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

by Talbot, David

  And Helms? “Helms was a very sweet, well-meaning man,” said Ridder. “He would not have been in a murder conspiracy,” she added, overlooking his confessed role in the plots against Castro.

  With other Kennedy intimates, the very subject of the assassination is an emotional minefield that must be gingerly navigated. Theodore Sorensen quickly makes it known when the subject arises in conversation that it is still too painful for him to contemplate, even at this late date. An interviewer feels sadistic to press on. New Frontiersmen like Sorensen are in their autumn days now; they have lived long, eventful lives. But nothing filled them with as much pulsing sense of purpose as their time with Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Their eyes pool with tears as they relive those days, when they were the young and the chosen and were changing the world, before something was cut from their hearts.

  Like Schlesinger, Sorensen says that he is “agnostic” on the question of Dallas. “I have never seen any hard evidence that contradicted the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald acted alone,” he tells me, making it clear that he would prefer to change the subject.

  Sorensen seems weighted down with the melancholy burden of history. He knows that John F. Kennedy lived for a purpose; he just can’t bring himself to believe he died for one. “It’s terribly painful. You see, there’s emotion on both sides internally. On the one hand, if I can know that my friend of eleven years died as a martyr to a cause, that there was some reason, some purpose why he was killed—and not just a totally senseless, lucky sharpshooter—then I think the whole world would feel better. That brave John F. Kennedy, with all these courageous positions, went into Texas knowing that it was hostile territory, and he ended up dead. But I just think that’s a fanciful theory as of now, and comforting as it may be, I’m not going to embrace it, because there’s no evidence of it.”

  But Kenny O’Donnell—Kennedy’s vigilant watchdog, the politically shrewd White House aide who wielded the most influence over the president—did see evidence of a conspiracy. He saw it with his own eyes in Dallas. And it would torment him the rest of his life. Among the Kennedy brotherhood, Kenny O’Donnell’s story looms as the saddest of them all.

  KENNY O’DONNELL AND HIS fellow Irish mafia warhorse Dave Powers were eyewitnesses to history on November 22, 1963. Riding immediately behind the president’s limousine in the Secret Service backup car, the two men saw it all that day. Before the motorcade began, JFK—attentive as always to political details—had asked them to take seats in the follow-up car so they could closely observe the reactions to him and Jackie from the crowds. The two men could never forget what they saw that afternoon. As the shots rang out, Powers blurted, “Kenny, I think the president’s been shot.” O’Donnell quickly made a sign of the cross. As both men stared intently at the man they had loved and served ever since he was a scrawny young congressional candidate, a final shot “took the side of his head off,” O’Donnell would later recall. “We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air. The impact lifted him and shook him limply, as if he was a rag doll, and then he dropped out of our sight, sprawled across the back seat of the car. I said to Dave, ‘He’s dead.’”

  O’Donnell and Powers, both World War II veterans, distinctly heard at least two shots come from the grassy knoll area in front of the motorcade. But when they later told this to the FBI, they were informed that they must be wrong. If they did not change their story, it was impressed on the men, it could be very damaging for the country. So O’Donnell altered his account to fit the official version, testifying before the Warren Commission that the shots had come “from the right rear”—the direction of the School Book Depository. Powers, however, could not be fully shaken from his story. Even though one of the Warren Commission employees who took his statement kept interrupting him, Powers insisted that he “had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front” as well as from behind—which is probably why Powers was not invited to testify before the commission as the more amenable O’Donnell was.

  Five years after the assassination, O’Donnell confessed to his friend, Boston congressman (and future Speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill, what he had dutifully hidden from the public—he heard two shots from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. O’Neill, who was dining with O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, was stunned. “That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” he said.

  “You’re right,” replied O’Donnell. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said O’Neill. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”

  “Tip, you have to understand. The family—everybody wanted this thing behind them.”

  It’s clear from O’Neill’s account—and one given by Dave Powers, who suggested that Hoover himself pressured O’Donnell to change his account—that the FBI played a key role in this fateful distortion of the record. But it’s equally obvious that O’Donnell was also responding to signals from the Kennedy family, and that could only mean his close friend Bobby, the man with whom his life and career had been completely intertwined ever since they were Harvard roommates. The intensely loyal O’Donnell, who was as close as a brother to Bobby, would never have changed his story without first checking with Kennedy. And Bobby had made it clear that he was not ready to publicly question the official story about the assassination.

  Whatever his reasons for hiding the truth about Dallas, O’Donnell’s decision weighed heavily on him. The Kennedys had been his life. Tough, taciturn, and utterly dedicated, he had put in slavish hours at the White House. But he laughed at the notion it was a sacrifice. “Tough job my ass. It was the best job I ever had,” he would say. Now the man he had served was gone. He wished the bullets had hit him instead, he told his wife. And instead of helping bring the president’s killers to justice, he was misleading the country. “The assassination was the end of his life,” his son Kenny Jr. told me. “He never was the same again. None of the men around Kennedy were. But especially him.”

  O’Donnell confided what he really witnessed in Dealey Plaza to his son as well. “He said there was fire from two different directions,” recalled the younger O’Donnell. And his father would bitterly complain about his experience with the Warren Commission to his son. “I’ll tell you this right now,” he told him, “they didn’t want to know.” O’Donnell called the inquiry “the most pointless investigation I’ve ever seen.” Pulling out the records of his testimony to show Kenny Jr., he would point to a passage with disgust and say, “Look, this is ridiculous—they weren’t even looking for an answer to this.” O’Donnell might also have been disgusted with his own performance before the commission.

  In the months after Dallas, O’Donnell would devote himself to helping Jackie. The two had clung to each other like old soldiers ever since the assassination. As they flew back to Washington that day, both were stained with Jack’s blood. Kenny and Bobby found solace by gathering friends at Jackie’s Georgetown house and entertaining her with old stories about Jack.

  But O’Donnell could not put Dallas behind him. What he and Dave Powers witnessed that day continued to work inside them. O’Donnell experienced wrenching bouts of nausea for six months after Dallas. Powers began suffering violent headaches. The pain was focused in the same part of his skull where he had seen the bullet blow off the top of his friend’s head. He couldn’t get the “sickening sound” out of his own head—like “a grapefruit splattering against the side of a wall.”

  O’Donnell began drinking heavily. When friends warned him to go easy on the stuff, the man nicknamed The Cobra would fix them with a cold glare and tell them, “Go to hell and mind your own business.” But he listened when Jackie and Bobby sat him down and ta
lked to him. “It worked,” observed his daughter, Helen. “He seemed to step forward into human company again.”

  But Kenny O’Donnell never fully recovered. “He just lived the rest of his life with a heavy heart,” said his son. He ran twice for the Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts, in 1966 and 1970; but his political talent was as a behind-the-scenes man, not as a campaigner, and he lost both times. Bobby’s assassination was the final blow. Kenny Jr. was with his father the night he heard. His father had just spoken to RFK on the phone about the California primary results. “It’s over,” his father told him after hearing that history had repeated itself. “That’s all he said,” recalled Kenny Jr. “That was the absolute end.”

  When O’Donnell died in a Boston hospital in September 1977 at age fifty-three, his family requested that the cause of death be withheld, but the press reported he had succumbed to a liver ailment. There was no more Bobby to tell him to put down the bottle. His memorial service was held at St. Matthews Cathedral, where he had escorted Jack’s casket fourteen years before, walking slowly up Connecticut Avenue from the White House. At the Irish wake held afterwards at the Mayflower Hotel, a Boston pol reminisced about his fallen friend. Without the Kennedys, he said, “O’Donnell was the music without the harp.”

  ONCE AGAIN, ED GUTHMAN was worrying about his friend Bob Kennedy’s life. It was fall 1964. Kennedy’s campaign for the Senate was under way and everywhere he went, the candidate spiked into deep wellsprings of emotion. The people strained against police lines, they lunged to touch him. Whites, blacks; the young and old; men, women. It was a longing that went beyond politics. Americans needed to feel that not all hope had died on November 22. Here he was in the flesh, a living reminder that the Kennedy dream was still alive. After the long months of mourning, when nothing seemed right anymore about the country, the very sight of Bobby set off explosions of ecstasy.

  But Guthman knew that passions about Kennedy ran in opposite directions. As he marched along the New York campaign trail, less the happy warrior than an ashen penitent, Bobby also stirred darker thoughts. Guthman, who had left the Justice Department with Kennedy to work on the Senate campaign, heard about the constant stream of death threats. The FBI would call nearly every morning with another warning about their campaign destination that day. Were they all real? Was Hoover exaggerating the threats to disrupt the campaign or make his bureau seem more vigilant than it was in protecting his brother? Guthman took the threats seriously enough to talk to Jim King, the NYPD detective who was traveling with the campaign. But both men knew it was useless to say anything to Bobby; he would never let security precautions dictate his campaign style. The people needed to touch him; he needed to touch the people. It was the only thing that seemed to bring him alive.

  On September 29, the campaign rolled through Rochester. It was the hometown of his incumbent Republican opponent, Kenneth Keating, but as usual, the Kennedy crowds were boisterous. Still, Guthman felt that dark undercurrent.

  Earlier that day, a man with a rifle who had asked about Kennedy’s motorcade route was arrested by the police. (They released him after he convinced them he was a deer hunter on his way home from a gun shop and was trying to avoid traffic.) But Kennedy did what he always did—he went into the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, including the ghetto that had been torn by rioting in July. He climbed onto car hoods to speak to the surging, grasping crowds—alone, with no guards. In Rochester, he reminded people what America should stand for.

  It was the day after the Warren Report’s release, but Bobby came out of the gloom that had descended over him when he was asked at a press conference to define his foreign policy differences with his opponent. Keating was a genial, white-maned, ruddy-faced uncle figure with a progressive record on civil rights. But he had played a provocative role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, using information leaked from the CIA to goad the Kennedys into a combative stance. Bobby told the press that day he stood for a strong military. But, he immediately added, America’s military prowess must be coupled with “the inner strength and wisdom not to use that military strength precipitately or indiscriminately.” He said that in the end communism would only be defeated “through progressive practical programs which wipe out the poverty, misery and discontent on which it thrives.” He suggested that true national security would come from strongly supporting the United Nations—“mankind’s noblest experiment”—and helping lift the world’s two billion poor from their wretched fate. Finally, he declared, America would only command the world’s respect if it practiced what it preached at home, upholding democratic principles and working towards racial equality.

  “We cannot expect an African to believe we are on the side of equality and human dignity when his own ambassadors are not served in our restaurants. We cannot expect countries with far lower standards of living to respect our belief in human dignity if their aged are venerated and ours are neglected. We cannot expect nations to join us in combating poverty if in the midst of unprecedented wealth, six million families live in poverty.”

  Giving voice to these New Frontier ideals lifted Kennedy from his doldrums of the previous day, as if borne aloft by his brother’s soaring rhetoric. But if Bobby was conjuring his brother’s spirit, Guthman was concerned with keeping this living, breathing Kennedy safe from bodily harm. “I was with him that day in Rochester,” he recalled, “and it appeared to me to be a kind of dangerous situation. So I went up to these news photographers who were covering the campaign and I asked them to gather around him, to give him some protection.”

  It’s astonishing in today’s political climate to consider a media pack agreeing to do this—to put themselves in the line of fire for a candidate. But that’s precisely what the photographers did, said Guthman. “Look, a lot of people would have taken a bullet for Bob Kennedy any day of the year.” Would Guthman have done so? “Absolutely, without hesitating.”

  Robert Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign rolled forward on a wave of popular sentiment, a yearning that he realized had more to do with his brother than with him. After a hectic day of campaigning, Guthman rejoiced in the clamorous receptions that Kennedy had received. “I’ve never seen crowds like you’re getting, they’ve got to be a good omen,” he told Bobby.

  But Kennedy looked at Guthman with a melancholy expression. “Don’t you know?” he said. “They’re for him—they’re for him.”

  Kennedy’s race for the Senate was the critical first step in his strategy to regain the White House, where, he had vowed, he would continue his brother’s policies. But Bobby’s heart was clearly not in the campaign. He had announced his Senate candidacy at the last moment, on August 25, after declaring he would not run just two months earlier. The decision came after an overwrought process, in which he first considered running for governor in Massachusetts (finally rejecting this option out of concern he would be stepping on brother Teddy’s turf) and then allowed himself to be briefly pushed forward by supporters as Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential running mate. Both men knew it would be a disastrous match and LBJ summoned Kennedy to the White House on July 29 to make his decision official. The meeting was deeply awkward for both men. As Bobby later recounted to Kenny O’Donnell, Johnson told him that “he wanted a vice president who could help the country, help the party, and be of assistance to him…and he concluded by saying that person wasn’t me.” Kennedy, who knew that Johnson needed to establish an independent political base, took the decision in stride. “Aw, what the hell,” he laughed, after telling his Justice Department colleagues what happened, “let’s go form our own country.” From then on, Bobby and his circle would be “the government in exile,” as Ethel accurately jested.

  Kennedy’s outsider status would be driven home at the Democratic Party convention in late August. Bobby announced his Senate candidacy the day before the convention began in Atlantic City, but Johnson was so fearful that his rival would spark a delegate stampede for the vice presidential—or even president
ial—nomination that he took the unprecedented step of ordering the FBI to keep Kennedy under surveillance. Cartha DeLoach and a thirty-man FBI team swept into Atlantic City to monitor every move of the attorney general of the United States—the man who was officially still their boss. The FBI spies, who flashed fake NBC News press passes and other bogus credentials, had special instructions to look for any contacts between Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—a charismatic combination that could have swept the convention hall. Johnson’s chief of staff, Marvin Watson, even instructed former JFK advance man Jerry Bruno to keep a close eye on Bobby. “We are not going to let Bobby and Jackie Kennedy steal this convention,” Watson told him. Bruno, a Kennedy loyalist, was stunned by the order. He would stick with RFK at the convention, but as a friend not a spy.

  Johnson did not have to worry. Bobby was in such fragile shape during the convention, where his brother’s ghost hovered everywhere, that he could never have mounted a political rebellion. When he climbed onstage to introduce a film tribute to JFK—a speech that the nervous Johnson had rescheduled from the beginning of the convention to lessen its impact—Kennedy was greeted with a massive ovation. He stood on the podium, while it washed over him in unending waves, for twenty-two long minutes. “Mr. Chairman,” he would begin as the applause finally began to wane. But then it would rise up again from some new corner of the cavernous hall. Wearing the same black suit and tie he had worn almost continuously since the assassination, he fought back tears as he looked over the cheering crowd. His eyes, red and glistening in the spotlights, were filled with the sorrow of the past nine months. Finally he began his speech. There was nothing political about it—he said nothing of the forces that had cut down his brother. But even his sentimental references to the fallen president would be interpreted by his enemies in the Johnson camp as political attacks. “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars,” said Bobby, quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—an addition to the speech suggested by Jackie. “And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Supporters of the garish Texan were quick to take offense. Other observers interpreted the extended ovation for Kennedy as a slap at party bosses. But after he finished his speech, Bobby simply retreated to the fire escape outside the convention hall, where he sat sobbing for fifteen minutes.