Killing Kennedy

by O’Reilly, Bill

  It is a line that Norma Jean Baker herself suggested. After spending much of her youth in foster homes, she began modeling in her teens and landed a movie contract in 1946, changing her name to Marilyn Monroe. Born a brunette, she dyed her hair and began cultivating the “dumb blonde” persona that became her calling card. Her career path led her to a number of high-profile performances in movies such as How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. She has been married and divorced three times, and has developed a reputation for abusing alcohol and prescription drugs. Substance abuse is slowly destroying her career. But she is still voluptuous, vivacious, and clever enough in her lucid moments that her true intelligence reveals itself.

  Kennedy first met Monroe at a dinner party in the 1950s. Their relationship ramped up on July 15, 1960, the night he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. The two flirted that night, much to the dismay of Kennedy’s staff, who were immediately concerned the pair would be caught having an affair during the campaign. Patricia Kennedy Lawford went so far as to pull Marilyn aside and warn her not to have sex with her brother.

  But that was almost two years ago—and ironically, it was Patricia who invited Marilyn and JFK to a dinner party at her New York home in late February 1962. Marilyn marched in late, as was her custom. She’d been drinking sherry. Her dress was a small beads-and-sequins affair. “It was the tightest goddam dress I ever saw on a woman,” the legendary show business manager Milt Ebbins would later remember of Monroe’s pre-party preparations—specifically of pulling the dress on over Monroe’s head: “We couldn’t get it past her hips. Of course, typical of Marilyn, she wasn’t wearing any underwear either. So there I was, on my knees in front of her … pulling down this dress with all my might, trying to get it [down] past her big ass.”

  Ebbins was eventually successful with the dress, and JFK immediately gravitated to Monroe’s side as she sashayed into the party. A photographer attempted to take their picture, but the president quickly turned his back so they wouldn’t be photographed together. For good measure, the Secret Service demanded the film.

  Before the night was over, JFK had casually invited Marilyn to meet him in Palm Springs on March 24. To close the deal, he confided that “Jackie won’t be there.”

  * * *

  Now Marilyn Monroe wears a loose robe as the party swirls at the Crosby estate. She is “calm and relaxed,” in the opinion of one partygoer.

  The president is entranced by her wit and intellect and would be thrilled to add such a famous sex symbol to his list of conquests. He also finds her nurturing. After Kennedy complains of his chronic back pain, Monroe phones her friend Ralph Roberts, an actor and masseur knowledgeable about back issues. When she puts Kennedy on the phone, Roberts doesn’t know it’s the president he’s talking to, but he can’t help but think that the man on the other end sounds just like John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Roberts offers a quick diagnosis and hangs up after a few minutes, thinking to himself that Marilyn is once again up to no good.

  In some ways, she can’t help herself. Monroe has been married to two very famous and powerful men—baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller—but JFK eclipses them by far. “Marilyn Monroe is a soldier,” she later tells her therapist, speaking in the third person. “Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey the commander-in-chief. He says do that, you do it.” The attorney general has caught her attention, as well. “It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer,” she will tell her therapist. “Bobby would do anything for his country, and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  Yet despite her passion and beauty, Marilyn Monroe is damaged goods. Her three marriages aren’t socially acceptable in the Kennedys’ Catholic world, nor is her affair with Frank Sinatra. JFK knows that she broke up Arthur Miller’s previous marriage so that she could marry the playwright. More ominously, the president suspects that Monroe has visions of moving into the White House sometime soon. He has even made a point of telling her that she’s “not First Lady material.”

  No, Marilyn is not going to replace Jackie, no matter what the movie star might believe during the two nights she spends with the president in Palm Springs. Marilyn gives JFK a chrome Ronson Adonis cigarette lighter as a gift to remind him of their special time together, although the president certainly needs no reminder of his time with the world’s leading sex symbol.

  * * *

  News of the Kennedy-Monroe liaison would be about as explosive as it gets. The question lingering in the minds of Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and the president’s close-knit Irish Mafia cronies is why the president continues to take such risks. Some believe it’s a carryover from the old days of the Kennedy heritage in Ireland, where the leader of a clan commonly had free rein to sleep with women outside of marriage. Until his recent stroke, the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, behaved in just such a manner.

  In addition, some believe that John Kennedy’s personal tragedies—the death of his brother and of his infant child, and his own brushes with death—have given him a fatalistic attitude. All the sex is his carpe diem way of living life to the utmost.

  And then there is the issue of his chronic physical pain. John Kennedy’s appearance may be robust, but he suffers from a nervous stomach, back pain, and Addison’s disease. His physical activity is limited to walking, sailing, and the occasional nine holes of golf. He can barely ride a horse. And the Kennedy family’s legendary games of touch football don’t include him as much as they used to.

  Sex is the president’s physical release of choice. He’s an adrenaline junkie, and his psyche requires illicit excitement. As he told a family friend, “The chase is more fun than the kill.”

  * * *

  “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

  Two months after their weekend in Palm Springs, Marilyn Monroe stands before a dazzled crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden, singing the traditional birthday song in the most salacious manner possible. Her skintight dress leaves little to the imagination, both front and back, even as her breathless words inspire a thousand questions. Marilyn, still stung by JFK’s blunt assessment that she is not First Lady material, is desperately trying to rekindle the Palm Springs nights of romance.

  “Happy Birthday to you,” she purrs into the microphone.

  The date is May 19, 1962, ten days before JFK’s actual birthday. Jackie, once again, is not in attendance, but she knows all about Marilyn. She’s not so much hurt as disgusted, correctly sensing that the president is taking advantage of an emotionally troubled woman who is easy prey for such a powerful man.

  The president never comes in contact with the seemingly tipsy Marilyn as he climbs to the lectern at Madison Square Garden. But he does favor her with a lupine gaze that one journalist will later remember as “quite a sight to behold, and if I ever saw an appreciation of feminine beauty in the eyes of a man, it was in John F. Kennedy’s at that moment.”

  Marilyn Monroe has become so obsessed with JFK that she calls the White House constantly, but her singing performance falls on deaf ears. The president has moved on, putting as much distance between himself and Marilyn as he did between himself and Frank Sinatra.

  “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Marilyn Monroe serenaded JFK at his birthday gala in 1962. (Getty Images)

  Like Sinatra, Marilyn is a snare that could easily entangle Kennedy and bring down his presidency. This is where the pragmatist in JFK returns, overriding his libido. He is willing to take great personal risks to satisfy his sexual needs, but he does not gamble when it comes to remaining in power. Better to have Monroe and Sinatra and the Mafia as enemies whom he can view from a wary distance, rather than as friends who could drag him down.

  At the lectern before the party faithful in New York City, the president adopts the chaste mien of an altar boy. “I can now r
etire from politics after having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet and wholesome way,” the president speaks into the microphone, his wry delivery suggesting that he is above such sexual shenanigans.

  But the president hasn’t given up on extramarital affairs. He is just beginning a new long-term relationship with a nineteen-year-old virgin whom he deflowers on Jackie’s bed.

  * * *

  The presidency is a daunting and lonely job. Moments like the Madison Square Garden party offer a welcome respite from the pressure. JFK basks in the birthday appreciation, which comes in the midst of a campaign rally that raises more than $1 million for the Democratic Party.

  The president has no way of knowing that he will celebrate this special day just one more time.

  * * *

  In the faraway Soviet city of Minsk, Lee Harvey Oswald has finally cleared the tangle of red tape that has prevented him from returning home.

  The plan now is for him, Marina, and five-week-old June Lee to take the train to the American embassy in Moscow to pick up their travel documents.

  On May 18, Oswald is discharged from his job at the Gorizont (Horizon) Electronics Factory. Few are sad to see him go. The plant director thinks Oswald is careless and oversensitive and lacks initiative. Even Marina thinks her new husband is lazy and knows he resents taking orders.

  The Oswalds arrive in Moscow on May 24, 1962, the same day that navy test pilot Scott Carpenter becomes the second American astronaut to orbit the earth. President Kennedy is quick to commend Carpenter for his courage and skill, even as he grapples with Congress over the issue of affordable nationwide health care.

  On June 1 the Oswalds board a train from Moscow to Holland. Lee Harvey carries a promissory note from the U.S. embassy for $435.71 to help start his life anew in America. On June 2, as Secretary of the Navy John Connally wins a runoff to become the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, the Oswalds’ train crosses the Soviet border at Brest. Two days later they board the SS Maasdam, bound for America, where they stay belowdecks most of the journey. Oswald is ashamed of Marina’s cheap dresses and doesn’t want her to be seen in public. He passes the time in their small cabin writing rants about his growing disillusionment with governmental power.

  Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald with their daughter, June Lee, in 1962. (Getty Images)

  The Maasdam docks in Hoboken, New Jersey—Frank Sinatra’s hometown—on June 13, 1962. The Oswalds pass through customs without incident and take a small room at New York City’s Times Square Hotel. The plan is to stay there until they can afford to fly to Texas, where Oswald’s brother Robert lives. There, Oswald can finally settle down and find work.

  The next morning, in far-off Vietnam, South Vietnamese soldiers are flown aboard U.S. helicopters to combat a Communist stronghold, a move that forces President Kennedy to backpedal publicly on the issue of direct U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, a war that he believes is vital to stanching the worldwide spread of communism.

  Meanwhile, thanks to a loan from his brother, Lee Harvey Oswald and his family fly to Dallas. The city simmers with a rage that mirrors Oswald’s ongoing personal unhappiness in many ways. The Deep South swung in President Kennedy’s favor during the election, but there are pockets of militant anger about Kennedy being the first Roman Catholic president, his desire to bring about racial equality, and what some perceive as his Communist tendencies.

  This is the environment into which the Oswald family arrives. They land at a Dallas area airport called Love Field, where the president and First Lady will touch down aboard Air Force One in seventeen short months.

  Oswald is unhappy that his return to the United States has not attracted widespread media attention—or any media attention, for that matter. But even as he fumes that the press is nowhere in sight, he has no idea that he is being secretly watched—by a very powerful concern.

  6

  AUGUST 23, 1962

  WASHINGTON, D.C./BEIRUT, LEBANON

  MIDDAY

  The president is impotent.

  Or so thinks Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union. Not physically, of course, but in the bruising global arena of realpolitik.

  Khrushchev has watched Kennedy closely since the Bay of Pigs, searching for signs of the same weakness and indecisiveness that defined the U.S. president’s handling of that crisis. The sixty-eight-year-old Khrushchev, who came to power after a brutal political battle to replace Joseph Stalin, well knows how to evaluate an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. He does not see a worthy adversary in Kennedy. September will mark Khrushchev’s tenth anniversary in power. He plans on marking the occasion with a celebration of Soviet dominance in the world. If he can humiliate an American president in the process, so much the better.

  The Russians, as the Soviets are often called, are flaunting their control of outer space by sending not one but two spaceships into orbit at the same time. The cosmonauts piloting each craft then further parade Soviet mastery of missile technology by speaking to each other through a device known as a radio telephone.

  In addition, Khrushchev and his Politburo are thumbing their noses at an international nuclear test ban by exploding two 40-megaton nuclear weapons over the Arctic, one week apart.

  They are also building an eighty-seven-mile-long wall through the heart of Berlin, Germany. The wall separates the Soviet-controlled sector from the rest of the city, which is controlled by the Western Allies. The barrier is not meant to keep people out, but to imprison the citizens of Communist East Germany, preventing them from fleeing to the freedom of West Germany. The results are horrific. On August 23, 1962, East German border guards shoot a nineteen-year-old railway policeman who is trying to sprint to the West through a hole in the still-unfinished wall. They watch as the young man struggles to crawl the final few yards to freedom, then do nothing to help him as he collapses and dies.

  The same thing happened a week earlier, when another young German was shot while trying to escape East Germany. Again, border guards watched for an hour as the man slowly bled to death. No one was allowed to go to his rescue. Riots broke out in West Berlin to protest the Soviet behavior, but it continues without apology.

  Through it all, President Kennedy has refrained from making public threats or even critiquing the Soviet atrocities. Still, the American people overwhelmingly support JFK. He is the most popular president in modern American history, with an average approval rating of 70.1 percent—almost six points higher than Eisenhower’s and a whopping 25 points higher than Harry Truman’s. But the public will not forgive another misstep like the Bay of Pigs, so JFK tiptoes carefully through the high-stakes arena of foreign policy.

  * * *

  Lyndon Johnson does not tiptoe when it comes to foreign relations. The vice president—whose Secret Service code name is Volunteer—now stands up in the front seat of a convertible in Beirut, Lebanon. This “Paris of the Middle East” loves him. He waves to the huge crowds lining the road as he is driven to the Phoenicia Hotel.

  No matter where in the world he travels, the vice president wades into crowds, handing out ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with the initials LBJ stamped on them. Then he launches into a pep talk. Whether it’s a leper in Dakar or a shirtless beggar in Karachi, the vice president is keen to shake his hand and tell him that the American dream is not a myth—that there is hope, even in the midst of poverty.

  And best of all, LBJ believes this. Johnson was raised in poverty himself. He knows firsthand the ravages of neglect and substandard living conditions. In many ways, the vice president has a far deeper emotional connection with the unwashed crowds along the side of the road than with the wealthy diplomats who host him.

  Johnson is larger than life, a towering dynamo with basset hound bags under his eyes and sweat rings soaking his shirt. Back in Washington, he mopes around, bemoaning his lack of power. But when he travels abroad, Johnson is a rock star. His foreign antics are becoming legendary, particularly his impulsive habit of halting motorca
des so he can jump out of his personal convertible limousine and into crowds to press the flesh.

  Beirut is no different. This is the first layover on a nineteen-day trip that will also see stops in Iran, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Italy. Lebanon was just supposed to be a refueling stop for his 707, but when Johnson learns that he is the highest-ranking American official ever to visit the Land of Cedars, he can’t help himself. The refueling stop suddenly becomes an official visit, and the vice president is soon whisked from the airport and into the heart of Beirut.

  As his motorcade slows down, Johnson spots a crowd of children at a roadside melon stand. He orders his driver to halt. Whipping off his sunglasses to make eye contact, Johnson bounds over to the startled kids and tells them about the power of the American dream. Some of the children look confused. A teenager wearing a “Champion Spark Plugs” cap is told that the United States stands behind the “liberty and integrity” of Lebanon.

  Johnson’s voice is booming, and he waves his arms as he speaks. Secret Service agents hasten to surround him, once again annoyed at the vice president’s ignorance about security. Then, in a flash, Johnson is back in the front seat of his car, standing tall, waving to the crowds with both hands as he continues into the heart of Beirut.

  Lyndon Johnson is a persnickety traveler. In addition to his limousine, he travels with cases of Cutty Sark scotch and a special shower nozzle whose needlelike jets of water he prefers. He demands a seven-foot-long mattress in each hotel room, to accommodate his large frame—not that he sleeps much: long after his staff has gone to sleep, LBJ is still at work, making phone calls back to Washington and reading diplomatic cables.

  Originally, Johnson fought JFK over being used as a roving ambassador, but now he has come to love this aspect of his job. In Washington his craving for authority has many in the White House referring to him as Seward, a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s power-hungry secretary of state. But on the road, Johnson truly does have power. He speaks for the president, but just as often veers off message to speak his own mind, which are moments he relishes.