A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (7 page)

He was scared that he was the second target. He and Lady Bird Johnson had been in the motorcade, after all, in an open-air limousine just two cars behind the president’s. One stray bullet, and they could have been hit, too. Johnson’s close friend and protégé John Connally was a passenger in Kennedy’s limousine and had been severely wounded. In the first hours, it was not clear Connally would survive the damage done by a 6.5-millimeter rifle bullet that had pierced his back and erupted from his chest.

One of Johnson’s first orders as commander in chief was intended, specifically, to prevent himself from being killed, too. After Kennedy was declared dead at about one p.m., Johnson ordered the traveling White House press secretary, Malcolm Kilduff, to withhold the news from reporters until after the Johnsons had safely left Parkland Hospital for Dallas’s Love Field airport, where Air Force One had been waiting since Kennedy’s arrival late that morning. Johnson worried that whoever had killed Kennedy was still on the streets, hunting for him. “We don’t know whether it’s a Communist conspiracy or not,” he told Kilduff. The assassin may be “after me as well as they were after President Kennedy—we just don’t know.”

After a frantic drive across Dallas in an unmarked police car, its sirens switched off on Johnson’s order to avoid drawing attention to the passengers hunched down in the backseat, the new president arrived at the airport and scrambled up the steps into Air Force One at about one forty p.m., Dallas time. (It was an hour later, about two forty p.m., in Washington.) It had been approximately seventy minutes since the shots rang out at Dealey Plaza. Fearful of snipers hiding at the airport, Secret Service agents “rushed through the interior ahead of us, pulling down the shades and closing both doors behind us,” Johnson said later of the scene aboard the plane.

He recalled a slight sense of relief at being aboard the regal presidential jet, surrounded by the familiar trappings of power, including the telephones and other communications equipment that would allow him to reach almost anyone in the world in a matter of minutes. As always, the simple presence of a telephone was a comfort to Johnson. Few politicians ever conducted so much business over phone lines as Johnson; a telephone receiver was alternately his instrument of political seduction and his weapon. In his years as president, many of those conversations were tape-recorded and transcribed—a secret that few of his callers knew.

Although Secret Service agents wanted to depart the instant Johnson arrived at Love Field, he would not allow the plane to take off until Jacqueline Kennedy was also on board. Mrs. Kennedy, then still at the hospital, had refused to leave without her husband’s body, which had created a struggle between Secret Service agents and the Dallas coroner. (Initially, the coroner demanded that the president’s corpse remain in the city for an autopsy, as required by local law; in the end, the agents all but shoved him aside.) The Johnsons would wait at Love Field another thirty-five tense minutes before a powder-white Cadillac hearse bearing Mrs. Kennedy and the bronze casket pulled up alongside the Boeing jet.

Minutes before departure, Federal District Judge Sarah Hughes of Dallas, a family friend of the Johnsons whose nomination to the federal bench had been arranged by the then vice president, rushed aboard to perform a swearing-in ceremony. Johnson took the presidential oath standing alongside a stricken Mrs. Kennedy. The White House photographer who captured the scene scrambled from Air Force One seconds before the doors were sealed; he had been told to get the photo to the Associated Press and other wire services as quickly as possible as proof to the world of the transition of presidential power. Minutes later the plane raced down the runway and climbed into the sky at what passengers remembered as a near-vertical angle. Two hours and eleven minutes later, it landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

*

That night, as Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy waited at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy to be completed, Johnson was already moving decisively to assume command. His aides later marveled at how comfortable he seemed in those first hours in power. After a seven-minute helicopter ride from Andrews to the White House, he made only a brief appearance at the door of the Oval Office, perhaps sensing that it was presumptuous for him to be there so soon after the assassination. Then he walked across a blocked-off street and into the Executive Office Building, where his vice presidential offices were located and where he would conduct his meetings and make a string of phone calls.

He received a military briefing from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The initial news was reassuring. There was no evidence of a military advance by the Soviet Union or other foreign adversaries in the wake of the assassination, although American military forces would remain on high alert indefinitely.

The report from Dallas was not so comforting. Although there was no immediate evidence that Oswald had accomplices, both the FBI and CIA had troubling details about his past, including his attempt to renounce his U.S. citizenship and defect to Russia four years earlier. Since his return to the United States in 1962, the FBI had, sporadically, been tracking Oswald and his Russian-born wife as possible Soviet agents. The CIA reported that it had placed Oswald under surveillance when he had traveled to Mexico City in September; the reasons for his trip to Mexico were not entirely clear.

In his meetings that night and the next day with senior Kennedy aides, Johnson pledged continuity with the policies of the Kennedy administration and suggested that he intended to retain Kennedy’s entire cabinet; he wanted people to know their jobs were secure. Johnson used the same words again and again: “I need you more than President Kennedy needed you.”

From his first hours in office, Johnson made what he felt were valiant efforts to comfort—and seek guidance from—Robert Kennedy. But if the new president had any hope that the shock of the events in Dallas might ease their relationship, he was mistaken. The attorney general had always loathed Johnson, and that would not change, even after Kennedy accepted the new president’s offer to stay on at the Justice Department. Unlike his older brother, who always seemed so remarkably even-tempered, so willing to make peace with former adversaries, Robert Kennedy was capable of bitter, even irrational hatreds. He seemed almost energized by blood feuds with men like Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, and, maybe most of all, Johnson. He privately described Johnson as “mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” He was appalled, he said, that Johnson—a man “incapable of telling the truth”—had taken his brother’s place in the White House.

*

At about seven p.m. on his first night as president, Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover. This was hardly surprising: Johnson would have expected the FBI director to have the latest information about the investigation in Dallas. And there were other good reasons for Johnson to reach out to Hoover that night—and to remind the FBI director of their years of loyal friendship. In the decades that followed, it would often be forgotten that in November 1963, Johnson’s political survival was in grave doubt because of a fast-moving corruption investigation involving a Washington lobbyist who had once been one of Johnson’s closest aides in the Senate. The FBI was overseeing parts of the inquiry.

Bobby Baker, the lobbyist, was known as “Little Lyndon.” He was accused of bribing lawmakers and running a so-called social club on Capitol Hill—the “Quorum Club”—that doubled as a de facto prostitution service for members of Congress and White House officials. The Baker scandal had threatened to ensnare President Kennedy as well as Johnson. Kennedy’s extramarital activities were no secret to Hoover, and the director was closely monitoring the allegations against Baker, including charges that the lobbyist had helped arrange liaisons between Kennedy and an East German–born beauty who was rumored to be a Communist spy.

In the week before the assassination, Baker began spilling some of his secrets about Kennedy and Johnson to Washington’s most famous and feared muckraking newspaper columnist, Andrew “Drew” Pearson. Pearson’s syndicated column—the Washington Merry-Go-Round, written with his deputy, Jack Anderson—was a mix of serious political scoops and salacious, often flat-wrong gossip about the powerful. Pearson had sources everywhere, including senior White House aides, cabinet officers, and others at the highest reaches of government. Some of his sources leaked information to him because they feared him; others talked to him because they genuinely admired his bravery in exposing corruption and hypocrisy in Washington. To his credit, Pearson had been an early critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Among Pearson’s admirers was Chief Justice Earl Warren. In fact, the sixty-six-year-old columnist counted Warren among his closest friends—and boasted in print of the friendship. At a time when the Warren court was under attack in much of the country for its rulings on civil rights and civil liberties, the chief justice could count on Pearson to defend him. They were so close that they regularly vacationed together. In columns that September, Pearson wrote about his yachting holiday that summer with Warren and his wife in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. During what was a working vacation for Pearson, Warren sat in as the columnist interviewed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, and, later, the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Josip Tito.

On the afternoon of Thursday, November 21, less than twenty-four hours before the assassination, Pearson met with Bobby Baker in Washington. It was their first face-to-face conversation, and the Senate-aide-turned-lobbyist had dirt to share. “Bobby confirmed the fact that the president had been mixed up with a lot of women,” Pearson wrote in his personal diary. One of Kennedy’s women—a prominent aide to Jacqueline Kennedy—“had her bed wired for sound by her landlady when Jack was sleeping with her,” the columnist wrote.

Johnson was in Pearson’s crosshairs in the Baker story. That very Sunday—November 24—Pearson’s column was due to target the vice president over his financial ties to the lobbyist. In his diary, Pearson wrote that it would be “quite a devastating story” involving Johnson, Baker, and possible corruption in a $7 billion fighter-jet contract handed to General Dynamics, a Texas firm.

If Johnson was going to survive the Baker scandal and whatever else Pearson had tucked away in his notebooks, he could be certain—both before and after he became president—that he would need Hoover’s help.

*

Johnson and Hoover were close friends, at least by the cynical standards of political friendships in Washington. Throughout his career, Johnson had courted the FBI director; as well as anyone in Washington, the Texan understood the value of Hoover’s support. The FBI director was seen by millions of Americans as the face of law and order; opinion polls showed that Hoover remained one of the most popular men in the country, more popular than most of the presidents he had served.

Johnson understood the danger, too, that Hoover could pose to a politician with something to hide. He was well aware that the sixty-eight-year-old Hoover trafficked in the secrets of public figures—political, financial, sexual—and there was a constant threat that the secrets might be disclosed at Hoover’s direction or whim.

Over the years, Johnson’s attempts to befriend Hoover were fawning, sometimes comically so. In 1942, he bought a home on the same block as Hoover’s—a coincidence, Johnson insisted—in a comfortable neighborhood of the capital known as Forest Hills. The two men were neighbors for nearly twenty years. Hoover saw Johnson’s two daughters grow up, and often joined the Johnson family for Sunday breakfast. “He was my close neighbor—I know he loved my dog,” Johnson said. The president and Hoover’s mutual love of dogs remained a theme of their friendship. When one of Johnson’s beagles died in 1966, Hoover gave him a new one. The president named his new pet “J. Edgar.”

In May 1964, six months after he was thrust into the presidency, Johnson would sign an executive order exempting Hoover from compulsory retirement when the FBI director turned seventy the following year. “The nation cannot afford to lose you,” the president said. Johnson’s motives were not fully patriotic, he admitted privately, acknowledging that he kept Hoover in his job in part because “it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

Over the course of several conversations in the weeks following the assassination, Johnson would remind Hoover—again and again, almost to the point of obsession—of his friendship. “You’re more than the head of the Federal Bureau,” he told Hoover during a call in late November. “You’re my brother and my personal friend, and you have been for twenty-five, thirty years.… I’ve got more confidence in your judgment than anybody in town.”

*

Late on the night of the assassination, Johnson returned to his family’s home and slept—less than four hours, he recalled—before heading back downtown to the White House the next morning. Unlike the previous evening, he went to work in the Oval Office—a move that outraged Robert Kennedy, who felt that it was too early for Johnson to occupy what he still considered his brother’s workspace. Johnson asked President Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, if she could vacate her desk within thirty minutes that morning to make way for his own secretarial pool. Lincoln agreed, but the request left her in tears.

Johnson received a briefing at about nine fifteen a.m. on Saturday from the director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, who had more alarming news about Oswald: the CIA’s detailed surveillance of Oswald’s mysterious visit to Mexico City revealed that he had made contact with diplomats in both the Soviet and Cuban embassies. That evening, McCone placed a call to Secretary of State Dean Rusk to alert Rusk to the situation in Mexico, including the possible diplomatic consequences of the arrest of a young Mexican woman, Silvia Duran, who worked in the Cuban consulate and had met face-to-face with Oswald. Her arrest had been requested by the CIA.

At about ten a.m., Johnson talked again with Hoover, and this time the conversation was recorded on the Oval Office taping system that Kennedy had also used as president. For reasons that were never made clear to the National Archives, which later compiled an inventory of Johnson’s White House recordings, the tape of the call with Hoover that morning was erased, leaving only an officially sanctioned transcript.