by Bryce Zabel
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 h
er 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 pub
lic, 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.”
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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.
