by Bryce Zabel
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.”
