Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  A few months after the Kennedys took office in Washington, a New York Times Magazine profile of Bobby described him prowling the “broader reaches of his brother’s administration…like a Welsh collie—and with much the same quick-nipping protectiveness.”

  Now his brother was dead. And in the barrage of phone calls and conversations on November 22, it is clear to see where Bobby was hunting for the culprits. In those corners of the administration that had been his responsibility—the CIA, Mafia, Cuba.

  When Bobby Kennedy told his comrade-in-arms Harry Ruiz-Williams, “One of your guys did it,” he might as well have been saying, “One of our guys did it” or even “One of my guys did it.” Bobby was saying that his brother had been killed by someone in his own anti-Castro operation, or by someone suspicious in the anti-Castro exile world he should have been watching. He should have been on top of this—that’s the way Bobby’s mind worked. Around his neck hung a St. Michael medallion, symbol of righteous power. He was supposed to know where the darkness fell, and how to keep his brother safe from it. His brother’s death was his fault—this is certainly another wound that his brother’s killers aimed to inflict. For they knew it would not be enough to assassinate the president—they would have to find a way to stop his avenging brother from coming after them as well, to hobble him with guilt and doubt.

  But this poison dart would take a while to work its enervating effects. On November 22 and the days immediately after, Bobby Kennedy was a man on fire to find the truth.

  AS DUSK FELL ON the 22nd, RFK and Guthman drove from Hickory Hill to the Pentagon, where Kennedy joined Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McNamara, the former Ford Motor president who had tried to tighten civilian control of the Pentagon, was the Cabinet member most admired by the Kennedy brothers. Taylor, an intellectual military man who had fallen out of step with his colleagues for challenging the Eisenhower-era nuclear orthodoxy of massive retaliation, was also viewed as a Kennedy imposition at the Pentagon. Bobby would name a son after him. The Kennedy brothers’ tensions with the military hierarchy were no less severe than those with the CIA. They were grateful to have two commanding presences like McNamara and Taylor in a military culture they otherwise thought of as a hostile camp.

  While Guthman remained in the E-Ring, Kennedy, McNamara, and Taylor walked out to a Pentagon landing pad and boarded a helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base, where they waited in the gathering darkness for the arrival of Air Force One. McNamara said he could not recall if Kennedy discussed his suspicions about Dallas with him that evening: “I don’t have any recollection of him saying he thought A, B or C did it.”

  The presidential plane heading their way in the evening gloom was a vessel of dark thoughts. In the rear compartment, Jacqueline Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell brooded by the coffin of her dead husband, drinking from dark tumblers of Scotch that seemed to have no effect on them after the horrors of Dealey Plaza, even though the young widow had never tasted whisky before. She shrugged off Admiral George Burkley, the White House physician, when he gently tried to persuade her to change out of her gore-soaked pink Chanel suit. She was covered in rust-red stains; her husband’s blood was caked even under her bracelet. But she refused to scrub herself clean. “No,” she hissed. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

  This would become one of the most indelible remarks from that haunted day, ever since William Manchester recorded it in his 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President. It’s widely quoted but seldom analyzed. Like Bobby’s “I thought they would get me, instead of the president,” Jackie’s defiant statement was filled with implications too chilling for journalists or historians to dwell upon. The feeling took hold immediately within the Kennedy inner circle that day—they were facing an organized “they,” not a lone, wayward malcontent. This is not to say that they were necessarily right or that their convictions were shared by every core member of the New Frontier. But a surprising number of Kennedy loyalists did reach the same desolate conclusion as Bobby and Jackie that day, and believed it for the rest of their lives.

  As Air Force One prepared to land, Jackie and O’Donnell decided that he and JFK’s other close aides would carry the coffin off the plane. She pointedly told a White House military attaché, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, “I want his friends to carry him down.” And when another general came back to the rear of the plane to tell O’Donnell, “The Army is prepared to take the coffin off,” O’Donnell shot back, “We’ll take it off.” But in the end, the military would have the final word. “Clear the area,” McHugh ordered as soon as Air Force One taxied to a halt. “We’ll take care of the coffin.”

  This tussle over proprietorship of the presidential coffin would set the stage for a larger drama around the JFK autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, which was ostensibly controlled by Bobby Kennedy on behalf of the family but was actually in the hands of military officials.

  Bobby hurried to Jackie on Air Force One, brushing past Lyndon Johnson in a brusque manner the new president never forgot. “I want to see Jackie,” LBJ’s press secretary, Liz Carpenter, thought she heard him mumble. “Oh, Bobby,” Jackie exhaled as he wrapped his arms around his brother’s blood-spattered widow. It was just like Bobby, she thought; he was always there when you needed him. Later, riding with him in the rear of an ambulance to Bethesda, next to the coffin, Jackie reported what had happened in the hot, bright streets of Dallas, the words rushing out of her for twenty minutes, as she told him about the sudden explosion of violence and the chaotic aftermath at Parkland Hospital.

  Bobby was also anxious to hear from the Secret Service men who had returned from Dallas that evening. In the ambulance, Kennedy slid open the plastic partition separating the rear from the front and spoke to Roy Kellerman, the agent who had ridden in the passenger seat of JFK’s limousine in Dallas.

  “At the hospital I’ll come up and talk to you,” Kellerman told the president’s brother.

  “You do that,” replied Kennedy, and shut the partition.

  As Kennedy later learned when he quizzed Kellerman, a lumbering Secret Service veteran so soft-spoken his fellow agents nicknamed him “Gabby,” the agent did not believe “it was one man.” Kellerman would later tell the Warren Commission that “there have got to be more than three shots, gentlemen”—proof there was more than one shooter—and that a “flurry of shells” flew into the vehicle. After her husband died, Kellerman’s widow, June, would say that he always “accepted that there was a conspiracy.”

  According to one account, the chief of the Secret Service himself, James Rowley, also told Bobby that evening that his brother had been cut down in a crossfire by three, perhaps four, gunmen. The Secret Service believed the president was “the victim of a powerful organization,” Rowley informed Kennedy. By the time he testified before the Warren Commission months later, Rowley had changed his mind, telling the panel he believed Oswald alone had killed the president. But the night must have grown darker for Bobby on November 22 when the head of the Secret Service told him of an organized plot more powerful than the presidency itself.

  As his brother’s autopsy proceeded in the morgue below, Bobby and Jackie waited in a dreary seventeenth-floor suite in the stone tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. They were surrounded by a retinue that now included McNamara; JFK’s close friend, Newsweek journalist Ben Bradlee, and his wife, Tony; Bobby’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith; and Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss. While Bobby made a flurry of phone calls, the group consoled the young widow, still wearing her murder-scene clothes. “There was this totally doomed child, with that God-awful skirt, not saying anything, looking burned alive,” Bradlee would recall.

  Manchester, whose book remains the classic account of the post-assassination Kennedy drama, wrote that it was Bobby who “was really in charge in the tower suite” that evening, even making sure that his brother’s personal possessions were removed from his White House bedroom to spare Jackie’s f
eelings when she returned there. Manchester’s portrait of a fully in command Bobby was later taken up by Kennedy critics such as journalists Seymour Hersh and Gus Russo, who depicted the attorney general as a feverish cover-up artist that night, working into the early hours of the morning to make sure the autopsy report would not include any evidence of his brother’s Addison’s disease or chronic venereal afflictions that would have damaged the JFK legend. In reality, however, RFK’s dominion over the grisly proceedings in the morgue below was far from complete. The family’s medical representative, JFK’s personal physician Dr. Burkley, was banished from the morgue soon after the eight-hour procedure began, and he joined the Kennedy group in the tower. The autopsy itself was in the hands of three inexperienced pathologists under the constant supervision of a cadre of high-ranking military men. So crowded was the small room with uniformed officers, Secret Service men, and FBI agents that a Navy autopsy photographer would describe the scene as “a three-ring circus.”

  The report finally produced under this blanket of military supervision would contradict key findings of the emergency room surgeons who had first examined the mortally wounded president earlier in the day at Parkland Hospital, as well as the death certificate signed in Dallas by Dr. Burkley. For instance, where Parkland doctors saw clear evidence of an entrance wound in the throat—indicating a shot from the front—the Bethesda report was edited to conclude it was an exit wound, conforming to the theory of Oswald as lone assassin, firing from the rear.

  Years later, one of the Bethesda pathologists, Dr. Pierre Finck, would testify in the case brought to court by flamboyant New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison—the only trial to come out of the Kennedy assassination—that it was the Kennedy family who had blocked him and his medical colleagues from properly examining JFK’s throat wound by dissecting the bullet track and removing the neck organs. But the Kennedys placed no such limitations on the autopsy. The authorization form for the post-mortem examination, signed by Robert F. Kennedy on behalf of the president’s widow, was left blank in the space that asked if the family preferred any restrictions on the procedure. Under persistent questioning from Garrison’s assistant D.A. at the 1969 trial, Finck finally conceded that an Army general and two admirals were actually running the show in the crowded autopsy room, none of whom had medical credentials. “Oh, yes, there were admirals, and when you are a lieutenant colonel in the Army you just follow orders,” Finck told the New Orleans court.

  It is doubtful that Bobby—high in the seventeenth floor suite at Bethesda—was aware of how the story of his brother’s assassination was being rewritten in the morgue down below. But he made one final attempt to take control after the autopsy was finally completed at well past three in the morning. Bobby took possession of his brother’s brain and tissue samples, entrusting them to the care of Dr. Burkley. Over the years, this would produce waves of morbid speculation, with some suggesting it was a sign of Bobby’s gloomy, unsound mind at the time and others arguing it was yet more proof of a family cover-up aimed at protecting the Camelot myth. Perhaps a more convincing explanation is that a deeply suspicious Bobby, with Burkley’s assistance, was desperately holding onto any physical evidence he thought might be vital in a credible investigation in the future—that is, one under his control.

  Kennedy’s phone logs show that in February 1964, he also discussed taking possession of JFK’s death limousine, which had been sent to a Detroit repair shop after the assassination, where—his brother’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, informed him—it was to be “done over” for President Johnson. Perhaps the repair process—which would eliminate forensic evidence—“could be stopped,” Lincoln told RFK, if Kennedy declared that he wanted the limousine to be “given to the [Kennedy] Library.”

  Whether or not Kennedy was intent on collecting evidence for a future investigation, it is certain that Burkley shared his dark thoughts about Dallas. Oddly, the president’s physician—who should have been near the top of the Warren Commission’s witness list—would never be called to testify. Nor was he questioned by the Secret Service or FBI. Nor was the death certificate he signed—which refuted the claim that JFK’s throat wound was caused by a shot from behind—admitted into the official records. As far as government investigators were concerned, Burkley was a non-person.

  But Dr. Burkley left his ghost world—briefly—to put on record his true opinion of what had happened to President Kennedy. JFK was the target of a conspiracy, Burkley told assassination researcher Henry Hurt on the telephone when he contacted him in 1982, refusing to elaborate. After years of public silence on the subject, this was a thunderclap.

  That night at Bethesda, when Burkley was still down in the morgue, as all the beribboned men hovered over the president’s cadaver, O’Donnell came down to retrieve Jackie Kennedy’s wedding ring, which in a spasm of grief she had slipped onto the finger of her husband after he expired on the operating table at Parkland. O’Donnell knew she would want it. Burkley insisted on taking it upstairs himself. There she was, in the very hospital suite he had reserved for her during the final days of her last, ill-fated pregnancy. He gave it to her, while words awkwardly worked their way out of him. There was nothing to say, after the day they had been through together. She reached into her pocket and gave him one of the red roses she had been carrying in the motorcade, whose petals were slowly turning the wine-stain color of her splattered suit. He bowed his head. “This is the greatest treasure of my life,” murmured the loyal doctor.

  IT WAS AFTER 4:30 in the morning when Bobby and Jackie finally returned to the White House with the body of the president. Bobby walked upstairs with Jackie and her mother to make sure they could get to sleep. “A terrible sense of loss overwhelmed everybody who was present in the room,” remembered family friend Charles Spalding, “and Bobby was trying to calm everybody and get them to bed.” Later he asked Spalding to walk with him to the Lincoln Room, where he was going to sleep. His friend, realizing he was “terribly distraught,” urged him to take a sleeping pill, which he did. Then Spalding closed the door. “All this time he had been under control. And then I just heard him sobbing. He was saying, ‘Why, God? Why, God, why?’…He just gave way completely, and he was just racked with sobs and the only person he could address himself to was ‘Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?’”

  After a brief, restless sleep, Bobby was up and walking the South Grounds by 8:00 a.m. that Saturday. The White House was now filled with family, close friends, and aides. Among them was actor Peter Lawford, husband of Bobby’s sister Pat, and his manager, Milt Ebbins, who had flown in from Los Angeles the night before. JFK had always enjoyed the two Hollywood men’s company, pumping them for show business gossip and taking them on impromptu White House tours to show off the pomp of his new domicile. “Did you ever think you’d be in the White House with the president of the United States looking at Gilbert Stuart’s painting of Washington?” a bemused Kennedy asked the Hollywood agent

  Now Ebbins was back in the White House and witness to another historical tableau. The cavernous East Room had been transformed into a black-crepe-bedecked funeral hall, with the coffin of Ebbins’s friend at the center, resting on a catafalque modeled on the one that had held the body of President Lincoln. A madcap mood of Irish mourning gripped the White House. “We had dinner that night, it was like an Irish wake,” Ebbins recalled. “You’d never know there was a dead man upstairs in a coffin. Laughing, jokes, everything. At one point Ethel took off her wig and put it on me. That family just turns off death. They grieve alone, by themselves, I think.”

  Ebbins later came upon Bobby, who did not participate in the frantic dinner party, standing alone next to his brother’s coffin. “I walked in and he had both hands on top of the coffin, with his head down. He was crying. I thought it was strange, because Bobby never showed his emotions.” Ebbins had always thought of the younger brother as a “cold fish.”

  “Every time we met him, he was nice to me, but it wasn’t
Jack. Oh, Jack, he was something else. They were so different. Bobby had his holy grail. He was out to do something. Jack was too, but you never knew it. Eventually you did, but he would never talk about it.”

  But Ebbins was seeing another side of the younger Kennedy that weekend. His suffering seemed biblical.

  Years later, Peter Lawford would tell a friend that during the weekend at the White House, Bobby revealed that he thought JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government’s secret anti-Castro operations. Bobby reportedly told Lawford and other family members that there was nothing he could do at that point, since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government.

  During that gray, wet weekend, the tensions between the inner Kennedy circle and the national security team that had served the president continued to flare. Defense Secretary McNamara, who had convinced Jackie and Bobby Kennedy to lay the president to rest at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac from the capital, escorted groups of family and friends on four separate occasions to scout for a burial site in the cemetery. (O’Donnell and the Irish mafia, ever possessive of their fallen leader, were lobbying strenuously for Jack to be returned to the Boston soil from which he had sprung.) On his second trip, McNamara, unprotected by raincoat, hat, or umbrella, was soon soaked to the bone in a sudden downpour. None of the attending generals, safely bundled up in their own rain gear, made even a polite attempt to extend their civilian boss some cover. Artist and close family friend William Walton, who had been tapped by Jackie to help oversee the aesthetics of her husband’s funeral, was flabbergasted by the military retinue’s blatant show of disrespect for McNamara.

  The sodden McNamara weathered the storm and oversaw the successful selection of a site, high on the slope below the white-columned antebellum mansion of General Robert E. Lee. The defense secretary was told that this was the same spot where President Kennedy had stood admiring the view, during a tour of Arlington Cemetery that he took a few weeks before his assassination. The young tour guide who escorted the president that day told McNamara that Kennedy had gazed across the Potomac at the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. “The president said that it was so beautiful, he could stay up there forever,” the guide recalled.