The Kennedy Half-Century (47 page)

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Kennedy’s need for protection expired with his life. The body of Abraham Lincoln had a state-of-the-art autopsy inside the White House in April 1865, with no prying and meddling from others. See Dr. Robert King Stone’s “Report on Lincoln’s Death and Autopsy,” Library of Congress website,
http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/lincoln/hebelongstotheages/ExhibitObjects/AutopsyReport.aspx
 [accessed July 26, 2011].

11
Inevitability: The Assassination That Had to Happen

It has taken fifty years to see part of the truth clearly. John F. Kennedy’s assassination might have been almost inevitable. It didn’t have to happen on November 22, 1963, but given a host of factors, one could reasonably argue that JFK was unlikely to make it out of his presidency alive. This assertion is jarring but completely supported by the facts that have emerged.

Almost no one disputes that the security surrounding President Kennedy was thin on November 22, as it often was. The leader of the free world, the most powerful person on the globe, was guarded by twenty-eight Secret Service agents in Dallas, only twelve of whom were actually in the motorcade. Hundreds of local law enforcement personnel assisted with the Dallas visit, but they were neither assigned specifically to, nor trained for, presidential protection.
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Only a few of JFK’s agents were close enough to do him any good in case of attack, yet he was passing an estimated two hundred thousand people from Love Field to Dealey Plaza—most just a few feet away, others gathered with a view of him from open windows in buildings along the way. It had been no different in Fort Worth that morning, when he spoke to hundreds of unscreened people outside his hotel, or in other stops on the Texas trip.

No one had even considered that the president’s back brace, needed to stabilize his war-injured torso, would make it difficult for him to duck or be pushed down in the limo in the event of an attack. Nellie Connally was able to pull her wounded husband into her lap. Jackie Kennedy could probably not have quickly done something similar even if she had tried. Some believe the back brace kept JFK upright after the first traumatic back-to-neck wound, giving the assassin a clear follow-up shot to Kennedy’s still-erect head.

Much has legitimately been made of the fact that Secret Service agents were not on the runners of JFK’s car, which was specifically designed to permit agents to stand guard just a few feet away near the back bumper. While not certain, it is probable that an agent would have blocked Oswald’s line of
sight to Kennedy most of the time, though perhaps not enough to keep the president completely out of harm’s way. Had the agents been on the runners, however, they would have saved precious seconds if the president had been hit with the first bullet, probably jumping on top of him to shield him from the head shot, as Lyndon Johnson’s Secret Service agent did in a follow car. (However, Oswald might have chosen to shoot Kennedy from the front or side, just as the limo was turning from Houston Street onto Elm Street; even with agents on the runners, the president was terribly vulnerable.)

Kennedy certainly understood his frightening degree of exposure, and thought a good bit about the possibility of assassination—though he was fatalistic about it. He had a false sense of invulnerability, perhaps relying on history’s odds. His White House predecessors had taken their chances and (since McKinley) all had survived. In addition, for the Texas trip, JFK undoubtedly preferred to avoid criticism that he was anxious about his reception in a place perceived as opposed to him.

Then there was the Kennedy clan’s penchant for risk—very apparent in JFK for sure, but also a trait on display in his father and most of JFK’s siblings. It was quite a gamble for a forty-three-year-old Catholic to think he could be elected president of the United States; far safer to have stayed in the Senate, as Harry Truman had advised, and run for the White House at a more mature, traditional age. Some friends and biographers have noted Kennedy’s past brushes with death, from disease as a child, the Japanese during World War II, and back injuries in the 1950s as experiences that inured him to danger. A long-standing Kennedy family joke was that when a mosquito bit JFK, the mosquito died. Moreover, JFK’s almost unfathomable level of recklessness in pursuing women of all types, even prostitutes, clearly suggests someone who enjoyed the adrenaline high of getting away with edgy behavior. In any event, Kennedy’s role in waving off the Secret Service agents from the runners on November 22 may have been a fatal miscalculation, assuming this allegation is accurate.

Kennedy’s staff bears some indirect responsibility for creating the security conditions that made the assassination possible. There is no indication anywhere that his closest advisers made the case to him for tighter security.
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If they had insisted on greater protection, especially the aides in his longtime inner circle, Kennedy likely would have acceded to the request.

No president had been assassinated since the current Secret Service had begun to provide protection in late 1901.
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That bred overconfidence; as one agent was heard to say in the aftermath of the assassination, “We’ve never lost a president before,” as though that record had been created by airtight security instead of a large dose of luck. There were many avenues open to the then-director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to appeal the overall lack of
funding, point out the giant holes in presidential protection, and object to a thoughtless decision by the staff or even the president himself about the degree of security around the motorcade. Back channels to RFK or Mrs. Kennedy might have yielded results. According to former Reagan aide Mike Deaver, Nancy Reagan gathered key staffers and Secret Service officials together after the attempt on her husband’s life and insisted on greater presidential protection.
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By the time Reagan left office, procedures had been tightened in dozens of ways and the president’s protective cordon had been considerably strengthened.

Kennedy, his staff, and the Secret Service had plenty of company in self-delusion. In 1963 it was alarmingly easy for a disturbed man such as Oswald to obtain a deadly scoped rifle by mail order under a false name. As J. Edgar Hoover said to Lyndon Johnson less than a day after JFK’s killing, “It seems almost impossible to think that for $21.00 [the amount of Oswald’s money order for the gun] you could kill the president of the United States.”
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The real conundrum is why this observation had not inspired the man who had headed the FBI and its predecessor for nearly forty years to take action much earlier. In addition to the actual slayings of Presidents Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), and McKinley (1901), many presidents before Kennedy had survived attempts on their lives—some of them close calls.
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Andrew Jackson lived when a man pointed two pistols at him at point-blank range in 1835; both guns misfired, but when police tried them later, they discharged perfectly. Before John Wilkes Booth’s bullet found its mark, Lincoln had survived at least two other assassination plots and received scores of death threats. At one point, Lincoln showed a newspaper reporter the eighty-plus threatening letters he kept in his desk and said, “I know I am in danger; but I am not going to worry over threats like these.”
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There were probably disturbed individuals like Oswald represented in the sixteenth president’s letter packet, but Lincoln’s actual assassin was perhaps the most famous actor in America, a national celebrity. In that sense, Booth’s accomplishments and notoriety created a macabre equilibrium in the Lincoln case: A luminary killed a superstar. Lee Harvey Oswald, on the other hand, was a complete nobody—even less than a nobody. The psychological dissonance created by this vast imbalance encourages conspiracy talk in the JFK case.

During the final weeks of the administration of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a crazed woman accosted him in the halls of the White House before she was easily subdued.
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Theodore Roosevelt, running for president again in 1912 after a term out, was shot in the chest on the campaign trail in October. A thick speech manuscript in his pocket helped slow the bullet, which was never removed from his body—a wise choice, since operations often did as much damage as projectiles in that era. Argentinean police foiled
a serious attempt on President-elect Herbert Hoover’s life during a December 1928 goodwill tour of Latin America. Police found guns, grenades, and a railway map inside the house of four anarchists who were determined to “vindicate those who have been exploited by capitalism.” This plot had the potential for success, since someone had leaked Hoover’s detailed itinerary to the would-be assassins.
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An assassin, Guiseppe Zangara, also nearly claimed the life of Franklin Roosevelt before he took the oath of office four years later. In mid-February 1933 while in Miami, bullets fired at President-elect Roosevelt from close range proved fatal to Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead and wounded four others sitting with Roosevelt and Cermak in FDR’s automobile.
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In an example of the serendipity sometimes accompanying a failed assassination attempt, the gunman’s aim was deflected at the last instant by bystanders Lillian Cross and Thomas Armour. Their efforts, combined with a rickety seat on which Zangara was standing, spared the life of a man who was shortly to become one of America’s most consequential presidents. Incidentally, FDR personally cradled Cermak, who survived for three weeks, on the way to the hospital; the president-elect’s car served as the ambulance that transported the wounded. He visited the victims the next day, bearing gifts. Mrs. Cross received a warm thank-you note from FDR, plus an invitation to the inauguration and a White House tea. Mr. Armour, who apparently was more reticent about his role, was ignored.
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Harry Truman was attacked by pro-independence Puerto Rican nationalists in November 1950. The assailants killed a policeman and wounded a Secret Service agent, but Truman escaped injury. Richard Nixon was targeted by a man who very nearly hijacked a commercial airliner, with plans to crash it into the White House. Nixon was also trailed by Arthur Bremer, the man who instead turned his gun on presidential candidate George C. Wallace in 1972. Gerald Ford had two serious assassination attempts in the month of September 1975, both in California by troubled women, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme of the murderous Charles Manson cult and Sara Jane Moore. Jimmy Carter was stalked by John Hinckley on the campaign trail in 1980, and his nonpartisan assassination plans to impress actress Jodie Foster continued through the Reagan transition, when he managed to get into a press conference that announced cabinet appointments. Reagan failed to show for the event. Hinckley finally achieved infamy in March 1981 when he shot Reagan and three others. George H. W. Bush was the target of a foiled plot by Saddam Hussein while Bush visited Kuwait shortly after leaving the White House in 1993. In addition to the bridge-bombing incident on foreign soil that has been mentioned already, Bill Clinton was targeted twice domestically in 1994, once by a man who opened fire outside the White House gate and by another who crashed his Cessna into the White House. (Clinton was indoors the first time,
and away entirely during the second incident.)
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Another man fired a gun directly at the White House just three weeks after George W. Bush took office. Beyond the 2005 grenade incident in Tbilisi, Georgia, that we have already recounted, Bush was possibly a target on September 11, 2001—not just by a plane headed for the White House but early that morning near Sarasota, Florida, where Bush was to speak at an elementary school that became the backdrop for his first statement about the 9/11 attacks. The terrorist Mohammed Atta had been in this area earlier in September, and a van showed up at Bush’s hotel full of men described as “of Middle Eastern descent” claiming they had a nonexistent “poolside interview” with him. They were turned away and have never been identified.
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Keep in mind that these enumerated actual and attempted assassinations probably represent only the tip of a large iceberg; undoubtedly, as mentioned before, some plots and threats throughout history have not been discovered or disclosed. Looking back at the number of incidents we see on the public record, mainly luck has kept the number of assassinated presidents to a total of four. If the presidency was judged by the usual standards employed by the life insurance industry, the job would be almost uninsurable. This much was evident well before 1963. The refusal to learn from our bullet-ridden past—guaranteeing that we would repeat it—is a massive failure all around. Government leaders virtually denied history in the years leading up to November 22 with a conceit that suggested somehow it could not happen again.

Even prior to 1963, President Kennedy had experienced some close calls that should have given all the warnings needed to dramatically tighten security.
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Twin scares occurred five days before the 1960 election, on November 4 in Chicago. Police arrested two men with guns who were on their way to see JFK speak at Chicago Stadium. The first man, twenty-three-year-old Jaime Cruz Alejandro, “closed in” on Kennedy’s car as it moved toward its destination. Alejandro was tackled by a policeman, who needed the help of five other officers to subdue him. At the time of his arrest, Alejandro was carrying a .25-caliber automatic pistol. A sixty-one-year-old minister, Israel Dabney, was also arrested after he tried to push past an officer while carrying a .38 revolver in a brown paper bag. Both men claimed to be carrying their guns for self-defense and said they had no intention of harming Senator Kennedy; both were charged with a misdemeanor for carrying a concealed weapon.
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Police concluded that Alejandro and Dabney did not intend to harm Kennedy, but the fact that people could get within twenty feet of JFK with concealed weapons was a warning.