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

by Talbot, David

  Kennedy took the threatening atmosphere in Dallas in fatalistic stride. When Dealey’s newspaper ran a caustic, anti-Kennedy ad on the morning of November 22, he shrugged it off, but he knew that it would disturb Jackie. Framed in a funereal black border, the ad—which was paid for by right-wing oil baron H. L. Hunt’s son, Nelson, and future Dallas Cowboys owner Bum Bright—accused JFK of selling out the country to the Communists. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he told his wife that morning before their short plane ride from Fort Worth to Dallas. “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

  JFK, who often broached the subject of assassination during his contentious years in office, seemed particularly preoccupied with the specter during his Texas trip. There was good reason for this. In the weeks preceding Dallas, he was informed of two serious assassination plots against him—one in Chicago and the other in Tampa. We can now conclude that Kennedy was, in fact, being methodically stalked in the final weeks of his life.

  On Saturday, November 2, a motorcade that was to take the president from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to Soldier Field, where he would watch the Army-Air Force football game with Mayor Richard Daley, was abruptly canceled after the FBI informed the Secret Service of a plot to shoot the president before he reached his destination. The conspiracy, which was detailed in the 2005 book Ultimate Sacrifice by assassination researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, involved a four-man sniper team (at least two of whom were Cuban exiles) and a fall guy named Thomas Arthur Vallee with an Oswald-like profile (a troubled ex-Marine with an apparent affinity for guns and extremist politics). Kennedy was to be ambushed as his limousine made a slow, hairpin exit from the expressway onto Jackson Street—similar to the 90-degree turn his car would take onto Elm Street in Dallas shortly before the shots rang out there—passing a tall warehouse building where Vallee worked, not unlike the Texas School Book Depository. Vallee, who was arrested by Chicago police two hours before Kennedy’s plane landed at O’Hare, later claimed that he was framed by someone with special knowledge of his background, namely his “CIA assignment to train exiles to kill Castro.”

  Later that month, another plot to kill Kennedy was exposed by law enforcement officials in Tampa, where the president was scheduled to ride in a lengthy motorcade on November 18 from MacDill Air Force Base to a speech at the National Guard Armory and then a second speech at the International Inn. “The Tampa attempt,” noted Waldron and Hartmann, who interviewed former Tampa Police Chief J. P. Mullins and other officials about the plot, “had even more parallels to Dallas than Chicago.” A key suspect in the Tampa plot, a Cuban exile named Gilberto Lopez, seemed stamped from the same strange mold as Oswald. Like the accused Dallas assassin, Lopez had earlier defected to Russia and masqueraded as a pro-Castro member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Despite the plot—which Waldron and Hartmann assert was aborted when one of its architects, Florida Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, was tipped off that it had been exposed—Kennedy went ahead with the motorcade. He even stood up in the moving limousine and waved to the crowds, to the distress of Secret Service agents and Tampa police officials assigned to protect him. Kennedy did not take the risk lightly—one Florida official later observed that he was under obvious strain that day—but he refused to let the growing threats against him preempt another motorcade so soon after Chicago and curtail his contact with the American people. JFK was also well aware of the electoral importance of Florida, the only other southern state besides Texas that he planned to aggressively contend in 1964.

  By the final month of his life, John Kennedy seemed a marked man, encircled by a tightening knot of treachery. On the weekend of November 16, as the president took up residence in the family’s Palm Beach mansion to work on his important olive branch/war arrow speech about Cuba that he planned to deliver in Miami, a suspicious group of Cuban exiles moved into the house next door. The group was led by a wealthy Bay of Pigs veteran named Alberto Fowler, who bitterly blamed the president for the brigade’s defeat. Fowler later told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he was simply trying to annoy Kennedy by blasting loud Cuban music all weekend. But his apparent role as an intelligence operative—after Dallas he tried to spread the false story that Oswald was a Castro agent and he later infiltrated Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation of JFK’s murder—point to a more disturbing explanation for his sudden appearance as Kennedy’s neighbor.

  Robert Kennedy was fully aware of the Chicago and Tampa plots, and while there is no evidence he knew about Fowler’s odd stalking of the president, he was keenly conscious of the growing intrigue against his brother in the Cuban exile world. Bobby was Jack’s protector, but he was also his political point man. The two roles must have clashed in a particularly disturbing way for Bobby in November 1963. Like his brother, he fully grasped how important the Texas trip was for their political ambitions. But he was growing increasingly apprehensive about Jack’s safety, to the point where he was maneuvering to take away presidential protection duties from the Secret Service and bring them under his control in the attorney general’s office. Like Kenny O’Donnell, the “third Kennedy brother” in the administration, Bobby could not bring himself to try to block Jack’s Texas trip. The Kennedys were supposed be tough enough to ride out dark nights of foreboding. But Dallas disturbed him. Perhaps both brothers had a sense of what was coming.

  On November 20, Bobby turned thirty-eight. He was in a gloomy, wry mood at the surprise party thrown for him at the Justice Department, mocking himself for being a drag on his brother’s reelection chances. “Who do you think clinched the South for President Kennedy?” he exclaimed like a politician on the stump, while his staffers looked down in embarrassment. “Robert Kennedy, that’s who!” No matter how maniacally he worked for his brother, it was never enough for Bobby. Later he went over to the White House for the annual reception for the judiciary. He talked to his brother about his forthcoming Texas trip. Why did Jack have to go on political missions like this, Bobby asked? “You are president and those duties are enough,” he told his brother. There was a sad, wistful quality to his complaint, and of course, he knew exactly why Jack had to go.

  JFK tried to jostle his younger brother out of his mood. “But, Bob, ’64 is coming and I can’t wait.” Remember what Lord Tweedsmuir said, the president reminded his brother, invoking the Scottish diplomat and novelist he was fond of quoting: “Politics is a noble adventure.” Then he clapped his brother on the back and marched out the door. Bobby never saw him again.

  AS A BOY GROWING up in the tiny East Texas farm town of Chandler, Ralph Yarborough liked to hunt. But when he went into the woods by himself, a fear would always creep over him. This is something just built into a youngster, he would remark years later. Stalking his prey under a dark canopy of trees, accompanied only by his hunting dogs, he would get the shivers sometimes until he finally reached the open light. The same feeling of dread came over Yarborough on the afternoon of November 22, as he rode through the shadowy canyon of downtown Dallas, two cars behind the president.

  The senator was squeezed into the backseat of a convertible between the vice president and his wife, Lady Bird—a cozy proximity that pleased neither of the men, who were pitted bitterly against one another in the Texas Democratic Party feud. LBJ still resented Yarborough for breaking ranks with the Texas delegation at the 1960 Democratic convention and throwing his support to Kennedy instead of Johnson, the state’s favorite son. And Yarborough felt, with considerable cause, that the conservative Johnson-Connally wing of the state’s Democratic Party had been seeking to punish the renegade liberal ever since. When the president’s plane landed at Love Field at 11:38 that morning, Kennedy—desperately trying to smooth over the dispute during his trip—had to order Yarborough to ride in Johnson’s car. White House aide Larry O’Brien backed up the president’s demand by shoving Yarborough into the vehicle at the airport and slamming the door behind him to ensure th
e bickering politicians presented a harmonious face to the Dallas crowds. As the motorcade left Love Field, heading down Mockingbird Lane toward downtown, the senator, who could turn on the folksy charm when he needed to, quickly slipped into his proper role, shouting “Howdy thar!” to the spectators lining the streets, while Johnson sat sullenly beside him.

  When the motorcade began gliding down Main Street, underneath the dark towers of corporate Dallas, Yarborough’s mood began to change. The old boyhood fear came upon him. On the street, the crowd—which was now ten to twelve people deep—seemed exuberant, raucously cheering the president and first lady, who was making her first trip to Texas. But the senator did not like what he saw when his eyes scanned the office building windows. The people standing there—businessmen and their secretaries—stared with eerie silence at the passing spectacle. “They stood there rather stonily,” Yarborough would recall. “They just stood there looking at the president. And they weren’t saying anything…I’d look up there on the second, third floor, I’d see people through glass windows up there, standing back…. They’d be looking down at the president, it looked to me like, with positive hate. I saw them, and I grew apprehensive.” Among the grim-faced office building spectators was ultra-right oil tycoon Hunt, who gazed down at the president from his seventh-floor perch in the Mercantile Building, flanked by two secretaries.

  Yarborough was afraid that someone would throw a pot of flowers or something and hit the first lady. As the presidential cavalcade moved slowly down Main Street’s sunless gulch, the senator strained to see the open light, as he had on his boyhood expeditions through the woods. If they could just get through the dark shadows of downtown, he felt they would be safe.

  When the motorcade reached sun-spangled Dealey Plaza, Yarborough breathed a sigh of relief. It was like finally coming out into the open fields with his dogs when he was twelve. “I thought, ‘I’m glad to see daylight. I’m glad we’re through.’ I felt safe the minute we got [there]. It’s all over.”

  But as the column of cars turned left on Elm Street, heading for the expressway to the Dallas Trade Mart, a noise rang out that snapped Yarborough immediately back to his childhood terrors. This time he felt like the hunted, not the hunter. It was the unmistakable sound of a rifle shot, quickly followed by more shots. The day froze dead in its tracks. And then he caught a sharp whiff of gunpowder on the breathless air.

  Hunted down, ambushed—these were the ways that passengers in the motorcade would describe their doomed feeling that day. They were trapped in a crossfire. And the prey, the president of the United States, was defenseless. For the rest of his life, Yarborough would wonder about the peculiar stone-footed reaction of the Secret Service that day. “Here stood the Secret Service men around that car in front of me like a bunch of dupes,” he would spit. “They didn’t do anything. They stood and stared around.” Everyone except agent Clint Hill. After he threw himself into the presidential limousine as it suddenly began to accelerate from its near dead stop on Elm Street, Hill beat his hand on the back of the car. Yarborough never forgot the awful sight. “He had all kinds of anguish written on his face and despair and everything else.” Seeing that, “I knew they had either killed or seriously wounded the president.”

  John F. Kennedy had been gunned down at high noon, in a Dallas plaza named for the frontier-era father of Kennedy-hater Ted Dealey. JFK, the avid reader of history, would have appreciated the ripe irony.

  Americans would get some sense of the utter horror—the visceral obscenity—of Dealey Plaza, when a home movie of the assassination made by a fifty-nine-year-old Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder was finally excavated from the Life magazine vault where it had been kept for years and widely exhibited. The infamous twenty-six-second film clip of the president’s final moments—culminating in the repulsive frame where a searing bolt slams his head viciously backwards, tearing off a shard of his skull in a spray of bloody mist—will forever punish the souls of those who watch it. Zapruder himself paid a terrible price for being the nation’s eyewitness. Amazingly, he kept steadily filming the horrible spectacle as it unfolded in graphic detail before his camera. Then he clambered down from his vantage point—a concrete abutment on the grassy knoll overlooking the crime scene—and stumbled back to his office in a daze, screaming, “They killed him, they killed him, they killed him!” Afterwards, he sat at his desk sobbing.

  A terrible thought flashed across Zapruder’s mind as he watched his president being executed before his eyes. “I just felt that somebody had ganged up on him.” His words—conjuring the image of the most powerful man in the country bullied into bloody submission by anonymous assailants—are still deeply troubling.

  Zapruder, a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to America as a teenager, never recovered from the shock of what he intimately observed through the lens of his Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera. For the rest of his life, he suffered recurring nightmares. When he was called before the Warren Commission in July 1964, he broke down in tears as he relived the afternoon. At the end of his testimony, he apologized abjectly for his outburst of emotion. “I am ashamed of myself,” he told the staff attorney taking his testimony. “I didn’t know I was going to break down, and for a man to—but it was a tragic thing, and when you started asking me that, and I saw the thing all over again, and it was an awful thing—I know very few people who had seen it like that—it was an awful thing and I loved the president. And to see that happen before my eyes—his head just opened up and shot down like a dog—it leaves a very, very deep sentimental impression with you. It’s terrible.”

  Wesley Liebeler—the assistant counsel who was dispatched to belatedly and perfunctorily take Zapruder’s eyewitness account—was not interested in hearing about his trauma. Nor was the attorney particularly interested in his observations that the shots “came from right behind me” on the grassy knoll—the spot where most eyewitnesses and police bystanders that afternoon immediately suspected the sniper’s nest was located. The Warren Commission, which originally did not plan on interviewing Zapruder at all, treated him as an afterthought. But his 486-frame film would reveal more about the death of the president than the vast twenty-six-volume report delivered by the commission chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, to President Johnson on September 24, 1964. Zapruder’s handheld horror movie would live on long after his death in 1970, a haunting testament to how President Kennedy was “ganged up on” in Dealey Plaza by more than one assailant—gunmen firing shots from the front as well as rear of the presidential limousine.

  As dreadful as it was, the Zapruder film did not capture the full mayhem inside the presidential limousine during the explosion of violence in Dealey Plaza. But the wives of the two men shot that day—Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connally—would insist on telling everything they witnessed. It was Jackie’s wrenchingly matter-of-fact account, delivered to Life magazine correspondent Theodore White in an extraordinary interview at the family’s Hyannis Port compound one week after Dallas, that most vividly conveyed the unfiltered horror of it all. This—along with the interview she gave William Manchester, the family’s authorized chronicler of the assassination—would be the only times she ever publicly discussed November 22, 1963. Sitting on a sofa, dressed in black slacks and a beige pullover—her dark eyes “wider than pools”—she told her unspeakable story to White in a remarkably calm voice. The words poured out of her as if she were in a trance. “I realized that I was going to hear more than I wanted to,” White later wrote—an odd comment for a journalist who had just scored the scoop of his career.

  White’s employer shared his tender sensibilities. Once again, Life would find it necessary to suppress a terrible document of Dealey Plaza, publishing a soothingly expurgated version of the interview in its December 6, 1963, issue. The brief article, “An Epilogue for President Kennedy,” focused on JFK’s love of the musical Camelot, helping turn his story into a gauzy Arthurian legend instead of the monstrous crime mystery it was. Missing was the
eyewitness testimony of a woman still scorched by what she had endured just one week earlier. But over three decades later, following the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994, the Kennedy Library finally released White’s “Camelot documents,” including his handwritten notes from the interview. Despite the passage of time, Jackie’s account was still awful to read. And media coverage of the documents’ release was still decorous, pulling a veil over the grisly details that Jackie could not forget.

  The motorcade from the airport that afternoon put her in mind of the first couple’s tumultuous procession through the streets of Mexico City the previous year, Jackie told White. It was “hot, wild” and the sun was blazing in her eyes. Jack had asked her not to wear her sunglasses for fear it would make the first lady look too much like an aloof movie queen to the people on the Dallas streets. She was happy to oblige him, knowing how important the Texas trip was to her husband’s political fortunes. After suffering the death of their newborn son Patrick in August, the couple seemed closer than they had been in a long time. Jackie had grown weary of the political circus, but riding with her husband that day was an expression of her love. JFK, who took pleasure from the electric effect that his wife had on crowds, deeply appreciated her company on the trip. Even without their sunglasses, the couple emitted a starry glow as they waved to the boisterous crowds lining the streets. Sitting in the press bus several cars behind the Kennedys’ limousine, Robert Donovan, the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief, mused that “if Hollywood had tried to cast a president and his wife, they could never have dreamed up John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. They were just two beautiful people that day, glamorous, and they had a screaming reception. There was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas.”