The Kennedy Half-Century (58 page)

Yet former Johnson aides vehemently dispute the portrait painted by Mrs. Kennedy. Harry McPherson, LBJ’s chief speechwriter, rejects Jackie’s version
of events. “When you listen to the tapes that the Johnson Library has put out, it’s clear that Johnson is doing everything he can to ingratiate Mrs. Kennedy and she is responding with, ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done,’ ‘you’ve been so wonderful,’ and so on. Anyway, that’s the Jackie Kennedy you hear on the [tapes], and then to think that that same Lyndon Johnson would be referred to [in the manner] she apparently did with Arthur is just appalling and to me, it’s not the case. It’s not what happened.” McPherson insists that JFK and LBJ had a cordial working relationship. “[It] was by no means a warm, untroubled, loving, admiring relationship on both sides, but [it] did reflect an accepting, good spirited understanding … They understood who they were and Jack Kennedy understood that Lyndon Johnson was an enormously significant person for him.”
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Still, comparing “the kind of president Jack was and the kind Lyndon is,” Mrs. Kennedy made an observation some would find prescient: “When something really crisis
[sic]
happens, that’s when they’re going to miss Jack. And I just want them to know it’s because they don’t have that kind of president [JFK was] and not because it was inevitable.”
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The Kennedy-Johnson dispute broke out into the open during the “Manchester affair” in 1966 and 1967. William Manchester had penned a book entitled
The Death of a President
,
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and prepublication press accounts were filled with sensational details, including an introductory passage that portrayed Johnson as vulgarly goading a reluctant JFK into killing a deer on the LBJ ranch—a contrast between New England refinement and Texan boorishness.
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President Johnson was convinced that the purpose of the book, which had Mrs. Kennedy’s initial cooperation, was to defame him and position Robert Kennedy for a 1968 run for president.
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However, Mrs. Kennedy was no happier about the book than LBJ was.
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Jackie had instructed JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger to contact Manchester in February 1964 to write what she intended to be a dignified, comprehensive account of the assassination.
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Apparently, she expected Manchester to be as discreet with her intimate recollections as Arthur Schlesinger would prove to be, but Manchester did not have the same close ties to the Kennedy family. He was also determined to make a great deal of money on the project. The world serialization rights with
Look
magazine alone amounted to $665,000, a fantastic sum in the 1960s. Much of the sensational material came from ten hours of interviews Manchester conducted with Mrs. Kennedy, and she believed the money should go to the Kennedy Library. So Jackie sued in December 1966, filing for a court injunction to stop publication of the book. It was a disaster all around.
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Most leading journalists sided with Manchester, as did much of the public, which wanted to learn the truth about JFK’s assassination. Mrs. Kennedy settled out of court, the book was published,
and Jackie had given it such publicity that it likely sold tens of thousands more copies than it would have otherwise.
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A Lou Harris poll found that a third of the public thought less of Mrs. Kennedy because of her attempt at what some saw as censorship.
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LBJ wrote Jackie when her suit was filed, trying to soothe her:

Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us. If this is so, I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account. One never becomes inured to slander but we have learned to live with it. In any event, your own tranquility is important to both of us, and we would not want you to endure any unpleasantness on our account.
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Jackie responded in kind:

I was so deeply touched by your letter—I am sick at the unhappiness this whole terrible thing has caused everyone—

Whatever I did could only bring pain. Not to sue would have been to let them print everything and take such cruel and unfair advantage. Every day since I returned from Hawaii I have been pleading by letter, phone or in person with one or more of their side.

The author and publishers always broke their word, and I finally understood that was what they intended to keep on doing—play cat and mouse [with] me until I was exhausted and they had gone to press.

Now I suppose I am “winning”—but it seems a hollow victory—with everything I objected to printed all over the newspapers anyway. At least I made it known that I object …

I am so dazed now I feel I will never be able to feel anything again.
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Perhaps partly because of the Manchester book, interest in JFK’s assassination was renewed and skeptics of the Warren Commission’s official version of the events of November 22 were becoming outspoken and publishing widely—years after the report was issued.
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The first congressional resolution to establish a joint committee of the House and Senate to reinvestigate the Kennedy assassination was filed on
September 28, 1966, by the New York Republican representative Theodore Kupferman.
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Newspaper and television reports carried a drumbeat of disbelieving voices, especially around the time of the large, widespread, continuing commemorations held twice a year for President Kennedy’s May 29 birthday and the November anniversary of his death.
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Among observers who were astounded at the unceasing questioning of the Warren Commission was Chief Justice Earl Warren himself, who wrote to one correspondent, “It is really amazing how many people choose to doubt [the commission] without reference to facts.”
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As for a Washington, D.C., television station’s invitation to Warren to attend a November 1966 program on a “Reexamination of the Warren Commission Findings,” the chief justice sent word he would not be in attendance.
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The dam of skepticism and doubt about the Warren Commission burst on February 18, 1967, when Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish in Louisiana, told the press that he had proof President Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy hatched in New Orleans. On March 2, Garrison arrested a prominent city businessman, Clay Shaw, and charged him with plotting to kill JFK. Younger Americans are mainly familiar with this seminal event because of Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
, which was based in large part on Garrison’s investigation.
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It took two full years for the case to reach trial, and in that time Garrison became famous, appearing on many domestic and foreign television broadcasts, including
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
, and granting interviews not just to the traditional press but to
Playboy
magazine. Unfortunately for Garrison, his evidence against Shaw was so weak that the jury took less than one hour to acquit the defendant in March 1969.
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Garrison did not get a conviction, but he had an unmistakable effect on public opinion. Between February and May 1967, the proportion of Americans believing in a JFK assassination conspiracy jumped from 44 to 66 percent, according to a Louis Harris survey.
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President Johnson was given several days’ advance notice of the poll results, which were released on what would have been JFK’s fiftieth birthday. Johnson made no public comment and consistently refused entreaties to reopen the investigation into his predecessor’s murder.
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LBJ may have later felt justified in this decision by the results of a widely seen series by CBS and the Associated Press in the summer of 1967. Over four days the network and the AP reported on their own reinvestigation of the Warren Commission’s findings, concluding that “Despite critical flaws, the [report] stands up as the most intelligent, most reliable view of what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.”
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The CBS anchor of the series, Walter Cronkite, told me in 1991 that he had been suspicious of the Warren findings, and set out to prove them wrong. He secured the support of
the top CBS brass, which approved a million-dollar budget. To Cronkite’s surprise, the pieces of the reinvestigation kept coming in affirming the Warren Commission. “I accepted it. I reported it the way it was,” reprising a version of his longtime sign-off for the
CBS Evening
News—his trademark phrase, “And that’s the way it is.” Critics have since found errors in CBS’s reenactment of the Dallas gunshots—so it may not have been quite “the way it was.”
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Assisted by mounting controversy over Vietnam and increasing unpopularity of the Johnson administration at home and abroad, the myth of Camelot flourished as LBJ’s time in office wore on. A 1966 film on JFK by the United States Information Agency had a considerable impact. Designed mainly for international viewers, the hagiographic movie, entitled
John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning / Day of Drums
and narrated by the actor Gregory Peck, was in such demand that it was distributed to regular theaters throughout the United States. The distributor fees were waived and the profits sent to the Kennedy Center by special congressional legislation.
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The emotive script shifts back and forth between November 1963 and the key events of the Kennedy presidency, and Peck concludes: “The day of drums is over, but the years of lightning glow in everyone he touched and in everyone he continues to touch … John F. Kennedy is now silent and invisible, but so is peace and freedom and so is love and faith and so are memories and dreams.”

Other tributes to John F. Kennedy continued at a pace somewhat astonishing, considering the assassination was years removed. A permanent JFK gravesite was consecrated in Arlington on March 15, 1967, with President Johnson and the Kennedys present.
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Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts, was designated a national historic site. A new 13-cent stamp was issued with Kennedy’s visage.
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And in one of the largest ceremonies of the year, the aircraft carrier
John F. Kennedy
was launched at Newport News, Virginia, on May 27, 1967. Mrs. Kennedy and her two children headed a large delegation of Kennedys that witnessed Caroline christening the ship with the traditional bottle of champagne before a forest of TV cameras and a crowd of ten thousand people.
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The main speaker was the incumbent president—and his staff saw the dilemma. As aide Ben Wattenberg advised LBJ, the event “may well be the most dramatic single appearance you will make all year … an occasion that is, at once, a great opportunity and a great hazard.”
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With Senator Robert Kennedy looking on, the elephant in the room was once again Vietnam. Even calling JFK “a man of peace” or someone who “brought a new style of politics to America” were considered dangerous phrases, since an increasingly skeptical press corps might flip the terms to suggest that Johnson was, by contrast,
a warmonger and an old-style politician. The speech LBJ actually delivered was gracious to his predecessor, but it also contained some veiled messages about Vietnam for RFK as well as the nation and world. “John Kennedy understood that strength is essential to sustain freedom … In times past, it has often been our strength and our resolve which have tipped the scales of conflict against aggressors, or would-be aggressors. That role has never been an easy one. It has always required not only strength, but patience—the incredible courage to wait where waiting is appropriate, to avoid disastrous results to shortcut history. And sacrifice—the tragic price we pay for our commitment to our ideals.”
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The launch of an aircraft carrier is hard to miss—an obvious legacy—but the heritage of the Kennedy years is also found in America’s basic document of state. A few months before Johnson spoke in Newport News, Americans ratified the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a direct result of the Kennedy assassination and worry over possible scenarios affecting future presidential successions. For the first time, clear procedures for the temporary or permanent replacement of a living but incapacitated president were delineated. And presidents were given a notable new power—the selection of a replacement vice president, subject to the approval of both houses of Congress, whenever the vice presidency became vacant through death, resignation, or succession to the Oval Office. A mere six years after its ratification, the amendment produced a vice president, Gerald R. Ford, following the 1973 resignation in disgrace of Vice President Spiro Agnew. Also, without the Twenty-fifth Amendment, American history would have recorded the name of the thirty-eighth president of the United States, succeeding upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, as Carl Albert, not Gerald Ford. Albert was the Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, next in line to be president under the old pre-Twenty-fifth Amendment order.
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