had learned in the months that followed, I, in my turn, was not able to summarize the situation. I was mired in the death. If obsession is a species of mourning for all the fears we bury in unhallowed ground—the unhallowed ground, that is, of our psyche—then I was obsessed. The death of Marilyn Monroe would not leave my mind. If, according to my father, Hoffa could conceive of such a crime in order to leave an unstanchable political wound in both Kennedys, then how many people could I name who might be ready to kill Jack in order to ignite a war against Fidel Castro?

Harlot might have recognized that no pattern can be pulled from such a porridge, but I did not. I lay captive to the velocity of my mind and it raced around the track on many a night. I thought often of Howard Hunt and his deep friendship with Manuel Artime. Hunt had the time, the opportunity—did he have the depth of rage? He might, by way of Artime, have a line into the most violent members of the Brigade. When my mind wore out from asking questions about Hunt, I moved on to brood about Bill Harvey. I went so far as to check on whether he had left Rome on that particular Friday in November. He had not. Then I realized it did not matter. One could run such an operation from Rome. Or could one? And where was Dix Butler? Was he already in Vietnam, or had he stopped over in Dallas? I could not determine that. I also wondered whether Castro, by way of Trafficante, had succeeded in one assassination where we had failed in many. There were hours in those sleepless nights when I could not keep from picturing Oswald and his narrow, tortured, working-class face. Oswald had been down to Mexico City in September. Cal showed me a memo. Headquarters at Langley had cabled Mexico Station for the names of all contacts of the two leading KGB men at the Russian Embassy in Mexico City. Station came back with their response. The taps on the Cuban Embassy and the Russian Embassy produced Oswald’s name and Rolando Cubela’s. Oswald had even made a phone call from the Cuban Embassy to the Soviet Embassy. In a harsh and highly ungrammatical Russian, the man who called himself Oswald had insisted on speaking to “Comrade Kostikov.”

“That’s dubious,” said Cal. “We know that Oswald spoke Russian well.”

“And Cubela?”

“Ah, Cubela. He had talks with Comrade Kostikov. We don’t know what about. I expect he has contacts with everyone.”

“We’ve dropped him, of course.”

“Heavens, yes.” Cal shrugged. “In any event, it’s over. The FBI is going to tell us that Oswald acted alone.”

Had J. Edgar Hoover done it?

My thoughts did not rest. One day, during the hearings of the Warren Commission, Chief Justice Warren inquired of Allen Dulles, “The FBI and the CIA do employ undercover men who are of terrible character?” And Allen Dulles, in all the bonhomie of a good fellow who can summon up the services of a multitude of street ruffians, replied, “Yes, terribly bad characters.”

“That has to be one of Allen’s better moments,” remarked Hugh Montague.

I was at the point where I was ready to believe that Allen Dulles did it. Or Harlot. Or, in the great net of implication, Cal and I might be guilty as well. Thoughts raced. I had not yet approached my first piece of universal wisdom: There are no answers—there are only questions.

Of course, some questions have to be better than others.