THAT FALL John F. Kennedy was worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons among the superpowers. The United States and the Soviet Union possessed arsenals of several thousand nuclear weapons. Most of them were more powerful and destructive than the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 to end the Second World War. Through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the nations that possessed nuclear weapons tested their effectiveness and demonstrated their military superiority by exploding them in their own territory, either underground, in the ocean, or in the atmosphere in remote areas far removed from population centers. Nonetheless, the tests still resulted in radioactive fallout, which winds and weather systems could carry for hundreds of miles and contaminate the food supply or towns and cities.
At a historic speech at American University in June 1963, JFK laid out his quest for peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union. He did not overlook the differences between the nations but invoked “our common interests.” For in the end, he said, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Kennedy negotiated with the Russians to end atmospheric testing, and in October 1963, he signed a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He considered it the most significant achievement of his presidency.
A CHASTENED and humiliated Oswald returned to the United States on October 3, 1963, and went to Dallas, where he visited Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving and spent the weekend of October 11–13. Paine worried that Oswald was having trouble getting a job, so she told some of her friends he needed work. On the night of October 14, Ruth told him over the phone that a girlfriend of hers said they were hiring at a place called the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street. The next day, Oswald applied in person. The manager liked that he had served in the Marine Corps and addressed him as “sir.” Lee was hired and reported for work on October 16.
Lee and Marina agreed that he would live at a boardinghouse in Dallas during the week and visit Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving on the weekends. Ruth, who disliked Lee and hated the way he treated his wife, hoped Marina would leave him. A neighbor of Ruth’s named Wesley Buell Frazier also worked at the Book Depository, and he offered to drive Oswald from Dallas to Irving on Fridays after work and to the Book Depository on Monday mornings. Marina threw her husband a surprise birthday party on Friday, October 18, and he seemed touched. Then, on October 20, their new baby daughter, Rachel, was born. Perhaps Oswald’s odd and unsettled life would finally calm down.
On October 23, Lee attended a right-wing political rally where General Walker spoke. Was this a warning sign that he was plotting another assassination attempt? Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation made a couple of visits to Marina Oswald. They told her they would like to speak to Lee. It was nothing serious, she was told, just a follow-up to chat with him since he had returned home from Russia almost seventeen months ago. The visits angered Oswald—he believed the FBI agents were harassing Marina. On November 12, he left an angry note at the FBI headquarters in Dallas for agent James Hosty, telling him to leave his family alone.
But he failed to sign the note with his name.
IT WAS the autumn of 1963, and the presidential election was just one year away. John Kennedy planned to run for a second term and hoped to win by a margin wider than he had eked out in 1960. It was essential that he again win the state of Texas. In 1963, warring factions of the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in that state were at each other’s throats, fighting over which group would control politics in the state. JFK wanted the dispute to end. To increase his chances for reelection, he planned to travel to Texas in late November to campaign with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1960 Kennedy had chosen Johnson as his running mate—over the strong objection of his brother Robert Kennedy. It was a savvy move. Without Johnson and the electoral votes of Texas, JFK would not have won that election. Texas was to be a major political trip involving private meetings with Democratic leaders, public speeches, and fund-raising events. The president and first lady would visit five cities in two days—San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin—and then head to Johnson’s Texas ranch to rest. It was an ambitious schedule packed with activities.
Jacqueline Kennedy would accompany her husband to Texas. She had traveled with JFK to Paris, and without him on private visits to Italy, Greece, India, and Pakistan. But she had not been on a real campaign trip since the presidential election in the fall of 1960. The Texas events would come only three months after her new baby, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had died on August 9—two days after he was born.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1963. It was one of those legendary Kennedy parties. And although they did not know it at the time, it was also John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s last night together in the presidential mansion. The occasion was a reception for the federal judiciary, including the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Several days earlier, the Kennedys had treated hundreds of guests to a performance by the bagpipes and drums of the Black Watch, the legendary British military unit. Kennedy receptions and dinners were already the stuff of legend. One of the most memorable was a dinner that the president hosted for Nobel Prize recipients. He quipped that never had such talent and brilliance been assembled at the White House—since Thomas Jefferson had dined there alone.
The Kennedys looked forward to more social events the next week. On Monday, November 25, they would host their next dinner party—it was to be a state dinner for the new chancellor of West Germany, Ludwig Erhard. The invitations were already in the mail. They loved to entertain—not just at official events but also intimate, private dinner parties and small dances. Often these evenings concluded with guests being invited upstairs to the private family quarters. It was at a small private dinner party in Georgetown where they had met twelve years earlier.
Earlier in 1963 they had celebrated the tenth anniversary of their marriage. Monday, November 25, would also be their son John’s third birthday. Jackie would organize a little party for him before the adults arrived for dinner.
Then, for Thanksgiving that Thursday, November 28, they would travel to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and spend the holiday at a Kennedy family home there. Already on JFK’s calendar for December 6 was a special event over which he was eager to preside—the first ever presentations of the new Presidential Medal of Freedom to a group of distinguished Americans. He had created the award and then vetted the names of potential recipients. The ceremony would epitomize the Kennedy style and its celebration of achievements in literature, culture, and the arts.
Just last month, when he spoke at Amherst College in a tribute to Robert Frost, JFK had paid homage to the arts. It was similar to President John Adams’s famous observation that he studied politics and war so that his grandchildren could study poetry and music. True, Jackie was the more passionate cultural devotee in the family (JFK might prefer a private screening of the Hollywood spectacular Spartacus over a sublime solo performance by Pablo Casals), but the president’s enthusiasm for American achievement in all fields was genuine. He was entranced by excellence. When he nominated former football star and Justice Department lawyer Byron White to be a Supreme Court justice, Kennedy said that one of White’s qualifications was that he had excelled in everything he had ever attempted.
After the Medal of Freedom awards, the Kennedys were looking forward to Christmas in Palm Beach, Florida, at the family compound there. The president and Jackie had just signed the first batch of their Christmas cards for mailing later.
John Kennedy loved his job. He savored every moment of it—even the times of crisis and testing. He was never one of those presidents who complained about the debilitating stress and awesome burdens of the office. He knew how lucky he was—not just to be president of the United States, but to be alive at all. In addition to his own narrow escapes, many of those close to him, even some of his own s
iblings, had died young. He and Jackie had lost their stillborn daughter, who Jackie would have named Arabella, and their son Patrick, who had lived less than two days. Just as JFK had described Robert Frost in Frost’s own words in that October speech at Amherst, he too was “one acquainted with the night.”
But in November 1963, the Kennedys looked forward to the future. Jackie had emerged from her mourning for Patrick. JFK had started to think about the presidential campaign of 1964. His prospects looked decent. To improve them, he had scheduled the three-day political swing through Texas in the week before Thanksgiving, where he would visit the five cities and make numerous speeches, as many as three in a single day.
Jackie had even agreed to join him on the trip. She had never liked campaigning and had not done it since the election of 1960. But she was eager to make this journey. In the fall of 1963, as unlikely as it might sound to a jaded modern reader with fifty years’ worth of cynicism and hindsight in the wake of all the subsequent revelations about JFK’s private life, John and Jacqueline Kennedy might have been more in love with each other this November than they had been since the year they married.
Once they returned from Texas, they could begin again.
The president had received warnings that he might not be entirely welcome in Texas. In Dallas, various political enemies criticized him as either too liberal on civil rights or too soft on Communism. Weeks earlier, the president’s opponents had protested a visit to the city by Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations. In the auditorium where he spoke, hecklers disrupted his speech. Stevenson did not help his cause when he insulted one of them with a prissy tongue-twister: he might as well have said it to the whole state. “Surely, my dear friend, I don’t have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I? . . . I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”
It was exactly the aspect of Stevenson’s prickly, egghead personality that made JFK dislike him. When, outside, the ambassador asked an angry woman how he might help her, she hit him in the head with a cardboard picket sign. Jackie may have been a fan of Adlai—they enjoyed private dinners in New York City—but the two-time Democratic presidential nominee and two-time loser rubbed Jack the wrong way. Thus Stevenson was never accepted into JFK’s inner circle.
Several people had warned JFK to stay out of Dallas. The previous month, on October 3, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas suggested during a meeting with President Kennedy that he not go there. “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” The hostile reception that Adlai Stevenson received in Dallas on October 24 seemed to confirm Fulbright’s counsel.
And on November 4, Byron Skelton, Democratic national committeeman from Texas, sent a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that warned him about the hostile political climate in the city.
“I am worried,” he confessed, “about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas.” He mentioned a prominent figure in the city who had complained that JFK “is a liability to the free world.” The insult troubled Skelton. “A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President.” Skelton suggested that Kennedy bypass Dallas.
Skelton was so worried, he also wrote a warning to an aide of Lyndon Johnson, and the following week, when Skelton was in Washington, he alerted two other men at the national committee. One woman from Dallas sent a letter to presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger. “Don’t let the president come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.” Others expressed misgivings about the visit.
But no warnings would intimidate John Kennedy enough to stay out of Dallas. First, he was a fatalist. Second, he dismissed such warnings as exaggerations. And third—and this was the most important reason he refused to drop Dallas from his itinerary—JFK believed that no president of the United States should ever be afraid to visit an American city.
Any man who showed such fear was not, in John Kennedy’s opinion, up to the job. He was going to Dallas.
Before the Texas trip, JFK was less interested in threats than he was in what Jackie planned to wear to Texas. In general he was happy to leave such matters to her personal taste—except when he saw the bills. Often she tried to conceal the cost of her purchases. On one occasion, she insisted that reports of her extravagance were so exaggerated they could not be true. “A newspaper reported that I spent $30,000 a year buying Paris clothes and that women hate me for it,” she moaned. “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.” But aside from occasional spats about the expense involved, JFK did not micromanage Jackie’s wardrobe. Of course he wanted her to look good, and she always did.
But he was concerned how she would look in Texas. “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at that lunch [in Dallas on November 22],” he told her, “wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them.” But don’t, he cautioned, go over the top. “Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.”
He need not have worried—Jackie rarely overdid it. In the family quarters of the White House, she began to show him the outfits she had chosen for the trip, holding them up in front of her body one after the other. Three of the most attractive outfits included a black velvet dress, a matching white wool suit, and a matching pink suit.
AT THE White House on the morning of Thursday, November 21, John and Jacqueline Kennedy said good-bye to their daughter, Caroline. On the lawn, three helicopters, their rotor blades spinning, prepared to leave for Andrews Air Force Base, where their jet was waiting. Their son, John, who would celebrate his third birthday in a few days, loved flying in the helicopter; as a special treat, they agreed to take him along for the ride to Andrews. The president sat with his boy and a few Secret Service agents in the first copter. Staff members climbed aboard the other two. But the president’s helicopter could not take off. Jackie was nowhere in sight. Then, dressed in a white two-piece suit, she left the White House and walked to her husband’s aircraft. She was the last person to board.
Awaiting the party at Andrews was Air Force One, the sleek new jet that had become the symbol of the modern presidency. The plane had gone into service on October 21, 1962, making John Kennedy the first and only president to have flown in it so far. It was a beautiful aircraft decorated with two tones of bright blue paint and a big red, white and blue American flag painted on the tail. Raymond Loewy, the famous industrial designer, had given the aircraft his imprimatur, and JFK himself had approved the design.
Kennedy considered the aircraft one of the great perks of the presidency and a big step up from his own private plane—the Caroline, on which he had flown all over the country during his pursuit of the presidency. Kennedy’s blue and white Caroline was a twin-engine Convair 240 that seated sixteen; it had been purchased by the president’s father, Joe Kennedy, in 1959. The plane had a galley and a bedroom, and Kennedy and his staff used it to great effect during the campaign. But it was a puddle jumper compared to the majestic presidential jet.
At Andrews, John Kennedy Jr. wanted to get on the plane and fly to Texas with his parents. The president told his son he could not come on the trip, and explained that he would see him in a few days. His parents would be home before his birthday. The Kennedys said good-bye to their son and boarded Air Force One for the flight to San Antonio. The plane took off, bearing the president and first lady west to Texas and two busy days of back-to-back events. John Jr., accompanied by Secret Service agent Bob Foster, returned to the White House by helicopter.
John Kennedy had left some unfinished paperwork behind on his desk in the Oval Office, including an autographed photograph he intended as a gift for a supporter. After inscribing the photo, he had neglected to sign it. It was of no consequence. He could add his name once he returned from Texas.
THE DAY the Kennedys left the White House for Texas, a man waiting twelve hundred miles away in Dallas was eager for the
president to arrive. He was not an important politician who wanted to discuss business with President Kennedy. He was not a supporter who hoped to shake his hand, nor one who had purchased a ticket to the November 22 breakfast to be held for several hundred people in nearby Fort Worth, or for the big lunch scheduled in Dallas that afternoon.
Nor was he a political opponent of John Kennedy’s who planned to protest his policies with a homemade, hand-lettered cardboard sign. No, this man who awaited John Kennedy in Texas had something else in mind. He wanted to kill the president.
But the man’s timing was strange, because these feelings had come on all of a sudden. Just two days earlier, on the morning of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald awoke in Dallas, Texas, he did not know that within the next three days, he would decide to murder the president of the United States. If a fortune-teller had prophesied this future, the twenty-four-year-old married father of two children might not have believed it.
Indeed, among Oswald’s corrosive obsessions—and there were many—John F. Kennedy was not one. There is no evidence that Oswald hated the president. Much evidence suggests he did not think about him much at all. He had no long-standing fixation with Kennedy. He had not made him the primary subject of his everyday conversations. He had not been stalking the president or, as far as can be told, fantasizing about killing him. Among Lee Harvey Oswald’s list of long-simmering resentments, frustrations, and grievances, the Kennedy presidency was not one of them.
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