Harris Wofford was born
in New York City on 9th April, 1926.
After graduating from the University of Chicago (1948) and Howard
University Law School (1954) he became a lawyer. Wofford was legal
assistant, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1954-1958) before becoming
a law professor at Notre Dame University (1959-1960).
In 1960 Wofford was appointed
special assistant to John
F. Kennedy and
chairman of the Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights (1960-1962). He assisted
in the formation of the Peace Corps
and served as special representative to Africa. He was later to hold
the post of Associate Director of the Peace Corps (1962-1966).
Wofford also served as
president of the College at Old Westbury (1966-1970) and Bryn Mawr
College (1970-1978). In 1980 he published Of
Kennedys and Kings (1980). The book provides an insiders
view of John
F. Kennedy,
Robert
Kennedy,
Martin Luther King, Lyndon
B. Johnson,
Hubert Humphrey, McGeorge
Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert
S. McNamara,
Theodore Sorenson and other leading
political figures in the 1960s.
A member of the Democratic
Party, Wofford was Pennsylvania secretary of labor and industry
(1987-1991). In May, 1991, Wofford ; was appointed to the United States
Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Henry John Heinz,
III. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1994.
Harris Wofford was Chief
Executive Officer of the Corporation
for National and Community Service from October 1995 to January
2001.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys
& Kings (1980)
From the findings of the Senate committee, we could begin
to understand the burden of knowledge - even of guilt - that Robert
Kennedy was carrying in the last years of his life. Together with
the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979,
these facts can account for the grief beyond ordinary grief with which
Robert Kennedy wrestled for long months and years. They do not prove
that John Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy, but they
do suggest that it was not a tragedy without reason.
Robert Kennedy must have
considered the story those facts told to be worse than the most terrible
fiction. Adding to his burden was the obligation he felt to keep all
the key facts secret from most, if not all, of his family and friends,
and to try to withhold them forever from the people of this country
and the world. Those secrets provided motives for Castro, or the Mafia,
or the ClA's Cuban brigade, or some people in the CIA itself to have
conspired to kill the President, yet to preserve the good name of
John Kennedy and of the government of the United States they had to
be kept from the Warren Commission and from the eyes of history. Also
weighing on Robert Kennedy's mind must have been the risks of blackmail
against the government and the family of the murdered President which
threatened to make a special hostage of the Attorney General.
From the reconstruction
of the record made possible by the Senate and House reports, and from
everything we know about the character of Robert Kennedy, I believe
that the shock of these discoveries and his realization of what violence,
crime, and secret conspiracies can lead to were significant factors
in his transformation. Thus, in order to understand Robert Kennedy
and his times, the truth about these stories must be sorted out and
the painful facts faced. That is what I believe Robert Kennedy did.
(2)
Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys & Kings (1980)
In 1967, when Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote a column
reporting that the CIA may have conspired with the Mafia to murder
Castro and that "Bobby, eager to avenge the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
played a key role in the planning," Kennedy told his aides, "I
didn't start it. I stopped it." The record available to the public,
however, is not so clear.
The Attorney General certainly
didn't start it, and before the Bay of Pigs he apparently had little
to do with the CIA or Cuba. But in the aftermath of the invasion,
he became the President's representative in Operation Mongoose, the
ClA-led, interdepartmental secret campaign against Castro. He persuaded
his brother to issue a top-secret order "to use our available
assets... to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime." In January
1962, Robert Kennedy assembled the Mongoose planners at the Justice
Department and said that the operation had "top priority";
he urged that "no time, money, effort - or manpower... be spared."
How could he be sure that his pressure had not encouraged the CIA
to reactivate or intensify its assassination efforts?
His involvement may have
gone deeper. At least one of those familiar with his role in Operation
Mongoose thinks that his fascination with violent counter-insurgency
and his frustration with Castro would have invited the assassination
planners to make him privy to their plots (even as McCone's aversion
to unsavory operations may have led them to keep him in the dark).
Since the cost of the various expeditions of sabotage sponsored by
Mongoose was excessive, in comparison to any damage they did in Cuba,
the CIA planners needed an ally. They had one in the Attorney General.
A rationale for Operation Mongoose was always inadequate, according
to a non-CIA participant in the planning, but it was approved because
of the Attorney General's insistence. In retrospect, that official
thinks Mongoose made sense only as a cover for the attempts at murder.
The assassination plotters needed just such a large unchecked budget,
repeated landings of sabotage teams, and secret agents.
If Robert Kennedy understood
and supported this secret plan within the larger covert operation,
he himself may have been the source of "terrific pressure"
for the assassination. Nothing in the testimony before the Senate
committee suggests that the circumlocutious and evasive leaders of
the CIA would have put such direct pressure on the President. Then
who did? "Terrific pressure" is what anyone, including his
brother the President, would have felt if he tried to resist a course
strongly advocated by the Attorney General.
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