End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  Robert Kennedy lusted for the spot. He viewed it as a springboard that might launch him to the presidency one day, possibly in 1968 or 1972. Bobby campaigned for it and, in a face-to-face meeting with Johnson, had almost begged for it. His loathing for LBJ had always been obvious, and he had never made much effort to hide it. And Johnson despised him for it. He had no intention of making John Kennedy’s little brother his vice president.

  But Johnson worried that Jackie might be promoting Bobby for the spot behind the scenes. Johnson had asked Robert McNamara to stay on as secretary of defense. The president considered him one of his most trusted advisers, and he sent him on a secret mission. Go to Jackie Kennedy, who adored McNamara, and take her temperature.

  For Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy had always been the elusive and mysterious object of his desire. Not sexually, of course, but in the sense that he craved her support, her friendship, her presence, and her essence. His frequent calls to her after the assassination, preserved when LBJ recorded them, document his pursuit. Now he wanted a sign of her blessing.

  She had given it to him once, that day aboard Air Force One. But ever since the assassination, Jackie had proven resistant to his charms. She had politely declined his various invitations to return to the White House. She was elusive prey, resistant to the pressures of the “Johnson treatment.” But she was not immune. Jackie well knew that the most effective way to resist Johnson was from a safe distance, before his cajoling voice or physical presence could work their magic. Jackie had always been flattered and attracted by the attentions of older, powerful men. She understood them. And they understood her. Johnson was no exception.

  In his first year in office, Johnson suffered in John Kennedy’s shadow. Now he was haunted by the ghosts of Camelot in exile, personified by Robert Kennedy. Thus, Johnson reasoned, he must never allow Bobby to become his running mate in the presidential election of 1964. Johnson wanted to show that he could win on his own.

  But what did Jackie think? On August 3, 1964, Secretary of Defense McNamara carried out his assignment and prepared a memo to his files: “On Friday the president said he believed that Jackie had been pressuring Bobby to run for the Vice Presidency. The president had been told by one or more individuals that Jackie had repeatedly stated to Bobby he must run for the Vice Presidency and that it was at her insistence, rather than any desire of his own, that was moving him toward that objective. The President further said he felt, and had been told, that Jackie was very bitter toward him.”

  McNamara disagreed that Jackie had turned against LBJ. “I replied that I was certain he was wrong on both counts; that I had frequent conversations with her during the past several weeks; I knew what she thought. There was no bitterness toward the president, and she not only was not pressuring Bobby to move toward the vice presidency, but she repeatedly questioned whether it would be wise for him to accept the nomination if it were offered.

  “Following my return from Newport yesterday, I called the President and repeated that I could absolutely guarantee that Jackie had no bitterness toward him, and that she had not in the past and would not in the future put pressure on Bobby to move toward the Vice Presidency.”

  AT THE Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lyndon Johnson was wise to secure his own presidential nomination and to select Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey as his running mate before what became the unofficial “Kennedy night.” Delegates were treated to a worshipful documentary about President Kennedy.

  When Bobby Kennedy appeared at the podium, he received a thunderous, twenty-minute-long standing ovation. He compared his dead brother to a tragic, lost romantic hero and then quoted Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

  When he shall die

  Take him and cut him out in little stars

  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.

  This was Robert Kennedy’s coded declaration of war against Johnson. It was his announcement that from this moment on, he was the leader of a Kennedy party—or royal court—in exile.

  Ten months after the assassination, on September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission completed the report of its investigation. Almost three hundred thousand words long, it was accompanied by twenty-six volumes containing seventeen thousand pages of testimony, photographs, and exhibits. In sheer bulk it was massive, staggering, overwhelming. Its central findings were that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated John F. Kennedy, that two of the three shots he fired had struck the president, that the assassin had acted alone, and there was no evidence that he was part of a conspiracy.

  That fall, on November 3, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson got his mandate. He won a crushing victory over Republican senator Barry Goldwater, taking forty-four of fifty states and the electoral vote by a margin of 486 to 52. LBJ had won 61 percent of the popular vote, 43,127,041 to 27,175,754. His victory was total, and he had done it without Bobby Kennedy, whom he had left behind in his wake, rejected and humiliated.

  A FEW weeks later, the press inundated the American people with its coverage of the first anniversary of the assassination. Life magazine had already given Jackie Kennedy what she wanted last year—the legend of Camelot. This year she cooperated with rival Look magazine for a special feature and interview.

  Many journalists never got over their crush on John Kennedy. He had flattered their vanity. They could not love a new president who they believed was their inferior in culture and style. They longed for the days of the prince of Camelot.

  “I feel suddenly old without Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the White House,” wrote prominent journalist James Reston. “Not only by their sheer verve and joy, the Kennedys imparted their youth to everyone, put a sheen on our life that made it more youthful than it is.” Then Reston likened Lyndon Johnson to the aging sheriff in the Gary Cooper film High Noon: “Growing older,” and reflecting a “less fresh, if no doubt a practical and effective mood.” Reston waxed: “All will be well, I feel sure, but it is August, not June.”

  Chief Justice Earl Warren and members of his commission present their report to President Johnson, September 1964.

  (Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

  Reston’s cinematic reference is telling. Like Mary McGrory, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charlie Bartlett and others who echoed the “things will never be the same” and the “we will never be young again” themes, the journalists who mythologized Kennedy emphasized his intangible star quality—a style, an attitude, a mood—over the details. In their swooning eulogies, none included something so practical and unromantic as a list of his failures and accomplishments.

  THE YEAR 1968 was a dark time for Jacqueline Kennedy. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. When King had attended President Kennedy’s funeral, the civil rights leader told his wife, Coretta, that one day this would happen to him. King’s prophecy had come true. Now, five years later, Jacqueline Kennedy attended his funeral and comforted his widow.

  Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 electoral triumph proved ephemeral. His massive escalation of the war in Vietnam turned much of America against him. Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged him for the nomination, and when Robert Kennedy saw that LBJ was vulnerable, Kennedy joined the race. In March 1968, Johnson surprised the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection. Robert Kennedy rejoiced, believing that Johnson had reinvigorated his own campaign for the Democratic nomination and had perhaps handed him the presidency.

  In June, Robert Kennedy’s days ended in the pantry of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he won the California primary. His murder by an assassin’s pistol shots brought back all the old feelings. Jackie was devastated and bitter. Like Jack, he had been shot in the head. Since her husband’s assassination, Bobby had been her closest friend and adviser. Now, five years after she had lost Jack, Bobby had also been taken from her. She fel
t alone.

  THINGS WERE not going well with the planning of the Kennedy Library. Jackie was not happy with the direction Harvard University was taking it. On July 16, 1968, she complained in a long, handwritten letter to Robert McNamara: “Memorials can never replace men—& one just argues to exhaustion with a lot of wooden people who will have it their way in the end anyway. . . . What is happening is that it is on its way to becoming the deadliest place in the world.”

  She included for McNamara’s scrutiny minutes from the previous meeting of the board of trustees: “I don’t know how watered down they are—if all our objections & my explosion was deleted.” Jackie was worried that Harvard would have too much control over the institution. “Do you realize—we gave Harvard $20 million—plus 13 acres of land they have always coveted & could never get . . . in return they named their dismal school of Government after Jack—and in so doing, assured they’d always keep the Institute under their thumb. [Supreme Court justice] Byron White says we should have known that would happen all along—but we were in shock & in a hurry. . . . And we gave them the papers of President Kennedy—which forever will be one of their greatest treasures.”

  Jackie complained, “Do you know I was the only Kennedy allowed to be on the committee—because Harvard feared the Kennedys might ‘use it as a springboard for the dynasty?’ ” Robert Kennedy had been assassinated little more than a month ago. Jackie noted the bitter irony in that. “Well there aren’t many people left to use the springboard.” She vowed to battle Harvard. “I am going to make such a fuss—do something so Machiavellian—once you tell me the best way to deal with these people.”

  Jackie fantasized about taking back JFK’s papers: “I can think of nothing that would give me more pleasure than to leave the Harvard Corporation with its mouth watering—& put President Kennedy’s papers in Washington—with [National] Archives—or in an adequate working Library-Warehouse somewhere in Massachusetts—Other sites were offered us—or in Ireland.” Jackie relished the thought of pulling the plug on Harvard. “And Jack and Bobby would not mind the discomfort at the Corporation—it would give them a laugh in heaven.”

  In 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy remarried. Her choice of husband, the older, dodgy Greek shipping millionaire Aristotle Onassis, horrified many of her friends and shocked the American people. To her fans, it was a desecration of JFK’s memory—the death of Camelot. She became prey to the international media.

  Once upon a time she had been one of them, the “Inquiring Camera Girl” from the Washington Star newspaper. Once, she had enticed some of the best photographers in America—Lowe, Avedon, Shaw, and others—to employ their art in her service. She had manipulated the most prestigious photojournalism magazines in the country to present her and Jack in the best possible light. Now the tables had been turned.

  Jacqueline Kennedy never again spoke publicly about November 22, 1963. She gave no interviews about the assassination, appeared in no television specials, and refused to commemorate the event. Every five years, when the national media marked the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, and thirtieth anniversaries of her husband’s death, she remained in seclusion and maintained a sphinx-like silence. Despite her substantial talent as a writer and her subsequent work as an editor, she wrote no books or memoirs. She survived the president by nearly thirty-one years, dying in May 1994 at the age of only sixty-four. In Arlington National Cemetery, she lies buried beside her husband, near the eternal flame she lit in November 1963.

  EPILOGUE

  “ALL HIS BRIGHT LIGHT GONE FROM THE WORLD”

  In Dallas, the Texas School Book Depository still stands at the corner of Elm and Houston Streets. The building was fortunate to survive the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. Ashamed that the murder had been committed in their city and embarrassed that their police department had allowed Lee Harvey Oswald to be shot to death right under their noses, many leading citizens of Dallas wanted the Book Depository to be torn down.

  To them, the building was an ugly landmark of the day that Dallas could never forget, one that they feared would scar the city’s reputation forever. But cooler heads prevailed, and the Book Depository was preserved for history. Its iconic silhouette looms over Elm Street, but the famous Hertz clock atop the roof—dismantled long ago—does not flash the bottom of the noon hour each day at 12:30 P.M. The Depository no longer serves as a warehouse for textbooks. Like Ford’s Theatre in Washington, where John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the Texas School Book Depository is now a museum.

  Today an institution named the Sixth Floor Museum occupies the place that the Book Depository’s most famous employee, Lee Harvey Oswald, made infamous. Once a controversial and unwelcome reminder of Dallas’s worst day, today the museum is an important part of the city’s cultural landscape and has attracted millions of visitors. It is not a shrine to an assassin and does not sensationalize the crime. Instead it is a responsible museum that frames the events in Dallas within the broader context of President Kennedy’s life story, American politics, and the history of 1960s America. The museum honors Kennedy, not his assassin. What a mistake it would have been, fifty years ago, in the heat of passion, to have torn the building down.

  As Oswald did, you can take an elevator to the sixth floor, and there you can retrace his footsteps to the wall of windows facing Elm Street. But you can no longer gaze out the window from which he shot the president. To protect the sniper’s nest from vandals and souvenir hunters, a Plexiglas barrier now surrounds Oswald’s corner window. You may, however, stand at the window beside it, look down to the street, and imagine what Oswald must have seen on that beautiful fall afternoon of November 22, 1963. How close President Kennedy must have appeared to him in the eyepiece of the rifle’s scope. Indeed, in person, all of Dealey Plaza is smaller than it appears to be in photographs.

  There are other things to see in Dallas: Oswald’s escape route from the Book Depository to his rooming house; from there his path to the street where he shot police officer J. D. Tippit; and from there his footsteps to the Texas Theatre, where he was captured. There is another site to see: the haunted place where on the night of Thursday, November 21, Oswald decided to carry out his plan—Ruth Paine’s house, still a private home, where Oswald slept on the eve of the assassination and from which he emerged the next morning with his rifle, determined to kill a president.

  But it is the Texas School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza that exert the most powerful gravitational force over visitors. From Elm Street, tourists gaze up at the sixth-floor window, calculating the trajectory of the shots. The conspiracy-minded lurk behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll, speculating about a second gunman and whether he could have fired upon the presidential limousine from there.

  At the decorative roadside pergola along Elm Street, they mount the low concrete pedestal where Abraham Zapruder once stood as they pan with their own cameras from left to right while they replay the famous assassination home movie in their heads. Then they step into the middle of Elm Street, dodging traffic in order to stand on the painted X that marks the exact spot where President Kennedy was shot in the head.

  Inside the museum, they approach the sniper’s nest, listening for the echo of the three rifle shots and the hollow ping of three empty cartridge cases bouncing on the wood floor, sounds heard by several of Oswald’s coworkers that day.

  Once a year, on November 22 at 12:30 P.M., on the date and time of the anniversary, Dealey Plaza resembles a flea market or a street bazaar. Vendors push trinkets and souvenirs, including bootleg autopsy photographs of John F. Kennedy’s corpse. Authors peddling conspiracy theories hawk books and magazines to passersby. Assassination buffs make annual pilgrimages to attend conspiracy-oriented conferences, as if these annual rituals—through a kind of harmonic convergence—will finally reveal the truth.

  There is nothing else like it in America—Dealey Plaza is the liveliest assassination site in the nation.

  In contrast, in W
ashington, D.C., on every April 14 at around 10:15 P.M., the anniversary of the murder of Abraham Lincoln, the street in front of Ford’s Theatre is deserted. Tourists make no pilgrimage there. Only a handful of people—no more than five or ten—come to maintain a nighttime vigil at the place where Lincoln was shot or to sit on the steps of the Petersen House where he died. One person, in homage to Walt Whitman’s poem, usually leaves a bouquet of fresh lilacs there for Father Abraham.

  IN THE fall of 2013, America’s basements, attics, and closets will disgorge millions of mementoes of the Kennedy assassination. Long-hidden souvenirs overlooked for decades will be resurrected for the fiftieth anniversary.

  On November 22, 1963, the American people experienced the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a shared event. On the same day at the same time, an entire nation read the same stories, saw the same photographs, listened to the same radio broadcasts, and watched the same images on television. For four days straight, the three national television networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—immersed the American people in a shared moment of national grief. For the first time in U.S. history, the medium of television unified a nation through its coverage of a historic event. Similarly, the great weekly picture magazines, Life and Look, published photos and stories seen by tens of millions of people. The nation’s newspapers, some printing several editions per day, published several hundred million copies.

  Once the story was over, people did not throw away their old newspapers, magazines, and commemorative publications. Instead, they preserved them as iconic family heirlooms, as time capsules for future generations. There is no better way to experience the utter shock, disbelief, and horror caused by the assassination of President Kennedy than by returning to these original sources and imagining what it was like to be alive and reading the afternoon editions of November 22, 1963.