Surrounded by Enemies

What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?

Bryce Zabel

AN ALT.WORLDSTM BOOK

Copyright © 2013 by Bryce Zabel

Publish Green

212 3rd Ave North, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401

612.455.2293

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or used fictitiously.

ALT.WORLDSTM is a trademark of Stellar Productions, Inc. that refers to creative works of alternative history.

Cover art and Top Story images by Lynda Karr Design.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1916

ISBN: 978-1-62652-332-6

Table of Contents

- Cover Page

- Foreword

- Preface

- Introduction

- Chapter 1: Seven Days in November

- November 22, 1963 - November 28, 1963

- From the Editors of Top Story

- "The Day JFK Dodged a Bullet"

- Dealey Plaza

- Hickory Hill

- Parkland Memorial

- Love Field

- Dallas Police Department

- Andrews Air Force Base

- First Brothers

- The Morning After

- Ground Truth in Dallas

- The Fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

- On the Record

- Thanking God

- Johnson Agonizes

- Change of Plans

- A Tale of Two Funerals

- Another Profile in Courage

- Chapter 2: Battle Lines Being Drawn

- November 28, 1963 - December 31, 1963

- Giving Thanks

- Web of Suspicion

- Lee Harvey Oswald

- The Soviet Union

- Cuba

- Organized Crime

- Joint Chiefs of Staff

- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

- Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

- Secret Service

- Vice President Lyndon Johnson

- All Or Some Of The Above

- Fight for Jurisdiction

- The Three Bad Options

- Sounds of Silence

- The Warren Omission

- Oswald Casts a Shadow

- Christmas Truce

- Chapter 3: An Election With Consequences

- January 1, 1964 - December 31, 1964

- A Family Retreat

- State of Whose Union?

- Life in a Foxhole

- To Run or Not to Run?

- Parallel Tracks

- Back Channels

- Till There Was You

- The Primary Thing

- Rebalancing the Ticket

- The State of Texas vs. Lee Harvey Oswald

- Opening Arguments

- Nowhere to Hide

- A Plea to Leave

- Stroke of Midnight

- Choices and Echoes

- All the Way With LBJ

- Cursed

- Split Decisions

- Tiebreaker

- Distant Thunder

- General Anxiety

- The Arguments

- Now What?

- Chapter 4: Proxy Wars

- January 1, 1965 - August 23, 1965

- Second Chances

- Night Vision

- Moving On

- Shadow Voices

- Whispers in the Dark

- Justice Delayed

- Flashpoints

- Strangelove Leaks

- Assassination Theater

- Changing the Subject

- Mission to Moscow

- The Secret Life of the President

- The Debate

- The Final Hours

- The Top Story at Top Story

- Better Late Than Never

- Ground Zero

- The Day After

- Blowback

- Catch-25

- A Tale of Two Committees

- Chapter 5: Impeachment and Trial

- August 23, 1965 - February 25, 1966

- The War Not at Home

- Impeachment

- The People’s Grand Jury

- House Politics

- Blackout

- Tale of the Tapes

- The Case for Impeachment

- Article One: Abuse of Power

- Article Two: Obstruction of Justice

- Article Three: Contempt of Congress

- Coal for Christmas

- Failure to Launch

- Go Away, LBJ

- Trial

- The Winter of Our Discontent

- The Century Club

- Dallas on Trial Again

- New York Stake

- Clean-Slaters

- The End

- The Long Count

- Fall from Grace

- Chapter 6: Life After

- Closing the Book

- Justice Swerved

- Lyndon Baines Johnson

- The Conspirators

- David Powers

- Aftermath

- The Ex-President and the Ex-First Lady

- Politics Continue

- End of an Era

- Whodunit?

- Strangelove’s Identity Revealed

- Another Torch Is Passed

- The Unmaking of the President

- Acknowledgements

- About the Author

- Coming Up from alt.Worlds

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie —deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

President John F. Kennedy

Commencement Address at Yale University

June 11, 1962

Foreword

By Harry Turtledove

When I was a kid, I noticed that my parents — and everyone else of their generation — could (and, at the slightest excuse, would) tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I thought that was pretty strange... until November 22, 1963.

I was a high school sophomore that November. It was not quite half past eleven in the morning. I was walking from Spanish to PE when a guy who’d snuck a transistor radio into school (for those too young to remember them, tiny transistor radios were what the benighted ’60s had to use instead of iPods) told me John Kennedy had been shot. I said the first thing that popped into my head: “You’re crazy.” But maybe a minute later, I heard somebody coming the other way say the same thing. I started to think Frank wasn’t crazy — I only wished he were. I turned out to be right about that, worse luck.

Anybody my age can tell you a story like that. As with my folks’ generation all those years before, it won’t take much to get people my age to tell you what they were doing when they heard Kennedy was killed.

Eventually, I had three kids of my own. For a long time, they didn’t understand how every so often my mind would slip back to that dark day in fall, 1963. Then September 11, 2001 rolled around. Two of them were in high school at the time, the youngest still in middle school. Now they get it, and their kids (I just had my first grandchild) will wonder what they’re going on about... till those kids have their own black day on the calendar. And I’m afraid they will. Such horrible things do happen, however much we wish they wouldn’t.

Even after half a century, we remember — or, if we aren’t old enough to remember, we think about — John Kennedy’s brief presidency with fondness. Those of us with white beards (guilty) recall that we were young then, and had seen and been through a lot less sorrow. We remember the Kennedys’ own youth, their vigor, their flair, their style.

And we remember their beauty. Has a more photogenic couple with prettier children ever graced the White House? I don’t think so. One of the reasons JFK won the election in 1960 is quite simply that he was better-looking than Richard Nixon. Not a high standard to meet, I know, but he flew high over the bar.

Because we remember the times and the handsome martyred man with such affection, to this day we don’t want to hear anything bad about him. We didn’t hear much bad about him then. The press was different in those days, and cozied up to people in power. Reporters didn’t try to catch them with their pants down; they mostly didn’t write or say anything when they did catch them like that.

All of which went a long way toward keeping John Kennedy’s reputation burnished bright. By what’s come out since his death, he made later philanderers like Bill Clinton seem pikers by comparison. He would and did screw anything that moved, and gave it an experimental shake to see if he could get it moving in case it didn’t. Some of the ladies of his intimate acquaintance had other intimate acquaintances who could easily have embarrassed or wanted to kill the President because he was boffing their women.

He and his brother Bobby, the attorney general, weren’t always the Constitution’s best friends either. Bobby, let it not be forgotten, was appointed by Joe McCarthy as assistant counsel for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1951. Bobby had also served as John’s campaign manager in 1960. He was, perhaps, not completely objective about everything he did in the attorney general’s office. After all these years, we still remember the Kennedys as ruthless, too.

So we could wonder whether John Kennedy’s reputation shines so bright precisely because he was assassinated so early in his presidency. We could wonder what it would look like had he lived past that day in Dallas, campaigned for reelection in 1964, and gone on to a second term with all that added time for his excesses to become visible to the power brokers in Washington and to the American people as a whole.

We could, and Bryce Zabel has. That’s what Surrounded by Enemies is all about. It’s an alarmingly believable look at what might have happened had Lee Harvey Oswald missed. Some of you will know that I’ve written a lot of alternate history, which is the usual name for this what-might-have-been kind of story. One of the things about which you need to warn readers, and especially readers unfamiliar with this sort of story, is that people don’t write them to tell you what would have come next had the world turned left instead of right. By the nature of things, what would have come next is unknowable unless you happen to be God. People write alternate histories for two main reasons. One is to tell you what plausibly could have come next in a world after a particular kind of change. The other, and closely related to the first, is to make you think in a whole new way about what did come next. Imagine alternate history as a funhouse mirror, squeezing this and stretching that, and giving you a different picture of the way things did work and all the myriad way they might have.

Plausible development, building from what we know about what really did go on, and a whacking good story are the two things you can reasonably expect from a good alternate history. Surrounded by Enemies delivers on both, big-time. So hold on to your hats, folks. You’re in for quite a ride.

Harry Turtledove

Chatsworth, California

June 7, 2013

✪

Preface

By Richard M. Dolan

My first encounter with Bryce Zabel occurred years before I met him. That, of course, was when I followed his TV show, Dark Skies, along with millions of other Americans, back in 1996 and 1997. It was, and remains, a great moment in American television history.

Indeed, it was a show that beautifully integrated two of America's most classic cover-ups: JFK and UFOs. What made it work was a combination of courageous historical imagination, reasoned analysis, and a great script. Bryce, along with his co-producer Brent Friedman, had the guts and moxie to envision a plausible scenario that connected two of the biggest secrets of our era.

A few years ago, I was fortunate to work with Bryce on one of the great intellectual adventures of both our lives: a vision of the future in which the UFO reality is openly acknowledged. This was the book, A.D. After Disclosure. It wasn't easy to undertake this. How, we wondered, might such secrecy even end, considering that it appears to be so deeply entrenched within the black budget, national security apparatus in which a supine and subservient corporate media does nothing to expose it, and in which the intelligence community has placed key individuals as gatekeepers?

Next, we asked, after such a seemingly insurmountable obstacle has been cleared, how would such a revelation transform our world? That was when our real adventure began. Throwing as much objectivity, imagination, and courage as we could muster into the mix, we came to understand that the end of such a secret would affect everything: politics, economy and finance, culture, religion, science, energy, infrastructure and ultimately, global geopolitics. It was a sobering exercise, one that made it easy for us to understand why such secrecy might have begun all those years ago, and why certain groups would want it to continue indefinitely. For the changes brought about would be like a strong wind, blowing away so many lies, so much detritus.

I learned that one of Bryce's many gifts as a writing partner was his ability to see things. That is, to see them concretely, vividly, and to have real human beings react to the events we envisioned in our book. This came from his years of experience as a screenwriter. After all, if you can't portray people acting and reacting to complex situations realistically, you have no business being in the game. One of his key contributions to A.D., in my view, was his ability to make the reader experience "disclosure," to see it and feel it, almost viscerally.

Now, Bryce Zabel has done it again, with an extraordinary and thought-provoking scenario. What if President Kennedy had survived Dallas?

Many people have wondered how our world might have been different had JFK not been assassinated. Writers and pundits have occasionally tried their hand at this, usually arriving at some feel-good conclusion, such as Kennedy helping America to exit the Vietnam debacle sooner, or taking on the Federal Reserve, or even ending UFO secrecy. Who knows, perhaps such things could have happened.

But Bryce Zabel asks a much more interesting question, one with greater realism and nuance. For John F. Kennedy had powerful enemies. After all, this was why he was assassinated to begin with. Eliminating such nefarious elements from an analysis of his presidency and assassination, as most of these other alternative what ifs do, amounts to little more than an exercise in fantasy. JFK was taken out precisely because he turned out to be a threat to powerful interests on a full spectrum of issues. Indeed, he seems to have been the last President in American history who tried to act as President on behalf of The People, not simply a shadowy elite that has sought to continue and strengthen its chokehold over the global political and financial system.

In Surrounded by Enemies, Bryce asks a much better question: What if JFK had survived the assassination attempt of November 22, 1963? What if he had lived?

This is a question to ponder. For JFK already had a confrontational relationship with the intelligence establishment. He had tried to clean house at the CIA in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He and his brother Bobby were flat-out enemies of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the greatest blackmailer in American history. Kennedy had already shown that he had no intention of being the tool of America's intelligence establishment. He was the President, and he was determined to make the intel chiefs know who was boss.

Had he survived Dallas, he would have demanded — and gotten — answers. Kennedy was many things, but he was no fool. He would not have been satisfied with the pieties and lies that would have been offered to him. Can anyone honestly think he would have been satisfied with an explanation that pinned it on a lone gunman? Such simplistic lies might satisfy a patriotic public too trusting and distracted to offer a challenge, but they would not have satisfied John F. Kennedy.

Bryce takes us through this dramatic aftermath. Of all the what-if scenarios ever written about JFK, this is the one that rings true. It is an account that takes us deeper into the clandestine world that JFK himself tried, and ultimately failed, to gain control over during his life in our timeline. In the parallel history of Surrounded by Enemies, Kennedy’s struggle only intensified after Dallas, and the entire nation bore witness.

Richard M. Dolan

June 10, 2013

Rochester, New York

✪

Introduction

By Bryce Zabel

It’s now been half a century since the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. To admit you lived through their shock and fury is to be of a certain age. Those of us who were children then, at the end of America's great Baby Boom, have forged countless different paths, but we share in common a question that, over the years, has haunted almost all of us:

What if Kennedy lived?

Almost since the assassination, writers have speculated about the great things President Kennedy would have done for the country and the world had his life been spared in Dallas. It’s commonly assumed he would have rolled back our Vietnam involvement, enacted landmark civil rights policy, made peace with the Soviets and even finished the attack on organized crime.

That upbeat scenario is probably wishful thinking. Kennedy had a definite to-do list for a second term, yes, but the forces in opposition to his presidency in 1963 were organized and powerful. Let’s shade the question just a bit differently:

What if Kennedy survived Dallas?

This new question puts front-and-center the plain fact that Kennedy's survival could not exist in a story vacuum, as if November 22, 1963 were just another day. After all, whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the President of the United States still had been targeted for execution in broad daylight on a public street before a global television audience. Life would not have pinged back to normal if the assassin's bullets had missed their target.

Investigations would have been launched to determine if what just happened was an attempted professional hit, a failed political assassination, or the work of a crazed, lone gunman. In any case, the world would have been turned upside down during this period, raising an avalanche of questions and blowback on multiple fronts, particularly since the President would have been alive and asking these questions himself, along with some of the world’s most powerful allies, including a brother in charge of the U.S. Justice Department.

If there were conspirators, they and their target would have regarded each other like scorpions in a bottle. In a cascade of post-ambush cause and effect, these traitors who had plotted to achieve a coup d'état by public murder would have found President Kennedy now physically impossible to get at, protected by enhanced security. In this telling, the system comes unhinged, and the conspirators go after Kennedy by other means after their bullets fail.

There is no doubt that John Kennedy’s presidency was a high point in our nation’s history. What we did not know when we were living through it, however, was that President Kennedy's reckless behavior behind the scenes kept him always one headline away from disaster. Surviving a well-planned assassination attempt could not have made JFK’s personal weaknesses any easier to disguise. He also had enemies with the means to lay bare the most intimate secrets of his private life. Had they done so, the President’s dark side clearly had the potential to destroy any second term the voters might have granted him.

This alternative history, then, is not a time-travel story with a protagonist sent back to save JFK (a continuing fascination right up through last year’s Stephen King book 11/22/63). That kind of political science-fiction usually sees an idealized and heroic JFK through rose-colored glasses. Rather, this narrative sheds light on the shadowy events of late 1963 in the context of the constitutional crisis they easily could have triggered. To the best of my knowledge, this is a new way to examine the what if of JFK and ends up illuminating what the stakes were in our own timeline.

Because Kennedy was the most mediagenic political figure of his time, and possibly of all time, I have created a media vehicle uniquely suited to tell his story. Top Story magazine was, in this alternative historical reality, a struggling newsweekly routinely getting its lunch eaten by the publishing powers-that-used-to-be until it hitched its wagon to the charismatic young President’s star-crossed descent into scandal. A story as big as this demands all the resources a full-fledged news outlet like Top Story would have at its command: teams of reporters, exhaustive research capabilities, a definitive Rolodex. As it happens, all these elements already existed in my own imagination.

So JFK's epic tragedy is also, tangentially, the chronicle of how one media outlet at the brink of obscurity clawed its way to prominence on the Kennedy coattails. It only makes sense then that I’ve chosen to write Surrounded by Enemies as a book published by Top Story magazine on the anniversary of JFK’s survival of the shootout at Dealey Plaza.

Here’s a world where, fifty years earlier, history’s tree grew another branch. Where journalism and the counter-culture ignited a political explosion over Watergate in the 1970s and led to Nixon's impeachment in our world, Kennedy's battle with the treasonous forces of conspiracy in the 1960s in the alternative scenario probably would have triggered an implosion in JFK's reputation. Rather than the steady drip of scandal we’ve experienced over the past five decades, the events surrounding a failed JFK assassination might have gotten seriously out-of-hand, and fast.

Many people now see The Warren Commission Report as the greatest work of American fiction published in the twentieth century. Still, it’s been impossible to ignore the importance and validity of the “Oswald acted alone” pushback we've seen recently, from Stephen King’s book to Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy to legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. And it’s nothing new. Even back in the immediate aftermath, the Byrds rewrote the popular folk song “He Was a Friend of Mine” to say, “His killing had no purpose / No reason, no rhyme.” In my opinion, that is the wrong sentiment wrapped up in a classic melody.

After a lifetime of casual reading on the topic compounded by this recent intensity of research, I’m simply swayed that whatever role Lee Harvey Oswald actually played on history's grand stage, his was not a one-man show but one populated by and synchronized with multiple unseen actors. That is the point of view from which I’ve written this fictional account.

Since we live in a time of often bitter polarization, it is also worth noting that I’m a lifelong Democrat who remembers when America's two great political parties at least tried to work together for the good of the country. I write this book because, to me, its scenario is a fascinating what if, not because of any agenda involving President Kennedy. This alternative history depicts Kennedy — accurately, I believe — as an enormously charismatic man whose intelligence, political mastery and legendary charm could not, ultimately, disguise his deeply human flaws.

Surrounded by Enemies is not a research book. I have changed names, compressed events and, in the interest of presenting an alternative history, made up some things completely. I have tried to do all of this with a healthy respect for the actual facts of the matter, but there is no question that I have taken many liberties. On the other hand, I also ask that everyone who sees a real name in this piece of fiction understand that the person in question is a character in a story that takes place in a parallel universe. In a world that accepts stories about Abe Lincoln as a vampire hunter, this story should not offend, but intrigue.

In several instances, I have taken existing documents and quotes from the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, lines from past State of the Union speeches, etc., and modified them to fit this story. In this context, I hardly think this sampling is a literary sin, but a device to show just how possible it is to see JFK in a similar context. In any case, very little of this book contains this type of historical transposition. I have not footnoted my work with tedious accounts of its accuracy or fabrication, because it is meant to be read as an immersive piece of fiction; to undertake such an academic challenge would only distract the reader. Those engaged by the events of this story are encouraged to begin their own research and draw their own conclusions.

The plain reality is that Jack Kennedy had a lot of things he was hiding and there were numerous powerful men who wanted him dead. If those conspirators had taken their shots and missed, President Kennedy would have come back at them not only with a vengeance, but also with a carefully constructed strategy. The very existence of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his family loyalty guarantees that. I’ve come to see this entire story, despite its many working parts and vastly different points-of-view, as the story of two brothers. Had the shots fired in Dallas, Texas missed their target on November 22, 1963, they still would have set the 1960s ablaze, turning John and Robert Kennedy into the original conspiracy theorists. Their story from this alternate world needed to be told and I've enjoyed telling it.

Bryce Zabel

Los Angeles, California

June 10, 2013

✪

Chapter 1:

Seven Days in November

_______________

November 22, 1963 - November 28, 1963

From the Editors of Top Story

This book about the fate of America’s thirty-fifth President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, takes its inspiration from the Top Story newsweekly coverage of the 1960s. That breaking news “instant history” has been revised and updated by our 2013 editorial staff to provide a perspective to the events of the 1961-1966 Kennedy administration, and make it feel fresh again.

This endeavor draws heavily from the work of Top Story reporters Frank Altman and Steve Berkowitz and their journalistic efforts throughout the national crisis that began in Dallas and continued for years through Washington's corridors, forever changing our national identity. On November 22, 1963, at the time those shots cracked through America's sense of well-being, Top Story had been publishing for barely a year and was teetering near bankruptcy. It's fair to say that behind some acknowledged journalistic bright spots, this magazine was mired behind the two leading newsweeklies of that era, Time and Newsweek, in both circulation and gravitas. While those publications were headquartered in New York, Top Story was then, as now, based in Washington, D.C., and was more heavily tilted toward American policy issues and the people behind them.

This special fiftieth anniversary compilation clearly shows that times of extreme danger and uncertainty do not preclude politics but intensify its practice. In addition to our own archives, the dramatic scope of this endeavor draws on the accumulation of five decades of history and journalistic digging, tell-all books from those who were involved and even some private papers released in 1998 by the Kennedy family, following the death of Robert Kennedy at the age of seventy-two.

Responding to a French journalist's question with characteristic élan at a historic, 1965 press conference, John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave the world some insight into why it all mattered. “Forgive your enemies,” he said, “but never forget their names.”

“The Day JFK Dodged a Bullet”

Our nation and the world breathed a sigh of relief upon learning President Kennedy had miraculously avoided the bullets targeting him in Dallas, but that feeling was overshadowed by an almost unthinkable fact: Someone had tried to murder our President. That thought proved to be so unnerving that country music populist Jimmy Dean scored a December 1963 instant hit with his upbeat ballad, “The Day JFK Dodged a Bullet.” The phrasing fit right in with the mythos that had been so carefully cultivated since a young, brave, PT boat officer named John F. Kennedy began seeking office almost twenty years earlier. It was a way to see the unnerving current circumstances as proof of the President’s charmed life rather than a shattering of our national calm.

As the events broke that day, however, there was fear and confusion among all the President’s men working in his White House. Many of their stories of shock and panic in Dallas have been told now, but other accounts have been lost in the fog of conspiracy. We know the number of bullets but continue to argue about who fired them and from where. We also know now that their intended target, President Kennedy, quickly recovered from his minor injuries and sprang into action.

In retrospect, it is clear that within the first hour after the event, both the President of the United States and the attorney general felt the government they represented was under siege and their civilian authority was in serious jeopardy. How they came to that conclusion, and what they said to those working in the White House in those first days set the stage for an epic confrontation.

Dealey Plaza

As the presidential motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza, Secret Service Special Agent Clinton J. Hill did not like what he saw. To the left of the President’s car was an open, landscaped area at the western end of downtown Dallas. Hill, riding on the left running board of the follow-up car, felt his stomach tighten at the sight of so much open space. On the right, he saw the Texas School Book Depository, toward which the President was waving. Hill glanced up to the building’s higher floors. The bodyguard’s reflex changed the course of history.

A glint of metal in the midday sun flashed from a window on the sixth floor. It is not clear whether Hill saw only the rifle barrel or also, perhaps, the man who was holding it. Either way, there was no time to look, only to act. He launched himself from the running board of his own vehicle and sprinted toward the President’s car, screaming, “Go! Go!” as he leaped on the trunk and scrambled forward.

The driver, Secret Service Special Agent William Greer, inexplicably had hesitated and nearly slowed to a stop, a reaction opposite from what he had been trained to do. Hill screamed, “Greer! Now!”

Greer mashed his foot down on the gas, swerving out of his lane in an evasive pattern. Even as he did, multiple shots were fired, seemingly from a variety of directions, according to numerous witnesses. The presidential motorcade had entered what would come to be called the “Kill Zone.”

Hill was the agent assigned to the First Lady but, in an instant like this, he was trained to cover the President, particularly when he saw that the agent in the passenger seat, Roy Kellerman, whose job it was to protect the President, was frozen, just as Greer initially had been.

Hill tried to push the President down, but Kennedy’s body was stiff; it wouldn’t bend even under Hill’s muscle. The Secret Service agent instantly readjusted so he could move both President Kennedy and the First Lady into prone positions across the seat. He supported his body over them with both arms.

The President, by his own testimony under oath before his interrogators at his U.S. Senate trial, screamed, “Jesus Christ! They’re trying to kill all of us!” His advisers Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers reacted similarly. O’Donnell was JFK’s appointments secretary and political sounding board and Powers was the President’s long-time close friend. Because of their White House importance, the two men were riding in the car immediately behind Kennedy, and they, too, felt they were being targeted from at least two directions and that everyone was going to die.

Agent Hill was hit twice, one bullet shattering his spinal cord and the other ripping through his left temple. The amateur film of Dallas resident Abraham Zapruder caught the action, including a spray of blood and brains that appeared to knock Hill’s head back and to the left. For many observers, the head shot did seem to indicate that at least one bullet was fired from a grassy knoll area nearby and not from the upper window of the book depository, the likely origin of the first spine-shattering explosion.

Later testimony from witnesses told a tale of Secret Service agents in other cars who seemed asleep or operating in slow motion. All that can be stated for certain is that the heroic Agent Hill’s instant action had forced Greer to react quickly enough to make up for any other neglect that may have been in operation. Kellerman had similarly snapped into delayed response and had climbed back to the jump seats that Governor Connally and his wife were using. Connally was bleeding badly but he wasn’t Kellerman’s concern. The Secret Service’s job is to protect the President first and the First Lady second, at all costs. The description says nothing about the governor of Texas. And so, even as Kellerman lay across the Connallys, he looked directly past them to Kennedy. “Mr. President, are you hit?”

The President and First Lady were covered in blood and brains that had been splattered from the shots that had nearly taken off an entire side of agent Hill’s head and broken his back into pieces. Kennedy answered honestly, “I don’t know.”

Historians continue to debate whether four or five total shots were fired and from where. What is known with certainty is that the salvo was aimed at a fast-moving car. That it was a conspiracy seems clear to most today, even though the confessed or convicted participants — now in their eighties and nineties, with many others dead or still at large — have continued to contradict each other about their roles and obfuscate the facts time and again.

What mattered at the instant of what would gruesomely be called the “turkey shoot,” was that bullets were fired from at least two locations. Greer’s evasive driving of the Lincoln made the car difficult to hit, no matter how many shooters were involved. Bullets were flying but most, seemingly, were fired out of desperation by would-be assassins who knew their chance at the target was nearly over.

Even so, Hill was down, Governor Connally had been hit once, and the President’s condition was unknown. That left Jacqueline Kennedy and Idanell "Nellie" Connally still to account for.

Two more shots appear to have hit the Kennedy vehicle in its furious escape. One shattered Agent Kellerman’s shoulder, and entered Governor Connally’s chest, causing severe internal bleeding and collapsing his right lung.

With three confirmed victims and the status of the Kennedys uncertain, Greer zoomed the Lincoln toward Parkland Memorial at speeds approaching eighty miles per hour.

Later asked who “they” were, in response to his statement, “They’re trying to kill us all,” President Kennedy famously told the investigators deposing him, “How much time do you have?”

Hickory Hill

At his suburban McLean, Virginia, Hickory Hill estate, purchased years earlier from JFK, the President’s brother, thirty-eight-year-old Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was lunching with U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who represented the southern district of New York. They ate hot clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches.

The younger Kennedy had just finished a swim and was still wet. He appeared to be trying to relax and not succeeding, according to Morgenthau. “He had a lot on his mind but he could only share a tiny bit with me. I could see he was frustrated.”

The outside phone rang at about 1:45 p.m. on the other end of the pool and was picked up by Kennedy’s wife, Ethel. “You can never get away from this damn job,” said Kennedy as he took the call.

On the other end of the line was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, someone who never called his ostensible boss at home. Neither man had ever had the slightest positive regard for the other. Never much of a conversationalist, Hoover said simply: “I have news for you.”

The attorney general asked the first thing to come to mind: “How is the President?” Hoover delivered a two-sentence précis of the news, and the two men hung up. In later years, each claimed to be the one to have ended the conversation.

Kennedy asked his guest Morgenthau to excuse him, explaining only that the President’s motorcade had been attacked, adding as an afterthought that the governor of Texas and at least one Secret Service agent were wounded. Morgenthau offered his help in any way. “Call everyone you know today,” said RFK. “Let me know what they’re saying.”

Morgenthau nodded his understanding but added his own reassurance: “They’re praying for your brother and our country.” The New Yorker was escorted to the downstairs living room in the house, where he was left to watch the news on television. “I felt a sense of great dread in those moments,” said Morgenthau in a December 2, 1963 Altman and Berkowitz piece for Top Story. “I could not bear to stay in this sadness and terror, but I could not leave without permission.” Eventually, however, Morgenthau did leave. With no one else in the room and Bobby still rolling from one urgent phone call to another, the New York attorney simply walked from the house, determined to get to his office and roll his own calls so he could give the attorney general the information he had requested.

Bobby Kennedy’s first telephone call, revealed during the future hearings of the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President (JCAAP), was not to his brother but to national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. “Have the combinations on the President’s locked files changed right away,” the attorney general said. Kennedy continued to work the phones from his upstairs bedroom so feverishly that he would not change his wet swim suit for more than two hours and only then when his wife demanded it.

There was concern that whoever was behind the Dallas ambush might be coming to Hickory Hill next. Because of this fear, the Fairfax County police surrounded the grounds of the RFK compound without being asked, and Kennedy did not object. Normally opposed to strict security, he instructed Justice Department spokesman Edwin Guthman who had rushed to be by his boss’ side, to replace the police with federal marshals.

Under the supervision of Chief U.S. Marshal Jim McShane, Kennedy’s estate was immediately encircled. As McShane testified in late 1964, “If someone was coming to kill that man, we were prepared to make them kill us first.”

Parkland Memorial

Parkland Memorial Hospital’s Margaret Hinchcliffe, working the emergency desk, had been told to assign teams to handle the injuries that were on the way in. When the President’s appointments scheduler and close friend Kenneth O’Donnell approached her with two Secret Service agents, revolvers drawn, he instructed her to assign the best doctor to the President immediately. Hinchcliffe protested this breach of established triage protocol. Seeing her confronted by armed men, Doctor Robert Shaw, senior ER physician then on duty at Parkland Memorial, approached O’Donnell. “I am in charge," he said, "and I will save the President if he needs saving. Follow me.”

With that, Dr. Shaw, O’Donnell and the agents found President Kennedy, accompanied by his wife and even more Secret Service agents, and directed them all into Trauma One. Dr. Shaw took one look at the commander-in-chief and said, “Sir, lie down on this gurney here. Immediately."

Kennedy refused, pointing to Connally and Hill, who both had just been wheeled in, unconscious, on gurneys of their own, blood staining the crisp white linens. “They need help first.”

Shaw, however, focused on the President. “I can personally vouch for the teams working on both of them, sir, but you are my concern, and the country’s. I need you to lie down and let me examine you." Kennedy looked at the First Lady, who nodded that he should do as he was told.

Kennedy looked around at the pale tile, sterile instruments, and the clock that read 12:37 p.m. Then he flashed his famous charm. “Well, Doctor, I can assure you I would like very much to lie down on that gurney, but I can’t right now.” Kennedy removed his blood-caked suit coat, then began to unbutton his shirt, which was heavily splattered with blood from Connally and Hill.

As Shaw watched, President Kennedy removed his tie and dress shirt, revealing an unusually constrictive shoulder-to-groin brace. “I'm afraid my back needs support occasionally,” he told the doctor. In subsequent interviews, Shaw remembered being startled by the President's compromised appearance, which was so uncharacteristic of his normal image. In truth, Kennedy had aggravated his back during a sexual encounter in the White House pool nearly two months earlier.

As Shaw helped him out of his back supports, Kennedy indicated Trauma Two, where Texas Governor John Connally was fighting for his life. Inside, Dr. Charles J. Carrico, only two years a practicing physician, and two nurses were using surgical shears to cut the clothes away from the Texas governor. What they saw was not good; he had been hit three times, most grievously through the chest. Carrico checked for a pulse and blood pressure, and pronounced both “palpable.”

Shaw explained the scene to the Kennedy party. “The governor’s in the care of Doctor Carrico. He’s on his way to the OR any minute.”

From the side of the room, Jacqueline Kennedy spoke softly. “What about the agents? Where are they?”

Without taking his eyes off the President’s body, now prone on the exam table, Shaw answered. “One of the agents was alert and is being attended in an OR. The other agent, Agent Hill, suffered extensive head trauma and spinal damage and has not survived his wounds. I’m very sorry.” As those words were spoken, the First Lady gasped, looked as if she might faint, and was given a chair by a nurse. His death made Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill only the second member of the organization to be killed while protecting a United States President during an assassination attempt, along with Leslie Coffelt, who had died protecting President Harry Truman in 1950.

Shaw carefully examined the President’s body, looking for wounds, as everyone watched. In a few cases, he used cotton gauze and alcohol to wipe away blood in order to satisfy himself that it had not originated from the President himself. After several minutes, Shaw offered his initial conclusion, spoken to the nurse assisting him: “I see no entry wounds.”

President Kennedy was allowed to dress and did so in the same bloody clothes that he had entered with. He had discussed trading shirts and jackets with O’Donnell, but Jackie was most adamant that he not do that: “Let them see what they’ve done.” The Kennedys resolved then to wear these clothes until this day was over.

Shaw instructed the President to remain in Trauma One for at least an hour for observation. Kennedy said he wanted to meet privately with Nellie Connally but was told such a conversation would have to wait. She was at her husband’s side, moving with the trauma team to the OR. Kennedy nodded, turned to O’Donnell: “Right before this happened, Kenny, she said to us, ‘You can’t say Texas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.’”

At Parkland Memorial, chaos reigned. Dallas police officers, FBI agents, and Secret Service agents were everywhere, most of them with guns drawn. An intern was nearly shot when he tried to hide in a linen closet to deal with a panic attack. Meanwhile, Agent Hill was dead, and Governor Connally was near death. Only agent Kellerman looked like he would survive. Yet, despite the blood and carnage, the President of the United States and the First Lady had been physically untouched.

In the middle of this, Kennedy, scheduler Kenneth O’Donnell, and presidential factotum David Powers commandeered Trauma One as a temporary Oval Office, given Dr. Shaw’s instructions that the President must stay for medical reasons. Finally, Jack Kennedy heard what he wanted to hear: “Your brother is on the phone.”

“They fucking tried to kill us,” the President told the attorney general, based on the testimony of Doctor Shaw, who had refused to leave Kennedy’s side in case he went into shock. He later said, “It was odd. Aside from the curse word, which hardly surprised me under the circumstances, it was the way he phrased it. They tried to kill us.”

Even though Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s phone line was thought to be secure, the FBI later disclosed it had transcripts of that call. The fact that the Kennedy brothers were speaking on a line that had been wiretapped without their knowledge would later prove to be more shocking than what was actually said. RFK responded, “I want to know if Sam Giancana is behind this. I need to know right now. Can you say yes or no?”

The President responded, “You’re prosecuting him, what do you think?”

In fact, that very day the attorney general was waiting to hear about a verdict in the Giancana case. “He’s got motive and he’s got the resources,” said Bobby.

While Jackie distracted Dr. Shaw with conversation about Agent Hill, the President responded, “We both know plenty of people with motives and resources to put me in the ground.” Powers and O’Donnell, who would be called to testify before JCAAP as well as the House Committee on the Judiciary, each remembered the President's words exactly the same way.

“I have people checking,” said Bobby, “but we can’t count on Hoover or McCone for a straight take.” He was referring to the FBI director, a notorious thorn in the side of the Kennedys and other Presidents, and the CIA’s leader, John McCone. Jack and Bobby agreed to meet that night in the Oval Office, as soon as possible after JFK came back to Washington. The Kennedys had begun the search for suspects.

Less than two hours after his arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Governor John Connally died in the main OR. President Kennedy, who had refused to leave while Connally was alive for fear he would be seen as uncaring toward the man who hosted him in Texas, agreed to his advisers’ demand that it was time to go. President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy were driven in separate cars to Love Field, the public airport in Dallas, where they would reunite for the trip home on Air Force One.

Love Field

Still grounded six miles northwest of the downtown on the tarmac at Love Field, Air Force One was a hotbed of paranoia. It was jammed full, with speculation of all manner underway. Vice President Johnson had arrived minutes before and was arguing with the assistant special agent in charge, Emory P. Roberts, who had taken over leadership duties for the Secret Service detail since Roy Kellerman was still in surgery at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Roberts was trying to get Johnson to leave the plane immediately but having no luck.

Seeing President Kennedy entering, Johnson pushed through the crowded plane to intercept him, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close (the so-called “Johnson Treatment”). “It’s your goddamned friend Khrushchev,” he growled. “We may be at war. We need to get our heads together on this right now.” Calling the leader of the Soviet Union the United States President’s “friend” seemed inappropriate and revealing at the same time, but this was hardly the time to take offense.

Agent Roberts literally pulled Johnson away from Kennedy. His training made clear that no one is allowed to touch the President without permission, something that was particularly important under the existing conditions. The agent spoke directly to President Kennedy: “Mr. President, I’ve told the Vice President that he cannot be on this plane, that he must depart on Air Force Two. Particularly now that you are here, sir, we need you two separated to assure continuity of authority.” Looking between the President and the Vice President, the agent made his case crystal clear: “You can’t fly together. He needs to leave now.”

President Kennedy nodded to Johnson. “Lyndon, stay in Texas. I have to get back. People will need to see that happen.”

Johnson processed the political implications of sticking around Dallas surrounded by death and shame against the idea of returning to Washington to assure the continuity of the government. “Mr. President, that seems ill-advised.”

Kennedy leaned forward, collared Johnson somewhat more gently than Johnson had just collared him and so many others, pulled close to his ear and said, “We can’t fuck around here, Lyndon.”

Kennedy let go, and simply nodded to Roberts. Within seconds, Secret Service agents Jack Ready and Donald Lawton lifted a humiliated Lyndon Johnson almost off his feet and escorted him from the plane. Using a long-distance lens, AP photographer Ralph Philpott captured the scene. It was a necessary moment to secure national leadership but, to Lyndon Johnson, it always looked as if he was being treated like “a two-bit poker cheat.”

Indeed, in the time that followed, Johnson told practically anyone who would listen about this “ball-crushing” moment, confiding to them that this was when he knew his fate on the 1964 Democratic ticket was sealed. That Johnson would even be engaging in such political speculation on the day that the President of the United States had been targeted for murder is perhaps egocentric on his part. But the truth is that both Jack and Bobby Kennedy were thinking the same thing.

President Kennedy knew something else for certain while standing on that plane surrounded by key members of the government and his wife. He knew these men who had challenged him and tried to undermine his authority these past few years had crossed a line. And he knew he would make them pay.

Dallas Police Department

News of the events out of Dallas rocketed around the world. Nothing since Pearl Harbor seemed to have touched the American nation as powerfully. This was the first true breaking news television event of the modern age, driving audiences to record numbers and beyond, both in the United States and abroad. And, as is true for all good television dramas, it had a hero people could root for and a villain they could jeer.

Inside the Dallas police building, the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald was advised that anything he said could be used against him and that he was entitled to an attorney. He made several telephone calls seeking representation. He also spoke with the head of the Dallas Bar Association, who offered to find a lawyer for him. He declined, saying he preferred to secure one himself.

Under questioning, Oswald denied shooting Governor Connally, Agent Hill or Officer J.D. Tippit, a Dallas policeman found dead at the scene. He claimed he was eating lunch when the Dealey Plaza gunfire took place. When he was placed in a lineup, several eyewitnesses identified him as the man responsible for killing Tippit.

“I didn’t shoot anybody,” Oswald stated forcefully.

“Maybe it would be smart for you to come clean, Mr. Oswald. Maybe you don’t understand how much trouble you’re in,” Captain Will Fritz said. The Dallas Police Department veteran had been on duty at the Trade Mart when the shots were fired and immediately reported to Dealey Plaza, where he had been part of the team that had found a rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Police Chief Jesse Curry picked Fritz, who had a reputation as an effective interrogator, to speak to Lee Oswald first. “We’ve got witnesses who saw you shoot a police officer. And we’ve got strong evidence that you shot the governor and the Secret Service man, too. Those are all capital crimes. If you’re convicted, you’ll go to the electric chair.”

Although no stenographer was present at those early interrogations and no tape recorder was used, police officer Dan Selkirk took notes. These were later compared to a report written afterwards by Captain Fritz, who noted that Oswald, already pale, turned “white as a sheet” when the death penalty was mentioned. Nevertheless, the suspect repeated, “I didn’t do any of that stuff, so what can I say about it?”

“Why would you want to kill the President of the United States?” Fritz asked, ignoring his plea of innocence.

Lee Harvey Oswald refused to answer any further questions during that session. While trying to lead the suspect to his secure location for safekeeping, two Dallas cops unwittingly led him into a sea of reporters instead. The scene, already chaotic, became threatening to the physical safety of the prisoner as well as the news reporters and the officers.

Top Story’s Steve Berkowitz, a reporter with just three years' experience, was covering his first major news event for the magazine. No shrinking violet, Berkowitz summoned his most authoritative voice to rise above the cacophony: “Did you do it, Mr. Oswald?”

Oswald stopped, allowing the reporters clogging the hallway to quickly close ranks around him and the officers, trapping them for questions. He looked straight at Berkowitz and said, “I didn’t do anything except go to work today.”

“Was it your job to kill the President?” Berkowitz was not above using sarcasm to address his sources, a trait that had gotten him dressed down by both editors and press secretaries. In this case, however, it seemed more appropriate than usual.

“The truth on that matter will come out if they will let it, I assure you,” said Oswald, looking angry and offended. “But me? I’m just a patsy.”

Meanwhile, with President and Mrs. Kennedy in mid-flight, Bobby Kennedy was still working the phone feverishly from his Virginia home office. Although he rarely smoked, he had taken a stale pack of Kents from his drawer and was on his fifth cigarette. Like everyone else in America, he was watching the television and making his assessment of Oswald. The attorney general thought the alleged killer looked smaller than he had imagined, expecting his assassins big and threatening. RFK allowed himself a momentary smile. Of course, people often underestimated him as well.

Close on the heels of the Oswald proclamation of innocence, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade put on his jacket, straightened his tie, and went out to the press area, where reporters and photographers and TV crews were standing mob vigil in the hallway outside, having been whipped into near-hysteria by Oswald’s walk-by. Wade started by acknowledging that there were already calls for turning the whole thing over to federal authorities. That was what the FBI agents in Washington, D.C. wanted.

“This crime may or may not have national implications, but it took place in Dallas,” Henry Wade declared. “We know how to prosecute murder down here, and I expect we can handle this case, wherever the facts take us.”

Asked why he should trump federal authority in an attack on the President of the United States, Wade replied, “The only public official who was murdered here earlier today was the governor, who was, last I checked, a Texas resident.”

Robert Kennedy could not believe what he was seeing. He hurled his ashtray across the room, furious that people from Lyndon Johnson’s home state were sticking their noses where they had no real business. He left for the White House to greet his brother.

Andrews Air Force Base

When President Kennedy landed in Washington D.C., he felt compelled to respond to the rapidly changing story. Reporters had gathered near Air Force One, buzzing with the day’s news, oblivious to both the temperature and the chill wind. One of them, Top Story’s Frank Altman, noted how this story would have changed if the President were coming back in a casket. Then he reminded himself that if JFK had died that day, Texas authorities would not have released his body until they’d had a chance to perform an autopsy. Those were rules, almost universally respected.

Emerging from Air Force One with his wife Jacqueline, John Kennedy shrugged up his jacket. Both had on the same bloody clothes they had worn all day long, resolved that the nation and the guilty parties should face what had happened in Dallas.

So, looking more like he’d come in off a battlefield than a cross-country flight, Kennedy was uncharacteristically terse with the freezing press corps: “The government is secure. Our prayers are with the Connally, Hill and Tippit families. And, of course, agent Kellerman.” At this point, the President was supposed to walk away but instead went off his talking points, taking a question from the Washington Post’s Bart Barnes and replying: “I want whoever did this to know that last night was the last good night of sleep they’ll ever have.” It was angry and aggressive, spoken like a surrounded general, who had decided to fight rather than surrender.

As Kennedy moved toward a waiting limo, Top Story’s Altman maneuvered himself into a position directly in the President’s line of sight and shouted out the question on everyone's mind: “Mr. President! Does that mean you think someone besides this Oswald was involved?” Although softer-spoken than Berkowitz, Altman knew how to command attention.

Kennedy paused as if he hadn’t quite heard the question, buying time to decide the exact tenor of his answer: “We don’t know who is involved just yet. The attorney general is in contact with Mr. Hoover at the FBI. I presume that investigation has only just begun. Good night.” The President of the United States stiffly got into the limo, helped by a Secret Service agent. His presumption that the FBI was just beginning an investigation would soon be proven incorrect. In fact, the bureau was doing all it could to wrap up its investigation immediately.

In her testimony before the JCAAP hearings, the First Lady was asked what she and her husband talked about in the limousine ride to the White House. She replied that they did not speak, only that they had held hands.

First Brothers

According to the controversial entrance logs that were later subpoenaed and found to have been altered, President and Mrs. Kennedy arrived together at the White House at 8:39 p.m. EST on the night of November 22, 1963. Both were still wearing the same clothes they had worn all day long. Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, in all her testimony given to multiple committees over time, always used the word “disturbing” to describe their appearance.

“I’m so very happy to see you both tonight, Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. President,” said Lincoln, re-directing to JFK. “The attorney general is waiting for you in the Oval Office.”

Kennedy kissed his wife goodnight. Lincoln overheard him saying, “I’ll be up late.” As the First Lady departed, Mrs. Lincoln asked the President if he was at last ready for a change of clothes. The President nodded his tired agreement, then entered his office on that cool evening, finding Bobby Kennedy looking at a bank of three televisions featuring the three TV network newscasts. Only Walter Cronkite — by now running on pure adrenaline — was audible. Bobby was monitoring CBS because the nation preferred that network’s news by big numbers; he wanted to hear what the people were hearing when they heard it.

JFK instantly picked up the conversation he and his brother had been having on the phone less than an hour after the shootings in Texas. When testifying two years later, Mrs. Lincoln had to be reminded of her oath twice before she could recall the President’s first shouted words, fired out as the door was still closing. “We have to hit back, Bobby,” said the President. “Whose side is Hoover on?”

Bobby Kennedy quickly turned, picking up a pencil from his brother’s desk. He scribbled on a notepad — “We can’t talk here!” — and held the message up for the President’s eyes. JFK stopped himself from responding and moved with his brother into a small side alcove adjacent to the Oval Office, a place where the President had been known to nap. It had the distinction of being the only room in the White House that was swept for electronic surveillance bugs on a daily basis. Aside from the outside portico, it was the most secure spot on the White House grounds, and it was warm. But as secure as it was, whenever you came into this room, you still whispered.

As they took seats across from each other, the oldest Kennedy brother characterized the attack in Dealey Plaza as a screw-up, one that should not distract from the obvious conclusion that someone had almost killed the President of the United States in broad daylight. The younger brother worried openly that the failure of that plan was already setting events in motion that threatened to tear apart the administration. Yet here the Kennedys were, locked up in the White House prison, where they were suddenly unsure who, if anyone, could be trusted. They would have to get word outside quickly and get some friendly shoes running down the details.

The brothers already knew, however, that they faced formidable enemies from the worlds of organized crime, Cuban freedom fighters, the FBI’s Hoover, an overtly hostile CIA, and the combative Joint Chiefs of Staff. Analyzing his position, JFK's gallows humor prevailed. “Well, Bobby,” said the President. “Based on this discussion, the question is not who would want to kill me but who wouldn’t.”

Immediate security improvements were ordered. Elevated to top priority was the need for every member of the Secret Service to be vetted for loyalty. Clearly, in the aftermath of Dallas, that organization was going to come in for the heaviest criticism ever, since its creation by Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Ironically, it came into existence on April 15 of that year, the same day that Lincoln himself had been assassinated. Its original mission of suppressing counterfeiting was not expanded to include presidential protection until the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

Maybe those agents reacted slowly in Texas for a reason, thought the attorney general, and if so, there could be someone armed, already close to President Kennedy, who would be willing to trade his life for the President’s. Lie detector tests were ordered and administered by military police officers flown in from Florida within twelve hours of the attack. In addition to the standard screening questions, Robert Kennedy instructed that all agents be asked, “Do you recognize John F. Kennedy as the legitimate leader of the United States government?”

They both knew the President would have to show his face publicly, and they decided that in the foreseeable future it would only be in a carefully controlled event like a news conference. There would be no more of what Bobby described with disgust as “that clusterfuck ambush Lyndon dragged you into.”

At that point, presidential secretary Lincoln patched FBI director Hoover through to Attorney General Kennedy, saying he was calling with an update that had been relayed to him by his agents on the ground in Dallas. After a short briefing, the exhausted Kennedy acidly pointed out to Hoover that the news he was hearing from the FBI was barely as comprehensive as what he was already hearing from Walter Cronkite. He hung up and read from his yellow legal pad, laying out what he’d heard about this suspect Oswald to Jack. “Ex-Marine. Lived in Russia from 1959 to 1962 — claimed to be a Marxist. Tried to renounce his citizenship but didn’t. Came back in June of ’62 with a Russian wife, Marina. Lived in New Orleans earlier this year — there’s a photo of him passing out leaflets for something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That’s what they’ve got.”

The President indicated the televisions in the Oval Office itself. “They’ve been parading the son of a bitch all around Dallas. He says he’s innocent.”

The two men were silent for as much as a minute as they considered the possibilities, Cronkite’s voice continuing to summarize the same basic fact set. When they were together, with no one else, the brothers would often sit in long silences while thinking, knowing that the first one of them who had something important to say would say it. Finally, the attorney general offered his assessment, “It’s better for the White House at this point if Oswald keeps his mouth shut.”

That led to another thirty minutes of terse back-and-forth, toward the end of which Bobby took note of the dark circles formed under his brother’s nearly closed eyes. He knew tomorrow would be another tough day in a presidency already full of tough days. He ordered the President off to bed and received no argument. For years, Robert Kennedy’s own recollection of these events remained a mystery, as he cited executive privilege and attorney-client privilege and refused to furnish investigators with any information, despite ultimately being cited for contempt. His recently released notes are full of the kind of specific detail that forms the basis of this reporting.

Before retiring himself, however, the equally exhausted younger brother balled up the paper that he’d been nervously folding and unfolding during the recent conversation and tossed it into the wastebasket. The paper that said, “We can’t talk here!” in his own tightly scribbled and recognizable handwriting.

That single piece of twenty-four-pound, antique laid paper with a presidential seal watermark would be collected the next morning by Francis Mullen of the White House janitorial staff and kept as a memento of the day President John F. Kennedy was nearly killed. Although neither Kennedy brother knew it at the time, Bobby had created Exhibit 517, so described and numbered by the Senate and House staff lawyers for the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President, or JCAAP.

Bobby Kennedy’s written exclamation raised a compelling question. What did the President of the United States and the attorney general have to talk about that was so secret it couldn’t be discussed in the Oval Office itself?

The question had many answers, each one raising another set of questions. None of the questions was as succinct as the one that President Kennedy was asked when he arrived in the upstairs family quarters, where he found the First Lady still awake, sitting in the near-dark. Her bloody pink dress was thrown on the floor, along with her pillbox hat, and she was wearing a bathrobe with her hair wrapped in a towel. The ashtray was full of L&Ms that she’d been chain-smoking, and she was drinking an uncharacteristic glass of Scotch. She removed the towel and shook her hair out. Her question was heart-achingly simple: “Why do they want to kill you, John? What have you done?”

The Morning After

Robert Kennedy did not go home the night of November 22. Instead, he took a fitful two-hour nap on a couch in Kenny O’Donnell’s office, covered by a crimson Harvard blanket that last saw duty at a frigid football game against Yale two years earlier.

On Saturday morning, November 23, Kennedy met with Mrs. Lincoln, in the Oval Office at 8 a.m. According to Lincoln’s testimony, Bobby Kennedy was highly agitated. “They’re going to look at everything that ever happened,” Mrs. Lincoln quoted him as saying. She said the attorney general went on to explain his fear that a wide-ranging investigation into the events of the day before was imminent.

As his first order of business, Bobby Kennedy asked for and took possession of Lincoln’s handwritten telephone log as well as President Kennedy’s appointment book. He also wanted to know where the records of people who had been upstairs to visit the President’s living quarters were kept and by whom.

In earlier administrations, these lists of personal visitors were considered public record. Chief White House usher J.B. West testified that he was surprised when the attorney general asked for them and was told they were needed for safekeeping. West, who thought they were safe enough in the White House, was told they would go to a “more secure place.” West surrendered the logs to Robert Kennedy who was, after all, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States at the time he asked for them. Evelyn Lincoln was not at the meeting between West and Kennedy, a man who understood that what no one else overheard, no one else could testify about. The attorney general also knew that there were some matters that he could not be directly involved in either.

One of those sensitive areas was a recent discussion with Secret Service agent Robert Bouck. On Saturday morning, Bouck was contacted by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, RFK’s number two man at the Justice Department. “If you have knowledge of any recordings of private Oval Office or telephonic conversations with the President of the United States that exist under your protection, Mr. Bouck — and I am not saying that I have confirmed personal knowledge of such existence,” he said, parsing his words, “those recordings would need to be securely stored on the third floor of the Executive Office Building immediately.”

When asked by congressional investigators if he felt any hesitation in obeying Katzenbach’s order, Bouck replied, “I believed he was speaking for the attorney general and that anything the AG had to say came straight from the President of the United States.” Bouck immediately collected the recording equipment and all the tapes at his disposal and took them to the discussed location in the newly constructed Executive Office Building, not far from the White House. That floor also headquartered the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, a bureau dedicated to finding ways and means of defeating Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam and elsewhere around the world. Because of its highly secret operations, armed guards patrolled the third floor around the clock.

After one of those guards tried and failed to relieve Bouck of his equipment and tapes, the two men placed them under lock and key with the logs that Robert Kennedy had confiscated earlier in the morning. There was no more secure depository for those vital records that the attorney general could have chosen, or at least none that were under his control.

All of this had been completed before President Kennedy presented himself for work the next morning at 9:32 a.m. He took coffee from Mrs. Lincoln, entered the Oval Office and closed the door. Chief of Staff Kenny O’Donnell was seated on the sofa, making notes. He said, “They won’t get away with this, Mr. President.” Then O’Donnell nodded toward the alcove where Robert Kennedy had spent the rest of his morning making phone calls on the secure line that had been installed there the year before. By the time lunch was served, the first twenty-four hours were over, but the work was just beginning.

At this point, although transfixed by the close call for President Kennedy and the related deaths, the public was already being told as fact that the would-be assassin had been caught. After all, every source from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the nation’s three television networks seemed to be making that assumption based on apparently definitive information from the FBI. By the end of JFK’s first term in January 1965, of course, almost everyone said that they knew from the beginning that a conspiracy had sent assassins to ambush the presidential party, but that was clearly hindsight operating.

While the public watched an endless rehash of events on TV, the White House was heating up with most of the high-level officials there knowing in their bones there was much more to be concerned about than a lone gunman who had just been arrested. To a man, they seemed to understand that grave forces building up for years had just been ferociously unleashed on the streets of Dallas.

Indeed, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a man who had been through the thirteen days of danger that had come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, felt immediately that this situation was at least as dangerous. “If the President of the United States had been targeted by a conspiracy,” the man with the computer-like brain wrote in his 1992 memoir, “then the government was not secure, and if the government was not secure, then neither were the nation’s nuclear weapons.”

At first the halls of the West Wing were home to whispers about who could have truly been behind it all. Staffers up and down the chain of command knew that a duly elected President of the United States had been targeted for murder by forces that probably considered their acts reasonable and necessary and not treason. Everyone had a theory. The suspects included: the CIA, organized crime, Soviet agents, key members of the U.S. military going all the way to the Joint Chiefs, anti-Castro Cubans, Castro himself, and even Lyndon Johnson. Only one man, speechwriter Ted Sorensen, held out hope that Oswald could have actually acted alone, and his belief was, by his own admission, “more a matter of denial than conviction.”

What to do about it was equally confusing. Everyone wanted to obliterate this craven attempt to control U.S. policy through murder, but they knew the fight ahead had the potential to cripple JFK's presidency with as much finality as a fatal bullet would have.

There was much to fear. Most of the prime suspects could be prevented from gaining access to the White House to do actual physical harm to the President and his staff. There was one force, however, that could not be restrained — the military power of the United States. The nation’s military readiness had been advanced to DefCon 2 — one step short of actual nuclear missiles flying. The decision had been made without the sign-off of the commander-in-chief, who had been notified three hours later as an afterthought.

Kenny O’Donnell bluntly worried about the “Seven Days in May scenario” based on a popular book about a military coup in the United States. (The film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would be released only a few months later.) Well before Dallas turned up the paranoia, President Kennedy had told friends in private conversations after reading the book that he feared something similar could happen to him. He had experienced first-hand the insubordination of the Joint Chiefs, particularly the Air Force’s chief Gen. Curtis LeMay. Even Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the former chair and now Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, seemed to have a first response that questioned any order from the White House rather than simply following it.

Only one thing was crystal clear at this moment. The cold war that had been taking place within the Kennedy administration had gone searingly hot on the streets of Dallas. Things would not — could not — go back to normal.

Ground Truth in Dallas

By Saturday morning, no one had any doubt that the true target of Friday’s gun attack in Dallas was President John F. Kennedy and that Governor John B. Connally, Special Agent Clint Hill, Police Officer J.D. Tippit and even injured Special Agent Roy Kellerman were all just collateral damage. Most Americans never seriously considered any other scenario, even though Connally, like Kennedy, had his own share of dark forces that wished him ill.

Indeed, the hatred for President Kennedy in certain circles ran deep and dark. Those people kept their feelings to themselves for the most part, but they were of the strong opinion that it was a shame that the assassin or assassins had missed. Around the globe many citizens thought the fact that things like this happened in America was not surprising. Many observers were only surprised that Kennedy had cheated death, given the lethality of his enemies.

For most Americans, though, the idea that anyone should try to snuff out the life of the young, vital President seemed particularly outrageous. This may have been true in Dallas even more than elsewhere, amplified by the belief that the shootings had stained the city’s reputation, perhaps forever.

Police operators lost track of the number of telephoned death threats against Oswald. Some were explicit enough to alarm Dallas Police Chief Jesse E. Curry. For the first weekend, the suspect stayed in a maximum-security cell on the fifth floor of the Dallas Police Department. Fearing a possible lynch mob, Curry also called back off-duty policemen to help protect his besieged headquarters. Outside his window, Curry could see an angry mob demanding that justice be delivered to the man they assumed was the killer. They shouted curses and shook fists. One man threw a stone. A flying squad of police waded into the crowd, billy clubs swinging, and arrested him without challenge. Their bold action, and the implicit promise of more if necessary, squelched a potential explosion.

The Fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

During this first weekend after the assassination attempt, the residence and workplace for the nation’s chief executive had an under-siege quality. Outside the gate, D.C. police patrolled in record numbers. A collection of military buses was driven in on Saturday night, forming a cordon around the White House fence. Looking inside at the grounds, you could see snipers on rooftops and extra security guards.

White House reporters spotted Attorney General Robert Kennedy coming and going on several occasions, always in the company of large, hard-faced men carrying briefcases and wearing jackets that bulged from shoulder holsters they made no effort to conceal. This was shocking because Kennedy had an aversion to security, thinking it intrusive. Even after receiving death threats in 1962, he had said “Kennedys don’t need bodyguards,” and gone on about his business of confronting organized crime and trying to jail its leaders.

Dallas had changed all that. The President of the United States had been targeted by a man who may or may not have been working alone, and probably by a larger conspiracy, the makeup of which he had not yet determined. No precaution was too much. Not now.

There had been calls to activate National Guard troops to watch over the White House in the first hours, but RFK had refused the offer. While others debated his motivation, the truth was that he did not want the Guard called in because he felt the country might well be in the middle of a coup attempt. If National Guard troops were deployed around the White House, treasonous leaders in the extreme right wing of the U.S. military might cause U.S. Army forces to move on them, spilling American blood in the worst fratricide since the Civil War.

The younger Kennedy was not in a trusting mood. He had first come to his brother asking permission to banish the Secret Service. In Bobby’s mind, the very organization trusted to protect the President’s personal safety had failed his brother miserably and might be compromised. When asked to sign an executive order dismissing them, the President did not hesitate. “I concur,” was all he said as he affixed his signature.

As savvy politically as any two people operating in the nation’s capital, John and Robert Kennedy knew they might be hurt by this decision to evict the Secret Service. The problem was, there would be no politics or scandal to worry about if they did not survive the next few days. That was central. They could not allow themselves to think of this any other way. They had families to protect and they were, said the attorney general, “surrounded by enemies.”

Yet Robert Kennedy could not turn to the federal forces at his true command as attorney general, those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had little use for the Kennedy brothers, spying on them and keeping files of all manner of indiscretion. Some of the incidents on file were concocted or overblown, but a good portion were true and incriminating enough to force President Kennedy to keep Hoover on the job when everyone else assumed he would fire him. The FBI under Hoover was compromised and not to be trusted.

Having rejected the services of the U.S. Army, the National Guard, the FBI and the Secret Service, the remaining list of capable security assistants was extremely short. In fact, it had only one name on it. Jim McShane.

Fellow Irish-American Chief U.S. Marshal Jim McShane ran the federal marshals. These people were loyal to McShane, and McShane was loyal to the Kennedys. He had started his career as a New York cop and had worked with Bobby as an investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee. He had even been a bodyguard for candidate John Kennedy during the 1960 election.

McShane and his marshals were called off their assignment protecting Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate early Saturday afternoon and told to come to the White House immediately, and to bring “other men you can personally vouch for” directly to the White House as well.

It is difficult to assess whether this action of embracing the federal marshals was needed or not. In the heat of the moment, all parties to these discussions have described over the years a sense of panic over personal safety that passed like an infection from one administration player to another. With the hindsight of fifty years, it now seems to have escalated a conflict that was already high to a level at least equal to the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The President of the United States, however, was not ready to speak or answer hard questions about this issue or any other, not just yet. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger got that assignment. His opening statement expressed that the President was shocked and saddened by the loss of Connally, Hill and Tippit. He fed the assembled journalists a tidbit about Jackie, describing her as “shaken but recovering,” noting that, unlike her husband, she had never seen combat.

The reporters, on the other hand, wanted to know if the White House’s use of federal marshals meant the administration was convinced the Secret Service and FBI were riddled with spies or conspirators.

Salinger, acting as the point man for the politically attuned machinery of the White House, cast the decision as a temporary reassignment and nothing more. It was designed to give the Secret Service a chance to concentrate on its internal review of the failure in Dallas and adjust, rather than focus on the demanding job of securing the White House, which others could do. Salinger tried to sell the idea that these agencies had their own problems to take care of, but nobody seemed to be completely buying it. In frustration, he blurted out the awful truth. “You try getting shot at,” said the usually gregarious talking head for the administration, “and see if you want to trust the people who were supposed to protect you.” Even the candid Salinger knew immediately he had said too much too soon.

Immediate polls showed that the public bought the administration’s argument. That was clearly a testament to John Kennedy’s power to evoke empathy, which would be his strongest asset in the years ahead. On the other hand, winning the debate was not winning the battle. Feeling shamed and humiliated, regardless of presidential explanations, agents who had routinely covered up an array of presidential misbehavior since they got the assignment to protect “Lancer” (JFK’s codename) suddenly felt a little bit less committed to the cause.

By the evening of Saturday, November 23, it was clear to those who were in Washington, D.C. that the White House was under siege. Even under these extraordinary circumstances, however, politics could not be put aside. The executive order banning the Secret Service from doing its job protecting the President was a tactical necessity that created a political storm. As soon as it had been signed, Republicans on Capitol Hill began whispering about this act as an overreaction. With an election less than a year away, Dallas had provided them with their first issue. The first battlefield would be the Sunday talk shows.

On the Record

That Sunday morning, November 24, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ran the bases of all three network talk shows, an unprecedented feat that has since been matched only a few times (less successfully by Susan Rice, trying to spin the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya). He taped CBS’s second-place Face the Nation first, sped across town to open up NBC’s top-rated Meet the Press, and then closed out the hour with ABC’s third-place Issues and Answers. All shows drew record numbers of viewers to their broadcasts.

“We are keeping all lines of communication open between the various law enforcement jurisdictions,” he told CBS moderator Paul Niven, as if this were breaking news. On the security issue, Kennedy stated the administration’s premise that there was no need to surround the nation’s residence with actual troops from the Army or the National Guard, that the Secret Service needed to focus on its internal investigation, and that the FBI had its hands full running point on the investigation that he had begun at his brother’s direction. He tried to describe the federal marshals as the logical choice. Niven did not contest this analysis, and the attorney general was out the door into a waiting limousine before the newsman could think of a follow-up.

The big show was Meet the Press. Moderator Ned Brooks, it was later learned, had spoken to an insider at CBS who told him about the Face the Nation intervew, and he was far more confrontational as a result. Brooks burrowed in almost immediately on the Secret Service issue and what that said about the administration’s analysis of the national security situation. Kennedy stated and restated his position, not budging or giving his questioner what he wanted.

When the answers could not be parsed any further, Brooks asked, “What did you and the President discuss when you first talked?”

Bobby Kennedy clearly had not thought this one out. “My, uh, only concern, at that time, uh, of course, was his, uh, safety,” he stammered before gaining his footing. “And his was that the American people should pray for Governor Connally and Special Agents Hill and Kellerman and Officer Tippit and all their families.”

On the way to the ABC studios, Kennedy wrote out his response to this question in long-hand on a yellow legal pad in order to better field it if it came up again. Moderator Howard K. Smith, however, had already interviewed potential Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona while waiting for the attorney general to show up. The conservative Goldwater had a reputation for never pulling any punches and had gaffed badly. “This administration is on a hair-trigger,” Goldwater had said before Smith gave him a chance to rephrase his criticism.

This gave Kennedy the opening, however, to act offended. “This is no time for partisan politics or launching campaigns,” he said. “Senator Goldwater needs to think before he speaks. President Kennedy knows this from deep experience, and that is why he is studying the situation now and gathering information before he briefs the American people.” Later that day at the White House, JFK summoned up the gallows humor he so often enjoyed when he told his brother he should have called Goldwater's unfortunate choice of words a “cheap shot.”

Goldwater’s self-inflicted wound was widely covered and soon forgotten but it did allow the Kennedy administration to change the subject and defuse the issue before it gained real traction. It also added to the already great public sympathy for the President of the United States, whose job approval rating was measured at 79 percent, the highest it had been since after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. Privately, Republicans groused that the worse things got for President Kennedy, the more the public seemed to like him. It was a premise that would eventually be tested to the limit.

Thanking God

Robert Kennedy’s trio of television appearances on Sunday only half-completed the White House strategy. Next on the itinerary was St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, where the Kennedys worshiped. The big, cross-shaped red-brick building with the weathered, green copper dome was a conspicuous landmark and would prove to be an excellent backdrop for a family show of support.

Bishop Hannan celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass for the Kennedy family in sonorous Latin, but when he preached his sermon, Hannan switched to a language all could understand:

We thank God and His son Jesus Christ and the glorious Virgin that John and Jacqueline Kennedy are preserved alive today. Our hearts are heavy because of what they have suffered, yet also glad, because the President and First Lady walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and the Lord saw fit to spare them for further service.

While Hannan spoke, Chief Marshal McShane was outside the cathedral, directing the security operation on this exterior perimeter, plus coordinating five undercover marshals inside the building. Almost pitiably, the Secret Service dispatched a unit as they always did, but this time they stood on the side, quietly fuming and smoking cigarettes.

As the Kennedy family exited into the watery November gloom, they were swarmed by reporters. Washington was afloat in them now. Every national media outlet had sent someone; international reporters were arriving by the hour; even local papers and TV stations had their own teams in both Dallas and Washington to cover the assassination attempt and its aftermath. Kennedy ignored the questions the Johnny-come-latelies shouted at him. He engaged with some of the regular press corps, though. The chief executive understood his relationship with the media better than any of his predecessors, even FDR. He knew reporters wanted to be in his field of vision, literally and symbolically, and they would often slant stories to stay in favor at the White House. JFK had created a club everyone wanted to join.

Standing next to each other, both dressed for Sunday services, the President and First Lady provided quite a contrast from the bloody examples they had been only forty-eight hours earlier. “Today we mourn the victims as is appropriate,” said the man who had nearly been among them. “Tomorrow we will return our attention to finding the guilty parties and holding them accountable.”

Pierre Salinger visibly winced from the sidelines. Particularly when reporters shouted the obvious question: “When you say ‘guilty parties,’ are you saying you believe this was a conspiracy?”

“I’m withholding judgment until the facts are clear. It’s irresponsible to speculate,” concluded the President, even though that is exactly what he and his inner circle had been doing almost nonstop for two days.

Jackie Kennedy, seeing Salinger’s discomfort, pulled at her husband’s arm. “If you’ll excuse us,” she said to the press in her now trademark whisper, and she pulled the President away, allowing herself to be used as a human shield.

At this point, Salinger was set upon by the reporters. He clarified that President Kennedy had been using the term “guilty parties” only in a generic sense, that they were aware that the early investigation seemed to be focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone gunman. He promised a news conference where the President would take all questions. Pressed on a date, he offered Tuesday as a likely candidate, buying time under the pretext of needing to bury the dead.

The federal marshals around President and Mrs. Kennedy were a collection of clean-cut men in off-the-rack suits, eyes constantly shifting. As several escorted the first couple toward a waiting Lincoln limousine, others moved quickly to put themselves in front of the pack of reporters, roughly shoving them back.

The President and First Lady got into the waiting Lincoln. It was a closed car, not a convertible like the one in Dallas. Never again would such an exposed vehicle be used by an American president. Motorcycle cops fore and aft, it sped away. Even those uniformed officers had been personally approved by RFK’s right-hand man at the Justice Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, that morning before church. He had asked for a dozen local police officers to be sent over, from which he randomly selected four at the last possible minute. When it came to personal security, no one was taking any chances.

Johnson Agonizes

Across town, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a member of the Disciples of Christ, sat in the front pew of the National City Christian Church with his wife Lady Bird Johnson. The Vice President looked ravaged. Every so often, Lady Bird would touch his hand or pat him on the arm. He kept shaking her off. His outsize features showed outsize anxiety. Years later, it seems clear he was not concerned for the Kennedys or the Connallys but for himself.

Later, at his own impromptu news encounter, Johnson was asked about his emotions and said, “I am sadder than I know how to tell you.” Johnson’s fleshy face twisted into a Texas mask of tragedy. “John Connally was a friend. I’ve known him since he was a very young man, and liked him and admired him, too. He worked for me for a spell and he made a wonderful, just a wonderful, governor of Texas. I looked to see him on the national stage one day before too long. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him run for President, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him win.”

More than a few reporters noted Johnson’s focus on Connally without mentioning Kennedy but reasoned that Connally was dead and the President still among the living. It was an oversight that could easily be made by a man enduring profound grief for a friend and fellow Texan. And they noted Johnson’s invoking the presidential chances of his protégé when his own were always on his mind. All in all, it felt tone deaf but, to those who knew him, that was LBJ.

Was Johnson upset because he had come within half a second of being the President of the United States? Or was he aware that with Kennedy’s survival and continued viability in the 1964 presidential election that, he, Johnson, might now more easily be dumped from the ticket he had blackmailed his way onto in 1960?

Or did it go beyond even that?

An astute politician, LBJ knew that if he was now going to run for President, he’d have to wait until 1968 whether JFK kept him on the ticket or not. He’d be sixty by then — not too old, but not young either, particularly with his record of heart troubles. If he ran, he probably wouldn’t run unopposed. Bobby Kennedy seemed unlikely to wait in line while somebody else succeeded his brother. “That ruthless little shit doesn’t wait for anybody, except maybe Jack,” LBJ had told his young assistant, Bill Moyers. “Bobby Kennedy's the kind of guy who gets into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front.”

All that was interesting, but not for today. Even the 1964 election lay almost a year away, and a politician’s year was longer than a dog’s.

Johnson did not need a heart attack or an imposing opponent to cause him concern, however. There was also the growing scandal that had begun last summer over Johnson’s protégé, Bobby "Little Lyndon" Baker, one that involved trading money and women for votes and government contracts. And if that weren’t enough, another Johnson associate, Billie Sol Estes, was up to his ears in a scandal from the year before that threatened to send Johnson to jail amid charges involving suitcases of money and implications of being an accessory to murder.

As it turned out, on the very day that LBJ was watching the carnage from his own limo in the presidential motorcade, a Senate Rules Committee in Washington, D.C. was hearing testimony in closed session from a Donald B. Reynolds about a $100,000 payoff that had been made to Bobby Baker intended for Johnson.

Possibly just as threatening for LBJ was the fact that in the New York offices of Life magazine, managing editor George P. Hunt had convened a gathering of nine reporters, all working on a story about Johnson’s path from poverty to wealth while pursuing a life in politics. Several of these reporters had just returned from Texas with information that was going to be split up and investigated by the entire team.

The news of the assassination attempt in Dallas had refocused priorities in both the Senate committee and at Life magazine. Suspicious financial practices by the Vice President hardly merited attention when the President’s life had just been threatened.

Change of Plans

With the world watching what was happening at the Dallas Police Department, Chief Jesse Curry fretted in his office on Sunday morning about a promise he’d made to the media that wasn’t sitting well with him. He had agreed to allow them to film the transfer of Lee Oswald to the county jail. In order to do that, the accused assassin would be led through the parking basement of the headquarters on Sunday at 12:30 p.m., nearly two days to the hour that he was alleged to have shot at the presidential motorcade. Curry sat in his office, drinking coffee from a thermos that his wife had handed him on his way out the door at 6 a.m. After watching all the morning news shows, he'd started to have buyers’ remorse. After all, the White House was treating security as a national priority. Could he do any less?

Detective James Leavelle presented himself at the chief’s door and asked if he could have a moment. Leavelle was to be the man handcuffed to Oswald for the transfer, something that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the logistics. He made a strong case to Curry that the elevator at the Dallas Police Department should be stopped on the first floor where they should take the prisoner off, put him in a car on Main Street, and whisk him off to the county jail before the media in the basement even realized he’d been moved.

Curry considered this carefully. “You want me to lie to the press?”

“Only if our priority is to keep the prisoner alive long enough to give him the death sentence,” answered Leavelle.

Curry thought about it. He’d been an all-district tackle for Dallas Technical High School and led their football team all the way to the state finals back in 1933. “A feint might be just what we need here.” Curry gave Leavelle the go-ahead and they agreed that the press would be told only after Oswald was already on the way. Sure, the TV networks with their live cameras down in the basement would be furious but they didn’t run the show, he thought. He was still in charge.

The decision to move Oswald in this way may have saved the accused gunman’s life. A Dallas bar owner, Jack Ruby, was apprehended in the basement with a loaded handgun at the exact moment Oswald was supposed to be coming out of the nearby elevator. The officers who detained Ruby did not immediately arrest him. Instead they called Chief Curry.

Ruby, it turned out, was no stranger to the Dallas Police Department. He ran a local nightclub, and he made sure police officers felt comfortable there. He was friendly enough with local cops that no one had thought to stop him from watching the prisoner transfer that day.

Under questioning, the nightclub operator said he’d come to the basement on the spur of the moment, wanting to kill Oswald for darkening the good name of Texas and terrorizing the Kennedy family. Curry would normally have let Ruby go with a warning and thanked his lucky stars that things had gone no further. But there were so many reporters who witnessed Ruby’s detention that it could not be ignored — particularly since the fifty-two-year-old was described as waving the gun in a way that most reporters and officers on the scene found impossible to miss. Curry ordered that Ruby be arrested and booked.

Only one thing bothered Curry. Ruby had a reputation for being mobbed up with deep contacts in the organized crime underworld. What if he wasn’t telling the truth about his motives? What if Jack Ruby had been sent to silence Lee Harvey Oswald from talking?

A Tale of Two Funerals

Through circumstance, bad planning and, possibly, political motivations, both the funerals of Secret Service agent Clint Hill in Washington, D.C. and Governor John Connally and police officer J.D. Tippit in Texas were scheduled at the same time on Monday. Based on long-established protocols of rank, the original plans called for President Kennedy to return to Texas to be at the funeral of the governor and for Vice President Lyndon Johnson to cover Hill’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. LBJ made no secret of his displeasure at being forced to miss out on the funeral of a man he had known since 1939. Coming on the heels of being escorted off Air Force One, this new slight left him “sucking hind tit again,” as he told several friends.

Both Kenny O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger confronted the President and his brother about this plan and told them it must be stopped immediately. There was no way that Kennedy could go back to Texas so soon. That was a non-starter. And there was no way he could miss the funeral of the Secret Service agent who gave his life to save him, particularly when the Kennedys had rewarded that sacrifice by banishing the Secret Service from the White House. Protocol made no difference in this situation.

Both Kennedys felt the analysis was correct. They accepted the reality of the situation and made it work for them. If you get to deliver good news to someone, take credit for it if you can.

JFK called LBJ first. “Lyndon, I just told these people that you have to represent this administration back in Texas at the funeral for Governor Connally,” said the President. “I need you get on Air Force Two and return there now so you can pay all our respect to your friend on behalf of the United States of America. Will you do that for your country, Lyndon?” Johnson barked out a fast yes and effusively thanked the President he had been cursing all weekend.

The President then called the head of the Secret Service, Chief James J. Rowley, and told him there was no way that protocol would keep him from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday and that he would like to say a few words, if Rowley would allow it. He knew that the situation in the past day had been “misinterpreted” by some of his political opponents, said Kennedy, but this was a good way to send the message that there was “no daylight” between the President and the brave agents who put their lives on the line to protect him. Rowley also effusively thanked the President he had been cursing since the day before.

Figuring they had caught a break, Robert Kennedy returned to Hickory Hill under escort of the federal marshals to shower, shave and change into some clean clothes. John Kennedy took lunch with his wife and children.

Monday in Washington, D.C. was raw and chilly, with a biting wind blustering down from the north. Across the Potomac River in Virginia was Arlington National Cemetery, at one time Robert E. Lee’s mansion and grounds, which had now become the chief military burial ground for the country Lee fought so hard to defeat. Most of the leaves today were off the trees at the cemetery. The grass was starting to go yellow. The waiting grave stood open, a new wound in the earth. By the grave, the Secret Service had set up a portable lectern with a bulletproof glass shield in front.

Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill was to be buried here based on having served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1957. A special presidential order had waived any other issues that might have been raised under normal circumstances. Hill, in the view of almost everyone, had given his life on the field of battle at Dealey Plaza.

The U.S. Secret Service had a staff of nearly two hundred agents working for it nationwide. Thirty-four of them had been in the presidential detail, responsible for protecting John F. Kennedy around the clock. They worked in eight-hour shifts, rotating the duty times every two weeks.

Clint Hill had been assigned to the Jacqueline Kennedy detail as the special agent in charge. He had been positioned in the follow-up car behind the one with the Kennedys and the Connallys when he saw something and leaped instinctively to shield the President and First Lady, saving their lives and giving up his own in the process. While the President and the attorney general had strategized and acted over the past forty-eight hours, Jackie Kennedy had been left alone with her grief. Ever since the attack in Dallas, there was speculation among a few wags that Hill and the First Lady had been involved in an extramarital affair, something that has never been confirmed and was, in fact, denied by both parties while they were alive. What is clear, however, is that Clint Hill had become Mrs. Kennedy's close friend, and she found the pain of his loss unbearable.

The assistant special agent in charge in Dallas had been Roy Kellerman, who was advised to stay there to recuperate from a shoulder wound that had required extensive surgery. Kellerman refused this advice and came to Arlington, where he sat with the contingent of Secret Service agents who had come to mourn their fallen friend. These men were easy to spot, and not just because they sat together. They were fairly young and tough and clean-cut. Many of them had to be wondering if, faced with identical circumstances, they would have responded as quickly and as bravely as Clint Hill did.

President and Mrs. Kennedy were seated strategically out of view of any potential line of fire. For this event, the Secret Service had been allowed to provide security, even though the attorney general had seen to it that a generous contingent of federal marshals was also on the job to watch the watchers. While it was obvious that fence- mending needed to be done, the President being at the service was seen as a clear sign that his rearranging of White House security was temporary, as he’d said all along through his spokesmen, including his brother. Regardless of the politics, security was heavy. Some carried pistols, some tommy guns, and some scope-sighted rifles. They all wore don’t-tread-on-me expressions. All agents regarded anyone they were unfamiliar with through hard eyes. To a man, they looked jumpy as hell.

The surprise of the event, however, was yet to come. After Chief James Rowley spoke about courage, self-sacrifice and duty, it was expected that President Kennedy would speak briefly. He did not. Instead, it was the First Lady who walked to the lectern. All three networks had TV cameras on hand to record the emotional moment.

A good man is dead. A man I call my friend. Clint Hill gave his own life so that my husband and I might live. Agent Hill knew there were dangers when he joined the Secret Service. No one made him jump up on the trunk of our car. No one would have thought less of him if he didn’t do it, but he did, and now he is gone. If God ever needs a bodyguard up in Heaven, He will find one in Clint Hill. He protected us as he would his own family. He made the whole country his family in Dallas on Friday afternoon. Thank you.

The entire speech by Jackie Kennedy was so short that it was replayed in its entirety over and over on November 25. Her husband did not speak, but after the service he presented Hill’s wife with a folded, cased flag, the kind any veteran’s widow was entitled to have. He gave her a warm, long hug and in an image made famous, he removed his white pocket handkerchief to dry the tears from Mrs. Hill’s eyes. After that, Kennedy and his wife walked over to the Secret Service contingent and spoke to agents for seventeen minutes.

Those pictures of the Kennedys offering grief counseling in the shadow of their own brush with death seemed for the moment to completely eliminate the issue of the Secret Service. What the First Lady did not know but surely suspected, was that a number of these agents knew a great deal more about her husband's activities when he was not with his family than she did. If they were to speak, the damage to the reputation of the First Family simply could not be calculated.

Another Profile in Courage

By Tuesday, the initial shock had worn off, the bodies of the dead had been buried, and the White House knew that the President of the United States needed to speak to the American people. John Kennedy had made statements — at the airport, after church and at Arlington Cemetery — but they were limited in scope and general in information. It was time to say more in a press conference, an art form he had mastered in sixty-four different appearances before Dallas.

Normally, press secretary Pierre Salinger would have introduced the President, but Kennedy told him to hold off. It was not like he was an unknown quantity. Asked what his strategy would be, the President shrugged: “Kennedys smile, Pierre. That’s how we do it.”

Far more reporters than usual crowded the East Room for Kennedy’s sixty-fifth press conference, and many others had been turned away, put into a room with a closed- circuit feed in the Executive Office Building next door. As the event was being televised live, JFK entered precisely on cue at 9 p.m., primetime on the East Coast and dinnertime on the West Coast. He looked tanned and fit as usual. Seeing him enter, so masculine, so presidential, and so alive, the White House press corps burst into authentic and spontaneous applause out of the sheer spirit of it all.

He was there in the room for the reporters and there on the screens for the rest of America to accept the outpouring of emotion in a give-and-take that was cathartic for everyone. Unlike Truman and Eisenhower, presidents past their prime and not especially good-looking to begin with, this president understood what TV could do for him, the bond it could forge with the people who voted for him.

“I’ve never looked forward to taking your questions so much before,” said the President, and the reporters broke up. How could they help it?

The President said he had a brief statement before those questions, and continued:

Our country has been shocked and saddened by the events that took place in Dallas last Friday. I know the American people have many questions that demand answers, as I do. The United States government, however, is secure and operational. Our friends from around the world should know we have been hurt by these events but that we are a strong nation that knows how to rise to a great challenge. Our adversaries should take no advantage of these times. We are as confident today as we were last Friday before any shots were fired. Now I’ll take those questions.

“Mr. President!” Everybody shouted at once. A sea of hands flew into the air. Kennedy pointed to Kevin Brown, the White House correspondent from the Washington Post, who wanted to know if the President was as yet satisfied that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter.

“That certainly seems to be what the FBI believes,” said Kennedy, not using Oswald’s name. “They seem confident that the accused assassin is in the hands of the law. For myself, I am confident the truth will come out during the investigation and at this man’s trial.” His face hardened. “Political murder of any kind has no place in a civil, democratic society.”

The man from the Post got a follow-up. Why did the President refuse to say Oswald’s name?

“The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a man who burned a great temple to win everlasting fame. ‘I know his name,’ Herodotus said, ‘but I will not set it down here.’ And that man who burned the temple because he wanted to be remembered forever has been forgotten for twenty-five hundred years.” It was pure JFK. As it turned out, the story of the ancient Greek had been dredged up by his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, but Kennedy made the lines his own when he delivered them. That talent he had in abundance.

“Mr. President, maybe you don’t want to use his name because you think there are other names that should go along with his. Could he have been part of a larger conspiracy?” This question came from Helen Thomas of UPI.

“Helen, there you go again, always asking these easy questions.” Kennedy’s disarming grin and the subsequent reaction gave him time to collect his thoughts. He had some pretty definite ideas about who might want to shoot him besides Lee Harvey Oswald. His inner circle was already looking into them.

“If the evidence against the accused is strong enough, they’ll indict him,” he said. “If they indict him, he’ll go to trial. If he’s convicted, he’ll suffer the appropriate penalties under the law. If there were others involved, I expect that they will have the same treatment, but I do not have any personal knowledge that there are.”

“Do you expect to be called as a witness?” This came from NBC’s Chet Huntley.

JFK looked surprised, as it was not something he’d given any thought to yet. “I’m not sure a sitting President can be,” he said slowly. “I’d have to consult with the Justice Department before I gave you a firm answer.” He meant he would have to talk to his brother. He went on, “The courts might also have to speak to that issue. It’s an interesting question, Chet. I have already given a statement to FBI agents and, of course, I’ll cooperate with any investigation that might arise out of this.”

That statement took Kennedy into even more uncertain territory. The questions flew fast and furious. Who was investigating now? Would the President appoint a special investigatory panel of his own? What was the next step?

Before the news conference was over, President Kennedy found himself discussing the intricacies of jurisdiction, given that the crime happened in Dallas, and then supporting the FBI’s investigation, even though he personally had no trust whatsoever in any agents working for J. Edgar Hoover. His answer was a stall, one that he knew he could not let stand for long.

If the federal marshals had to stand in for the Secret Service, what agency or investigatory body could be called in to replace the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

This would need to be worked out and soon. The question of who would write the official record of what happened in Dallas, determine who was guilty and of what crime or crimes, had to be decided.

✪

Chapter 2:

Battle Lines Being Drawn

_______________

November 28, 1963 - December 31, 1963

Giving Thanks

When Thanksgiving came on Thursday, November 28 in 1963, many millions of Americans at their holiday tables gave thanks for the survival of President Kennedy. Pope Paul VI, whom Kennedy had visited in the Vatican only in July, offered a special Thanksgiving blessing for the first Catholic president. In it, he called President Kennedy a “peacemaker” and implied that he had been spared by God to continue his mission.

Look magazine devoted more than a dozen pages and twenty-seven photos to that 1963 celebration. Despite its focus on average Americans, the most famous image from the Look spread was that of the President’s mother, Rose, as she took her son’s face in her hands when she first saw him arrive at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and kissed his cheek. “The Lord is not done with you, Jack," she reminded him. "I hope you’ve said your prayers.” The President had done so, religiously, since Dallas. Now he was celebrating with the First Lady, their children, and both their extended families. Every cousin, brother, mother or anyone else related to the Kennedy name was there as a show of support for John.

Primetime television went back to regular schedules days before, although there were more news cut-ins — the greatest volume ever since the invention of TV news. As in the White House, three televisions were in the study of the Hyannis Port main house so that Jack and Bobby could keep an eye on ABC, CBS and NBC simultaneously during the network news block. As the botched assassination that had kept everyone spellbound began to loosen its grip on the national consciousness, the Kennedy brothers were wary and focused, shocked by their enemy’s brazen behavior. Should they strike back, surrender, or just go to ground?

Six days out from the ambush at Dealey Plaza, the Kennedys had to come to realize how many moving parts now existed in the management of what had happened there. There were federal and state investigations, a laundry list of potential suspects and a clear battle brewing over jurisdiction.

Massachusetts' newly elected Senator Edward Kennedy, or Teddy as the youngest brother was called, had been told by Jack and Bobby to stay clear of strategy sessions on the grounds that he needed “plausible deniability,” a term then gaining currency in the intelligence community. They had kept him at arm's length to this point, because they wanted Teddy to be able to hear what was being said in the shadows of the Senate without having to offer up any real insight from the White House. At his insistence, however, they relented and brought him into their conversations at Hyannis Port.

On Friday, the blood relations were joined by the political family. The White House team contributed Kenny O’Donnell, Pierre Salinger, Dave Powers and Ted Sorensen. This self-described group of “all the President’s men” was brought together to review the options that would be on the table when Congress returned from the Thanksgiving break in less than seventy-two hours.

It began with them all seated outside at a round table on a cold, dreary afternoon, looking out over the water. Federal agents had established a cordon around the property. They had advised against an outdoor meeting but had been overruled by the President himself.

Web of Suspicion

As the men gathered outside, the scoop from Washington, D.C. was that Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader of the Senate, was going to call for a congressional investigation of the botched assassination at an afternoon news conference. Teddy, being a United States senator, broke the news that everyone had been expecting. They knew Dirksen would try to “stir up his own unique brand of shit” and had been waiting for the moment.

President Kennedy made some small talk, then nodded to Bobby, who announced there would be two primary issues to be debated before dinner. First they would have a spitball session on the issue of what collection of killers had planned the ambush of last Friday afternoon. It would be free-flowing and off the record; no one would ever confirm or deny anything said today on this subject. O’Donnell stopped the conversation when he asked, “What if we were put under oath?”

“Well, Kenny, we would never allow that to happen,” assured the President. He turned to his kid brother. “Of course, the attorney general may have another opinion.”

Bobby assured everyone that no oath-taking was contemplated but that, even if it came to pass, this conversation was protected under the umbrella of “executive privilege.” Under oath, all participants would confirm that they were at a meeting, but any other questions would require them to invoke privilege and refuse to answer. “It is my opinion,” said the top law enforcement officer in the United States, “that this conversation as well as any other conversations you may have had on these subjects, both in the past and in the future, are protected by privilege.”

If there was anyone uncomfortable with accepting this legal strategy and supporting it for the administration, Bobby advised them to leave now. The choice was simple: Stay and learn everything going forward, or resign. Everyone stayed.

The middle Kennedy brother then explained the ground rules for the next hour. He would propose the name of an individual or a group, and O’Donnell, Powers, Salinger, Sorensen and Teddy Kennedy would speculate about what they knew. The President and the attorney general would only contribute after everyone else had spoken. They needed to hear independently what the others had to say. It was safer that way.

The following assessments have, over time, now been confirmed by multiple participants and represent the thinking of the Kennedy inner circle just one week after the shooting.

Lee Harvey Oswald

Hardly anyone in the post-Thanksgiving huddle believed Oswald had acted alone. The information they heard from internal reports and the media shouted otherwise. Emerging facts included Oswald’s working with U2 intelligence at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, which was the CIA presence in the Far East. The fact that he had renounced his U.S. citizenship to live in the Soviet Union, then returned and was never arrested for treason seemed to be of key importance. His contradictory work with the violent anti-Castro Cuban community while making public appearances supporting Castro raised another red flag. There were already rumors that Oswald had been on the FBI payroll at $200 a month.

From his jail cell in Dallas, Oswald had found himself a fire-breathing New York attorney by the name of William Kunstler. Kunstler was making a name for himself by defending clients no other lawyer wanted to take on. Oswald phoned Kunstler — he was given free access to a telephone by the Dallas Police Department — and Kunstler agreed to defend him pro bono for as long as his case lasted. In conducting the Oswald legal update, RFK referred to him as “Kuntsler,” deliberately transposing the “t” and “s” in the attorney’s name.

The consensus among the group was that there was a great deal more to this Oswald than met the eye. The fingerprints of the intelligence community were all over him. Even so, it was clear that there was a powerful counter-narrative at work that claimed he had acted alone.

The Soviet Union

In the minutes and hours after the shooting in Dallas, suspicion had focused on the Soviet Union. The fear, not unfounded, was that the Soviets might try to decapitate the American government as a distraction for a nuclear showdown. After President Kennedy’s peace speech before the American University on June 10, 1963, both sides had feared that such an overt peace feeler could trigger a counter-reaction from hard-liners on either side of the Iron Curtain.

As the facts came in, however, and the Soviet leadership, particularly Chairman Khrushchev, seemed genuinely shocked, it appeared less and less likely that the Soviet Union was directly involved. There was Cold War suspicion, but the evidence just wasn’t there. With arsenals on both sides pushing toward fifty thousand nuclear weapons, the fact that the Soviet Union was not a prime suspect in an attack on a U.S. President was good news.

The Hyannis Port assembly gave Soviet involvement a very small likelihood and moved on quickly.

Cuba

Fidel Castro, however, was another matter. So was his country. And so were the Cubans who hated Castro and had come to hate Kennedy with the same vehemence. This island nation, just ninety miles away from the Florida Keys had become a centerpiece of Cold War sound and fury since the Cuban revolution had toppled Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

No one doubted for a moment that Cuba was involved in some way. Mutual antipathy and mistrust had dogged the U.S. and Cuba since the Kennedy administration's disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The only question was whether Cuban hostility was the organizing principle behind the Dallas attack or whether our Communist neighbor was being used as a smokescreen by other adversaries.

Certainly, Oswald’s membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee alarmed both John and Robert Kennedy. With covert help from the Mafia (which was highly involved in Cuban gambling before the Cuban revolution), the CIA had unsuccessfully sought to murder the new Cuban strongman. Was Castro trying to pay the Americans back in the same coin? Or were angry anti-Castro Cubans, based in New Orleans and Miami, the ones who wanted Kennedy to pay the price for not fully supporting the Bay of Pigs fiasco and for taking an invasion of Cuba off the table during the Missile Crisis the previous year?

As recently as the previous month, the administration had been sending out peace-feelers to Castro through back-channel diplomacy, to the great alarm of Washington national security hard-liners. While it was possible Castro wanted JFK dead, it seemed much more likely that he would know such a situation would be used against him, eventually as a rationale to end his own life and leadership in Cuba.

The issue had another level, however. In order to appease his hard-liners long enough to have a chance at making an accommodation over Cuba, the President had approved continuing a plan known as “Operation Mongoose.” It was aimed at de-stabilizing the Castro regime by any covert means necessary. There was no doubt that from a Cuban perspective, the U.S. was sending some mixed signals out of the White House.

Bobby eventually ended this debate saying “I’ll give this one top priority.” The President admonished him with a dry smile, “Not so fast, Bobby. We’re just getting started.”

Organized Crime

If the Kennedys had a challenging relationship with Cuba, they had no less of one with the powers of the United States Mafia. Despite — or perhaps because of — the common knowledge that family patriarch Joseph Kennedy had accumulated much of his wealth through illegal activity during Prohibition, Bobby Kennedy had chosen, in the late 1950s, to plant his personal and political flag square in the midst of the organized crime issue. He’d made his national debut as chief counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, squaring off mano-a-mano on national TV against Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa and other highly placed mob figures. He’d also written a 1960 best-seller, The Enemy Within, that attacked organized crime as a greater threat to America than communism.

Indeed, as attorney general, Robert Kennedy had told his fellow crusaders at the Justice Department that failure was no option — they had to crush the mob or the mob would run the country.

That antagonistic relationship alone made a mob hit a real possibility. Yet the thinking went that if the Mafia wanted to kill a Kennedy, they’d probably go for Bobby first. After all, the Mafia godfathers had expected leniency from the Kennedy administration after their cozy friendship with Joe Kennedy, but instead they were the target of a declaration of war by his children, particularly Bobby.

Still, as with all the suspects, there were twists and turns that made thinking about the mob far more complex than could be seen at first blush.

There was the fact that Joseph Kennedy had convinced some organized crime members to help out with John Kennedy’s 1960 election, despite the fact that Robert's recent efforts to put them out of business were starting to border on obsession.

The greatest twist was that leaders of organized crime had been working hand-in-glove with members of U.S. intelligence to assassinate Castro in a classic “enemy-of-my-enemy” operation.

When President Kennedy excused himself to take a phone call, Bobby took the opportunity to alert the others to a “sensitive situation.” JFK had, from 1960 through 1962, an affair with the Los Angeles socialite Judith Campbell, who was also involved with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy had used Campbell (later known as Judith Campbell Exner, after her 1975 marriage to professional golfer Dan Exner) as a messenger to communicate with Giancana, hoping to enlist support for the assassination attempts against Castro. Now the question was whether the mobster’s jealousy prompted him to try to rub out the President.

Bobby reminded the group of the need for discretion in this matter and stated that the only reason Campbell was even relevant to today’s conversation was her connection to Giancana. In other words, anything else in the area of “relationships” was none of the group’s business.

Before the President returned, the attorney general had another “priority” on his list to go along with the entire Cuban problem.

Joint Chiefs of Staff

From the beginning of the Kennedy administration, the leaders of the United States military establishment had treated JFK disrespectfully. He was berated behind his back, undermined whenever possible, and often lectured to his face by members of the Joint Chiefs as if he were a schoolboy. The worst offender here was Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an aggressively confrontational character willing to face doomsday by launching preemptive attacks on both Cuba and the Soviet Union. LeMay was not alone. There were many military officers angry at Kennedy for trying to put some brakes on the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower had warned the nation about.

The falling out had started with the planning and execution of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. JFK felt he’d been tricked into approving the invasion of Cuba by exiled resistance fighters and that the military fully expected this to force his hand into ordering a full-scale, U.S. backed invasion. The following year, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the generals seemed to be arguing for risking nuclear war as an acceptable option. Lately, they were alarmed at the President’s increasing skepticism about the slow military escalation in Vietnam. The American University speech had them in an uproar.

The military chiefs were outraged at Kennedy’s plans to withdraw from Vietnam, furious about his dramatic peace overtures to Soviet Premier Khrushchev, livid about his back-channel approaches to Fidel Castro, and utterly hostile to his plans to end the Cold War while they were determined to win it, even at the cost of a nuclear war.

The men in Hyannis Port agreed that the U.S. military had motive. They also had guns. But would they use them against their own commander-in-chief? Everyone in attendance had read the 1962 thriller Seven Days in May and knew the idea was out there in the air. It was possible.

It seemed more likely, however, that the sour, self-righteous attitude in the military might have unleashed a few freelancers who thought they were ridding the country of a treasonous leader and thus acting as patriots. Besides, the military was used to a big flexing of muscle; they lived in a world of invasions, air strikes and nuclear payloads. The idea of triangulating an assassination was more of a finesse job.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

President Kennedy was also out of the room when the question of FBI involvement was broached. This was yet another government organization that had taken a hostile attitude toward the new president from the moment he took office back in January of 1961.

J. Edgar Hoover had been running the Federal Bureau of Investigation since its 1935 inception, and he now treated it as a lifetime appointment. Both Kennedy brothers had wanted to replace him, but he had blackmailed his way to a reappointment, one of the first that John Kennedy had made after his election. Hoover had simply made clear the vast knowledge he possessed based on surveillance, files, interviews and so forth, all of it aimed at finding embarrassing and politically devastating personal failings of the President-elect and others. Hoover’s files went all the way back to the years before World War II. It was a powerful sledgehammer, and it worked.

Hoover did not like John Kennedy, went the thinking of the group at Hyannis Port, but he had no reason to see him dead. He enjoyed the power he had over the President and his brother too much. Hoover did not like Robert Kennedy, either, particularly since RFK was, as attorney general, Hoover’s boss. Yet Hoover also enjoyed tweaking RFK whenever he could.

There was another angle still. Hoover lived down the street from Vice President Lyndon Johnson. They were close friends and had been for some years. The Kennedy men had always assumed that LBJ got all his blackmail material on JFK that landed the Texan on the 1960 ticket in the first place from Hoover.

So even though J. Edgar Hoover was clearly an implacable foe of the Kennedys, he was not seen as a force behind an assassination attempt as much as he was seen as a force behind the current cover-up. Hoover, for reasons not a hundred percent clear, seemed to be taking the position through his investigation of the ambush that Oswald had likely acted alone. This would be a productive way to misdirect an investigation, the thinking went, particularly if Hoover was part of the conspiracy.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

The already distrustful relationship between the Kennedys and the Central Intelligence Agency was shattered completely when the shots were fired on November 22.

Ironically, at the beginning of his term, JFK supported the agency’s aim to accomplish strategic objectives without hurtling toward Armageddon. Spying was also far less expensive than actually fighting wars. Plus, the cloak-and-dagger had appealed to the new President’s dash and style. He was actually a James Bond fan of both the books and the new films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.

The honeymoon had ended less than three months after JFK’s inauguration. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA plan that was a leftover from the previous administration. As presented by CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, President Kennedy had been open to it. The fact that it had supposedly been vetted by President Dwight Eisenhower, the general who had succeeded at D-Day, made it even more attractive. In reality, the President’s men hugging up their jackets against the November cold thought it had been a con job, a setup all the way.

In the aftermath of its failure, the Kennedys had come to think of the men who ran the Central Intelligence Agency as “virtually treasonous,” the same that the CIA apparently thought of them. President Kennedy, as angry as he had ever been in his life, threatened to break the agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Soon he had fired Dulles and two other key players, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. To say that Allen Dulles was embittered was a grand understatement. By all accounts, he felt a deep and powerful antipathy toward the man who had terminated his career so ignobly.

The President of the United States did not trust the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA did not trust JFK. They disagreed over many things ranging from the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the administration’s Castro policy and its vision for the future of the Vietnam conflict. To have bad blood exist with an organization that increasingly considered coups and assassinations as mere policy choices seemed particularly dangerous.

Secret Service

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that November 22, 1963 was not the Secret Service’s proudest day. While the President had survived, his life was saved by agent Clint Hill and not by the organization. It was as if the entire group of agents had been asleep at the switch. The question was why?

It might have been unintentional sloppiness. The Secret Service detail assigned to Dallas had been incredibly “off-procedure” the night before, with multiple agents up until 3 a.m. drinking. None of those agents were likely to have been at the top of their game.

Or it could have been more than incompetence. Were they drinking because they knew what was going to happen and weren’t going to stop it?

The route had not been properly secured. Instructions to Dallas Police had not maximized their effort but minimized it. The motorcade at Dealey Plaza was traveling below the minimum speed. The agents in the President’s car reacted poorly, responding only after Hill, a man who had just been shot, shouted them out of their somnambulance. Certainly the driver, William Greer, would be called before investigators and asked for an explanation for his leaden reflexes behind the wheel of the President’s car.

There were so many loose ends. There was, for example, the issue of the decision not to go with the protective bubble-top glass for the President’s limousine. It was a Secret Service call, according to protocol, but Lyndon Johnson, as part of his trip-planning responsibilities, had asked directly that it not be used.

The head of the Secret Service James Rowley was no fan of President Kennedy either. He knew better than most that there were more than a few of his agents who had open disdain for the President. Unlike the CIA, their hostility was not about policy; rather this emotion came from seeing Kennedy’s personal behavior up close. It was a mixed bag. JFK had made friends with many agents, particularly the Secret Service’s first black agent, Abraham Bolden. The President always asked Bolden and others about their families, vacations and sporting affiliations.

President Kennedy asked that Bolden be brought into the White House security plans immediately. Bolden was loyal, yes, but he had also heard all the trash talk from other agents and, when asked, he would tell the Kennedy brothers what he knew.

There were reports of Secret Service agents showing identification cards in Dealey Plaza, although there were no such agents deployed, at least officially. The attorney general had heard from a source who heard from someone else that they were the work of the CIA’s Technical Services Division.

That would mean that there were CIA agents in Dealey Plaza doing the job of Secret Service agents, and Secret Service agents that had abandoned their own jobs by standing down in their defense of the President.

None of it was definitive proof of anything. The CIA may have learned of the plot and only been monitoring it from the sidelines, and maybe even working to stop it. The Secret Service may have had its agents intimidated and manipulated into adverse choices without support or knowledge of a full plot.

The conclusion was that some elements inside the Secret Service may have had a role among the plotters. As of now, with the information available, it was simply unclear.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson

While the jury was out on the Secret Service, virtually everyone who voiced an opinion had a greater suspicion of Vice President Johnson, a statement that by itself spoke volumes about the man and his reputation.

Johnson was considered to be a devious viper in the nest, the Brutus to Kennedy’s Caesar, who with the help of J. Edgar Hoover had blackmailed his way onto the 1960 presidential ticket and who knew he was about to be dumped from the 1964 ticket. Bobby Kennedy loathed Lyndon Johnson and the feeling was mutual.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a potential scandal for Johnson was slowly building, as the Senate rules committee looked into the activities of the man whom Johnson had appointed to serve as his secretary for the majority of his days on the Hill. Bobby “Little Lyndon” Baker had resigned under pressure from the probe, but the scandal was growing, and it threatened to embroil Baker’s former boss. Life magazine had chronicled it all and, unlike prior press coverage, had tied the whole metastasizing mess directly to Johnson. The magazine had bigger targets in mind, too. That very morning, editors and reporters were meeting to discuss angles for a broader investigation, this one into the Vice President’s personal finances.

LBJ also had strong reason to believe he was about to be indicted and could very well go to prison for his provable role in the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes scandals. There was no doubt that the Texan’s lifelong lust and endless scheming for the presidency was relentless. But murder? There were rumors back in Texas about suspicious deaths that LBJ had connections to that a few of Robert Kennedy’s young turks actually thought were sufficiently grounded that a grand jury would indict the sitting VP if presented with the facts.

If this line of reasoning were correct, however, it would make Lyndon Baines Johnson the greatest conspirator since Brutus, who precipitated the death of the Roman Republic by helping to assassinate Julius Caesar. Brutus, it was worth noting, was forced to flee Rome to avoid the inflamed passions of the public and ended his own life in suicide.

All Or Some Of The Above

There were other candidates, each one bending and twisting into a Mobius strip of suspicion. In addition to what had already been said, there were other questions:

Was it Big Oil, which Kennedy was threatening by eliminating the industry's depletion allowance worth billions?

Was it Big Money, which Kennedy was threatening by printing U.S. Treasury notes, thereby ending the Fed’s monopoly on currency?

Was it Big Steel, which Kennedy had stared down over price increases just a year ago and which never forgave him?

So many theories and possibilities existed that it truly seemed like a joke. How could anyone get into this and find success? Where would one even start?

Clearly there was the chance of some network of hostile adversaries who had come together to solve mutual problems by removing the President of the United States through extreme action. In fact, this seemed to be a far greater probability than the idea that the President would be attacked at the hand of a loser with no affiliations or connections to any of the other players. Still, until direct proof was offered to the contrary, Oswald remained the prime suspect.

The team gathered that November day at Hyannis Port strongly believed this brazen attack had to have been perpetrated with varying degrees of complicity, collusion and coordination from the highest levels of the CIA, the FBI and the Texas power structure.

Reluctant to use the actual word “conspiracy,” they pointed the finger of blame instead at what was called the “nexus.” The word would be used in place of conspiracy in White House meetings, particularly those that were recorded. Once things got ugly in 1965, the word “conspiracy” was openly used as a matter of policy by members of the Kennedy administration, including the President and the attorney general.

The recent past had showcased a sinister alliance to kill Fidel Castro. Under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, mob bosses had conspired with Cuban exile leaders to assassinate a country’s leader. That was fact.

The CIA, the Mafia and Cuba were already intertwined; it was no stretch of anyone’s imagination to consider that they might have worked together to eliminate a common enemy. John and Robert Kennedy thought they had shut down this CIA-Mafia merger when the agency had confessed it in May of 1962. But they also knew that defiance of legitimate executive authority was common in their government.

Dave Powers tried to lighten the mood. “Maybe we should just discuss who couldn’t have done it.”

“Davey,” said the President with a wink. “That might only include those of us who are freezing our asses off out here.” That statement gathered more consensus than any other this day, and the decision was taken to move inside for part two of the discussion.

Fight for Jurisdiction

Inside, fortified by hot chocolates made by the Kennedy children, the Hyannis Port collective turned its attention to the subject of who should serve as point man in sorting out the entire situation. The need was made critical by a press conference that Senator Everett Dirksen was now giving on live television.

Each of three TV sets was tuned to a different network, all featuring the Illinois Republican, a moderate only by the standards of his own party. JFK, who admired a winning performance, knew that Dirksen was good TV and that such a quality could always be dangerous. The Senate Minority Leader had curls that came close to rivaling Harpo Marx’s. And his voice was a pipe organ he could use for any sort of sound effect under the sun. He was, said Dave Powers, “the biggest ham outside an Armour can.”

Dirksen did not disappoint, calling for a Senate investigation that would, presumably, include himself or Mississippi Senator James Eastland in a key position. He also promised legislative leadership. “Why, gentlemen, do you know it’s not even a federal crime to assassinate the President of the United States or any other official of the government? That is a shame and a disgrace that we shall remedy shortly.”

He immediately ran into the same line of questioning the President had fielded at his recent primetime news conference. The issue was jurisdiction, and reporters wanted to know if Congress and the state of Texas wouldn’t be stepping all over each other to conduct what was essentially the same kind of investigation. He argued that the U.S. Congress was capable of casting a broader net with finer mesh. He implied that the Dallas Police Department might be good at investigating what happened in Dallas last Friday, but for what led up to it, for what led Oswald to do the deed — if, in fact, Oswald was the culprit — a federal investigation seemed more appropriate.

Having declared his jurisdictional intentions, Dirksen was asked whether the White House was encouraging him in his pursuit of a congressional investigation.

The senator rolled his eyes. “Any President naturally wishes Congress would roll over on its back and wave its legs in the air. The executive branch believes that to be our proper role. This administration seems no different.”

As the networks cut away from Dirksen's conference, the Kennedy team adjourned to the study. The President’s back was torturing him again, and he didn’t want to have to use crutches. Everyone packed into a space that was much smaller than was comfortable. Ethel sat outside the door to keep out interruptions.

As the men took their seats behind that closed door, Bobby shrugged: “Well?”

The first answer came from Kenny O’Donnell, who held up a yellow legal pad where had written one word: “Clusterfuck.”

After seeing the sensitivity of their situation over the last hour of conversation, everyone knew that jurisdiction was everything. It defined the winners and the losers that would need to be sorted out. It was clear that things could soon be spinning out of control, what with Dirksen making his play and that Dallas Police Chief What’s-his-name enjoying sticking it to Washington. JFK nodded his agreement: “We have to get in the game. We have to control the game.”

The single greatest asset the White House controlled on the day after Thanksgiving 1963 was what a previous occupant, Theodore Roosevelt, had called the “bully pulpit.” Americans generally wanted answers and soon on this matter of shooting at the President at high noon. But there was no consensus as to what should be done. JFK’s press conference on Tuesday had only added more fog to the confusion. The good news was that the White House was still the most legitimate entity to lead on the subject.

The question was: Lead where?

The Three Bad Options

After the review of facts and suspicions, it seemed clear to everyone in this discussion that the nation and the government were at a tipping point. While there was lots of room for improvisation within the options, there were only three basic ways to look at the big picture, none of them particularly good.

- Option One: allowing the Soviets and/or Cubans to be blamed. This was deemed unacceptable because it was likely not true and, in any case, stopping nuclear war — not encouraging it — had now become the mission of the Kennedy administration.

- Option Two: taking on the conspiracy directly. This could quite possibly lead to a military coup that might destroy the country and would destabilize institutions that control nuclear weapons.

- Option Three: covering it all up, at least temporarily. This too was unacceptable, because it required the President and members of the administration to subvert a potential congressional investigation.

Since all the options seemed equally unattractive, the President and his trusted allies were forced to examine each of them more deeply. The first one involved examining incoming intelligence that indicated Oswald was closely aligned with not only the Soviet Union but also the pro-Castro Cubans. This was the line coming in from the CIA. The agency had even produced evidence of Oswald at the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico just the month before. Yet Hoover himself had just told the President that the FBI analysis confirmed that man was not Oswald; neither the photos nor the recordings matched the suspect sitting in the Dallas jail cell.

Given the poor relationship the Kennedys had with the military, the CIA and the FBI, the idea that the CIA intelligence was accurate was given about a fifty-fifty possibility. Just as likely, it had been cooked up by the agency to cover up something the CIA itself had done or been complicit in. The bottom line was that, true or not, following where the intel was leading would force an invasion of Cuba, followed by the real possibility of a full-on nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

The second option meant grappling with the strong possibility that the facts would lead to an inside job, conceived and created by members of the CIA and the U.S. military to remove the elected president through assassination in order to take a more hawkish position in the Cold War. The team considered this to be the cold, hard truth of the matter. After all, JFK was engaging in peace initiatives with both Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev and had been privately talking peace and withdrawal from Vietnam. He was therefore not likely to be on Soviet or Cuban hit lists, but conspirators would benefit if the populace believed otherwise. The people would demand some kind of revenge against the Communists who had attacked our President.

It was a hard thing to swallow, this second option. It meant that high-level members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities had somehow hatched a plot that called for killing the President of the United States in a broad-daylight ambush and then blaming it on the Soviet Union and Cuba. This would give the plotters what they needed, a call to war, and it would remove the one man standing in the way of authorizing that war, the commander-in-chief.

To take on this cruel, awful reality would be terrible. If the first option placed the nation at war with the Soviet Union, this one placed the nation at war with itself. To push this fight out into the light of the public might tear the country apart as deeply as had the Civil War. It could lead to a classic military coup with tanks surrounding the White House. The men who had approved this plot, tacitly or not, would not go down easily. The gloves would come off, and they would fight to the end.

The third and final option was to buy time for tempers to cool and facts to be solidified by siphoning off the passion somehow, keeping a lid on the situation at least through the election, so it could be addressed out of strength in the next term. This one involved stopping with the arrest of Oswald, investigating in a way that the public knew was proper and dignified, and confronting the treasonous cabal that had done this deed in the shadows rather than in the headlines.

At the end, President Kennedy spoke. “Well, gentlemen,” he said as if summarizing the options on a dull farm support bill, “we seem to have a choice between nuclear war, a military coup or an illegal cover-up.” No one voiced disagreement.

“We have Chairman Khrushchev behind door number one,” began Bobby Kennedy, ticking off the possibilities on his hand. “Then we have the CIA behind door number two, and we’re behind door number three.” Everyone knew what he meant. It was a reference to a new game show on NBC and its young, agreeable host, Monty Hall.

“Uh, Monty,” said Dave Powers taking on the voice of a nervous housewife, “I’d like to take door number four.”

Alas, for the Kennedy team, there were just the three. To a man, everyone at this meeting preferred in his guts the second option of hunting down and putting on trial every single member of this unspeakable conspiracy. This contemplated hot war demanded that they strike back hard against the traitors — to protect the Kennedy presidency, yes, but also to protect the country from itself. These plotters who had so little regard for the Constitution of the United States had to pay a price. And yet once the floodgates truly opened, it seemed unlikely the President would escape being damaged in some way.

There was, first of all, the practical question of whether this situation could be held under control for the immediate future, specifically until the 1964 election, now less than twelve months away. After the next November, it would either be JFK’s problem or he could try to work with his successor by briefing him fully about what was going on.

President Kennedy had spoken only a few times in this discussion, but had listened carefully. He broke in with a call to “return to the issue of the Constitution.”

The President noted his oath of office called for him to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.” He reviewed the options as such. If the nation were to be destroyed in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the Constitution would be rendered meaningless. If the military were to seize control of the government from its legitimate civilian authority, that would be a direct violation of the oath’s objective. The third option, however unpalatable, risked neither the destruction of the nation nor the destruction of the Constitution. “Indeed, if navigated properly, it might be possible to buy a year to tack away from the calls for war,” posited the President, “get elected on that platform and, in the end, simply postpone the day of reckoning for the conspirators by kicking it down the road.”

If their decision to choose the third option was an overreach or in any way adverse to the Constitution, said the attorney general, the Constitution itself provided the remedy of impeachment by the House, and trial and removal by the Senate. If that remedy were to be required, the system would survive and the oath would be maintained. Abraham Lincoln felt that way about many of the measures he implemented during the Civil War that some considered unconstitutional. Lincoln felt that could all be sorted out after the war was over and so could be ignored in the middle of the conflict.

“I'm with President Lincoln on this one,” said the President.

“Contain and maintain,” agreed Kenny O’Donnell.

They reassured themselves that they would still seek the truth in time; their actions now merely meant that the truth could be managed to the benefit of the country, particularly in an election year. The President needed a nonpolitical body quietly investigating in order to assure the public. Either a House or Senate committee (or, God forbid, both) would be a circus of the kind not seen since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Bobby, who had worked for McCarthy and retained some affinity for those memories of the man if not his ideals, knew this better than most.

A congressional investigation into Dallas, complete with massive egos dying to get on TV at any cost, simply could not be allowed to happen. It would open doors during an election season that could escalate into political gridlock and chaos. That situation could be exploited by the conspirators and might trigger a coup. Worse, it could inflame Cold War adversaries in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to miscalculate. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been a terrible near-miss. “The world might not be so lucky a second time,” reminded the President.

Sounds of Silence

By now, the meeting at Hyannis Port was being fueled by a third pot of coffee. “How do we stop them?” O’Donnell asked. “How do we stop the U.S. House and the Senate from doing what they have a legitimate right to do without making them wonder why we’re stopping them?”

“National security,” Bobby Kennedy said at once.

John Kennedy lit a rare cigar and drew on it before speaking: “We can’t use that without scaring people and making them ask even more questions.” The statement hung in the air like cigar smoke, as people read between the lines: Asking questions in an election year was to be avoided at almost any cost.

Pierre Salinger could hold forth with reporters for hours on end but when he was in with the President and his men, he often held back. So it was surprising when he blurted out, “It’s simple. Congress can’t do the job right during an election, and the people will recognize that after we explain it properly.”

It was almost December, argued the Press Secretary. The 1964 election, just eleven months away, would feature a hotly contested presidential race, made even more unpredictable by current events. Therefore, the U.S. Congress could hardly be trusted to investigate the attack in Dallas. They would be reaching conclusions in the midst of highly charged partisan wars that were certain to exist. Impartiality would be impossible.

Kenneth O’Donnell agreed to that line of reasoning. “The administration has a moral obligation to set up an honest nonpartisan investigation. The matter is too important to be left to Congress. We need to form an independent committee.” It was quite an argument, given that Congress was exactly where the Constitution said important matters had to go.

Kennedy exhaled cigar smoke. “In the Navy, we’d call that a gun deck job,” he said, using a term usually reserved for an exercise that was bullshit from top to bottom. “But it’s probably the way to go.”

As a general rule, President Kennedy had little patience for committees and the meetings they liked to have. His back pain made sitting through them excruciating, and usually they had no real purpose and accomplished nothing of value. If you wanted something done, you surely shouldn’t ask a committee to do it. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d been happy to let Bobby run the ExComm and not just because those attending would speak more freely if the President wasn’t in the room.

In his own mind, JFK thought a committee would be no more competent at its work than most of the ones he had served on since going to Congress. It would, however, keep the work private until the election. Then, with a second term, the facts could fall where they may. In retrospect, it was an unusually optimistic position.

Everyone had his own opinion about what needed to happen next, particularly who should head any committee, but all waited for Bobby to go first. This happened often, and it was clear that he was speaking for his brother. “I’ve received some suggestions, but there’s one in particular we may want to explore.” He was asked where that suggestion came from. “It’s better for all of us if we keep the source confidential,” he said, ending that line of questioning.

The suggestion was Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

“We talked this morning. I asked him hypothetically if he would lead such a committee, and he said yes. He said he would be honored, as a matter of fact, if that’s the direction we decide to go.”

So there it was. “That’s not bad,” thought O’Donnell out loud. “But can we trust him not to go wandering off on his own?”

It was a valid question. Earl Warren was a Republican. He’d been the attorney general and the Governor of California, and he’d run for Vice President with Thomas Dewey back in 1948 against Truman. He wanted to run for President on his own in 1952. After being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, Warren had, to many, veered left during his years as chief justice. Now the John Birch Society had him targeted. “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards dotted the landscape, especially throughout the South.

The President weighed in. “He understands that we can’t let a nuclear war start because a few congressmen need to distract voters from their own incompetence.”

Bobby nodded. “Warren will play ball. I’ll put Hoover in charge of the investigation. He’s already made up his mind about Oswald. We’ll just see that they don’t report until after November.”

The meeting broke up a few minutes later. The administration had a plan.

The Warren Omission

On Monday, December 2, 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11130, creating a commission to investigate the assassination of Governor John B. Connally of Texas, the death of Special Agent Clint Hill and the death of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963. The commission was directed to evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding the ambush, including whether or not it was specifically targeted against the President, and to report its findings and conclusions to the President for submission to the U.S. Congress with all due haste. Kennedy explained the mandate of the commission to reporters in the White House Briefing Room:

The subject of the inquiry is a chain of events that saddened and shocked the people of the United States and, indeed, the world. By my order establishing this commission, I hope to avoid parallel investigations and to concentrate fact-finding in a body having the broadest national mandate.

Then the President introduced Chief Justice Earl Warren, who looked like everybody’s kindly grandfather. Joining President Kennedy for the announcement, Warren addressed the assembled press in a dark blue suit instead of his usual judicial robes.

We will conduct a thorough and independent investigation of these tragic events. We will cooperate with the Dallas Police Department in any way we can. Obviously, they have a criminal investigation and trial to conduct. We do not want to interfere with Mr. Oswald’s right to a fair trial. If he is found guilty, we do hope to determine whether his role was of his own device or whether he acted as part of a possible conspiracy.

The chief justice announced the makeup of what was nearly instantly called the Warren Commission: two senators and two representatives, split evenly between the Republicans and Democrats; plus four members from outside the Beltway who were not actively serving in Congress; and of course, Warren himself.

The senators were Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson and none other than Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen. Kennedy and his team had decided that the devil they knew was better than the devil they didn’t. Dirksen wanted the status of being on the committee. But even his ego would not be enough for him to try to take over the spokesman’s position from the chief justice of the Supreme Court. With his own position in history secured, Dirksen was the first to condemn his own idea of a congressional investigation as “duplicative.”

As far as senators went, Warren Magnuson was deeply experienced, well liked and certainly of Dirksen’s stature, if not his prominence. Magnuson, it was also pointed out by a few news reports, had been the beneficiary of a 1961 fundraiser where President Kennedy had come to Seattle and gotten three thousand people to pay $100 each to hear JFK sing the senator’s praises. The two men had history in the club that was the U.S. Senate. The Kennedy team felt he would be loyal if they needed him on a particular issue.

The representatives were Democrat Hale Boggs of Arkansas and Republican Florence Dwyer of New Jersey. Boggs was the Majority Whip in the House and got the job after Majority Leader Carl Albert said he could not run the House and serve on the commission at the same time. Dwyer was one of the very few women in either the House or Senate. The Kennedy team liked her because she had sponsored the Equal Pay Act that had just passed. Looking ahead to the 1964 election, it would be good to have appointed a woman who believed in equal rights and was from the opposing party. When President Kennedy had first met her, Dwyer had said, “A Congresswoman must look like a girl, act like a lady, and think like a man.” For Kennedy, she was the perfect Republican.

Even better, the thinking went, the four “politicians” could be balanced out with four others who could be presented as keeping the Warren Commission impartial. Appointed were former president of the World Bank, John J. McCloy; civil rights leader James Farmer; ailing news legend Edward R. Murrow; and New York City’s young superintendent of schools, Calvin Gross.

These four so-called “wild cards” were carefully calibrated so that none would stand out enough to cause Congress to reject the idea of the Warren Commission in favor of its own committee. McCloy’s reputation was unassailable. Farmer brought along the black community. Murrow had already received congressional approval for his Voice of America work. Gross was a wild card within the wild cards, selected for his can-do attitude on the front lines of education.

“This is one advantage an independent commission has over a congressional investigation,” Kennedy offered. “By the very nature of things, a congressional investigation is bound to be partisan. This commission will be anything but.”

The time estimated for the job was about a year, plus or minus. The public reaction to Oswald’s trial and whether any further arrests would be made were unknown elements in the equation. As for the hot potato that this could become, given next year’s presidential primaries and general election, both the President and the chief justice agreed the report would not be delayed or moved forward based on any political considerations, be they favorable or unfavorable to the administration.

What the Kennedys already knew and the public had yet to fully comprehend, was that the Warren Commission would be receiving testimony, files and theories from the FBI which, at that time, seemed to be leaning strongly toward pinning the matter on Oswald and moving on.

The commission had no funds or authority for independent investigation. It would have to make whatever case it felt needed to be made from other people’s evidence.

Oswald Casts a Shadow

Against the backdrop of this high-stakes gamesmanship, the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald loomed large. Oswald, who at the beginning had talked much more than anyone had expected, had suddenly gone quiet at the insistence of his attorney, William Kunstler. The New Yorker, however, was anything but quiet, arguing his client’s innocence regularly to all takers. The one thing that Kunstler said that grabbed everyone’s attention, however, was the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was going to take the stand in his own defense. Kunstler dropped this bombshell on a crowd of reporters outside the Dallas courts building after a hearing about whether Oswald’s federal troubles might supersede local jurisdiction.

My client is innocent. It is not up to him to prove that, as you all know, and he is under no legal obligation to testify, a right protected by the U.S. Constitution. It is up to the Dallas District Attorney to prove that he is guilty. Lee Oswald, however, will testify, under oath, that the only mistake he made on November 22 was coming to work at the Texas School Book Depository on a day when someone chose to shoot at the President of the United States. Powerful forces have framed him, ladies and gentlemen. He is exactly what he said on the day he was arrested. A patsy.

Day in and day out, Kunstler embellished his reputation as a radical firebrand and showed that he intended to carry out an aggressive defense of Lee Harvey Oswald. Besides proclaiming his client’s innocence, he declared that all of Oswald’s statements before he gained legal representation were obtained under duress and were therefore “inoperative” — the attorney’s word, which was later widely quoted and ridiculed.

When confronted with a statement from Dallas D.A. Henry Wade that a recovered bullet matched the gun that Oswald had bought by mail-order before the shooting, Kunstler was unfazed. “Henry Wade can say whatever he damn well pleases. He’s a state lackey, and they pay him to get convictions. He doesn’t care that he’s prejudicing the jury pool against my client.”

Kunstler would later say in his 1967 book The People Versus Lee Harvey Oswald that he was “preparing the battlefield.” He wanted to be the underdog, citing the fact that he was a New York Jew fighting in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and hoping that some of that would rub off on his client. He continually invoked his theory of a grand right-wing conspiracy that decided the President was too progressive. He railed against conspirators, real and imagined, with a vested interest in nipping change in the bud. By “change,” Kunstler meant peace talks, black civil rights and strengthening organized labor.

The irony, of course, is that the Kennedy men all seemed to agree with William Kunstler about the likelihood of conspiracy, even as they hoped the Warren Commission — which they had empowered as the official investigation — would come to the opposite conclusion. It was, to use a word favored by psychologists, a “cognitive dissonance” that would make living in the White House during 1964 the trickiest year yet.

Christmas Truce

By mid-December 1963 the nation was exhausted. It had been hit with the impact of what felt like a stressful brush-with-death of a family member, combined with the unsettled feeling that won’t go away after being mugged. America was high-strung and stressed-out.

Holiday shopping sales figures were headed for a historic low. Retail organizations implored President and Mrs. Kennedy to consider lighting more public Christmas trees but were rebuffed for security reasons. The First Lady’s social secretary Liz Carpenter explained the feeling in her own memoirs, tying the public’s down mood in part to the loss of the Kennedys’ infant son from respiratory stress disease: “People understood that the President and Mrs. Kennedy needed some time alone. They’d suffered the death of their son that year as well… and then what happened in November. It was just a bit too much for anyone.”

The mood of Christmas 1963 was one of somber and earnest prayer for many people. After the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis hung over the 1962 holiday season, now the ambush in Dallas hung over this one. America’s holidays had been hijacked by a couple of frightening and disturbing near-misses. Many people did without holiday parties and spent time with their families.

No one talked about politics, at least publicly. December had been declared the lull before the storm, but politics, particularly presidential politics, were gone only temporarily. In many homes of America’s political elite, there was a great deal of thinking and strategizing.

This current quiet, sold as respect for the dead, would end soon.

✪

Chapter 3:

An Election With Consequences

_______________

January 1, 1964 - December 31, 1964

A Family Retreat

As a political matter, President Kennedy’s survival had taken an already uncertain electoral map and made it more fluid. Before Dallas, it had been assumed that the election would be close. Nothing had changed the White House perspective, even the bullets of an assassin.

One thing had taken a turn, however. John Kennedy had made separate comments to his brother, Kenneth O’Donnell and Theodore Sorensen that maybe he would surprise them all and “not go through it again.” It was a trial balloon, said without conviction, but still, it bothered them. They understood, however, that being shot at by professional assassins is something that changes a man.

Jacqueline Kennedy had been traumatized by Dallas even more than her husband. She could not accept any more public invitations until further notice, said her new social secretary Liz Carpenter in such a way that it seemed untoward to even think of asking a follow-up question. In reality, the First Lady had practically moved out of the White House by January 1, heading with her children to Wexford, the newly-constructed family home on 39 acres in the Middlesburg, Virginia area, a place where the President himself had only been twice before. After a week there, however, she felt the entire area had been too commonly identified as a Kennedy retreat, and she began a cycle of visiting several locations short-term, moving out almost before she and the family had settled in, trying to keep her whereabouts and those of her children a mystery. To calm her decidedly manic behavior, she had been prescribed sedatives by her husband’s personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell.

And so, it was against this backdrop that Jackie Kennedy told John Kennedy that she was going into virtual hiding and that she expected him to curtail his own public activities as well. He could still do his news conferences and Rose Garden activities with guests if he wanted, but only if Bobby approved of security. Most importantly, she instructed him to stop taking risks outside the gates. No more wading into crowds, no more convertibles, no more windows for assassins. “I started to argue with her,” Kennedy explained in a 1969 interview, “but I thought she was right.”

The First Lady further demanded of the President that there would be no planned travel or public appearances for either of them for the entire month of January. They needed time to assess the situation. The President pointed out that he had spent plenty of time lately assessing the situation. “Not with me,” she countered.

With her husband's agreement secured, Jackie left with Caroline and John Jr. The President instructed his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to make certain there was a daily note on his desk with the family’s current whereabouts. He also wanted to make certain he spoke to his wife and children every day. He instructed her to see to it that it was scheduled.

State of Whose Union?

President Kennedy then turned his attention to the January 8 State of the Union speech he was mandated to give to Congress. It had only a short mention of Dallas in it, a reference to the strength of America being tested again, as the country again proved itself to be stronger than any adversity thrown in its path. He talked about his budget, cutting a full $1 billion in Defense Department spending, owing mostly to Secretary McNamara’s campaign for better procurement practices and a shutdown of unneeded military bases. The total number of Americans working to support the Cold War effort was 990,000, a number that represented cuts to the civilian employment in the Defense Department by seventeen thousand employees, so determined was Kennedy to bring that number below one million. The President also cut the Atomic Energy Commission, limiting production of enriched uranium by twenty-five percent and shutting down four plutonium piles. Kennedy also called for more attention to the nation’s impoverished citizens, swift congressional passage of a civil rights bill, and a tax cut.

It was a businesslike speech, not a great one, certainly not by Kennedy standards. If anything, the rapid criticism delivered by Republican officials did, however, show how fast the country was moving on beyond Dallas. Said House G.O.P. leader Charles Halleck: “I hope that the administration’s newfound enthusiasm for economy is as great in June as it is in January.” House Minority Whip Les Arends called the President’s speech “patently a 1964 political campaign document.”

Life in a Foxhole

With the Union addressed about its state, and Jackie and the children in motion, Jack Kennedy hunkered down in the White House. The entire inner circle began to refer to the Oval Office as “the Foxhole.” The President clearly displayed signs of what we call today post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He had tried to ignore or laugh off his feelings in November and December. Now, as the rest of the nation seemed to be turning a corner, he was turning inward.

A major snowstorm turned into a blizzard for portions of the northeastern United States between January 11-16 of 1964. All of the major cities from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia, New York City and Boston reported about ten inches of snowfall or more.

For those five days in Washington, D.C., it was so difficult to get around that the President could actually cancel nearly all of his meetings and obligations and just get some work done. Plus, he was in a lot of pain, and the cold seemed to aggravate his back. The bad weather did not, however, prevent one of Kennedy’s many lovers, Mary Pinchot Meyer, from stopping by twice, according to the testimony of Evelyn Lincoln, who had made sure the visits were not recorded in the White House log.

Jackie was snowed in up in Massachusetts, chain smoking L&M filtered cigarettes and trying to calm down. It didn’t help that on the first day of the blizzard, Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a report finding that cigarettes can cause cancer and urging all smokers to stop, advice the First Lady ignored.

Health issues were often hidden away from prying eyes in the Kennedy White House. What no one in America knew at the time was how important Dr. Travell had become to the health of the President and First Lady. During the fall of 1961, Travell had been giving the President up to several injections daily of procaine, a local anesthetic similar to Novocain. He was under her personal treatment for an adrenal ailment he lived with since his youth, constant high fevers, cholesterol levels that by today’s standards would be catastrophic, the inability to get a good night’s sleep, and colon, prostate and stomach problems.

The wide variety of pills and shots that Travell was administering to the President of the United States for these issues filled out the “medicine administration record” she kept. Yet it was not a complete accounting, not by far.

Dr. Max Jacobson had entered John Kennedy’s life back during the 1960 campaign. Known informally among patients as “Dr. Feelgood,” he had continued to make house calls to the White House and even shadowed the President on trips to foreign capitals, such as Paris and Vienna. Jacobson’s injections were also being enjoyed by the First Lady.

At Bobby’s request, the President's medications were submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for analysis. The agency reported back that Jacobson’s injections included amphetamines and steroids. The President told his brother, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”

Based on testimony of a nurse who had worked with Jacobson, the injections appear to have also included hormones, vitamins, enzymes and even animal cells. The result was what another client, author Truman Capote, called “instant euphoria,” a condition where one might feel he was flying like Superman, able to go seventy-two hours without sleep. The bottom line was that at least some of the “vigor” that was so embraced as a description of JFK’s activity level was chemically induced.

A future Congress eventually raised concerns about the potential national security consequences of such a concoction. These shots, while alleviating pain, made their recipients experience an exaggerated sense of personal power, something that Kennedy might have experienced often, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis, given that he took them throughout the years he’d been in office. Other side-effects included hypertension, impaired judgment and elevated anxiety. Between doses, mood swings were common. Over a long period, the dosages the President had been using could produce paranoia, schizophrenia, memory loss and even hallucinations.

In the beginning, both Jack and Jackie Kennedy were making use of the physician’s injections at least once a week and sometimes as often as three to four times weekly. Over the years, they had tapered off the regular use of Dr. Jacobson’s injections, at one point quitting altogether. It was too much. They needed to be in control.

But that was before someone had tried to kill him. JFK picked up the phone in the side office and told the operator to get him an outside line. Now he just needed to take the edge off and prepare himself for battle.

To Run or Not to Run?

Feeling energetic thanks to a snowbound Washington, D.C., with a schedule that had been cleared by his wife’s decree, John Kennedy reached out to the usual suspects. He invited the team from Hyannis Port to the Oval Office for lunch. The subject was the 1964 election.

To a man, Robert Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell, Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, Dave Powers and Teddy Kennedy thought the President might be summoning them to tell them he would not be running for reelection. “First of all,” said the President, “I have made no decision yet on whether or not to run. I want to see where we stand politically.”

Before Dallas, when they did discuss the political situation, the Kennedys and their team of advisers believed the Republican nominee would be Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a plainspoken Westerner whom the right wing of his party adored. He had announced his candidacy on January 3, describing the choice ahead between the Democrats and Republicans as a stark one. “As a general rule, one party has emphasized individual liberty and the other has favored the extension of government power,” claimed Goldwater. “I’m convinced that today a majority of the American people believe in the essential emphasis on individual liberty.” Goldwater then famously added the impromptu words that would become his campaign slogan. “And in your heart, you know I’m right.”

What Goldwater could not possibly understand as he uttered those words was how much his likely opponent (and friend) John Kennedy agreed with him on the subject. Wherever Kennedy had been politically at the start of his term in 1961, by early 1964 he wanted to accomplish only one thing before he left office, whether it be a year later in 1965 or, God and voters willing, early 1969. As much as anybody in politics, he wanted to curb the power of government to defy civilian authority.

Goldwater still had to win the nomination from a Republican party that tended to support mainstream conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower over political ideologues like Robert Taft. This meant that New York’s liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller and moderate Governor Bill Scranton out of Pennsylvania had an outside shot at the nomination, too. O’Donnell said he wouldn’t put it past the Republicans to run Dick Nixon again either, although Nixon had lost the California governor’s race in 1962 and declared his retirement from politics.

“It’ll be Goldwater,” stated Bobby, cutting the debate short. “At least we have to plan as if it will be. How do we assess his… electability?”

The consensus was uncertainty. Before shots were fired, it was going to be possible to paint Goldwater as a reckless man who could only drag the nation into trouble. Now, on their watch, the Kennedy administration had dragged the people close to a nuclear war one year and barely avoided a public execution of the President the next. Goldwater might start to look like the conservative choice in more ways than one.

President Kennedy listened to it all and summed up. “We can beat Barry if we can keep things calm and keep the economic numbers solid. If Dallas becomes an issue, I don’t know. I think it could be as close as ’60, with a chance that one of us gets more electoral votes and the other gets more popular votes. The nation is stirred up and restless, and we’re in a street fight.” No one in the room disagreed with his assessment.

The discussion pivoted to what, if anything, needed to get done now, regardless of the President's reelection decision. Bobby said they needed to form a committee to run the campaign.

The President shook his head, bemused. “First, as someone with no use for committees, I formed all of you into a committee up in Hyannis Port, and then we formed Earl’s commission, and now we have reconvened the original committee to form a new committee. Maybe we should adjourn while we’re ahead, gentlemen.”

Bobby continued with the news that he had cleared a name just in case. It would be called the Committee to Re-Elect Kennedy. It was pointed out that the acronym sounded like CREEK, as in something you were up without a paddle.

The meeting adjourned when the President was called into an urgent national security briefing. Panama had just broken diplomatic ties with the United States. John Kennedy, always able to compartmentalize, dispatched the political meeting and was on to the next.

Parallel Tracks

The reality of the United States presidential election was set by the calendar. Primaries and caucuses happened as the established order had set them, and the 1964 election would happen on Tuesday, November 3.

Woven into this tapestry of national politics were the parallel tracks of the investigation of the Dallas ambush.

Even as the Warren Commission began its work, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade moved aggressively to prosecute Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission and the district attorney’s office had been on a collision course, and neither one had blinked.

The nation was following the investigation like a soap opera narrative at odds with itself. On the one hand, there was the powerful, establishment-supported Warren Commission, quietly and soberly gathering its evidence within the reassuring confines of the nation’s capital. This was the cerebral approach.

The visceral side of the equation could be found in Dallas, where the loud trial of the assassin was boisterously in full bloom. Every day brought new attempts at headline- grabbing and new heights of grandstanding to get there. The stakes were life and death here in this rough-hewn Texas city.

One young man in a cowboy hat, driving a pickup truck slowly past the courthouse, said it best: “You screw up in Washington, all you get is spanked. But you mess up in Texas, you’re gonna fry.”

Back Channels

Robert Kennedy used back channels with the Soviet Union’s U.N. ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to craft a compromise during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He trusted the concept and, because he did, he made it work. Now, in 1964, it was about to use him.

It would be too harsh to describe John Kennedy as playing the Hamlet role (“To run or not to run…”) but he had not ended the speculation either. He refused to state that he would be a candidate for president in 1964, and because he wouldn’t, it left open the real possibility that he would take a pass. Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington were all positioning themselves to jump in if Kennedy bowed out.

Refusing to declare too early was a long-held tradition among incumbent Presidents, but this was different. It felt like Kennedy might just walk away, and if he did, who could blame him?

There were powerful men who watched this situation in early 1964 and found it too unsettled for their liking. And so they decided to move the process along through a back channel. They chose Edwin Guthman, press spokesman for the Justice Department and a close friend of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Guthman came to his boss on the morning of January 24. He told Bobby he’d been phoned by a man who refused to give his identity yet clearly came from the intelligence community based on whom he knew and details he knew about multiple operations. The man said that some “concerned patriots” had a message for President Kennedy and Guthman should be their point-of-access.

As Guthman explained the threatening conversation, President Kennedy had a week to announce his intention not to seek reelection. He could blame it on his personal feelings about what happened in Dallas or a desire to spend more time with his family. It made no difference. He just had to get out of the race fast.

“Please, Ed,” Bobby said with fierce irony, “let me know how my brother and I might have the pleasure of communicating with these new friends.”

Guthman informed Bobby no response was needed. The messenger had told him, “My friends and I will know whether he heard our message based on the President's actions, and we will react accordingly, in our best interests, exercising our Constitutional rights as free Americans.”

Kennedy took a moment to process this phrasing, thinking it sounded like the rhetoric of the extreme hard right, the way people like LeMay and his crowd would talk. He asked Guthman a series of questions designed to determine how real this message was. After all, the White House routinely received threats from all manner of cranks and dismissed them as the cost of doing business. Of course, this was before Dallas.

The attorney general immediately went to see the President in person. He laid out the circumstances of Guthman’s message and engaged in spirited speculation about who this messenger might be. When Bobby told him about the demand that he immediately take himself out of the presidential race, his brother’s stare grew hard.

“Nice of them to ask this time,” said President Kennedy.

Interviewed repeatedly about this moment, both under oath and in memoirs, JFK never deviated from his description of the impact it had on him. “I had been feeling better for almost a week at this point, starting to see some daylight,” said Kennedy. “This news from the attorney general, well, I hadn’t felt that way since the shooting happened.”

Till There Was You

By February of 1964, not quite three months after Dallas, the deadline imparted by the conspirators to Guthman had just passed, and the President still had not decided what to do about it. He and Bobby discussed one option, that the threat should be made public, but rejected it because it would inflame the nation’s mood. Besides, it would be difficult to prove, and the White House would look paranoid and shaken — not exactly the image required for the times.

The President told his brother that he would think about it a bit longer. “If I don’t run, there’s no problem,” he explained. “If I do run, then we see what they do before we react. Nobody wins if all hell breaks loose. It’s possible they’re bluffing.”

Before Bobby left, JFK pointed at the New York Times front page. The Big Apple was in a turmoil over the arrival of a British rock-and-roll sensation called the Beatles. They’d be arriving in just days now to play on the Ed Sullivan Show Sunday night. The issue of the moment seemed to be providing security against mobs of screaming girls. To better understand this, the President called in Pamela Turnure and Mimi Alford, two young women with White House jobs, and had Mrs. Lincoln put on a 45 rpm record, a song called “Love Me Do,” that had been sent up by the mailroom at Pierre Salinger’s request. Both men teased the young women about how much they liked the music but admitted it did have a lot of energy.

The Beatles were coming to America whether America was ready for them or not. Predictions were everywhere that Ed Sullivan would attract the highest ratings in his show’s history, even higher than they had been for Elvis Presley’s appearances. There would be more security outside and inside CBS-TV Studio 50 (later renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater) than there currently was at the White House.

“Great,” said the President. “Maybe it would be safe for me to see them.” JFK had taken lately to complaining to his younger brother that he was a virtual prisoner in the White House, with the heavy security and his wife's declared moratorium on public trips. Now, JFK was looking to come out of his shell, even if Jackie and the security teams said he couldn’t. Bobby took this as a sign of progress, though in the brothers' typical way of joking with each other, he wouldn't show it.

“Don’t go to any theaters, Jack,” Bobby deadpanned. “You know what happened to Lincoln.”

And, yet, that is exactly what President John F. Kennedy did on February 9, 1964. He went to the theater.

The Beatles played two sets of their music that seemed the perfect medicine to lift the national depression. Sullivan smiled, girls screamed and, during the second set, Kennedy was escorted backstage, where he watched along with Bobby and Ethel.

The Kennedy brothers had decided to send the conspirators a message, publicly, that they, too, could keep a secret and pull off an operation. Kenny O’Donnell knew someone who knew someone, and discrete calls were made from secure lines. It came so fast and from so far out of left field that absolutely no one saw it coming.

Millions of Americans and nearly everyone under twenty-five, it seems, remembers the night when the President of the United States appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to greet the Beatles after their second set as the greatest jolt of pop cultural intensity they’d ever experienced. Seeing the Beatles was beyond huge to millions and millions of people. Seeing the President smiling was an unbeatable relief. Together, the two images were off the charts. It was, said Sammy Davis Jr. to Newsweek, “magic times magic, man.”

“I wanted to come up to New York to welcome you young men to the United States,” grinned the President as the shocked Fab Four shook his hand on live television. “Now, which one of you is the leader?” Kennedy held out an over-large gold key that had been given him by a stage hand.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney exchanged glances. Neither one wanted to discuss this with the President of the United States. Lennon grinned back. “We don’t have a leader in the Beatles,” he declared.

Kennedy did not miss a beat. “Probably safer that way.” He winked and smiled and that photo of the President laughing with the Beatles as they all stood together seemed to instantly dispel the rumors that he was shaken and brooding in the Oval Office.

Later, after the show, the President posed for a photo on the stage with the Beatles that did not include the gold key. In fact, by this point, both George Harrison and Ringo Starr had already changed out of their trademark Beatle suits. This is the image that everyone remembers. Kennedy smiling broadly, surrounded by four slightly stunned Mop Tops, an arm on the backs of Harrison and his bandmate John Lennon. Heralding how “The Wild 1964 Election Begins,” Top Story ran it as the cover of its February 24 issue, which quickly sold out on the newsstand, went into a second printing, and sold out again.

Whether President Kennedy had just tweaked the treasonous conspirators who wanted him dead, it was clear he couldn’t have picked a better coming-out party. The record shows that the President of the United States did not look afraid at all and seemed to be enjoying himself as much as these four English lads from Liverpool.

The Primary Thing

Campaigning in the Currier and Ives landscape of snow-covered New Hampshire, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater took on an issue that had been bothering him since the President’s State of the Union speech. It was the implication that Dallas was caused by hate and that the hate had been inspired by conservatives. The Arizona senator practically cried out his indignation: “Immediately after the trigger was pulled, a hate attack against conservative Americans was started by the Communists and taken up by the radical columnists and kept going. I never use the word ‘hate,’” he continued. “I think it is the most despicable word in the English language.”

The White House watched the Republican candidates carefully. He was clearly claiming communism was behind the ambush and that, by implication, if Oswald acted alone, it must have been out of his Communist sympathies. In order to move to the right, where the votes in the GOP primaries would be, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller actually managed to accuse his far-right opponent of being soft on communism himself. “My God,” said President Kennedy to an office gathering, “how can we resist this?”

JFK called his 1960 campaign manager, his brother, over the phone. “The issue we’ve been discussing,” he said, and Bobby knew what he meant, “I think we have to just go ahead with it. So I’m working with Ted now.” Working with Ted meant that the President was writing a speech or a statement with Theodore Sorensen, not Teddy Kennedy.

“If you’re in it, then I’m in it with you,” said Bobby. They discussed how he would need to stay out of politics and in the Justice Department and that, this time, Kenny O’Donnell would have to run the campaign by taking on the leadership duties at CREEK.

While his surprise appearance with the Beatles kicked off the election cycle’s charm offensive, it had also drawn its own fair share of criticism. There were complaints that it demeaned the office, that it took unfair advantage over political opponents, and that it showed the President as a person who was not as serious as the times demanded. These comments came largely from Republicans. The party of the Kennedys, the Democrats, said it just proved that the GOP stood for Grand Old Party-poopers and tried to laugh it off.

Still, the White House political team felt that an official announcement had to tack away from the criticism. All three network anchormen (Ron Cochran, ABC; Walter Cronkite, CBS; David Brinkley, NBC) were summoned to the White House for a discussion in the Oval Office. Seeing Kennedy taking their questions in his familiar rocking chair reminded viewers that the President still was on the job, and when he had something to say, the networks wanted to hear it and cover it. Goldwater and Rockefeller could not make that happen.

Under ordinary circumstances the partisan nature of all three networks giving primetime to a sitting president in an election year might have led them to decline the invitation. But this was a President of the United States who had been shot at on live TV, survived, and was back on the job. The American people had a right to see him and hear from him in this way. If a little politics seeped into this news, thought Pierre Salinger who had put the deal together, that couldn’t be helped, could it?

At one point, ABC’s Cochran, knowing his network was in a distant third place, went for the score, actually interrupting President Kennedy during an answer he was giving to CBS’s Cronkite. “Mr. President,” interjected Cochran, “you sound like a man who’s running for reelection. Are you?” While Cronkite glowered at Cochran off-camera, JFK bit his lip, then smiled.

“There are some people,” said the President, “who won’t be happy with what I have to say on that subject...”

The President paused for a full three seconds before speaking again, giving his plotters ample time to assume he had taken their threat seriously and was getting out of the race.

“I’m talking about the people we have working for us over at the Democratic party headquarters here in Washington who say there is a right way and a wrong way to handle these things. The right way I’m pretty sure involves a big, important speech with flags.”

The Kennedy inner circle appreciated this ironic twist. They knew for a fact that the people who would not be happy were the conspirators who had tried to kill this man and then threatened him again to leave office or else.

“But yes, let’s make it official. I intend to stand for reelection this year.”

There it was. Inside the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs of Staff had offices, there were reports of shattered drink glasses and cursing. More than a few CIA operatives narrowed their eyes and wondered how this was going to be handled. And at the Dallas County Courthouse, Lee Harvey Oswald told guard Chester Northridge, “good for him.”

“I’ll campaign hard and on the issues facing our country,” Kennedy said. He listed the pursuit of peace with our enemies abroad, cutting the budget, civil rights and addressing the growing poverty gap between America’s haves and have-nots. He did not mention arresting and trying alleged conspirators in an attempted presidential assassination.

Asked how the events in Dallas would impact the type of campaign he would be able to conduct, he replied, “As you know, Mrs. Kennedy and I have promised each other to avoid public spaces and events until such time as an entire review of security can be conducted. So whether that leads to a less public campaign than we had in 1960 or not will have to be determined later. However, I feel confident that will not be a defining issue. The people know who I am and what I stand for and that I stand with them.”

If the conspirators were watching this performance on their television sets that night, they knew that this man they hated, this man they had tried to kill, had just given them the finger.

Rebalancing the Ticket

On February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay, against all the odds, demolished the giant known as Sonny Liston with a seventh-round TKO and became the new world heavyweight champion. It all took place in Miami, Florida, the hotbed of the anti-Castro fervor that may have been a breeding ground for conspiracy and assassination.

The Kennedy inner circle watched the fight from a safe distance, that being the White House, thanks to a closed-circuit connection. After the first round ended with the clanging of a bell, both fighters continued to punch at each other for nearly seven seconds. Clay would not be the first to go to his corner.

“Cassius Clay is not afraid of that man,” noted Bobby. “If he wins this fight, we should take a lesson.” The lesson Bobby had in mind was that of the schoolyard: Any adversary could be taken down, and the most important action was to show him that you did not fear him. Fear was the advantage people thought Liston had going into the fight, but after the earlier weigh-in and now this first round, it was clear that Clay had taken that away from the champ.

In this analogy, the President had shown the conspirators he did not fear them or their threats. Going on Sullivan and summoning the network news anchors to the Oval Office were symbolic acts of a confident man. The issue of the moment was finding something to do that was actionable policy, something real, to show the traitors the Kennedys meant business.

“Lyndon,” said Bobby, and everyone knew what he meant.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a man held in such low regard at the White House that Kennedy’s team of advisers actually wondered if he might have been involved in approving or supporting the assassination attempt in his home state of Texas. The enmity between RFK and LBJ was particularly personal and harsh. On one level it was political, but on another it went back to 1958, when Johnson had invited the younger Kennedy to his Texas ranch and tried to intimidate him during a hunting trip. He had given RFK a 38-gauge shotgun, capable of blowing a deer in half, without warning him about the kick it would have. Bobby had been knocked off his feet, and the gun stock had opened a wound on his forehead. In response, LBJ gave RFK a hand up and noted that he was going to have to “learn to shoot like a man.”

The Kennedys were forced to let LBJ on the ticket in 1960. The details were tightly held by the brothers and Johnson and to this day are not clear. Historians now believe Johnson’s Georgetown neighbor, J. Edgar Hoover, had provided him damning evidence about JFK’s extramarital affairs, and that Johnson had used the information straight-out, Texas-style to get the number two spot he coveted.

Both John and Robert Kennedy made mental notes to avoid being in such a position again where they could be attacked with the weapon they had given an enemy. It had been impossible to keep that pledge entirely. The mere existence of J. Edgar Hoover in their lives assured that. Now, however, that dynamic would work in their favor. LBJ had given them what they needed to get rid of him.

The black eye of Dallas alone could probably not have toppled LBJ, but the VP’s choice of friends put him on shaky ground indeed.

Johnson’s close associate, Texas financier Billie Sol Estes, had just been tried and convicted of fraud against the U.S. government for a scandal that threatened to engulf the Vice President. The con man had been sentenced to twenty-four years in jail after enduring a corruption trial that followed a congressional investigation into his contacts with the federal government. More than eighty FBI agents had been assigned to look into the business dealings of Estes.

What they’d found so far was fraud against the United States government on the scale of $172 million in today’s dollars. There was also a mysterious suicide that looked like murder, and a trail of generous support for powerful Democrats including, most particularly, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now, with his fate swinging in the wind, Estes was said to be teasing grand jury testimony that would implicate Johnson not only in a direct cash-for-services bribery scandal but also, incredibly, in the murder of the dogged Henry Marshall who had been investigating the Billie Sol Estes case for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency starting in 1960. The next year, Marshall was found dead on his farm, shot five times by his own rifle. Although the death was ruled a suicide, there were many who were skeptical that it took Marshall five self-inflicted shotgun shells to kill himself in his car.

Feeling confident that even Lyndon Johnson would know when he was beat, President Kennedy already had a short list of replacements in mind. There was Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, the man he’d originally wanted on the ticket before LBJ’s power play. There was also Florida Senator George Smathers, a man JFK enjoyed socially and who had the discretion to attend parties with dubious guest lists and say nothing to anyone later. And, if Johnson’s southern roots were considered necessary to prevail in 1964, there was also Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina, who unlike Smathers, would be completely untainted by presidential skirt-chasing.

The only decision of the moment, however, was who would tell LBJ that the clock had run out on his prospects. All agreed it shouldn’t be the President, who must be kept out of the fray. Bobby would enjoy the job the most, seeing LBJ suffer after all the headaches Johnson had caused the Kennedys. But the President said Teddy should do it. “He’s got to get some experience at this someday,” is how he phrased it.

So it became the task of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers to tell Lyndon Johnson face-to-face that he was being dropped from the 1964 Democratic presidential ticket. The new senator from Massachusetts started the job by focusing on his talking points, only to be cut off by Johnson. “Your brother sent you to tell me I’m off the damn ticket,” said LBJ nailing it, “because he wants me to understand I don’t rate the President, I don’t even rate the attorney general. What I rate is some turd-blossom named Junior.”

Johnson stood toe-to-toe with Teddy, his face just an inch from the other man’s, and put an arm on his shoulder so he could not escape. “Now I don’t dislike you, Teddy, I know it’s hard for you, growin’ up with a couple of brothers like you got, but what makes you think that I should even entertain this proposition you’ve come to make?”

Teddy said it wasn’t a negotiation, that the President could certainly decide who his running mate should be. And there were the various financial scandals that made LBJ’s tenure untenable.

Johnson pursed his lip and glared at this “junior” senator. If he surrendered to the Kennedys now, Johnson thought, he faced a dismal future. He would be remembered only as the first Vice President sentenced to the penitentiary for tax fraud, extortion, illegal campaign funding, bribery, influence peddling and, if investigators were working under the thumb of Bobby Kennedy, just possibly his own involvement in a number of murders in his home state.

His heart had leaped when he heard the shots in Dealey Plaza. Had they connected with their target as intended, he would be the President now, and all these charges would have melted away in the interest of continuity and national security. Now, despite his hatred of the vice presidency, his only choice was to hold onto the office and force the Kennedys to see it was in their best interests to save him.

“You can throw all the ten-dollar words you want at me,” said Johnson, “but I’ve done nothing wrong but help my country, and no Senate committee or picture magazine is ever gonna say otherwise. You’ll see.”

Seeing that Johnson was not taking no for an answer and panicking at the large Texan’s physical proximity, Teddy said he would run Johnson’s position past the attorney general. Johnson blocked his escape from the office and handed him a telephone, calling out to his assistant for an outside line. Once Teddy had explained the situation to his brother, Johnson grabbed the phone from him and said, “Mr. Attorney General, whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty?”

Robert Kennedy replied that such a concept applied to the legal system but not to politics. The Democratic party simply could not afford to have LBJ’s situation flare up in the middle of a presidential campaign.

“The Democrat party loves me, Bobby, always has. What you mean to say is that you and your brother need a reason to say to me what you’ve wanted to say since 1960.” As he said this to Robert Kennedy, Johnson winked at the youngest Kennedy brother as if they were now a couple of kids having fun with the neighbor who was hard of hearing. After hearing RFK’s response, LBJ said, “That won’t be a problem. You tell the President how much I look forward to our campaign.”

Hanging up the phone, LBJ turned to Teddy, “It’s all worked out.” What the attorney general had told him was that he had two months to straighten things out and, if LBJ’s financial dealings had reached public scandal proportions, he would be expected to resign. What Johnson said to Teddy, however, was, “You don’t threaten to put the fucking Vice President of the United States behind bars. It’s goddamn disrespectful. This will bite your big brother in the ass if he doesn’t wise up.”

To his enduring credit, Teddy did not run for cover. He stared right back at the Vice President and said, “It is a very serious matter to threaten the President of the United States, particularly given the recent attempt on his life that has yet to be resolved. You wouldn’t be threatening the President now, would you, Mr. Vice President?”

Johnson smiled, knowing the point had been made. “No, I am not,” he said. “I support the President of the United States as any proud American does during this time of trouble for our nation.”

The State of Texas vs. Lee Harvey Oswald

It seemed to many that it had taken forever to get to the business of prosecuting Lee Harvey Oswald. In reality, it had taken only five months, and the miracle was that they could navigate the cacophony of accusations, insinuations and demonstrations with any sanity at all. History now seems clear; things did not go well.

In retrospect, perhaps the first sign that it would be a troubled trial was the resignation of Oswald attorney William Kunstler, who left with an uncommonly terse statement: “I’m making this change in the service of my client.” He was replaced by San Francisco trial attorney F. Lee Bailey. Media wags immediately took to calling the lawyer and his client “the two Lees.”

“Every American deserves a fair trial,” said Bailey when he first announced his presence on the case. “My client is a man accused of a crime that he did not commit, and on that one level, it is just that simple. The men who tried to murder our president are still at large.”

Bailey had distinguished himself in the mid-’50s case of Sam Sheppard (which TV's The Fugitive was based on). With Kunstler’s near-daily diatribes, the American Bar Association had begun a whisper campaign among its members and the press designed to undermine him. The ABA leadership had come to believe that the verdict in the Oswald trial would never be embraced by the people if his defense was seen as showboating and self-serving. Bailey also had a flair and a style, but he was clearly the more buttoned-down type, and his demeanor simply shouted competence.

The question that hung over the trial was always the same: Would Lee Harvey Oswald take the stand in his own defense?

“Next question,” said F. Lee Bailey.

Opening Arguments

The circus-like atmosphere on the streets of Dallas, Texas was unsettling and inappropriate, yet no one seemed able to resist it. It was like the Scopes trial in sheer, high-wattage sensationalism, but it was being televised with an intensity that had only been seen before during the McCarthy hearings of the early ’50s. If the Warren Commission wanted to stay behind closed doors, it was almost as if nature had created its polar opposite force in Texas. Every network featured “live” coverage, and the pre-trial hullaballoo led the evening news on all three networks with amazing regularity.

The trial was set to begin April 20, 1964 but was delayed, based on a prosecution request, to Monday, May 18.

After a two-week jury selection process, the trial began with both prosecutor Henry Wade and defense attorney F. Lee Bailey given an entire day to lay out their opening arguments. While each seemed to have marshaled an incredible assortment of facts, testimony and theories, the basic brief each man brought to their arguments was clear.

- The prosecution intended to prove only that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter in the Texas School Book Depository. Witnesses would place Oswald as the man in that sixth floor “sniper’s nest” who shot at the Kennedy motorcade with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The jury would be presented with evidence that would convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald murdered Connally, Hill and Tippit, and attempted to murder President Kennedy.

- The defense meant to obscure Oswald’s role by raising grave doubts about the lone-actor theory and disputing testimony that placed him at the Texas School Book Depository. Moreover, Oswald was only a puppet, ultimately manipulated by a shadowy, wide-reaching conspiracy to appear guilty when he was, in fact, a victim himself. By the end of the trial, the jury would see so many holes in the lone-gunman theory that they would have honest and reasonable doubt and would have to acquit on all charges.

In the opening days, when the prosecution presented its case, Henry Wade used his down-home Texas demeanor to hammer witnesses over and over in ways that portrayed Oswald’s involvement as just another crime that needs sorting out before the guilty man is sent away. The victims of gunfire were famous, but it did not change the nature of the crime. “Murder is still murder,” said Wade, and he said this mantra seven times in this opening statement so no one could mistake his belief.

The evidence favored Oswald acting alone, argued Wade, but so long as he pulled a trigger in an act of premeditated assassination, he was guilty as charged. Wade believed the conspiracy charges were a big smokescreen and, in any event, could be addressed at a later date in another venue.

Bailey saw the entire trial as a Kafkaesque masquerade of conspiracy, mirrors within mirrors, secrets and lies. And in the center of this madness, said Bailey, was Lee Harvey Oswald, the puppet who was being danced against his will. Kunstler had always used the word “patsy” to describe his client, because it was the word Oswald himself had used. Bailey felt it sounded like a word that Al Capone would favor and so abandoned it.

Oswald was a puppet, Bailey thundered. The people on that Dallas jury, he imagined, would like the chance to cut those strings, and freeing his client was the best possible way for them to express their outrage.

Nowhere to Hide

After just nine days, the prosecution was about to rest. Henry Wade didn’t believe in gilding the lily and, in any case, felt he should not overreach. Wade had presented eyewitnesses to both the shooting in Dealey Plaza and the physical location of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository. He brought in witnesses and evidence that placed Oswald as a supporter of communism who had lived in the Soviet Union and had returned to the United States to agitate against the government’s policy in Cuba. This was a man, said the prosecution, who deeply hated his country and showed his contempt for it by shooting at the President himself.

Wade felt, and most agreed, that he had established a crime, presented evidence that placed Oswald at the crime location, tied him to the gun that had been found, and revealed his anti-American motive.

F. Lee Bailey had not really been able to touch him during this phase, and the case against Oswald seemed to be strong. At the same time, Bailey always said he would win his case during the testimony of the defense witnesses who would raise question upon question about the prosecution’s case. Bailey also teased his ace in the hole to the hundreds of reporters and cameramen gathered outside the Dallas Courthouse. Lee Harvey Oswald had a powerful and confounding tale to tell and, if he should tell it, “the heavens shall fall.” At the same time, he refused to confirm that Oswald would testify, always pointing out that he had every constitutional right to refuse and was keeping his options open until the last moment.

June 3, 1964 was, by the calendar, exactly two days until that moment when the defense would mount its own case.

Lee Harvey Oswald sat quietly in his cell that morning and waited. He was in a special holding cell and was allowed only an hour of exercise with other inmates once a day. The case was literally driving him crazy, and he had come to have a maniacal focus on his getting fresh air and exercise in the jail yard.

What happened next was never made explicitly clear in 1964 and is not any more focused today in 2013. What is known as fact is that at 1:37 p.m., Oswald was found by fellow inmate, Clyde Melville, in a pool of his own blood inside a side entrance off the exercise yard. He was unconscious from a severe beating and barely breathing when orderlies, responding to Melville's frantic shouts, summoned the prison doctor on call.

Dr. Joseph Nowotny was not capable of delivering a level of care that would have guaranteed Oswald’s survival, but he got lucky when Melville revealed he had worked briefly as a hospital attendant in Houston before his arrest. Together, Melville and Dr. Nowotny managed to stabilize the injured Oswald. Soon after, Oswald was taken to Parkland Hospital, the same place where Oswald’s alleged shooting victims had been treated.

The trial was immediately suspended, pending an investigation and a judgment on Oswald’s condition. Judge Harlan Epel locked the jury down in a local hotel while the legal teams debated the issues. Within forty-eight hours, everyone realized the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial, which he did immediately.

The one-two punch of Dealey Plaza and now the Dallas Jail gave Texas a public relations black eye that it took decades to recover from.

In the aftermath, F. Lee Bailey had this to say: “There are no accidents and certainly none in prison. A man this important to the nation’s sense of justice does not get beaten within an inch of his life unless someone wants to send a message. You must ask yourself today who wants to send a message to my client, and what would that message be?”

The internal investigation blamed the attack on inmates angry at Oswald for trying to kill the President. Oswald was not able to voice his response given the swelling in his broken and wired jaw. He did write three words on a doctor’s prescription pad: “Get me Warren.” Oswald had determined there was only one person in America worth talking to more than his lawyer and that was the nation’s top judge, Chief Justice Earl Warren.

A Plea to Leave

The trial was left in chaos by the beating of Lee Oswald. It would not be a fast recovery, the doctors at Parkland advised. The trial was postponed for a month, but the delay was expected to be extended again when the first one ran out. It was just as well. With the mistrial sending all the jurors home, it was clear that the wheels of justice would have to start turning all over again if they were going to turn at all.

While Oswald recovered under police guard at Parkland for the first two weeks before he was shipped back to the Dallas County Jail, F. Lee Bailey was busy. He relayed an urgent message to Earl Warren, saying his client wanted to meet with the chief justice in Texas.

The men who run the Supreme Court are not accustomed to being summoned anywhere by a lowly defense attorney. When the accused, however, is suspected of trying to kill the President of the United States, it pays to listen. Bailey said his client was adamant. He would no longer tell his story in a Texas courtroom. That was off-the-table forever now. But he would tell it to the chief justice, man-to-man.

At the same time, Nicholas Katzenbach, RFK’s top man, had been presenting a case to a federal grand jury convened by the AG’s office that sought to indict Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of Secret Service agent Clint Hill. For while it was true that a law still needed to be passed making it a federal crime to murder the president, there was federal jurisdiction established for the Secret Service.

So Earl Warren traveled to Dallas, Texas to hear from Oswald. The meeting was set up in a secure conference building. Warren insisted that several commission staff attorneys accompany him. Afterward, they all characterized Oswald as practically begging them to charge him under federal statutes and drag him back to Washington, D.C. Only then, said Oswald, would it be possible for him to confide what he truly knew about the Kennedy “hit.” Oswald argued that telling the truth while he was still physically in Dallas would get him killed for sure next time. He wanted to be granted immunity and moved to Washington, D.C.

The chief justice was stunned. “Immunity?” he asked. “Sir, you are on trial for attempting to murder the President of the United States and succeeding at murdering the governor of Texas, a police officer and a Secret Service agent. All of these people have families.”

Oswald stood his ground. “You want to know what’s happening, Mr. Chief Justice sir, and you want to get the responsible people placed in one of these cells instead of some puppet like me, then I have to demand protection.” Even Oswald had changed the P-word from patsy to puppet.

After the hour-long interview of Oswald ended, he was taken back to his prison hospital bed. He was limping with a cane as he left, and his left jaw still looked as if he had a plum inside his cheek.

Eventually, the content of the talk with Oswald leaked. When it did, District Attorney Henry Wade made it clear he had asked Police Chief Jesse Curry to double security over Oswald and said the only way the feds would ever get their hands on Lee Harvey Oswald was after the state of Texas was good and done with him.

In the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Robert Kennedy met with his team of attorneys to discuss what to do next.

Stroke of Midnight

By July, the demand for action was reaching a fever pitch in Washington, D.C. Republicans and Democrats alike had come to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald should be a federal prisoner and that the Texas authorities had demonstrated grave incompetence, going back to November 22, 1963 and certainly culminating with Oswald’s beating.

What the people demanding action did not know at the time was that an elite team of federal marshals was training in Virginia to take control of prisoner Oswald in a raid the following Sunday night. The plan was bold and a little bit reckless. It involved serving a warrant, seizing Oswald, and signaling to a helicopter that would pick him up off the rooftop and whisk him to Love Field, where a waiting plane would fly him to D.C. Once there, he would be charged with a civil rights violation.

With the plan less than forty-eight hours from implementation, guards at the Texas County Jail infirmary found Lee Harvey Oswald had taken an entire bottle of his pain medication, Demerol. His stomach was immediately pumped, but it was too late.

Lee Oswald was dead, as was the jurisdictional dispute about who should get to try him first. He would never testify at a legitimate trial, nor would he survive long enough to make a confession before an execution.

The nation was shocked and seething with anger. What the hell was happening in this country, they wondered. The President isn’t safe in broad daylight, and the most important prisoner in the nation can’t be kept safe in order to stand trial. It was outrageous and, coming so close to the still-vivid Cuban Missile Crisis, it felt like the nation was in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

Then the coroner’s report revealed that Oswald’s body showed signs of fresh bruising on his neck and arms. The document concluded it was likely Oswald did not take these pills without a struggle and, therefore, it was more likely a homicide that had been committed than a suicide.

People did not cry as they did after Dallas. This time they cursed. And it made no difference whatsoever.

Choices and Echoes

After California’s June 2 primary, there was no doubt the 1964 election would be a choice between John Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. President Kennedy had not been challenged within the Democratic party, and Goldwater and his opponents had not made what happened in Dallas an issue at all. They simply did not discuss it.

That would change as the political struggle shifted from intra-party fights to the general election. Given that Kennedy had been the intended victim of a public execution while on the job, both Democrats and Republicans discussed internally whether it would become a hot-button issue in the ’64 showdown. The consensus on both sides was that it might be avoided altogether but it was still important to have a plan if it did break out into the open.

All the Way With LBJ

The Democratic ticket still included Lyndon Johnson. In a flurry of activity, mixing threats, bravado, payoffs and sycophancy, LBJ had managed to stand down both the investigation of the Senate Rules Committee and the articles that had been contemplated by Life magazine.

The Senate investigation disappeared, said LBJ, “like smoke from a barbeque after the steer’s been cooked.” This had less to do with Johnson’s innocence as it did with the second thoughts of a number of senior politicians in Congress whom LBJ promised would “rot in jail with me” if he had to take a fall. It also had to do with having Bobby Baker take the rap on his own, after receiving Johnson’s pledge that he would be taken care of and that it would be worth his while if he did.

The Life magazine article was not so much killed as ignored. By the time it was published, Baker was looking more and more guilty of deceiving not only LBJ but other astute politicians. Johnson made a public mea culpa about how disappointed he was to have been “sold out” by a good friend. He promised to be more careful in the future but implied that any mistakes that were made had occurred because he had focused on his political service at the exclusion of careful business practices. He had “paid more attention to the country than to myself,” he said. He added that if these matters were considered serious, he would expect the Congress to investigate, something he had already taken great pains to assure would never happen.

In the end, John Kennedy had given Lyndon Johnson two months to get his house in order, and it had taken LBJ barely half that time.

Johnson had been dispatched to hit the road on behalf of the Democratic ticket as soon as the clouds over him had cleared. Despite his campaign in 1960 and the fact that he was the nation’s Vice President, no one really knew him, and he provided a welcome distraction for the press.

The strategy was simple. John Kennedy would stay in the White House or travel discreetly, while acting presidential, and Johnson would find the party faithful in all the states that were likely to be in play in November.

Senator Goldwater ultimately picked Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton as his running mate. The moderate Republican had lost to Goldwater on the first ballot but had made it known he would accept the vice presidency. Goldwater needed an inroad into the Northeast, and Scranton would serve that purpose.

Everyone knew that no vice presidential candidate, even an incumbent one, would make a real difference. The nation had to decide if John Kennedy had been up to the job and, even if they had doubts, they had to consider replacing him with the untested Goldwater.

Cursed

On June 19, 1964, just seven months after John Kennedy had been targeted in Dallas, death nearly struck the Kennedy family again, when the youngest surviving brother, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, nearly died in a small plane crash. He was only thirty-two years old and had won his seat just two years earlier (the one vacated by his brother’s election as president).

On the way to a campaign stop, the plane suddenly lost altitude and crashed in an orchard three miles short of the runway. Two people would die in this crash and Kennedy would break three vertebrae and two ribs and suffer a collapsed lung.

Both John and Robert dropped everything to come to his side at the hospital, as they had done earlier when their father had his stroke, and which the family had repeated for Jack the previous November. The idea of the Kennedys rallying around their own touched a national nerve. One media commentator wondered out loud if the Kennedys might somehow be cursed, given that the eldest Kennedy brother, Joe Kennedy Jr. and their sister Kathleen Kennedy had also both been killed in air crashes.

Split Decisions

The general election was conducted against a backdrop of two news stories that told conflicting narratives about who Lee Harvey Oswald was and his involvement in the assassination attempt and related murders.

In the deep background, as always, resided the Warren Commission. It had chosen to present itself as the sober group of professionals going on about the great work of the nation. The commission's meetings were not public, and its members had strictly honored their vow to withhold comment for the duration. Thus, none could grandstand on his or her own behalf. Reporters and commentators speculated that they were doing a “deliberate” job, implying a slow and steady approach to the truth.

The Oswald death, however, was anything but slow and steady. It was fast and loud and accompanied by a small coterie of opinionated men who would shout from street corners and occasional TV shows about conspiracy. His beating was portrayed as a “warning” by guilty men, and his subsequent death was commonly accepted as a murder staged to look like suicide.

A slight majority of the jury, interviewed after the Oswald death, confirmed their belief that Oswald was what he claimed — a puppet. Still, they all believed he was guilty of firing on the presidential limousine in an attempt to murder President Kennedy. Most jurors felt he would have been convicted and fast, had the trial gone forward. Several of the most vocal jurors, however, believed that multiple gunmen were involved, and therefore, they were reluctant to convict on the actual murder charges of Governor Connally, agent Hill or Officer Tippit.

Attempts to study this jury’s statements and make sense of them have been a parlor game of sorts for almost fifty years now. The truth is that they were contradictory and changing. The defense had never presented its case asserting a full-on conspiracy, having been short-circuited by Oswald’s beating and overdose.

Although they never got the chance to see the trial through, members of the Oswald jury told reporters they might have convicted the ex-military drifter if they could have instructed the grand jury to bring charges against other gunmen they were sure must have been involved. Others deny that level of consensus. It seems that the jury might just as easily have ended up deadlocked had they gone all the way.

With the dismissed members of the Texas jury ending up on Sunday talk shows, Chief Justice Earl Warren met privately with President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy to brief them on the commission’s progress. He told them the preponderance of current evidence seemed to lead to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Still, he felt the death of Oswald and the federal intent to seize the prisoner (even though it had not been carried out) indicated the situation had clearly gotten out of hand. The Supreme Court would likely be asked to rule in the future on issues arising from this very battle, pitting the rights of states against those of the federal government. If that should happen, Warren would be unable to take part in one of the Court's most central decisions of his time. He should never have taken the assignment, he fretted, no matter how well intentioned, and now he realized the mistake. The chief justice said, “I must do the right thing, and I am compelled by a love of this country to do it immediately.” Warren resigned his commission, as it were.

The Kennedy brothers shared a brief glance. They both felt strongly that someone had gotten to Warren, but they knew they couldn't address that for fear of introducing the “paranoia” issue into the national conversation. Still, Bobby Kennedy took a hard stance: “Mr. Chief Justice, you know the political world well, and you know that it simply will not do for the nation to have its confidence in your mission undermined by your recusal,” he argued. “You must do no such thing as resign; it is imperative that you see this through.”

John Kennedy nodded his slow agreement. “I have to agree with the attorney general,” he told Warren. “None of us will win if our efforts to assess blame do not have the impartial power of the judiciary behind them. And it may be even worse if you leave before the job is done.”

Warren agreed to reconsider his position, went home to think on it, and sent over the following letter in the morning: “I resign, effective immediately, the chairmanship of this commission. I recommend that the commission staff work with congressional staff to support an appropriate congressional committee, operating under public oversight.”

With those words, Warren threw a bomb into the middle of America’s public square. He had left, and he had taken his commission with him. In the middle of a presidential election, the chief justice of the Supreme Court had told the White House not to investigate its own crime but to let the U.S. Congress do the job.

In a move that struck the White House as clearly choreographed, the moment Warren’s resignation and recommendation were released to the press, Senator Everett Dirksen was standing before the cameras, pledging his patriotic effort to follow Warren's sage advice.

Soon, even though it was a political autumn, both the House and the Senate had taken a seat at the table by creating the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President. It came to be pronounced, "J-Cap," and it would change everything.

Tiebreaker

The political cover that Congress gave itself when it created JCAAP was that it would take several months to fold the work of the Warren Commission into the congressional system, and so it would not begin its own fact-finding and deliberations until after the November election.

The non-congressional members of the Warren Commission (McCloy, Farmer, Murrow and Gross) were thanked for their service and dismissed. They were replaced by a contentiously assembled group of representatives and senators from each party. All were assembled under the election year mandate that the public needed to know there would be no cover-up and that their representatives would follow where the facts led. People in 1964 still trusted Congress, and many thought that, yes, their elected representatives probably ought to earn their paychecks and look into this.

With the Warren Commission leaning toward the lone-gunman theory, and the Dallas jury leaning toward conspiracy, JCAAP immediately became known as the “tiebreaker.” The first two rounds had been split, and now Congress would settle it.

While Congress stipulated, in an effort to appear nonpartisan, that public hearings would not begin in earnest until after the election, being selected for the committee clearly propelled six representatives and six senators toward reelection in November. The committee was composed of all the congressional names from the Warren Commission roster (Dirksen and Magnuson for the Senate; Boggs and Dwyer for the House), plus eight others — four Republicans and four Democrats.

Because the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House, the chairman of the committee became Democratic Senator Magnuson of Washington. It was the biggest political matter ever placed on his desk, and it would overwhelm him. On a ten-year anniversary panel about the JCAAP committee, Magnuson described the experience by saying he “had been driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown. It seemed so straightforward when we started, and it became so impossible so quickly.”

Distant Thunder

The fact that the assassination attempt had become what often seemed like a national obsession did not stop real events from needing presidential attention. The Cold War continually threatened to become hot. Always, there was the forward march of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy commitment to the cause of racial equality.

Also demanding a lot of President Kennedy’s attention was the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs had never given up pitching a beefier response to the Communist menace there. Lately, after Dallas, it seemed that their frustration grew greater and their impatience at the President’s restraint more visible. Kennedy did not believe in land wars in Asia and had said so often. He had been to Vietnam in the early ’50s, heard the advice from the diplomats there, and taken it to heart.

Then, on August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox, an American naval destroyer, got into a shooting incident with three North Vietnamese navy torpedo boats. The Maddox expended more than 280 shells, and four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter-bombers strafed the torpedo boats. Four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, but no Americans.

The upshot, however, was a “rally ’round the flag” effect and a demand for action. John and Robert Kennedy brought together a smallish new ExComm structure and sat all its members down in the Cabinet room. The military leaders all believed that the United States must stand ready to fight.

“Do I need a formal declaration of war to take offensive action?” the President asked his attorney general.

The answer was probably not. Nonetheless, Capitol Hill was alive with a Southeast Asia Resolution that conveyed full congressional authority to the commander-in-chief to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” It looked like it might even pass unanimously but, obviously, the White House would have to ask for permission before it could be granted.

Suddenly, Kennedy found himself with both the U.S. Congress and his Joint Chiefs of Staff pushing him toward deploying combat troops in Vietnam. He had already made up his mind to withdraw more or less completely after his reelection.

During a break, JFK brought Bobby to the outside patio. They had taken to doing all their talking there; it just felt safer. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire affair in the Gulf of Tonkin has been cooked up,” he raged, “and those men will not tell me the truth.” It was a tragic testament to the divide between the civilian and military leadership that the President would question the facts as they were brought to him. Yet he did question them, and deeply.

In the early afternoon, Vice President Lyndon Johnson joined the Executive Committee after cutting short a campaign swing through Illinois, a state that could have gone either way in the last election, and may in fact have been decided by voter fraud in both parties. The Vice President had visited South Vietnam only last year and had come back as a strong supporter of doing what was necessary to hold off the Communists.

“What would happen if I just said, ‘We assume it was an accident, and we also assume it will not be repeated’?” asked Kennedy. He could argue that if either of those assumptions were incorrect, he would act according to that new information. The administration, however, did not need, nor did it want, a statement backing military force. If it needed to act, it would do so, and Congress would then be brought into the picture. The administration did not wish for a blank check.

“Mr. President, the problem with that tactic,” said the Vice President, “is that you can’t keep splittin’ the damn baby, because half a baby’s no good for anybody.” He went on to clarify that he believed his boss had split the baby by giving the go-ahead to the Bay of Pigs invasion but withholding air power, and he had done it again with the Cuban Missile Crisis by putting a blockade around Cuba instead of taking out the Soviet missiles.

In the end, the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as did the Senate by a vote of 88-2. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two dissenters, called President Kennedy before the vote. “You do not need this resolution, Mr. President, and I will not support it.”

“I appreciate that straight talk from you, Senator Morse, and I fully expect you to offer your seasoned advice to me as you judge I need it.” Morse confided to friends that he wondered if the President wasn’t putting him in his place. The next time they met, he reminded himself, he would need to set that right.

President Kennedy told his circle of advisers at a meeting the next day not to be concerned. “Just because they said I can do whatever I want, doesn’t mean I have to do anything at all.”

General Anxiety

Tradition holds that American presidential campaigns get started on Labor Day weekend, and 1964 was no exception. Over the three days of September 5-7, both President Kennedy and Senator Barry Goldwater hit multiple campaign events across the nation. Goldwater looked every bit as suntanned and confident as President John Kennedy, and much more relaxed. Reporters who had little respect for Goldwater judged his persona on the campaign trail, framed through his ever-present, black, horn-rimmed glasses, as being like that of a “square Kennedy.” The Republican had a conservative, plainspoken charisma of his own.

Goldwater and Kennedy created a dynamic that no one had foreseen. Each brought the other’s game up a great deal. Both spoke more extemporaneously than the average politician, and each man seemed to particularly disgust and frighten supporters of the other. Passion, light and dark, surrounded the campaign from the beginning.

Goldwater’s crowds were large, wild and enthusiastic on Labor Day weekend. Kennedy’s would have been the same way, except that the Democratic campaign had severely limited the types of campaign events it would allow the President to attend. The larger the event, the more time and resources were devoted to protecting it. The upshot was that JFK did smaller and safer events. Kennedy seemed like a boxer trying to fight somebody else’s style besides his own. He wanted to jump out into crowds, but he could not.

This allowed Barry Goldwater to wrap himself up in the relaxed, western lifestyle he represented, presenting himself as more of a common man. The President seemed less fluid and friendly without the adoring crowds surrounding him.

The problem was corrected by the middle of September, when the young Minnesota attorney general, Walter Mondale, took over the Committee to Re-Elect Kennedy. Mondale was a rising star in the Democratic party, he’d been elected AG just four years out of law school. He shared Kennedy’s “vigor” in his public image.

As Mondale laid out his vision, the President would, in fact, do fewer events than Goldwater, but the ones he did do would be designed to perfection. There would be crowds and audiences, but they would be like extras in a film production. Commercial camera crews were turned loose on each one of these events. They came back to editing rooms with stunning images of John Kennedy, a man who had nearly been martyred in Dallas, now surrounded by people, touching them, shaking hands, smiling, even kissing babies.

Mondale hired Tony Schwartz of Doyle Dane Bernbach to create the ad campaign for CREEK. The subliminal message of every JFK commercial was that John Kennedy was a good guy who’d just come through a close call, and the nation was lucky to have him around, agreeing to finish the job he had started.

Goldwater’s media buys, in contrast, were sharp and aggressive. He looked like a man who was just mad enough to grab the bull by the horns, stop all the foolishness and get the job done.

JFK’s team portrayed Goldwater as a lunatic who would get America into a nuclear war that would destroy the world. Goldwater’s team portrayed JFK as an entitled rich boy who was in over his head.

It got very, very ugly. There were accusations from both sides in October that each had bugged the other’s campaign headquarters. Goldwater’s campaign went further, accusing the administration of ordering illegal wiretaps of his personal phone conversations. No evidence was ever produced. The White House vigorously denied this charge.

The Goldwater campaign slogan was “In your heart, you know he’s right,” something that was successfully parodied by the Kennedy campaign as, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

Dallas continued to spin its dark magic over the campaign. The Kennedy campaign acted most often to downplay conspiracy, letting the lone-gunman theory take the day, even though the team knew otherwise. The Goldwater campaign, in ironic contrast, felt strongly that Oswald was the likely killer who worked alone but that any suspicion of conspiracy reflected badly on their opponent. Both sides seemed to be in hot disagreement, even though each side was publicly arguing the other side’s private position. The issue transcended politics and became an existential touchstone for the tortured logic of the time.

No one seriously thought Barry Goldwater could win the general election, and that included most Republicans. Yet there was something unsettled in America that said anything could happen. A Gallup poll released after the Republican convention suggested Goldwater was within five points of Kennedy. You might say that Kennedy would likely win unless something happened. Then you remembered that something did always seem to happen with President Kennedy. Games change.

On a campaign stop, Barry Goldwater sighted through a replica scope of the Mannlicher-Carcano-style rifle reportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald and quipped, “I don’t care if he was a Marine sharpshooter. Nobody could get three shots off in that time, let alone four or five.” Goldwater further implied that Kennedy himself may have had something to do with creating the conditions of his assassination attempt. “I make no specific charge,” he said. “I simply question whether President Kennedy has leveled completely with the American people about what he really knows about the events in Dallas.”

Goldwater’s comments seemed like more of the same from a man prone to gaffes. Yet there was a large constituency out there for the Arizonan who felt he was only getting in trouble because he spoke the truth too plainly. The White House knew that no matter how extreme he might sound, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss the threat he posed.

The Arguments

The fall campaign had gotten so nasty and just plain angry, particularly on the Goldwater side, that the two presidential debates of 1964 became known as “the Arguments.”

The Kennedy and Goldwater teams agreed to only two debates, or as JFK said, “two more than are absolutely necessary.” One would be on domestic policy and the other on foreign policy issues. The Kennedy campaign team considered not debating Goldwater, but given the President had debated Nixon four years ago, they felt they would have to match that commitment or be seen as being afraid of a fair fight.

In the first domestic policy debate, Goldwater aides had prepped him to “soften his image” a bit, to appear more calm and presidential. He had been branded as an extremist by his opponents within his own party in the primaries and had seemed to embrace the characterization, famously saying that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” in his acceptance speech.

The debate started with Goldwater trying to portray his opponent as out of touch in contrast to his own common touch. “This President cares that a sailboat named Constellation won the America’s Cup this year, but I don’t, and neither do you people at home,” Goldwater told the audience. Kennedy smiled, “Constellation won? I did not know that.” Kennedy had not lost his ability at political jujitsu.

In the end, the first debate was genial enough. Both Kennedy and Goldwater had served in the Senate together and were on friendly terms. The media declared the debate a tie, then declared that ties go to the incumbent. The narrative being developed was that Goldwater was going to lose on points if he didn’t go for a knockout the next time he and Kennedy got in the ring.

The good news for Goldwater in all this was that the 1964 Summer Olympics were being beamed by satellite around the world for the first time ever, and ratings for the debate were depressed. The second debate, however, was scheduled for October 25, the day after the Olympics sent all the athletes home.

Prior to that second debate, polls showed Goldwater losing by double digits (49-38, Gallup). His campaign advisers knew that they had to shake things up or they could lose in a landslide. Goldwater friend and campaign adviser George Shadegg could not restrain himself, leaping to his feet. “Forget being presidential, for God’s sake, Barry,” he implored. “Take the battle to Kennedy, hit him hard, knock him down, and if he gets up, knock him down again.” They egged the senator on: Be who you are, a warrior for truth. This way, the reasoning went, even if they lost on November 3, they could feel good about showing the electorate what was really at stake with this “big government at home and appeasement abroad” operation that Kennedy was running.

Democrats knew this change of tactics was in the wind. Goldwater aides claimed they had knowledge only because CREEK had seen fit to bug Republican headquarters, a complaint they never grew tired of making. That belief would turn out to be just one of more than a dozen extreme disagreements in the second debate’s ninety minutes of back-and-forth.

Within minutes, Goldwater’s aggressive behavior had triggered a lot of that pent-up stress that Kennedy had suppressed over the past year. Ordinarily, he might have held that in check and delivered one of his measured and good-natured performances. But an hour before the debate, Kennedy had received an injection from Dr. Max Jacobson that contained a strong shot of amphetamine. The President of the United States was buzzing when he took the stage that night.

So, for different reasons and with different strategies, Goldwater, by design, and Kennedy, by circumstance, punched hard the entire time. To this day, it is the feistiest presidential debate on record and feels like the political equivalent of an Ali-Frazier championship fight.

Goldwater immediately tried to put Kennedy on the defensive over the Atomic Test Ban Treaty, mocking the agreement as something “you and your Harvard friends think will bring peace and happiness to the world.”

“No, senator,” said Kennedy, cutting him off. “We will still probably have our share of locals wars and unhappiness on this Earth, but at least we will all be alive to have that experience.”

Goldwater attacked Kennedy for having supported selling wheat to the Soviet Union in 1963 or as he put it, “buying dinner for your friend Nikita.” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had only recently survived an attempt to remove him from power by Supreme Soviet head Leonid Brezhnev, who was now under arrest in Moscow. The two leaders who had nearly come to war two years earlier, Kennedy and Khrushchev, now found themselves sharing a common brush with conspiracies designed to remove them from office. In private correspondence in 1963, each man had stated to the other their belief that they had been targeted by domestic political enemies angered over actions and statements they had made together in the pursuit of world peace.

In the debate with Goldwater, Kennedy did not acknowledge his communications with Khrushchev but did call the Soviet leader an “adversary America can and should do business with” to advance the cause of peace between the Cold War rivals. This immediately was seized upon by Goldwater, who claimed the statement represented Kennedy’s problem in a nutshell. “There is no doing business with Communists, Mr. President,” he said. “All you can do is prepare to defend yourself.”

During the 1960 debates, Kennedy had successfully boxed in his opponent Richard Nixon by talking tough about Cuba and implying Nixon was weak on the issue, knowing full well that Nixon could not talk about classified activities that might prove otherwise. Now it was JFK’s turn to be boxed in. He could not reveal the private exchange he’d had with Khrushchev only the day before, when the Soviet premier confided that the only reason he’d fought to keep his office was his strong desire to work with Kennedy to end the Cold War.

The debate over China’s October 16 detonation of an atomic bomb drew a similar back-and-forth. As far as nuclear policy went, Goldwater argued against the increasing dependence on intercontinental missiles instead of SAC (Strategic Air Command) bombers. “I don’t feel safe at all about our missiles,” he answered moderator John Chancellor of NBC. “I wish President Kennedy would tell the American people how undependable the missiles in our silos actually are.”

The President declined, stating that the matter was classified. “I am, however, glad to hear Senator Goldwater agrees with our goal to reduce global tensions by reducing the world’s nuclear stockpiles.” Goldwater shot back his outrage that his words could be twisted so terribly.

Goldwater had backed the populist nature of following the Oswald jury’s conspiratorial leanings because they hinted at dark secrets in the Kennedy White House, secrets that could be used to destabilize a reasonably popular incumbent. The photo of the Republican presidential candidate sighting through the same style of rifle that had been aimed at the President made the Kennedy men see red.

During the debate, President Kennedy finally got his chance to respond, and he came out swinging in outrage. “For Senator Goldwater to come before the American people and say in so many words that somehow the President of the United States is the responsible party for an attempt on his life and the lives of others is reckless behavior in the extreme.”

Kennedy looked straight at Barry Goldwater. They’d been friendly in earlier times but not now. “Senator, if you believe that, then you need to say it to my face, and let the people you would ask to lead, hear you say it and judge your own character for themselves.”

It was political dynamite, the most shocking moment in televised presidential debate history. This was not much of an accomplishment in 1964, given that the only other televised debates had been the ones between Kennedy and Richard Nixon just four years earlier. But nearly fifty years later, it is still the moment played in the highlight reels before every presidential debate. It was a moment that transcended politics and felt more like the beginning of a brawl.

Instead of backing down and saying he had been misinterpreted, as presidential candidates would likely do today, Goldwater fixed Kennedy with his own steely gaze. “I will say it, Mr. President, and to your face. I believe that the way you ran your White House caught up with you in Dallas. Oh, I don’t know the specifics, and maybe we never will, but we do know your record of reckless appeasement of the Soviets. That kind of weakness incites a response from your enemies. It’s not pleasant to hear, sir, I know that, but someone must say it.”

Rather than further escalate the fireworks, the President smiled cryptically to himself. Audiences perhaps got a glimpse of what was on his mind moments later, when NBC’s Chancellor said it was time for the candidates to deliver their closing statements. Kennedy looked straight at Barry Goldwater and began:

Barry, we’ve been friends for years, and I’ve seen you express true outrage. But tonight it just seems that you have come to pick a fight. Now my opportunities for retaliation and justice are few. I could refuse to shake your hand at the end of our debate here, or maybe, and this is purely hypothetical, but if I were angry enough, as angry as you seem to be, I could stride over to your podium and take a punch at you. But that’s it — my fist, your face, as it might be. But what if nuclear weapons were involved? What if you’re feeling like you were tonight, like you wanted to pick a fight, and you succeed, and the other guy feels like punching back. And he has nuclear bombs a thousand times more destructive than Hiroshima. What then?

At that point, President Kennedy turned from Goldwater to the camera, and directly asked, “What then?”

Many believe that the chance Barry Goldwater had to be President of the United States evaporated into thin air at that moment on the University of Wisconsin stage. A clear majority of undecided voters decided that the Republicans had nominated someone who was politically suicidal and potentially insane. The election was over, even though it had twelve days yet to go.

The headline had been set, as had the tone of the rest of the campaign. The New York Times titled its article, “Desperate Goldwater Blames JFK for Dallas.” Top Story headlined its own coverage, “Goldwater KOs Himself.”

The polling data that the GOP establishment started getting was dismal. The country, still unsettled, had nonetheless collectively decided that Kennedy deserved a second term, particularly given Goldwater as his opponent. In the final ten days of the campaign, a veritable GOP all-star team of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Everett Dirksen all hit the road, not for Barry Goldwater, whom they felt was a lost cause, but for Republican candidates in the House and the Senate. They urged Kennedy-leaning voters to avoid giving the incumbent President a “liberal blank check” by handing him congressional super-majorities. Top Story called it, “The Drive to Bury Barry,” and it stuck.

Then, with only two days to go until the election, Vietnam came alive again as an issue when Viet Cong guerrillas hit a U.S. air base at Bien Hoa, killing four Americans and wounding a dozen more. Five planes were destroyed and many others were heavily damaged. All of this happened just ten miles northeast of Saigon.

Goldwater called for immediate retaliation, saying, “Let’s take the planes they didn’t get and anything else we need and go after them.”

Kennedy, knowing he only had to straddle the fence a matter of hours, used it to play into the prevailing theme of his campaign that Goldwater was a hothead who would drag the country into danger. “This is a very serious matter,” said Kennedy somberly, “and those who have done this should expect our response soon. What I won’t do is treat real-time foreign policy as a political game and, frankly, my opponent shouldn’t either.”

Now What?

The election that year was an odd one. Pundits had openly speculated about what might have happened had John Kennedy died in Dallas. LBJ would have become President Johnson. He could probably have passed a civil rights bill based on Kennedy’s martyrdom, a bill that was still stalled in Congress in the real world. Johnson might have crushed Goldwater under the right conditions.

By surviving, John Kennedy remained fair game. He got the tough race he always expected, albeit made so much more unpredictable by the events in Texas.

What happened on the electoral map surprised everyone. Kennedy had benefitted by the rejection of Barry Goldwater in the final days of the campaign as a serious candidate. In the end, the more than seventy million popular votes were split 53 percent to 44 percent in Kennedy’s favor, with 3 percent going to other candidates. Voters gave the South solidly to Goldwater, who had only sporadic success elsewhere. LBJ managed to lose his home state of Texas, but the Democrats picked up California, a state they had lost to Nixon in 1960. It was an Electoral College rout, 366-172.

At the same time, though, the country was disturbed and wanted to throw some bums out. Tickets were split so badly that Kennedy’s success was marked by his party’s overall loss, leaving Democrats with a Republican-controlled House and a paper-thin majority in the Senate.

The Kennedy families came together for Thanksgiving once again in 1964. Given the horrible dark cloud that had hung over the last year’s gathering, this one seemed to be about rebirth. Edward Kennedy had just been reelected senator from Massachusetts, despite being confined to a hospital bed while recovering from his near-fatal plane crash. Against his doctors’ wishes, he was transported by ambulance and allowed to recuperate in the Hyannis Port compound in a special hospital bed that had been moved there for him. On Thanksgiving Day, John Kennedy helped his youngest brother put on a back brace and walk to the dinner table, where they posed for a picture together. They shared a special bond with their back injuries and the fact they had each cheated death in the last year. Until this day, it had always been Jack and Bobby. For the first time, friends and family members saw them as Jack and Teddy, their own duo with its own potential.

John Kennedy was alive and had just retained the presidency. His family was unified. They could begin to pick up the pieces and move forward again, after a year of difficulties.

During the holidays, President Kennedy spent a great deal of time reading and consulting over the two big events of the next month — the State of the Union, followed by his second presidential inauguration. Pierre Salinger told the New York Times that the President had read Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. While that may have been true, it was later learned he had also re-read one of his favorite books, Melbourne by David Cecil. This biography of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s prime minister and political adviser, includes many anecdotes of the young aristocracy in England, which held honor above all else but often spent weekends at country estates, where parties and extramarital sexual relations were the order of the day (and night). When it was time to get back to business, however, no one talked about these events, and divorce was considered disgrace.

Clearly by his choice of reading material, John Kennedy was considering both his public and his private life during these weeks.

Kenny O’Donnell, wearing the hat of political strategist, argued during the entire month of December that the January 3 State of the Union and the January 20 inauguration speech had to be considered a double shot to address the American people and the world about where America stood. The opportunity could not be wasted.

The New Frontier had taken the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, featured man’s inhumanity to man in the deep South, and shattered the domestic tranquility on the streets of Dallas, Texas. The one area of agreement for everyone in the administration was that this second chance could not be wasted.

✪

Chapter 4:

Proxy Wars

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January 1, 1965 - August 23, 1965

Second Chances

Nineteen sixty-five was shaping up to be an ugly, tumultuous year. More than thirteen months had passed since the dismal winter of 1964, and the reality about what happened in Dallas, and why had yet to be made clear. If anything, the truth seemed to be slipping away. The nation’s shock had slowly turned to anger.

Indeed, two separate investigations had foundered during this recent past: the Oswald trial, because of the suspect’s death; and the Warren Commission, because of the Oswald trial. The reasons and excuses were what they were, but the public was unhappy with the lack of results. A majority of people felt that the truth about Oswald had been covered up and that the Warren Commission was a sham.

Politically, voters had shown their discontent in the November election by splitting tickets in absolutely unprecedented numbers and sending divided government to Washington. The appeal made by the GOP establishment to focus voters on Congress and not the presidential race had worked. When the smoke cleared, the Democrats lost six Senate seats and a whopping thirty-eight House seats. Although this left the President’s party still in control of the Senate by a reduced but comfortable 59-41 margin, the Republicans had taken control of the much larger House by the slimmest possible margin, 218-217.

That single seat set the stage for an epic struggle to control Congress and, by extension, to decide the fate of the newly reelected President and his agenda. As an example, Democratic Congressman Albert Watson of South Carolina’s Second District supported Barry Goldwater. Ordinarily the Democrats would have thrown him out of the party, forcing a vacancy that would have called for a special election. Now they needed him, no matter what his politics were. There were many senators and representatives like Watson, all from the southern states, who were now questioning their allegiance to the Democratic party. They could not be trusted to vote with their party on individual issues, particularly those concerning social justice. With a virtually tied House of Representatives, they would have to be dealt with.

For now, though, the Republicans had the House, and that meant they had the Speaker. The position went to Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, a man known to his colleagues as a congressman’s congressman. It was the accomplishment of Ford’s personal agenda to be the Speaker of the House, a position he had dreamed of since the 1950s, when he declined offers to run for both the Senate and the Michigan governorship. He had become Minority Leader in 1964 in a closely contested race, replacing Indiana’s Charles Halleck. The fact that Ford had also served on the now-imploded Warren Commission made Democrats nervous.

Ford’s stated position was that by splitting tickets in 1964, voters had shown John Kennedy their sympathy for what happened at Dallas but were reminding him not to interpret his victory as a mandate for a liberal agenda. This would be much easier to enforce now that Republicans, by virtue of their paper-thin majority in the House, got to chair all the committees. The new numbers meant nothing was going to be easy for the Democrats going forward.

John Kennedy’s “luck of the Irish” in surviving both the assassination attempt in Dallas and a spirited GOP reelection challenge also had the White House in a more combative mood. With those boxes checked off, JFK’s inner circle now felt the time had come to strike back somehow and hold accountable those who had been a part of this crime. They had to seize the momentum. Whatever people thought about the lone-nut-versus-conspiracy debate, John Fitzgerald Kennedy still needed to make it clear that he was in charge.

A more activist approach brought with it grave danger: the exposure of the President’s extramarital private life and drug use; the real depth of dissatisfaction the nation’s military and intelligence agencies felt toward him; and the possibility that the conspirators would try again, with force, and this time succeed. Still, the Kennedy White House knew that the election, then the State of the Union address, and even the second inauguration could not forestall the inevitable.

The one-two punch of the two looming speeches needed to launch a new theme. It was time to turn a page in the history of the 1960s, and if any man had the rhetorical skills and personal charisma to do that, it was John Kennedy.

Night Vision

In his January 3, 1965 State of the Union address delivered to both houses of the Eighty-Ninth Congress, President Kennedy looked out across the faces in the room and joked that it was good to see so many old friends and be given the opportunity by the nation’s voters to make so many new ones. It was one of the few lines that got a positive reaction from both sides of the aisle. Any applause line the President offered was guaranteed to be accompanied by TV images showing half of the new Congress sitting on their hands.

Three weeks earlier, while planning for the address, John Kennedy had, in a moment of keen political clarity, realized exactly that TV dynamic and planned accordingly.

He knew that Americans would see those sour images and be disgusted. He would use television and speak past the congressmen and senators, engaging the camera as directly as possible, and speak to the people at home who had just reelected him. And he would direct their attention to the humorless Republicans who sat motionless, without response.

The Kennedy White House added a dramatic touch, to justify a feeling of greater importance and potential for bipartisanship. They borrowed from the great Franklin D. Roosevelt and scheduled the speech for delivery at night, the first time this had been done since FDR’s State of the Union message in 1936. By doing so, Kennedy thus assured himself a nationwide television audience of more than thirty-one million of his fellow citizens.

The rhetoric of the election was toned down and, in its place, was a President Kennedy simply acknowledging Dallas and its aftermath, lamenting the “political stagnation” of the previous year. His word choice and his demeanor addressed his comments to the viewer at home.

We are weary of this crime and wonder why more than a year later this Congress is just now beginning its own investigation, the so-called Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President. This committee will have the cooperation of the President’s office, but it should do its work expeditiously. Those of you without jobs, farmers who need help, auto workers in Detroit, and the others, you all want answers and an end. And you want Congress to turn its attention to the great issues that still challenge our society. Congress will be tested this year and it must not fail.

With that, JFK did his best to put Congress in a box, knowing that in most minds, their new committee should have been up and operating a full year ago. New staff members had been sifting through the voluminous amount of material that had been collected by the Warren Commission. Most of it was gathered and distributed to committee members on the very day that the President was making his address.

In order to give Congress reasons not to turn all of its attention to Dallas, the State of the Union needed to put serious policy matters before the legislative branch and challenge them to show the same enthusiasm for bill-passing as crime investigation. With that in mind, President Kennedy unveiled a laundry list of activity.

The national budget was now close to $100 billion and could not be increased without a fight. So frugality in government had to be stressed over bold, new programs. Kennedy called for the full development of all national resources, human and natural — but not for more spending — to improve the quality of life in the U.S.

The President also asked for fresh congressional action on several bills that got by the Senate but failed to pass the House in 1964: Medicare under Social Security, aid to Appalachia, and liberalization of the immigration laws. As a stimulus to the economy and a follow-up to last year’s $11.6 billion tax cut, he asked for heavy cuts in excise taxes. He also promoted a bigger war on waste, a new regional redevelopment program, and more money for housing and urban renewal.

The President prodded legislators to pony up money for the sea water desalinization projects he had proposed in his first State of the Union. Kennedy managed to sound like the first green president when he declared that the phrase, “America, the beautiful” is itself in danger. “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air we breathe, are threatened with pollution,” argued President Kennedy. “Our parks are overcrowded, and our seashore overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.”

He said he did not regard the administration’s agenda for a second term as pushing for “a final objective, finished work,” but rather as a “challenge constantly renewed.”

JCAAP met formally for the first time, just three days after the State of the Union. That first call-to-order was pro forma and businesslike, actually avoiding the sense of partisan fighting that most people were expecting. Instead, the committee focused on which witnesses to call back and whether to do so publicly. It also decided which witnesses to add to the lists that had been forwarded.

Everyone, from the President to the committee members to the conspirators themselves, knew this was the calm before the storm.

Moving On

John Fitzgerald Kennedy took his second oath of office on January 20, 1965 when it was administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the man who had run from the commission named after him and hung the President of the United States out to dry. An estimated 1.2 million people attended this inauguration, a record for any such event held at the National Mall until the Obama inauguration of 2009. It was also the last time an inauguration was covered by newsreels.

All in all, it took little more than an hour to transact the business of the occasion — to swear John Kennedy in again for a second full term as the thirty-fifth U.S. President and Lyndon Johnson once more as the thirty-seventh Vice President. While the pundits did not consider it as dramatic as the 1961 inauguration, in which the torch was passed from the World War II generation’s Eisenhower to a new generation led by Kennedy, it had its own sense of history. Covering it for CBS, Walter Cronkite noted that “no one who is watching can help thinking how close the nation came to having another man standing there with his hand on the Bible.” As he delivered that line, the camera lingered on Vice President Lyndon Johnson who seemed downcast and somber.

The problem that President Kennedy faced for his second inaugural address was that his first one had been declared certainly one of the best ever and possibly in the top position. He was in competition with himself. Knowing this, Kennedy had tried to be smarter. In 1961, he had stayed out until 4 a.m. partying with friends and even, rumor had it, sleeping with a woman who wasn't his wife. In 1965, he was in bed by 9 p.m. the night before, and with Jacqueline Kennedy. We now know she had told him that if he wasn’t home with her by midnight that she would come down with a serious bout of the flu and miss his speech.

Kennedy had also gone through five full drafts of his comments with Theodore Sorensen, including one done on the morning of the Inauguration. Kennedy woke his speechwriter up at 6 a.m., telling him on the phone that the version they had written had too much “treacle” in it and summoning him to the Oval Office. Together they ended up cutting it down to less than three-fourths of its original length, leaving out an entire section that dealt with the need to refocus energy on the economy, something they both agreed had been amply covered just two weeks earlier. Instead they substituted:

The United States seeks no dominion over our fellow man, but only man’s dominion over tyranny and misery. Let us now transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose, to achieve progress without strife, change without hatred; not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations.

Kennedy said the New Frontier, still the destination of his administration, was “not a set of promises, but a set of challenges.” It would only be built, he said, by the combined efforts of government and the public and not by a series of laws and edicts. The journey had to be personal for everyone.

During the policy debates leading up to the speech, Sorensen had noted that even before Dallas, Vice President Johnson had been promoting the idea that the second term should be about "the Great Society.” He wondered if, just possibly, it might be the one good idea LBJ had given them during his tenure and that they might want to borrow it. Kennedy thought the phrase smacked of press-agentry, and a particularly grandiose kind at that. “Spare me from another Johnson Treatment” is how he put it, sticking in the final knife.

While the New Frontier had no room at all for a Great Society, as it turns out, it could be a place where people could get a second chance. Kennedy tackled the shadow of assassination by rhetorically sailing past it.

It is time to move beyond the blame and guilt of the past events in Dallas and begin again to address the issues of war and peace, the human rights of men and women of all nations, and the pursuit of justice. Let our work begin anew. Let Americans and the world enjoy the redemption that only a second chance can offer.

John F. Kennedy’s “Second Chance” speech was meant to get the country moving again. He used the metaphorical power of the phrase over and over as he ran through his administration’s record from the success of the early space launches, but also defending and deflecting the record on the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights protests, the Berlin Wall, and Vietnam.

President Kennedy then transitioned to the biggest headline of his speech. If the first term had a too-close brush with war, then the second term would be about the search for peace. Echoing many of the themes from his 1963 American University speech and 1963 United Nations address, he cast 1964 as a dramatic pause that must now end. He had accepted an offer from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to visit Moscow and would do so before the year was out. Together, they would discuss ways to reduce international tensions and seek new ways to work together.

After the speech, the Kennedys and the Johnsons enjoyed what looked like a long, glittering toast offered up by the capital and the nation, even though at this time, JFK and LBJ were barely speaking to each other. First came the parade where they stood beaming in a glassed-in and bulletproof box outside the White House and saluted the paraders marching past. Then came a visit back to the Oval Office for Kennedy to do a little business and change into evening clothes, while the Vice President went to a local club for a few scotches with friends.

The long evening came with five inaugural balls where the President and First Lady danced late into the night. “My husband rarely dances with me but when he does, there is no one finer,” explained Jackie Kennedy, adding a comment that made a few observers wonder if she was discussing the ballroom or the bedroom. “Of course, all the ladies seem to want to dance with the President.”

The smiles and toasts were observed by heavily armed men who were part of security measures that were nearly double what had been in place four years earlier. At one point, Kenneth O’Donnell pointed this out to Dave Powers over a martini and asked, “If Oswald acted alone, and he’s dead, then why are so many of these guys still on the job?”

These two men, who had personally felt the hot fire of bullets coming from behind the grassy knoll along with that from the now-infamous sixth floor of the School Book Depository, knew the answer. The men who had planned Dallas were still at large.

Shadow Voices

It has always been a truth of politics that what is publicly discussed is never the whole story. With the President now on the job for his second term, the man-on-the-street probably saw things as going back to normal. Kennedy was back at work, the new Congress was digging in, Russians were still threatening to bury us, blacks were planning new demonstrations, and kids were back to listening to incomprehensible music their parents could never fully understand.

Many were even hopeful that the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President might finally straighten out the entire mess that Texas had become and get to the bottom of who did what. Under the surface, however, Republicans were looking to use the committee as a blunt instrument to break into the White House and do political damage. Democrats sought to keep things under control. What was clear to everyone on Capitol Hill, however, was that it was going to be as contentious as the McCarthy hearings or even the rackets hearings, and maybe even more so.

Congress was hardly the only group simmering with the potential to shatter this fragile return to normalcy.

Whispers in the Dark

The heavy scrutiny for the past year had made the kind of communications that hatched the conspiracy in the first place even more difficult. Even so, chance meetings and hushed utterances began happening with a greater frequency after the election.

From the point of view of the conspirators, the situation was dire. Kennedy had been targeted because he was seen as taking America off a cliff. They had lain low for nearly a year after the failure in Dallas, covering their tracks, destroying evidence, even seeing that a few key witnesses met untimely ends. Even in their retreat, though, they had kept their objective in mind. Kennedy had been given a chance for a graceful exit and had refused it.

Seeing him campaigning for reelection was hard enough. When he began his new term in 1965 by naively reaching out again to the Soviet Communists, it was simply too much to bear. All bets were off now, the conspirators told themselves (as if hiring gunmen had been only a half-measure). Still, they were ever mindful that the direct tactic of assassination had failed and could not be tried again. In quiet moments inside shadowed offices, the conversation continued. Something had to be done and soon.

Two new books were being read by a lot of Americans, both punching holes in the lone-gunman theory. The first was F. Lee Bailey’s The Puppeteers, a work that seemed to be more about the San Francisco attorney than his client or even the men he claimed had conspired to use that client for the nefarious purpose of killing the President. None of this prevented the book from shooting to the top of the New York Times best sellers list the week it was released.

More threatening to the actual conspirators, however, was Rush to Judgement, a book that unabashedly presented strong evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone and, possibly, hadn’t even fired a shot at the motorcade. Authored by New York lawyer Mark Lane, it methodically assembled the case that the fingerprints of the intelligence community could be seen everywhere, from the moment those shots were fired in Dealey Plaza.

These powerful men (and, yes, they were all men) knew that the national discussion could not be allowed to focus on taking revenge against the people who had tried to kill their beloved President. Goldwater had floated the idea that Kennedy had brought the whole thing down on himself, but the charge had never gained traction. JFK seemed like one of those new frying pans, coated with that miracle substance Teflon that was becoming so popular. Nothing seemed to stick to the man. That had to change, too.

Equally worrisome was the fact that the Warren Commission, the only real chance for the cover-up’s success, had given way to a far less controllable congressional investigation. No one was naming names yet, but could that really be far behind?

A battle for the perception of the American people now loomed. John and Bobby were two of the most skillful political forces ever to come to Washington, but the conspirators had access to vast sources of experience in espionage, intelligence and disinformation. They had the will and the ability to change the subject.

There would be no more bullets, but Kennedy still had to go. There was more than one way to assassinate a man. It was time to change tactics.

Justice Delayed

From the beginning, Attorney General Robert Kennedy knew how to describe the difficulty in sorting out who did what before the ambush in Dallas. The term he used was first coined in counterintelligence circles to denote the feelings of paranoia and confusion that sometimes develop in the byzantine business of spy-hunting, when one is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is illusion. “It’s a wilderness of mirrors,” he would say.

Quietly, since December of 1963, RFK had been working with his gung-ho staff of young prosecutors on the Dallas case, all through the 1964 election and beyond. Often, they would gather late at night or early in the morning, when their absence from other work duties would not draw anyone’s attention. Because of their extreme discretion, the reality of their quest had leaked to virtually no one.

One such meeting took place at Bobby's Hickory Hill estate in mid-February 1965. The choice of location was convenient for the attorney general, and also held the advantage of being private and secure. No matter how often he had his Justice Department office swept for bugs, Bobby was always aware of the chance that J. Edgar Hoover’s prying ears might have worked their way inside. The need for secrecy and discretion was challenged by the sheer number of leads he and his team had to follow. Just the ones introduced at this meeting alone demonstrated the complexity.

One of these included the story of Richard Case Nagell, who claimed he got himself arrested for attempted bank robbery in El Paso, Texas on September 20, 1963 in order to avoid being made a fall guy in a CIA plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Nagell looked like a man who preferred to spend the next few years in jail if that’s what it took. There was also the rumored existence of a 201 (“personality”) file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a set of documents maintained by the U.S. government for members of the armed forces. It seemed that Oswald had been trained by the CIA and had actually been on the FBI’s payroll. He said he was a patsy. “It’s fifty-fifty that he was telling the truth,” RFK argued, “but the conspirators will use our institutions to prove he worked alone, so we must ask the other questions, the harder questions.”

Fueled by deli sandwiches and coffee, RFK and his six-person crew worked until almost eleven, at which point he sent them home with the understanding that they continue on their own in the days ahead, keeping in mind the same mandate he had described in his first crusade against organized crime in 1961. At that time, he had directed many of these same young prosecutors to stamp out “the conspiracy of evil” that the plotters represented. “Don’t let anything get in your way,” Bobby told them now. “If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.”

Inevitably, one of them asked the United States Attorney General who he thought was behind the attempt on his brother’s life. Kennedy believed the President had been the victim of a domestic conspiracy, he told his prosecutorial team. He did not believe it was the Soviet Union or the Cuban government that was involved. He believed others had concocted a trail of falsified evidence to lay blame on our Cold War opponents and trigger a new invasion of Cuba.

Both professionally and personally, Bobby Kennedy had obsessed on this issue for months now. He had mulled it over, studied the evidence and weighed the issues. His best guess now was that the hit had been planned and executed by elements of the United States intelligence community, exploiting elements of the Mafia, and anti-Castro Cubans, with key support from within the U.S. military, largely funded by Texas oil interests.

It sounded like a joke. The nation’s top law enforcement officer believed the answer to “Who tried to kill President Kennedy?” was “all of the above.”

RFK freely admitted his theory was based only on his gut suspicions and not yet on hard facts. He expected these prosecutors to get him those facts so they could make arrests and bring people to trial. He wanted to charge these conspirators with treason, the only crime specifically defined in the U.S. Constitution.

Kennedy had as little faith in JCAAP as he did the Warren Commission. He believed that the conspiracy would never be shattered and held accountable without the Department of Justice bringing charges against the suspects. It was only by shaking the trees that they could see what kind of interesting fruit might present itself.

What none of these eager avengers fully appreciated yet was how every lead would take them down a road that either turned into a dead end or splintered into a dozen new paths.

Flashpoints

Political life in Washington was complicated by the fact that history was not taking a pause to let anyone sort out the past. There were two huge issues facing America that would not wait: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

There was no doubt that America’s troubled race relations were at the boiling point. Even Martin Luther King was having trouble keeping his flock united behind his idea of nonviolent resistance, particularly as their opponents continued to ratchet up their opposition with intimidation, beatings and even murder. Those who wanted to respond in kind, like the black militant Malcolm X, were under attack. Black Muslims had assassinated the fiery leader on February 21, proving that America was becoming a place where change was more often coming from the barrel of a gun.

Vietnam was turning into the nightmare that John Kennedy had always feared. He had talked tough during 1963 to placate those who warned against the dominoes falling in Asia; then, to win the 1964 election, he’d had to play it both ways, speaking of firm resolve while characterizing his opponent as a man over-eager to bring America to war. Now, in 1965, it was becoming clear that decisions needed to be made. Already Kennedy had authorized air strikes on North Vietnam in retaliation for guerrilla attacks against the 23,500 American military “advisers” now on the ground. That offensive did not prevent the American Embassy or the major American air base at Da Nang from being bombed. The President had on his desk a proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit two battalions of U.S. Marines to shore up protection.

In his 1974 book, Flashpoints, Robert Kennedy wrote that his brother’s thought process had been heavily impacted by Dallas, making him bolder on some issues and more tentative on others. In Vietnam, JFK had pulled back from his commitment to end American involvement completely, knowing full well that his intentions to do so, stated shortly before the assassination attempt, may have put his life in danger. On civil rights, however, he was more willing to line up behind decisive action, seeing the potential for a national race war if the government stayed aloof from the issue.

From March 25 to March 28, more than twenty-five thousand civil rights demonstrators embarked on a fifty-mile walk for freedom from Selma, Alabama to the state Capitol in Montgomery. Led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was a response to the mass arrests of Negroes protesting segregation and voting rights violations. And those protests were themselves a response to continued violent suppression of black Americans across the deep South. The ultimate civil rights violation, of course, is murder, and JFK’s own experience with it had changed his thinking about slow forward progress. He wanted action and he wanted it now.

President Kennedy had exercised federal authority before, but the move was always tricky. It immediately turned the U.S. government against state authorities, who used the controversy to fan the flames of their own political bases, inevitably resulting in even more violence. Kennedy was particularly upset at a pattern he saw developing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership, FBI agents assigned to the racial disturbances in the South were passive observers, taking notes and photos, but not acting when laws were being violated.

President Kennedy summoned Hoover to the Oval Office for a meeting on March 26, during the height of the march on Montgomery. Kennedy and Hoover had an awful relationship, but as officers of the government, they still needed to talk to get things done. Hoover was not happy when Attorney General Robert Kennedy joined them, but RFK ostensibly was Hoover’s boss and had a right to be there. At the beginning of the conversation, President Kennedy pressed a button beneath his desk, activating the White House recording system.

The agenda began with the Kennedys requesting a more active response from Hoover’s agents, stating that it was necessary to make certain this current protest march would not explode into violence and trigger even more violence around the country as a result.

“We don't guard anybody; we are fact-finders,” stated Hoover. He was told that he needed to broaden his definition but refused to back down. “The FBI can’t wet-nurse every Negro in the South or every do-gooder from the North who goes down there and tries to reform or educate them.”

Robert Kennedy was livid. He called Hoover “insubordinate,” a characteristic the director had maintained toward presidential authority since the beginning of President Kennedy’s term in 1961. Hoover shot back that both Kennedys were in “over their heads” and needed to “change their tune.”

As was his style, JFK watched this back-and-forth escalate. Clearly Bobby was speaking his brother’s mind, but the tactic allowed the President to weigh in at the end. By this point, the President could not suppress his own anger.

“If the President of the United States and the attorney general find their views in conflict with the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Hoover,” said Kennedy, “what remedy do you think should be pursued?”

Hoover shot back that he was only trying to protect the Kennedys from themselves, a favor he was granting them out of respect for their offices.

“Mr. Hoover, you have enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the service of your country. I am quite sure that history will record your sense of duty.” The President and the attorney general traded looks. They had talked about this moment as being inevitable, but they had not discussed that it was imminent. “Perhaps it is time to close that chapter honorably and allow new blood into your organization.”

There it was. The President of the United States had invited the man who had run the FBI like his own private business for decades to step down. Hoover’s response was curt. “I will not resign,” he said.

RFK tried to intercede. “There is no need for the nation to see conflict here. If you resign, both the President and I can sing your praises but if not…” He let the idea hang in the air.

Hoover ignored the younger Kennedy, addressing his remark straight to the President. “This is a bold gambit, Mr. President. Particularly for a man as… vulnerable… as you appear to be.” It was obviously a reference to the thick files the FBI director had maintained on the Kennedys going back to the 1930s.

The President did not flinch. “This country and the Soviet Union have not been involved in a nuclear war, because both sides understand that such a war would destroy their own countries and not just their enemy’s. We call this concept mutually assured destruction, and so far, it has kept the peace. Do you not believe that there are lessons learned from that policy that could be applied to our own situation?”

Hoover stood. “I will consider your ill-advised request and give you my answer.” The FBI Director left the Oval Office without waiting for the President to end the meeting as was the custom and protocol.

Strangelove Leaks

The aftermath of Dallas had not been American journalism’s finest hour. By and large, the nation’s press corps capably covered the immediate excitement of gunfire, funerals and trials, but they had shown little appetite to get beneath the surface of the story. Someone else could do that — the Dallas jury, the Warren Commission, now JCAAP — and the media would be content to report the findings and the process of arriving at them. This was a hundred percent true for the television networks, and the nation’s newspapers weren’t much different.

Perhaps that is why the financially struggling magazine Top Story became the lightning rod and the facilitator for a political explosion. Bob Dylan might have nailed the motivation with his impending release, Highway 61 Revisited, which included the classic anger anthem, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The singer/songwriter’s lyric summed up Top Story’s situation nicely: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

By the winter of 1965, the investigative reporting team of Stan Altman and Adam Berkowitz were stymied internally and externally. The older, more conservative Altman felt it was probable that Lee Harvey Oswald, despite suspicions to the contrary, was just a disaffected Communist-sympathizer who wasn’t as good a shot as he thought he was. The younger Berkowitz embraced conspiracy theory like a duck to water. He had spoken to at least a dozen direct witnesses from Dealey Plaza who had told him to his face that at least some of the shots came from in front of the motorcade. That meant two or more shooters, and that meant conspiracy.

While the reporters held daily, often angry, debates, their work product suffered. Since the rule they operated under was that they would only write what they agreed on, and they agreed on practically nothing, they found themselves reduced to covering White House news conferences and attending JCAAP hearings, even the dull ones.

The State of the Union and the inaugural speeches had not exactly been riveting either. What they didn’t know, however, but were soon to be the first to find out was that the inaugural announcement of the impending visit to the Soviet Union by the President had changed everything.

On January 24, 1965, just four days after Kennedy’s “Second Chance” speech, the reporters were contacted by a potential source who claimed to have access to secret files and asked to meet just one of the reporters. The rendezvous was arranged in a Sambo’s restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland at 8 p.m. Berkowitz drew the assignment because Altman, a married man, was under an ultimatum from his wife to be home in time for dinner with his children that night or face unspecified but disastrous consequences to his marriage.

The man sitting in the orange vinyl booth wore sunglasses he refused to take off, and Berkowitz guessed he must have been in his mid-fifties. He also refused to give his name, instructing the young reporter to instead assign him one. Berkowitz, a movie fan, pulled the name “Strangelove” out of the cinematic zeitgeist, referencing a now-classic film that had made a marked impact on him when it was released the previous year. The man said something that Berkowitz found quite odd: “Do you think I am a homosexual, sir?” Berkowitz assured him that he had no opinion on the matter and was simply a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a film about the madness of nuclear war. To that statement the man replied, “Madness was not using the superior weapons we had in 1962 to destroy the Soviet Communists when the advantage was ours.”

After arguing with the waitress over whether he should be charged extra for ordering an omelet with tomatoes instead of potatoes, Strangelove then offered up the reason for requesting the meeting with Berkowitz. He had access to the FBI files on the President, and they made clear that the nation’s chief executive was nothing more than a “moral degenerate.” He offered a manila envelope with a single file in it. He asked Berkowitz to share it with his partner Altman, and satisfy themselves that it was the real deal. They would be contacted again to see if they had the stomach to do the hard work that needed to be done. With that, he dismissed Berkowitz and dined alone on his nighttime breakfast.

The memo Strangelove had given Berkowitz was explosive. It dealt with FBI surveillance of German-born Ellen Rometsch, who in 1963 had allegedly begun an affair with President Kennedy. She was being investigated at the time as a possible East German spy and, as the report indicated, she’d been a member of the Communist party before coming to the United States. She was also, it was alleged, a prostitute, who had been brought into the White House under the nose of the Secret Service and had sexual relations with Kennedy in the White House pool area. Supposedly, certain Republicans on Capitol Hill and other reporters had become aware of this in the fall of 1963, when Rometsch was suddenly deported at the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and allegedly paid hush money.

Altman and Berkowitz checked the memo out as discreetly as they could, and both became convinced that whether or not its contents were a hundred percent accurate, the memo itself was legitimate. They began to gather notes on the many allegations of extramarital affairs that had been swirling around John Kennedy going back to his days in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some but not all of these they had heard whispers of before.

In the 1960s, reporters still looked the other way when it came to presidential romantic dalliances, believing they were private matters and even, perhaps, that a President must be allowed an extraordinary amount of personal leeway to relax in whatever way he saw fit. The problem with the Rometsch memo was that it raised questions about JFK's judgment that went beyond his right to enjoy a private life. The Secret Service had never been allowed to search Rometsch before her clandestine meetings with Kennedy. Had she been so inclined, she easily could have caused him physical harm or even killed him. Certainly, she could have held him up for blackmail.

Finally, an excruciating eleven days later, Berkowitz received a phone call. “Mr. Berkowitz,” said the voice. “This is your Doctor Strangelove.”

Assassination Theater

The nation soon had a new soap opera. It was called the Joint Commission on the Attempted Assassination of the President. The hearings were open, except for frequent closed-door sessions when the CIA and other intelligence assets testified in ways that might impact national security, a situation that occurred by their estimation, every time they were called before the committee.

Still, the seemingly endless parade of eyewitnesses, police officers, government insiders, Mafia bosses, Cuban activists, Soviet experts, and agents of the FBI and Secret Service made for compelling viewing. The hearings were telecast live to the nation by the fledgling ABC network, something that was akin to political catnip for the committee members of both political parties, jostling for position and visibility. Chairman Magnuson nearly wore out his gavel trying to keep the egos in check.

During the hearings, Secret Service agent Robert Bouck testified about the existence of tape recording systems in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room and the President’s living quarters on the second floor of the White House, and a separate Dictabelt recording system for use on the telephone lines in the President’s office and his upstairs bedroom. All had been installed in the summer of 1962.

Lawyers for JCAAP immediately requested tapes of conversations before and after the Dallas ambush. The White House nearly as immediately turned them down, citing executive privilege — if the conversations of the President of the United States were no longer considered confidential, the President’s attorneys claimed, it would create a chilling effect on the Oval Office, causing advisers to be less free in their advice to the nation’s chief executive. That, they argued, could have a detrimental effect on his decision-making ability. The White House recorded these conversations for their own use and review, not for the inspection of Congress.

It seemed like a reasonable argument, and for the moment, there were enough Democrats on the committee who agreed that the situation went no further.

One of the men glued to the television set during all this was famed newsman and former Warren Commission member Edward R. Murrow, who was in the last days of his life. He had been battling cancer since a malignant tumor had caused the removal of his left lung in October 1963, after a lifetime of smoking up to seventy cigarettes a day. He had been in and out of the hospital ever since, but he’d been discharged from New York Hospital at the beginning of April and had gone home to die. On April 25, just two days before he passed away, Murrow allowed himself to smoke a final cigarette while watching the hearings and told his wife Janet that “they won’t let this President finish.”

Changing the Subject

In May of 1965, a single ticket to the rematch between Muhammad Ali (no longer known as Cassius Clay) and Sonny Liston had appeared in an envelope under the door of Steve Berkowitz’s modest Georgetown apartment. He and Frank Altman drove up to Lewiston, Maine, where the fight was to take place. Ali was now publicly embracing the Nation of Islam, some adherents of which were widely suspected of having just assassinated Malcolm X, and there were rumors that Ali might be murdered in retaliation. It was a tense and sober fight, held in a very small-town ice rink.

Altman was a huge boxing fan, and Berkowitz barely knew Sonny Liston from Sonny Bono. Nonetheless, Altman had to sit in his car a few blocks away from the venue, while Berkowitz took his seat inside, as he suspected, next to the man known as Strangelove. The fight ended with Ali knocking out Liston in the first round. As the stunned crowd began to leave, Strangelove nodded under Berkowitz’s seat where a manila envelope could be seen. “Champions fall,” he said, and departed.

On the way back from Maine, Berkowitz drove while Altman read aloud from the almost three dozen documents from Strangelove, each one seemingly more scandalous than the next. Hearing them spoken in a speeding car gave the documents a thrilling urgency to Berkowitz. He slammed at the dashboard, more than once shouting, “The floodgates are open!” They were also closed, as it turned out, as Strangelove was never heard from again.

Altman knew that none of what the documents contained was yet deemed publishable by the standards of journalism as practiced in the mid-1960s, where the private lives of public officials were not considered to be of sufficient importance to merit disclosure. “Roosevelt and Eisenhower had their mistresses that the public never heard about,” he shrugged. “And the medical stuff, hell, Roosevelt was a cripple for his entire twelve years in office.”

“I now realize that this was completely different,” Altman wrote in Top Story’s 1988 anniversary coverage, “because of the magnitude and the questions it raised, but it took me a few days to get there.”

It wasn’t just the falling of the barrier of past journalistic standards that bothered the older reporter. It was the powerful emotions he began to feel about President Kennedy, emotions he had never associated with a politician.

Indeed, when Frank Altman came to bed early in the morning after reading all the documents, his wife took one look at him and asked, “What are you so sad about, Frankie?”

Just as the government has always been plagued by leaks, the nation’s fourth estate has not been immune. Through sources that have never been made public but are assumed to have emanated from the FBI, the White House advisers came to know that Altman and Berkowitz were up to something they didn’t like. They heard, discreetly and indirectly, that John Kennedy’s sex life was the subject of daily discussion at Top Story and possibly the Washington Post. The Post published Newsweek magazine, Top Story’s direct competition.

President Kennedy met privately with his brother to discuss this rumored turn of events. Bobby considered the matter carefully and concluded, “Jack, we always knew this could happen.”

The problem was that no plan existed for what to do when that arrived, said JFK. Bobby countered that there was a plan but it was best that he not know what it was. The President agreed, “Just make sure it’s a good plan.” Even at their moment of maximum danger, there was a soldier’s joking bravado.

Although it was not necessarily important where the leak originated, the President had allowed the impasse with J. Edgar Hoover to continue without his resignation or firing. The arrogant FBI director had left the Oval Office that day with only the slim promise that he would think about the President’s request to step down and get back to him. The President concluded for his brother’s benefit, “I guess now we have our answer.” Hoover’s retaliation was to use his files as a weapon.

Fearing a phone call from journalists asking to confirm or deny these reports, the Kennedys decided to move up the President's scheduled visit to Moscow. No responsible journalistic organization would dare publish such scandal, they felt, if the President of the United States was on foreign soil negotiating matters of global peace with a nuclear-armed adversary.

Mission to Moscow

Both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had survived attempts to remove them from office over the past year and a half, and each knew just how precarious his grip on power truly was. Khrushchev actually felt that had Kennedy been killed in Dallas, the impact would have extended all the way to Russia and led to his own removal by the Politburo. They both had reasons to change the subject and keep it changed as fast as possible.

Khrushchev had been to the United States before, back in September of 1959. He had debated Vice President Nixon, visited Hollywood, and even been barred from going to Disneyland, supposedly for security reasons. Now it was Kennedy’s turn to visit the Soviet Union.

In mid-May, with JCAAP nearing the end of its hearings, and journalists in Washington sitting on a bombshell of sexual misconduct, President Kennedy stepped off a plane in Moscow and shook hands with Premier Khrushchev. The two men had already traveled a unique path together, from Cold War nuclear adversaries who nearly incinerated the planet, to men who understood that the mission of their times was to create the architecture of peace. They had been communicating regularly by private correspondence, the substance of which was known only to each other and their translators. They had achieved a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and started talks on global disarmament. Those talks had been scuttled by Kennedy’s close call in Dallas and Khrushchev’s close call with the Soviet Politburo.

They needed a big idea but one that would not set their generals off, as disarmament talks seemed to do. They needed to “Trojan Horse” peace into the public discussion. They needed the moon.

The idea was already on the table, just dying for lack of support. Back on September 20, 1963, President Kennedy had spoken before the United Nations Eighteenth General Assembly. In that speech, he had extended an invitation to the Soviet Union to join with the United States in a joint mission to the moon. At the end of that address, Kennedy said: “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity — space — there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts.”

Why, the President asked, should the United States and the Soviet Union conduct parallel efforts that would include “duplication of research, construction and expense?” He laid out a proposal for a joint series of space missions, which, if enacted would, he said, “require a new approach to the Cold War.”

Khrushchev told Kennedy at the time that he could not accept the offer even if he wanted to. Kennedy needed to win reelection, but Khrushchev needed to put down an insurrection from his own internal enemies who thought he had backed down and lost the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Now, two years later, the timing seemed to be right. Both men knew that a space race to the moon would be economically prohibitive and accomplish nothing. Better to share the costs and turn it into a win-win.

After four days and three nights touring the Soviet Union side-by-side, Kennedy and Khrushchev faced the press together. They proposed the Joint Lunar Exploration Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. They would join forces, share costs, and crew missions together. Sometime before 1970, they hoped, a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut would both set foot on the moon together. Kennedy let his former foe Khrushchev have the first word:

Space offers no problems of sovereignty; the members of the United Nations have already foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure?

Khrushchev laid out the full legal framework. The man who’d slammed his shoe on his desk in the United Nations years before was now using the U.N.’s mission and charter as his own rationalization for action. Kennedy followed with the poetry.

Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries can work together in the conquest of space. They will look back at the Earth while standing on the surface of the moon and they will see a fragile world that deserves the full measure of our devotion. While showing that Humankind can leave the Earth, we will also demonstrate why we must always return to our home.

The only thing standing in the way of such a peaceful and cooperative enterprise was the approval of the Soviet Politburo and the American Senate.

For the most part, the Joint Lunar Exploration Treaty was embraced by Americans as a good idea. Conservative Republicans derided Kennedy’s advocacy of the program and referred to him as “Moonbeam Jack,” although the phrase never seemed to catch on outside of their own political circles.

The real opposition came from within. The military establishments of both the Soviet Union and the United States were staunchly opposed. Both viewed implementation of the treaty as putting them in the unacceptable position of sharing treasured national technological advances with their rivals. Both sides worried that rockets that could take men to the moon could also carry nuclear weapons to the cities of their enemies.

After watching the coverage of Kennedy and Khrushchev on a live satellite feed out of Moscow, General Curtis LeMay turned to his fellow military careerists and said, “that treaty will pass over his dead body,” while pointing at Kennedy. When asked to confirm this statement shortly before his death in 1990, LeMay said that it had been a slip of the tongue and he meant the conventional use of the phrase.

The Secret Life of the President

The visit to the Soviet Union had, in fact, worked its magic, holding off publication of any damaging information about John Kennedy’s personal life until after his return. Even then, with internal debates raging, it was no sure thing that such details would ever see the light of day.

No one at Top Story who knew about the files felt they were anything other than the most explosive document leak in the history of politics and journalism combined. Certainly, that is how Berkowitz characterized them to Altman when they were first received, and Altman, who often felt it was his job to tone down his partner’s natural exuberance, could not disagree. They were political dynamite.

By this point, the two men had determined that the files came to them from J. Edgar Hoover himself. Hoover had given them to his number two, Clyde Tolson. Then Tolson had given them to this connection of his, unidentified during the coverage cycle, known as “Strangelove,” to pass on to Berkowitz, who brought them to Top Story.

The Debate

Over at Top Story, then-editor Joseph Carlyle wrestled with their publication day and night for months. Even as he wondered if they could ever be published, Carlyle continued to insist that his reporters source them to perfection. Given all the calls being made by Altman and Berkowitz, the existence of these files was becoming an open secret. In the final week of May, one of the targets of Altman’s investigation, a socialite and former runway model, told Altman, “Look, what happened between me and the President, or didn’t happen, is none of the Washington Post’s business.” Then she hung up the phone.

Altman mentioned the call at that day’s conference held in Carlyle’s office. “Sounds like the Post has it, too,” he said. “We’re ahead of them, but we won’t be for long.”

The line was out there now for all to see. It was publish or perish. But no story of this magnitude could be printed if the primary source was not contacted for comment or rebuttal. Someone had to call the President of the United States and ask him if it was true that he had turned the White House into what looked like a revolving door of sex partners while his wife and children were away.

Berkowitz volunteered. Altman shot that down. “No one in the Kennedy White House is going to talk to some kid who’s out to make his bones on this story. I’ll do it.” Carlyle agreed.

Altman set a meeting with Pierre Salinger, feeling it was best to follow protocol. “Certain facts have come to our attention,” said Altman, “facts that require the President to comment directly. I need to know from you that you will take this directly to President Kennedy for a response.”

Salinger protested that he could make no such assurance without knowing what they were talking about. Altman stated that they were talking about women that the President had extramarital affairs with. Salinger waved him off. “No, no, no. That’s not news.”

“It’s news if these affairs happened in the White House,” said Altman. “It’s the people’s house, paid for by the taxpayers. And it’s news if some of these women have connections to mobsters, or foreign governments, or actually work in the White House, where the President might be considered to be exerting undue influence on them to engage in sexual acts with him.”

Salinger said he didn’t need to talk to the President. The White House position would be not to dignify these charges with an answer. Altman reminded him that he had a professional responsibility to his boss and to the ethics of journalism to take this to the President. Top Story would give him forty-eight hours to get back to them. If the President agreed, as he hoped he would, Altman and his partner, Steve Berkowitz, would like to schedule a sit-down with President Kennedy at his earliest convenience. They felt that at least two hours should be allocated and understood that the President could include anyone he wanted in such a meeting, including his lawyer or lawyers. “Fine,” barked Salinger, confirming that he would take this information to his boss.

The press secretary would later contend to anyone who asked that, to his credit, the President took it like a man. He didn’t rage or deny. Instead, he asked questions, trying to tie down exactly what was being said. Salinger told him everything he knew and was dismissed.

That night Kennedy visited with his friend Ben Bradlee, the newish editor of the Washington Post and someone who knew more than most about JFK’s activities. Bradlee’s wife Antoinette (Toni) was the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer, who seemed to enjoy both a sexual and a personal relationship with the President. Bradlee promised Kennedy the Post would not be first to publish these charges but that if Top Story or other reputable news organizations did, then his newspaper and probably Newsweek would have to follow suit. He assured the President that they would stick to the facts. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kennedy said, and even managed to flash his trademark smile to his close friend. In 1963, Bradlee, who with his wife had often dined with President and Mrs. Kennedy, had published what Kennedy considered unflattering material about the administration and had suffered a three-month ban from White House insider privileges. Both men knew this would go far beyond that skirmish and could lead to a lifetime estrangement.

The President wanted to know if there was anything that could be done to stop or delay Top Story from publishing the results of its investigation. Bradlee thought about it, then offered that they must know that the Post had the same material. If they thought the Post was determined to publish, then the race was on. But if they understood that the Post would not go first, they might think twice. With that analysis, however, Bradlee told Kennedy that he could say no more.

The next day, Pierre Salinger phoned Joseph Carlyle and told him the President of the United States would not be responding to Altman’s inquiries as that would only give the magazine further incentive to publish its findings. He made it clear to Carlyle the White House knew that this same material had been distributed to the Washington Post and that they had been assured that the town’s leading newspaper was not planning to publish anything. “They want us to go first,” said Carlyle. The conversation, according to both men, lasted less than two minutes.

Carlyle and his two reporters, Altman and Berkowitz, plus Top Story publisher Dante Falcone and lawyers Rich Cortright and Susan Monteith, gathered in Carlyle’s office to decide what to do next. It was impossible to underestimate the importance of the decision. If they published the story they had, it would likely destroy John Kennedy’s marriage and maybe his presidency. It would put the nation’s progress at risk, sow discord and set in motion events that were, at best, unpredictable.

There was a series of questions that had to be asked and answered. Were all the allegations true? If true, were they news? If so, would they be seen as such, or would they destroy the magazine along with the President? And even if that were the case, was it the magazine's duty to print the story anyway?

Several of the magazine's top editors, along with Altman and Berkowitz, began an exhaustive review of everything they knew, starting with the contents of the leaked FBI files. There seemed to be little doubt that the documents were real. Many of them contained transcriptions of phone wiretaps between Kennedy and the various women. Others were based on surveillance. Still others included testimony of friends, family and former lovers about conversations the women had had that implicated the President in affairs. The numbers were staggering. Berkowitz counted all the allegations and names mentioned in the files and came up with a number, thirty-seven. Many of these preceded JFK’s presidency, a few preceded his marriage, and many were based on rumor and gossip.

The aggregate, however, did highlight a pattern of behavior that could have compromised the nation’s security and/or Kennedy’s ability to appropriately manage the duties of the presidency. These women were not being adequately identified by the Secret Service and were not searched for listening devices or weapons. Some had prior allegiances to foreign governments. Almost all of these relationships would have exposed President Kennedy to potential blackmail. Just covering up the existence of these affairs had already caused the President to expend untold personal and government resources.

A partial list of women documented to be among the President’s sexual conquests included:

- Ellen Rometsch, the German-born prostitute who was being investigated by the FBI as a potential spy, just prior to her deportation in 1963. The files alleged that Rometsch worked for Walter Ulbricht, the Communist leader of East Germany. When Robert Kennedy was told about this information, he allegedly ordered her to be deported.

- Pamela Turnure. After a three-year affair when JFK was a U.S. senator, at President Kennedy’s suggestion, the twenty-three-year-old Turnure was hired as Jacqueline Kennedy’s press secretary in the White House, even though she possessed very few secretarial skills and no newspaper experience. Turnure’s former landlady, Mrs. Leonard Kater, became incensed with Kennedy, calling the media, patriotic organizations and churches, even writing the attorney general. She paraded in front of the White House with a sign asking, “Do you want an adulterer in the White House?”

- Mimi Beardsley. A debutante from a prominent New Jersey family, she first had sex with the President in the summer of 1962 when she was nineteen years old and a virgin, continuing the relationship during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and not ending it until shortly before Dallas, when she married a college boyfriend. She had been given a White House internship despite never having applied for it. On her first day on the job, she was invited to swim with the President, given a daiquiri after work, and taken on a tour that ended in Jackie Kennedy’s bedroom, where she and the President made love. Before the end of the eighteen-month affair, she was also asked by the President to perform oral sex on Dave Powers and Teddy Kennedy while in the White House pool. When she first had sex with Kennedy in the White House, the age of consent in Washington, D.C. was twenty-one years old.

- Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen. These two White House employees were even given Secret Service names, Fiddle and Faddle, because they regularly swam nude with the President in the White House pool in the afternoon. Wear (Fiddle) worked for Evelyn Lincoln, and Cowen (Faddle) for Pierre Salinger. One or both of them were asked to try amyl nitrates, known as “poppers,” which had been supplied by Peter Lawford and were supposed to enhance sexual experience.

- Judith Campbell, a California socialite introduced to JFK by Frank Sinatra, and a sometime-girlfriend of Mafia kingpin Sam Giancana. She had made at least twenty visits to the White House since May 1961, and she had seen the President in Palm Springs and even once at the Plaza Hotel in New York. More than seventy phone calls had been made to the President by Campbell, according to the logs of Evelyn Lincoln. Campbell entered through an unofficial back door to the Oval Office that was supervised by Kenneth O’Donnell, and no logs were kept about her comings and goings. Kennedy had ended the affair in 1962, only after Hoover made it known to RFK that Campbell’s associations could cause “trouble.” The FBI file showed that they learned of Campbell in early 1961 by way of a wiretap on Johnny Roselli, a Mafia leader she had met through Sinatra.

- Marilyn Monroe. Her affair with John Kennedy was alleged to have begun before his election in 1960, when she, too, was introduced by Sinatra, at the Cal-Neva Lodge. Their relationship was an open secret in Hollywood and continued during his presidency. After Kennedy ended the affair in 1962, the file states that Robert Kennedy continued with her and was at her house on the day she died.

- Other celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, Gene Tierney, Rhonda Fleming, Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Sophia Loren, Lee Remick, Peggy Cummins, Hedy Lamarr, Olivia de Havilland and even David Niven’s wife, who claimed JFK had given her chlamydia.

- Mary Pinchot Meyer. She was married to the CIA’s Cord Meyer and secretly visited the White House at least thirty times during JFK’s presidency from January 1962 until Dallas. She was Bobby Kennedy’s next-door neighbor and a frequent visitor to White House parties with her sister Antoinette and brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee. Her file included allegations that she and the President had used marijuana, cocaine and even LSD together, based on a diary it was said had been recovered. She had seen Kennedy twice more after Dallas, but had suddenly moved across the country where she lived briefly with Timothy Leary, telling the Harvard-professor-turned-drug-advocate that she feared for her life. Meyer was assumed to be living on a commune in Colorado.

- Helen Chavchavadze, a divorcee with two young daughters. Kennedy, driving a convertible, followed her to her Georgetown home after a dinner party and began a sexual affair just prior to his 1960 nomination. After his election, he announced he would continue to see her, and they continued the relationship when Jackie Kennedy was away, always after a phone call from Evelyn Lincoln inviting her to the White House.

- Durie Malcolm. Her file included details of an alleged marriage to John Kennedy before a justice of the peace on January 24, 1947. She was a well-known socialite in Chicago and Florida, whose family lived across from the Kennedys in Palm Beach. Joseph Kennedy had Cardinal Cushing of the Roman Catholic Church quietly grant an annulment, and the marriage record was removed and destroyed from the Palm Beach County courthouse.

- Alicia Darr Clark. Alleged to be a former call girl, she had an affair with Kennedy beginning in the 1950s, perhaps resulting in a child. In any case, according to the file, she later tried to extort money from the Kennedy family, and received $500,000.

- Inga Marie Arvadi. The former Danish beauty queen and married journalist had socialized with Hitler before carrying on an affair with Kennedy when he was a naval intelligence officer and she was twenty-four.

- Maria Novotny, a prostitute thought to be connected to a Soviet vice ring.

- Suzy Chang, another prostitute (Chinese), who frequently claimed Kennedy as a client. She was involved in the British Profumo scandal at the same time she had been seeing the American President.

With publisher Dante Falcone listening from a corner, editor Carlyle and his two lawyers grilled the two reporters about not only the details of the files but also the work that had been done to substantiate them. Altman and Berkowitz had developed multiple unnamed sources among the women and their friends, multiple confirmations from disaffected Secret Service agents and one Kennedy insider. None of them were on the record, however, and the reporters declined to name them to their bosses.

There was a heated debate about Marilyn Monroe. The source was a Hollywood director who’d been at a party where Monroe and Kennedy had disappeared into Peter Lawford’s guest house and returned hours later with Marilyn wearing JFK’s now-rumpled white shirt and no panties. While it did not involve either potential national security or an inappropriate workplace relationship with a subordinate, it also did not have a living subject who could sue the magazine. Monroe was fair game.

At the end of an exhaustive (and exhausting) seven-hour session, Carlyle offered his judgment. The story should be written up for final analysis and approval. Definitely ruled in were all the current White House employees (Pamela Turnure, Mimi Beardsley, Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen), Ellen Rometsch, Judith Campbell, Mary Meyer and Marilyn Monroe. He wanted a first draft on his desk in three days. The quote from JFK that had surfaced from multiple sources — “I’m not through with a girl until I’ve had her three ways” — would not be included, period. They weren’t that type of magazine. The fact that the editors of the same magazine are introducing the quote in this book five decades later only shows the length that journalistic standards have traveled in the intervening years.

It was also decided that at least the first draft of the article should include the rumors of drug use and abuse in passing, pointing out their unverified nature, but should focus most heavily on the President’s medical condition, its cover-up, and his routine use of substances that may have included amphetamines and other stimulants.

After the reporters were sent to their typewriters and the lawyers dismissed, Carlyle and Falcone remained to talk privately about the stakes. Carlyle, the editor, fretted that this explosive information had the potential to destroy the magazine. Falcone, a no-nonsense Italian-American, made explicit what Carlyle already suspected. “This magazine is six months away from bankruptcy,” he said. “The story has just as much chance of saving us.” He told Carlyle that an editorial decision was needed, not a financial one, and that he, as publisher, was taking himself out of the equation.

The decision was Carlyle’s to make.

The Final Hours

On Thursday, June 3, 1965, astronaut Edward White took a twenty-minute stroll, untethered, a hundred miles above the Earth, while James McDivitt stayed in the capsule of Gemini 4. Given the importance of this step in the U.S. planned moon mission, and the possibility that future missions might include cosmonauts, it ranked as the story of the week.

Newsweek, Time and Top Story all followed the same schedule, publishing every Monday. The cover for the coming week's issue seemed likely to be the space walk, unless bigger events interceded. The problem was that the Gemini crew would not be returned to Earth in time for glorious color photos to be made available from NASA.

As a publisher, Dante Falcone knew that Time would probably feature its usual piece of commissioned art on its cover, something showing White and McDivitt. Newsweek would likely go with a NASA simulation or a photo of a black-and-white TV screen. If the cover of Top Story featuring the President’s extramarital affairs became the competition, it would potentially explode on the newsstand beyond any publishing figures the magazine had ever seen. He said to Joseph Carlyle, “As I said, the decision is yours, but the time for you to make your decision is now.”

Carlyle knew the publisher was correct. He and the Altman-Berkowitz team had been through five drafts of the story that was being called “The Secret Life of the President.” It was tight, fair and sensational. It left out as much as it left in. It was true, even if the sources weren’t on the record. And its timing was right.

Bobby Kennedy had called Carlyle earlier in the week to warn him that if the story were published, Top Story could be facing a lawsuit. “Are you telling me that as the attorney general or as the family’s lawyer?” asked Carlyle. Kennedy slammed the phone down and hung up.

Carlyle put a call through to the attorney general’s office. They were preparing to publish the story on Monday’s cover, he said, but because of the sensitive, personal nature of the material involving the President of the United States, he was willing to take the unprecedented step of allowing a representative of the President to read the story in advance. The representative would have to come to read it at the Top Story offices, however. If so desired, he would be provided a conference room and a secure line to call the Oval Office and discuss the content. If the President then wished to comment, arrangements could be made to incorporate those responses into the story. Robert Kennedy heard him out and announced, “I’ll be over in one hour.”

The Top Story offices were emptied of most of their staff while the Secret Service swept the area for bugs, and the conference room was prepared. It included a solid mahogany table, a telephone, a yellow legal pad, three No. 2 sharpened pencils, and a photocopy of the entire five thousand word article by Frank Altman and Steve Berkowitz. Exactly fifty-eight minutes after hanging up the phone, the attorney general arrived with two of his top aides, Ed Guthman and Nicholas Katzenbach. Carlyle tried to introduce himself and his reporters, but Kennedy brushed aside his pleasantries. “Where is the article in question?” he asked and was directed to the conference room.

Kennedy and his aides read the article with RFK finishing one page, handing it off to Katzenbach, who read it and handed the page to Guthman. After all three men had read the material, they could be seen in animated conversation with each other through the conference windows until Guthman noticed and closed the blinds. The last thing Frank Altman remembers seeing was the attorney general picking up the phone receiver in the middle of the table.

Two hours later, Kennedy and Carlyle went into private session, leaving Katzenbach, Guthman, Altman and Berkowitz all staring silently at each other. Carlyle remembers that the face of Robert Kennedy frightened him. “That article is malicious, defamatory and intolerable,” began the attorney general. “If you publish it, you will do the President of the United States and this country a great disservice at a time of maximum danger. While a free press is something that President Kennedy has always believed in, it is also true that a great magazine should aspire to more than this level of vile character attack. We ask that you reconsider your decision to publish this material if that is, in fact, your intent.”

Carlyle considered this and replied. “I understand that this is difficult material, and we are all aware of its potential for disruptive impact. However, at this time, there’s only only one thing that would cause us to reconsider our decision to publish.”

Kennedy was ahead of the editor on that one. “You wish to know if it is true.” Carlyle nodded. “There are elements of truth, elements of falsity, elements of misinterpretation, and an overall unappealing tone of hubris on the part of your reporters,” said Kennedy. “Neither the President nor I will address these charges generally or specifically. If you publish this, Mr. Carlyle, your career as a serious journalist will be forever destroyed. And that, I can confirm, is true.”

The meeting was over as quickly as it had begun. As Kennedy rose, Carlyle extended a hand that was not taken. “Please tell the President that this is not personal.”

Kennedy replied, “I’ll do no such thing.” With that, he exited the office and left with his aides, refusing to make eye contact with Altman or Berkowitz.

The Top Story at Top Story

The Monday, June 14 issue of Top Story (released, as was practice in those days, on June 7) carried the title “The Secret Life of the President.” It sold more than six million copies, almost all of them newsstand sales, more than three times its usual circulation of 1.6 million copies. This compares with Time’s circulation that week of about 3.3 million copies and Newsweek’s with 2.2 million copies. As predicted, Time featured a line drawing of the Gemini astronauts and Newsweek a photo of space walk simulation.

In its final form, the article began:

Throughout his political career, John F. Kennedy has appeared to be the loving husband with a storybook marriage to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy. A Top Story investigation, however, has revealed that this public image has not been matched by private reality. Documents from a secret FBI surveillance file on President Kennedy, supported by this magazine’s own interviews and reporting, show another side. The John Kennedy who emerges here is a man foreign to most Americans and appears to be a serial adulterer who has engaged in sexual brinksmanship from his youngest days to more recent times as the resident of the nation’s White House. His actions may have placed his life, and by extension, the well-being of the nation at risk.

It was tough copy, and for readers who had virtually no inkling that it was possible, it was even more shocking than the events that had transpired in Dallas just nineteen months earlier. In the final analysis, Top Story had decided that half-measures would not do justice to the story’s comprehensiveness. Accordingly, it began in Kennedy’s adulthood, wove through his political life as a Congressman and a senator, and landed harshly in the Oval Office as President.

The article named names when there were two or more sources that could be cited by Altman and Berkowitz beyond the FBI files. In other cases, it described the participants in more general terms. Still, even by today’s standards of political scandals that seem to spring to life as regularly as the sunrise, it was unsparing.

The story it told began with the marriage of Jack and Jackie Kennedy in 1952 and allegations that even in their first year of matrimony there were extramarital affairs.

The article laid out dozens of sexual relationships with women who included foreign nationals, those with CIA connections, Mafia girlfriends, Hollywood starlets, and numerous White House employees. It reported the FBI files even included the possibility of drug abuse and use of prostitutes by the commander-in-chief during the Cuban Missile Crisis but that those allegations were unsubstantiated by other sources.

Better Late Than Never

In actual fact, the special edition facilitated one rare moment of agreement between the current occupant of the White House and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both John Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover declined comment.

In the immediate aftermath, however, the FBI’s Hoover was summoned to the Oval Office, where President Kennedy demanded to know what Hoover knew about the leaked material. Hoover denied any personal involvement as well as having any knowledge of who might have done it. It was the first time the two men had met since Kennedy had asked for Hoover’s resignation and had been rebuffed.

“While it is obviously too late to affect what has just transpired,” the President told the director, “I instruct you to turn over all similar files regarding other government officials and civil rights leaders including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as it is my judgment that you have abused your authority and can no longer be trusted to maintain physical custody of such files.”

Hoover replied, “I am unable to comply with your unjustified and misguided request. The files you seek do not exist.”

President Kennedy fired Hoover from his position on the spot, effective immediately. He instructed him not to return to FBI headquarters but to appoint an individual to act on his behalf. That individual would return under the supervision of federal marshals to retrieve Hoover’s personal belongings. With Hoover in the office, Kennedy called his brother, advised him that Hoover was no longer in charge, and directed him to see to it that the ex-director adhere to the policy he had just laid out.

Hoover replied, “Mr. President, you have made a serious mistake here.”

“Yes, I have, Mr. Hoover,” replied the President. “I made it back in 1960 when I allowed you to remain in this job. I was, apparently, ill-advised to believe that you would exercise discretion over your personal control of sensitive material.” With that, Kennedy asked Hoover to leave, and he did so.

Hoover’s first words as a private citizen were spoken to secretary Evelyn Lincoln. “Good day, Mrs. Lincoln. That is a lovely dress you have on today.”

Ground Zero

The effect of “The Secret Life of the President” was immediate and monumental, impacting the body politic of Washington, D.C., the feelings of average Americans, the members of the conspiracy against the President, and the relationship between John Kennedy and his wife. People who lived through both the Dallas ambush and the revelation of the President’s affairs have consistently in public opinion polls rated the second event as even more significant than the first.

Although the White House had known it was coming for days, seeing the actual magazine, feeling its heft and flipping through its pages, gave it a dark power beyond mere words. Kenneth O’Donnell felt strongly that refusing comment for the article was only postponing the inevitable. John Kennedy simply could not remain President and pretend this article never happened. After all, almost everyone on the planet was going to hear and talk about it soon, and the allegations were sensational enough that they would not simply go away on their own accord. O’Donnell felt the team had no more than twenty-four hours to get their response together. “What is Mrs. Kennedy’s response?” he asked.

As of that moment, however, the President had not spoken to her and spoke with heavy sarcasm. “I think she and I should talk before I talk to the press, don’t you?” The meeting was interrupted by Evelyn Lincoln’s call stating that Mrs. Kennedy would like to see the President in the family quarters at his earliest convenience. The meeting broke up momentarily with the President going upstairs and Pierre Salinger heading to the White House Briefing Room.

The White House issued the following statement through the press secretary: “The issues inside the President’s marriage belong there and there alone, and are solely for the President and his wife to consider.” Of course, even as he was reading them, Salinger knew that they would not satisfy anyone, nor would they last longer than a single news cycle.

Neither John nor Jacqueline Kennedy has ever spoken to the media about the conversation that took place between them on the afternoon of June 7, 1965. Both, however, spoke to others who have spoken out.

It appears that Jackie was packing when the President arrived in the family living quarters. He asked her if she was packing for the weekend as she often did or perhaps something longer. “I haven’t decided, Jack. I will let you know, which is more than you have done for me.”

The President apologized and promised that such behavior would not continue in the future. He asked for her forgiveness. The First Lady lit a second cigarette from the one she was smoking and acknowledged a small fact that could only be appreciated between the two of them. “You have been better since that awful day.” It was the truth. Even before the events in Dallas, the First Couple had been working at falling back in love and had been making progress. After Dallas, they both felt driven closer together by the force of the tragedy.

Still, she pointed out, she had agreed to look the other way only because his behavior was not public. Now that her husband’s infidelity was no longer secret, he had humiliated her, embarrassed their children, and allowed his implicit promise of discretion to be broken beyond repair. Their relationship had been on the road to recovery after Dallas, but she did not believe they could recover from this.

The President was dismissed by the First Lady. There would be changes made, but she was not thinking clearly enough to make them today. She had one immediate demand. No actual copies of the magazine should be allowed in the White House, and under no circumstances was Caroline or John Jr. to see it.

By this point, Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, had arrived through the back entrance to the White House. Jack and Bobby met privately in the Oval Office, as they had done so many times before, in so many crises, and the younger man who had, more than anyone else, truly been his brother’s keeper informed him of Ethel’s mission.

She was sharing a good cry with Jackie, said Bobby, and when the tears were over, they would discuss business. Trust funds would be set up for Jackie and both children, great enough to provide for both of them for the rest of their lives, the funds approved by both Joseph Kennedy and Rose Kennedy. All Jackie had to do was to meet the press with JFK tomorrow, stand by his side, and agree not to initiate divorce proceedings so long as Kennedy was in office.

“My God,” said the President. “How did you get Dad to agree to this so quickly?”

Bobby shook his head. The truth was that this plan had been hatched back in 1959 and was ready to go if this day ever came to pass. The only real question was what Jacqueline Kennedy would do.

The reputation of President Kennedy had been forever changed by the events of this day. That battle could, at best, be fought to a standstill. The current strategy, agreed to by all the President’s men, was to shift tactics to basic political survival. John Kennedy would have to defeat attempts to drive him from office. That would be a bloody fight, but it could be won.

The Day After

For the first hours after the article was published, the reporting duo of Altman and Berkowitz owned the story and appeared to own it alone. Not only was nobody else touching it, but many journalistic organizations were expressing chagrin that Top Story had cheapened journalism forever by printing it, whether or not its facts were accurate. The reporting team and its editors were starting to swing in the wind. As it turned out, however, this condition was only temporary.

By Tuesday morning, it was Standing Room Only in the White House briefing room. Not only were the hundreds of questions raised by the Top Story article on the table, but so was the firing of J. Edgar Hoover, which had become public overnight but had not yet been confirmed by the White House. Altman and Berkowitz were treated as celebrities by some of their fellow reporters and as pariahs by a substantial group as well. The truth was, everyone now knew their names and everyone had read their work.

In the Oval Office, President Kennedy huddled with his advisers, discussing how to handle the questions they knew were coming. Of course the President would stand on privacy as regards to the actual names and allegations. That left plenty of room to discuss the peripheral issues. How was it possible that the FBI was keeping such a file on the President of the United States for so long? Why had it been leaked? By whom?

The firing of J. Edgar Hoover did much to draw the public’s attention to those issues. Reaction ranged from, “JFK should have fired him a long time ago,” the Democratic talking point, to, “This shows how dangerously out of control this President has become,” on the Republican side. Kennedy caught one break, however, in that Hoover decided to go into hiding himself, refusing requests for interviews, cursing at photographers and generally looking like a guilty man.

Finally, Mrs. Lincoln interrupted: “The First Lady is here.”

Together, President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy walked from the Oval Office to the White House Briefing Room. This again was one of the times when the President needed no introduction, from Salinger or anyone else. There was an audible gasp from the hardened reporters when the First Couple entered. As they had in Dallas on the day of the assassination attempt, the two of them looked sensational. If there had been crying or arguing since the article’s publication, you could not tell by looking.

These days the idea of the political wife standing by her man who has been caught in a sex scandal is a cliché. We have seen it with President Bill Clinton, Senator Gary Hart, and too many more to list. But in 1965, particularly in the White House, this was a first. The President stepped to the microphone, and the First Lady stood to the side. She seemed quiet and subdued, but she did not look defeated.

I’ll make a short statement, and then I’ll take your questions. Mrs. Kennedy will not be taking your questions at her request, and she asks that you respect her wishes. As is always the case here at the White House, multiple issues occupy our minds. The most important today, from the position of government, is the issue of the firing of FBI Director Hoover. I am the responsible officer of this government and that decision was mine. I made it not because of the article that appeared yesterday in Top Story magazine but because of what that article represented. According to both Mr. Altman and Mr. Berkowitz, who I see are here today, they began their reporting when FBI files were released to them without authorization. Additionally, those files deal with private matters that the Bureau should not have been investigating. Until yesterday, Mr. Hoover was the responsible officer at the FBI. He has approved illegal wiretaps of the President and also of other private citizens. He did not maintain proper custody of those files whether they were legally or illegally obtained. That is a fireable offense and so, the director has been fired. I’ll take your questions.

Those questions came in a full-throated roar from a room that was already swooning from all the compressed body heat. By prearrangement, JFK pointed to UPI’s Helen Thomas for the first question: “Whether or not Mr. Hoover deserves to be fired, Mr. President, most Americans today are wondering, did you do all the things that those FBI files say you did?”

Kennedy, with his innate sense of timing, spoke directly to the forty-five-year-old Thomas. “Helen, I was hoping if I picked you first, you’d ask something easier.” It got a laugh that bought the President a few seconds. One laugh was all he could play for, however, given that his deeply wronged wife stood next to him.

The short answer is no. The difficulty with that answer, however, is that many of you would like me to go through those files and what has been made of them and respond to each and every accusation, and that is something that I cannot and will not do. I will say, however, that the issues raised are deeply painful to my wife, and I am humbled by the damage my actions have caused my marriage. Jacqueline and I have been married for a number of years now and hope to be married for the rest of our lives. I will answer your question — not before this group but to her. I will ask her forgiveness in the privacy of our marriage, not in the publicity of the moment.

It was a good answer, particularly the look he gave his wife when talking about their marriage, but no one in the room thought for a moment that it would suffice. Reporters came after him in waves, and his answer was always a rephrasing of his response to Thomas. It is worth mentioning that neither Frank Altman nor Steve Berkowitz was called upon by the President that day, nor ever again, no matter how often or how loudly they shouted their questions.

The news conference was notable for one turn of a phrase that has often been credited to Theodore Sorensen, but actually came from President Kennedy himself, on the spur of the moment. He was asked by NBC’s David Brinkley what he made of any possible motivation for the FBI to have gathered all this material for years only to unleash it now in 1965.

“There were apparently some who wished my presidency might have ended back in 1963,” said Kennedy. “Yet here I am still in the White House in 1965 with a full-term ahead of me. Perhaps some of those people feel that a sniper firing a rifle at a man is only one way to assassinate him.”

The room, so boisterous at the beginning, fell momentarily silent. Rarely has the truth been spoken so clearly in a situation where it is so often hidden.

The press conference answered almost no questions except for one. Would Jackie Kennedy stand by her man? At least temporarily, it seemed, the answer was yes.

On the way out with her husband, one reporter pushed his luck enough to shout at Jackie Kennedy, “Mrs. Kennedy, did you know about any of this before you read about it?”

She seemed taken aback and stammered only the word, “Oh,” before the President grasped her forearm and led her from the room. “Jackie Oh” caught on as her nickname and followed her until her death in 1994.

Blowback

If Jackie Kennedy would not talk, then reporters seemed to be of the mind to find someone who would. The article and the news conference unleashed the investigative force of the Washington journalistic establishment as reporters sought response from all of the suspected paramours of the President. More than a few who had respected their vows of silence regarding their sexual liaisons with Kennedy, now found themselves completely out of their depth. It was one thing to remain silent when few if anyone knew you had anything to say, and another thing entirely when reporters and photographers were waiting on the street outside your home.

The “other women” became household names. Within a week, arguments were breaking out as to whether Priscilla Wear was Fiddle or Faddle. But it was Jill Cowan (Faddle) who famously confirmed her relationship with the President when she told a reporter, “If you think it was just about sex, then you don’t know President Kennedy at all.”

All legal issues aside, the nation seemed transfixed by the state of the Kennedy marriage, with men and women often finding themselves on opposite sides of the issue. A Gallup Poll released at this time showed that 58 percent of women — Republicans and Democrats in nearly equal numbers — agreed with the statement that “If current revelations of multiple affairs are true, Jackie Kennedy should consider divorce proceedings against President Kennedy.” Only 29 percent of men felt the same way.

Most of the pillars of the fourth estate, pressed for an honest reaction, admitted that news of Kennedy’s secret life was widely known and probably would have dribbled out bit by bit over decades had the story been contained until his term expired in 1969. These explosive revelations, made suddenly and with a completeness that was stunning, simply demanded follow-up and independent investigation. By the end of the first week following publication, everyone had reporters on the job: the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and all the TV networks.

Suddenly, things that were known about the President’s medical condition, the allegations about associations with mobsters, election money-laundering and even attempts to assassinate foreign leaders like Castro were under investigation.

The American people were stunned. It wasn’t as if the President had just been discovered having an affair. That might have been tolerable or understandable for some people (although not the Catholics in Kennedy’s own church) but the sheer numbers of women he had been involved with said something else entirely. It was reckless to be sure, given his office, but it was more than that. It seemed to be completely unhinged behavior. Today we might call it sex addiction, but in 1965 the right words were more difficult to find.

Initially, because the President wouldn’t confirm or deny any specifics, it was the Republican party that condemned him most strongly, while Democrats took a wait-and-see approach. The problem with that strategy was that the more anyone waited, the more they saw.

It was all anyone talked about. Americans felt they knew John Kennedy, so hearing the news of his fall from grace was like hearing the same thing about a close friend. The twin nature of the revelations — sexual feats and medical disabilities — led to a robust comedy take in the nation’s barber shops and taverns, places where men gathered with other men out of earshot of the women in their lives.

The comedian Lenny Bruce — famous for a controversial style that would have barely raised an eyebrow these days — had just over a year left to live when the story of the President’s risk-taking private life surfaced and became a top item on the national agenda. Health aside, Bruce was feeling in a particularly angry mood, given his conviction the year before on obscenity charges arising from his act. No stranger to substance abuse or promiscuity, and looking for some material he could ride back to the top, Bruce embraced the Kennedy story as his new cause. Not even a call from Bobby Kennedy, thanking him for his support but asking him to tone down his act, could get him to back off. Two days after the article broke, Bruce had a microphone and a New York audience:

How about that fucking JFK? And by fucking JFK, well, that’s exactly what I mean. This man, it turns out, is a complete fuck machine. Now, I know we’re all supposed to be shocked and appalled by the fact that the man has seen more poontang in his time in office than anybody I know will see in a lifetime. I’m not shocked, I’m in awe. Look, say what you will, but instead of the man screwing us, he’s out screwing Marilyn Monroe. This is progress folks. There is hope for democracy here.

Bruce went on to include some unkind remarks about Jackie Kennedy and found out that this was about the only line that even his audiences, who came expecting raunch and anger, would not let him cross. America loved her before and they felt sympathy for her now. She was off-limits.

Instead of making any public statement that might have implied she and her husband were now separated, Jacqueline Kennedy simply did what she had done during the first four and a half years in the White House. She quietly gathered up her things and her children and the support staff, and she left for the country. She would have had her press secretary Pamela Turnure explain it all away, except that it turned out that JFK had been having regular sexual relations with Turnure as well, and she had been given paid leave to find a new job. The young woman was hired by the office of Massachusetts Congressman Tip O’Neill and was ushered off to the relative safety of Capitol Hill. It was left to Jackie’s social secretary Liz Carpenter to explain that the First Lady’s absence was not that unusual.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson, sensing blood in the water, began raising his Washington profile, particularly hanging around the Senate, which was his right as the constitutional president of that body. What he was really doing, he told his own mistress, Madeline Brown, was “letting them know that this fox was in the henhouse.”

The Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger said that his office would reexamine the supposed suicide of Marilyn Monroe in light of the FBI files that were recently disclosed. He went to great lengths to state that he was not accusing the Kennedys of any foul play but was simply exercising the oversight that voters had trusted him to use when they elected him in 1964, more than two years after his predecessor had closed Monroe’s case.

Although many, if not most, Americans were appalled at Kennedy’s affairs and his treatment of Jackie, he was now something he had never been before — an underdog. For reasons that psychologists had a field day with, his problems actually increased his support among a prime demographic — young men eighteen to thirty-four. A significant number of these men actually found something to admire in a President who could sleep with that many women, get away with it for so long, still have a beautiful wife and run the country at the same time.

Within the first twenty-four hours, however, the political elites in Washington, D.C. began quietly asking about impeachment. It was as if Top Story had written the position paper that could serve as the basis for the charges, or articles.

Catch-25

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment did not exist yet. This created one of the most complex political equations ever seen in American history. One of the largest variables was Lyndon Johnson.

While the Kennedys’ first choice was for JFK to remain in office, their back-up position was to be able to pick his successor. Yet as things stood, if President Kennedy were to be impeached, that would mean Johnson would become the next President, an option completely unacceptable to John and Bobby Kennedy, who loathed him.

Johnson’s legal troubles made him vulnerable as well, but even if he could be quickly forced to resign, President Kennedy could not appoint anyone to take his place. Based on the Constitution as of 1965, if the Vice President’s office were to be left vacant for any reason, the position could not be filled until the next general election. Only when the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was ratified in 1969 were the terms of presidential succession finally clarified, allowing the President to appoint a new Vice President, subject to congressional approval.

This meant that if Johnson resigned and Kennedy were impeached, the next in line to assume the presidency would be the Speaker of the House. With the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, that would mean that the genial but conservative Gerald Ford would get to serve out Kennedy’s term.

The Republican hold on the House of Representatives meant, oddly enough, that the more a Democrat felt a Kennedy impeachment was possible, the more likely that he would want to keep Vice President Johnson in office, corrupt or not. Otherwise, Congress could hand the presidency to Ford and the Republicans. For this reason, the GOP had joined the drumbeat in Washington, D.C., predicting Johnson’s imminent political demise. They needed him out of office before they trained their fire on Kennedy.

It is a testament to just how much the Kennedy White House sought to block the ascension of Lyndon Johnson that they became fierce and uncompromising in the battle to force him out. Bobby had never liked anything about the man, but now he felt there was more to it. He actually began to believe that LBJ had foreknowledge of the Dallas assassination attempt. He and his brother were determined to prevent any possibility of Johnson becoming President, even if it meant handing the country’s leadership to the Republicans. This created an unholy alliance of shared interest, never formal or even discussed, between JFK and the leaders of the Republican party to oust LBJ.

Robert Kennedy called a meeting of his young Turks and gave them a new mission. Behind closed doors and zipped lips, RFK announced that LBJ must be forced out, the sooner the better. He needed to know everything that was knowable about Lyndon Johnson, particularly anything that might have implicated him in any prior knowledge of the attack in Dallas.

Even though Lyndon Johnson had to go and go soon, all the President’s men knew the corollary political reality that followed with it. John Kennedy, however flawed and damaged he might be, had to stay in office. They did not intend to hand over the nation's stewardship, either to Johnson or to a Republican President Ford, without a fight.

A Tale of Two Committees

The revelations about John Kennedy shot through the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President like a surge of electricity. Having already subpoenaed Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, the way was now open to also force the girlfriend he had shared with Kennedy to testify. The ostensible reason that Judith Campbell was sworn in to testify was to see if she had been told anything by Giancana that would implicate him in ordering the Dallas hit. Once she was under oath, however, asking her about her relationship with JFK was simply too tempting. She spent two entire days being grilled. The most damning information she delivered was her confirmation that Giancana felt he had been “double-crossed” by the Kennedys and had been overheard speaking to his lieutenants about how he wished JFK were dead.

America was at a boiling point. While the hearings were winding down, the Watts Riots in Los Angeles from August 11-17 provided a violent backdrop, leaving thirty-four dead, more than one thousand injured and close to four thousand arrested, and also caused more than $40 million in property damage.

As the long, hot summer claimed its victims on the West Coast, JCAAP continued its work on Capitol Hill. On August 19, two days after what rioters called “the rebellion” in Los Angeles had ended under the thumb of the National Guard, the committee issued its report on Dallas.

The Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President finds that the rifle attack on the motorcade of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 was probably the result of a conspiracy. The Committee believes on the basis of all available evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did, in fact, participate in the assassination attempt. The Committee also believes that Oswald was not the sole assassin and that evidence supports the existence of a second and, possibly, a third gunman.

Beyond that, the Committee was vague. It did not name names and expose whom it actually thought was a part of that conspiracy. In fact, it ruled out several possibilities, saying that it did not believe “on the basis of all available evidence” that the Soviet Union or the Cuban government was behind what had happened. Ample evidence had been found, however, to implicate “rogue elements” of the CIA, the Cuban exile community, and organized crime. It did not find sufficient reason to say that any single group had organized it, only that the conspiracy had probably drawn resources and manpower from a “linkage or connection” of these groups. In this way, it held the institutions responsible for not policing their own employees but not necessarily for planning the attack.

Of particular importance in the report’s conjecture was the “probability” that the assassination plot that had placed John Kennedy in its crosshairs had its origin in an assassination plot that had been intended for Fidel Castro. Under this scenario, the plot was redirected at Kennedy based on pent-up frustration with the President. The clear implication was that anti-Castro Cubans were integral to the well-planned attack on the Kennedy motorcade.

On August 23, 1965, the first Monday after the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President made its report public, the Republican Speaker of the House, Gerald Ford, held a news conference to announce that the Committee on the Judiciary in the House of Representatives would begin to consider impeachment charges against President Kennedy. Most Democrats made a show of halfheartedly accusing their Republican counterparts of playing politics and reminded them that impeachment was not inevitable as the GOP held control of the House by only a single vote. National Review editor William F. Buckley wrote a column in which he stated his opinion on the subject: “I should think a single vote would do the trick.”

The next day President John Kennedy gathered with his inner circle in the Oval Office to discuss strategy. “Maybe I have to go, but if I do,” he warned everyone, “those treasonous bastards are going with me.”

✪

Chapter 5:

Impeachment and Trial

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August 23, 1965 - February 25, 1966

Thinking about how our world would have been so different had President Kennedy's brilliant flame been extinguished on that bright and clear Dallas afternoon is a “what-if” that our scholars have been playing out for decades. They wonder if a President Lyndon Johnson would have pursued a war in Vietnam, what the success of the conspirators would have meant to America’s sense of itself, and whether Kennedy would have become a martyr in his death.

In the real world, however, even historians now consider the struggle between the Kennedys and their enemies to be the most shattering constitutional crisis our government has faced since the Civil War. The President fought back with everything he had. His adversaries spared nothing in return. In the end, the epic battle waged in the mid-1960s made it seem that JFK’s political survival was not the point anyway.

On an unusually muggy August day, Gerald Ford stood before reporters, sweating heavily in a jacket he refused to take off, and said that as Speaker of the House, he would not take a position on whether President Kennedy should remain in office unless the House Committee on the Judiciary agreed on the articles of impeachment. He would simply see to it that the process ran as smoothly as possible until it had run its course. As he put it, “America’s long, national nightmare since Dallas must come to an end one way or another.” Ford, a strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution, told Kennedy in a private phone conversation that he could see no other way than impeachment. No matter what the outcome, it would either legitimize the President’s second term or end it altogether.

As events unfolded during the march toward impeachment, even John Kennedy’s popularity could not hold off the blowback from his years of incautious behavior. The cascading revelations felt like a betrayal to most voters. Like Jackie Kennedy responding to her own marriage, the relationship with voters now felt like a sham. The question to be decided was whether or not the relationship could be saved.

Few would have enjoyed the resulting spectacle even if it had been unleashed in a vacuum where no attempt had been made on Kennedy’s life. As experienced in the shadow of that violence, everything seemed dirty and lethal at the same time. The curtain had been pulled back on anti-democratic plotters that would assassinate an American President as a matter of convenience, power or greed. Now it seemed as if the President might have unleashed some of these destructive forces on himself.

One result of Kennedy’s reckless behavior and all the arguments about it was confusion. Suddenly the ground under the debate about the attack on the President shifted to Kennedy himself. Shadowy conspiracies were difficult to understand and nearly impossible to prove. Affairs, sex scandals and drug-taking could be talked about by the common man and woman, and talk they did. The leaks of the FBI files accomplished exactly what the leakers had hoped. The subject was changed. It made no difference that it was a crime to gather some of this information or to leak it. Overnight, it seemed, there were so many potential crimes to discuss that the average person could hardly be blamed for throwing up his hands in frustration at the mess of it all.

John Kennedy is not the only president who has ever faced an impeachment by the House of Representatives and a trial in the United States Senate, but his story is surely the most tragic. Indeed, since the Kennedy case, impeachment has been threatened or acted upon with sufficient regularity (Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) that it seems more like a parliamentary vote of no confidence than the last-ditch constitutional remedy the Founding Fathers intended it to be. Each party, the Democrats and the Republicans, has embraced the process in what many now view as a partisan tit-for-tat.

In late 1965, however, it had been nearly a full century since the impeachment of any President of the United States had been seriously contemplated. Ironically, the story of how Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, had been kept in office by a single vote in his Senate trial was one of the stories that John Kennedy had written about in his Pulitzer-winning book, Profiles in Courage. Not a single person with a conscious memory of that earlier event, however, was even alive in the mid-1960s. Everything in the process felt like the first time.

The War Not at Home

Historians now seem to agree that the implosion of John Kennedy’s reputation shocked most Americans even more than the failure in Vietnam. Yet revisionist thinking also has it that seeing his power slipping away through the fall and winter of 1965-66, Kennedy stiffened his resolve to prevent the United States from becoming fully involved in a land war in Asia while he still had the chance.

Even as Kennedy’s efforts to save himself politically dissolved, so, too, did any chance to prop up the South Vietnamese government. He knew that his choices had narrowed. Having straddled the middle ground longer than he ever thought he would, JFK now realized he could either turn up the heat with a vast new commitment of American military power, or he could wind it down and let it end. There seemed to be no responsible choice in between.

So, even as the House, and then the Senate, debated what to do about the Kennedy presidency, the still-incumbent commander-in-chief decided the war in Vietnam must end. In a series of three executive orders, President Kennedy declared a halt to all aerial bombing of North Vietnam, forbade American military advisers from operating in active combat roles, and organized the U.S. forces in established military bases where they would plan their eventual return in six months’ time.

The Kennedy administration then asked the North Vietnamese for peace talks through diplomatic channels. The talks began, but the North’s military campaign continued. Kennedy’s withdrawal literally showed that the South Vietnamese forces had no real will to fight. It became only a matter of time, a deathwatch. The reorganization on the ground did not go smoothly. It was no secret that the Joint Chiefs felt this was a suicidal retreat and were slow to implement. One unnamed, high-ranking U.S. commander said, “We were hoping to run out the clock on him. Stall long enough for the bastard to get his ass thrown out of office, then cut a better deal with the next guy.”

Back in the United States, the public was deeply divided. A plurality actually favored withdrawal of forces, but favoring it in the abstract and watching it happen on the nightly news was something else. And the people who were opposed saw this as another example of why Kennedy had to go. In their view, he was simply too weak and too naïve to continue to serve as President of the United States.

By refusing to deepen American involvement in the war under his own authority as commander-in-chief, President Kennedy had practically dared Congress to demand that troops be sent. As it turned out, the majority of representatives and senators favored war only if the President would take the ultimate responsibility. Without the cover of his leadership, the hawks in Congress fell surprisingly silent. The unexpected gift of Kennedy's troubles may very well have been the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives in Southeast Asia.

In the end, the Vietnam situation did not gain the President any support, and it probably cost him some. He took the actions he did for practical reasons. He opposed widening the war, and he knew he could end it if he moved quickly. His presidential power was waning.

In February 1966, the South Vietnamese government fell to forces loyal to North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. The American withdrawal was underway simultaneously. The TV newscasts juxtaposed images of Viet Cong raising their flag over the old American embassy, against film showing U.S. soldiers cutting and running with their tanks and planes and helicopters. It was ruinous theater of the national mood, raising anger, and it was in the news along with the latest events from the Kennedy impeachment story.

Impeachment

Under the leadership of Speaker Ford, the House Committee on the Judiciary was encouraged to get the job done on the issue of impeachment before adjournment. That was originally scheduled for late October, but Ford said he would keep the House working until Christmas Eve, if necessary. Ford’s firewall was his determination that the fate of John F. Kennedy would be out of his House by 1966.

Impeachment, then, began with a ticking clock of approximately four months. That amount of time was considered short by virtually everyone but Ford, who remained adamant that JFK’s fate not derail the upcoming second session of the Eighty-Ninth Congress.

The Speaker further argued that the President’s fate was not a topic that should need great investigation, given the publicity to date, a statement that even members of his own party felt was simplistic and wrong. Yet it was Ford’s decision to make, and he had made it. Do whatever you feel is right, he seemed to be saying to the Congress, but do it fast.

The People’s Grand Jury

Most constitutional scholars consider the House Committee on the Judiciary, backed up by the full body of the House of Representatives, to be the equivalent of a grand jury. The lower body of the U.S. government is empowered to conduct official proceedings to investigate potential criminal conduct (i.e., treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors) and to determine whether criminal charges should be brought before the upper body (i.e., sent to the U.S. Senate for trial). As with a grand jury, the Judiciary Committee can compel the production of documents and command witnesses to appear and offer sworn testimony.

It is a common misconception that to impeach a President is to remove him from office. It only means that the House believes the charges are sufficient to generate a trial in the Senate. Only by approving at least one article of impeachment by a two-thirds vote can the Senate remove the President from office.

As for the case of President Kennedy, the House Committee on the Judiciary was authorized in the late summer of 1965 to consider the specifics and to gather and review the evidence. If deemed sufficient, the committee would write and debate proposed articles of impeachment. If the committee voted them down, that would be that. If committee members voted to send the articles to the floor of the House, a simple majority would impeach the President and send the matter to the United States Senate in January for a trial.

Naturally, it was not that simple. The mere act of considering a President’s impeachment can put the Congress and the executive branch into conflict and even trigger impeachable behavior that did not exist before impeachment was considered. The struggle over the recordings that were made by the White House, for example, became an issue debated by the Judiciary Committee as possibly justifying an article of impeachment.

House Politics

Since January 1965, the Republican party had controlled the House of Representatives by a single vote, 218-217, making their leader, Gerald Ford, the Speaker of the House. The Republicans also controlled the committee chairmanships. This became extremely important during the impeachment proceedings, because William Moore McCulloch, the Republican representing Ohio’s Fourth District, had replaced the previous chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York’s Tenth District.

Over the course of any congressional session, seats are commonly vacated by death, disability or personal issues that might cause an incumbent to resign while in office. This usually leads to a special election held within a few months, or the next general election, if that is feasible. Normally these elections have little importance other than being symbolic bellwethers of the electorate’s mood. The years 1965 and 1966 were anything but normal, though, given that House leadership teetered on a virtual tie between the parties.

On October 2, 1965, Edwin Edwards retained Louisiana’s Seventh District for the Democrats after the incumbent T. Ashton Thompson was killed in an automobile accident. This left the House still in GOP control, 218-217. Had Edwards lost, it would have put the Democrats behind by three votes.

However, falling right in the middle of the impeachment debate, in which the Republicans barely controlled the House of Representatives, was another election to be held on November 2, and it had the power to change history.

Ohio’s Seventh District had been Representative Clarence Brown’s since 1939. Brown died on August 23 in a Bethesda hospital, the same day that Gerald Ford declared he would support impeachment hearings. With only two months to campaign, Brown’s son, Clarence “Bud” Brown Jr., was set to run as a Republican against Democrat James Barry. If Barry could defeat the younger Brown, the Democrats would reverse the Republicans’ 218-217 majority in the House. Democrat John McCormack would become the Speaker, and Emanuel Celler would get back control of the Judiciary Committee. The Democrats poured money and volunteers into the campaign, hoping to score an upset win over the late incumbent’s son. In the end, though, Barry simply could not overcome Brown’s name familiarity in such a short campaign, and lost by a margin of 54-46 percent.

The House might still change leadership from Republicans back to Democrats in the future, but not in time to save the President of the United States, if his fate were to be decided along party lines.

Blackout

Republican Chairman William McCulloch called the House Committee on the Judiciary to order on September 15. Its first order of business was a decision not to allow its impeachment hearings or deliberations to be televised. The decision was on party lines, with McCulloch casting the deciding vote. The GOP, having been stung by the Kennedy charisma going back to his 1960 debates with Richard Nixon and his standout news conference performances, wanted to make sure that TV would not impact their work. Also, the spectacle of the JCAAP hearings was recent enough that it served to end the debate before it started.

Kennedy friend and lawyer Clark Clifford represented the President’s legal team in these proceedings. In 1960, Clifford was a member of Kennedy’s Committee on the Defense Establishment and was appointed in May 1961 to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which he was chairing when asked to handle the impeachment defense. Over the years, Clifford served frequently as an unofficial White House counsel and sometimes undertook short-term official duties. When the President asked him if he would have any problem leading the defense team, Clifford had answered, “Mr. President, I do not approve of much of what I have read lately, but I know that you have been a good President for this country, and I will gladly defend you on the basis of that record.” Even though Bobby had no choice but to recuse himself officially, he continued to remain his brother’s closest confidante, and worked in an unofficial capacity with Clifford from start to finish.

After settling the rules, the committee attempted to decide the scope of its investigation. Members seemed to focus their main concern on the following issues:

- Improper relationships that jeopardized the security of the United States or even the life of the President through reckless behavior.

- Undisclosed presidential medical conditions and treatments that could have affected the safety and security of the United States during times of crisis.

- Presidential approval and encouragement of extralegal activities of the CIA and the FBI.

In addition to these areas of interest, it was also up to committee members to seek all relevant testimony and evidence.

From a testimony point of view, it was decided to bring no woman before the committee simply on the basis of her having engaged in sexual relations with Kennedy, whether inside or outside the White House. Members also decided to bring no cases before the committee that had occurred before January 20, 1961, ruling out a great deal of what was in the FBI files. The decision did, however, leave in some difficult cases, including those of Ellen Rometsch, Judith Campell and prostitutes such as Suzy Chang, who were not U.S. citizens. Even Democrats on the committee were forced to reluctantly agree to investigate these cases.

Where Republicans and Democrats sparred the most was on the issue of the young women who were White House employees and were involved in relationships with the President. The laws in the 1960s were undefined about what constituted an improper workplace environment, and it seemed clear that none of these young women were physical threats to the President. All were known by the Secret Service agents on duty. Republicans wanted these women interviewed by counsel at the very least and got their way with their one-vote majority.

There was also the question of whether Kennedy had abused his presidential power by using Kenneth O’Donnell, David Powers or Evelyn Lincoln to procure or schedule the women involved in these sexual liaisons. All were fair game for compelled testimony, the committee ruled.

The medical condition of President Kennedy was another matter. There was no specific law to prevent a President from lying to the American people about his health, but if the President could be shown to have directed his personal physician to lie about his records, that would be another matter. There was also the issue of what drugs Kennedy was taking when, and whether or not they could have clouded his judgment at crucial times, such as during his meetings with Khrushchev or the Cuban Missile Crisis. All records were then subpoenaed. Dr. Janet Travell and Dr. Max Jacobson would be brought before the committee.

The third leg of potential charges was perhaps the trickiest of all. It involved the role of the President in overseas assassinations and coups in the Congo, Vietnam, Cuba and other countries. In some of these cases, if not most, the CIA had pushed for action that Kennedy had reluctantly agreed to, but as chief executive, the responsibility was his. Even FBI wiretaps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been approved because Hoover wanted them and the Kennedys had agreed in order to keep their own vulnerabilities secret.

Then there was the larger issue of which of these conceivable charges could have generated possible assassination plots against Kennedy. Clearly, sleeping with a mobster’s girlfriends could have triggered a reaction. Approving plots to kill Castro could likewise have triggered counter-plots to kill Kennedy.

William Foley, the general counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary, knew better than most that Ford’s deadline was crushing and nearly impossible to meet. He saw two possible solutions: The committee would have to narrow the focus early, and it would have to fight the White House for the presidential recordings of Oval Office conversations.

“I believed that the committee would have to pick and choose its battles carefully, deciding which charges were most likely to lead to an article of impeachment in advance, and then investigate,” said Foley, “rather than cast a wide net and see what we caught.” In other words, they would have to make full use of what the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President and the Warren Commission had learned, plus the journalistic output spawned by the FBI file leak, rather than start from scratch. The committee’s investigation would have to be supplementary and not primary, whenever possible.

Most importantly, thought Foley, committee members would have to get their hands on the White House recordings that Secret Service Special Agent Robert Bouck had disclosed before the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President. Chairman McCulloch agreed, and asked Foley and his lawyers to prepare for battle.

Tale of the Tapes

The White House was served with a subpoena requesting all recordings and responded that the request was too broad. The committee narrowed the request to a list of forty-five days’ worth of tapes and was told by the White House that it would not comply, based on the concept of executive privilege.

The battle was on. Chairman McCulloch met the press on the Capitol steps to complain, “If the President did not want Congress to hear what is on these recordings, he should not have made them in the first place. They are evidence, and we are prepared to fight for them.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case immediately, because of its importance to the nation. Once again, Chief Justice Earl Warren was in the middle of the President’s affairs. Once again, he refused to recuse himself.

For three days running, lawyers for the executive and legislative branches of the government made their arguments. The White House certainly had possession of the tapes, that much was clear, but having created them, the question could now legitimately be raised in a democracy as to who really owned them? Particularly when they were considered crucial in a showdown between the two branches. The justices were heavily involved, asking dozens of sharp questions.

In the end, the Court ruled 6-3 that the tapes must be turned over. Warren wrote the majority opinion:

Presidential power is not absolute, but proportionate, and must exist within the framework of three-branch government. Checks and balances are real, and the executive branch may not deny the legislative branch evidence without sharing direct cause. The simple claim of privilege is not sufficient.

On the afternoon of November 5, 1965, White House lawyer Clark Clifford informed Chairman McCulloch and General Counsel Foley that he had conducted his own review and found that the White House could not comply with the Supreme Court request. It was not because he did not recognize the ultimate authority of the Court or the committee, he said, but because the tapes apparently no longer existed.

While this conversation was taking place, New York was plunged into darkness, the result of a faulty power grid that threatened the entire East coast. Staff Director Bess E. Dick interrupted the meeting shortly after 5:30 p.m. with the news. It was best for everyone to head home to their families while they still could; the legal wrangling would have to wait until later. It's unlikely that anyone in the room missed the obvious metaphor: This crisis, too, was about to bring the entire system down, if the players were not careful.

As it turned out, power was restored by 7 a.m. the next day across most of the affected areas, and in Washington, D.C., the lights remained on throughout. By 9:30 a.m., Kennedy aide Dave Powers had received a second subpoena, asking him to return to the committee the very next morning. Powers had already testified on charges that he had procured prostitutes for President Kennedy and had used his authority to prevent the Secret Service from doing its due diligence in vetting their identities and examining purses for drugs or weapons.

During that testimony, Powers had exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to all questions that were asked of him. Earlier, Powers had made news by first refusing to testify at all, but he had changed his mind on the advice of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Now the attorney general had to discuss the situation with the President. “Where are these damned tapes, Bobby?” Kennedy had asked. He was informed that Powers had destroyed them. All of them. RFK had retrieved them all from their storage, sent them to Powers’ office, and asked him to begin reviewing them from the moment the committee had asked for them.

Reconstructing the scene in his 1974 book, Flashpoints, Robert Kennedy recalls his brother delivering the following words cautiously:

“Dave would never destroy those tapes on his own. We both know that.”

The attorney general chose his own words carefully. “I have just spoken to Dave, and it is his testimony that he took this action on his own volition in an obviously misguided attempt to protect the office of the presidency.”

“They’ll hold him in contempt. He’ll go to prison,” the President said. Jack Kennedy and Dave Powers had been friends going back to the first campaign for Congress in 1946.

“He knows,” Bobby said. “Under no circumstances should you contact him. My advice is that you must fire him immediately before he testifies tomorrow.”

Dave Powers was fired by the White House that afternoon. The next morning he went to Capitol Hill and appeared again before the House Committee on the Judiciary. Rather than take the Fifth Amendment again, he read the following statement:

On October 13, 1965, I removed all of the boxes containing the audio tapes recorded in the White House during the presidency of John Kennedy. I did so with authorization papers on which I forged all necessary signatures. I took this action completely on my own. No one told me to do this, and I specifically state that this action was not taken at the directive of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell, Clark Clifford, nor any other member of the White House staff. I drove these tapes myself to a location in Virginia and supervised their destruction by burning. While this may not be the wish of the committee nor President Kennedy, I have taken this action on my own and am solely responsible.

The Judiciary Committee responded with fury. All of their questions were met by Powers once again invoking the Fifth Amendment. Powers was held immediately in contempt. He was later indicted for lying to Congress and convicted. Powers was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $100,000.

This case has been hotly debated ever since. Many believe, as President Kennedy apparently did, that Powers would not have acted on his own. Yet he never spoke again on the subject, and his statement to the committee stands as his only comment. Many committee members felt that his actions seemed like prima facie evidence of criminality. West Virginia’s Arch Moore Jr. was most outspoken: “The only reason one man agrees to go to jail is to keep another man from going.”

The closest anyone ever came to a link to the White House was the admission by Kenny O’Donnell, who recalled that he had angrily said, “Somebody ought to burn those fucking tapes!” when the issue was first introduced. O’Donnell insisted, however, that he was not proposing a serious action but simply expressing his frustration at the process and how the tapes had become such a focus of the committee.

Yet the committee was instructed by its counsel that it could draw no conclusions about President Kennedy or the facts based on Powers’ action. It did, however, have an extremely negative impact on the mood of everyone serving.

President Kennedy addressed the issue. “I have never advocated the destruction of evidence on any matter that has come before me in this White House. Mr. Powers, who has been a longtime friend, says he committed this act on his own. I know him to be a truthful man, and I have to take him at his word.”

The Case for Impeachment

It has become an axiom of political scandal that the cover-up is more damning than the crime. But in the articles of impeachment drafted to strip John Kennedy of his office, alleged crime and cover-up were both amply cited. Certainly the House Committee on the Judiciary wrote up a varied menu of high crimes and misdemeanors for the Senate to choose from when deciding whether to truncate Kennedy’s term.

The first draft of these articles became known as the “kitchen sink” impeachment by Democrats, who wanted to characterize the litany as a Republican fishing expedition. But no one doubted their chilling, dark power when rendered in the formal language of impeachment. They began directly:

These articles of impeachment are exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors. Resolved, that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.

The charges were broken into three categories: abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. The high crimes and misdemeanors, screamed the New York Post headlines, were “Sex, Drugs, Murder!”

There it was. The stakes were instantly back at Dallas levels of hysteria. The average person knew that John Kennedy screwed up, but a lot of people clung to liking him anyway. Their opinion wasn’t the issue now. Congress would take over, and many of its representatives believed that the President was guilty of something that was probably impeachable if they were in the mood to see it that way.

In retrospect, the articles as drafted were overkill, sloppily constructed, overlapping and unequal in importance. Yet, underneath the verbiage lay a chilling reality for the White House. Based on the Constitution itself, if only a single article made it out of the Judiciary Committee and was approved by the entire House of Representatives and then agreed to by the Senate, President Kennedy would be out of a job.

Article One: Abuse of Power

This came to be known in common terminology as “the sex article.” What the charges covered, however, were the improper relationships that jeopardized the security of the United States or even the life of the President through reckless behavior.

The abuse of power charges were, by far, the ones with the greatest traction among the public. They specifically included misuse of the FBI, something that was ironic at best, given the fact that the impeachment itself had been caused by the illegal leaking of FBI files against the President and, in some cases, the illegal wiretapping of citizens by the FBI. Still, on at least one instance, the bugging of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the President had authorized the wiretapping. He had done it to stop Hoover from leaking the very same files he had eventually leaked to damage Kennedy, but that was hardly an excuse. His only alibi, such as it was, was that he had given his approval through the attorney general, acting on his behalf, and no record existed of their conversation. The President of the United States had plausible deniability.

Kennedy was also accused of the misuse of the Secret Service, another irony given the organization’s poor job performance in Dallas in November 1963. The charges, however, predated that event for the most part, referring to the fact that Kennedy had forced the agents entrusted with his safety to look the other way when women were brought to the White House. Beyond even that, when prostitutes were brought in, it was argued that the agents were being asked to ignore personal knowledge of a crime being committed.

In the months since Dallas, Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden had become close to JFK, spending double-shifts more often than not. When asked about the other agents, Bolden replied, “There were agents that day in Dallas, who would not trade their lives for you, sir. I’m damn sorry to say that.” Kennedy replied that Bolden couldn’t be as sorry saying it as he was to be hearing it.

Beneath his usual wry veneer, the President was alarmed to hear his suspicions confirmed about some of the agents charged with protecting his life. What Bolden was suggesting went beyond simple dereliction of duty; it bordered on treason. Kennedy cared too much for Bolden personally to put him on the spot by asking him to name names, but he must have been visibly shaken. The following evening, he was surprised when the agent approached him at the entrance to the Oval Office, offering a folded slip of paper with three names handwritten inside. “If you need me to make some kind of a formal statement,” Bolden told him, “I’d be willing to do so, sir.”

Kennedy looked over the list, then regarded his friend warmly. “I don't think that will be necessary, Agent Bolden. Thank you for this.”

In the coming weeks, one of the agents on Bolden’s list was transferred to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he was assigned to protect former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower at the farm where she lived with her husband. Two others were sent out of the country to work indefinitely on a currency investigation in the Philippines.

At the same time, the President could only sit back and watch as a divided House committee pondered its response to the charges against him. Two specific relationships formed the core of the issue of whether the President’s behavior put himself and, by extension, the nation at risk: Ellen Rometsch and Judith Campbell. One was an alleged East German spy, and the other was an alleged Mafia girlfriend. Kennedy’s best defense on these issues was the obvious one that guilt by association was not part of our judicial system. He could simply deny knowledge of their connections.

Any one of those cases, if deemed substantive by the committee, would have been sufficient to send an abuse of power article to the floor of the House. There were also two more articles to be considered.

Article Two: Obstruction of Justice

This became known as “the drugs article” because it dealt with undisclosed presidential medical conditions and treatments that could have affected the safety and security of the United States during times of crisis.

There were other counts on other matters, but this was the angle that held steady traction from the beginning. The President of the United States had serious ailments and was often taking powerful medications with serious side effects. Kennedy had taken an oath to perform the office of the presidency, “to the best of my ability.” Did that mean he should take any drug to boost his performance on the job no matter what the risk or side effect, or did it mean that he needed to be straight about his health issues and seek appropriate measures to avoid risking mood alteration and possible drug addiction?

The House of Representatives needed to decide if Kennedy’s medical treatment was a legitimate concern of the people and providing accurate details about the condition of his health was part of his oath. If it was, then the numerous times that the President had lied, covered-up, misled and hidden the truth, were attempts to stop the administration of justice and, thus, obstruction.

Both Dr. Travell and Dr. Jacobson had been compelled to testify about the drug cocktails they had personally administered to the President and First Lady. Both had also gone out of their way to prevent these ministrations from becoming part of the public record. Other medical experts had been brought in to testify about how such drug mixtures could have affected the President’s performance at crucial times. There was actual talk of calling Elvis Presley as a witness because he, too, had been a patient of Dr. Jacobson’s.

Article Two seemed to be a grab-bag of sins, some more serious than others, but all difficult to prove. They involved, in several cases, trying to assess the intent of the administration, for example, when it set up the Warren Commission. Was Kennedy’s appointment of that commission an attempt to delay the truth about Dallas, which the President would rather be kept quiet until after the 1964 election? Or, for another example, was the President’s testimony — or the testimony of his staff at his direction — incorrect or incomplete by design? These were difficult questions to answer, and certainly to prove. They demanded the interpretation of both intent and action.

The voters, however, knew what it meant to lie about your health. Most of them had done it at one time or another. Would they hold the President to a higher standard? Were his lies more significant? Enough to end his career?

Article Three: Contempt of Congress

This became known as “the murder article” because it involved presidential approval and encouragement of extralegal activities of the CIA that included alleged assassinations of foreign leaders. It was a supreme irony to blame this on John Kennedy, given his own close call in 1963, but it was a measure of the extreme times Americans were living through that it seemed to be just another thing that didn’t quite fit.

Kennedy stood accused of directly or indirectly through the Central Intelligence Agency targeting foreign leaders for death or coup. These targets included Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in January 1961; Prime Minister Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in May of 1961; and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in November of 1963. Those were the successful kills. There was also the matter of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a man both the CIA and the administration seem to have been bent on killing for years, though without success.

Incredibly, the CIA that had carried out these missions and pushed for them so strongly was now in a position to use them to hang Kennedy. Several key witnesses managed to make it sound like it was all the President’s idea. The bottom line still remained that Truman was right — the buck stopped on the President’s desk — and if Kennedy approved something, it was the same as if it were his idea.

The contempt of Congress interpretation had been agreed to because of the constitutional war powers that favor the action of the chief executive with congressional oversight and approval. By not consulting Congress before or after these actions, the thinking went, President Kennedy was preventing the Senate and the House from performing its constitutional duty and, thus, showing it contempt.

The article also contained a key count about the defiance of the committee’s subpoena by Dave Powers, who claimed to have destroyed certain documents and all of the Oval Office recordings by himself with no instruction from above. While hardly any member could believe this explanation as the truth, it was a far greater stretch to pin it directly on the President.

Coal for Christmas

On December 17, 1965, the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives decided all three articles of impeachment by a sharply partisan vote. The President’s defenders called the committee’s mission a “witch hunt,” while the GOP insisted that they were merely performing their constitutional duty.

Committee chairman William Moore McCulloch, the Republican representing Ohio’s Fourth District, said, “The office of President of the United States is the greatest position of responsibility in the history of the world. It demands respect, particularly from its occupant.”

Leading Democrat Emanuel Celler, from New York’s Tenth District, countered, “This man, John Kennedy, was shot at on the streets of an American city just two years ago. I will not vote to put him on trial while the traitors who plotted his murder walk free.”

Within each of the three articles, subsections had been deleted. There were thirty-four members of the committee, divided in favor of the GOP, 18-16. The abuse of power article was approved by the largest margin, 19-15. The obstruction of justice article and the contempt of Congress article were each approved 18-16.

On the night that his impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee finally came to a vote, President Kennedy watched the final debate in the White House residence with his brothers, Bobby and Teddy, and others from his inner circle. Even before it was over, the President assessed the situation wryly: “It looks like Santa’s bringing coal this Christmas,” he said.

With two seats vacant and headed for special elections in February, the debate in the full House of Representatives was acrimonious and partisan, lasting nearly three days. The vote came on December 22, with Christmas recess on everyone’s mind.

Speaker Gerald Ford ultimately agreed with the overwhelming majority of his Republican colleagues that it was his solemn duty to support the articles of impeachment. He tried to maintain his independence by voting against several of the specific counts, but, in the end, he made certain that all articles got sent to the U.S. Senate for trial. Ford’s counterpart, Minority Leader John McCormack, no real fan of the Kennedys, mounted a public show of support but refused to trade valuable political capital he would need in 1966 to save the President. In that regard, both Ford and McCormack were united in a desire to get the impeachment out of the House and into the Senate.

In the end, the House approved the abuse of power article 227-206, with three GOP members and seven Democrats breaking ranks. The House approved the Obstruction of Justice article, 219-214, but approved the contempt of Congress citation by the slimmest of margins, 217-216.

Not all of the charges under each article were approved but at least one was. All three had passed.

With that, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became only the second President — and the first in almost one hundred years — to face a legal trial in the Senate. Afterward, on a freezing afternoon, the President forced the media to gather on the lawn near the Rose Garden, where he offered no hint he would resign. The vote margins had been thin and sharply partisan, he pointed out. His GOP foes, he said coolly, should find a way in the Senate to craft a “reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate” deal to avoid trial.

With more than sixty House Democrats standing behind him, Kennedy vowed to serve “until the last hour of the last day of my term in 1969,” when he would legitimately turn power over to the next President. The tableau on the lawn had one clear message: The President would make a deal, but he’d never quit. Yet, he had reason to worry. A Gallup poll taken in the next twenty-four hours showed that after his impeachment, 43 percent of the country felt he should resign immediately, compared to just 45 percent who felt he should stay and fight.

After the Rose Garden freeze-out, President Kennedy, his aides and dozens of congressmen retired to the larger Cabinet room for hot chocolate. The atmosphere, it was said, was eerily giddy, with the death-be-not-proud bravado of an Irish wake. The Kennedys toasted to a battle in the Senate, a place where they felt JFK’s service for eight years would be implicitly acknowledged in a friendlier forum. The President stepped forward. “I would give anything,” he said, “to keep you from being in the position you were in today, and for me not to have acted in such a way as to put you there.” Of course, he had acted that way, and the war would soon rage to judge the consequences.

In mortal political peril, however, his team knew that the next order of business was to make certain that no Democrats — inside or outside Washington — called for his resignation. Starting the next morning, President Kennedy would begin to roll calls with Mrs. Lincoln, and would not stop until he had spoken to each and every one of the Senate Democrats who would now sit in judgment of him.

At the same time, the idea was to stake out a bargaining position for an eventual deal. To that end, Kennedy would also call his two Republican opponents, Richard Nixon from the 1960 election and Barry Goldwater from 1964. He did not expect their support, but he was hoping they would work with him to craft a compromise deal, allowing him to accept censure and a fine to resolve the case.

Congress adjourned on Tuesday, December 23, 1965. Every senator who went home for the recess knew that his constituents would have a lot to say about how to vote in the new year.

Failure to Launch

It is perhaps only a sad side-note to impeachment that the once-vaunted Lunar Exploration Treaty binding the United States and the Soviet Union to a joint moon mission never even came up for a vote in the United States Senate. Perhaps it was a sign of Kennedy’s declining influence and his upcoming trial, or the reality that Khrushchev finally appeared to be on his way out in the Soviet Union, or both.

Many senators explained the death of the treaty on practical grounds, saying it had taken so long to get around to it that the United States would now have to give up far too much by approving it. We were already winning the space race and the moon race in particular. Just last December, two Gemini capsules had docked in space. We could have astronauts walking on the moon by the summer of 1969 if we kept our eye on the ball. The Soviets, it was widely presumed, were nowhere close.

President Kennedy accepted this calmly. He knew when he came home with the idea that his generals would fight it to the end. He might have beaten them as he did with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When that passed the Senate in 1963, he was as politically muscular as he’d ever been, and it took every ounce of strength to pull it off. Now, he was fighting just to keep his job.

If America was going to the moon, it was going solo. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas, NASA was pouring plenty into the economy. If it wasn’t for his ongoing efforts to keep scandal at bay, Johnson would have been sitting pretty.

LBJ knew in his gut that his benefactor and nemesis John Kennedy was going to get fired by his constituents in the next year. That, he knew, would open the door for the realization of a lifetime dream, a Johnson presidency.

According to a plea bargain statement later made by Johnson associate Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson had only one goal now, and it consumed his every waking hour. He had to hang on long enough to outlast Kennedy. The Congress would never impeach John Kennedy and then go after him, too. The public would never stand for it. He would be safe, finally.

Go Away, LBJ

During the Christmas recess, everyone in the Kennedy administration knew they were in a fight for political survival. One would have to be in absolute denial not to realize that things could end badly. If they did, Lyndon Baines Johnson would take over as the President of the United States unless he could be forced out first. This is something that John and Robert Kennedy wanted to avoid with almost the same passion as they wanted to avoid conviction in a Senate trial.

Fortunately, the attorney general’s young Turks had done their job well. They had accumulated enough testimony and evidence to take Johnson down. They had also, incredibly, found a plausible trail of suspicion that put Johnson in the middle of the conspiracy. He was not, to their way of thinking, definitively the ringleader, but they believed he had knowledge of what was going to happen well in advance of Dallas and had done nothing to stop it. At the very least, he had let John Kennedy ride into an ambush.

The suspicious behavior of LBJ generated its own kind of evidence. There was a classic photo of Johnson slumping so low in his limousine’s seat that he disappears, and it was taken two seconds before shots were fired. His involvement in planning the trip was extreme, and he had interacted negatively on several security issues. Comments like the one made by oilman Clint Murchison that “Lyndon don’t get no more ready [to be president] than he is now” looked particularly suspicious when they turned up in an FBI wiretap.

Robert Kennedy came to Lyndon Johnson’s office on the morning of January 3, 1966 and laid out the situation. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whom LBJ had always claimed to like, assisted him. “We both know that you’ve been involved in dirty business, Lyndon — far worse than anything President Kennedy has ever contemplated,” said the AG, obviously relishing the moment. “There is no way that you are ever going to be President of the United States. I hope we are absolutely clear on that.”

Johnson was not clear, and so Katzenbach explained it further. His team of investigators had the Vice President on bribery, extortion, influence-peddling and probably murder. He rattled off names. Not just Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker, but Malcolm Wallace, Edward Clark, Henry Marshall and Clifton Carter. He mentioned John Kinser and LBJ’s own sister, Josefa. Each name contained the story of an illegal act that could manifest in Johnson’s imprisonment.

Johnson exploded with rage aimed at Bobby. “Your brother’s about to be yesterday’s news around here, and you come into my office like that?”

“You have blood on your hands, Lyndon,” responded Kennedy. He waved a sealed indictment, handed down from a grand jury, in front of Johnson. It named the Vice President as a co-conspirator in the death of his own friend, John Connally, and the attempted murder of the President. “Let me explain what happens next.” Bobby instructed Johnson to write out two confessions: one for blackmail and influence-peddling in both the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes cases, and another for complicity in the assassination attempt on JFK and the deaths of Connally, Tippit and Hill.

LBJ said he would do no such thing, and the bargaining began.

“Much as I hate to do this,” said the attorney general, “I am here to offer you a deal. You will accept it while I am here in your office, or you will not accept it, and I will see that these matters are all turned over to the courts, including your involvement in this Dallas debacle.”

Kennedy informed the Vice President that by writing his two confessions he could spare his family the shame he had brought on them, at least while he was alive. Only the first confession would be used against him by the Justice Department. LBJ would resign immediately, and he would plead to multiple charges of extortion and bribery. The other confession would be sealed until ten years after Johnson’s death.

Johnson did not accept this fate easily. He fought back in every way he knew how. Yet the longer he disputed the conclusion that he had no choice but to sign, the more he realized that it was better to go to prison for some hardball politics and a kickback here and there than it was to be the man who tried to bump off the President of the United States so he could take his job.

The Vice President changed his tone from threats to pleas. “Those men were serious, Bobby,” he said. “They’d have killed me.” Kennedy was surprised and a little exalted to see Johnson fighting back tears. He tried to bargain, asking the attorney general to push back the unsealing of the second confession until twenty-five years after his death. The attorney general did not budge. Then Johnson asked if the President would consider pardoning him.

“Lyndon, you know the President cannot do that, given the situation in the Senate. Most particularly, he has hard feelings toward you now, as you might imagine.” The attorney general did agree to use his office to influence local authorities in Texas to stand down on their own investigations, given Johnson’s plea bargain with federal authorities. Plus, he would see to it that LBJ would serve his time in a medium security facility in Texas, if that was his wish. That was the best he could do.

Kennedy said the Justice Department would need LBJ to testify against the other plotters. Johnson responded that if he did that, he would be dead. And if that was the price of the deal, then there would be no deal. They should charge him right then and there.

Within the hour, Kennedy and Katzenbach had the two confessions, and Johnson’s letter of resignation. He would not cooperate on the mechanics of the assassination plot, but at least he would never, ever be President.

Trial

The second session of the Eighty-Ninth Congress convened on January 10, 1966. The House of Representatives officially approved a group of managers, a dozen Republicans led by Wisconsin’s Melvin Laird, to take the impeachment case to the Senate. Some Democrats attempted to challenge the propriety of a lame duck House impeaching a President but found insufficient support.

By this time, Chief Justice Warren had spent the Christmas weeks boning up on rules and precedents. The trial was scheduled to begin in February, when the managers were to present the articles of impeachment to the full Senate. Before then, witnesses would be interviewed and evidence gathered, but there was little patience for too much investigation, given the scope of the JCAAP hearings and the House Judiciary Committee’s findings. Besides, that scope had been narrowed from nearly two dozen counts in the Committee’s first draft. Now there were just eight counts, still distributed over the three articles.

One profound difference was that the Senate, as opposed to the House, had decided that all proceedings, except for the final deliberations of the senators, would be public and broadcast on TV.

The Winter of Our Discontent

Although the dates do not perfectly line up with the seasons of the calendar, the nearly six months of intense drama in Washington, D.C. became known as the “winter of our discontent.” The phrase gained greatest traction when President Kennedy used it himself in a February 1, 1966 news conference, causing it to be immediately picked up by the press and the public, and applied retroactively to the constitutional crisis that culminated during the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966.

The nation was dealing with a great nor’easter blizzard that had unleashed fourteen inches of snow on Washington, D.C. from January 30 to 31, and up to two feet along much of the East coast. The weather had turned rapidly raw after the New Year, with snowdrifts forming and arctic air settling in and dropping temperatures into the teens.

President Kennedy had taken a question from Tom Wicker of the New York Times about the impact of the blizzard on transportation and the resulting effect on the economic recovery that everyone agreed was needed. Kennedy famously replied, “I’m just relieved, Tom, that the winter of our discontent you’re asking about is meteorological and not political.”

William Shakespeare coined the phrase, of course, in the first two lines of his play, Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” But it was author John Steinbeck who had introduced the phrase into common parlance by using it as the title of his last published novel. The book was a meditation on morality in America, and had been reviewed widely in the first year of the Kennedy administration as an exploration of the cultural malaise of the 1960s and its far-ranging implications: social, familial and personal. John Kennedy had read the book and liked it.

In any case, after an excellent briefing on how the storm’s intense, drifting snow would keep roads closed for several more days, Kennedy discussed the restoration of crippled transportation lines and the by-products of a food shortage and rationing. He was at his best — less wonkish than President Bill Clinton would be in the 1990s, yet competent and reassuring.

The next question came from Newsweek’s Karl Fleming, who picked up on Kennedy’s metaphor, baited the President with the idea that “January came in mild and left with this blizzard. Do you think that’s a metaphor for impeachment?”

Kennedy pointed out that starting the year as the first President to stand impeached by the House of Representatives since Andrew Johnson was hardly “mild” and, if it was to be considered as such, he would not be looking forward to the upcoming Senate trial, where he believed he would find sufficient support to remain in office.

The Century Club

During the winter of 1966, as the country prepared itself emotionally for their President’s bad behavior to be fully explored and perhaps severely punished, in the U.S. Senate, journalists and Beltway insiders began using the term Century Club to refer to that legislative body. The term had a double meaning. Its primary usage came from the idea that it was almost a full century ago that President Andrew Johnson was impeached and his case sent to the Senate for trial. The secondary usage referred to the cozy little club of one hundred (since Alaska made it fifty states times two senators in 1959) that would be deciding the President’s fate.

To begin the proceedings, each senator took the following oath:

I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, now pending, I will do impartial justice, according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.

The trial began in the manner of an ordinary criminal trial, with the defense and the prosecution each allowed to give an opening statement. Both sides then presented and cross-examined witnesses and could introduce evidence. Senators could submit written questions or motions to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whom the Constitution placed on call throughout the procedure to clarify any points of law. A simple majority vote could overturn any of Chief Justice Warren’s decisions on matters of evidence or procedure. Clark Clifford once again represented the President.

Republicans overplayed their cards when they introduced framed photos that had surfaced of President Kennedy frolicking naked in the Lincoln bedroom with two naked and masked women. The photos had apparently been moved secretly for framing to the Mickelson Gallery, where they were found by Senate investigators, who had been tipped off by an anonymous source. All members of the Senate were allowed to see these and other similar exhibits in a closed evidence room. In the end, this probably offended a few senators enough to stick with the President, but it was not a decisive moment, not at this stage of the deliberations.

Dallas on Trial Again

Realizing that they fought and lost the impeachment vote in the Judiciary Committee by arguing the facts, the President and the attorney general decided a change of tactics was needed. They had been stunned by the building chorus for the President to step down and spare the nation the trauma of a Senate trial that had the potential to embarrass the nation and, worse, to make public certain U.S. security procedures and private White House discussions. People wanted to see the entire mess go away.

Still, the President’s men decided they would fight in the Senate based on the big-picture assassination conspiracy, and attempt to make the vote about that, instead of the alleged crimes and misdemeanors the President may or may not have committed. They decided to go on the offensive yet again, as crusaders for justice and American principles.

The Kennedy brothers felt strongly that JFK’s best chance lay in the relationships he formed in the Senate in the 1950s. If the trial could be framed as a vote on the dangerous levels of power held by the nation’s intelligence community and military-industrial complex, they could win. They resolved to use the trial to do what the Warren Commission, JCAAP and the Oswald trial could not — shine an intense, unwavering light directly on the conspirators, and make them pay.

The longer John and Robert Kennedy fought the march to impeachment, the stronger their belief grew that history would record not the President’s personal failings and physical ailments, but instead would focus more on the profound menace to democracy that the conspiracy represented. That was the gamble they made.

New York Stake

Once again, the one-vote margin of control in the House of Representatives was up for grabs. On February 5, 1966, with two seats vacant, the GOP led the Democrats 217-216. That day, Democrats regained one seat, when Walter B. Jones won a special election in North Carolina’s First District. The House of Representatives was officially a 217-217 tie as a result, and would stay that way for three days.

On February 8, control of the House all came down to Republican Congressman John Lindsay’s seat in New York. If any Republican could be said to have a Kennedy’s looks and charisma, it was Lindsay, who had just used these natural advantages to get elected mayor of New York City. In the special congressional election to replace him, liberal Republican Theodore R. Kupferman was in a neck-and-neck race with liberal Democrat Orin Lehman. Under ordinary circumstances, both men would probably have voted the same on most issues. The main difference between them was that one of them would vote to organize with the GOP and the other with the Democrats.

Both parties threw everything they had into the New York race. For more than twenty years, it stood as the most expensive congressional campaign ever waged, adjusted for inflation, and featured television ad coverage that rivaled any presidential election. Both parties drafted their top vote-getters in the state to walk point. Governor Nelson Rockefeller campaigned nonstop for Kupferman, while Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating took turns doing the same for Lehman. The White House was silent at the request of the Democratic congressional committee.

As often happens in New York politics, fringe and third-party candidates can upset the mix, serving as game-changing anomalies. In this case, the wild-card was right-leaning journalist Jeffrey St. John of the Conservative Party. The pressure was so intense for St. John to throw his support to the Republican candidate, he literally checked into the Plaza Hotel under an assumed name to consider what to do. St. John somehow came down with food poisoning from room service (Republicans always blamed Democrats) and was not well enough to make any endorsement before the election. When the votes were in, Lehman had 47 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Kupferman and 7 percent for St. John. This tipped the House to the Democrats by the same margin Republicans had enjoyed all year, 218-217, making Massachusetts Congressman John McCormack the Speaker of the House by virtue of some undercooked chicken.

Seeing this in isolation, it is possible to say that while control of the House was a big deal for the two-party system in 1966, it had nothing to do with the political struggle being waged in the upper-house of the U.S. Senate. Yet, as it turned out, it had everything to do with it. The new Speaker of the House, John McCormack, was now in line to advance to the presidency instead of Gerald Ford if John Kennedy were to go, but only if the Democrats retained or expanded on their one-vote lead.

Clean-Slaters

The so-called “clean-slaters” were Democrats who, while personally loyal to President Kennedy, had reached the conclusion that only his removal from office could wipe the slate clean and allow the party to still compete in the next election. The rise of this group was a recognition that the White House strategy seemed to be weakening by the day. At one point, President Kennedy had hoped to defeat the articles with a majority vote. Eventually his team came to realize they were playing for a lesser victory, depriving Republicans of passing the articles by the two-thirds vote requirement and, thus, staying in office. But to achieve even that much, the ranks of the clean-slaters had to remain small.

Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) led a delegation of these political pragmatists to the White House. The group of Democratic senators were becoming vocal about the need for President Kennedy to step down so their party’s candidates would not be tarred in the upcoming midterm elections by the aftermath of an ugly Senate trial.

John Kennedy had argued with his advisers about even letting them come to visit. The media would cover it as an ultimatum. Bobby convinced him to hear them out on the theory that they might be bringing the outlines of a deal. Maybe the Senate could still be convinced to formally censure the President and allow him to remain in office.

The senators started the meeting over coffee in the Oval Office by agreeing with Kennedy’s stated position that the greatest crime had been done to the American nation by the forces that conspired to murder a sitting president. “We get a lot of mail here, senators,” said Kennedy, pointing to a pile of letters that had been arranged on a side table. “And most of it lately is from constituents who wonder how it works that someone tries to kill the President, but we put the target on trial.”

“What those evil men, those plotters with murder in their hearts, have done to their country can never be forgiven,” Morse agreed. In the end, though, Morse countered that the venality of the conspirators simply didn’t matter. They would be held accountable for their behavior but so, too, would Kennedy. The rule of law had to be maintained.

Morse, speaking from notes hammered out and agreed to in a caucus, stated that sufficient numbers of senators now felt they could no longer support JFK’s acquittal, given some of the blatant missteps made by the President and the team working for him.

Kennedy smiled, by all accounts. “Thank you, senator,” he said, “it’s always nice to know where the Senate stands on the issues of our day.” The President had heard nothing about a bargain, and nodded to his brother.

Bobby was blunt. “Senator Morse, if you have come to the White House simply to tell us we have lost your vote, I believe we could all have used our time more wisely. I had been led to believe that the censure option was still viable.”

Morse put aside his notes and shook his head. He did not address his answer to the attorney general but to the President. “With time, you will be seen as a whole man and, on that measure, you will do very well.” Morse paused, placed a paternal hand on JFK’s forearm, “We still need a clean slate, Mr. President.”

The End

The Long Count

On February 10, President Kennedy swam in the ninety-degree waters of the White House pool. When the President emerged this time, he was wearing trunks. Since the “Secret Life” story had broken the year before, there had been no more nude swimming, let alone in the company of White House interns with names like Fiddle and Faddle. While the President toweled off, Bobby Kennedy showed him a handwritten sheet of numbers and names, all sketched out, erased and redone again and again. Bobby watched his brother and waited.

“You certainly seem to have done your homework,” said the President, handing the paper back to his brother.

“Every way you can look at it.” The attorney general, always one to preempt one argument with his own, simply stated the one essential fact. “The numbers just aren’t there for us.”

For us. The President would later say he was touched by this phrasing. It would have been so easy for his younger brother to say “for you,” but he held back.

The two men, these brothers who had gained the political authority of the most powerful nation on Earth, were about to have it taken away. Still, their lives had been spared.

“You were always better at math than I was,” said Jack Kennedy, still managing a trace of a grin. Bobby noticed how old he looked, how tired.

“Jack, the math doesn’t get any simpler than this.”

“What if you’re wrong about some of these yes votes? They might not be as firm as you think they are,” said Jack Kennedy, knowing Bobby never missed his count. “We only need to turn two or three.”

Bobby shook his head and bit at his pencil. Jack could see in his eyes the cold, unforgiving finality of political reality. Both of them knew what had to be done. Bobby reached for the phone. “We’re going to need a secure line and then to dictate a letter.” The President asked the attorney general if perhaps Ted Sorenson should come in and work his magic. “It’s not that kind of letter,” said RFK.

Evelyn Lincoln stated that Robert Kennedy, referring to notes he had made about resignation letters for the encounter with Lyndon Johnson over a year ago, dictated the actual letter. President Kennedy stared out the window behind his desk, turned to suggest a few words, but mostly remained silent. After it was done, she typed it up at her desk, dabbing at her moistening eyes with Kleenex.

She gave it to the President first. Lincoln said later that he read it and pursed his lips, something she’d seen him do many times when he was experiencing a twinge of severe pain from his various conditions. Then he handed the document to his brother and said, “Getting out of Dallas was the easy part.”

That night, President Kennedy dismissed his staff early and spent the night alone in the White House Oval Office. Evelyn Lincoln stayed outside, refusing to leave him alone. Bobby contacted the White House Secret Service agent-in-charge and told him to assign extra agents to the President’s watch and to keep him updated hourly throughout the night. It was, as Bobby put it, “just in case.”

Closing arguments were made by Clark Clifford for President Kennedy. Melvin Laird and Leslie Arends spoke for the House, specifically the House Republicans.

During the non-televised, closed session, each senator had fifteen minutes to speak in the debate. Looming ahead were separate votes to be taken on each article. If a single one passed with a two-thirds majority, Kennedy would be convicted and, under Article Two, Section Four, of the Constitution, must step down. If the senators were feeling particularly harsh, they could take a further vote to bar Kennedy from future office.

Fall from Grace

If Dallas had come to be known as “the day JFK dodged a bullet,” then February 24, 1966 would become “the day JFK bit the bullet.”

The Senate was close to wrapping up the comments from individual senators. All that was left was a short wait and then instructions from Chief Justice Warren. The vote was scheduled for the next day.

At that moment, Senator Edward Kennedy approached the Senate leadership and spoke quietly with them. Soon he left the room. Within a half hour, all the seats in the Senate were taken by their elected occupants.

Although it was never photographed, the image of Senator Kennedy escorting his oldest brother, President Kennedy, into the Senate chambers was never forgotten by anyone who had seen it. Teddy opened the door, and JFK strode through it. There had been no formal announcement, nothing from the sergeant-at-arms introducing “the President of the United States,” as was the custom.

In this daring climax, President Kennedy stood at the lectern before one hundred members of the U.S. Senate, all of whom were extremely mindful that their own careers, too, would be in jeopardy in the next election. He began speaking without notes. Those who heard him said there was no hesitancy, no fumbling for words, no gathering of thoughts. In a stirring speech, Kennedy demanded the accountability of all the senators before him in the cause of preserving democracy. It was perhaps the most passionate speech of his career, and it came to be known as the “Finish What You Started” speech.

Having served in this body with many of you sitting here today in judgment of me, I know this political trauma carries a personal cost for all of you as well. Because your business will not be finished when I walk out of the Senate chamber tonight; it will just be beginning. For you all know that a coup has been attempted in this country to replace the legitimate elected authority. While the identities of the conspirators are not known to everyone, their treasonous activity is in plain sight for all to see. You must carry that serious burden forward, and see to it that this dark moment of history shall never be repeated. I wish you courage in that battle, and success. For while we are a divided nation, we are still a nation, one of laws that command me to leave office now, and command you to finish the job that has been started here.

At the end, President Kennedy said he would discuss the details of his resignation that night with “the American people who put me in this office, rather than now, with the members of this body who would ask me to leave it.” Because the Senate deliberations were closed, Kennedy was thus guaranteeing that history would never record a vote on the matter of his Senate trial, but would maintain a color TV archive of his final words. The bottom line was still that, within twenty-four hours, the country would be President John McCormack’s to run. The Speaker of the House was next in the line of succession, given that the nation had no Vice President with Johnson in jail.

The Kennedy brothers left the Senate chambers together and rode in the presidential limousine to the White House. There, President Kennedy prepared to address the nation from the same desk from which he had told them about the Cuban Missile Crisis three and a half years earlier. In a statement barely four minutes long, he revealed that he would tender his resignation, as the Constitution stipulated, to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, effective noon Friday, February 25. The speech is famous for this concluding statement that JFK supporters in a Boston bar dubbed the “White House Fuck-Off,” a crude name that, nonetheless, has always had more currency with the public than “the speech he made before he quit.”

While mistakes were made and have not been denied even today, it’s clear that two and a half years have taught us a great political lesson. There are many ways to assassinate a man, particularly in Washington. Considering the finality of the alternative to the resignation that I now offer, I accept this verdict gladly, and intend to start tomorrow behind a sail, and plot a new course for my life.

After the speech, Kennedy was driven by the Secret Service to the Georgetown apartment of Ben and Toni Bradlee. There he had dinner with his estranged wife, Jacqueline, and the Bradlees. When asked what they had discussed by reporters who had been waiting outside, Kennedy replied, “We talked about the children.” Observers of the scene said they’d never seen John Kennedy as visibly disturbed as he seemed at that moment.

The next day at 9 a.m., Kennedy gave a farewell talk to an East Room assembly of White House staff and selected dignitaries, including the entire Cabinet and Speaker John McCormack. Many eyes were on the seventy-five-year-old Speaker, a tall, thin, teetotaling Irishman, whose House leadership had been challenged repeatedly by unruly Democrats. He also had history with the Kennedy family. His favorite nephew, Edward McCormack Jr., had been defeated by the President’s brother, Edward Kennedy, in the 1962 Democratic senatorial primary.

While there was some concern from Robert Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell and others, that the occasion could descend into maudlin emotion, it instead turned out to be classic JFK. He shook hands, exchanged hugs and kisses, and smiled a lot. The most memorable moment came when he took Evelyn Lincoln aside, apologized for what he had put her through, asked for her forgiveness, and kissed her hand. When it was done, he signed the letter of resignation and handed it to Secretary Rusk. The nuclear codes were left in the care of Speaker McCormack.

The now-former President Kennedy then was escorted by his senator brother and his attorney general brother to the Marine One helicopter that flew the trio to Andrews Air Force Base, where Air Force One waited to take JFK to Palm Beach, Florida. Bobby had urgent matters to take care of at the Department of Justice, but Teddy announced that he needed a vacation from the Senate and asked John if he’d mind a little company. The President was surprised but said yes.

The ride in Air Force One began the reshuffling of the deck for the Kennedy brothers. While Jack and Bobby always remained close, forged by fire as their relationship had been, they needed a break. John Kennedy and Edward Kennedy began to spend more time together, something neither one of them had ever seen coming, let alone anyone else in the family.

Once the Kennedys were in the air, the White House staff began preparations for McCormack’s swearing in. More chairs were added for a larger crowd of invited guests to witness the oath as administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. President John McCormack addressed the nation shortly thereafter from a lectern in the East Room.

My fellow Americans, I am aware that the American people have not elected me President by their ballots, and so I ask you to guide me toward the justice and mercy and wisdom that this office demands. John Kennedy is a friend of mine; we come from the same state. History will judge President Kennedy, but I will not. Yet both he and I know that our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. The people have spoken through our constitutional process. Now, today, I humbly accept this great honor and will, as I have sworn today, protect this office to the best of my ability. God bless America.

With McCormack’s spare 112 words delivered, the new President met with the Cabinet, asked them all to stay on the job until he could determine what combination would work best to the advantage of the United States. President McCormack then took his daily nap. He was awake before his predecessor’s plane had touched down to his new life far from Washington.

✪

Chapter 6:

Life After

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Closing the Book

On March 16, 1966, President John McCormack asked for time on all three television networks. It was initially assumed that he wanted to address the American public about the situation near Palomares, Spain where a B-52 bomber had collided with a KC-135 jet tanker over Spain’s Mediterranean coast two months earlier. Three seventy-kiloton hydrogen bombs were found on land but one was lost in the nearby sea. Although none of the bombs was armed, their loss created an international incident as more than two thousand U.S. military personnel were on site decontaminating the area and more than thirty U.S. Navy vessels had been engaged in the search for the lost hydrogen weapon. It had been located the day before.

McCormack, however, had a bomb of another kind to drop. The new President had been relatively silent about the fate of John Kennedy since the transition but, as was later revealed, that was his public position. In private, he had apparently lost a lot of sleep over the matter.

He began his address by relaying how he had come to a decision that he felt was good for America, one that he had struggled with, seeking the advice of God and conscience about the right thing to do with respect to his predecessor, John Kennedy.

What has happened in this country over the past two and a half years is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must. There are no historic or legal precedents to which I can turn in this matter, none that precisely fit the circumstances of a private citizen who has resigned the presidency of the United States. But it is common knowledge that serious allegations and accusations hang like a sword over our former President's head, threatening his health as he tries to reshape his life, a great part of which was spent in the service of this country and by the mandate of its people.

With that, President McCormack granted the former president a full pardon for “all offenses against the United States that he, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, has committed, or may have committed” during his time in office. McCormack said he had not spoken with Kennedy, nor his representatives, and that he was unaware of any specific attempts to bring charges against Kennedy. Even so, accepting the pardon, McCormack argued, would be the admission of guilt that some Americans had demanded.

The simple fact is that a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society. During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.

McCormack knew this decision would be controversial, and because he had already lived a long life with a full career, he concluded, “In order for this decision to be considered in the least political environment possible, I have resolved to end my service as President on January 1st, 1969 and not to seek the nomination of my party for a second term.”

Later, acting as the lawyer for former President Kennedy, Clark Clifford accepted the pardon. Asked if this meant the public could assume Kennedy was admitting guilt on any of the potential charges he might face, Clifford responded, “Former President Kennedy agrees with President McCormack that justice delayed is justice denied and has instructed me to end this chapter for both himself and the nation at large.”

Justice Swerved

What is most surprising about the constitutional crisis of the Kennedy years is how few people actually went to jail, given the magnitude of the original crime that began it.

Clearly, even though the assassination attempt failed to kill President Kennedy, it had been constructed with a post-Dallas cover-up in mind and those plans had still been implemented. During the twilight war waged in the background of the 1964 election, forensic evidence was destroyed, documents shredded, and witnesses silenced through bribery or murder. Prosecutors who faced the standard of overcoming reasonable doubt often found themselves simply unable to imagine convincing a jury of something they knew in their bones was true.

The irony, in retrospect, was that the intended victim of the crime, John Kennedy, was made to suffer such a humbling, public punishment in the immediate aftermath. Even so, over the years, others were punished as well. Some went to prison.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

While John Kennedy received a pardon from President McCormack, Lyndon Johnson did not. His plea deal with the Justice Department eventually derailed all continuing investigations, in both Washington, D.C. and Texas. He grumbled to Lady Bird, “They’ve turned me into Aaron Fucking Burr.” On May 13, 1966, Lyndon Baines Johnson surrendered himself to authorities of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Texarkana, just 175 miles east of Dallas, Texas, where his most serious crime had been committed, and began serving his ten-year sentence.

Johnson immediately unleashed the same skills he had honed on U.S. senators while running the United States Senate. Soon the inmates he served with knew him as “Lyndon,” and he became extremely popular. The warden stated, “All issues here end up in Lyndon’s cell before they get to my office.” LBJ, it turned out, was a born deal-maker. If he couldn’t make them in the congress or the White House, the prison yard would serve just fine. He is widely credited with improving the quality of food served to inmates when he began a hunger strike to denounce the injustice of his own preferential prison menu, stating, “I won’t eat another bite until everyone here gets the same square meal they give me.” His hunger strike was ended with Texas steak and shared with every member of the penitentiary. He died in prison at age 64, on January 22, 1973.

The Conspirators

An exact identification of all the conspirators and participants in the Dallas ambush has never been fully accomplished. It has become something of a national parlor game, full of speculation. While shadowy, some definition has emerged with time.

First, it is generally accepted that Lee Harvey Oswald was aware of and recruited into the conspiracy, although his death before full evidence could be presented at his trial means we will never know for certain if he was an actual member of a shooting team or “just a patsy,” as he had maintained. We do know that Corsican mobster Lucien Sarti was convicted of being Oswald’s backup, with or without Oswald’s knowledge. A jury said in 1976 that Sarti, dressed in a Dallas police uniform, had fired several of the bullets that hit the Kennedy motorcade from the grassy knoll area behind the picket fence.

We also know that the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bill Harvey was convicted of having recruited Sarti and others to take part in the plot. Actual CIA planning was never shown, however, and Harvey has always contended that he acted as a classic rogue element within the agency. Harvey’s boss, James Angleton, was a constant suspect. He denied any involvement and no prosecutor ever managed to mount a case against him.

U.S.-based members of organized crime also were under suspicion, but none ever made it to court. Johnny Roselli, Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana and Carlos Marcello all were, to one degree or another, believed to have participated in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and suspected of transferring that working relationship to targeting John Kennedy. Active cases existed against Roselli and Marcello, who were both viciously murdered before charges could be filed. Trafficante and Giancana also died mysteriously. Prosecutors leaned heavily on Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby to testify. Two days after he met with them, he died in a car accident.

Federal prosecutors mounted a case against Antonio Veciana, the leader of the anti-Castro group Alpha 66. The jury found him not guilty. Even though the majority of jurors believed he had been involved, they simply felt the government had not proven its case.

Texas oilman Clint Murchison also was taken to court and, as with Veciana, the jury came away loathing him as a person and acquitting him as a conspirator.

And so it went. Trial and error.

Today, it is generally believed that the main plotters escaped punishment because they had planned carefully, never stating explicitly what they wanted or expected. The men who carried out their wishes either managed to stay silent or were silenced by violent means. Over and over, men were found to be victims of shocking suicides, or robbery-turned-homicides. In some cases, particularly with some of the Mafia leaders, the deaths were not mysterious at all. They were outright murders, designed to send a message not to talk, a message that was heard.

In the end, there was no doubt that a conspiracy had led to the ambush in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. There were two and possibly three teams in Dealey Plaza that fired as many as seven shots. The plot involved Texas oil money that hired both foreign and domestic sharpshooters who were managed by CIA rogue agents working with organized crime leaders in concert with anti-Castro Cubans. It was as complicated as it sounds, wildly improbable, and yet it happened.

David Powers

A continuing source of pain and guilt to the former President was the incarceration of his great friend Dave Powers at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Norfolk. Powers had received an eight-year prison sentence for his role in disposing of the White House tapes and charges of interfering with the authority of the Secret Service to perform its duty to protect the President of the United States. The relatively spacious and campus-like atmosphere and architecture of MCI-Norfolk permitted a form of “community life” that was generally not available at other penal institutions of the time.

Kennedy knew that even though he had not asked Powers to destroy the tapes or to specifically thwart the Secret Service by bringing women into the White House, those acts had, indeed, been performed to his benefit. Kennedy visited Powers once a month, every month, from the time he left office until the time Powers was given early release in August of 1970. The two men were allowed to visit in private on the grounds and to smoke cigars together. After he was granted his freedom, Powers told friends that his privileges involved Scotch from a flask first used by Joseph Kennedy during the days of Prohibition, something that has always been officially denied.

Aftermath

Former President Kennedy moved his base of operations to the family compound in Palm Beach, Florida, and started his new life. He joked to friends that his situation proved to what extremes a man might go to escape the harsh winters of Washington, D.C. He stayed in Florida through the spring of 1966, living as a virtual recluse.

At the President’s request, his housemate was Paul “Red” Fay Jr., who had served with JFK going back to their PT boat days in World War II and continuing through his administration. Fay took a room in a separate wing of the house and was a constant companion. Because Kennedy could not venture into town without photographers following in great abundance, it was Fay who, along with a housekeeper, kept the place running. Evelyn Lincoln made occasional visits to work personally with Kennedy, although she spent most days at an office maintained by the Kennedy family in Washington, D.C.

Senator George Smathers often saw Kennedy when he was in his home state of Florida as well. Smathers, Kennedy and Fay made several famous nighttime visits into town, but none of them ever provided a photographer with a single picture of the ex-President and a female. The trio provided a disappointing guys’ night out to the nation’s curious. Where JFK’s buddies had once enabled his lifestyle, they now went out of their way to keep him from it. Kennedy took it all in stride, admitting to his friends that he had enough women in his life for all of them, and that as a military man, he knew when it was time to stand down.

The Ex-President and the Ex-First Lady

John Kennedy had left Washington, D.C. a President who was separated from his wife and landed in Florida as a Catholic trying to avoid a messy divorce. For more than a year, there remained avid interest in where the situation stood between Jackie and him. It was a source of endless speculation and interest from the American public on the part of both friend and foe.

During this time, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to New York City with the children and enrolled them in private school. She rarely saw the former President when Caroline and John Jr. were handed off. It was all done through family members or other intermediaries. The tables had clearly turned. She had several rumored affairs. He minded his own business. Even when she was seen in public on the arm of another man, it was always explained that the gentleman was acting as an escort only.

In May of 1967, both Jack and Jackie were seen in a red convertible Ford Mustang in Cape Cod just before tourist season. By the summer, Jackie and the kids had moved back into the Hyannis Port home (she loathed the Palm Beach house) with this complex man, who both infuriated and enchanted her. The divorce papers were withdrawn as quietly as possible, given the inflamed tempers of the times and the heightened public interest.

Politics Continue

President McCormack kept his promise to be only a caretaker President and did not seek reelection in 1968. He turned seventy-seven that year, and most voters appreciated his discretion. Instead of curtailing partisan politics, however, his announcement had the opposite effect. From the moment President McCormack took office, it seemed, he was a lame duck, and politicians by the droves in both parties began floating one trial balloon after another.

There was serious talk of Bobby Kennedy running in 1968, but he chose to step back from such an emotionally overwrought race. He accepted a teaching position with Harvard Law School, where his courses were standing room only on everything from the legalities of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the appropriate legal course to pursue with regard to the conspirators who targeted his brother. (He felt the death penalty would be too harsh and believed they should spend as much time in prison as possible in order to consider their treasonous behavior.)

John Kennedy’s 1960 nemesis, former Vice President Richard Nixon, took the Republican nomination that year, holding off a strong challenge from New York’s liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller. With Lyndon Johnson and both Kennedys out of the running for the Democrats, and Vietnam contained as an issue, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Ed Muskie of Maine fought it out with a number of “favorite sons” holding on to blocks of votes, hoping to be kingmakers. Muskie took the nomination on a third ballot, when Humphrey threw his support behind him. None of the competition mattered in the end, as Nixon beat Muskie by a comfortable margin and returned the White House to Republican rule.

In 1969, former President Kennedy began a national book tour to promote what his publishers had hoped would be an autobiography but instead had become a call to action for Americans to retake control of their government. Just Courage — as the book was titled — led to a national reevaluation of his time in office, with sides being taken once again. The growing conservative movement focused on Kennedy’s transgressions, and the liberal community said JFK’s behavior simply could not be compared to the venal treason of the conspirators. His support, particularly among women, had dropped precipitously, but not enough to prevent his book from becoming the year’s best seller.

Although it took as much brokering as the Kennedy-Khrushchev Summit of 1965, eventually President Richard Nixon invited John Kennedy to the White House in November of 1969 to greet the astronauts who had returned from the moon the past July. At the time, Nixon had gone to see the astronauts in their isolation quarters, where they had been placed to avoid lunar contamination. He had invited them to the White House after they completed a global goodwill tour on behalf of the United States.

The shadow that haunted Richard Nixon that summer and fall looked like his old rival John Kennedy, the man who had first challenged the United States to send a man to the Moon before the 1960s were over. Nixon’s own advisers fretted that their boss might look like he was trying to take credit for something that wasn’t his, particularly given that he had been in office less than a year. It only took some impertinent questions from some Democratic-leaning reporters to push them into the photo op of the decade.

The photo of an awkwardly smiling Neil Armstrong flanked by former President John Kennedy and current President Richard Nixon became almost as famous as the one with Kennedy and the Beatles. The odd men out, of course, were astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, both cropped from the photo by circumstance and artistic design. As JFK left the White House that day, he winked to Kenneth O’Donnell, who had accompanied him to their “old stomping grounds,” and said, “I still got it.” John Kennedy had begun the decade with his New Frontier and had left the decade with his flag firmly planted on the lunar surface.

That same summer, on July 18, 1969, a young political intern named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned under mysterious circumstances at a party Senator Edward Kennedy attended on Chappaquiddick, off the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard. No charges were filed, but Teddy’s excuse, that he was too inebriated to drive and thus could not have been at the wheel of the car, had most people convinced the night was not among his finest. The police report stated that a Kennedy cousin, Joseph “Joe” Gargan, Jr., was the driver. An inquest into the incident failed to lead to charges in the case, but it left a lingering suspicion about Teddy’s own behavior just over a year before he would face the voters in his reelection bid.

In 1970, Teddy surprised no one when he announced he would not be seeking reelection for a second Senate term. He told his close friends that he was following his brother Jack’s example of leaving to avoid being a distraction from the important business facing the nation. At the news conference, however, the youngest Kennedy brother smiled and said he intended to serve as his brother Jack’s chief of staff.

In a precedent-smashing, mind-blowing turn of events, the supposedly disgraced and humiliated ex-President was going to run for his old Senate job in his home state. The world simply could not believe this was happening. Most loved the move, particularly after they heard JFK’s explanation, which he laid out in private more than once. “It’s the biggest finger I can give the sons-of-bitches,” said the former President. “I’m still standing, and they know I know who they are.”

The legendary Kennedy self-deprecating humor was called into action again when reporters asked if it wasn’t wrong to act like a Senate seat could just be handed from one brother to another. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” warned JFK. “So far, Teddy is all talk.”

End of an Era

In November of 1970, the eldest still-living Kennedy brother was elected in a landslide by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (defeating Josiah Spaulding) and became, once again, Senator John F. Kennedy. He was welcomed back to the U.S. Senate in January 1971 by a crowd that mostly contained the same names and faces as the crowd that came this close to voting him out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors five years earlier. He became the most sought-after guest in the Senate cloak room and used his position to push aggressively on the issue of nuclear arms reduction treaties.

In his first years as a junior senator, from 1953 to 1960, the younger John Kennedy seemed to most to be a man in a hurry to get someplace else. The second time around, however, from 1971 to 1977, Kennedy was a man at peace with who he was and where he was. By all accounts, he was a far superior representative of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in this twilight of his career.

Jack and Teddy became the new Kennedy power team. Edward Kennedy had never wanted anything more than to be trusted by John Kennedy to be his number two, a position that had seemed impossible to attain during the JFK presidency. But Bobby was now finding his own footing. He had served Jack nobly, loyally and passionately, and he was spent. He retreated into academia and practiced politics as an observer and not a participant whenever possible.

Together with Jacqueline Kennedy, former President Kennedy moved back to a Georgetown home just three blocks from the one he lived in back in the 1950s. Friends noticed that they spent far more time together in the 1970s than they had when they were supposedly living in harmony in the White House.

They fell into old routines like having breakfast together while each read something different, occasionally interrupting to point out an item of interest. To the end of his days, John Kennedy found reading the New York Times a great diversion, telling his brother Robert, “The most goddamn frustrating thing is, I still read this crap and it’s not even about me anymore.” JFK, however, refused to read Top Story, preferring Time for his newsweekly. The magazine had selected JFK as its “Man of the Year” twice — once in 1962 and again in 1966 — an honor commensurate with his fall from grace.

The former First Couple did not go out much, but when they did, they preferred a dinner party with old friends to a social engagement at some large Washington, D.C. event. Those always came stocked with photographers whose editors had told them to come back with Kennedy photos or not to bother coming back at all. Jack and Jackie were still the toast of the town, or at least the most interesting couple on the guest list.

The Kennedy family managed to hang together more closely, too. Jackie became more comfortable with the clan gatherings she had formerly despised and even played touch football with the boys once or twice. Jack, Bobby and Teddy established an easy familiarity and comfort that had eluded them in the pressure cooker of the White House. Watching President McCormack and then President Nixon and commenting was so much easier and carried far less personal risk.

Even the haters of the Kennedys seemed to take a step back. They were still hated, of course, by the extreme right, but they were not considered an immediate threat to the safety of the nation. In later years, Robert Kennedy confessed that this was his motivation in not pursuing a political career of his own. He had lived through his brother’s brush with martyrdom and had resolved that, however it turned out, he was through. In actual fact, all three of the Kennedy brothers — John, Robert and Edward — had taken a private family oath to never seek the presidency. They agreed to be happy without it, and besides the occasional twinge of regret that comes from knowing one of them could probably have defeated the existing candidates of any particular year, they seemed to accept the decision with great high spirits.

For nearly six years, then, John Kennedy lived a life that he enjoyed immensely. He was able to watch his children grow up, to fall back in love (or, as doubters maintained, to fall in love for the first time) with Jackie, and to practice club politics in the United States Senate with his little brother Ted, who seemed to be naturally drawn to the rhythm and mood of the congressional lifestyle. There were family gatherings, sailing trips, old friends and a true appreciation for what it meant to be alive, something that only a man who has nearly been killed can ever truly experience.

In 1975, the former President’s health began to fail. Whether it was the long-term grinding down of his Addison’s disease or the years of drug abuse to combat his various infirmities, he began to suffer one setback after another. Even so, after years of masking pain and disability, he was able to keep all but those closest to him unaware that he was dying.

In 1976, John Kennedy announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection, just as Edward had done six years earlier. But Teddy did not step in to try to reclaim the so-called “Kennedy seat,” because he had come to believe the voters might hand him the first defeat in an election that the Kennedys had ever suffered, a distinction that he did not want.

In presidential politics, John Kennedy even managed to stage a series of primary appearances with the young governor of California, Jerry Brown, the son of the man who had defeated Richard Nixon for the same office in 1962. His endorsement was sufficient to derail the candidacy of little-known Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. The general election of that year came down to a choice between two California governors — Jerry Brown for the Democrats and Ronald Reagan for the Republicans. Reagan defeated his Golden State successor, a rebuke that hurt Kennedy as much as Brown. JFK knew he would not see another presidential election, while Brown knew he had another shot in 1980 for a rematch.

In the early summer of 1977, having celebrated his sixtieth birthday only a month earlier, John F. Kennedy died of heart failure. He was sailing with numerous members of the Kennedy clan on a hot summer afternoon and complained of indigestion. They came in early; Kennedy skipped dinner and went to bed. “Leave the light on,” he said to Jackie as his wife kissed him goodnight. He passed away in his sleep.

In 1978, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote her own national bestseller, Leave the Light On. It detailed her life with John Kennedy in very personal terms and tried to reconcile the complex feelings she had about him as a leader, father and husband. She worked in the New York publishing industry until her own death in 1994.

Whodunit?

To the extent that the Kennedy assassination attempt was ever “solved,” it occurred on January 23, 1983, the day the confession of Lyndon Johnson was finally unsealed, ten years after his death. In the handwritten page, LBJ had stated, “To my eternal shame, I was aware of and may have indirectly encouraged the irresponsible actions of others to make an attempt on the life of President John Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.” He concluded dramatically, “May God have mercy on my soul. Lyndon Baines Johnson.” Critics of the way the confession was handled have argued that LBJ should have been forced to turn evidence against others, particularly Clint Murchison, something he had steadfastly resisted doing, saying that if he complied, his life in prison anywhere in the United States “wouldn’t be worth the ass-hair on my beagles.” In national polls taken since that day, LBJ has consistently placed at the top of the least liked politicians in American history.

That history can pivot in an instant has been made crystal clear by the case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He had come so close to losing his life in Dallas. Had that happened, it is more than likely he would have become an instant martyr, and his many sins would have remained unknown. Lyndon Johnson, rather than being seen as one of the men who let the ambush happen, would have become President Lyndon Johnson, and all the charges and investigations involving him would likely have been forgotten. After all, the nation would have just suffered the death of a popular President; it might have been too much to bear to see Johnson impeached.

With a Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office instead of a federal prison, the United States might have committed its blood and treasure to a losing cause in Vietnam. The 1960s might have been even more revolutionary than they were. Anything could have happened.

Instead, Lyndon Johnson is remembered today as a corrupt player of rough-and-tumble Texas politics who ended his life in jail when he confessed, more or less, that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination plot. If he was not a leader of the conspiracy, he was still its highest ranking member.

Strangelove’s Identity Revealed

On Memorial Day in 2005, Strangelove’s identity, something that had become a national guessing game during and after the constitutional crisis, was finally revealed. The FBI’s Mark Felt was the source for Altman and Berkowitz. He was close friends with Hoover’s far closer friend, Clyde Tolson. Felt worked for Tolson since 1964 as the assistant director for the bureau’s training division. In coming out as the anonymous source, Felt talked about the emotional cost of his actions in 1965.

I have never been proud of my role in leaking the Kennedy papers. At the time I rationalized that I was acting on behalf of Director Hoover, which I was, but I never asked the questions about what was in these files, how the information had been gathered, and whether it was appropriate to use it as a destructive force. I simply did my job as I was instructed by Tolson. President Kennedy made a lot of mistakes that these papers describe in detail, but he was the American people’s elected President. Yet men in our own government tried to execute him, and then I was their assassin when it came to his character.

Felt managed to elude Altman or Berkowitz ever making his identity on the streets of Washington, D.C. by accepting a posting in Los Angeles before he leaked even the first document. He came forward near the fortieth anniversary of the Ali-Liston rematch and the “document dump.” Fighting pancreatic cancer, he said, “If I see President Kennedy wherever I’m going next, I want him to know what I’m doing now, and understand that the shame is mine.”

Another Torch Is Passed

While Jack, Bobby and Teddy had agreed informally that none of them should pursue the presidency, pressure developed to see that at least one of John Kennedy’s children picked up his standard. Caroline was oldest, but she lacked the drive and ambition for a public life and, being a woman in those days, could realistically see that her chance of being elected President of the United States was small.

The same could not be said of the former President’s son, John Kennedy Jr. The nation had fallen in love with him as a little boy hiding under his father’s desk. He had celebrated his third birthday just three days after the ambush in Dallas. When his father passed away, John Jr. was just sixteen years old.

As he grew into young manhood, John Kennedy Jr. seemed to exhibit his father’s gene for risky behavior, but times were different and he was not married. In the mid-’90s, however, he entered into a relationship that changed his life when he began dating Princess Diana of Great Britain. She was already well on her way out of favor with the Royal family. At first, she and John tried to keep their relationship secret, but that turned out to be impossible for the two young celebrities.

Their celebrity, however, transcended anything that Hollywood could confer. He was the son of the charismatic thirty-fifth President, and she was the blonde commoner who became a fairy-tale princess. Together they were explosive, both personally and publicly. And yet, for reasons that can never be fully understood, it worked. They each knew what it was like to be famous because of the fame of someone else.

They wanted to date other people and did, off and on. JFK Jr. almost married former model and fashion-industry saleswoman Carolyn Bessette, but backed away at the last moment, literally breaking off an engagement two weeks before the ceremony. Diana nearly wed film producer Dodi Fayed, the son of an Egyptian billionaire. Yet by 1999, they were back together and by the end of the year they were married to each other. Some commentators believed that John had married a woman who reminded him of his mother, a classic beauty with intellectual passions of her own and only a passing tolerance for the formality of politics. “My parents stayed together,” he said. “It was hard, hard work, particularly for my mother. But seeing their final success, that made me believe that Diana and I could work out anything, and we have.”

The rest of their narrative. as they became the darlings of two continents, could easily fill a Top Story special edition. Diana campaigned with John when he ran for United States senator in New York in the 2000 election, where voters gave him a victory with an incredible 63 percent of the vote.

Senator John Kennedy Jr. was reelected in 2006 and 2012. This year, 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his father’s near murder in Dallas, Texas, he is being talked about as the odds-on favorite to win his party’s nomination for President in 2016. The nation has never had a First Lady from another country, but there is nothing to prevent it.

Asked about his feelings on the eve of this anniversary of the event that led to his father’s political undoing, Senator Kennedy said, “My father was my hero when he was alive, and now that he’s gone my feelings in that regard have only deepened. We were all lucky to know him.”

The Unmaking of the President

Had John F. Kennedy died from the bullets fired by his would-be assassins on November 22, 1963, it is possible his reputation today would still burn brightly. Yet in a preternatural display of anticipation, lightning reflexes and bravery, Secret Service agent Clint Hill sacrificed his life to ensure the President of the United States would escape with only a few scratches and bruises.

For Americans under age fifty, the wrenching agony of the assassination attempt on President Kennedy and the subsequent events that led to the premature end of his presidency are events from their parents’ past, things they’ve read about in history books. For those who lived through the political tumult of the mid-’60s, however, the memories brought to the surface by a phrase or a photo can be as stark and vivid today as they were so many years ago.

Two strands of political DNA were twisted together by the incredible events that transpired during the twenty-seven months between November 1963 and February 1966. The first was JFK’s battle with the dark forces of conspiracy. Could faith in our democracy be restored in the face of the powerful expansion of a national security state that would try to execute the nation’s elected leader? The second strand was Kennedy’s personal fall from grace, a monumental series of events, because we as a people had placed him on such a high pedestal.

Hatred of President Kennedy led powerful men to plot his public execution. Their plan could have come from the mouth of the Leonardo DiCaprio character in Gangs of New York: “When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark. You kill him where the entire court can watch him die.” Of course, there is another quote, widely claimed and attributed, that states when you plot to kill the king, you must in fact succeed.

Kennedy’s response to the failure of the conspiracy was to plot against its members in the same way they had plotted against him. Their counter-response was to try to change the subject away from their own shadowy crimes and place the issue of Kennedy’s intimately personal foibles before the public. That Kennedy was forced to pay such a high price, even as many of the men who sought his death walked free, was the ultimate irony of that turbulent period.

John Kennedy cheated death in Dallas only to face a fate that for him might have been even worse — the public exposure of his private double-life. Learning the truth was just as difficult for many Americans, who loved and admired him when they knew him less well. Being forced to face the whole picture — for Kennedy and for the nation — was something no one ultimately was prepared for, yet we all took the journey together.

The sense of denial, anger and tragedy which hung over those days leading up to February 1966 may even have caused some to have secretly wished that our charismatic and vigorous leader had died in Dallas, leaving only cherished memories.

Yet even through the dissolution of both his marriage and his political administration, John F. Kennedy found a way to give meaning to it all. He fought long and hard enough to ensure that all thinking people in the United States understood that far more importance hung on these matters than whether the President’s relationship with his wife was sound or his health perfect.

There is one matter on which all sources agree: On November 22, 1963, most of this nation admired John F. Kennedy and approved of his job performance. What has turned out to be so vexing about the post-Dallas revelations is how so many others could have wished him dead at a time when his personal popularity with the majority of the American people was authentic and solid. The collision of these two forces outside the Texas School Book Depository near the fateful overpass at Dealey Plaza reverberates to this day.

In the final analysis, the venal men who tried to kill President Kennedy with actual bullets in Dallas switched tactics to political assassination in Washington, D.C. They saw a chance to break his career into pieces with his own actions. This is not to make excuses for the President, or to argue for pardon, but only to state the obvious: He himself had given vicious enemies the weapons they would use against him.

John Kennedy survived his brush with death on November 22, 1963 and then suffered an almost unimaginable fate. He became a mere mortal.

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Acknowledgements

This labor began with a love of President Kennedy, whom I shed tears for as a student in Laura Braden’s fourth-grade class at Peter Boscow Elementary in Hillsboro, Oregon. All students came to lunch learning the President had been hit by gunfire, and we left knowing that he was dead. Mrs. Braden, a tough old cookie, cried at the table and didn’t force us to eat our vegetables as she normally did. Then we went home and watched TV with our parents all weekend.

My father, Harvey Zabel, worked as a high school history teacher and left me a treasured thirty-five-cent paperback edition of Profiles in Courage with its underlined highlights and his handwritten side comments. Through his eyes and his library, I’ve been able to see how history often springs from a series of close calls that, had they gone another way, would have had dramatic and profound impact. Equally important to this literary exercise, however, was the influence of my mother, Lucile Zabel, who gave me permission from a young age to think differently than all the other kids.

After years of laying out the structure of this book, I approached the gifted alternative history writer Harry Turtledove about collaborating to bring it to market in the mid-2000s. Harry and I briefly worked together but deadlines and commitments pulled us apart, and I’ve carried on with his blessing. I’m grateful to Harry for his continued support, particularly of this final version, for which he has generously contributed an important Foreword. If you’d like to dive deeper into alternative history, I highly recommend Harry Turtledove’s work.

Author Richard Dolan provided a wonderful Preface that made me remember what a true pleasure it was to write our book A.D. After Disclosure together. He is a grounded force of reality in the sometimes lawless UFO community of opinions. If you want to know the ground truth about UFO history, read Richard Dolan’s work.

The first person to engage my passion for an alternative version of the Kennedy assassination was Brent V. Friedman, my creative partner on the primetime NBC series Dark Skies. Back in 1996, Brent and I co-created that series and produced twenty hours of television drama that made Jack Kennedy’s death and Bobby Kennedy’s life central parts of the story.

My mentor out in Hollywood, Bill Asher, was a close friend of the Rat Pack and, by extension, the Kennedys. Bill directed JFK’s inaugural party the night before his famous “Ask Not” speech and Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” performance. He also told me about being at parties where the President-to-be acted in ways that seem wildly dangerous from today’s perspective. He gave me a clear understanding of how those times were so different from today.

My thanks also go to Kennedy assassination expert Don Clark, who has been my true north on the issues of the conspiracy to change the leader of the U.S. government. To all the other researchers who have written about President Kennedy and the circumstances of his death over the years, it can only be said that anything published today is informed by your work and dedication. In this group I include everyone from author Mark Lane to filmmaker Oliver Stone, two men whose pursuit of clarity, justice and closure in the death of John Kennedy has made it easier for others.

My appreciation for making this book possible in crisp, clean, readable form extends to graphic artist Lynda Karr, who assembled the striking images that grace its cover and inside illustrations, and editor Eric Estrin, whose facility with language equals his sense of drama, story structure and character development. Both have been my collaborators on the film review site MovieSmackdown.com for years. Hillcrest Media (Publish Green and Mill City Press) brought a powerful team of talented professionals to the race, and they took these materials and made them ready for market in beautiful form, and in record time. My close partner in the hard work of telling the world about this project in a competitive media environment has been Jerry Lazar, a man whose experience and knowledge helped us find paths to publicity that are sometimes audacious, but always effective.

Finally, I’d like to thank my family for allowing me to keep my collection of Time and Newsweek in all its pre-digital bulk for all these years. Jackie, Lauren, Jonathan and Jared have indulged this storage challenge and so many other peculiarities I’ve brought into their lives, and I am eternally grateful. They have given me the motivation to carry on whenever doubts have threatened to overtake me and, always, courage.

✪

About the Author

CNN correspondent-turned-screenwriter Bryce Zabel has created five primetime network television series and worked on a dozen TV writing staffs. A produced feature writer in both live-action and animation, he has written and produced for nearly all major networks and studios and collaborated with talents that include Steven Spielberg and Stan Lee. He has worked for ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, HBO, Showtime, Syfy, Sony, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Universal, Paramount, Hallmark, USA, and Animal Planet, among others.

In 2008, Zabel received the Writers Guild of America (WGA) award for writing his third four-hour Hallmark mini-series, Pandemic. He has received credit on other produced films and miniseries that include Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Blackbeard and The Poseidon Adventure. He wrote SyFy’s first original film, Official Denial, and the first film in the Unsolved Mysteries MOW franchise, Victim of Love. His end-of-World War II true story, The Last Battle, is currently in active studio development.

Zabel served as the elected chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the first writer in that position since Rod Serling. During his term, he was responsible for handling the post 9/11 Emmy awards, the negotiations which led to an unprecedented 250 percent license fee increase for the telecast, and the move to the Nokia Theater at L.A. Live.

He has been an award-winning on-air journalist for PBS (investigative reporter), CNN (correspondent) and NBC (local news).

In addition to the Emmy-winning Dark Skies (NBC), Zabel has received the WGA “created by” or “developed by” credit on Kay O’Brien (CBS), M.A.N.T.I.S. (FOX), The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (SYN) and E.N.G. (CTV). His other series work includes Steven Spielberg’s Taken, L.A. Law, Life Goes On and Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Besides two WGA nominations and one win, his work has been nominated by the Environmental Media Association, Mystery Writers of America, Golden Mike, Gemini and Emmy awards. He is a member of the DGA (Directors Guild of America), SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and the WGA. As an adjunct professor for the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Marshall School of Business, Zabel taught “Produce or Perish,” a graduate-level class.

Zabel is an often-featured speaker, moderator, keynoter and panelist, who has appeared in numerous TV interviews that include The Today Show, CBS Morning News, Politically Incorrect, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and Extra, as well as being interviewed by news organizations that include Time, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Daily Variety, Hollywood Reporter and others.

His non-fiction book, A.D. After Disclosure, published by New York’s Career Press in 2012, was chosen by Barnes and Noble as a “New & Noteworthy” selection and was ordered to a third printing in 2013.

✪

Coming Up from alt.Worlds

Surrounded by Enemies: What if Kennedy Survived Dallas? is the first book published under the alt.Worlds imprint.

These are full-length books, combining the look and feel of non-fiction journalism and reporting with alternative and counter-factual historical concepts. This book you’ve just read, for example, uses the device of drawing on vintage newsmagazine coverage to write a fiftieth anniversary retrospective of the attack on President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas.

There are other books coming in this line, also from author Bryce Zabel, and we’d like to tell you about them.

Next up will be Across the (Other) Universe: What if the Beatles Stayed Together? This work tells a powerful story of recovered memory from a mental patient who claims to have crossed over to our world from a parallel reality where the Beatles did not break up in 1969-1970 but continued to record and perform together through a large part of the 1970s. It will come complete with the albums and songs the band made famous that were not released as Beatles songs in our own world.

Following that Magical History Tour comes In the Shadow of the Saucers: What if Truman Disclosed Roswell? The historical pivot point in this work grows from the events of July 1947 where, in our timeline, a crash recovery in New Mexico was covered up by the U.S. military, and a policy of “deny and ridicule” regarding flying saucers was put in place. In this book, the military is twenty-four hours slower in responding to the fast-unfolding events, forcing President Harry Truman to confirm a saucer crash and turning the 1950s into an era of paranoia, not about Communists but about alien beings.

We hope you’ll continue enjoying the alt.Worlds brand for many years to come. It’s guaranteed to be a history course that you’ve never taken before.

We welcome your feedback. Visit our website: http://www.surroundedbyenemies.com

Join the conversation: https://www.facebook.com/surroundedbyenemies

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Seven Days in November

November 22, 1963 - November 28, 1963

From the Editors of Top Story

"The Day JFK Dodged a Bullet"

Dealey Plaza

Hickory Hill

Parkland Memorial

Love Field

Dallas Police Department

Andrews Air Force Base

First Brothers

The Morning After

Ground Truth in Dallas

The Fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

On the Record

Thanking God

Johnson Agonizes

Change of Plans

A Tale of Two Funerals

Another Profile in Courage

Chapter 2: Battle Lines Being Drawn

November 28, 1963 - December 31, 1963

Giving Thanks

Web of Suspicion

Lee Harvey Oswald

The Soviet Union

Cuba

Organized Crime

Joint Chiefs of Staff

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Secret Service

Vice President Lyndon Johnson

All Or Some Of The Above

Fight for Jurisdiction

The Three Bad Options

Sounds of Silence

The Warren Omission

Oswald Casts a Shadow

Christmas Truce

Chapter 3: An Election With Consequences

January 1, 1964 - December 31, 1964

A Family Retreat

State of Whose Union?

Life in a Foxhole

To Run or Not to Run?

Parallel Tracks

Back Channels

Till There Was You

The Primary Thing

Rebalancing the Ticket

The State of Texas vs. Lee Harvey Oswald

Opening Arguments

Nowhere to Hide

A Plea to Leave

Stroke of Midnight

Choices and Echoes

All the Way With LBJ

Cursed

Split Decisions

Tiebreaker

Distant Thunder

General Anxiety

The Arguments

Now What?

Chapter 4: Proxy Wars

January 1, 1965 - August 23, 1965

Second Chances

Night Vision

Moving On

Shadow Voices

Whispers in the Dark

Justice Delayed

Flashpoints

Strangelove Leaks

Assassination Theater

Changing the Subject

Mission to Moscow

The Secret Life of the President

The Debate

The Final Hours

The Top Story at Top Story

Better Late Than Never

Ground Zero

The Day After

Blowback

Catch-25

A Tale of Two Committees

Chapter 5: Impeachment and Trial

August 23, 1965 - February 25, 1966

The War Not at Home

Impeachment

The People’s Grand Jury

House Politics

Blackout

Tale of the Tapes

The Case for Impeachment

Article One: Abuse of Power

Article Two: Obstruction of Justice

Article Three: Contempt of Congress

Coal for Christmas

Failure to Launch

Go Away, LBJ

Trial

The Winter of Our Discontent

The Century Club

Dallas on Trial Again

New York Stake

Clean-Slaters

The End

The Long Count

Fall from Grace

Chapter 6: Life After

Closing the Book

Justice Swerved

Lyndon Baines Johnson

The Conspirators

David Powers

Aftermath

The Ex-President and the Ex-First Lady

Politics Continue

End of an Era

Whodunit?

Strangelove’s Identity Revealed

Another Torch Is Passed

The Unmaking of the President

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Coming Up from alt.Worlds