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

by Talbot, David

  On September 11, 1971, less than a year after his memoir was published in the United States, Khrushchev died of a failed heart. The Central Committee decreed there would be no fanfare and no formal Red Square funeral. His wake was held in a drab red-brick building and he was quietly buried in the remote corner of a Moscow cemetery next to a sixteenth century nunnery. Only a small crowd of determined mourners was allowed through the lines of police, who photographed them as they entered the cemetery. It would take four years for his family to get permission to put a monument at the head of his grave.

  IN THE WEEKS AFTER Dallas, as political leaders and intelligence services all over the world were struggling to make sense of the assassination, so was Robert Kennedy. But his was a deeply emotional, as well as political, struggle. As the days went by, his rush to uncover the mystery faltered. Overtaken by the enormity of his loss, his investigative zeal began to ebb away. His brother was the center of his orbit, and his sun had fallen from the sky. What difference would it make to solve Jack’s murder, he would tell people—it wouldn’t bring him back. But as Robert Kennedy slowly emerged from his tomb of mourning, his quest for justice was reborn as well.

  Robert Kennedy wore the burden of that mission uneasily. At times he did not want to face the truth. He suspected that the conspiracy involved elements of his own government, and he realized that following its dark trail could tear apart the country. He also feared that the quest would highlight the brothers’ own fatal errors—and reveal how his own passions had stirred up the furies that took Jack’s life. And, finally, he knew that the search would put him in mortal danger. But, in the end, Kennedy could not help but pursue the truth.

  6

  THE AWFUL GRACE OF GOD

  In moments of national crisis, the public’s desire to huddle together and put its trust in the country’s leadership can be frantically powerful. Such was the mood of the country in the days and weeks after Dallas. The government declared that the calamity that had befallen the nation was the work of one misfit, and that his shocking elimination two days later was the work of another distraught individual. The press rushed to endorse this conclusion. There was only one lingering mystery, the public was reassured—that of the human soul. Whatever prompted Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president—a man whose civil rights record he was said to admire—was a secret that he took with him to the grave.

  It takes a certain temperament to challenge a national consensus with the near compulsory power that the lone gunman theory had in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. A pugnacious self-righteousness and a charmless egocentricity are certainly essential ingredients of this personality. And these happened to be defining characteristics of a thirty-six-year-old crusading New York attorney named Mark Lane. He would become the first American to throw himself in front of the freight car of official opinion, declaring that Oswald had been railroaded to infamy without an honest public hearing and that “the assassin of President Kennedy remains at large.”

  Less than a month after the assassination, in the December 19, 1963, issue of a left-wing national weekly paper called the Guardian, Lane published a ten-thousand-word broadside that punched disturbing holes in the official version of the crime. The attorney highlighted a list of inconvenient facts about the case, including several that would become the cornerstone of conspiracy research for decades to come. How could Oswald have been the lone gunman, firing from his perch in the Texas School Book Depository behind the president’s car, when Parkland Hospital doctors declared that one of the bullets fired at Kennedy struck him in the throat? How could a gunman using a rudimentary, bolt-action rifle that he had purchased for $12.78 squeeze off three expertly aimed shots in less than six seconds—a feat that even the skilled marksman who headed the National Rifle Association was unable to match? Why would alleged left-winger Oswald kill a president who was intent on improving relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba—a man whom Fidel Castro believed could become “the greatest president of the United States”?

  Despite the marginality of the Guardian—where Lane was forced to take his work after getting rejections from a wide range of U.S. publications, including Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, the Nation, and Fact (“the magazine of controversy”)—his article created a sensation. When the issue promptly sold out on the newsstands, the Guardian printed thousands of extra copies of the article in pamphlet form. Blacked out by the American media, Lane found an eager audience in the European press. He also formed a Citizens Committee of Inquiry, which began interviewing Dealey Plaza witnesses, and he rented a New York theater, where each evening for many months he presented his case against the lone gunman theory.

  On January 14, 1964, Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, hired Lane to represent her son before the Warren Commission. Portrayed in the media as a figure of frazzled pathos, the plump, matronly Marguerite would insist in her testimony before the commission that her son was a U.S. “intelligence agent” and that he was “set up to take the blame” for the assassination. When Lane himself later went before the commission, he insisted the session be held in public—the only time the secretive panel did so—and the confrontation was heated. “We had very, very little trouble of any kind” during the hearings, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—the panel’s chairman—later recalled, “except from one fellow by the name of Mark Lane. And he was the only one that treated the commission with contempt.”

  Lane knew the Kennedy brothers slightly from the 1960 campaign, when he ran successfully at the bottom of the Democratic ticket for a New York assembly seat. The young attorney was part of a reform movement that was trying to wrest control of the city’s Democratic Party from the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. When Bobby met with the group at the Kennedys’ Carlyle Hotel suite, he shocked the West Side liberals by bluntly telling them their righteous battle to clean up New York city politics was not as important as getting his brother elected president. “Once he’s elected we don’t give a damn if blood runs in the streets of New York,” Bobby informed them. Afterward, the reformers clucked in outrage. But Lane did not share their indignation. “Bobby might be lacking in tact, courtesy and manners,” he felt. “His honesty was commendable, however.”

  Bobby did not return Lane’s admiration. Despite his own hard-nosed reputation, Kennedy was often rubbed the wrong way by abrasive personalities. “He just didn’t like him,” recalled Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz. “I’m really sorry that Mark Lane jumped in [to the assassination inquiry] so quick. He gave the whole thing a kind of a queer, bizarre tone.”

  In January 1964, Bobby returned to what was now his forlorn post at the Justice Department. His law enforcement team was drifting without his energetic direction. “We need you,” Walter Sheridan had told him. “Yeah, I know,” Bobby had replied, “but I don’t have the heart for it right now.” Later that month, his friends in the administration arranged for Kennedy to make an official visit to Indonesia, to take his mind off his loss. The trip briefly restored his sense of purpose. But Dallas was looming for him as soon as he returned. Among his first callers after arriving back in Washington was Mark Lane.

  “I said, ‘I’d like to see you,’” recalled Lane. “He said, ‘All right. Lunch tomorrow?’ I said, ‘OK.’ And then he said, ‘But you’re not going to talk about that, are you?’” Kennedy still could not bring himself to give the assassination its name.

  Lane’s notoriety as an assassination researcher was already on the rise and he knew exactly what “that” meant. “Yes, that’s what I want to talk to you about,” Lane told Kennedy. And then the attorney made the mistake of playing a card that was far too explosive with Kennedy. He told Bobby, “You know, you have an obligation—” Before he could finish his sentence, Kennedy sharply cut him off. “Don’t you tell me about my obligations to my family.” The conversation skid to an abrupt conclusion. “If that’s the only thing you want to talk about, Mark,” said Kennedy, “then we’re not going to meet.” The two men never spoke agai
n.

  The chilly exchange between Kennedy and Lane set the stage for Bobby’s awkward and volatile relationship with assassination watchdogs for years to come. Kennedy could not stop himself from avidly following their activities, and even sometimes personally engaging with them. But he was easily put off by their often tactless or eccentric personalities, and seemed relieved when this gave him an excuse to dismiss their investigative work, no matter how valid it might be. Their very existence shamed and disturbed him, because their inquiries were boldly public, while he felt forced to carry out his own search in dark privacy.

  In the gray, lifeless winter months following the death of his brother, Bobby lacked the will to face what had happened in Dallas. His burst of investigative passion in November quickly drained out of him, replaced by a paralyzing sense of loss. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s friends felt driven to keep bringing information about the assassination to his attention. In December, Arthur Schlesinger was impressed enough by a sober and meticulous dissection of the lone gunman theory that appeared in the New Republic two days after the publication of Lane’s essay to send a copy to Bobby. Titled “Seeds of Doubt,” the article—written by scholars Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd—raised many of the same questions about the case as Lane did, but without his rhetorical flourishes. Concerned citizens also wrote Kennedy’s office to express their fears of a conspiracy. “To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something rotten in Dallas,” University of Illinois psychology professor Charles E. Osgood, a former chairman of the American Psychological Association, declared in a letter to the attorney general.

  In March, Kennedy was urged to contact two journalists whose work on the case was beginning to attract the same florid attention as Lane’s—syndicated gossip columnist and game show celebrity Dorothy Kilgallen and a Paris-based American journalist named Thomas Buchanan. Writing in the French newsweekly L’Express, Buchanan had created a stir by charging that President Kennedy was the victim of a far-right plot. His L’Express articles would become the basis for the first JFK conspiracy book—Who Killed Kennedy?—which was released in May by a British publisher.

  Buchanan’s articles were part of a wave of European press coverage that tartly questioned the official version of Kennedy’s demise. While the U.S. press accepted the soothing reassurances of Washington officials, European publications cried out that something dark and foul had occurred in Dallas. As Raymond Cartier wrote in Paris-Match, the Life magazine of France, “Europe, almost in totality, rejects” the official view of the crime. “Europeans are convinced the Dallas drama hides a mystery, which, if uncovered, would dishonor the United States and shake it to its foundations.”

  Buchanan alleged that Oswald was a low-level CIA agent who had been assisted by others in the crime. The petty crook who dispatched him, Jack Ruby, was a coconspirator known to Oswald. The motive for the assassination, according to Buchanan, was to disrupt the developing détente between Washington and Moscow, which threatened the weapons industries on which the plotters depended. “I believe [Kennedy] lived for something, and I think he died for something,” Buchanan would conclude in his book. “Any man is measured by his enemies. The list of those who hated Kennedy the day he died does honor to him. It must never be forgotten that he went to Dallas to combat these men, to tell the people of that city, of the nation and the world beyond, that peace is not a sign of weakness.”

  Like Mark Lane, who was ridiculed in the U.S. media as paranoid (while his phones were being tapped and offices bugged by the FBI), Buchanan received rough treatment in his native country. Washington Post columnist Chalmers Roberts notified his readers that Buchanan had been fired in 1948 as a Washington Star reporter after confessing a brief membership in the Communist Party. (Blacklisted at home, Buchanan had been forced to go overseas to find employment.) “On the face of it, it is absurd to call Buchanan, an admitted former Communist now living in Paris, a ‘rival’ to the group of seven distinguished Americans headed by the Chief Justice of the United States,” sniffed Roberts. But that is just the predicament that the Warren Commission found itself in, lamented the columnist, after Buchanan “sowed vast quantities of seeds of doubt about the assassination.”

  But Ben Bradlee, JFK’s press pal who was destined to take over Roberts’s newspaper the following year, had a higher estimation of Buchanan. On March 9, 1964, Bradlee phoned Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department, getting his efficient secretary Angie Novello, who told him the attorney general was in New York for the day. Bradlee left a message for Kennedy, urging him to meet with Buchanan, who was visiting the United States at the time. Buchanan was “one of the most articulate writers on the assassination,” according to the message Novello relayed to Kennedy, and “is most anxious to see you without going to the FBI.” Novello asked Bradlee if Buchanan “had some information” for Kennedy “and Ben said he did, but he also wanted some information” from the attorney general.

  Bobby apparently did not meet with Buchanan. Instead, he directed him to his brother Ted, who in turn steered him to Nick Katzenbach, the Justice Department official whom RFK had asked to serve as his liaison—or, more accurately, his screener—with the Warren Commission. Katzenbach dutifully met with Buchanan for an hour and then passed him on to a commission staff member, who took the journalist’s material and dropped it deep in the panel’s voluminous files.

  The same day that Ben Bradlee was trying to set up a meeting between RFK and Buchanan, Pierre Salinger was intervening with Kennedy on behalf of Dorothy Kilgallen. “[Salinger] says Kilgallen has been calling him for an appointment with you,” read a phone message for Bobby, because “she has some information she wants to turn over to you.”

  There is no evidence that Kennedy and Kilgallen met to discuss Dallas. But the Hearst newspaper columnist—known to millions for her sensational scoops as well as her regular guest slot on the popular Sunday evening game show What’s My Line?—was digging more and more into the assassination. Kilgallen would become a thorn in the side of the Warren Commission, running a leaked copy of Ruby’s testimony—which exposed the hapless quality of the panel’s interrogation, prompting an FBI investigation of the newspaperwoman—and later scoring her own jailhouse interview with Oswald’s killer. She hooked up with Mark Lane, who began feeding the columnist provocative items from his investigation. When Lane referred to Kilgallen’s coverage of the assassination in his lectures, audiences would snicker at the mention of the gossip queen’s name. But he admired her courage—she was the only prominent journalist in the country willing to take on the case, declared Lane.

  After her exclusive interview with Ruby, Kilgallen began telling friends that she was going to “break the real story” behind the Kennedy assassination, that she was going to have “the biggest scoop of the century.” But she never revealed in her newspaper column what Ruby—the only key figure in the case who was in custody—had told her. Apparently she was holding on to the scoop for her forthcoming book—a collection of the crime stories she had covered, titled Murder One—to ensure that it would be a blockbuster. But the book was never published. On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, a victim of what police said was an overdose of alcohol and Seconal. The draft of her Jack Ruby chapter, and her notes for it, were never found. The Kilgallen story would become one more mysterious footnote in the aftermath of Dallas. For some it represented the deeply sinister aspect of the case, and the lengths that the conspirators would go to cover up their crime. For others it was simply another tawdry aspect of the world of conspiracy enthusiasts, a gaudy carnival peopled by hard-drinking, pill-popping gossip peddlers like Kilgallen.

  While Bobby avoided controversial sleuths like Lane, Buchanan, and Kilgallen in the months after the assassination, he did not reject their suspicions about the case. But he was determined to keep his own inquiries into Dallas private. He was seen taking long walks in a Washington park with Allen Dulles, the former CIA director who had returned from the exile imposed on him by
President Kennedy to become the dominant force on the Warren Commission. But Bobby never revealed what the two men discussed during these lengthy conversations. CIA veteran Sam Halpern later told Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and George Lardner that RFK also secretly recruited a mobster from upstate New York to dig into his brother’s assassination. But the late Halpern was an unreliable source on the Kennedys, one of those CIA officials eager to portray the brothers in the most unflattering ways. And having Bobby, of all people, consort with mobsters would be a particularly lurid way of tarnishing his image.

  Still, Kennedy was obviously in emotional extremis in these early months after Dallas, the kind of punishing state of mind where a man feels driven to take extraordinary steps. One day, Bobby went as far as to arrange a secret meeting with the man he considered Public Enemy Number One.

  EARLY ONE MORNING IN March 1964, Secret Service Agent Mike Howard and his partner had a surprise encounter with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Howard was one of the agents assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy in the months after Dallas. His eventful career had also included overseeing the Fort Worth leg of JFK’s Texas trip and taking Marina Oswald and her children into protective custody for a week after the assassination at a Six Flags motel outside Dallas. Years later, Howard would guard former President Johnson when he retired to his Texas ranch. While on duty with the former first lady, the agent sometimes drew the midnight shift. Sitting outside her bedroom, he would hear Jackie’s screaming nightmares.

  One morning around seven, after another graveyard tour of duty—this time at Wexford, the weekend manor that Jackie had built in the Virginia horse country the last year of JFK’s life—Howard and his partner were leaving when they came upon Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. “Will you fellows, ah, be going past Dulles?” Kennedy asked the Secret Service agents. When Howard told him they would, he asked if he could ride with them.