Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  “The way you write this, about that ’52 election, any reader would think that we had bought that paper for the editorial support,” Kennedy objected.

  “Frankly, that’s the implication I want to leave because I think that’s what happened,” Knebel shot back.

  The two men continued squabbling at some length over Knebel’s characterization of the deal until Kennedy finally got him to agree to insert a strong denial from family finance man Stephen Smith. Their dispute resolved, JFK then walked Knebel to his door. Years later, the journalist laughed at the memory of what Kennedy did next. “This was a trait about Kennedy that reporters just loved, it just killed them.” Opening the door for Knebel, Kennedy said, “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I would have lost the election.”

  “How shrewd that guy was, you know?” the journalist later marveled. “That strange, whimsical, almost magical quality that that guy had about him; he did have it. It wasn’t something that was painted on by the press or that was manufactured. It was real.”

  Knebel made sure that Kennedy got an early copy of Seven Days in May before it was published. JFK quickly devoured the book, as did his brother and others in their circle. Then Kennedy contacted Hollywood director John Frankenheimer, maker of the soon-to-be-released film The Manchurian Candidate—another Cold War thriller JFK admired—and encouraged him to turn Seven Days in May into a movie. So began a remarkable, little-known footnote of the Kennedy years, when the president appealed to his Hollywood friends to help him awake the nation to the threat of far-right treason.

  The president wanted to send his enemies in Washington a message. “Kennedy wanted Seven Days in May to be made as a warning to the generals,” Arthur Schlesinger said years later over glasses of Perrier and lemon in the book-lined drawing room of New York’s Century Club. “The president said the first thing I’m going to tell my successor is ‘Don’t trust the military men—even on military matters.’”

  “President Kennedy wanted Seven Days in May made. Pierre Salinger conveyed this to us,” Frankenheimer recalled. “The Pentagon didn’t want it done. Kennedy said that when we wanted to shoot at the White House, he would conveniently go to Hyannis Port that weekend.”

  JFK had also encouraged the production of Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate, which starred the president’s yet-to-be excommunicated friend Frank Sinatra. Destined to become a Cold War classic, the 1962 film was a perverse dream that tapped into the political psychosis of the era. In The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing Communists and scheming right-wing extremists are amoral equivalents; they join forces to assassinate a president and dispose of American democracy. Kennedy was an avid fan of the darkly lurid 1959 Richard Condon best seller on which the film was based. When United Artists suddenly got cold feet about the movie, fearing that it might exacerbate Cold War tensions, Sinatra persuaded Kennedy to intervene with the studio. The president maintained an active interest in the movie’s production. “He was really interested in the facts of the project,” Sinatra recalled. On August 29, 1962, Kennedy gave The Manchurian Candidate a special screening at the White House.

  John Kennedy clearly grasped Hollywood’s dreamlike power to conjure the public’s deepest fears and hopes. As with Bobby’s Enemy Within project, JFK showed his communications savvy by turning to Hollywood on Seven Days in May. But there is also something poignant about his entreaty. The fact that the president of the United States was driven to enlist the support of show business friends in his struggle with the military underscores how embattled he must have felt.

  Frankenheimer and an A-list of Hollywood liberals responded to the president’s call. Kirk Douglas’s production company acquired the rights to the novel even before it was published and he agreed to co-star in the film with Burt Lancaster as the mutinous General James Mattoon Scott and Frederic March as peace-loving President Jordan Lyman. The Defense Department “shunned” the Seven Days in May project, Knebel later reported, after Frankenheimer refused to submit the script (by future Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling) for “consideration,” as military censors euphemistically called the process. But with Kennedy’s support, Frankenheimer filmed scenes at the White House and staged riots outside on Pennsylvania Avenue—mock battles between opponents and supporters of “President Lyman” that echoed the real-life clashes swirling around the Kennedy administration.

  Months later, Look magazine ran a photo essay by Knebel on the making of Seven Days in May, including shots of overturned government cars burning in the streets of Washington. The journalist revealed the rampant anxieties that the movie’s production had set off within the government: “At the outset of filming, the moviemakers had a call from still another arm of government. The Secret Service was alarmed at a spurious report that the movie involved a President’s assassination.” Three days after the magazine’s publication date, Kennedy was dead. A strange and melancholy air would hang over the film when it was finally released in February 1964, despite the fact that in the story, at least, the good guys won.

  The day Kennedy was assassinated, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of Seven Days in May, planned to run an ad for the film, using a quote from one of its fictional military conspirators: “Impeach him, hell. There are better ways of getting rid of him.” The studio yanked the ad at the last minute, fearing it was too provocative, “narrowly avoiding an embarrassing coinci dence on the very day the president was shot,” Variety later reported. But several media commentators found the movie itself too disturbing when it was released. An opinion writer in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner questioned whether movies like Seven Days in May should be made. “The world is on too short a fuse,” he argued, and pictures like this damaged “the American image abroad.” A Los Angeles Times columnist felt compelled to reassure his readers that a military coup could not really happen in America, quoting none other than retired admiral Arleigh Burke to support his case. Meanwhile congressmen, including Melvin Laird, a future secretary of defense, called for the movie to be clearly labeled fiction before it was shown overseas.

  Seven Days in May was one of several nerve-wracking political features to come out of the Kennedy years, including The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove, and Fail-Safe. Together they weave a jittery picture of American democracy “as an excitingly perilous arena,” in the observation of film critic J. Hoberman. “Shot in sober black and white and populated by demagogues, dupes and traitors, such movies were delirious news bulletins that set American presidents and presidential candidates in the midst of some personal or public Armageddon.” Hollywood, in short, was trying to tell America something about the country’s precarious political situation. With most of the Washington press corps remaining cheerfully oblivious to the ominous tensions building in the nation’s capital, “the delirious news bulletins” had to come from the country’s dream factory.

  Critics would later call these films masterpieces of political paranoia. But Frankenheimer rejected the description in an interview near the end of his life. “Paranoia only exists if the circumstances are totally untrue,” he pointed out. And America was fraught with dangerous circumstances in those years, he said. As for The Manchurian Candidate, he said, history has “vividly demonstrated that there are lots and lots of plots to assassinate presidents and high-ranking figures for political gain…. There’s a certain grotesque reality about The Manchurian Candidate. And as far as Seven Days in May is concerned, we know that there was a very definite group in the military that would have, at one point, liked to have taken over the government…. The extreme right has been very, very effective in undermining quite a few things that could’ve changed the destiny of this country.”

  Her husband never believed the lone gunman theory of President Kennedy’s demise, said Evans Frankenheimer, widow of the director, who died in 2002. She said that John Frankenheimer would discuss his ideas about the assassination with Bobby Kennedy, with whom he drew close in 1968, while filming his presidential campaign ads. Both men agreed the
re were other forces at work in Dallas besides Oswald.

  When President Kennedy read the advance copy of Seven Days in May that Knebel had sent him, in late summer 1962, he was confident that he could head off any such disaster before it befell the country. The day after reading the book, JFK went sailing on the Honey Fitz with his old World War II pal, Red Fay. As the assistant Navy secretary, Fay served as a window for the president into the hostile military culture. Fay too had read an early copy of Seven Days in May and he was eager to hear JFK’s opinion of the book. Could a military coup really happen here?

  “It’s possible,” JFK told his sailing mate in a calm voice. “It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

  Finally, said the president, “if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.” He paused, as Fay absorbed this chilling scenario. “But it won’t happen on my watch,” Kennedy added.

  Just weeks later, however, the Kennedy administration would suffer two more shocks to the system, with one crisis following hard on the heels of the other. Both crises deepened the same jagged fracture lines in the government that the Bay of Pigs had first chiseled. They reinforced the conviction in some Washington quarters that this was a failing presidency. And, as Kennedy sensed would happen, there were now those who felt a patriotic obligation to do something about it.

  “I HAVEN’T HAD SUCH an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” President Kennedy dryly remarked. His brother was in an equally mordant mood. “The attorney general announced today he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton University,” he deadpanned. It was nearing midnight on September 30, 1962. The Kennedys were huddled in the Cabinet Room with a handful of their closest advisors, including O’Donnell and Sorensen. The president was nervously pacing the room, while Bobby crouched over a telephone connecting him to the University of Mississippi, where a race riot sparked by the arrival of James Meredith—who would become the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss—was rapidly blossoming into a full-blown Southern insurrection against the federal government.

  As the night wore on, Bobby continued to monitor the deteriorating situation by phone, talking to his top two men at the scene, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Ed Guthman, who relayed increasingly frantic reports from a pay phone booth in the Lyceum, the old administration building where they were holed up. Outside the historic, colonnaded structure—where wounded Confederate soldiers had once been nursed—raged what some would call the last battle of the Civil War. A motley federal force—comprising a few hundred marshals and hastily deputized prison guards, border patrolmen, alcohol and tobacco agents, and the like—were desperately trying to hold off over 2,500 students, Klansmen, squirrel hunters, and even off-duty lawmen, who, armed with bricks, metal pipes, gas-filled Coke bottles, and shotguns, were trying to overrun the citadel. As they charged, they filled the warm night with blood-curdling rebel yells and cries to “lynch the nigger.” A majority of the federal marshals were Southerners themselves and were no champions of school integration. But under the command of the attorney general’s favorite New York Irishman, Jim McShane, they resolutely held their ground during the long, bloody siege, using only tear gas guns to repel the rioters. The marshals were under strict orders not to draw their sidearms, unless the mob came close to grabbing Meredith, who was passing the night, with odd serenity, on a dormitory cot not far from the Lyceum.

  “Stay right by Meredith. Shoot anybody that puts a hand on him,” Robert Kennedy told his men.

  James Meredith, an eccentric and visionary twenty-eight-year-old Air Force veteran, was possessed by a religious-like belief in his mission, which he described as a “Divine Responsibility” to end “White Supremacy” in his native Mississippi. He had been inspired to undertake this dangerous endeavor after hearing President Kennedy sound freedom’s trumpet in his inauguration speech. Meredith had the supreme equanimity of a man who didn’t much care whether he lived or died in the process. But the federal marshals were frantic to save his skin, as well as their own. And, as their tear gas supplies ran perilously low and the attacks on their thin line of defense outside the Lyceum grew more vicious, they were not confident they would succeed.

  Inside the Lyceum, the scene was bloody bedlam. A young marshal from Memphis had been shot in the throat, severing his jugular vein, and he was dragged inside the building, jetting blood onto the walls and tile floor. (The marshal, Graham E. Same, would expire and come back to life four times that night, but would miraculously survive.) Dozens of other marshals with broken and bleeding limbs were splayed on the floor. Others were collapsed against the blood-splattered walls, crying inside their gas masks. There was no doctor at this point in the siege and few medical supplies. A persistent sniper was blasting away at the Lyceum’s windows. A swirling, eye-stinging haze of tear gas came drifting into the building from the ferocious battle outside.

  Kenny O’Donnell, who at one point relieved Bobby on the phone in the Cabinet Room, was shaken by what he was hearing. “Guthman’s so scared he can’t talk. Helpless feelings on the other end of that phone.” And these were two men who had weathered the firestorm of World War II combat.

  “How’s it going down there?” the attorney general asked Guthman when he got back on the phone.

  “Pretty rough,” Guthman told him. “It’s getting like the Alamo.”

  A pause. Then Bobby replied, “Well, you know what happened to those guys, don’t you.” The black Irish humor again. The exchange would be widely quoted in later reports on the battle of Ole Miss, as a way of underlining the Kennedys’ grace under pressure.

  There were indeed flashes of Kennedy wit throughout the long night. But what comes across most vividly in listening to the tapes from the Cabinet Room and Oval Office that later surfaced, thanks to the secret recording system installed in the White House by the president, is the Kennedy brothers’ mounting rage. It started when they began puzzling over the Army’s ass-dragging pace that night, its strange failure to promptly relieve the bloodied and outnumbered federal marshals. It grew when mad-eyed, beetle-browed General Edwin Walker—recently forced into retirement—suddenly appeared in the college town, dressed in a natty black suit and his trademark gray Stetson, and showed up later at a Confederate monument on campus, where he rallied the ragtag army of race-haters. And it boiled over as Army officials offered a series of excuses for why their troops were moving so slowly to prevent the lynching of James Meredith and the slaughter of his federal guard. The question that comes searingly through these presidential transcripts is: Why is the military being so unresponsive to the commander-in-chief?

  “General Walker’s been out downtown getting people stirred up,” Bobby Kennedy told the Cabinet Room group at one point. “Well, let’s see if we can arrest him,” he said over the phone connecting him to Oxford, Mississippi. “Will you tell the FBI that we need an arrest warrant?”

  Mention of the mutinous retired general prompted a strong reaction from the president. “General Walker,” JFK said disgustedly to the room. “Imagine that son of a bitch having been commander of a division up till last year. And the army promoting him.”

  The president’s comment raised the specter of a military coup in Sorensen’s mind. “Have you read Seven Days in May?” he asked the president.

  “Yeah,” said Kennedy.

  “It’s pretty interesting,” remarked Sorensen. “I read it straight thro
ugh.”

  Kennedy, a voracious and sophisticated reader, then subjected the book to a sharp literary critique. The novel was marred by “awful amateurish dialogue” and the portrayal of the president was “awfully vague,” but the treasonous General Scott made a strong impression on Kennedy.

  His brother brought the group back to the disturbing reality of General Walker. “He’s getting them all stirred up. If he has them march down there with guns, we could have a hell of a battle.”

  Later, gruesome reports from the blood-spattered Lyceum flowed into the Cabinet Room. Even the normally calm and collected Nick Katzenbach—who had gone down with his B-26 over the Mediterranean in 1943, spending the rest of the war in a German prison camp, from which he twice escaped—was starting to lose his cool, demanding to know when the Army was going to rescue them. Bobby Kennedy could not tell him. “Damn Army!” cursed RFK about a quarter past midnight. “They can’t even tell if the MPs have left yet!”

  More than ninety minutes had now passed since the attorney general had ordered troops from the 503rd Military Police Battalion—the Army’s riot-control SWAT team—to move from Memphis to Oxford. But Army Secretary Cyrus Vance and Major General Creighton Abrams, who was in charge of the military operation (and would later command the war in Vietnam), seemed at a maddening loss to explain the soldiers’ delay. The president barraged Vance with at least fifteen phone calls that night, trying to find out what was going on with his troops. The army secretary, suffering from a ruptured disc, lay on his office floor as the president berated him. “Where’s the Army?” Kennedy shouted at Vance. “Where are they? Why aren’t they moving?”