Killing Kennedy

by O’Reilly, Bill

  But the Kennedys, John and Bobby, are annoyed with Johnson, especially when he speaks irresponsibly. On one trip to Asia, he praises South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who tortured and killed an estimated fifty thousand suspected Communists. Incredibly, Johnson pronounces Diem to be the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” a pronouncement that leads some to question the vice president’s very sanity.

  In Thailand, LBJ conducts a 3:00 A.M. press conference in his pajamas. On that same trip, he is warned that patting people on the head is considered an offense in Thai culture—whereupon he immediately bounds onto a local bus and rubs his very large hands on the heads of its passengers.

  Johnson does one better in Saigon: while holding a press conference in his steamy hotel room, he suddenly strips naked, towels the sweat from his body, and puts on a fresh suit—all while answering questions from the media.

  But there’s no need for disrobing in Beirut. The Phoenicia Hotel is just two blocks from the blue Mediterranean. The August heat is tempered by a cool sea breeze. This will be one of the longest trips Johnson has ever undertaken, but the vice president is reveling in every minute, because for each one of these nineteen days away from the United States, he will be the most powerful and respected man in the room.

  * * *

  At the same time, at home, Bobby Kennedy is engaged in a completely different power struggle, one best epitomized by an incident that happened seven years ago.

  Mississippi, 1955. A fourteen-year-old African American boy named Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till is visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta town of Money. Till is from Chicago and has come to the Deep South to see for himself where his mother grew up. He had polio as a small child, which caused him to develop a stuttering problem. But though just five foot, four inches, Emmett now looks mature enough that he often passes for an adult. A close look at his smooth face, however, reveals that he is still very much a child.

  Emmett’s mother has warned him that there is a big difference between Chicago and Mississippi, and she isn’t talking about the weather. Just a week before Emmett’s trip south, a black man was shot dead in front of a courthouse not far from Money. His killers will soon be acquitted.

  Emmett tells his mother he understands the southern racial climate and promises to be careful. This will turn out to be a false promise.

  The teenager arrives at the small two-bedroom home of his sixty-four-year-old great-uncle Moses Wright on August 21, 1955. Three days later, on a Wednesday, he and some of his teenage relatives drift over to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a small mom-and-pop operation that caters mostly to local sharecroppers. It is 7:30 at night. The twenty-four-year-old owner, Roy Bryant, a former soldier, is away in Texas, hauling shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn, a petite woman with black hair and dark eyes, is running the store.

  Emmett is among eight young blacks who pull up to the store in a 1946 Ford. All are between thirteen and nineteen years old. They meet up with another group of black teens that is already playing checkers at tables on the store’s front porch. Emmett, hundreds of miles from home and trying his best to fit in, shows the group a picture of a white girl in his wallet and then brags that she was a sexual conquest.

  The crowd, which now numbers almost twenty teenage boys and girls, can’t believe their ears. Such an intermingling of the races is unheard of in Mississippi. Public restrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants there are segregated. A black man would never even dream of shaking hands with a white man, unless the white man extended his hand first. Blacks lower their gaze when talking to whites, always showing them respect, referring to them as “Mister” or “Missus” or “Miss,” and never by their first name. So Emmett Till’s claim that he not only spoke with a white girl but also took her clothes off and lay with her is met with monumental disbelief.

  So they tell Emmett to prove it. They dare him to go inside the grocery and talk to Carolyn Bryant. Sensing danger, Emmett tries to back out. But that spurs the group on, and they begin taunting him for being chicken. Emmett surrenders. He pulls open the screen door and steps into the store. He walks over to the candy case, where he asks for two cents’ worth of bubble gum. When Carolyn hands him the gum, Emmett places his hand over hers and asks the married mother of two young boys for a date.

  Back home in Chicago, a man touching a woman’s hand might not be considered a big deal. But in the Deep South, skin-on-skin contact between blacks and whites is forbidden. When money is exchanged in stores, a black person will place it on the counter rather than into the white person’s hand. Similarly, when the change is returned, it is also placed on the counter. And Emmett didn’t just touch a married white woman, he asked her for a date.

  Carolyn pulls away, astonished. Emmett reaches for her again, this time around her waist. “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby,” he assures her. “I been with white girls before.”

  Angrily, she pushes him away. Emmett finally leaves the store. But he is soon followed by the furious woman, who is racing to her car to get her husband’s handgun. It’s getting late, and she now fears for her safety.

  But Emmett Till means her no harm. He is in the habit of substituting whistling for words when his stutter sets in, as he does now, whistling at Bryant. Carolyn Bryant is shocked again. And so are the black teenagers watching the scene unfold. They “knew the whistle would cause trouble,” the official FBI report will read. “And they left in haste, taking Till with them.”

  When Roy Bryant returns home and hears what happened, he wastes no time in conducting his own personal criminal investigation. On August 28, at 2:30 A.M., he bangs on the door at the home of Emmett’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Roy is accompanied by his friend, J. W. “Big” Milam.

  Big Milam is twelve years older than Roy Bryant. He is a hulking, extroverted Mississippian who quit school after the ninth grade and fought the Germans in World War II. Each man carries a Colt .45 handgun—a revolver for Bryant and an automatic for Milam. The men force Moses to take them to “the nigger who did the talking.”

  A frightened Moses leads the two men into a small back bedroom, where Emmett and three cousins share a bed. Big Milam shines a flashlight in the boy’s face. “You the nigger who did the talking?”

  “Yeah,” comes the response.

  “Don’t say yeah to me. I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.”

  Moses and his wife beg for the two men to reconsider, even offering them money to let the whole thing slide, but Roy and Big won’t listen. They march Emmett out to Big’s pickup truck and drive off into the night.

  Their plan is to take Emmett to a cliff along the Tallahatchie River, where they will pistol-whip the youth and scare him by pretending that they’re going to throw him over the side. But in the dark, Big can’t find the spot. After three hours of driving, Big drives the pickup to his own house, where he has a two-room toolshed in his backyard. They bring Emmett inside and pistol-whip him, each man smashing his face hard with his gun. But instead of backing down, Emmett is defiant. “You bastards. I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are,” he tells them, his face badly bruised but not bleeding.

  This sets Big Milam into a rage. “I’m no bully,” Milam will explain to Look magazine. “I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place.”

  But apparently, Emmett doesn’t know his place, because he continues to tell his captors that he is their equal, and even brags about having sex with white women. This belief in the equality of blacks and whites, something that Emmett finds relatively common in integrated Chicago, infuriates Milam and Bryant. “I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me,” Milam will remember. “And I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to sti
r up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

  Big and Roy are no longer interested in just scaring Emmett. Now they want to murder him.

  Big remembers that a nearby cotton company has just changed the fan on one of their gins. The replaced part is perfect for what Big now has in mind. The fan is enormous—three feet across and weighing seventy-five pounds. They drive to the Progressive Ginning Company, steal the discarded fan, and continue on to a hidden spot along the Tallahatchie where Big likes to hunt squirrels. They force Emmett to carry the fan to the river’s edge, then they force him to strip.

  “You still as good as I am?” Big asks.

  “Yeah.” Even standing naked before men two decades older than he, Emmett Till finds a way to be courageous. Blood streams down his face, and his cheekbones are broken. One of his eyes has been gouged out.

  “You still ‘had’ white women?”

  “Yeah.”

  Big raises his .45 and shoots Emmett point-blank in the head. The bullet makes a small hole as it enters near the right ear and kills the fourteen-year-old in an instant. Big and Roy then run a strand of barbwire around Emmett’s neck and attach it to the fan. They roll his body, anchored by the giant hunk of metal, into the river, and then drive home to wash out the blood that’s pooling in the back of the pickup.

  Despite the heavy fan tied around his neck, Emmett’s body drifts with the current. Three days later, fishermen find his bloated corpse bobbing in the water some eight miles downstream. His head is almost flattened from the pistol blows.

  When Emmett’s body is returned to Chicago, his mother insists on an open casket at the funeral, so that the whole world can see the crime perpetrated against her son. Pictures of Emmett Till’s battered and flattened head are published in magazines nationwide. Tens of thousands attend the viewing, and public outrage about the murder spreads across the country.

  But not in Mississippi. Though police later arrest Roy Bryant and Big Milam, both men are acquitted of the crime by a jury of their peers (whites) three months later. Taking advantage of the judicial concept of double jeopardy, which does not allow an individual to be tried twice for the same crime, the two men later boast to a Look magazine writer about the day they murdered Emmett Till.

  * * *

  Until 1962 JFK was not eager to lead the fight for civil rights, knowing that taking a pro-black position could hurt him within the Democratic Party. In fact, the president’s record on race issues was middling at best when he was in the Senate. Since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court, which ordered that schools be integrated, tension between whites and blacks in the South has reached an all-time high, and events such as the murder of Emmett Till are no longer an exception. “Human blood may stain southern soil in many places because of this decision,” an editorial in a Mississippi newspaper correctly prophesied shortly after the ruling.

  But beginning with his May 1961 Law Day address at the University of Georgia Law School, Bobby Kennedy made it plain he would use his Justice Department as a bully pulpit to enforce civil rights throughout America, particularly in the Deep South. He is taking up an exhausting, never-ending battle, one that originated on the day the first African slaves were brought to America in 1619. The Kennedy brothers do so with the knowledge that this intense fight will gain them a whole new group of very dangerous enemies.

  Bobby Kennedy was instrumental in helping civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders travel by bus into the South to fight segregation in 1961. The Greyhound Company, fearing its buses might be vandalized, had initially denied the northern activists passage. Kennedy pressured Greyhound, and the company relented.

  But RFK could not stop what happened next. As soon as the activists tried to get off some of the buses, they were beaten with pipes and clubs by angry mobs. Local law enforcement did little to stop the brutality.

  Despite—or perhaps even because of—the violence, the civil rights movement continues to gain momentum, and Robert Kennedy is now paying close attention to one of its most prominent leaders, a thirty-three-year-old charismatic Baptist minister named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  Reverend King is as intense and enigmatic as President Kennedy. He is a man of deep religious values who also sleeps with women outside his marriage. His speaking tone and rhetoric are bold and impassioned, but he advocates the same nonviolence to achieve his methods as Gandhi used in India. King also appears to be a Communist sympathizer. This puts Bobby in the unlikely position of having to monitor King to determine whether the reverend is indeed a Communist, while at the same time ensuring that King is protected from harm and guaranteed free speech as he pushes the cause of civil rights. One assassination attempt has already been made on King, when a deranged black woman stabbed him in the chest in 1958, and there are constant fears that the reverend will one day be lynched during his travels through the Deep South.

  Truth be told, the civil rights movement is an enormous headache for Bobby Kennedy. His main enforcement arm, the FBI, has little concern for civil rights, or even for making inroads into Bobby’s other major legal concern, organized crime. Instead, J. Edgar Hoover is entirely focused on stopping the spread of communism. He is all too happy to play the part of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of racial bloodshed. In fact, in 1962 the FBI has only a handful of black agents in the field.

  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept dossiers on many civil rights leaders and even had a file on the president. (Abbie Rowe, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Hoover, however, does take an interest in Reverend King—but only because of the widespread belief within the FBI that the civil rights movement is part of a larger Communist plot against America. One of the bureau’s division leaders, William C. Sullivan, will characterize King as “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

  * * *

  The truth—and Bobby Kennedy knows this—is that in large parts of the South, black Americans have little protection from prejudice and violence. Although the Kennedy tradition is to put politics above social concerns, the two brothers raised in affluent northern liberalism have become increasingly interested in righting the wrongs of racial injustice.

  J. Edgar Hoover believes this preoccupation is folly and that Reverend King’s comments will one day be forgotten. For Hoover, civil rights are just a passing trend. So he will continue with the political game he’s played since he joined the Justice Department during World War I. He will endure Bobby Kennedy’s overeager style, just as he will continue to chronicle, yet keep silent on, the president’s indiscretions. First and foremost, he will keep his job.

  But that doesn’t mean the FBI chief has to like the Kennedy boys—and he doesn’t.

  Bobby knows that one of JFK’s first official acts after being reelected in 1964 will be to fire J. Edgar Hoover. So he soldiers on, investigating civil rights violations without the FBI director’s support. It’s tough going. Something as simple as getting a judge approved by the Senate for an open spot in a federal court is stymied when the senator in charge of the subcommittee orders that the proceedings be halted indefinitely. Not surprisingly, the judge up for approval, Thurgood Marshall, is black. And also not surprisingly, the senator who halted the proceedings is white.

  But Robert Kennedy is the U.S. attorney general, sworn to uphold the nation’s laws. And as long as young men such as Emmett Till are being lynched for the color of their skin, Bobby has no choice but to wage this war.

  * * *

  It is brutally hot in Fort Worth, Texas, on August 16, 1962. FBI special agents John Fain and Arnold J. Brown, warriors in J. Edgar Hoover’s war against communism, have been waiting all day to see Lee Harvey Oswald. They sit in an unmarked car, just down the street from Oswald’s newly rented duplex apartment on Mercedes Street, right around the corner
from the Montgomery Ward department store.

  Special Agent Fain is just two months away from finishing his twenty years with the bureau. He’s going to retire to Houston. There, he’ll live off his pension while working for his brother, an orthopedic surgeon. This will mark yet another major career change for the veteran agent. Fain is a complicated man in his mid-fifties who taught school, ran for public office, and passed the Texas state bar before joining the bureau in 1942. The Oswald case is nothing new to him. Back when Oswald first defected to the Soviet Union, it was Fain who was assigned a minor investigation of Oswald’s mother because she had mailed twenty-five dollars to her son in the Soviet Union. When it comes to rooting out Communists, no stone is too small to be left unturned by Hoover’s FBI.

  It is also John Fain who spoke face-to-face with Oswald just eight weeks earlier, on June 26, 1962. Oswald’s case has been designated as an “internal security” investigation, based on the belief that his defection might make him a threat to national security. Fain’s job is to find out whether the Russians have trained and equipped Oswald to perform a job against the United States. It is protocol with all internal security investigations to have two agents present, so that all statements can be corroborated.

  Something about the first interview, which lasted two hours, doesn’t sit well with Fain. He doesn’t like Oswald’s attitude, thinking him “haughty, arrogant … and insolent.” And his answers to most questions seemed incomplete. Fain has in-depth knowledge of Oswald’s struggle to return to America and knows that the Russians originally would not allow Marina and the baby to leave with him. But Oswald refused to leave without his wife, and the Soviet authorities finally relented. The one question that Oswald has never answered in a completely truthful manner is whether the Russians demanded anything in return for letting him come to America.