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

by Talbot, David

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AT 12:21 Eastern time, the second shock from Dallas struck the nation—Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down on live television as he was being escorted through the basement of the Dallas police building. His murderer—a burly nightclub owner named Jack Ruby who shouted, “You killed the president, you rat,” as he shot Oswald mortally in the stomach—professed to be distraught about the pain that the alleged assassin had caused the Kennedy family. But the killing had the feeling of a gangland hit meant to silence the accused Oswald before he could talk. In fact, Lyndon Johnson aide George Reedy thought the TV channel he was watching had cut away from coverage of the Kennedy funeral preparations to play an old Edward G. Robinson gangster movie when he first saw the shooting out of the corner of his eye.

  The brazen elimination of first the president and then his accused assassin sent a deep shudder through Washington circles. On the phone with Bill Walton, Agnes Meyer, the aging, blunt-spoken mother of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, growled, “What is this—some kind of goddam banana republic?” Even former President Eisenhower was put in the same bitter frame of mind. It reminded him of a tour he had made of Haiti’s national palace back in the 1930s when he was a young major. Reading the dates on the marble busts of the former heads of state that lined the wall, he was shocked to realize that two-thirds of them had been slain in office. His own country, he reassured himself, would never succumb to this type of political bloodlust. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  It was a worked-up Lyndon Johnson who told Bobby Kennedy about the shooting of Oswald. Entering the Blue Room of the White House, the new president greeted the surprised attorney general by urging him “to do something…. We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United States a bad name around the world.” LBJ accurately predicted the world reaction—newspapers in the free and communist camps alike howled about the “grotesque” display in Dallas, as the Daily Herald of London described the back-to-back murders, and openly wondered whether Oswald “was killed to keep him from talking,” in the words of a Paris newspaper.

  But it’s uncertain how sincere Johnson was in his appeal for Bobby to join him in taking action. At this point, LBJ was still resisting calls for even a decorous investigation along the lines of the future Warren Commission. The new president seemed more concerned about the public relations aspect of the debacle in Dallas than in its actual legal resolution. In any case, Kennedy, filled with loathing for a man he immediately regarded as a usurper, never accepted the new president’s challenge to work with him on the mystery of November 22. Such an alliance would have been the only way for the monumental crime to have been solved. If these dueling halves of the Kennedy legacy—antagonists out of a Shakespearean court drama—had been able to put aside their storied mutual contempt, history would have been different. But this would have been so far out of character for both men that it was never a possibility.

  Later on Sunday, Milt Ebbins stood in the living room of the White House’s presidential quarters with Peter Lawford, watching in grim disbelief as the TV played the shooting of Oswald over and over again. “Bobby came in, looked at the television, and then went over and turned it off. He didn’t say anything. Just turned it off.”

  Bobby didn’t want to dwell openly on the morbid spectacle in Dallas. But he wanted to quietly figure it out. It was a pattern established that first weekend, and he stuck to it for the rest of his life. He refused to cooperate with the two major public investigations of his brother’s murder during his lifetime—the Warren Commission and Jim Garrison’s probe—for reasons that are both understandable and perplexing. But he doggedly pursued his own secret avenues of scrutiny in a determined effort to find the truth. And Jack Ruby was one of his first investigative targets.

  There was no one in America with more acute investigative instincts than Robert Kennedy when it came to organized crime. And Jack Ruby had mob written all over him. If Bobby could not have figured this out himself, anonymous tipsters quickly emerged to point him in the right direction. One week after Ruby blasted his way into the national spotlight, an unsigned communication was sent to the attorney general and former CIA director Allen Dulles, from an informer who claimed that Ruby was a mob “finger man” or hit man. “If my memory serves me right,” wrote the informer, “Jack Ruby was visiting Syndicate Members in San Diego between the last months of 1961 and early months of 1962. The meeting of the Syndicate Members was at ‘The Brass Rail,’ a bar-restaurant…. It is used as a homosexual bar, much as the New York Syndicate under the former Gallo gang used some dozen homosexual bars as ‘fronts.’”

  Immediately after Oswald was gunned down, Bobby put his right-hand man, Walt Sheridan, on Ruby. An FBI memo dated November 24, 1963, shows that within hours of the shooting, Sheridan turned up evidence that Ruby had been paid off in Chicago by a close associate of Jimmy Hoffa. According to the memo, Sheridan reported that Ruby had “picked up a bundle of money from Allen M. Dorfman,” Hoffa’s chief advisor on Teamster pension funds and the stepson of Paul Dorfman, the labor boss’s main link to the Chicago mob. Robert Peloquin, an attorney in the Justice Department’s criminal division, was quickly dispatched to Chicago to check out the story about the Ruby payoff. Informed of this mission by the chief of the Chicago FBI office in a November 25 memo, an irritated J. Edgar Hoover scribbled on the document, “I do wish Department would mind its own business and let us mind ours.”

  A few days later, Julius Draznin, the federal labor lawyer whom Bobby had asked to look into a possible Chicago Mafia role in the assassination, provided further evidence about Ruby’s background as a mob enforcer. Draznin submitted a report on November 27 that detailed Ruby’s labor racketeering activities and his penchant for armed violence. Later, Kennedy would remark that when he saw Ruby’s phone records, “The list was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee.”

  Bobby opened up another line of investigation the weekend after the assassination. Still brooding about the collapse of security around his brother, he quietly asked family friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, to explore whether Hoffa had been involved and whether the Secret Service had been bought off. Bobby knew that Moynihan was not an experienced investigator like Sheridan, but with a background in the longshoreman’s union, the fellow Irishman was presumed to have some useful contacts and expertise about labor corruption. Moynihan would later hand Kennedy a confidential report stating there was no evidence the Secret Service had been corrupted.

  Even before Dallas, Bobby Kennedy seemed to be losing confidence in the ability of the Secret Service to protect his brother against the numerous dangers that surrounded him. At the time of the assassination, Kennedy was backing a bill, H.R. 4158, which would have given the attorney general the authority to appoint the agents who protected the president, instead of the Secret Service. Rowley, the agency’s chief, acknowledged in his testimony before the Warren Commission that he was adamantly opposed to the bill, asserting that the transfer of authority to RFK’s office would “confuse and be a conflict in jurisdiction.”

  On Tuesday, four days after the assassination, Kennedy spoke again with Clint Hill, following up the phone conversation he had with him on November 22 when the Secret Service agent was still in Dallas. There is no record of this conversation, but the security lapses in Dallas were so flagrant, Kennedy would certainly have wanted to know what happened from an agent like Hill whom the family deeply trusted. (“Clint Hill, he loved us, he was the first man in the car,” Jackie would later tell Theodore H. White.)

  The Secret Service had selected an unsafe motorcade route through downtown Dallas, culminating in the slow, hairpin turn onto Elm Street where the president met his death. The tall buildings, grassy knoll, and overpass that turned Dealey Plaza into a perfect crossfire shooting gallery were not secured. Motorcycle patrolmen protecting the presidential limousine followed loosely behind instead of tightly surrounding the vehicle. There were no Secret Servic
e men on the limousine’s running boards, and agents were also ordered to stay off the rear of the vehicle. The Secret Service later spread the story that it was JFK himself, anxious that the crowd’s view of the first couple not be obscured, who insisted on this. But this has been effectively refuted by researcher Vincent Palamara, who interviewed numerous agents, all of whom said the order came from Secret Service officials, not the president.

  Clint Hill, riding in the Secret Service follow-up car, was the only agent to sprint for the limousine when the shots rang out. He did this despite being ordered to stay put by the agent in charge of his vehicle, Emory P. Roberts. Hill reached the limousine as the first lady was crawling onto the trunk, where, he realized to his horror, she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull. He clambered aboard the car and pushed Jackie safely back in.

  Despite his heroism, Hill was plagued for years afterwards by the fact that he had not reached the limousine sooner. In 1975, after retiring from the Secret Service, he agreed to be interviewed by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. On camera, the former agent’s face was convulsed with pain. At one point, Wallace later recalled, Hill broke down in sobs, but he insisted on continuing with the interview. His eyes rimmed in red, his head jerking as he fought to choke his emotions, Hill dragged on a cigarette and forced himself back to Dealey Plaza. If he had only reacted a split second sooner, he could have taken the fatal head shot instead of Kennedy, said Hill.

  “And that would have been all right with you?” Wallace asked.

  “That would have been fine with me.”

  “You got there in less than two seconds, Clint…you surely don’t have any sense of guilt about that?”

  “Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It’s my fault…. And I’ll live with that to my grave.”

  Remembering the interview years later, Wallace wrote, “I’ve never interviewed a more tormented man.”

  It surely is one of the more poignant ironies of November 22 that a man who performed more bravely than anyone else there that day was one of the most severely punished.

  ON THE MONDAY FOLLOWING the assassination, Bobby put aside his investigative work to bury his brother. In his funeral tailcoat, he marched past the solemn crowds lining the streets, following the flag-draped gun carriage that carried his brother from the Capitol rotunda to St. Matthew’s Cathedral and then his final resting place in Arlington. Walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue with Jackie and Teddy, he retraced the steps that Jack had taken a thousand days earlier to begin his presidency. In the old news footage, the utter bleakness of the day is all written in Bobby’s eyes.

  Ed Guthman and Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, had tried to prevail upon Bobby to ride in a closed limousine, for security reasons, instead of walking in the funeral procession. But he waved them off. It was the beginning of a recurring dispute between Guthman and Bobby over his safety that would drag on until the day he died. “He was never afraid. After his brother was killed, a bunch of us would talk to him about getting security, but he always brushed it off.”

  By midnight, the friends and family who had filled the White House for the funeral had deserted it, leaving only the president’s brother and widow. “Shall we go visit our friend?” Bobby suggested. The two drove past the Lincoln Memorial and over the Potomac to the sloping lawn below the Lee mansion whose panoramic vista Jack had marveled at weeks earlier. In the night gloom, brightened only by the grave’s fluttering eternal flame, the two knelt and prayed.

  The day after the funeral, the Kennedys began converging as usual for Thanksgiving at the family compound in Hyannis Port. Jackie arrived by plane with her children, Caroline and John Jr., after visiting her husband’s grave in the morning. Teddy and his family also flew to the compound, as well as his sisters Pat, Eunice, and Jean and their families. “It was a bleak day,” on the Cape that Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported. “The landscape, rust-colored with the dead leaves of scrub oaks, seemed more desolate than the gray, restless waters of Nantucket Sound.” The Times reported that when Jackie arrived, she went directly to her father-in-law’s house, avoiding her own, which was filled with mementos of the late president. One of the more touching, the newspaper observed, was a watercolor painting in the hall commemorating a happier family gathering, with a touch of Kennedy humor. It depicted a victorious JFK returning to his family’s cheers at the prow of his racing sloop Victoria—in a pose that called to mind “Washington Crossing the Delaware”—after winning his party’s presidential nomination in Los Angeles.

  Bobby could not face Thanksgiving at Hyannis Port, with a clan now hollowed of the two men who had once been its center—Jack and Joe, the powerful patriarch who had been robbed of speech and confined to a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 1961. Instead, Bobby stayed at Hickory Hill for the holiday with Ethel and their seven children. About twenty people, the usual mixture of Justice Department colleagues and press friends, were invited for brunch. Bloody Marys were served. Bobby and Ethel “were putting up their usual good fronts,” recalled Sheridan, who had just returned from the Hoffa trial in Nashville. “But you could tell, looking at him, of the strain.”

  Bobby steered Sheridan away from the party—he wanted to know what his investigator was finding out about the assassination. Sheridan suspected that the Teamster boss was involved. “I remember telling him what Hoffa had said when John Kennedy was killed…. I didn’t want to tell him, but he made me tell him,” recalled Sheridan. “Hoffa was down in Miami in some restaurant when the word came of the assassination, and he got up on the table and cheered. At least that’s what we heard.”

  That weekend Bobby took his family to the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, where he gathered around him the band of brothers who had fought alongside him, from the 1950s underworld probes to the New Frontier crusades—including Sheridan, Guthman, and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. It was a wrenching weekend, with Bobby alternately possessed by numbing grief and savage anger. Salinger, the former San Francisco journalist whose life Bobby had forever transformed after recruiting him for his Senate rackets investigation, remembered the weekend years later with a shudder: “I mean, he was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life. He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself…. From time to time, he’d organize a touch football game…. But they were really vicious games. I mean it seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down. Somebody, in fact…broke a leg during one of those games. I mean they were really, really tough.”

  Bobby also continued to be driven by investigative zeal that weekend. He conferred with Sheridan about Oswald and Ruby. Bobby asked him to fly to Dallas and make some private inquiries. “The key name was Marina Oswald [widow of the alleged assassin]—he wanted Walt to check in to see what she really knew,” Richard Goodwin, the JFK speechwriter and aide, told me.

  “The thing about Bob was he was going to deal with the truth, whatever it was,” Guthman said. “He was going to work hard to find it out. And the people who worked for him, like Walter, that’s the way it was for them too. He was someone Bob trusted totally. He was a first-class investigator. It was always hard facts with Walter, there was not going to be any bullshit.”

  After sending Sheridan to Dallas, Bobby dispatched another trusted Kennedy family intimate, Bill Walton, to Moscow, one week after the assassination. Walton carried with him a secret message for the Soviet government from Bobby and Jackie. It was the most astounding mission undertaken at the request of the Kennedy family in those astounding days after the death of JFK.

  WILLIAM WALTON WAS THE ideal man to play the role of confidential courier. There was no one the Kennedys trusted more. If Bobby had his loyal band of brothers, JFK attracted the devotion of his own circle of male friends. And none of these men enjoyed a more easy compatibility with the president than Walton, whom JFK fondly called “Billy
Boy.”

  “I was always surprised that he thought I was as close a friend as he did,” Walton recalled years later. “He kept drawing me into things. I was even in his bedroom in the White House. I never expected to be there. Finally we were totally intimate. I think he was deeply fond of me. I was of him. I haven’t had many male friends as close as he became finally.

  “I was not subservient to him in the way you see so many people. My position was independent. And to tell you the truth, [when we first met], he thought I was a lot more famous than he was.”

  Walton met Kennedy in the late 1940s in Georgetown, where the young unwed congressman was living with his sister, Eunice, and Walton was turning the second floor of his Victorian-style home into a studio, after leaving journalism to try his hand at painting. Walton, a former Time magazine war correspondent who won a Bronze Star after parachuting into Normandy with General James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division, had known JFK’s late brother and sister, Joe and Kick, in London. He flew one mission with Joe’s naval aviation outfit about a month before the eldest Kennedy brother died on a treacherous bombing run. Eight years older than JFK, Walton must have conjured memories of his heroic older brother in Jack.

  But if Walton had the resume of a man’s man, he was equally at ease in the company of women, with whom his relationships tended to be “sweet and safe and jolly,” in the words of one such female companion, Martha Gellhorn, the distinguished war reporter and ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway. Walton also enjoyed a “sweet and safe” friendship with Jackie Kennedy.