by Bryce Zabel
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 Presid
ent. 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.
