Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy

by O'Reilly, Bill

  Special Agent Fain is just two months away from finishing his twenty years with the bureau. He’s going to retire to Houston. There, he’ll live off his pension while working for his brother, an orthopedic surgeon. This will mark yet another major career change for the veteran agent. Fain is a complicated man in his mid-fifties who taught school, ran for public office, and passed the Texas state bar before joining the bureau in 1942. The Oswald case is nothing new to him. Back when Oswald first defected to the Soviet Union, it was Fain who was assigned a minor investigation of Oswald’s mother because she had mailed twenty-five dollars to her son in the Soviet Union. When it comes to rooting out Communists, no stone is too small to be left unturned by Hoover’s FBI.

  It is also John Fain who spoke face-to-face with Oswald just eight weeks earlier, on June 26, 1962. Oswald’s case has been designated as an “internal security” investigation, based on the belief that his defection might make him a threat to national security. Fain’s job is to find out whether the Russians have trained and equipped Oswald to perform a job against the United States. It is protocol with all internal security investigations to have two agents present, so that all statements can be corroborated.

  Something about the first interview, which lasted two hours, doesn’t sit well with Fain. He doesn’t like Oswald’s attitude, thinking him “haughty, arrogant … and insolent.” And his answers to most questions seemed incomplete. Fain has in-depth knowledge of Oswald’s struggle to return to America and knows that the Russians originally would not allow Marina and the baby to leave with him. But Oswald refused to leave without his wife, and the Soviet authorities finally relented. The one question that Oswald has never answered in a completely truthful manner is whether the Russians demanded anything in return for letting him come to America.

  John Fain needs that question answered. He’s a very thorough man and takes it upon himself to interview Lee Harvey Oswald one more time.

  At 5:30 P.M. the two agents see Oswald sauntering down the street, on his way home from his new job as a welder at the Leslie Machine Shop. Oswald lied on his job application, stating that his Marine Corps discharge was honorable when it was not. Oswald was kicked out of the Corps for a series of minor infractions. He also neglected to tell his employer about his time in the Soviet Union. And while he’s been on the job only a month, Oswald is already sick of the menial labor. He wants to quit and find better work in Dallas.

  Fain drives up alongside the walking Oswald. “Hi, Lee. How are you?” he says out the car window. “Would you mind talking with us for just a few minutes?”

  “Won’t you come in the house,” Oswald answers politely, remembering Fain from the last interview. Special Agent Brown is a new face. A different agent accompanied Fain back in June.

  “Well, we will just talk here,” Fain responds. “We will be alone to ourselves and be informal, and just fine.”

  Brown gets out to let Oswald into the backseat. Fain stays up front behind the wheel, but Brown slides in next to Oswald. Fain twists around to explain that they didn’t contact Oswald at work, not wanting to embarrass him with his new employer. And they don’t want to speak with him inside, for fear of rattling Marina. Thus the car.

  The three men talk for a little over an hour. The car windows are open just enough to take the edge off the stifling humidity. But the men still perspire—particularly the G-men, in their coats and ties. Oswald has already put in a hard day of blue-collar labor, and the smell of his body odor wafts through the car. Despite the discomfort, Oswald is friendlier than before, less defensive. He explains that he’s been in touch with the Soviet embassy, but only because it is required for Soviet citizens such as Marina to inform the embassy of their location on a regular basis. When pressed on whether this involved discussions with Soviet intelligence officials, Oswald is coy, wondering aloud why anyone would want to discuss spying with a guy like him. “He didn’t feel like he was of any importance to them,” Fain will later testify. “He said that he would cooperate with us and report to us any information that would come to his attention.”

  But Fain still is not satisfied. He presses Oswald again and again as to why he went to the Soviet Union in the first place. To the agent, it doesn’t make sense. U.S. Marines are known for their motto, Semper Fidelis, “Always Faithful.” Why would one of them willingly renounce America and take up residence in a nation that poses the greatest threat to the United States?

  It is the one question Oswald doesn’t answer. He dances around it, talking about “his own personal reasons” and that “it was something that I did.”

  At 6:45, Oswald is released from the car and goes inside his home. His time with the agents was actually a respite from tension in his household. He and Marina have been fighting, sometimes quite violently, for more than six months. The strife has become worse since they came to America. It used to be that Oswald was the only person Marina could talk to in America, because she doesn’t speak English. But now she’s made new friends within Dallas’s small local Russian expat community. Among these is a man named George de Mohrenschildt, who not only may have CIA connections, but also knew Jackie Kennedy when she was a child. De Mohrenschildt was a close friend of Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale. Marina’s new friends find her husband rude and take her side in their marital battles.

  And the battles are many. Oswald likes to be “the Commander” in their marriage, dictating the details of their life and refusing to let Marina learn English, for fear he’ll lose control over her. She is embarrassed by her bad teeth and wants corrective dental work, but he puts it off. He often plays out his need for power by hitting his wife in anger.

  But Marina is no shrinking violet. She screams at him for not making enough money and complains that he is indifferent to her. Their sexual relations are so infrequent that she accuses him of not being a man. She nags him constantly, and when he compares himself with the great men in the historical biographies he enjoys reading, she sarcastically derides him. Marina even writes to a former boyfriend in the Soviet Union, telling him she made a terrible mistake marrying Oswald. Unfortunately for her, the letter is returned for not having enough postage. Oswald opens and reads it, then beats her. Oddly, Marina condones Oswald’s violence. Even that little bit of passion, however misguided, is better than the cold side of his character that she finds so frustrating.

  The marital friction, coupled with his surprise FBI interrogation, would normally be enough to send Oswald into one of his trademark rants—the kind where he rails on and on about suppressive governments. But tonight his new copy of the Worker, the newsletter of the American Socialist Workers Party, awaits him. Oswald settles in to read.

  It is Special Agent Arnold J. Brown, not John Fain, who prepares the final report concerning the conversation in the car. The papers are submitted on August 30, 1962. But it is Fain, the twenty-year veteran, who will decide if there is any reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald is a secret agent for the Soviet Union, planted within the United States to do the nation harm.

  Content with the answers Oswald has given them, and looking forward to retirement, Special Agent John Fain requests that the Lee Harvey Oswald internal security investigation now be considered closed. After all, Oswald doesn’t own a gun or otherwise appear to be a threat.

  And so the case is closed.

  But Lee Harvey Oswald and the FBI will soon meet again.

  7

  OCTOBER 16, 1962

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  8:45 A.M.

  The president of the United States is rolling around on the bedroom floor with his children. Jack LaLanne is on the television telling JFK, Caroline, and John to touch their toes. Kennedy wears just a T-shirt and underpants. The carpeting and a nearby easy chair are cream-colored, providing perfect accents to the blue-patterned covers on the president’s four-poster canopy bed.

  The TV volume is “absolutely full blast” in Jackie’s words, as JFK and his son and daughter tumble around—loud enough that
Jackie comes in from her bedroom to see what’s going on. She loves her husband’s lack of self-consciousness and how at ease he is in all situations. But as she can plainly see, morning with the kids is when John Kennedy is at his most relaxed. He dotes on his children, letting Jackie be the disciplinarian, and takes unbridled pleasure in being close to them. She worries about their rambunctious behavior. The president thinks it a blessing. His one great lament is that his bad back prevents him from tossing young John into the air and catching him, a game the president’s son loves. Instead, JFK depends upon members of his staff and even visiting dignitaries to do the throwing for him.

  As president, JFK no longer needs to campaign or spend hours in his Senate office. He works at home. What was once a solitary morning ritual has become a family affair. He has drawn closer to his children than ever before and relishes each and every moment they spend together. They start each morning in his bedroom, even as he bathes, shaves, stretches, and eats.

  The president has just finished his bath and will soon get dressed. The kids will stick around and watch cartoons. Jackie might return to her bedroom, or she might come sit with him as he wraps his back brace into place before slipping on the tailored shirt that longtime valet George Thomas has laid out for him. Then will come the president’s shoes, the left one with a quarter-inch medical lift. Then, a quick glance into the bedroom mirror above the dresser to double-check his appearance. The mirror’s frame is a clutter of postcards, family photographs, and other minutiae, such as the Sunday Mass schedules for St. Stephen’s and St. Matthew’s cathedrals. He attends Mass and takes the sacrament regularly, although Kennedy bridles when photographers shoot pictures of him leaving confession. A time of atonement should also be a time of humiliation and privacy.

  Sometimes during the day, John and Caroline walk into the Oval Office and play on the floor or even beneath the presidential desk. Jackie fiercely protects the children from the public eye. But the president takes a larger view, realizing that America is enthralled by such a young First Family and clamors for every morsel of news about their daily life. Caroline and John have become celebrities in their own right, although they don’t know it. Photographers, writers, news magazines, and daily newspapers chronicling their young lives are just a fact of daily life.

  John, almost two years old, likes to stop at Evelyn Lincoln’s typewriter on his way in to the Oval Office and pretend to type a letter. Caroline, who is nearly six years old, likes to bring one or all of the family’s three dogs when she pays a visit to her father. In fact, the Kennedy children have turned the White House into a veritable menagerie, with dogs, hamsters, a cat, parakeets, and even a pony named Macaroni. JFK is allergic to dog hair, but he never lets on.

  Sometimes the president returns the favor by paying a surprise visit to Caroline and her classmates at their small private school on the third floor of the White House. The school is unique, set up by Jackie Kennedy to protect her children and those of her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy. The First Lady has brought in two teachers to give the children the best possible education.

  At nights the president is a great storyteller, making up tales about the fictitious giant in “Bobo the Lobo” and the sock-eating creatures of the deep in “The White Shark and the Black Shark.”

  The drop-in visits, forays to the schoolroom, and bedtime stories are unscheduled, but rolling around on the floor is a cherished morning routine. Kennedy, like every president since John Adams became the White House’s first resident in 1800, has learned that life inside the White House is complicated. Mornings are the only time the president can be carefree, unrehearsed, and, best of all, unwatched by a curious public.

  But on this Tuesday morning in October, a knock on the president’s bedroom door intrudes on his private time with the children. That knock will change everything.

  * * *

  National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy steps through the door. The razor-sharp creases of his suit pants and his polished shoes give the slim, bespectacled scholar an outward look of complete organization, which conflicts with his internal feelings of utter disarray.

  Bundy is about to deliver very bad news. He learned of it last night but has intentionally waited until now to tell the president. John Kennedy was in New York to deliver a speech and didn’t return to the White House until very late. The national security adviser wanted to make sure Kennedy received a full night of sleep before Bundy stepped into the presidential bedroom and broke the news. Bundy knows that from now until the moment this problem is solved, the president will be lucky to get any rest. For what McGeorge Bundy is about to tell JFK could change the course of history.

  “Mr. President,” the forty-three-year-old Bundy calmly informs Kennedy, “there is now hard photographic evidence, which you will see later, that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.”

  U-2 spy planes flying over Cuba have confirmed that six Soviet medium-range ballistic missile sites and twenty-one IL-28 medium-range bombers are now just ninety miles from the United States. Each of the airplanes is capable of launching nuclear weapons from thousands of feet up in the air. Each of the medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) can fly as far as Montana.

  The detonated nuclear warheads could kill eighty million Americans within a matter of minutes. Millions more would die later from the radioactive fallout.

  The president has dealt with crisis after crisis since taking office twenty-one months ago. But nothing—not the Bay of Pigs, not civil rights, not the Berlin Wall—can even remotely compare to this.

  * * *

  The Bay of Pigs, in its own mismanaged way, has shaped John Kennedy’s presidency. Now, listening to National Security Adviser Bundy, JFK is not nervous, as he was in April 1961. He is not overwhelmed. Instead, he behaves like the president of the United States, a man who long ago stopped defining himself by party affiliation.

  Kennedy knows that he needs to tread carefully. The Bay of Pigs will forever be a fresh wound. A second misstep in Cuba could be devastating—not only to his presidency, but also to his own children. The thought of losing Caroline and John to an atomic bomb terrifies Kennedy, for his children are always on his mind when he deals with the Soviets and the issue of nuclear war. The president is lobbying for an international nuclear test ban and characterizes himself as “President of generations unborn—and not just American generations.”

  Once, on a visit to a New Mexico nuclear testing ground, Kennedy was astounded at the enormity of the crater left by a recent underground test explosion. Even more troublesome was the opinion of two physicists, who explained, with broad smiles on their faces, that they were designing a more powerful bomb that would leave a much smaller crater.

  “How can they be so damned cheerful about a thing like that?” the president groused to a writer afterward. This was highly uncharacteristic. Kennedy’s typical behavior is outwardly friendly and inwardly guarded. He usually gives away nothing. So this sharing of his feelings is glaring evidence of his anxiety. “They keep telling me that if they could run more tests they could come up with a cleaner bomb. If you’re going to kill a hundred million people, what difference does it make whether it’s clean or dirty?”

  * * *

  JFK orders McGeorge Bundy to immediately schedule a top secret meeting of the national security staff. He then phones Bobby, telling him that “we have some big trouble. I want you over here.” The president decides not to deviate from his normal schedule, not wanting the news about Cuba to get out quite yet. One reason is that he doesn’t want to panic the American public. He knows very little about the situation and doesn’t have a plan for moving forward. Leaking word prematurely, at a time when he doesn’t have answers to the many questions the press will ask, will make him appear weak and indecisive.

  Another reason for keeping this “second Cuba” quiet has to do with JFK’s political best interests. The president long ago assured the American public that he would not allow the Soviets to install offensive weapons in C
uba. Khrushchev is calling Kennedy’s bluff at a time when midterm congressional elections are just a few weeks away. The president has no way of knowing whether the Soviets ever plan to use the missiles, but their mere presence shows that Khrushchev continues his quest to secure the upper hand in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.

  This must not happen. As with all midterms, the votes being cast across the nation will be a referendum on Kennedy’s policies and administration. His party holds a majority in the House and Senate, making it easier for JFK to promote his presidential agenda. Losing those majorities will complicate his job—and could perhaps cost him the election in 1964.

  President Kennedy, with brothers Robert and Teddy. (Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  There is another, even more personal, reason JFK wants his policies viewed in a popular light: his youngest brother, Teddy, is running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Something as catastrophic as a mishandling of this new Cuba situation could destroy any hopes of Teddy winning.

  JFK is proud of his thirty-year-old brother’s bid for office but has given it a wide berth during the campaign. The president’s official statement on the matter was a terse “His brother prefers that this matter be decided by the people of Massachusetts and that the president should not become involved.” JFK bristles at the widespread media coverage of Teddy’s run, including a sarcastic New York Times column about the youngest Kennedy brother’s relative inexperience and other newspaper articles warning of a Kennedy dynasty.

  None of this really bothers the president, personally. But he knows that if Teddy loses in the Kennedys’ home state, it will be a reflection on JFK’s political strength—or lack thereof.