by Bryce Zabel
“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 e
vents 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.
