End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  Other relics of the Kennedy assassination—those suppressed for the last half century—are unlikely to see the light of day for the fiftieth anniversary. Unlike the major relics of the Lincoln assassination, which the National Park Service displays in its museum at Ford’s Theatre and which the American people have been able to see since the early 1900s, the principal relics of the Kennedy assassination have been hidden from the American people by the National Archives for fifty years. At Ford’s, millions of Americans have seen John Wilkes Booth’s revolvers, repeating carbine, pocket calendar, handwritten diary, the knife he used to stab Major Rathbone in the president’s theater box, and the Deringer pistol he used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. The museum also displays Lincoln’s coat and bloodstained pillows from the Petersen House. The U.S. Army Medical Museum displays the bullet that killed Lincoln, medical instruments used on the president, and bloodstained shirt cuffs worn by one of the doctors who treated him.

  The National Archives has, in contrast, thrown a veil of secrecy over the artifacts of the Kennedy assassination. The evidence of the assassination remains buried in the vaults of the Archives in an annex building in suburban Maryland. There, stored in acid-free archival boxes to ensure their long-term preservation, are the clothes President Kennedy wore on the afternoon of November 22: his suit jacket, scarred in the back with the bullet hole from Oswald’s second shot, his necktie, his striped dress shirt, and other garments and accessories, still stained with dried blood.

  The other Warren Commission exhibits are stored there too, including Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, his pistol, his letters and writings, and his clothing, including the bullet-damaged sweater he wore when Jack Ruby shot him. None of these items has ever been put on public display. Also hidden away in the Archives is another relic, perhaps the most iconic symbol of the assassination, Jackie Kennedy’s pink suit, and her other clothing and accessories.

  The Archives seeks to suppress these from public view for another century. On November 22, 1963, Mrs. Kennedy said that she wanted the world to see her suit. Today, the National Archives wants to ban it from the sight of the American people for another century, until 150 years have passed since the assassination.

  In the mid 1960s, Jackie or her mother, Janet Auchincloss, sealed in a cardboard box the suit, the other garments from that day, and a list of the contents, and mailed the container to the National Archives. For the next three decades, Jacqueline Kennedy never sought to regain possession of the clothes, supporting the conclusion that they were donated to the Archives in the 1960s. But in 2003, the Archivist of the United States yielded to Caroline Kennedy’s claim of ownership, and executed an agreement banning all access to the material.

  Not all of the evidence from the assassination is at the National Archives. One unique, macabre item from the collection is missing—President Kennedy’s brain. During the autopsy, doctors removed it and sealed it in a leakproof stainless-steel cylindrical container with a screw-top lid. They failed to place his brain back in his head for the funeral, and so John Kennedy was buried without it. For a time, the steel container was stored in a file cabinet in the office of the Secret Service. Then it was put in a footlocker with other medical evidence and transferred to the National Archives, where it was placed in a secure room designated for the use of JFK’s former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, while she organized his presidential papers.

  Then, on some day prior to 1966—no one knows when—the locker, with all its contents, disappeared. Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, Ramsey Clark, ordered an investigation, which failed to recover the brain but did uncover compelling evidence suggesting that former attorney general Robert Kennedy, aided by his assistant Angie Novello, had stolen the locker and its contents, including not only his brother’s brain but also a number of medical slides and tissue samples. They have never been seen since.

  Robert Kennedy did not abscond with these materials to hide evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president. It is much more likely that he took them to conceal from the American people any evidence of the hitherto unknown extent of JFK’s serious health problems, illnesses, and medications.

  LIKE ARTIFACTS from the Lincoln assassination, relics from the Kennedy assassination have become prized collector’s items. When the Secret Service sent the Lincoln Continental limousine back to the manufacturer to be refurbished, one or more souvenir hunters sliced bloodstained swatches of blue upholstery from the backseat and sold them to eager buyers, complete with letters of authenticity. The limousine is now in a museum, but first it had been altered substantially after November 22 for use by the new president, Lyndon Johnson. Soon he stopped riding in it.

  A car blanket from JFK’s limousine, embroidered with the presidential seal, has been offered for private sale. And recently the American and presidential flags that flew from the front fenders during President Kennedy’s last motorcade were sold to a private collector for several hundred thousand dollars. The revolver Jack Ruby used to slay Lee Harvey Oswald, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, reposes in a private collection, as do the suit, hat, and even the shoes Ruby wore the day he committed the murder.

  On December 1, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy sent a handwritten letter to Nellie Connally in care of Parkland Hospital, where the wounded governor remained bedridden. “We loved them every way that a woman can love a man, haven’t we,” Jackie wrote, and we were “so fortunate to have them in our arms at that terrible time.” The letter was so intimate that Mrs. Connally refused to publish the rest of it in her 2003 memoirs of Dallas. Later her family sold the letter for several hundred thousand dollars.

  THROUGH IT all, the myth of Camelot endures. In time, Theodore White questioned his role in creating the legend. “Quite inadvertently, I was her instrument in labeling the myth.” He knew he had crossed the ethical line that divided journalist from hagiographer. “So the epitaph of the Kennedy administration became Camelot—a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back. Which, of course, is a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed . . . no Merlins advised John F. Kennedy, no Galahads won high place in his service.”

  And yet White could not let go. Fifteen years later, in the epilogue to his memoir, In Search of History, he was still in Camelot’s thrall. Writing about himself in the third person, he reflected on his historic meeting with Jackie: “The storyteller was unaware of passing a divide as he left the Kennedy compound that night. It was still raining as he reached the main highway to New York, and there he was on familiar ground. Except for the sadness and the personal ache, all seemed as it had been before. He did not know then that he and everyone else in America had, that week, passed through an invisible membrane of time which divided one era from another, and that Jacqueline Kennedy’s farewell to Camelot was farewell to an America never to be recaptured.”

  But was it only a dream? Or does its embrace by millions of Americans—even today—make it true? Passing time and a litany of unwholesome revelations about President Kennedy’s private life have not extinguished the myth. Like the eternal flame at Arlington Cemetery, it burns today. The truth once hidden behind the wizard’s curtain may have tarnished the legend, but the forces that Jacqueline Kennedy unleashed to preserve and romanticize the memory of her husband are too powerful to ever put the “one brief shining moment” back into the bottle.

  IN THE aftermath of the Warren Commission, many people found it hard to believe such an inconsequential man as Oswald could change history in such a monumental way. Many thought, and still think, this crime was too great to be explained by random chance. They wanted a more profound and complicated explanation. This was not unusual. For more than two and a half centuries, Americans have turned to numerous conspiracy theories to explain catastrophic events or troubled times. In the 1960s, many found Oswald’s journey to the Soviet Union and his i
nterest in Cuba suspicious. Was his murder just two days after the president’s a coincidence? Or was it the result of a plot to silence him?

  These and other questions provoked some critics to doubt the conclusions in the Warren Report, and to question even the most simple, obvious, and persuasive evidence of Oswald’s guilt. Many of the conspiracy theorists have devoted their lives to proving that John F. Kennedy was the victim of one plot or another. Many of their theories—and there are a dizzying number of them—contradict one another. According to the most popular ones, the president was killed by a Russian or Cuban Communist conspiracy, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the anticommunist American right wing, organized crime—the Mafia, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. military, Texas millionaires in the oil business, the “military-industrial complex,” or even Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

  Some conspiracy theorists claim that Oswald fired no shots in Dealey Plaza. They argue—despite the considerable evidence against him—that he was framed. Others admit that Oswald fired the shots but insist he was not the lone gunman, and that additional snipers—two, three, four, or more—fired as many as sixteen rounds, even though most witnesses said they heard only three shots. One theory asserts that there were two Oswalds—the real one, and the other an imposter sent back from Russia. A few critics accuse Kennedy’s Secret Service agents, the U.S. Navy doctors at Bethesda hospital, and even Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit of being part of the conspiracy.

  Some of the theories rely on falsified evidence. Others are based on lies. Some theorists believe the same master conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination controls other important and nefarious events in American life, including other subsequent assassinations. But all of the theories have one thing in common. They reject the proven role that chance, luck, randomness, coincidence, or mistake have played in human history for thousands of years. To them, there are no accidents in life. Everything that happens can be explained by conspiracy.

  Just as the conspiracy theorists have questioned everything about the assassination, so must a reader question their writings with equal skepticism. Today we know much more about the assassination of President Kennedy than the members of the Warren Commission did. More information and sophisticated advances in science and technology have illuminated the crime and its evidence in new ways. No one, after all these years, has yet disproved the key conclusion of the Warren Commission: Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and he acted alone.

  Indeed, in the future—fifty or one hundred years from now—it is more likely that the discovery of any new evidence, along with further scientific advances, will only strengthen the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman.

  One great mystery remains: Why? Why did Oswald assassinate John F. Kennedy? Oswald did not tell his wife, mother, or brother when they visited him in jail. He did not reveal his motives to the Dallas police, the Secret Service, or the FBI when they questioned him. Perhaps, embittered, he killed the president to impress Soviet officials who placed so little value on him after his defection. But by the fall of 1963, Oswald had long soured on life in Russia and had renounced the corruptions of Soviet Communism. Could he have wanted to impress Fidel Castro and seek political asylum in Cuba, fantasizing that he would become a revolutionary hero? Or could it be possible that Oswald came under the influence of others—an individual or a group—not as a knowing, paid assassin or agent of a conspiracy, but as someone who listened to whisperings in his ear telling him that any man who killed a president would go down in history?

  Perhaps his motive was not politics but fame. Anyone who remembers John Kennedy remembers the man who murdered him. Or maybe Oswald was one of America’s first glory killers, obsessed with Kennedy’s glamorous, movie-star-like celebrity. By killing the president, Oswald’s deluded mind sought to merge their identities, hoping that some of the magic Oswald never possessed—effervescence, popularity, wealth, success, and even greatness—might rub off on him. Oswald longed to possess the traits that were never meant to be his.

  Or in the end, perhaps the reason is much simpler and more fundamental and lies beyond rational human understanding: Lee Harvey Oswald was evil.

  It is impossible to know. Whatever his motives, Oswald took them with him to the grave. If he could return today to the scene of his crime, he would be pleased to see that, half a century later, he remains the subject of endless fascination and speculation. He taunts us still, defying us to solve the mystery of the why that he left behind. Unlike John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, Oswald did not leap to the stage, boast of his crime, and wave a bloody dagger before our eyes. No, Oswald struck from the shadows. Then he robbed us of the rest of the story.

  The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is as compelling as any drama written by William Shakespeare. It is the great American tragedy.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY’S unfinished life was cut short before he could fulfill his potential. He was just forty-six years old. The nation mourned the death of its young president, not only for the loss of what he was—but also for the loss of what he might have become. JFK loved America. He was an optimist about the country’s future. He had shown signs of greatness. If he had lived and won reelection in 1964, he would have served until January 20, 1969. One can only speculate what he might have accomplished if he had had more time.

  Many people, especially those who lived through it, saw the Kennedy assassination as a dividing line in our history and November 22, 1963, as the day when something went terribly wrong in American life. They believe the murder ushered in a dark era and set in motion a series of awful events: the escalation of the Vietnam War, civil unrest, racial violence, and five years later, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and of the late president’s own brother, Senator Robert Kennedy. We can look back in wonder, but we will never know the ways in which the death of President Kennedy altered the future course of American history.

  A YEAR after the assassination, reflecting on her husband’s life, Jacqueline Kennedy said, “I realized that history was what made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading the knights of the Roundtable. . . . For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way—if it made him see the heroes—maybe other little boys will see.”

  She recognized that the assassination had transformed him into a hero too. “Now, I think I should have known that he was magic all along—but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with [him] and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.”

  Jackie contemplated the meaning of his life. “John Kennedy believed so strongly that one’s aim should not just be the most comfortable life possible—but that we should all do something to right the wrongs we see—and not just complain about them. We owe that to our country . . .”

  “He believed,” Jacqueline Kennedy said, “that one man can make a difference—and that every man should try.”

  IN GEORGETOWN the house from which John and Jacqueline Kennedy set out on the journey that began on January 20, 1961, and ended on November 22, 1963, still stands. Over the last half century, little about it has changed. If you go there today, perhaps on a chilly fall evening in late November, when the crisp, fallen leaves crinkle underfoot, the twin lamps beside the front door still burn, still glowing in the darkness of the night.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank my most important reader, my wife Andrea Mays. Despite her busy life as a professor, author, and mother, Andrea helped shepherd all three books in my presidential trilogy—Manhunt, Bloody Crimes, and End of Days—to publication. She read every page of this book more than once, from first to final draft, and her editorial comments, from overall storytelling advice to meticulous line edits, were indispensable and improved the book in countless ways. Our boys, Harrison and Cameron, also helped me tell this story by assisting on my book for young adults—The President Has Been
Shot!—that preceded End of Days.

  It is impossible to think about the death and funeral of John F. Kennedy without recalling the death of another president ninety-eight years earlier. The upheaval that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the unprecedented national mourning unleashed by the events of April 14 and 15, 1865, was not seen in this country again until November 22, 1963. These two profound national tragedies have much in common. Indeed, the parallels connecting these stories are so striking that I began to think of them as bookends to one great sad, American tale of loss, legend, and myth. My previous books on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the chase for his killer, his funeral, and the national death pageant that transformed him from man to martyr made it possible for me to write about John Kennedy.

  A number of people helped bring my version of John—and Jacqueline—Kennedy’s end of days to print. Regarding Jackie it is easy to forget that, although she survived the gunfire in Dealey Plaza, the life she knew ended that day. This book is about her, too.

  My “first readers” Michael F. Bishop, Ronald K.L. Collins, and David Lovett read the manuscript early on and offered many helpful comments and insights. Michael, former Congressional staffer, White House veteran, and former executive director of the national Abraham Lincoln bicentennial commission, brought his extensive knowledge of the presidency and the modern executive mansion to bear to my advantage. Ron, one of the nation’s preeminent experts on the First Amendment, is a prolific author of books not only about law, but also on American legends of another kind, including Lenny Bruce and the Beats.