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

by Talbot, David

  It should have been front-page news when someone of Attwood’s prominence—backed up by a former Kennedy administration insider who was one of the country’s leading historians—raised such provocative questions about the assassination. But Attwood’s statement quickly disappeared into the media black hole where JFK revelations are routinely consigned.

  Nonetheless Attwood continued to speak to the press about his suspicions late into his life. “We thought there was more to Dallas than we’d been told,” his widow, Simone, said in an interview.

  In January 1986, Attwood repeated what he told Summers in a phone conversation with British TV producer Richard Tomlinson, telling him he suspected “disgruntled CIA operatives and Cuban exiles.” Attwood’s “theory,” Tomlinson wrote in his notes of the conversation, was “that the secret negotiations with Cuba were the last straw as far as the conspirators were concerned. It was then that they took the decision to kill Kennedy.” His “critical mistake,” Attwood remarked, was “to use phones which were tapped by the CIA. Until that point, only six people knew about the [peace] negotiations.” But “there were elements within the CIA which were violently opposed to rapprochement with Cuba.”

  In the United States, the only reporter who took an interest in Attwood’s provocative statements about the JFK assassination was someone from the Advocate, his hometown paper in New Canaan, Connecticut. Attwood shared with him his dark speculations about Dallas. “I knew there were people in the agency—one of them worked with me later—who felt strongly that Kennedy had let them down by normalizing relations with Cuba. These were fairly nutty people.” Attwood concluded his interview in his local paper by urging his fellow citizens not to forget the crime of the century.

  “If you don’t get to the bottom of these things, if you let it lie, then we’re all part of the cover-up.”

  But when Attwood died of heart failure in 1989, at age sixty-nine, the truth was still out of reach, fathoms below in the cold, dark unknown.

  5

  DALLAS

  President Kennedy looked tired and somber as he stood at the lectern in the spacious State Department Auditorium on Halloween 1963. There were dark bags beneath his eyes and his shoulders stooped, as if from pain or fatigue. It was the second to last press conference of his administration, a forum in which he generally sparkled. These were occasions for the deft and charming president to show off, and he did so often, holding sixty-four news conferences in his 1,037 days in office. Though he was invariably well-prepared, he always seemed spontaneous and light on his feet. There was no sign of effort in his smooth replies and displays of mischievous wit. A reporter tried to break through his easy self-confidence at one press conference. “The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure,” he poked Kennedy. “How do you feel about that?” With a comic’s sense of timing, JFK waited for the nervous chuckling in the auditorium to fade before responding. “I assume it passed unanimously.”

  But Kennedy seemed downcast at his October 31 news conference. The questions he was asked that day vividly demonstrated the pressures he was under: What were his intentions in Vietnam? Should U.S. generals stationed overseas be given the authority to order nuclear strikes, as Senator Goldwater has urged? Was the president expecting a white backlash against his civil rights policies in the forthcoming Philadelphia municipal elections? Castro has captured several CIA agents and is threatening to execute them—would he care to comment?

  A woman reporter sensed the president’s heavy spirit. She reminded him that after the Bay of Pigs she had asked him how he liked being president. Now, prompted by his dark mood, she repeated the question. It was a choice opportunity for Kennedy to exhibit his wit, to neatly deflect the emotionally probing query with a joshing jab at his Republican opponents or a self-deprecating quip. But, instead, he grew philosophical. In a voice oddly meditative for a man soon to announce his reelection bid for the White House, he mused that he found the job “rewarding.” And then he invoked the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, as his brother would often do in seeking solace after he was gone. “I have given before to this group,” Kennedy told the 304 reporters assembled in the auditorium’s tiered seats, “the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again. It is the full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the presidency provides some happiness.”

  It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the job. Despite his solemn mood, however, Kennedy was looking forward to the 1964 election. He predicted the race would pit him against Goldwater, a man with whom he had developed a friendly relationship in the Senate but who represented the opposite pole of the political spectrum. By fall 1963, JFK had settled on a peace theme for his reelection campaign—and he sensed that the American people, tired of being held captive by nuclear terror, would reward him with victory. The 1964 campaign would offer a stark choice—the emerging détente of the Kennedy-Khrushchev era versus the Cold War militance of the far right. In the final months of his life, he felt increasingly confident that he could carry his peace message even into Republican strongholds.

  He did just that on September 26 before a Mormon Tabernacle assembly in Salt Lake City, declaring that America must learn to live in “a world of diversity” where no one power dominated global affairs. “We must first of all recognize that we cannot remake the world simply by our own command,” the president intoned. “When we cannot even bring all of our own people into full citizenship without acts of violence, we can understand how much harder it is to control events beyond our borders.” To the astonishment of the jaded Washington press pack covering the president’s speech, the conservative crowd cheered and cheered.

  Nonetheless, Kennedy knew the 1964 campaign would be bitterly fought. He was aware of how polarized the country had become as a result of his efforts to end the Cold War and racial segregation. Because of his civil rights policies, the South was in hot flight from the Democratic coalition where it had resided since the New Deal.

  Kennedy’s June 1963 TV address announcing the introduction of civil rights legislation in Congress was a moral high point of his administration. But it was the final insult to a traditional Southern order built on white supremacy. The president asked Sorensen to write the speech on the spur of the moment, after watching TV in the Oval Office as another Southern governor—this time Alabama’s George Wallace—defied federal orders to integrate a Dixie university. Swinging around in his chair from the television set, Kennedy said to Sorensen, “We better make that speech tonight.” The White House speechwriter had two hours to craft the history-making address. “Scramble is putting it mildly,” Sorensen said. “While I was typing away, the president came into my office—I believe it was the only time in his presidency that he came into my office—and said, ‘How’s it coming?’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m just finishing some revisions now.’ And he said, ‘Whew, I thought I was going to have to go on national television ex tem.’”

  JFK’s TV address on civil rights, along with his Peace Speech that same month, defined where the administration was moving on the two burning issues of the day. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he told the American public with a stirring simplicity. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

  The president had at last dropped his cautious, pragmatic pose on civil rights—his doomed strategy to hold together the old Democratic Party coalition—and addressed America’s original sin with the passion it demanded. And once ag
ain, he turned to Ted Sorensen—the Nebraska progressive who in his youth had formed the Lincoln Social Action Council to fight racism in his hometown—to help him find the right words to inspire the better angels of our nature.

  “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

  JFK told his brother, who had become the administration’s battering ram on civil rights, he feared the speech would be his “political swan song.” Because he had finally put his full eloquence behind the cause of equal rights, the president knew he was facing the mass defection of white voters not only in the South but in ethnic neighborhoods that were resisting integration in the North. A Gallup Poll in early November found that the president’s popularity had sunk to 59 percent, after hitting 77 percent following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Republican leaders gathering in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 9 confidently predicted that Goldwater would sweep the South in 1964, even taking Texas out of the Democratic column. George Wallace, who had theatrically faced off against the Kennedy administration on the steps of the University of Alabama, told a cheering Dallas audience on November 18 that “the American people are going to save this country next year” by removing Kennedy from the White House. The press began wondering whether Kennedy’s reelection was becoming less of a sure bet, with Look magazine declaring “JFK Could Lose” and Time speculating that “Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathlessly close race.”

  Kennedy could lose most of the old Confederacy and still win reelection in 1964, but he could not afford to lose Texas, which he had narrowly taken in 1960 with the help of his wily Lone Star running mate, Lyndon Johnson. He needed the state’s twenty-four electoral votes and he needed to tap its riches for his campaign war chest and this is why he planned a two-day trip there in late November. The trip was a political necessity, but Kennedy and his staff dreaded it. “It’s a real mess,” Kenny O’Donnell told White House advance man Jerry Bruno in October. Texas’s increasingly conservative white voters had turned sharply against Kennedy’s liberal policies and open war had erupted in the state’s Democratic Party between conservative Governor John Connally and liberal maverick Senator Ralph Yarborough. Connally, Kennedy’s former Navy secretary, was well along the path that would eventually take him into the Republican Party. Fearing that the president could poison his own reelection chances in 1964, Connally made no secret of his opposition to the trip.

  If Connally could not stop JFK from coming to his state, he was determined to control his itinerary, shuttling the president to exclusive fund-raisers and limiting his public exposure so Texas Democrats would not suffer from an anti-Kennedy backlash. Tall, well-groomed, and blessed with the jutting-jawed good looks of a cowboy matinee hero, Connally seemed cut from the same cloth as the wealthy ranchers and oil men whom he politically served. He tried to intimidate the fireplug-shaped Bruno, when Kennedy’s emissary met with him in the governor’s mansion to plan the presidential visit. Towering over Bruno in his cowboy boots and surrounded by his aides, Connally began dictating the schedule for Kennedy’s trip. If the president didn’t like it, he informed Bruno, he could stay at home. “At one point,” recalled JFK’s advance man, “they brought in lunch: a juicy steak for Connally, a sandwich for me. And I’ll tell you, if you’ve spent most of your life working with your hands, you know what they’re trying to tell you with a move like that.”

  Connally was dead set against a presidential motorcade in Dallas, but the populist Yarborough lobbied aggressively for it. “Yarborough, the ‘People’s Senator,’ felt the trip was too heavy on visits with fat cats and didn’t provide enough of a chance for ordinary Texans to see the president,” recalled Texas politician Ben Barnes, a Connally protégé who helped him organize the trip. The White House sided with Yarborough on the motorcade and let Connally know where he stood in the chain of command. “The president is not coming down to be hidden under a bushel basket,” O’Donnell told Johnson aide Bill Moyers.

  Privately, however, Yarborough and Kennedy’s aides had deep misgivings about Dallas. The frontier boom city was a vortex of all the whirling passions that had bedeviled the Kennedy presidency. When Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey insulted the president to his face in the White House, telling him he was not “the man on horseback” the nation needed but a pantywaist “on Caroline’s tricycle,” he knew he was speaking for most of his hometown, which voted for Nixon in 1960 by the widest margin of any major city. In the final days of the campaign, even native son LBJ had come under assault, when he and wife, Lady Bird, were spat upon and roughly jostled by a “mink coat mob” of right-wing women in the lobby of the city’s plush Adolphus Hotel. A month before Kennedy was scheduled to visit Dallas, Adlai Stevenson—whose liberalism and UN ambassadorship made him a favorite target of the far right—was heckled off a stage in Dallas and then set upon by a mob outside the auditorium, who gobbed him, struck him over the head with a picket sign (which read “IF YOU SEEK PEACE, ASK JESUS”), and rocked his car as he tried to escape. “For a minute or two I thought we were going to be turned over,” recalled Dallas department store mogul Stanley Marcus, who was accompanying Stevenson that day. “I told the driver step on it…[blast] your horn and get out of here in a hurry, which he did, and fortunately we didn’t hit anybody [because] we were surrounded and I think we were in imminent danger of being manhandled.”

  Dallas was the city of retired General Edwin Walker, the apocalyptic “Christian Soldier” who electrified his fellow citizens with his attacks on Kennedy’s “defeatist” foreign policy and “socialistic” domestic agenda. JFK, he declared, was rapidly turning the American eagle into a “dead duck.” It was a seething mecca for John Birchers, Minutemen, and Christian Crusaders.

  Various people tried to warn JFK against going to Dallas, including Billy Graham, David Brinkley’s wife, Ann, and Stanley Marcus. On a flight to Little Rock, William Fulbright—the man who had spearheaded the administration’s Senate attack on the alarming politicization of the military—begged the president to cancel his trip, calling Dallas “a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” But Kennedy was determined to go. When Bobby and O’Donnell read a letter from a Democratic Party official in Texas imploring the president to stay away from Dallas because of the city’s extreme animosity toward him, they didn’t even pass it on to JFK. “If I had suggested cutting such a large and important city as Dallas from the itinerary because of [the] letter, the president would have thought that I had gone out of my mind,” O’Donnell later noted.

  Riding through the streets of Dallas in an open car would later come to exemplify the legendary Kennedy recklessness. It was pointed to as a prime example of the family’s arrogant defiance of the fates. Joe Kennedy had brought up his children to be blithe daredevils, it was said, indoctrinating them with the powerful myth of Kennedy invincibility. But JFK would have strenuously rejected this interpretation of his decision to go to Dallas. Kennedy had long since stopped believing in the sublime exceptionality of his family. It was World War II that had destroyed this family myth, a young JFK wrote in a remarkably revealing 1947 letter to Claiborne Pell. The war had “savaged” his family, he confided to Pell, taking the lives of his older brother, sister, and brother-in-law. “It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions. We still, with the old battles long over, have great confidence: great Kennedy confidence, which is the main strength of our tribe. But we sons and daughters no longer have that easy, witless, untested and meaningless confidence on which we’d been weaned before the war. Our father had us pretty well trained to appear to ourselves and others as unbeatable and immortal—a little bit like Gods. Now that’s over with. No
w, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us. And that’s a healthy thing to know.”

  It was Kennedy’s sense of political duty that compelled him to Dallas, not recklessness. He knew there was nothing inevitable about his reelection. Lyndon Johnson would bury Goldwater in 1964, but his landslide was triggered by the seismic post-Dallas grief that shook the nation. Kennedy knew the election would be close. If he hoped to be reelected president, he could not let himself be run out of major cities in the country, no matter how hostile they seemed. He refused to cede any part of the nation to his enemies on the far right. In fact, he planned to use his trip to Dallas to denounce the threat of extremism in American life.

  Here is what Kennedy planned to tell his audience at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, when he arrived there: Americans must stop listening to the voices of “nonsense” that blared “peace is a sign of weakness.” The most effective way to demonstrate America’s strength was not to brandish its awesome weapons and threaten its enemies. It was to live up to the country’s democratic ideals, “practic[ing] what it preaches about equal rights and social justice,” and pursuing peace instead of “aggressive ambitions.” Kennedy had been warned not to inflame the city’s right-wing passions, but he was undeterred. If the speech lit up Ted Dealey, so be it. Reading an advance copy of the Trade Mart address, Robert MacNeil—who was covering the Dallas visit for NBC News—was filled with a kind of pride, even though he had long maintained a journalistic skepticism toward Kennedy’s seductive charms. “On reading this speech, I felt a surge of the intellectual power and rational force that he represented. I felt warmed by it and was looking forward to the moment when he would loose his barrage on the citizenry of Dallas.”

  Going to Dallas was a risky but essential mission, and the president fully embraced it. It was not LBJ who had strong-armed Kennedy into going, as some Johnson haters in the Kennedy camp later bitterly charged. In fact, Johnson was just as fearful of the political backlash against the administration in his home state as Connally was. Taking his New Frontier themes—peace and racial equality—into an Old Frontier state, Kennedy would directly engage with the rugged electorate of Texas and try to persuade them that his policies were in their best interest. Riding through the streets of Dallas in an open car filled with the radiance of the young first couple, the politically astute president knew, was a dramatic way of connecting directly with the people he hoped to win over with his vibrant message. The heroism of Kennedy’s mission was underscored by his realization that it carried not just political risk but physical danger.