Lisa Howard: America's First Anchorwoman, Cuba, and the JFK Assassination by Joe Knapp Lisa Howard first made a name for herself as a journalist when she scored a major coup while working for the Mutual Broadcasting System covering the appearance of Khrushchev at the UN in 1960. This was the visit where K apparently had a problem with one of his shoes. Anyway, the normally chic and striking Howard dressed down in suitable proletarian garb and stole into the Soviet Embassy on Park Avenue muttering "Goot Mornink" to the guards in her best Natasha accent. There she hid out in the ladies room for three hours waiting for Khrushchev's entourage to leave, whereupon she joined the procession. Before K could get into his limousine, she took his hand, batted her eyes, and requested an interview. He assented. She later said, "He was so astounded that I think he rewarded me for sheer enterprise." He granted a 108-minute exclusive interview. No other reporter had access. Sheer enterprise was her trademark. When candidate John F. Kennedy was busy gladhanding New Yorkers, she pestered him for an interview. He finally asked if it was absolutely necessary. She said, "If you become President, I won't get another exclusive meeting with you. And if you don't, well, it won't make any difference." Kennedy laughed and appreciated the logic of dealing with Howard. The easiest way to get her off your case was to do what she wanted. Her secret? "I don't think my success has anything to do with being a woman. Call it tenacity or resourcefulness or refusing to take no for an answer." She had been active in the Lexington Democratic Club and had written "social protest" articles for liberal magazines like _Progessive World_, but wanted to branch out for the 1960 elections. "The conventions were coming and I wanted to leave the active side of politics and really get into the middle--reporting." Soon, she joined ABC. "The network has accepted my determination to hit only hard news. I don't want women's stories. If there's a fashion show, the men can cover. They can return with grace; I can't. My commitment is to current events." ABC touted her as the number one woman in TV news and gave her a five-minute slot 5 days a week at 2:55 pm, "Purex Presents: Lisa Howard and the News with a Woman's Touch." The "housewives" timeslot and sponsorship by a soap company belied the fact that her program consisted of hard news. Typical guests were Adlai Stevenson, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Madame Nhu, and a gaggle of Russian cosmonauts she corralled one day at the Hayden Planetarium. In addition, she had occasional interviews in the 5 pm time slot. In effect, Lisa Howard was the country's first anchorwoman. She next set her sights on Fidel Castro. For nearly a year she wrote to him through neutral embassies and even in one case personally slipped a letter to Castro through the Russian ambassador. Finally, the Ghanaian ambassador to Cuba, a friend of hers, got her a visa. She checked into the Hotel Riviera in Havana, from where she badgered officials of all nations to get her access. "I converged on the Prime Minister from many points." It was another classic Howard coup. In her hotel room at 12:45 am on April 21, 1963 she got a phone call from the Swiss ambassador: "Get dressed and come downstairs." She put on a low-cut cocktail dress and went down to the hotel steps. Castro soon drove up, saying, "Lisa Howard, how do you do?" They talked informally in the hotel nightclub until 5:15 am. Castro ordered a scotch-and-soda but hardly touched it. They talked philosophy, literature, whatnot. Castro appeared to enjoy it all. Howard said later, "All I can say is, he was calm, sober, reasonable. He was very interested in learning about the American position and about Kennedy. I told him Kennedy was a very good man, and a very progressive man, and he didn't argue with me at all about that... He's very intelligent." Castro agreed to an exclusive interview on April 24. In the interview Castro said he believed that the United States had "taken some steps in the way of peace" and hoped for better relations. Specifically, he mentioned exchange of prisoners and "the stopping of piratical acts against Cuba." "I have looked at such steps with good eyes," he said in English. However, he felt that US policy had forced him to look to the Soviet Union and had made the Cuban revolution "more radical." After the one hour interview, Lisa said, "Come on, I'll buy you two fellas a drink." They went to the hotel bar and talked for three more hours. Senator Hubert Humphrey remarked that Castro was "whistling in the dark" about any reconciliation. Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, said that Castro showed "a hunger for recognition" and that he was "just a puppet" of Khrushchev. Disingenuously, Howard claimed that her startling good looks were a handicap. "I stand before you as a confessed egghead, not as ABC's jazzy blond bombshell." In her 1960 interview with Khrushchev, the Soviet premier protested at one of her involved philosophical questions: "I cannot enunciate the whole of Marx's Capital in five minutes." She did admit that being a woman did help at times. She was the only reporter to interview the Shah of Iran when he came to the US. "I just walked up to him, took him by the hand, and sat him down on a couch." _Time_ remarked, "Think what the Shah of Iran might have done if Chet Huntley had tried to take him by the hand." Later that September, President Kennedy instructed Ambassador William Attwood to meet with the Cuban delegate to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, informally and without notifying the CIA or State Department. Attwood was a friend of Lisa Howard's and had been in contact with her since her interview of Castro in April. He was anxious for a break in the US/Cuba diplomatic impasse. He asked Howard to give a cocktail party inviting, among others, himself and Lechuga, whom she was also on good terms with. At the party, Lechuga said that Castro had liked the comment in President Kennedy's American University speech in June where he had said he wanted to make the world "safe for diversity." Overall, the meeting went well. Attwood subsequently used Howard as an intermediary to phone various contacts in Cuba, including Castro's closest confidant, Dr. Rene Vallejo. Attwood and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger later realized that this probably tipped off the CIA to the secret negotiations. Schlesinger told Anthony Summers, "I think the CIA must have known about this initiative. They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the UN were doing more than exchanging daquiri recipes when they met. They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations." Says Attwood, "If the CIA did find out what we were doing this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs. If word of a possible normalization of relations with Cuba leaked to these people, I can understand why they would have reacted violently. This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President." Schlesinger told Summers that he agreed. "Undoubtedly, if word leaked of President Kennedy's efforts, this might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded." Adds Attwood, "There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalization of relations with Cuba." Howard was involved in the group which secretly met in Mary Pinchot's apartment, a converted carriage house on Ben Bradlee's property in Washington. This was the location of the LSD sessions including Pinchot, Howard, Kennedy, and other powerful Washingtonians and their wives. In November 1963, one of the wives leaked the details of the clandestine meetings. _Mondo 2000_ reconstructed the converstaion: "We're in trouble, Lisa." Mary's voice shook. "It was a mistake to recruit the latest wife. She finked. I got a telephone call. The proverbial shit's hitting the fan." "Have you talked to Jack?" "Yes. He's nervous, too. He cancelled a session." "Did you discuss what I should do?" "Jack says to keep on--your work with Castro is too important right now to pull back from. I may have to disappear. Lay low for a while. I don't know." "Where will you go?" "I was thinking of heading up to talk about that with Timothy. I'm not sure. Things are weird. Have you heard? Dorothy tells me that Aldous Huxley's dying." "Oh, God." Lisa looked at Mary in despair. "Where are all our plans now?" "They might just be blowing up in our faces." [_Mondo 2000_, 1992 #6] Aldous Huxley, the great writer (author of _Brave New World_ and _Doors of Perception_) and friend of Dr. Timothy Leary died on November 22, 1963 after a long bout with cancer. He had once complained in a letter to Leary of the typical government approach to LSD research: Dear Tim, Thank you for your letter of Jan. 23rd, which came during my absence-- first in Hawaii, then at San Francisco (where we had a good conference on "Control of the Mind.") ... At S.F. I met Dr. [Oscar] Janiger, whom I had not seen for several years. He tells me that he has given LSD to 100 painters who have done pictures before, during & after the drug, & whose efforts are being appraised by a panel of art critics. This might be interesting. I gave him your address, & I think you will hear from him. I also spoke briefly with Dr. Joly West (prof. of psychiatry at U. of Oklahoma Medical School), who told me that he had done a lot of work in sensory deprivation, using improved versions of John Lilly's techniques. Interesting visionary results--but I didn't have time to hear the details. You are right about the hopelessness of the "scientific" approach. Those idiots want to be Pavlovians not Lorenzian Ethologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The "scientific" LSD boys do the same thing with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses. Yours, Aldous [Aldous Huxley, _Moksha_, p. 186] Huxley's wife Laura wrote: November 22, 1963, was to be the last day on earth for two men of good will. Although belonging to different generations, different countries, and different backgrounds, both John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley had waged a common fight against ignorance and bad will; both dedicated their lives to helping humanity to understand and love itself. They died on the same day; no imagination could be vivid enough to conceive of two ways of dying as antipodal as these. [_Moksha_, p. 259] -------------------------------- On April 19, 1964, Howard scored her second TV interview with Castro, airing at 5 pm. "I told Castro that I must have free access to go wherever I wanted, that I didn't have time to be sent to jail. He said, 'I don't believe this interview is going to do a thing for me, but it's going to be great for your career.'" Howard was with Castro on five occasions. "We talked and talked and talked. he's read Shakespeare, Camus, the Greek philosophers, Thomas Paine. He is an intellectual who also has a sense of humor." In the interview, Castro said he would "wait and watch" to evaluate the policies of the Johnson Administration. He believed that at the time of his death, President Kennedy was "persuading himself of his mistakes about Cuba. I had some evidence that some change was taking place in the mind of the Government of the United States... a new situation... and we had evidence I do not want to speak about." Bobby Kennedy meanwhile was making a bid for senator from New York, running against incumbent Republican Keating. While he certainly had wide support, his candidacy was causing resentment among some groups, notably Republicans (understandably) but also among liberal Democrats, who complained of the "Bobby Kennedy power grab." A group was formed called "Democrats for Keating," and included author Gore Vidal. The group's first meeting was held at the home of Lisa Howard, September 12, 1964. "There is an analogy between the Republicans and Democrats," Mr. Vidal declared. "The Republicans are splitting into a Republican party and a Goldwater party. In a very similar way the Democrats are splitting into a Democratic party and a Kennedy party." Miss Howard remarked, "if you feel strongly about something like this you can't remain silent--you have to show courage and stand up and be counted." According to the group, the former Attorney General was not a "true liberal." A member commented, "Bobby is the very antithesis of his brother, the late President. He is ruthless, reactionary and dangerously authoritarian. We feel he must be stopped now." The group was officially formed on September 28. Kennedy canceled a scheduled rally in Union Square in New York because of the release of the Warren Commission findings at that time. He spent the morning with Jackie. "It's been a rough day for both of them," an aide said. But the "Democrats for Keating" rally came off as scheduled. Keating called Kennedy's candidacy "a perversion of the democratic process." Kennedy, he said, was backed by "political bosses" and would reimpose old-time "boss rule" on the New York Democratic party. He poked fun at Kennedy who had not been a resident long enough to vote in his own election. In Ithaca the day before Kennedy had spoken to a mostly friendly crowd at Cornell, but some young Republicans heckled him. Signs read: "Get a road map and go back home," "Carry me back to old Virginny," and "Take your carpet and bag it." Kennedy quipped that he welcomed hecklers but found it difficult to associate Goldwater supporters with university life. At the "Democrats for Keating" rally, Gore Vidal told the small crowd: "Robert Kennedy is not entering the Senate race to serve New York State but to use New York State to serve his own vaulting ambitions. If elected, New York will become Robert Kennedy's springboard to the White House. We will not be so cynically exploited." He and Lisa Howard passed out a list of prominent members of their group, which included Carey McWilliams, editor of the _Nation_, Paul Newman, actor, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, movie producer. The next day, September 29, ABC News announced: "Miss Lisa Howard has been relieved from all A.B.C. News assignments for the duration of the political campaign because she has chosen to participate in partisan political activity contrary to long-established A.B.C. News policy." Howard's troubles began before her foray in Keating's campaign, however. In her book _Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News_, Marlene Sanders tells of her own employment at ABC, which preceded the Keating incident: ...I spotted an item in the trade paper _Variety_, indicating that ABC was looking for a second female news correspondent. Lisa Howard was the only one on staff. They item didn't explain why they wanted another and I didn't ask. Her subsequent interview preceded the Republican convention, so it was well before Howard's activities on behalf of Keating in September. When she got a job offer she was warned to "stay away" from Howard because she could be "troublesome." When Howard was subsequently fired, Sanders stepped into her afternoon news slot. A couple of weeks later, on October 14, Lisa received shocking news. Her friend Mary Pinchot Meyer had been shot and killed while walking on a canal towpath in Georgetown, where they had walked together in the past. A suspect was detained but later acquitted. The murder has never been solved. In November, Howard lashed out against ABC: A.B.C. has, in effect, created a blacklist on which they've placed my name. The concept of the blacklist is reprehensible to the courts and to the American public... I've also been deprived of my own news show, a show that I initiated, a show that the sponsors want to keep me on. If A.B.C. didn't want me on, why did they pick up my option for a full year in September? Who are they kidding? She was referring to $500 a week she continued to collect under a contract that was to run until September 1965. An ABC executive responded, "She's being canned. She doesn't fit. She's a mystery girl. We just don't want her on the staff." They had suspended Miss Howard, ABC said, because of her political work for Keating and because she had "sabotaged" network programs and had been insubordinate to her superiors. She threatened to sue the network for damages of $2 million and block ABC from continuing to use the "format or structure" of her news show. The New York Supreme Court rejected her suit in January 1965. On Monday, July 5, 1965, she made the news again. She was reported dead of an overdose of sleeping pills, apparently committing suicide. She had been staying with her husband, Walter Lowendahl, at East Hampton, Long Island, after having been released from Mount Sinai Hospital on July 2. She had spent three weeks there after suffering a miscarriage of her third child. She had two daughters, one 18 from a previous marriage and one 9 by her current marriage. Police said she had taken her prescription for 10 phenobarbitols and had altered it to read "100" before having it filled. She was observed to be "acting strangely" in the parking lot of a pharmacy by two friends who called police. "She kept mumbling something about a miscarriage," the patrolman who took her to the medical center said. "She collapsed before we got her inside." The County Medical Examiner found that she had taken enough barbiturates to kill 5 persons. She was about 38.