The Kennedy Half-Century (121 page)

50
. E-mail from Stephen Plotkin, August 1, 2011.

51
. Rep. James H. Morrison (D-LA), one of those who voted in favor of extending Jackie’s protection, “said it was the unanimous view of federal law enforcement experts that there is still an element of danger to Mrs. Kennedy and the children.” See “House Votes Office and Protection to Mrs. Kennedy in Unique Action,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, December 3,1963. The Senate concurred with the House and passed Public Law 83–195, which provided Secret Service protection for Jackie and her children for two years. See “Senate Passes Bill to Aid Mrs. Kennedy, Children,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, December 12, 1963. In 1965 Congress established the basis of the current spouse protocols, granting former presidents and their spouses lifetime protection, and children of former presidents protection until age sixteen. Prompted by Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, Congress in 1968
modified the clause for presidential widows to provide coverage until the spouse’s own death or remarriage. See the United States Secret Service historical timeline,
http://www.secretservice.gov/history.shtml
 [accessed November 10, 2011].

52
. Marvin Watson to LBJ, July 13, 1965, EX FG 2/Eisenhower, Dwight, Box 40, FG 2/Kennedy, John F. 11/20/64–8/31/65, LBJ Library, Austin, Texas.

53
. Caroline Kennedy has explained why she decided to publish her mother’s interviews with Schlesinger in 2011: “[E]nough time has passed so that they can be appreciated for their unique insight, yet the Kennedy presidency is still within living memory for many who will find her observations illuminating.” From the foreword by Caroline Kennedy in Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, XI.

54
. Said Jackie: “And anytime Lyndon would talk that night, Lady Bird would get out a little notebook—I’ve never seen a husband and a wife so—she was sort of like a trained hunting dog. He’d say something as innocent as—I don’t know—‘Does your sister live in London?’—and Lady Bird would write down Lee’s name and ‘London.’ Just everything. I mean, she had every name, phone number—it was a—ewww—sort of a funny kind of way of operating.” Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, 85.

55
. Ibid., 278. Whatever Kennedy’s private view of Johnson may have been, he wisely avoided public spats with the vice president. When Kenny O’Donnell and other Kennedy loyalists attempted to embarrass LBJ by leaking an unflattering story about him to the press, JFK chastised O’Donnell for his indiscretion: “I can’t afford to have my vice president, who knows every reporter in Washington, going around saying we’re all screwed up, so we’re going to keep him happy.” Dallek,
Flawed Giant
, 9.

56
. Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, 87, 274.

57
. Jackie found out that LBJ had had a gaggle of reporters in the Oval Office listening to one of his December 1963 calls to her—apparently, it infuriated Jackie when she discovered that her private conversation was simply a way for LBJ to prove to the press how “close” they were. See Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, 86.

58
. Telephone interview with Harry McPherson, October 5, 2011.

59
. Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, 273.

60
. Anxious to set the record straight on her husband’s death, Jackie commissioned the Wesleyan University professor William Manchester to write the definitive account of November 22, 1963. But she quickly became disenchanted with Manchester’s warts-and-all manuscript and sued to stop its publication.

61
. And, possibly, a suggestion that Texas’s culture of gun violence underlay November 22.

62
. Dallek,
Flawed Giant
, 520.

63
. Barbara A. Perry,
Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 195–96.

64
. John Corry,
The Manchester Affair
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 18.

65
. Sam Kashner, “A Clash of Camelots,”
Vanity Fair
, October 2009,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/10/death-of-a-president200910
 [accessed August 3, 2011].

66
. Manchester dropped about sixteen hundred words from the magazine version, including some personal anecdotes. The notes of the meeting between Manchester and Mrs. Kennedy were also sealed for a hundred years, until 2067. By any accounting, Mrs. Kennedy achieved a minor—and very costly—victory. See foreword by Caroline Kennedy in Kennedy,
Historic Conversations
, XIII.

67
. Kashner, “Clash of Camelots,” 7.

68
. LBJ to Jacqueline Kennedy, December 16, 1966, White House Famous Names, Box 7, Folder “Kennedy, Mrs. John F., 1966,” LBJ Library, Austin, Texas.

69
. Jacqueline Kennedy to LBJ, undated, White House Famous Names, Box 7, Folder “Kennedy, Mrs. John F., 1966,” LBJ Library, Austin, Texas.

70
. Harold Weisberg self-published
Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report
in 1965. Two other major November 22 conspiracy books, Mark Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
and Edward J. Epstein’s
Inquest
, came out the following year.

71
. Kupferman press release dated September 28, 1966, Earl Warren Papers, Box 758, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC.

72
. For example, on what would have been Kennedy’s forty-ninth birthday (May 29, 1966), twenty-five hundred people attended a memorial service at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. Thousands more filed past the Eternal Flame at Arlington Cemetery a few months later to commemorate the third anniversary of JFK’s death. See “Service Held in Capital on Kennedy’s Birthday,”
New York Times
, May 30, 1966, and Richard Harwood and John Carmody, “Mourners Mark Anniversary of Kennedy Death,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, November 23, 1966.

73
. Earl Warren to Clayton Fritchey, November 2, 1966, Earl Warren Papers, Box 758, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC.

74
. RSVP from Earl Warren to Robert M. Bennett, Vice President and General Manager of WTTG, October 27, 1966, Earl Warren Papers, Box 758, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC.

75
. Garrison wrote two books on the investigation—
A Heritage of Stone
and
On the Trail of the Assassins
. His third book—
The Star Spangled Contract
—is a fictional thriller loosely based on the Kennedy assassination.

76
. George Lardner, Jr., “Shaw Tied to Oswald by Garrison,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, March 3, 1967; James Kirkwood,
American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Affair in the City of New Orleans
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 13; Michael L. Kurtz,
The JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 132.

77
. Those believing one man had killed JFK declined from 35% to 19% over the same period. 21% were unsure in February 1967 and 15% in May 1967. See memo from Fred Panzer to LBJ, May 26, 1967, EX FG 2/Kennedy, John F. 12/28/65, Box 41> FG 2/Kennedy, John F. 12/28/65—[1 of 2], LBJ Library, Austin, Texas. See also Louis Harris, “66% See Conspiracy in Kennedy Slaying,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, May 29, 1967.

78
. However, in January 1968 the pathologists who performed JFK’s autopsy asked LBJ’s last attorney general, Ramsey Clark, to empanel a group of medical experts to reexamine their actions. Four such experts, who had no ties to the Kennedy controversy or the original autopsy, were so appointed, partly in response to a suit that had been filed to force disclosure of the autopsy photos and other materials that the Kennedy family wished to keep private. In an April 1968 report to Clark, the experts essentially upheld the professional integrity of the original autopsy, though they did suggest that it would have been preferable to have a sectioning of JFK’s neck wound to trace the exact path of that nonfatal bullet. See “ARRB MD 59—Clark Panel Report (2/26/68),” Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=323&relPageId=i
 [accessed October 25, 2011]; Dennis L. Breo, “JFK’s death—the plain truth from the MDs who did the autopsy,”
JAMA
267, no. 20, May 27, 1992: 2794–803; and Fred P. Graham, “Doctor Inspects Kennedy X-Rays,”
New York Times
, January 9, 1972.

79
. Leon Jaworski to Earl Warren, July 19, 1967, Earl Warren Papers, Box 758, “Kennedy Assassination Commission Correspondence with Warren, 1964–67,” Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC. See also “CBS News Inquiry, June 25, 1967, Part 1,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iolMAtbkOuo&feature=related
 [accessed October 25, 2011].

80
. Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff, “JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story,”
http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/mediaassassination.html
 [accessed October 25, 2011].

81
. John F. Kennedy Center bulletin
Footlight
, Summer 1966, Series 2, Box 8, Folder “Subject Files 1959–2004. NCC Publicity [General],” John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. I saw the film myself as a schoolboy in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1966, and you can view it on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4SwEUS4080
 [accessed October 26, 2011].

82
. Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Johnson at Grave with the Kennedys,”
New York Times
, March 16, 1967.

83
. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Statement by the President Upon Signing Bill Establishing the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, May 27, 1967,” John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters,
The American Presidency Project
[online], Santa Barbara, CA,
http://www.presidency,ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28275
 [accessed August 10, 2011]; “O’Brien Asserts Hero Worship May Obscure Kennedy’s Deeds,”
New York Times
, May 30, 1967.

84
. Laurence Stern, “ ‘I Christen Thee John F. Kennedy’: Caroline Christens Carrier Kennedy,”
Washington Post and Times Herald
, May 28, 1967. The JFK Library supplied me with an estimate of a crowd often thousand, a figure also mentioned in a
Boston Globe
headline detailing the event. Other sources place the number closer to fifteen thousand.

85
. Ben Wattenberg to LBJ, May 19, 1967, Office Files of Ben Wattenberg, Box 22, LBJ Library, Austin, Texas.

86
. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Christening of the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, May 27, 1967,” John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters,
The American Presidency Project
[online], Santa Barbara, CA,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28274
, [accessed August 10, 2011].

87
. Had Albert succeeded Nixon, a difficult situation would arguably have been made much worse. Nixon had won 61% of the votes over Democrat George McGovern in 1972, yet through the impeachment actions of a heavily Democratic House of Representatives, the Democratic Speaker would have taken the White House, overturning a large popular mandate for the Republicans. To some, it would have looked like a partisan power grab, if not a putsch. Ford, a Republican, was better able to fulfill the mandate his party had won less than two years earlier. For more information on the Twenty-fifth Amendment, see John D. Feerick,
The Twenty-fifth Amendment: Its Complete History and Applications
, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992); Birch Bayh,
One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); and Adam Gustafson, “Presidential Inability and Subjective Meaning,”
Yale Policy and Law Review
27, no. 2 (1999): 459–97.

88
. See Marc J. Gilbert and William P. Head,
The Tet Offensive
(Westport, CT: Praeger,
1996), Don Oberdorfer,
Tet!: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), David Schmitz,
The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and Ronald H. Spector,
After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam
(New York: Vintage, 1993).

89
. Dallek,
Flawed Giant
, 506. In a review of Douglas Brinkley’s
Cronkite
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012), Louis Menand questions whether LBJ ever uttered these words or even saw Cronkite’s broadcast. See Louis Menand, “Seeing It Now: Walter Cronkite and the Legend of CBS News,”
New Yorker
, July 9 and 16, 2012, 88–94.

90
. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Address to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection,” March 31, 1968, Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
The American Presidency Project
,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28772&st=&st1=#axzzibtxNKybQ
 [accessed October 26, 2011]. There had been no public hint of this stunning statement, which came at the end of a national TV address about Vietnam. It was so jaw-dropping that I can recall my father and I, watching it live, turn to one another and mutter in disbelief, “Did you hear him say … ?”