A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (6 page)

“Daddy, they just killed Oswald!”

Warren was annoyed at the interruption. “Oh, Dorothy, don’t pay any attention to all those wild rumors or they will drive you to distraction.”

“But Daddy,” she said, “I saw them do it.”

Warren rushed to the television set and watched a replay of footage of the handcuffed Oswald, surrounded by police officers as he was being marched to a squad car, being shot by Dallas nightclub impresario Jack Ruby. It was not clear if Oswald would survive his injuries.

Despite this new shock, Warren forced himself back to his legal pad. He had less than an hour to finish the eulogy and have Nina type it up before they hurried out the door for the drive across town to Capitol Hill. With the help of policemen who recognized the chief justice and cleared the crowded city streets, the Warrens managed to arrive at the Capitol in time. The chief justice was one of three speakers at the ceremony; the others were chosen to represent the two houses of Congress: House Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, both Democrats.

All three eulogies were short. Warren’s was by far the most pointedly worded and, it seemed, personally felt.

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy—a good and great President, the friend to all people of good will; a believer in the dignity and equality of all human beings; a fighter for justice; an apostle of peace—has been snatched from our midst by the bullet of an assassin,” he began. “What moved some misguided wretch to do this horrible deed may never be known to us, but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for this fanaticism!

“If we really love this country; if we truly love justice and mercy; if we fervently want to make this nation better for those who are to follow us, we can at least abjure the hatred that consumes people,” he continued. “Is it too much to hope that the martyrdom of our beloved President might even soften the hearts of those who would themselves recoil from assassination, but who do not shrink from spreading the venom which kindles thoughts of it in others?”

Warren was proud of the eulogy, publishing it in full in his memoirs, but his effusive, unqualified praise for Kennedy struck some listeners as inappropriate for a chief justice, given his responsibility to rise above partisanship. Would he have offered similar praise in a eulogy for Eisenhower? Almost certainly not.

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Robert Kennedy told friends later that he did not like the tone of Warren’s remarks. “I thought it was inappropriate to talk about hate,” he said. Others in Washington were even more offended. Warren’s words denouncing “the forces of hatred” and their “venom” were instantly seen by many prominent Kennedy critics in Congress, particularly southern segregationists who had opposed the president on civil rights legislation, as an attack on them. They were all the more outraged after it become clear that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of political forces that had nothing to do with them. If the early news reports were right, Oswald was a Marxist who had once tried to defect to Russia and openly admired Fidel Castro.

Senator Richard Brevard Russell Jr., the Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and widely seen as the most powerful man in the Senate, told colleagues that he seethed when he heard Warren’s eulogy. Russell, almost certainly the most brilliant legislative tactician of his generation, was a staunch segregationist. Most days, he memorialized his thoughts with jottings on a pad of tiny pink notepaper that he kept in his suit pocket; the pads were later gathered up by his secretary and filed away. In a handwritten note to himself about the eulogy, Russell described it as “Warren’s blanket indictment of the South.”

Russell could grow furious simply at the mention of Warren’s name. That had been true since 1954 and
Brown v. Board of Education
, which Russell saw as the start of a campaign by the Supreme Court to undermine what he had always called the “Southern way of life.” Russell felt very differently about the fallen president. Whatever their differences over civil rights, he had always liked Kennedy. On the afternoon of the assassination, reporters recalled seeing Russell in a lobby off the Senate floor, hunched over a cabinet that contained the “tickers” that printed out the news reports of the Associated Press and United Press International. He was reading the bulletins from Dallas aloud to his colleagues as tears streamed down his face.

If the sixty-six-year-old Russell could find anything of comfort that day, it was that he knew—and loved—the man who would now occupy the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson was arguably his closest friend; the new president had been Russell’s most devoted protégé in their years together in the Senate. Johnson called Russell “the Old Master” and treated him like a beloved uncle. He owed the Georgian much of his success in Congress and, as Senate majority leader, he had sometimes stood with Russell in opposing major civil rights bills.

Soon, however, Russell would have cause to be bitterly disappointed by his former protégé. In one of his first acts as president, Johnson chose to coerce his old Senate colleague—to blackmail him, really—into working with the man who, more than any other in Washington, Russell openly despised: Earl Warren.

THE HOME OF ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT KENNEDY

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

For a man who was only thirty-eight years old, Robert Kennedy had accumulated an extraordinary number of powerful enemies. In a horrible twist of fate, he learned of his brother’s murder from one of them—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Seconds after receiving word from the FBI’s Dallas field office of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Hoover picked up the telephone in his office and was patched through to Hickory Hill, Kennedy’s sprawling six-acre, Civil War–era estate in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Ethel Kennedy, the attorney general’s wife, answered the phone as Kennedy and his guest, Robert Morgenthau, the United States attorney in Manhattan, lunched on tuna fish sandwiches on the patio. They had been discussing Kennedy’s war on organized crime. It was a surprisingly warm November afternoon—so warm that the attorney general had earlier taken a swim in his pool as Morgenthau chatted with Ethel.

Ethel held the white telephone receiver and motioned to her husband. “It’s J. Edgar Hoover.”

Kennedy walked to the phone; he knew this must be important since Hoover never called him at home. “Yes, Director,” he said.

“I have news for you,” Hoover said. “The president has been shot.” Hoover said he believed the president’s injuries were serious and that he would call back when he had more to report. Then the phone went dead, Kennedy said. Years later, Kennedy could still recall the coldness in Hoover’s voice, as if he had been calling on the most routine sort of Justice Department business. Hoover’s tone, Kennedy remembered bitterly, was “not quite as excited as if he was reporting the fact that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”
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Morgenthau recalled later that Kennedy’s response to the news was one of horror and stark, inconsolable grief. After Hoover’s call, Kennedy crumpled into his wife’s arms, his hand over his mouth as if to silence a scream.

John Kennedy was his older brother and best friend, and the fact that Robert Kennedy was also the attorney general of the United States—the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer—seemed an afterthought in those first minutes. Ethel took her husband to wait in their upstairs bedroom for final word from Texas. She directed Morgenthau to a television set on the first floor.

*

Kennedy’s closest aides flooded to Hickory Hill that afternoon. After the formal announcement of his brother’s death at about two p.m. Washington time, the attorney general emerged from the bedroom and came downstairs. Slowly he began to move among his aides and friends, accepting their condolences and thanking them for their contributions to his brother’s presidency. To a few, he offered hushed remarks suggesting that he was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt—that he was somehow responsible for this. He seemed to believe that some vicious, powerful enemy of the Kennedy administration—and, specifically, of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department—was behind his brother’s murder. “There’s been so much hate,” he told one of his most trusted deputies, Ed Guthman, the department’s press spokesman. “I thought they would get one of us. I thought it would be me.” Recalling the exchange, Guthman said that Kennedy did not specify who “they” were.

Kennedy later confided to a handful of friends that he had initially feared that the assassination was the work of some element of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a shocking thought, but he knew that there were people at the spy agency who had never forgiven his brother for the disaster at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, when CIA-trained Cuban exiles failed in their attempt to invade Cuba and oust Castro’s government. Although CIA bungling was ultimately to blame for the fiasco, agency veterans were outraged by the president’s decision not to order up American air power to save the guerrillas when the operation started to go wrong. After the debacle, Kennedy ousted Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and reportedly vowed to an aide that he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Within an hour of the assassination, Robert Kennedy telephoned the CIA and asked that John McCone, the former California industrialist who was Dulles’s successor, come immediately to Hickory Hill. McCone arrived minutes later—the CIA’s headquarters in suburban Langley, Virginia, was only a short drive away—and Kennedy took McCone for a somber walk on the lawn. McCone offered his condolences, only to be startled by the question that the attorney general asked him: Had the CIA killed the president?

“I asked McCone … if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me,” Kennedy later recalled.

McCone assured Kennedy that the CIA had nothing to do with the assassination, a pledge he said he made as a man of faith—as a fellow Roman Catholic.

Kennedy said he accepted McCone’s denial. But if the CIA didn’t kill the president, then who, or what, did? The list of Robert Kennedy’s sworn enemies might actually be longer than his brother’s, and many had the motive and the ability to dispatch an assassin to Texas. The assassination had not required a sophisticated plot or a professional sniper; that much was already clear. Initial reports suggested that his brother and Texas governor Connally, who had been seriously injured in the gunfire as he rode in the president’s limousine, had been easy targets in the slow-moving motorcade.

Could it have been the Mafia, which Robert Kennedy had made his target for so much of his professional life—first as a congressional investigator, now as attorney general? Or could the president’s murder have been ordered up by a corrupt union boss, perhaps the thuggish Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa, another target of Kennedy’s Justice Department? Or was the assassination carried out by southern racists, angered over the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policies?

There was also the possibility that the president had been killed by a foreign enemy. In those first hours, Kennedy’s friends recalled hearing nothing from him to suggest that he had any strong suspicion that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination; Moscow would know that any successor administration in Washington was unlikely to treat the Kremlin differently. A more likely suspect was Cuba. The United States had almost been drawn into a nuclear war over Cuba during the missile crisis the year before. And Robert Kennedy knew better, maybe even better than his brother, that Fidel Castro might have reason to want to see John Kennedy dead.

Rather than wait for others to investigate the assassination, and perhaps sensing the political danger that an independent inquiry might pose, Kennedy launched his own private investigation that very afternoon. He picked up the telephone at Hickory Hill and called friends and well-connected political allies around the country, asking for their help to determine the truth behind his brother’s murder. He called Walter Sheridan, a trusted Justice Department investigator who was an expert on labor racketeering and the Teamsters, and asked him to try to find out if Hoffa was involved. He phoned Julius Draznin, a prominent Chicago labor lawyer who had valuable sources within organized crime, to see if Draznin could find a Mafia link to the assassination.

From the start, Robert Kennedy seemed unable to accept the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone.

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PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

DALLAS, TEXAS

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Lyndon Johnson had a conspiratorial mind. It had proved valuable in an unlikely political career that had taken him from the scrubby flatlands of central Texas to Capitol Hill and now, shockingly, into the Oval Office as the new president. His old colleagues in the Senate thought the cagey, power-hungry fifty-five-year-old Texan could see around corners, and God help anyone who might lurk around those corners and dare to conspire against him. Johnson would do almost anything—lying was the least of it—to deal with his enemies. He had always seemed to sense when plots were being hatched against him, which helped explain the brooding, ever-present paranoia and pessimism that he managed, usually, to keep hidden from the public. He had often felt humiliated during his three years as vice president, but he masked his despondency beneath layers of what some of Kennedy’s aides cruelly described as his “Uncle Cornpone” persona—the crude, chaw-spitting, bigger-than-life Texan who seemed so out of place among the Massachusetts sophisticates.

Often as not, his instincts about conspiracies proved right. Now, in his first panicky minutes in Dallas as the thirty-sixth president of the United States, he was convinced that his predecessor’s murder might be the first step in a foreign-born Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government. He feared his presidency would last only long enough to see him launch the nuclear warheads that would end the world. “When would the missiles be coming?” he recalled thinking to himself that afternoon. “What raced through my mind was that if they had shot our president, who would they shoot next?”