The Kennedy Half-Century (60 page)

An extraordinary funeral train ride from New York to Washington then took place. RFK’s coffin, accompanied by his pregnant widow, Ethel, his ten children, and dozens of family, friends, and working press, made its way as average Americans, many holding flags, wearing military and Scout uniforms, and saluting, gathered in train depots and simply alongside the tracks for hundreds of miles. An uncomprehending sadness was etched onto all their faces. Upon arrival in D.C., the casket was borne by thirteen pallbearers, mostly
family but also former astronaut John Glenn and former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, among others. The procession stopped at the Lincoln Memorial where the Marine Corps Band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The motorcade arrived at Arlington National Cemetery at 10:30 P.M. and made its way to the hallowed ground occupied by John F. Kennedy. Bobby was interred nearby. Sunday, June 9, was an official national day of mourning, as a depressed nation tried to recover from a tragic spring.
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President Johnson appointed yet another commission, this one headed by Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to investigate the causes and prevention of violence.
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In 1969 and 1970, the commission released a series of reports that called for tough new gun control laws, additional curbs on television violence, and other reforms aimed at controlling what appeared to be a national epidemic of bloodshed.
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Many similar ideas are still circulating in twenty-first-century America, where mass shootings are far more common than in the 1960s.

The parallels between the Kennedy assassinations are many, not least the persistent belief in conspiracy.
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The convicted assassin Sirhan was sentenced to death in the gas chamber, though his life was spared by a California Supreme Court ban on capital punishment.
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As with Oswald, though, many people do not believe that Sirhan acted alone.

Just as a Dictabelt was long thought to have recorded the gunshots in Dealey Plaza (though we have now disproven it), a reporter’s tape machine is believed to have caught the volley of gunfire in the Ambassador Hotel pantry. An audio analysis of free-lance newsman Stanislaw Puszynski’s recording may indicate as many as thirteen gunshots, while Sirhan’s gun contained only eight bullets. Given what we learned about the JFK Dictabelt by means of sophisticated testing, however, it might be best to consider the RFK recording’s finding as an initial possibility rather than a hard conclusion. Sirhan has regularly applied for parole in California, claiming he was in a trancelike state and does not recall shooting Kennedy. His most recent attorney insisted at a 2011 parole hearing that another gunman shot RFK.
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Conspiracy theories have also abounded about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Only recently, a Western Union telegram surfaced on the antiques market. Dated 1968, it reads simply, “Please accept my sincerest and deepest sympathy.” The recipient was Sirhan’s mother, Mary. The sender was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite.
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When the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in late August to nominate Vice President Hubert Humphrey, fury about Vietnam turned downtown Chicago into a domestic war zone, as youthful demonstrators
clashed with Mayor Daley’s police. Inside the hall, where tear gas occasionally could be smelled and reporters were fair game for pummeling by Daley’s angry allies, there was little peace. But calm prevailed for the showing of yet another film about yet another lost Kennedy,
An Impossible Dream
, narrated by Richard Burton—the same actor who had narrated John Kennedy’s celluloid memorial at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
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Politics continued for the living, and the last Kennedy brother was the focus of intrigue. Mayor Daley tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Ted Kennedy to permit a draft from the floor so that he could carry the party’s banner instead of Humphrey.
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By contrast, no one tried to draft Lyndon Johnson for another term. Johnson had hoped to give a valedictory speech as the retiring chief executive. The conclave had been timed originally to coincide with his birthday. But he chose to stay away lest his presence result in embarrassing anti-LBJ displays by many delegates on the convention floor. Also, Johnson probably would have turned the anger on Chicago’s streets into complete anarchy.

No comparable good comes from great evil, but the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King enabled President Johnson to notch his last major legislative achievement. On October 22, Johnson signed the Gun Control Act, which outlawed mail order gun sales and made it illegal to sell guns to anyone indicted or convicted of serious crimes, the mentally ill, drug addicts, and illegal immigrants.
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In the main, these restrictions are still in effect today—and gun control has not been greatly expanded since.
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In addition, Secret Service protection was extended to major party candidates for president and vice president.
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The tragic decade of the Kennedys was coming to a close. The queen of Camelot stunned the world on October 20, 1968 by marrying the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. “Ari” Onassis was the antithesis of John Kennedy in youth, looks, and charm, but in his vast fortune and isolated foreign retreats, the divorced, often unscrupulous wheeler-dealer offered Jackie Kennedy security and escape for herself and her children.
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Public reaction was not kind; as one
New York Times
report put it, Americans showed “a combination of anger, shock, and dismay.”
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And in Europe, the feedback was summed up in a much-cited headline, JACKIE—HOW CAN YOU?
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Camelot was in retreat, if not receivership. The presidential heir was leaving office deeply unpopular and reviled. The family’s crown prince had been assassinated. The living symbol of that one brief shining moment had fled to the Mediterranean. John F. Kennedy’s vanquished opponent, Richard Nixon, was elected the new president in November, which seemed to many a repudiation of the Kennedy-Johnson years and the tumult they had brought. Pundits prematurely wrote an end to John Kennedy’s era, as the second term he might have had came to a close.

But there were enduring signs that Americans were not willing to let go of their fallen leader. On the fifth anniversary of JFK’s assassination, thousands again showed up spontaneously at the Arlington gravesite to pay tribute. Memorial services were held in many places, not least Dallas, where the mayor placed flowers in Dealey Plaza and the nurses at Parkland Hospital left a wreath on the door of Trauma Room One.
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And when
Apollo
8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve, at last providing a soaring achievement to conclude America’s
annus horribilis
, John Kennedy’s pledge of manned space exploration was prominently cited by the news media. Despite all that had happened since November 1963, the nation’s memory of the Kennedy years was fresh and mainly favorable, its admiration for a martyred president undimmed.

As he prepared to leave office, Lyndon Johnson must have reflected upon his own star-crossed presidency. In 1964 he had won an electoral mandate as large as any president had ever enjoyed. Yet despite that, or perhaps because of it, Johnson had overreached and now his departure was mourned by few. His fall from power was tied to his own shortcomings, but in the background, and occasionally the foreground, was the unresolved conflict with the Kennedys. Whose presidency was it anyway? The tug-of-war continued until the day Johnson left office. During his entire White House tenure, Johnson was haunted by the question: What would John Kennedy have done? History still asks it, unanswerable though it is.

15
“Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming”: JFK’s Repudiation and Revival

The resurrection of Richard Nixon has no clear parallel in American politics. Defeated for the presidency by a whisker in 1960 and then beaten decisively for governor of California in 1962, Nixon was so washed up that ABC television ran a program in mid-November 1962 entitled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.”
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Astonishingly, he became president in 1968, put in office by a “silent majority” (actually, a 43 percent plurality) fed up with the Democrats’ handling of the Vietnam War and urban riots. The 1960s had zigged left, and far wrong in the eyes of many, so the electorate responded by zagging right to secure Nixon’s promised “law and order” and “peace with honor.”

Having been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the same postwar year of 1946, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon became friends.
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The two young, ambitious politicians were both World War II veterans, of different parties but a similar frame of mind. While they could not have imagined their lives would be so intertwined, and that both would reach the White House, Kennedy and Nixon recognized each other’s talents. As with any political pair in Washington, affable acquaintanceship was mixed with competition and, inevitably, jealousy.

Probably to Kennedy’s surprise, given his advantages of education and family finances, Nixon was the one who got fast-tracked. As a freshman congressman, the Republican became a central figure in the 1948 investigation of the former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was accused of being a Communist and later convicted of perjury.
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As chairman of a special subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Nixon thrust the hearings into the spotlight with allegations of espionage and skulduggery. This propelled Nixon from the House to the U.S. Senate from California in 1950, and then—at the remarkably young age of thirty-nine—to the vice presidency under President Eisenhower.
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While never especially close to
Ike, Nixon served dutifully and could possibly have become president during Eisenhower’s serious illnesses, such as a heart attack and a stroke, suffered during his White House years. Much more vigorous than Eisenhower, Nixon was sent abroad on a number of high-visibility missions, including the Soviet Union in 1959, where he famously argued with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev about the relative merits of capitalism and Communism in the so-called kitchen debate. (It occurred in a mock American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.) Nixon was still deeply controversial because of the Hiss case and a “secret fund” scandal during the 1952 presidential campaign,
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but he was a universally recognized national and international force by 1960. Meanwhile, John Kennedy waited until 1952 to win election to the Senate from Massachusetts, and he lost his bid to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1956. Worse, JFK spent much of the 1950s in pain and on occasion, near death from war-related back injuries. He was never a major force in the Senate.

Nixon was the inevitable 1960 Republican presidential nominee, but Kennedy’s path to the Democratic nod was not carefree. Nonetheless, through a combination of pluck, luck, and just enough “time for a change” sentiment—and the help of Chicago’s Mayor Daley and LBJ’s Texas allies—JFK defeated the more experienced Nixon.
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It was a bitter pill for the vice president, who believed that he was much better prepared to assume the highest office—and on that score, he was certainly correct. However, Nixon was realistic enough to know after a very close election and at the still-young age of forty-seven, he could stage a comeback. Even after his crushing and somewhat unexpected defeat for the Golden State governorship in 1962, Nixon saw a path to eventual victory, though not in 1964.

It is a supreme, coincidental irony that Richard Nixon was in Dallas on November 20–22, flying out on the morning of the assassination. Nixon had never stopped crisscrossing the country, campaigning for GOP candidates and causes, though he was in Dallas to attend the board meeting of the Pepsi Cola Bottlers Association. (The soft drink company had a financial association with the former vice president.) One can only imagine Nixon’s inner thoughts as he heard about President Kennedy’s assassination, but the next day, he wrote a note to Jackie that suggests he had been genuinely saddened:

In this tragic hour, Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you. While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding. Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world. But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess of America, and the mystique of the young in art which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness. If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command.
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At the same time, Nixon’s keen political mind no doubt analyzed the aftermath quickly: President Johnson would be a heavy favorite for election in 1964, but the natural cycles of politics might make 1968 a very different situation. Few establishment Republicans, and certainly not Nixon, thought Barry Goldwater would have a chance to win; his decisive defeat would strengthen Nixon’s opportunity for 1968. After all, Nixon had nearly won the presidency and he was already the party’s senior statesman.