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

by Talbot, David

  Now Earl Warren was asking Bobby to resolve his inner turmoil about the assassination and tell everything he knew about Dallas. But he simply could not do it. Kennedy turned to Katzenbach to get him out of his predicament.

  Conspiracy researchers would later blame the deputy attorney general for playing a key role in the government’s cover-up of the assassination. “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large…[and] speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off,” wrote Katzenbach in a post-assassination memo that would be widely quoted as evidence of his complicity in a cover-up. But Nick Katzenbach was a Kennedy loyalist—the man Bobby had called upon many times in the heat of battle, including the raging night at Ole Miss—and in the traumatic days after Dallas he was primarily responding to signals from his boss.

  Katzenbach worked out a deal for Kennedy with Warren and the commission’s chief counsel, Lee Rankin. In return for being excused from testifying before the commission, Bobby would be required to sign a letter written by Warren Commission attorney Howard Willens, which read, “I would like to state definitely that I know of no credible evidence to support the allegations that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy.” After hesitating for several weeks, Kennedy finally signed the letter, though he knew it to be untrue, and had it delivered to Willens on August 4.

  The pact Robert Kennedy made was a fateful one, for it would put his name on record as endorsing the Warren Report—a document that, as time passed, would be widely condemned as a monumental government fraud. For the rest of his life, Kennedy would be forced to publicly defend the official version of his brother’s assassination—a predicament that filled him with increasing turmoil over the years, since he believed that its central conclusion about a lone assassin was false.

  Kennedy made his first public statement about who was responsible for his brother’s murder during a trip to Poland in late June 1964. Despite a cool reception from the Communist authorities, Bobby and Ethel were given a raucous greeting by the Polish people. In the town square of Cracow, the old university town, a youthful crowd thronged their car, pelting them with flowers and serenading them with “Sto Lat”—“May you live a hundred years!”—while the Kennedys responded with an improvised version of a favorite family song, “When Polish Eyes Are Smiling.” The emotional Polish crowds—which unnerved government officials in Warsaw as well as in Washington—were the first sign of the Kennedy cult that was starting to sweep the world. The long-dispirited Bobby came alive in the crush of the crowds, climbing on top of the U.S. ambassador’s car with Ethel and denting the rooftop (to the horror of the rigidly proper envoy), and clasping the beseeching hands that reached out to him.

  Later, at a public forum in Cracow, a nervous twenty-five-year-old Polish student leader first put the question to Bobby. “We always greatly respected President Kennedy and we are very interested in your version of his death,” said the young man. “We hope you will forgive us for asking such a direct question, but we really would like your view.”

  Kennedy seemed to take the question in stride, calling it “a proper question which deserves an answer.” He told the audience that his brother’s assassination was the work of a solitary “misfit” by the name of Oswald, who was motivated by a vague dissatisfaction “with our government and our way of life” rather than a specific ideology. “There is no question that he did it on his own and by himself. He was not a member of a right-wing organization. He was a confessed Communist, but even the Communists would not have anything to do with him. Ideology in my opinion did not motivate his act. It was the single act of an individual protesting against society.”

  Kennedy seemed to be signaling to the authorities back home that they had no cause for concern—he would stick closely to the government’s line, an official story that was intended to put the public’s fears to rest, rather than exhume the truth.

  But three months later, on September 28, 1964, when Earl Warren presented his commission’s voluminous report to President Johnson in the White House, Kennedy could not muster the same enthusiasm. Bobby, who was then campaigning for the Senate in New York, issued a brief statement on the Warren Report, repeating the comments he had made in Poland and declaring that he was “completely satisfied that the commission investigated every lead and examined every piece of evidence.” But Kennedy felt obliged to add this caveat: “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” This would become part of his obligatory response on the subject whenever he was asked about it, a kind of escape clause that might become important in the future when he would undertake his own inquiries.

  The release of the Warren Report seemed to cast a pall over Kennedy. He canceled his scheduled campaign appearances in Manhattan that morning, overcome by what aides said were the “sorrowful memories” provoked by the report, and retreated behind closed doors with Jackie. In the afternoon, as he flew upstate to address rallies in Ithaca, he seemed “subdued,” according to the New York Times, sitting by himself on the plane and staring out the window. Later, “he smiled wanly during his speeches, which lacked fire,” reported the Times.

  Kennedy was trapped in an impossible position. Privately, he contemptuously dismissed the Warren Report as nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to reassure the public. But unwilling at this point to publicly challenge it, he was stuck with supporting it. Perfunctorily giving the report his stamp of approval was his way of deflecting any further press inquiries about the assassination. You know my position, let’s move on. In 1964, he was in no political—or emotional—condition to do anything more. “He always stood by the Warren Commission in public—he thought that was the right political thing to do,” said RFK aide Frank Mankiewicz, who knew that Kennedy privately harbored very different views about Dallas. “He didn’t want to talk about it. I think he was physically unable to talk about it.”

  The Warren Report won unanimous praise in the U.S. press, with the New York Times and Washington Post setting the euphoric tone of the coverage. Writing in the Post, Robert J. Donovan hailed it as a “masterpiece of its kind.”

  “For the stamp of honesty, authenticity and fact is on this report,” effused the Post correspondent. “It surely will convince reasonable men beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, a malcontent of questionable sanity, assassinated President John F. Kennedy while acting alone on his own impulses.”

  Both newspapers took pains to assure their readers, in a fusillade of articles, that the report once and for all “Knocks Props From Under All Plot Theories,” as a Post headline definitively announced.

  Press coverage of the Warren Report’s release followed the line that, ironically, had been set months earlier by New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis, who was close to Bobby Kennedy. Lewis’s promotion of the report—which began with a page-one story that ran on June 1, nearly four months before the report was released—reflected Kennedy’s own public position on the commission’s views. This was part of a pattern that started soon after Dallas and continues today, in which RFK friends—out of a sense of loyalty to the man they understandably deferred to on the assassination—stick closely to his public declarations about the crime. His mantra became their own: Lone misfit, nothing will bring him back, it’s morbid to dwell on the past. The tragedy, of course, is that—unknown to most of these friends—Robert Kennedy actually believed something quite different. In truth, Kennedy was one of the first—and among the staunchest—believers in a conspiracy.

  Unaware of this, Lewis took the lead in knocking down conspiracy theories, quoting anonymous Warren Commission staff members at length in his advance story on their investigation as they predicted that their final report would silence their critics once and for all. Lewis’ story singled out Thomas Buchanan and Mark Lane, whom his commission sources seemed particularly eager to discredit. Their report would “completely explode” these men’s theories, they
told a sympathetic Lewis.

  Over the years, Lewis would continue to disparage critics of the Warren Report, but he seemed to become less certain of his convictions. He later intimated to reporters for the Village Voice that his coverage of the Warren Commission was colored by his close ties to the Kennedy family—specifically Bobby Kennedy—making the subject “very painful to me personally. Over the years I felt I did not want to get involved as a counterexpert or expert. Maybe with all that has happened, Vietnam and Watergate, today’s reporters would have come to it with more resistance.”

  In its eagerness to embrace the Warren Report, the press failed to discover that among the study’s most prominent critics were some of its own authors, including Senators Richard Russell and John Cooper and banker-diplomat John McCloy, whose illustrious resume earned him the media moniker “chairman of the Eastern establishment.” All three of these commission members privately expressed strong skepticism about the single bullet theory—the shaky proposition that JFK and Governor Connally were hit by the same “magic bullet,” on which teetered the entire lone gunman belief system. But it was Russell in particular who would prove troublesome as the commission sought an elusive unanimity of opinion.

  LBJ had strong-armed a reluctant Russell to serve on the Warren Commission, feeling that his old Senate mentor would bring prestige to the panel and trusting that he would be able to work smoothly with the CIA, since Russell was one of the senators responsible for overseeing the agency. “You’re my man [on that commission]…period,” Johnson declared, closing his sales job on the venerable senator from Georgia. But Russell would be troubled by his service on the commission for the rest of his life. He came to the Warren Commission believing that the burst of gunshots in Dealey Plaza resulted from a conspiracy, and he left with the same suspicion, despite the panel’s reassuring conclusions.

  As the commission drove toward its goal of a unanimous report, Russell held out. At an executive session on September 18, ten days before the final report was released, the senator forced the commission to include a disclaimer stating that the possibility Oswald had coconspirators “cannot be rejected categorically.” Unknown to Russell, chief counsel Lee Rankin later had the disclaimer purged from the commission’s records, to expunge all signs of discord on the panel. But the legislator steadfastly clung to his suspicions. In January 1970, suffering from the lung cancer that would kill him within a year, Russell gave a final interview to Atlanta-based Cox Television in which he aired his doubts about the Warren Report. He “never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others,” Russell said. “And that’s what a majority of the committee wanted to find. I think someone else worked with him on the planning.”

  PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING Warren Report skeptic was the man who cobbled together the commission and herded it toward its reassuring conclusion—none other than President Lyndon Johnson. Working closely with J. Edgar Hoover—with whom he had developed a pragmatic relationship over the years that served both men’s interests—LBJ had moved aggressively to wrap up the case. “The thing I am most concerned about…is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,” Hoover told Johnson in a phone conversation two days after the assassination, which echoed the new president’s own sentiments.

  But privately, Lyndon Johnson was haunted by Dallas. LBJ began anxiously conjecturing about a conspiracy immediately after the assassination, while still at Parkland Hospital, and he clung to his suspicions until he died. He shifted blame for the assassination over the years, sometimes focusing his suspicions on Cuba and sometimes on the CIA, depending on the person with whom he was airing his thoughts. There seemed to be a strategy behind his speculations.

  Deke DeLoach, Hoover’s liaison with the White House, dismissed the president’s dark mutterings as simply his efforts to reassure himself that the Warren Report was correct. But Dick Helms, another audience for Johnson’s suspicious ramblings, probably had a more accurate read of the president: he was on a fishing expedition and he wanted to see who bit. “I didn’t know whether [Johnson’s conspiracy talk] was just like the fly fisherman flick over the water to see if he has any takers, or whether he really believed it,” remarked the spymaster. The relationship between these two consummate power players was fraught with hidden meaning. In 1966, Johnson would finally give Helms the top post at the CIA he had long coveted. But there seems to have been little trust between the two men. When Johnson asked Helms if the CIA ever plotted to kill foreign leaders, the CIA official flatly denied it to the president’s face. There were certain matters that were above the president’s pay grade, Helms believed.

  Johnson’s suspicions about JFK’s demise always seemed mixed with fears for his own safety. At Parkland Hospital, he asked White House press aide Malcolm Kilduff to delay announcing Kennedy’s death until he was safely back aboard Air Force One. “We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well as they were after President Kennedy,” he told Kilduff. Later, on the presidential plane, Johnson’s fears briefly blossomed into a full-blown panic attack. Searching for LBJ to get his approval to take off, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s Air Force aide, found him “hiding in the toilet…muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us!’”

  After moving into the White House, Johnson again grew agitated when he saw the blood-red rug that Jackie had installed in the Oval Office before the Dallas trip. “It reminded him of the president being assassinated, and he put another rug in the Oval Office with the presidential seal on it,” DeLoach recalled. Johnson did not trust the Secret Service with his life after Dallas and demanded that the FBI protect him even though it was not part of its job description. “Just honestly, Mike,” LBJ told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in a September 1964 phone conversation recorded by the president’s Oval Office taping system, “—and I wouldn’t have this repeated to anybody—my judgment is that they’re more likely to get me killed than they are to protect me.”

  DeLoach sympathized with Johnson’s security concerns, but gently rejected his request. “He was not a coward,” insisted the FBI official, although that’s precisely what Bobby Kennedy believed about him, ever since he witnessed Johnson’s shaky performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “The president was a very courageous man. He was a very strong man, but he wanted that added protection…. For example, he would call and ask me to put an FBI agent on Air Force One on almost any trip. A lot of times, he wanted me to go personally and I, frankly, couldn’t turn loose of my responsibilities and handle such assignments and I diplomatically told him that.”

  From time to time, Johnson would unsettle DeLoach by bringing up Kennedy’s violent end and speculating about “who may have caused it.” The FBI man would rush to assure him that his fears of a conspiracy were groundless. “He indicated that, ‘Could it have been the CIA?’ And I said, ‘No, sir.’ And he didn’t think so himself, he was just rambling in his conversation. ‘Could it have been Castro? Could it have been the Soviet Union?’ And I told him no, that the investigation had been very thorough, that the Warren Commission had confirmed the conclusions of the FBI, that there was no conspiracy involved and that Lee Harvey Oswald—and Oswald alone—did it.”

  But Hoover’s man in the White House failed to put the president’s mind at rest. After Johnson was driven from office in 1969, a nearly broken man, historians would conclude that he was a victim of the war in Vietnam. But as Max Holland, a scholar of LBJ’s White House tapes, has observed, “The assassination weighed on him as heavily as did the war.” Back home on his Texas ranch, smoking and drinking heavily again in defiance of his failing heart, Johnson continued to speculate about the dark trauma that had given him the terrible gift of the American presidency. In a 1969 interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS, he raised the possibility of an international conspiracy, but then quickly tried to shove the disturbing idea
back in its bag, pressuring CBS to cut this exchange for reasons of “national security.” Nonetheless, Johnson could not contain his disturbing thoughts.

  One day, lounging in his swimming pool on the ranch, he brought up Dallas with his Secret Service guard Mike Howard, who he knew had some connection to the case.

  “What do you think of this Oswald fellow?” Johnson asked Howard.

  The Secret Service man dutifully gave the former president the official line: he was a “deranged young man who had delusions of grandeur.”

  “So you think he did it by himself?” asked LBJ.

  “I sure do,” said Howard.

  Johnson squinted in the sun at the agent. “Uh huh.” That was all he said.

  Historians have cautioned that not much should be made of Lyndon Johnson’s dark speculations about Dallas, since his mind was given to conspiratorial brooding. But he was not alone in Washington power circles in his suspicions. One of the most startling and little-known facts about this chapter in American history is how much of the political elite believed Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. While the country’s ruling caste—from President Johnson on down—muttered among themselves about a conspiracy, these same leaders worked strenuously—with the media’s collaboration—to calm the public’s fears.