A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  Soon, however, Russell would have cause to be bitterly disappointed by his former protégé. In one of his first acts as president, Johnson chose to coerce his old Senate colleague—to blackmail him, really—into working with the man who, more than any other in Washington, Russell openly despised: Earl Warren.

  THE HOME OF ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT KENNEDY

  MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  For a man who was only thirty-eight years old, Robert Kennedy had accumulated an extraordinary number of powerful enemies. In a horrible twist of fate, he learned of his brother’s murder from one of them—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

  Seconds after receiving word from the FBI’s Dallas field office of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Hoover picked up the telephone in his office and was patched through to Hickory Hill, Kennedy’s sprawling six-acre, Civil War–era estate in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Ethel Kennedy, the attorney general’s wife, answered the phone as Kennedy and his guest, Robert Morgenthau, the United States attorney in Manhattan, lunched on tuna fish sandwiches on the patio. They had been discussing Kennedy’s war on organized crime. It was a surprisingly warm November afternoon—so warm that the attorney general had earlier taken a swim in his pool as Morgenthau chatted with Ethel.

  Ethel held the white telephone receiver and motioned to her husband. “It’s J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Kennedy walked to the phone; he knew this must be important since Hoover never called him at home. “Yes, Director,” he said.

  “I have news for you,” Hoover said. “The president has been shot.” Hoover said he believed the president’s injuries were serious and that he would call back when he had more to report. Then the phone went dead, Kennedy said. Years later, Kennedy could still recall the coldness in Hoover’s voice, as if he had been calling on the most routine sort of Justice Department business. Hoover’s tone, Kennedy remembered bitterly, was “not quite as excited as if he was reporting the fact that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”*

  Morgenthau recalled later that Kennedy’s response to the news was one of horror and stark, inconsolable grief. After Hoover’s call, Kennedy crumpled into his wife’s arms, his hand over his mouth as if to silence a scream.

  John Kennedy was his older brother and best friend, and the fact that Robert Kennedy was also the attorney general of the United States—the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer—seemed an afterthought in those first minutes. Ethel took her husband to wait in their upstairs bedroom for final word from Texas. She directed Morgenthau to a television set on the first floor.

  * * *

  Kennedy’s closest aides flooded to Hickory Hill that afternoon. After the formal announcement of his brother’s death at about two p.m. Washington time, the attorney general emerged from the bedroom and came downstairs. Slowly he began to move among his aides and friends, accepting their condolences and thanking them for their contributions to his brother’s presidency. To a few, he offered hushed remarks suggesting that he was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt—that he was somehow responsible for this. He seemed to believe that some vicious, powerful enemy of the Kennedy administration—and, specifically, of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department—was behind his brother’s murder. “There’s been so much hate,” he told one of his most trusted deputies, Ed Guthman, the department’s press spokesman. “I thought they would get one of us. I thought it would be me.” Recalling the exchange, Guthman said that Kennedy did not specify who “they” were.

  Kennedy later confided to a handful of friends that he had initially feared that the assassination was the work of some element of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a shocking thought, but he knew that there were people at the spy agency who had never forgiven his brother for the disaster at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, when CIA-trained Cuban exiles failed in their attempt to invade Cuba and oust Castro’s government. Although CIA bungling was ultimately to blame for the fiasco, agency veterans were outraged by the president’s decision not to order up American air power to save the guerrillas when the operation started to go wrong. After the debacle, Kennedy ousted Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and reportedly vowed to an aide that he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

  Within an hour of the assassination, Robert Kennedy telephoned the CIA and asked that John McCone, the former California industrialist who was Dulles’s successor, come immediately to Hickory Hill. McCone arrived minutes later—the CIA’s headquarters in suburban Langley, Virginia, was only a short drive away—and Kennedy took McCone for a somber walk on the lawn. McCone offered his condolences, only to be startled by the question that the attorney general asked him: Had the CIA killed the president?

  “I asked McCone … if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me,” Kennedy later recalled.

  McCone assured Kennedy that the CIA had nothing to do with the assassination, a pledge he said he made as a man of faith—as a fellow Roman Catholic.

  Kennedy said he accepted McCone’s denial. But if the CIA didn’t kill the president, then who, or what, did? The list of Robert Kennedy’s sworn enemies might actually be longer than his brother’s, and many had the motive and the ability to dispatch an assassin to Texas. The assassination had not required a sophisticated plot or a professional sniper; that much was already clear. Initial reports suggested that his brother and Texas governor Connally, who had been seriously injured in the gunfire as he rode in the president’s limousine, had been easy targets in the slow-moving motorcade.

  Could it have been the Mafia, which Robert Kennedy had made his target for so much of his professional life—first as a congressional investigator, now as attorney general? Or could the president’s murder have been ordered up by a corrupt union boss, perhaps the thuggish Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa, another target of Kennedy’s Justice Department? Or was the assassination carried out by southern racists, angered over the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policies?

  There was also the possibility that the president had been killed by a foreign enemy. In those first hours, Kennedy’s friends recalled hearing nothing from him to suggest that he had any strong suspicion that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination; Moscow would know that any successor administration in Washington was unlikely to treat the Kremlin differently. A more likely suspect was Cuba. The United States had almost been drawn into a nuclear war over Cuba during the missile crisis the year before. And Robert Kennedy knew better, maybe even better than his brother, that Fidel Castro might have reason to want to see John Kennedy dead.

  Rather than wait for others to investigate the assassination, and perhaps sensing the political danger that an independent inquiry might pose, Kennedy launched his own private investigation that very afternoon. He picked up the telephone at Hickory Hill and called friends and well-connected political allies around the country, asking for their help to determine the truth behind his brother’s murder. He called Walter Sheridan, a trusted Justice Department investigator who was an expert on labor racketeering and the Teamsters, and asked him to try to find out if Hoffa was involved. He phoned Julius Draznin, a prominent Chicago labor lawyer who had valuable sources within organized crime, to see if Draznin could find a Mafia link to the assassination.

  From the start, Robert Kennedy seemed unable to accept the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone.

  3

  PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  Lyndon Johnson had a conspiratorial mind. It had proved valuable in an unlikely political career that had taken him from the scrubby flatlands of central Texas to Capitol Hill and now, shockingly, into the Oval Office as the new president. His old colleagues in the Senate thought the cagey, power-hungry fifty-five-year-old Texan could see around corners, and God help anyone who might lurk around those corners and dare to
conspire against him. Johnson would do almost anything—lying was the least of it—to deal with his enemies. He had always seemed to sense when plots were being hatched against him, which helped explain the brooding, ever-present paranoia and pessimism that he managed, usually, to keep hidden from the public. He had often felt humiliated during his three years as vice president, but he masked his despondency beneath layers of what some of Kennedy’s aides cruelly described as his “Uncle Cornpone” persona—the crude, chaw-spitting, bigger-than-life Texan who seemed so out of place among the Massachusetts sophisticates.

  Often as not, his instincts about conspiracies proved right. Now, in his first panicky minutes in Dallas as the thirty-sixth president of the United States, he was convinced that his predecessor’s murder might be the first step in a foreign-born Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government. He feared his presidency would last only long enough to see him launch the nuclear warheads that would end the world. “When would the missiles be coming?” he recalled thinking to himself that afternoon. “What raced through my mind was that if they had shot our president, who would they shoot next?”

  He was scared that he was the second target. He and Lady Bird Johnson had been in the motorcade, after all, in an open-air limousine just two cars behind the president’s. One stray bullet, and they could have been hit, too. Johnson’s close friend and protégé John Connally was a passenger in Kennedy’s limousine and had been severely wounded. In the first hours, it was not clear Connally would survive the damage done by a 6.5-millimeter rifle bullet that had pierced his back and erupted from his chest.

  One of Johnson’s first orders as commander in chief was intended, specifically, to prevent himself from being killed, too. After Kennedy was declared dead at about one p.m., Johnson ordered the traveling White House press secretary, Malcolm Kilduff, to withhold the news from reporters until after the Johnsons had safely left Parkland Hospital for Dallas’s Love Field airport, where Air Force One had been waiting since Kennedy’s arrival late that morning. Johnson worried that whoever had killed Kennedy was still on the streets, hunting for him. “We don’t know whether it’s a Communist conspiracy or not,” he told Kilduff. The assassin may be “after me as well as they were after President Kennedy—we just don’t know.”

  After a frantic drive across Dallas in an unmarked police car, its sirens switched off on Johnson’s order to avoid drawing attention to the passengers hunched down in the backseat, the new president arrived at the airport and scrambled up the steps into Air Force One at about one forty p.m., Dallas time. (It was an hour later, about two forty p.m., in Washington.) It had been approximately seventy minutes since the shots rang out at Dealey Plaza. Fearful of snipers hiding at the airport, Secret Service agents “rushed through the interior ahead of us, pulling down the shades and closing both doors behind us,” Johnson said later of the scene aboard the plane.

  He recalled a slight sense of relief at being aboard the regal presidential jet, surrounded by the familiar trappings of power, including the telephones and other communications equipment that would allow him to reach almost anyone in the world in a matter of minutes. As always, the simple presence of a telephone was a comfort to Johnson. Few politicians ever conducted so much business over phone lines as Johnson; a telephone receiver was alternately his instrument of political seduction and his weapon. In his years as president, many of those conversations were tape-recorded and transcribed—a secret that few of his callers knew.

  Although Secret Service agents wanted to depart the instant Johnson arrived at Love Field, he would not allow the plane to take off until Jacqueline Kennedy was also on board. Mrs. Kennedy, then still at the hospital, had refused to leave without her husband’s body, which had created a struggle between Secret Service agents and the Dallas coroner. (Initially, the coroner demanded that the president’s corpse remain in the city for an autopsy, as required by local law; in the end, the agents all but shoved him aside.) The Johnsons would wait at Love Field another thirty-five tense minutes before a powder-white Cadillac hearse bearing Mrs. Kennedy and the bronze casket pulled up alongside the Boeing jet.

  Minutes before departure, Federal District Judge Sarah Hughes of Dallas, a family friend of the Johnsons whose nomination to the federal bench had been arranged by the then vice president, rushed aboard to perform a swearing-in ceremony. Johnson took the presidential oath standing alongside a stricken Mrs. Kennedy. The White House photographer who captured the scene scrambled from Air Force One seconds before the doors were sealed; he had been told to get the photo to the Associated Press and other wire services as quickly as possible as proof to the world of the transition of presidential power. Minutes later the plane raced down the runway and climbed into the sky at what passengers remembered as a near-vertical angle. Two hours and eleven minutes later, it landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

  * * *

  That night, as Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy waited at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy to be completed, Johnson was already moving decisively to assume command. His aides later marveled at how comfortable he seemed in those first hours in power. After a seven-minute helicopter ride from Andrews to the White House, he made only a brief appearance at the door of the Oval Office, perhaps sensing that it was presumptuous for him to be there so soon after the assassination. Then he walked across a blocked-off street and into the Executive Office Building, where his vice presidential offices were located and where he would conduct his meetings and make a string of phone calls.

  He received a military briefing from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The initial news was reassuring. There was no evidence of a military advance by the Soviet Union or other foreign adversaries in the wake of the assassination, although American military forces would remain on high alert indefinitely.

  The report from Dallas was not so comforting. Although there was no immediate evidence that Oswald had accomplices, both the FBI and CIA had troubling details about his past, including his attempt to renounce his U.S. citizenship and defect to Russia four years earlier. Since his return to the United States in 1962, the FBI had, sporadically, been tracking Oswald and his Russian-born wife as possible Soviet agents. The CIA reported that it had placed Oswald under surveillance when he had traveled to Mexico City in September; the reasons for his trip to Mexico were not entirely clear.

  In his meetings that night and the next day with senior Kennedy aides, Johnson pledged continuity with the policies of the Kennedy administration and suggested that he intended to retain Kennedy’s entire cabinet; he wanted people to know their jobs were secure. Johnson used the same words again and again: “I need you more than President Kennedy needed you.”

  From his first hours in office, Johnson made what he felt were valiant efforts to comfort—and seek guidance from—Robert Kennedy. But if the new president had any hope that the shock of the events in Dallas might ease their relationship, he was mistaken. The attorney general had always loathed Johnson, and that would not change, even after Kennedy accepted the new president’s offer to stay on at the Justice Department. Unlike his older brother, who always seemed so remarkably even-tempered, so willing to make peace with former adversaries, Robert Kennedy was capable of bitter, even irrational hatreds. He seemed almost energized by blood feuds with men like Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, and, maybe most of all, Johnson. He privately described Johnson as “mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” He was appalled, he said, that Johnson—a man “incapable of telling the truth”—had taken his brother’s place in the White House.

  * * *

  At about seven p.m. on his first night as president, Johnson called J. Edgar Hoover. This was hardly surprising: Johnson would have expected the FBI director to have the latest information about the investigation in Dallas. And there were other good reasons for Johnson to reach out to Hoover that night—and to remind the FBI director of their years of loyal friendship. In the decades that followed, it would often be forgotten that in November 196
3, Johnson’s political survival was in grave doubt because of a fast-moving corruption investigation involving a Washington lobbyist who had once been one of Johnson’s closest aides in the Senate. The FBI was overseeing parts of the inquiry.

  Bobby Baker, the lobbyist, was known as “Little Lyndon.” He was accused of bribing lawmakers and running a so-called social club on Capitol Hill—the “Quorum Club”—that doubled as a de facto prostitution service for members of Congress and White House officials. The Baker scandal had threatened to ensnare President Kennedy as well as Johnson. Kennedy’s extramarital activities were no secret to Hoover, and the director was closely monitoring the allegations against Baker, including charges that the lobbyist had helped arrange liaisons between Kennedy and an East German–born beauty who was rumored to be a Communist spy.

  In the week before the assassination, Baker began spilling some of his secrets about Kennedy and Johnson to Washington’s most famous and feared muckraking newspaper columnist, Andrew “Drew” Pearson. Pearson’s syndicated column—the Washington Merry-Go-Round, written with his deputy, Jack Anderson—was a mix of serious political scoops and salacious, often flat-wrong gossip about the powerful. Pearson had sources everywhere, including senior White House aides, cabinet officers, and others at the highest reaches of government. Some of his sources leaked information to him because they feared him; others talked to him because they genuinely admired his bravery in exposing corruption and hypocrisy in Washington. To his credit, Pearson had been an early critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  Among Pearson’s admirers was Chief Justice Earl Warren. In fact, the sixty-six-year-old columnist counted Warren among his closest friends—and boasted in print of the friendship. At a time when the Warren court was under attack in much of the country for its rulings on civil rights and civil liberties, the chief justice could count on Pearson to defend him. They were so close that they regularly vacationed together. In columns that September, Pearson wrote about his yachting holiday that summer with Warren and his wife in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. During what was a working vacation for Pearson, Warren sat in as the columnist interviewed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, and, later, the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Josip Tito.