A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Kennedy hadn’t even wanted to run for president in 1968, initially. He had feared his candidacy might split the Democratic Party if he ran against President Lyndon Johnson, giving the race to the Republican nominee. But Senator McCarthy demonstrated that the fissure already existed by his strong showing in the New Hampshire primary.

  Kennedy wasn’t certain McCarthy would be a strong enough candidate to compete against the presumed Republican nominee, former Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, in the fall election, so he considered throwing his hat in the ring. He was still undecided when his friend (and John Kennedy’s former speechwriter) Richard Goodwin put on a recording of the recent Tony Award-winning musical Man of La Mancha. When the song “The Impossible Dream” came on, Kennedy shouted from another room, “Turn that damn thing off. If you keep playing it, I might run for president.”7

  Kennedy formally entered the race on March 16, 1968. Two weeks later, President Johnson stunned the nation by saying that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination.

  “Pick one out, they’re all good dances,” John Fahey said to a shapely girl in her late twenties who had come up beside him. The two stood looking at dresses in a store window in the lower lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, about 15 feet from a sign pointing up the stairs to the “Kennedy Reception” to be held later. It was about 9:30 in the morning.8

  The girl asked Fahey if he knew where the hotel’s post office was. Fahey didn’t even know the hotel had a post office, so the girl walked off.

  The Ambassador Hotel was like a city unto itself, containing a concourse of shops, bars, restaurants, the popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub, and yes, even a post office. But Fahey knew little about the hotel except the location of the coffee shop, designed by celebrity architect Paul Williams.

  The hotel straddled two “ground-floor” levels due to a small hill at the eastern and southernmost ends. You could enter at street level, walk up or down a staircase, and still exit at street level, as if you were in an Escher print.

  When Fahey had arrived at the hotel that morning, he had parked in the back lot on the southern side and hurried through the southeast entrance, as he was late for a breakfast meeting with a colleague. As he neared the entrance, two men caught Fahey’s attention, because although they looked Spanish, the foreign language they were speaking wasn’t Spanish.

  From the upper lobby, Fahey had descended the spiral staircase to the lower lobby. He had been looking for his colleague when he had stopped in front of the store window and had his moment with the girl.

  Figuring he had missed his colleague, Fahey walked into the coffee shop, sat at the gracefully swooping counter, and ordered a cup of brew. A few minutes later, the woman joined him at the counter. Fahey asked her about herself. Her answers were surprisingly strange.

  She was from Virginia, she told him. But when he started questioning her about Virginia, she said she wasn’t really from Virginia, but New York. When he asked about New York she mentioned Iran. Or Iraq. He wasn’t sure, later. She also mentioned Beirut, Cairo, Eilat, and Aqaba.

  The girl asked for Fahey’s name, where he worked, what he did for a living. Fahey answered and asked what she was doing at the hotel.

  “I don’t want to get you involved,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want to get me involved?” Fahey asked.

  “If I tell you too much they’re liable to be watching me.”

  “Who?” Fahey asked.

  “I don’t know if I can trust you,” she said.

  Fahey noted she seemed very nervous, so they moved to the privacy of a table, where they ordered breakfast. He asked for her name, and she gave him a few different ones, explaining, “I can’t go by my real name.”

  “I think we’re being watched,” she added.

  Fahey looked around and saw what seemed to be the older of the two men he had passed on his way into the hotel watching them from outside the coffee shop window.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” Fahey asked the girl. She told him she had to get to Australia to get away from certain people, and that she needed a passport. Fahey couldn’t help with that. He had been in the service and hadn’t needed one. He had no idea what you’d need to get one.

  “Well, I know how to get a passport,” she said, surprising Fahey. She told him that she could get a deceased person’s name, use that person’s Social Security number, write to their place of birth, get the birth certificate, and get a passport made with that information.

  Fahey had initially assumed the girl was a troubled prostitute. Her comments, however, put things in a different light. His bigger surprise came with her next question. Could he come to the hotel tonight, to the winning reception, to watch them get Mr. Kennedy?

  “What do you mean?” Fahey asked.

  “Well, they’re going to take care of Mr. Kennedy tonight.”

  At this, Fahey felt uncomfortable and wanted to leave, “but being a gentleman, we were having breakfast and I didn’t want to cut it off or dump her. She told me that we were being watched and I did see this guy watching us.”9 He told her he had business up the coast. She invited herself along.

  Fahey started to pay for breakfast but the girl beat him to it. She pulled out a wallet that had, to Fahey’s surprise, a number of large bills—$50 and $100 bills. Still, Fahey felt strongly that a gentleman should pay, and he did.

  He started to lead her out but she knew a different way, taking Fahey up a staircase he’d never seen before that led to the back parking lot. They got into Fahey’s car and drove up the coast, past where Robert Kennedy was still sleeping.10 The marine layer locals call “the June gloom” hung over the coast like a shroud.

  It was late in the morning before Kennedy awoke. He phoned Dick Goodwin and invited him come out to Malibu to join his party, which included six of his ten children, his wife Ethel (then pregnant with their eleventh child), Theodore White, and Fred Dutton.

  Despite the cloudy sky, Kennedy took his children to the beach. As the kids played, Kennedy and White discussed coastal pollution, the disappearing kelp beds, and which ocean was better—the Atlantic or the Pacific. (Naturally, Kennedy preferred Cape Cod.)

  While Kennedy and his children were swimming, a large wave suddenly swept over his son David, pulling him out to sea. Kennedy dove into the dangerous surf to rescue him. Both could have died. A few tense moments later, Kennedy rose from the waves, bruised above one eye, clutching David.11

  At the Ambassador Hotel, an unkempt, 47-year-old William F. Crosson, an Army Sergeant who had served in World War II, kept approaching the hotel desk in the lobby, where Donald Reinke and Gail Farrar worked, to complain about the lack of security there.12 He mentioned how someone could hide behind the cameras and that they, presumably the Kennedy party, should be careful. Farrar got the impression that Crosson knew something was going to happen there.13

  Crosson asked for a floorplan of the hotel but was refused. He took a sheet of paper, drew his own map, and gave it to Reinke. “He is going to die,” Crosson said.14 Neither Reinke nor Farrar got the impression Crosson was making a threat. He seemed genuinely concerned.

  When Goodwin arrived at Frankenheimer’s home, he found Kennedy stretched over two chairs by the pool, his head hanging limply, his body motionless, Goodwin felt a sudden rush of fear. Then he realized the Senator was only sleeping. He returned to join the others at the buffet. “God,” Goodwin thought, as he served himself food, “I suppose none of us will ever get over John Kennedy.”15

  Robert Kennedy himself was not immune from such thoughts. “I can’t plan,” he had said some months earlier. “Living every day is like Russian roulette.”16

  The campaign had shared a similar scare the day before. Monday morning, as Robert Kennedy’s motorcade had worked its way through a crowded street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, someone had set off a string of firecrackers. Kennedy and the rest in his party thought someone was firing at them. As Newfield recounted:

 
; The memory of Dallas flashed through the minds of the press. Was it happening again? … Ethel Kennedy, terrified, crouched down. But Robert Kennedy didn’t flinch. He kept cool, refusing through will to show fear, shaking hands, waving to the people … The whole incident took perhaps ten seconds, but the next day we would all remember it, remember how close to the surface of our consciousness Dallas had been all along, how we all had a secret fleeting premonition of how the last passionate passage of Robert Kennedy might end. We remembered how John Lindsay of Newsweek had warned us … “This country is going to kill another Kennedy. And then we won’t have a country.”17

  As the early projections started to come in, Kennedy joined Goodwin and White in Frankenheimer’s living room. CBS projected that Kennedy would win 49% of the vote to McCarthy’s 41%. “If only we can push up our percentage a point or two,” Kennedy lamented, hoping to cross the 50% threshold. “We talked idly,” Goodwin would later note, “as if the big victory were already in—not because we were sure, but because that’s the only way politicians can talk.”18

  Thane Eugene Cesar, a self-described plumber at Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” facility where the CIA’s “Top Secret” spy planes were made, arrived five minutes late for his second job at the Ambassador Hotel. Cesar had signed up to moonlight as an after-hours security guard for Ace Guard Service barely a week earlier.19 Dressed in his gray Ace uniform, Cesar reported to Fred Murphy, his commander and a former LAPD lieutenant, and William Gardner, the head of the Ambassador Hotel’s unarmed, brown-suited security force, who was also a retired LAPD lieutenant. Gardner had asked for the additional help from Ace after realizing he was likely understaffed for the large turnout expected.

  In Malibu, Kennedy and Dutton clambered into John Frankenheimer’s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Frankenheimer sped so fast down the Santa Monica Freeway toward the Ambassador Hotel that it caused Kennedy some alarm. “Take it easy,” Kennedy said. “Life is too short.”20

  As night settled in, the Embassy Room filled past capacity. Some 1,800 people milled about, chatting as they awaited the results of the California primary and what many believed would be Senator Kennedy’s victory speech. Firemen and security officers shooed away supporters and campaign workers from the overflowing Embassy Room doors, pointing them instead to the smaller Ambassador Ballroom downstairs.

  North of the eastern half of the Embassy Room and parallel to it ran a small food preparation area that would become known as “the pantry.” The room contained three steam tables lined up along an east-west axis on the north side and a gargantuan ice machine that covered a large portion of the south side. It was not well guarded. Kennedy worker Judy Royer complained of having to constantly clear the room. Only campaign workers and press people were allowed in that area, but every time Royer entered, unauthorized people were present. Royer was concerned because this room was very close to where Kennedy would be speaking.

  The Embassy Room rippled with excitement with each primary update. NBC reported that McCarthy was ahead in the initial count, while CBS predicted a strong Kennedy victory. Kennedy’s biggest rival for the nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, wasn’t on the ballot in California. He was accumulating delegates the old-fashioned way, by lobbying them directly. He planned to make a play for delegates at the convention in Chicago.

  Due to a newly installed IBM computer voting system, the vote counting had proceeded more slowly than usual. In the past, ballots had been counted by hand at the precincts all day so the tallies were nearly done by the time the polls closed. The tallies had then been called in and summarized at the county registrar’s office. With the computerized system, however, the ballots had to be driven by truck from each precinct to the central computer in the IBM building, which happened to be across the street from the west end of the Ambassador Hotel. There, the new punch card ballots were fed into a computer to get the count. The new process significantly delayed the count.

  In Suite 511, Kennedy and his aides strategized. Senator George McGovern called from South Dakota to give Kennedy an update on the primary results there. McGovern told him that Kennedy had received more votes than Humphrey and McCarthy combined. He had won both the Native Americans’ and the farmers’ votes.21

  Down the hall, in Suite 516, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Budd Schulberg, Jimmy Breslin, John Frankenheimer and another 25 or so members of the press gathered. “There were no laptops, or cell phones, or BlackBerrys, or cable-television news either. So telephones rang insistently in the suite, were picked up, and names were called in stage whispers,” Hamill recalled.22 Hamill talked for a while to Frankenheimer about his film The Manchurian Candidate.

  “Do you think it could happen in what is laughingly called ‘real life’?” Hamill asked.

  Frankenheimer smiled nervously as he glanced at the suite’s door. “Yeah.”23

  As the crowd in 511 grew, people spilled into the hallway. At around 9 P.M., Kennedy walked out into the hallway and was immediately besieged.

  “I like politics,” Kennedy said to the reporters. “It’s an honorable adventure.” Kennedy asked if anyone knew whom he was quoting. No one did.

  “That was Lord Tweedsmuir. Does anybody here know who he was?” Again, silence. Kennedy told them Lord Tweedsmuir was John Buchan, a Scottish statesman whose novel The Thirty-Nine Steps was used as the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film of the same name.24

  Kennedy retreated to his room. On and off, Kennedy mingled with the crowd in his suite until he had to leave for an interview with Roger Mudd of CBS.

  Several floors below, in the Embassy Room, Sandy Serrano, a Hispanic 21-year-old “Youth for Kennedy” co-chair for the Pasadena-Altadena area, enjoyed the vodka and orange juice drink a friend had purchased for her. To escape the heat in the room, Serrano walked out the room’s southwest fire escape exit, descended the metal fire escape and reentered the hotel’s Sunset Room to listen to the “Viva Kennedy” band.

  Somewhere above Serrano in the hotel, Roger Mudd grilled Kennedy on live TV.

  “And you would not be willing to join with Mr. Humphrey in order to help the Democratic Party win—”

  “In what way?” Kennedy interrupted.

  “As Vice President,” Mudd replied.

  “In what order?” Kennedy responded, smiling.

  “Well, I,” Mudd laughed, caught off guard. Kennedy smiled broadly. Mudd asked if Kennedy would consider taking the second slot.

  “No I wouldn’t …. I’d be glad to help the Democratic Party, I believe in the Democratic Party. In what way, I’d have to work out … particularly if Richard Nixon is the nominee of the Republican Party, which I think is unacceptable to the country. And I have strong disagreements … with Hubert Humphrey and the positions he espouses, particularly what he said this week—that he’d step aside if Lyndon Johnson then decides that he wants to run.”

  “You thought that was fairly shoddy politics, I take it?”

  Kennedy smiled and blinked when Mudd said “shoddy.”

  “No, there again—Roger!” Kennedy smiled and blinked again. “I think you’re either in it, or you’re not.”

  “Are some of the delegates that are listed as leaning or even committed to the Vice President, are they ‘squeezable’? Are they solid?”

  “Roger!” Kennedy gasped, almost blushing. “Your language! I don’t like either of those expressions.”

  “Well … isn’t that the way you talk—behind closed doors?” Mudd pushed.

  Kennedy shook his head, talking over Mudd, who was starting to laugh. “I don’t. I don’t …. Probably somebody else does ….” He would, of course, make an effort to win over the delegates, Kennedy acknowledged.

  “Thank you, and I’ll work on my language for the next time, Senator,” Mudd ended, chuckling amiably.25

  Throughout the interview, Kennedy came across as poised, charming, bright, and most of all, presidential. “If he looks like that for the rest of the campaign,” Goodwin thought as he watched, �
�we might win.”26

  Michael Wayne, a 5’8” young man in his mid-twenties with dark, curly hair, sideburns and an olive complexion, tried to get into the Embassy Ballroom but was turned away. He walked unchallenged through the kitchen pantry instead and into the press area in the small Colonial Room just across the hall from the east end of the pantry. There, he managed to beg a “Kennedy Election Night Press” pass and a similar badge that read, “Kennedy for President – Press.”

  Wayne was not a member of the press.

  Wayne clipped the two badges together with a PT-109 tie clasp he had already obtained from Robert Kennedy two weeks earlier at another event at the Ambassador Hotel. He had traded a PT-109 clasp in his possession for one Kennedy had been wearing. Wayne took two Kennedy posters, found his way to Kennedy’s fifth-floor suite, walked brazenly through the open door, and begged a second PT-109 tie clasp from a worker there. He ordered a Scotch and water at the bar in the suite.27

  Wayne was not a Kennedy supporter. He was not even a Democrat.

  Elsewhere in the hotel, at around 9 P.M., a girl in a “white dress with dark blue polka dots” tried to beg a press pass off of Conrad Seim, a 50-year-old photographer. He would remember her later for her persistence and her funny nose, which he thought may have been broken at some point. She was between 5’5” and 5’6” tall, between 25 and 30 years old, Caucasian, with an olive complexion and dark brown hair.28

  Between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m, Mrs. Eve Hansen and her sister Nina Ballantyne went up to a bar on the lower level of the hotel. They were approached by a Caucasian girl with a “turned-up nose,” 25 to 26 years old, wearing a white dress with black or navy blue polka dots approximately the size of a quarter.