by Bryce Zabel
Committee chairman William Moore McCulloch, the Republican representing Ohio’s Fourth District, said, “The office of President of the United States is the greatest position of responsibility in the history of the world. It demands respect, particularly from its occupant.”
Leading Democrat Emanuel Celler, from New York’s Tenth District, countered, “This man, John Kennedy, was shot at on the streets of an American city just two years ago. I will not vote to put him on trial while the traitors who plotted his murder walk free.”
Within each of the three articles, subsections had been deleted. There were thirty-four members of the committee, divided in favor of the GOP, 18-16. The abuse of power article was approved by the largest margin, 19-15. The obstruction of justice article and the contempt of Congress article were each approved 18-16.
On the night that his impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee finally came to a vote, President Kennedy watched the final debate in the White House residence with his brothers, Bobby and Teddy, and others from his inner circle. Even before it was over, the President assessed the situation wryly: “It looks like Santa’s bringing coal this Christmas,” he said.
With two seats vacant and headed for special elections in February, the debate in the full House of Representatives was acrimonious and partisan, lasting nearly three days. The vote came on December 22, with Christmas recess on everyone’s mind.
Speaker Gerald Ford ultimately agreed with the overwhelming majority of his Republican colleagues that it was his solemn duty to support the articles of impeachment. He tried to maintain his independence by voting against several of the specific counts, but, in the end, he made certain that all articles got sent to the U.S. Senate for trial. Ford’s counterpart, Minority Leader John McCormack, no real fan of the Kennedys, mounted a public show of support but refused to trade valuable political capital he would need in 1966 to save the President. In that regard, both Ford and McCormack were united in a desire to get the impeachment out of the House and into the Senate.
In the end, the House approved the abuse of power article 227-206, with three GOP members and seven Democrats breaking ranks. The House approved the Obstruction of Justice article, 219-214, but approved the contempt of Congress citation by the slimmest of margins, 217-216.
Not all of the charges under each article were approved but at least one was. All three had passed.
With that, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became only the second President — and the first in almost one hundred years — to face a legal trial in the Senate. Afterward, on a freezing afternoon, the President forced the media to gather on the lawn near the Rose Garden, where he offered no hint he would resign. The vote margins had been thin and sharply partisan, he pointed out. His GOP foes, he said coolly, should find a way in the Senate to craft a “reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate” deal to avoid trial.
With more than sixty House Democrats standing behind him, Kennedy vowed to serve “until the last hour of the last day of my term in 1969,” when he would legitimately turn power over to the next President. The tableau on the lawn had one clear message: The President would make a deal, but he’d never quit. Yet, he had reason to worry. A Gallup poll taken in the next twenty-four hours showed that after his impeachment, 43 percent of the country felt he should resign immediately, compared to just 45 percent who felt he should stay and fight.
After the Rose Garden freeze-out, President Kennedy, his aides and dozens of congressmen retired to the larger Cabinet room for hot chocolate. The atmosphere, it was said, was eerily giddy, with the death-be-not-proud bravado of an Irish wake. The Kennedys toasted to a battle in the Senate, a place where they felt JFK’s service for eight years would be implicitly acknowledged in a friendlier forum. The President stepped forward. “I would give anything,” he said, “to keep you from being in the position you were in today, and for me not to have acted in such a way as to put you there.” Of course, he had acted that way, and the war would soon rage to judge the consequences.
In mortal political peril, however, his team knew that the next order of business was to make certain that no Democrats — inside or outside Washington — called for his resignation. Starting the next morning, President Kennedy would begin to roll calls with Mrs. Lincoln, and would not stop until he had spoken to each and every one of the Senate Democrats who would now sit in judgment of him.
At the same time, the idea was to stake out a bargaining position for an eventual deal. To that end, Kennedy would also call his two Republican opponents, Richard Nixon from the 1960 election and Barry Goldwater from 1964. He did not expect their support, but he was hoping they would work with him to craft a compromise deal, allowing him to accept censure and a fine to resolve the case.
Congress adjourned on Tuesday, December 23, 1965. Every senator who went home for the recess knew that his constituents would have a lot to say about how to vote in the new year.
Failure to Launch
It is perhaps only a sad side-note to impeachment that the once-vaunted Lunar Exploration Treaty binding the United States and the Soviet Union to a joint moon mission never even came up for a vote in the United States Senate. Perhaps it was a sign of Kennedy’s declining influence and his upcoming trial, or the reality that Khrushchev finally appeared to be on his way out in the Soviet Union, or both.
Many senators explained the death of the treaty on practical grounds, saying it had taken so long to get around to it that the United States would now have to give up far too much by approving it. We were already winning the space race and the moon race in particular. Just last December, two Gemini capsules had docked in space. We could have astronauts walking on the moon by the summer of 1969 if we kept our eye on the ball. The Soviets, it was widely presumed, were nowhere close.
President Kennedy accepted this calmly. He knew when he came home with the idea that his generals would fight it to the end. He might have beaten them as he did with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When that passed the Senate in 1963, he was as politically muscular as he’d ever been, and it took every ounce of strength to pull it off. Now, he was fighting just to keep his job.
If America was going to the moon, it was going solo. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas, NASA was pouring plenty into the economy. If it wasn’t for his ongoing efforts to keep scandal at bay, Johnson would have been sitting pretty.
LBJ knew in his gut that his benefactor and nemesis John Kennedy was going to get fired by his constituents in the next year. That, he knew, would open the door for the realization of a lifetime dream, a Johnson presidency.
According to a plea bargain statement later made by Johnson associate Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson had only one goal now, and it consumed his every waking hour. He had to hang on long enough to outlast Kennedy. The Congress would never impeach John Kennedy and then go after him, too. The public would never stand for it. He would be safe, finally.
Go Away, LBJ
During the Christmas recess, everyone in the Kennedy administration knew they were in a fight for political survival. One would have to be in absolute denial not to realize that things could end badly. If they did, Lyndon Baines Johnson would take over as the President of the United States unless he could be forced out first. This is something that John and Robert Kennedy wanted to avoid with almost the same passion as they wanted to avoid conviction in a Senate trial.
Fortunately, the attorney general’s young Turks had done their job well. They had accumulated enough testimony and evidence to take Johnson down. They had also, incredibly, found a plausible trail of suspicion that put Johnson in the middle of the conspiracy. He was not, to their way of thinking, definitively the ringleader, but they believed he had knowledge of what was going to happen well in advance of Dallas and had done nothing to stop it. At the very least, he had let John Kennedy ride into an ambush.
The suspicious behavior of LBJ generated its own kind of evidence. There was a classic photo of Johnson slumping so low in his limousine’s seat that he disa
ppears, and it was taken two seconds before shots were fired. His involvement in planning the trip was extreme, and he had interacted negatively on several security issues. Comments like the one made by oilman Clint Murchison that “Lyndon don’t get no more ready [to be president] than he is now” looked particularly suspicious when they turned up in an FBI wiretap.
Robert Kennedy came to Lyndon Johnson’s office on the morning of January 3, 1966 and laid out the situation. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whom LBJ had always claimed to like, assisted him. “We both know that you’ve been involved in dirty business, Lyndon — far worse than anything President Kennedy has ever contemplated,” said the AG, obviously relishing the moment. “There is no way that you are ever going to be President of the United States. I hope we are absolutely clear on that.”
Johnson was not clear, and so Katzenbach explained it further. His team of investigators had the Vice President on bribery, extortion, influence-peddling and probably murder. He rattled off names. Not just Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker, but Malcolm Wallace, Edward Clark, Henry Marshall and Clifton Carter. He mentioned John Kinser and LBJ’s own sister, Josefa. Each name contained the story of an illegal act that could manifest in Johnson’s imprisonment.
Johnson exploded with rage aimed at Bobby. “Your brother’s about to be yesterday’s news around here, and you come into my office like that?”
“You have blood on your hands, Lyndon,” responded Kennedy. He waved a sealed indictment, handed down from a grand jury, in front of Johnson. It named the Vice President as a co-conspirator in the death of his own friend, John Connally, and the attempted murder of the President. “Let me explain what happens next.” Bobby instructed Johnson to write out two confessions: one for blackmail and influence-peddling in both the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes cases, and another for complicity in the assassination attempt on JFK and the deaths of Connally, Tippit and Hill.
LBJ said he would do no such thing, and the bargaining began.
“Much as I hate to do this,” said the attorney general, “I am here to offer you a deal. You will accept it while I am here in your office, or you will not accept it, and I will see that these matters are all turned over to the courts, including your involvement in this Dallas debacle.”
Kennedy informed the Vice President that by writing his two confessions he could spare his family the shame he had brought on them, at least while he was alive. Only the first confession would be used against him by the Justice Department. LBJ would resign immediately, and he would plead to multiple charges of extortion and bribery. The other confession would be sealed until ten years after Johnson’s death.
Johnson did not accept this fate easily. He fought back in every way he knew how. Yet the longer he disputed the conclusion that he had no choice but to sign, the more he realized that it was better to go to prison for some hardball politics and a kickback here and there than it was to be the man who tried to bump off the President of the United States so he could take his job.
The Vice President changed his tone from threats to pleas. “Those men were serious, Bobby,” he said. “They’d have killed me.” Kennedy was surprised and a little exalted to see Johnson fighting back tears. He tried to bargain, asking the attorney general to push back the unsealing of the second confession until twenty-five years after his death. The attorney general did not budge. Then Johnson asked if the President would consider pardoning him.
“Lyndon, you know the President cannot do that, given the situation in the Senate. Most particularly, he has hard feelings toward you now, as you might imagine.” The attorney general did agree to use his office to influence local authorities in Texas to stand down on their own investigations, given Johnson’s plea bargain with federal authorities. Plus, he would see to it that LBJ would serve his time in a medium security facility in Texas, if that was his wish. That was the best he could do.
Kennedy said the Justice Department would need LBJ to testify against the other plotters. Johnson responded that if he did that, he would be dead. And if that was the price of the deal, then there would be no deal. They should charge him right then and there.
Within the hour, Kennedy and Katzenbach had the two confessions, and Johnson’s letter of resignation. He would not cooperate on the mechanics of the assassination plot, but at least he would never, ever be President.
Trial
The second session of the Eighty-Ninth Congress convened on January 10, 1966. The House of Representatives officially approved a group of managers, a dozen Republicans led by Wisconsin’s Melvin Laird, to take the impeachment case to the Senate. Some Democrats attempted to challenge the propriety of a lame duck House impeaching a President but found insufficient support.
By this time, Chief Justice Warren had spent the Christmas weeks boning up on rules and precedents. The trial was scheduled to begin in February, when the managers were to present the articles of impeachment to the full Senate. Before then, witnesses would be interviewed and evidence gathered, but there was little patience for too much investigation, given the scope of the JCAAP hearings and the House Judiciary Committee’s findings. Besides, that scope had been narrowed from nearly two dozen counts in the Committee’s first draft. Now there were just eight counts, still distributed over the three articles.
One profound difference was that the Senate, as opposed to the House, had decided that all proceedings, except for the final deliberations of the senators, would be public and broadcast on TV.
The Winter of Our Discontent
Although the dates do not perfectly line up with the seasons of the calendar, the nearly six months of intense drama in Washington, D.C. became known as the “winter of our discontent.” The phrase gained greatest traction when President Kennedy used it himself in a February 1, 1966 news conference, causing it to be immediately picked up by the press and the public, and applied retroactively to the constitutional crisis that culminated during the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966.
The nation was dealing with a great nor’easter blizzard that had unleashed fourteen inches of snow on Washington, D.C. from January 30 to 31, and up to two feet along much of the East coast. The weather had turned rapidly raw after the New Year, with snowdrifts forming and arctic air settling in and dropping temperatures into the teens.
President Kennedy had taken a question from Tom Wicker of the New York Times about the impact of the blizzard on transportation and the resulting effect on the economic recovery that everyone agreed was needed. Kennedy famously replied, “I’m just relieved, Tom, that the winter of our discontent you’re asking about is meteorological and not political.”
William Shakespeare coined the phrase, of course, in the first two lines of his play, Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” But it was author John Steinbeck who had introduced the phrase into common parlance by using it as the title of his last published novel. The book was a meditation on morality in America, and had been reviewed widely in the first year of the Kennedy administration as an exploration of the cultural malaise of the 1960s and its far-ranging implications: social, familial and personal. John Kennedy had read the book and liked it.
In any case, after an excellent briefing on how the storm’s intense, drifting snow would keep roads closed for several more days, Kennedy discussed the restoration of crippled transportation lines and the by-products of a food shortage and rationing. He was at his best — less wonkish than President Bill Clinton would be in the 1990s, yet competent and reassuring.
The next question came from Newsweek’s Karl Fleming, who picked up on Kennedy’s metaphor, baited the President with the idea that “January came in mild and left with this blizzard. Do you think that’s a metaphor for impeachment?”
Kennedy pointed out that starting the year as the first President to stand impeached by the House of Representatives since Andrew Johnson was hardly “mild” and, if it was to be considered as such, he would not be looking forward
to the upcoming Senate trial, where he believed he would find sufficient support to remain in office.
The Century Club
During the winter of 1966, as the country prepared itself emotionally for their President’s bad behavior to be fully explored and perhaps severely punished, in the U.S. Senate, journalists and Beltway insiders began using the term Century Club to refer to that legislative body. The term had a double meaning. Its primary usage came from the idea that it was almost a full century ago that President Andrew Johnson was impeached and his case sent to the Senate for trial. The secondary usage referred to the cozy little club of one hundred (since Alaska made it fifty states times two senators in 1959) that would be deciding the President’s fate.
To begin the proceedings, each senator took the following oath:
I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, now pending, I will do impartial justice, according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.
The trial began in the manner of an ordinary criminal trial, with the defense and the prosecution each allowed to give an opening statement. Both sides then presented and cross-examined witnesses and could introduce evidence. Senators could submit written questions or motions to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whom the Constitution placed on call throughout the procedure to clarify any points of law. A simple majority vote could overturn any of Chief Justice Warren’s decisions on matters of evidence or procedure. Clark Clifford once again represented the President.
Republicans overplayed their cards when they introduced framed photos that had surfaced of President Kennedy frolicking naked in the Lincoln bedroom with two naked and masked women. The photos had apparently been moved secretly for framing to the Mickelson Gallery, where they were found by Senate investigators, who had been tipped off by an anonymous source. All members of the Senate were allowed to see these and other similar exhibits in a closed evidence room. In the end, this probably offended a few senators enough to stick with the President, but it was not a decisive moment, not at this stage of the deliberations.
