by Bryce Zabel
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.
Havin
g 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 t
oday. 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.”
