The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe Kennedy had long ago taught his sons that time was the most precious of commodities, and the president filled every cranny of his life as richly as he could, even the short helicopter ride from the White House lawn to Andrews Air Force Base as he left for Texas. “Where’s John?” the president asked his wife’s maid, Provi, as he moved through the second floor looking for his son.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Provi replied defensively. “It’s raining, and Miss Shaw does not want him to go.”

  “Go down the hall and make sure he’s dressed,” the president ordered. “I want to take him with me.”

  John Jr. trudged toward his father wearing a raincoat and a sou’wester rain hat. The president hated hats, but he donned one for a moment as he and little John ran out in the rain to the helipad where three helicopters sat waiting. John Jr. would not be going on the long trip west, but spending time with his son was one of the president’s pure delights, even on the short hop to Andrews Air Force Base. The president could bid an especially happy good-bye to his son since, upon his return, on November 25, they would be celebrating his namesake’s third birthday.

  Kennedy was relieved that Jackie was going with him, but as he sat in the helicopter waiting for her to arrive, he was once again reminded of a woman’s prerogative to be late even if her husband was the president of the United States. His son was with him but he beat out a tattoo with his fingers on his leg, while his aides scurried back into the White House to attempt to hurry his wife. As he sat waiting on her, he apparently knew that on his return he had the most onerous and difficult of duties: to deal with the question of O’Donnell and O’Brien’s possible corruption. There were rumors in the White House that he was going to fire the two when he returned from Texas. That may not have been true, and while some former staff members are convinced that the men were fully culpable, others are not so sure. Still others who knew them outside the White House say that it was impossible that they would have sought financial benefits for themselves. Whether their still-loyal friends are correct, the matter had finally to be faced by a president who abhorred such confrontations and personal dealings.

  Jackie finally arrived, and the craft rose up off the manicured lawn to fly southeast to Andrews Air Force Base. Below, the city appeared an exquisite rendering of geometric shapes. From the obelisk-shaped tower of the Washington Monument and the rectangles of the Mall to the dome of the Capitol, Washington seemed a city of perfect forms, patterns, and designs. Kennedy knew as well as any man that political Washington was nothing like that at all, but a city of dark labyrinths and twisted alleyways as well as grand streets and noble buildings. In the exercise of power, he traversed the whole political city, going places that few knew he went, leaving images of himself that sometimes had little to do with the man flying high above.

  As Air Force One flew westward from the Maryland air force base, Kennedy was heading to a Texas that was a far different place from what it first appeared to be. From above, the state looked like a place of endless vistas and almost limitless horizons. As Kennedy well knew, political Texas was a narrow, convoluted, dangerous place rife with betrayals and mistrust. The Texas Democrats were feuding, wasting their energy fighting one another instead of their common Republican opponents. That was politics as it always was, an impossible brew of the sublime and the ugly, the passionate and the calculated, public idealism and private cynicism. Matters were so bad that the state’s liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and its conservative Governor John Connolly could hardly manage a civil conversation.

  That was a matter that Kennedy would deal with, but he was traveling here primarily because a man who was running for president followed the scent of money, and Texas was big money. For months he had been pushing the Texas Democrats to set up a major fund-raiser, an event that would allow him to take home a million dollars or more, money that was fuel to power his campaign.

  Every time Kennedy left the safe, confining presence of the White House, he had to know that someone might be out there looking at him with the eyes of a killer, if nor the hands and the will. Of the thirty-four presidents who had preceded him, three had been assassinated, and attempts had been made on the lives of three others. During the first thirty-four months of his presidency, the Secret Service had noted twenty-five thousand threats against the president and listed one million names on its “security index” of those who represented possible threats.

  Early in November, the president’s trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Navy game had been canceled, possibly because the Secret Service heard that Cuban exiles were planning to kill Kennedy as he sat watching the game. His trip to Miami went on as planned, though an FBI informant had warned of a plan to assassinate Kennedy from a high building in a southern city and some of the former members of Brigade 2506 had boasted that they would kill him.

  On the morning of November 22, 1963, Dallas was festooned with five thousand handbills headlined: WANTED FOR TREASON. The president’s face stared out like a criminal’s picture tacked to the post office wall. The papers declared that Kennedy was wanted for “treasonous activities” for such measures as giving up American sovereignty to the “communist controlled United Nations,” betraying the forces of a Free Cuba, and approving the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. There was a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News that made similar charges, the page bordered in black like a mourning card.

  That morning the president was sitting in his suite at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth when he saw the advertisement. “Can you imagine a thing like that?” he said, looking at the page with distaste. Kennedy was frightened by the dreadful propensity of mass man to follow demagogues leading him to disaster with mindless slogans. “You know,” the president said, turning to Jackie, “we’re heading into nut country today.” As Kennedy paced the floor, his thoughts turned not to the surly protesters who might line the streets, stimulated by such fare as the advertisement, but to the previous evening, when he had been among enthusiastic supporters at a massive rally at Houston Coliseum. It had been a splendid evening, though one of the Texas advance men, Jack Valenti, had noticed that Kennedy tried to keep his hands out of sight beneath the rostrum. They were “vibrating so violently at times that they seemed palsied,” and the president had nearly dropped his five-by-seven cards.

  “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” Kennedy said, almost as an aside. “I mean it,” he continued. “There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” He pantomimed a phantom killer, pulling out his gun and firing away. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.”

  The president and first lady set out in the motorcade to journey from Dilles’ Love Field to his speech at the Texas Trade Mart. Kennedy had both a politician’s savvy and a husband’s pride in his wife. He knew nothing of dress designers other than the bills that he paid, but Jackie looked exquisite in her pink suit, pink pillbox hat, and white gloves.

  The top was down on the presidential limousine so that the people could see their president and first lady. Jackie reached to put on sunglasses against the glaring Texas sun, but Kennedy asked her to put them back in her lap, telling his wife that the onlookers wanted to see her eyes. Kennedy liked to shield himself from the throngs that sought in him something they did not have and he could not give, but each time he drove in a motorcade through an American city he looked out into those restless faces as a gauge of his own political future. Whatever doubts he had when he set out this morning, as Kennedy scanned the faces this day, he had reason to believe that these people loved him, shouting his and Jackie’s names, pleading with him to look their way, waving at him, celebrating not only the president but also the presidency.

  For Jackie, it was often a blur of faceless humanity out there on the streets, but Kennedy seemed to look at each face, locking in his gaze so that thousands would walk away feeling that they had connected with
their president. At Lemmon and Lomo Drive a group of little children stood holding a sign: MR. PRESIDENT. PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS. “Let’s stop here, Bill,” Kennedy told Bill Greer, the driver. As Kennedy descended from the limousine, the crowd surged forward, pressing around him. Spectators wanted nothing more than a handshake, an autograph, a touch, but they would have drowned him in their adulation.

  As the motorcade crawled through the downtown streets, the crowds were at times a dozen deep, pushing against barricades, surging into the streets, pressing for a glimpse of their president. Kennedy waved and smiled, and yet as always there was a dispassionate quality to him, as if he were watching himself watching the crowds watching him. Though the crowds could not possibly hear him, he kept saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He was president, and he needed the votes of the Mexican-Americans shouting his name, the secretaries leaning out of the windows waving at him, the businessmen standing there clapping. If he was to win reelection, he needed Texas, and he rightfully saw these crowds as a good omen.

  In the summer he had doodled on a sheet of paper, “To govern is to choose.” He might as easily have written, “To live is to choose.” That was the axiom of his life. As a boy lying in a hospital bed, he had chosen health over illness, refusing to live as a near-invalid. Today, as the motorcade moved through the downtown streets, Kennedy looked like a vital, youthful president. No one in these cheering crowds knew that to protect his back he wore a brace of canvas and steel that held him supernaturally erect. No one knew about the drugs that he took, the pain that he felt, and the price that he paid to maintain the illusion of heath.

  Kennedy chose to enter politics and to stand for Congress, the Senate, and the presidency. He chose the issues he thought mattered and those that did not. In his press conferences as president, he tried to educate Americans about the hard choices they and he faced, to make them realize that men made war and peace by their conscious decisions. In his first 1,036 days in office, no issue had so defined his presidency as had Cuba. At the Bay of Pigs he had suffered his most pathetic defeat, and a year and a half later he had stood strong against the choice of war during the missile crisis. He then chose to continue the attempt to bring Communist Cuba down in the dangerous folly of a secret war. Even at this moment one of Castro’s would-be assassins was meeting in Paris with several CIA officers and receiving a Papermate pen with a tiny hidden needle that he was to use to prick Castro’s skin, killing him with poison. Cubela said that he preferred to do the deed with “two high-powered rifles with telescopic sights” that could be used to kill Castro from a distance.

  Kennedy was riding through the clamorous streets because he chose to be there. Everything he had done led him to Dallas. He was a politician, and he needed Texas money. The top was down because he had made a covenant with the people, and in a democracy the people saw their leaders. Kennedy carried the seeds of his own death within his pained, weakened body, and if he had not let his maladies haunt his days, he surely would not let the fear of assassination haunt him either. All of his life he contemplated courage and its meaning. For him, riding on a sun-dappled day in an open limousine through the streets of Dallas was not restless disregard of the dangerous circumstances. It was the essence of his life.

  The speech that he was about to give at the Texas Trade Mart evoked many of the themes of his life. What made it different was that in recent months he had grown distressed at the growing hysteria on the dark edges of American politics. There were critics who called strength weakness and slandered their enemies as traitors. Kennedy was a politician running for reelection, and it was natural that he would not look kindly at those who condemned his stewardship of America, but this was far deeper than a calculated ploy. Since his youth, he had seen that the strength of democracy was its people and the leaders they freely chose. “America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” He condemned the far Left and its apparent assumption “that words will suffice without weapons,” and the warriors of the far Right who thought that “peace is a sign of weakness.”

  “We, in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom,” he was to say. “We ask therefore that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward men.’ “It was an uneasy, difficult destiny, and Kennedy professed it passionately, even if he did not always listen to the words he spoke or act on the ideals he believed.

  As the limousine moved past the cheering crowds, the Secret Service men looked out on the restless, happy faces, searching for one with a hard, purposeful look. They were trained to look away from the president, to look into the faces of the crowd, to look up at the buildings, to look for a malevolent glint of steel, but never to look into Kennedy’s eyes.

  Ahead stood the Texas Book Depository, and on the sixth floor crouched a man with a cheap rifle and a dream of immortality. The next moment has become so much a part of the American psyche that it is as if we are all riding beside the first lady in the back seat of that black Lincoln. We shiver soundlessly at a loss beyond loss. In that instant all the certitudes and easy optimism of American history were blown away.

  32

  Requiem for a President

  The last of the flocks of geese had glided across the gray sky flying south. The Kennedys had already sent the Honey Fitz to Florida; if it had not been for the traditional family Thanksgiving, Joe would already have headed to the sun and warmth of Palm Beach. The president would be coming for the holiday, and Joe would have weathered even grimmer November days to spend another long weekend with his son.

  As Joe sat slouched in his wheelchair, even the expressions on his face appeared diminished. At times the seventy-five-year-old man seemed little more than an inert form to be hauled from bed to wheelchair and back again. Those who took care of him tiptoed around his diminished life, but in the minute circumference of his days there was little he did not see, and few nuances of life at Hyannis Port that he did not grasp.

  Joe had fallen asleep for his afternoon nap when Ann Gargan awakened him. “Uncle Joe, there’s been a terrible accident,” Ann said. Joe had hardly begun contemplating these words when Rita Dallas, the nurse, took Ann’s arm and pushed her outside. A minute later she returned and stood beside her groggy charge. “Uncle Joe, it’s Wilbur,” she said, mentioning the head gardener. “He’s been hurt, but he’s all right, he’s all right.”

  Joe went back to sleep. After Joe’s nap, Frank Saunders came rushing into the room, his voice charged with enthusiasm. “Hey, chief, it’s movie time!” the chauffeur exclaimed as he prepared to wheel Joe down to the private theater where he had once sat with mistresses and famous guests. Joe usually liked Elvis Presley movies, but after a few minutes of Kid Galahad, he became restless, and Saunders took him back to his room, where Joe was told his television set was not working.

  As Joe lay there perusing a magazine, Eunice and Teddy burst into the room. Eunice moved toward her father, took his hand, and kissed him. “Daddy, Daddy, there’s been an accident,” she whispered, as if her words were a secret. “But Jack’s okay, Daddy. Jack was in an accident.”

  Eunice did not want to say what had to be said, and then she said it. “Jack’s dead. He’s dead. But he’s in heaven. He’s in heaven. Oh God, Daddy.”

  “Jack’s okay, isn’t he, Daddy?” Her father always made everything right. Teddy could no longer even pretend to pretend. He fell on his knees in front of his father’s bed and covered his stricken face with his hands. “Dad, Jack was shot,” Teddy said. “He’s dead, Daddy,” Eunice said. “He’s dead.”

  Rose entered to see her husband lying there with a
stony stare and a hand that beat against the sheet. “He was so angry, mad at the world for doing it again,” she later told her niece, Kerry McCarthy. “It worried me more that he was so angry. He took everyone to task, including God. I would rather have him be in pain, but his anger at the Almighty, you can’t deal with that. Only later came the pain.”

  Bobby had been struck his own grievous wound, but the assailant had hit his heart, not his head, and he stumbled onward as if he had not been felled. He had always sought solace in action, and so he did now, moving to protect his brother in death as ultimately he could not protect him in life. Even before he knew that the president was dead, he called Bundy at the White House and ordered that his brother’s personal files be removed to the NSC offices in the Old Executive Office Building and kept under around-the-clock guard. He also ordered that the secret taping system be dismantled so that no one would know that the president had recorded their meetings.

  Bobby set out to try to learn who had murdered his brother. His first instinct was not to seek out the assassin among America’s enemies or hidden somewhere on a list of psychopaths and the deranged. He turned toward his own government and the agency he had helped to hone into a murderous machine. He had ordered the CIA to do whatever was necessary to destroy Cuba, and the agency was ready to garrote a watchman in the night and to poison a head of state.

  Bobby telephoned McCone and asked the CIA director to come over to Hickory Hill. When McCone arrived, Bobby asked him whether the CIA had killed the president. The director swore that the intelligence agency had nothing to do with the president’s death.

  Next Bobby called Harry Williams, a Cuban exile leader close to the attorney general, who was at the Ebbit Hotel in Washington preparing a new series of attacks from secret bases in Central America. He knew then that a man linked to Castro protests in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been arrested in Dallas. “One of your boys did it,” Bobby said. The attorney general had created this exile army, and now he feared that it had turned against him and expressed its deadly wrath against his brother.