A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (104 page)

Chief Justice Earl Warren and his wife, Nina, seen the day after the assassination outside the White House, where they had gone with other members of the Supreme Court for a viewing of the president’s casket in the East Room. On Sunday, November 24, Warren stood before Mrs. Kennedy and her daughter, Caroline, and offered a eulogy for Kennedy in the Capitol Rotunda, where the casket had been on public display.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy loathed President Johnson but agreed to remain in his cabinet. The two men, shown at the White House in October 1964, were the highest-ranking government officials not called to testify before the Warren Commission.

Kennedy and wife, Ethel, leave the new Georgetown home of Jacqueline Kennedy after helping her move in on December 6, 1963.

The Kennedys aboard the Coast Guard yacht
Manitou
, sailing in Narragansett Bay, on September 8, 1962. Mrs. Kennedy can be seen reading William Manchester’s respectful biography of Kennedy,
Portrait of a President
, as she smokes.

Although Kennedy demanded the resignation of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles as a result of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, he remained friendly with Dulles, seen here (
left
) on September 27, 1961, at the announcement of Dulles’s successor at the CIA, California industrialist John McCone (
right
).

Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson (
center
) is surrounded by police officers after he is struck on the head by a placard carried by an anti-U.N. demonstrator in Dallas on October 25, 1963. The incident, a month before the assassination, was another example of the hostility faced by prominent political visitors to conservative Dallas.

On the morning of his assassination, Kennedy told his wife that they were “heading into nut country” after seeing a black-bordered ad in the
Dallas Morning News
headlined: “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” in which the Kennedy administration was accused of “going soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America.” Leaflets appeared in the streets that portrayed Kennedy in a mock mug shot and said he was “Wanted for Treason.”

The president appears to practice “the Johnson Treatment” on his political mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, in the White House Cabinet Room on December 12, 1963, three weeks after the assassination.

President Johnson meets with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in an undated photograph. Johnson convinced the reluctant Warren to lead the commission by warning him that he might otherwise be responsible for a nuclear war in which tens of millions of Americans would die.

Johnson is interviewed on the White House lawn on April 16, 1964, by the powerful muckraking columnist Andrew “Drew” Pearson, a close friend of Chief Justice Warren’s.