RICHARD PAVLICK sat behind the wheel, waiting for Kennedy to climb into his car. Pavlick was seventy-three years old, with unkempt silver-gray hair and clothes that had seen better days. He had come a long way to this moment, and not just the thousands of miles he had journeyed, leaving Belmont, New Hampshire, to follow his target to campaign stops in St. Louis and San Diego and who knows how many other towns, up to the compound in Hyannis Port, where he’d gotten within ten feet of him, but lacked the tools to do the job, and now to Palm Beach, where he’d checked out the laughingly weak security, and where he was seconds away from saving the country he loved. For years, for decades, he had been a voice in the wilderness, a prophet without honor, earning for his labors indifference or ridicule. The signs were everywhere, why couldn’t they see it? The flag itself was a portent; look at how negligently it was displayed at the school, the town hall, the post office (he’d spent his working years as a postman and it was the same story everywhere he worked).
He’d tried his best. At every Belmont town meeting he’d spoken out, he’d warned the town it was committing sacrilege every single day. And they’d groaned and motioned for him to sit down and let them get on with the budget or the plans for the Fourth of July festivities. They’d even sent a supervisor from the water company to his house to harass him about a water bill. He’d exercised his Second Amendment rights, and met the supervisor with a gun. But it was more, so much more: the dollar itself was a false instrument, Woodrow Wilson had done that when he created the Federal Reserve in 1913, and Roosevelt—Rosenfeld was his real name, of course—had finished the job when he’d taken us off the gold standard. And now, with the election of Kennedy, America was on the brink. The Church of Rome had seized the levers of power. Oh, yes, Jack Kennedy talked a good game, separation of church and state, but Pavlick knew better. When had the church ever kept itself from taking every scrap of power it could? For God’s sake, hadn’t they tapped every dollar of Old Joe Kennedy’s money to steal the election? Young Jack even admitted as much, right in front of the Church’s most powerful leaders, at the Al Smith dinner in New York. He’d joked that he’d gotten a telegram from his father that read: “Don’t spend one dime more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.” They all laughed, the cardinals and bishops in their robes and jewels, the rich Papists in their white ties and tails, but it was no joke; and Pavlick was going to make sure they wouldn’t be laughing much longer.
He’d turned over his house—okay, it was not much more than a shack on the edge of town—to a local youth group, packed up what little he owned into his 1950 Buick, and left town. But America had to know what he was doing—and why. That’s why he’d been sending postcards back home to Tom Murphy, the young postmaster, telling him to let the townsfolk know they’d soon be hearing from him “in a big way.” And that’s why, on his way to Palm Beach, he’d bought ten sticks of dynamite. Seven of those sticks were wired to a switch that he held in his right hand, as he watched the President-elect begin to walk to his car. He knew Americans—real Americans, at least—would understand and sanction what he was about to do; he’d written a note to the people of the United States, telling them exactly why he was doing this: “If death and destruction and injury to persons has resulted from my vicious action then I am truly sorry, but it won’t help any. It is hoped that by my actions that a better country and a more attentive citizenry has resulted and corrected any abuses or ambitious moneyed persons or groups, then it will not have been in vain . . .”
As he watched Kennedy head toward his car—when he climbed inside, Pavlick would count to three and go—he saw Kennedy hesitate, turn back to the door. Was he being joined by his wife and children? If Jackie and Caroline and John Jr. were coming with him—even if they were at the door to wave good-bye—he’d have to abort the mission, wait for a better time. He was a patriot, not a remorseless killer; he just couldn’t do it in front of the family. So he waited—and held his breath.
LYNDON JOHNSON put his head in his hands and groaned. He had drunk himself to sleep again last night, and he was paying the price this Sunday morning. He’d promised himself and Lady Bird it would stop, but the liquor that had been his constant companion on the campaign trail was still with him in the days after the election. And who could blame him? More and more these days, he was trying to come to grips with the fact that he had made the biggest mistake of his political life. He could have had the Presidential nomination, at least made a hell of a fight for it, but he’d held back, paralyzed by fear of losing, and by doubts about just how much he even wanted it. The last year he’d been discontent with everything—his work, his marriage—and thought more than once about throwing in his hand, going for a very different life. By the time he’d reached for the prize everyone else knew he hungered for, it was too late: the foe he’d derided as “Sonny Boy . . . a scrawny kid with rickets” had wrapped up the nomination on the first ballot. Worse, he had an effortless grace, whose appeal to the public utterly eluded Johnson.
“It was the goddamnedest thing,” Johnson told a confidant as he saw the Presidency slipping away. “Here was a whippersnapper, malaria-ridden and yellah, sickly, sickly. He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing. But somehow . . . he managed to create the image of himself as a shining intellectual, a youthful leader who would change the face of the country.” Just after he’d lost the nomination, he’d gathered his closest advisors around him in his Biltmore Hotel suite in Los Angeles: Speaker Sam Rayburn, Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, John Connally, Jim Rowe. Amid the bitterness—Joe’s money had been the difference, buying everything from great press to longtime Johnson allies; Kennedy and his doctors had lied through their teeth about Addison’s disease, everyone knew that—there was this stark political reality to consider: what if Jack offered him the second spot on the ticket?
Speaker Sam had told him no, that he wouldn’t trust Joe Kennedy, wouldn’t walk across the street to say hello. But by the next morning, Rayburn had changed his mind; the idea of Richard Nixon as President bothered him a helluva lot more than a Catholic in the White House. Connally warned him he’d be burning a lot of bridges in Texas; Graham had told him to take it, that he’d already pressed the case with Kennedy. In the end, it was his own political instincts that told him to go for it. His grip on the Senate was weakening; a new class of senators had come in ’58, more liberal, impatient, unwilling to let him control every piece of Senate business. And the older liberals, men he’d worked with just fine in the past, Paul Douglas of Illinois, Bill Proxmire of Wisconsin, Joe Clark of Pennsylvania, were starting to push back, to say “no” to his wishes. If he stayed on as majority leader, he’d be battling members of his own party every day. And if Kennedy got elected President, what would he be then as Senate leader? Not much more than a water-carrier for the White House.
As Vice President, he could be Jack’s go-to man on the Hill. He knew the Congress far better than Kennedy did; Jack would be a fool not to use him to get his program—their program—through. Anyway, he had a Texas-sized insurance policy: He’d simply get the Texas legislature to change the law so he could run for Vice President and his Senate seat at the same time. If Nixon won, he’d still be majority leader, and the most powerful Democrat in the country, with a national profile for ’64 or ’68. If Kennedy won, he’d be right at Kennedy’s side, and in four or eight years, he’d be next in line. And there was more: For years, Johnson had been caught between his own political instincts and the political demands of Texas. FDR was his hero, ever since his days as a Congressional aide in the 30s. His impulses, going back to his days as the twenty-six-year-old director of FDR’s National Youth Administration, were all about helping the poor, and the hell with color. Back in ’35, he’d been called in to see the Governor, Jimmy Allred, and Jimmy had warned him about sending money to colored schools like Prairie View A & M. And he’d listened, and sarcastically thanked the Governor for showing him how “a fine Christia
n man” thought, and then told the Governor he was going to double the money for Prairie View A & M, and sent the money out that very afternoon. He even admired Huey Long, the populist demagogue from Louisiana. Huey may have been a world-class crook, but he was a champion for people who badly needed a defender. He got free textbooks for schoolchildren, farm-to-market roads, a better break for widows and orphans.
But those instincts ran right up against cold hard reality. Texas Democrats were conservative, even reactionary, worshipping at the altar of big oil and big capital, more than comfortable with white supremacy as a way of political life. He’d been one of the only Southerners in Congress not to sign the “Southern Manifesto” after the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in ’54, but he’d resisted federal laws against the poll tax and lynching, pushed back on the fire-breathers like Hubert Humphrey, and when he guided that civil rights bill through in ’57—he had to have a liberal credential if he was going to run for President in ’60—he’d had to tell Southerners like Dick Russell that it was because “the nigras were getting uppity,” and the bill had enough loopholes to drive a truck through. No, the only way to become a national Democrat was to free himself from the demands of Texas, and there was no better way to do that than by running on a national ticket. So when Jack came to his suite that Thursday morning, he’d said yes, even if it wasn’t absolutely, undeniably clear that he’d been offered the job for sure.
And then it all went south. It wasn’t Jack’s fault; he was sure it was that runt Bobby, that punk who’d had it in for Johnson for years. He’d probably never forgiven Johnson for that time when Bobby visited the ranch and Johnson took him out to hunt, put a shotgun in Bobby’s hands—okay, maybe he’d known it would be a little much for the punk to handle—then watched as the recoil from the gun knocked Bobby to the ground. “Son, you’ve got to learn to shoot like a man,” he’d said to him, and he knew, oh how he knew, how that must have cut with the runt of his family’s litter. He knew it was Bobby who was spreading the rumor that he’d suffered another heart attack—it wasn’t the same as the stories Johnson’s friends were feeding the press about Jack’s Addison’s disease; those stories were true—and so when Bobby came back down to the suite a few hours later to say that Jack was rethinking the idea, that it would be a tough sell for labor and the liberals, that maybe Lyndon would like to be chairman of the party instead, he knew it was Bobby messing with Jack’s head. He’d actually had to sit there with tears in his eyes, telling Bobby how proud he’d be to run, how if Jack really wanted him he’d take it. Meanwhile, his team was burning up the phone lines to Jack’s suite upstairs, demanding to know what the hell was going on, until Jack had said, yes, of course he wanted Lyndon, Bobby just didn’t know what was going on.
So he’d stood there with Jack at the LA Coliseum, waving and smiling, but already there was that nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’d taken a horribly wrong turn. And as the campaign wore on, that nagging little pebble had become a stone. He’d felt it up at Hyannis Port, caught the sidelong glances, the smirks, heard the snickers, the mockery of his accent. He’d taken his hurt and his rage with him on the campaign, drinking more than he ever had in his life. God, he could still remember a night in El Paso when he’d roamed the hotel corridors, hitting on damn near everything in a skirt, screaming at a poor advance man for typos on a press release that weren’t even there. He still had the letter sent him by Jim Rowe, as loyal a friend and aide as you could want, telling him, “Someone ought to tell you the truth occasionally—and there is no one around who does . . . [old friends] find it impossible to work for you . . . And most of the time you, LBJ, are wrong, and they are right.” And Jim wasn’t working with him anymore. But he soldiered on, riding that whistle-stop all through the South—“The Cornpone Special,” he’d heard the Kennedy folks dub it—and when that reactionary Republican Congressman Bruce Alger showed up with a mob of lunatics four days before election at that hotel lobby, screaming, hitting at him and Lady Bird, spitting on them, he’d known just what to do. He told the police to get back, telling them, “If the time has come when I can’t walk through the lobby of a hotel in Dallas with my lady without a police escort, I want to know about it.” That might have been worth that 46,000-vote margin in Texas all by itself. But somehow he knew it would turn sour; even on Election Night, an old friend had written him, “The night you were elected Vice President, I don’t think I ever saw a more unhappy man. . . . There was no jubilation. You looked as if you’d lost your last friend on earth, and later you were rude to me, very rude, and I tried to remind myself that you were very unhappy.”
And then . . . sure enough, the walls began to close in around him. He’d gone to Mike Mansfield, who would succeed him as majority leader, with a terrific idea: the Vice President was the President of the Senate, so why not let him preside over the party caucus, just as he had when he was leader? That way he could quarterback Kennedy’s program right there at the Capitol. Fine, Mansfield said—and then the Democratic senators, the very people whose roads and dams he’d gotten built, whose colleges he’d funded, whose friends he’d found jobs for, told him, You’re not a senator anymore, Lyndon, we run our own shop here. Don’t you remember separation of powers? And it wasn’t just the fire-breathers, it was the loyalists: Olin Johnson and Mike Monroney and Willis Robertson. Oh sure, the caucus had voted to let him preside after Mansfield threatened to quit, but with twenty-seven votes against him, there was no way he hadn’t gotten the message. He couldn’t show his face in the caucus, much less preside (even his chauffeur refused at first to stay with him—“when I drive the Majority Leader,” he’d said, “I’m driving a man with power, but the Vice President doesn’t have any power at all”).
And then there was Kennedy’s silence. Hell, he’d gone out of his way to extend a hand, take some of the burden off that young man’s shoulders. Johnson had had an aide draft an executive order, giving Johnson control over NASA and the Defense Department, making sure he was given all significant documents from every Cabinet member. That was ten days ago, and he hadn’t heard a word back from Jack.
As he headed for the bathroom and a fistful of aspirin, he wondered again what had possessed him to take the job. And then he remembered what he’d told Clare Boothe Luce at a Washington dinner party: “Clare, I looked it up. One out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darling, and this is the only chance I got.”
AS JOHN KENNEDY TOOK a step back to the front door, Richard Pavlick saw that it wasn’t Jackie and the kids at the door, but a housekeeper.
“Mrs. Kennedy told me to say she’s in bed with the baby,” the housekeeper said through the screen. “She says she will see you after church.”
“Fine,” he said, and turned back to the car where a Secret Service man was waiting to open the rear door. Kennedy would read through a stack of papers on his way to church, then work on his Inaugural—and his tan—when he got back. Down the street, Richard Pavlick saw that Kennedy was alone. He gripped the switch tighter in his right hand, gunned the motor, and sped toward the sedan. An instant before the collision, a Secret Service agent tried to scream out a warning. It was drowned out by an explosion big enough to level a small mountain.
EIGHT HOURS LATER, at six p.m. on Sunday evening, eight men gathered in a twenty-by-twelve-foot room hidden beneath the main floor of the Capitol Rotunda. A high, ornately decorated ceiling reflected the room’s original purpose as a meeting room for the House Committee on Territories. For a half century, it had been given to the House Speaker. Under Sam Rayburn, it had long been known as “the Board of Education,” where Rayburn and a few favored intimates would gather for drinks and informal conversations. It was a modestly appointed room by Washington standards—a worn Oriental carpet, furniture from the Capitol storeroom, a long leather couch and leather chairs grouped around a long mahogany desk packed with bottles of scotch and bourbon behind which Speaker Rayburn would preside—but it was the epice
nter of political power. It was here on an April day in 1945 that Vice President Truman had heard the news that Franklin Roosevelt had died, but FDR had been seriously ill for a year or more; that death was the passing of a patriarch. What had happened in Palm Beach earlier that day was as if a meteor had come hurtling out of a clear blue sky and smashed headlong into the Capitol.
It had taken a few moments for the news to break. The explosion had killed or maimed the clutch of reporters and photographers gathered outside the Kennedy home, and on this sleepy December Sunday, the skeleton staffs at local news outlets who were tuned to police scanners believed at first they were hearing reports of a gas main explosion. But within a half hour, the first fragmentary reports of what had happened were interrupting the religious services that were a staple of Sunday morning broadcasts, and throwing the Sunday morning political interview programs into utter disarray. On CBS’s Face the Nation, moderator Howard K. Smith, his voice breaking, was holding a telephone to his ear as he talked with local reporters who were shuttling between the perimeter of the explosion and a pay phone. On NBC, Meet the Press host Ned Brooks was displaying wire service still photographs, which—blessedly—showed little of the details. The National Football League canceled its schedule, but not soon enough to prevent a few thousand fans from arriving at Washington’s District of Columbia Stadium to watch the Redskins play the New York Giants.
Then Everything Changed Page 2