Killing Kennedy

by O’Reilly, Bill

  * * *

  If the Secret Service is aware of Lee Harvey Oswald, that fact is nowhere in any record.

  Their ignorance is not unusual. Why would the powerful Secret Service be watching a low-level former marine living in Dallas, Texas?

  Oswald and Marina are back together again. There is always a heat to their reunions, and their latest is no different. Marina Oswald is now pregnant again.

  Despite their very different life circumstances, Jackie Kennedy and Marina Oswald are connected by the fact that they are two young women enjoying the life-changing early days of pregnancy. Jackie is due in September, Marina in October. And one more thing links them: like Jackie, Marina finds JFK to be quite handsome. Which makes her unstable husband more jealous than he usually is.

  * * *

  Lee Harvey Oswald’s life continues to be defined by a balance of passion and rage. On January 27, 1963, as crowds ten abreast line the streets of Washington to view the Mona Lisa, Oswald orders a .38 Special revolver through the mail. The cost is $29.95. Oswald slides a $10 bill into the envelope, with the balance to be paid on delivery. He keeps the purchase a secret from Marina by having the gun sent to his P.O. box and even uses the alias of “A. J. Hidell.”

  Oswald has no special plans for his new pistol. Nobody has been making threats on his life, and for now he has no intention to kill anyone. He merely likes the idea of owning a gun—just in case.

  * * *

  January comes to an end, and with it the Mona Lisa’s stay in Washington, D.C. On February 4 another high-security motorcade drives the painting to New York, where “Mona Mania” reaches even greater heights.

  January has been an amazing month for the president and Mrs. Kennedy. The glamour surrounding the Mona Lisa has temporarily overshadowed the fear of the cold war. Two years into the Kennedy presidency, and it is clear to the world that John and Jackie are in control of America’s fate.

  Thus, Jackie Kennedy may be right: this might just be Camelot—or at least part of it. For her there is no dark side to the story—although it definitely exists.

  When Jackie thinks of Camelot, she focuses on the final act of the play, where King Arthur regains his wonder and hope. But she overlooks the rest of the story. Camelot is fraught with tragedy, infighting, and betrayal. There is danger and death. More than half the Knights of the Round Table are slain before the final curtain falls.

  And Queen Guinevere, the heroine with whom Jackie so identifies, ends up alone.

  9

  MARCH 11, 1963

  ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

  8:00 P.M.

  The loneliest man in Camelot wants to be president of the United States.

  Lyndon Baines Johnson stands bathed in a spotlight. His typewritten speech lies before him on the lectern, but he is not focused on the words. He’s more interested in the two tables of voters somewhere out in the audience who might just make that impossible presidential dream come true someday.

  What Lyndon Johnson wants, above all else, is a return to power. He adores power. And he will endure anything to know that heady sensation once again.

  Anything.

  The vice president searches the room for the “Negro tables,” desperate to know if his political gamble will pay off.

  * * *

  Robert Francis Kennedy also wants to be president of the United States.

  With five years to go before the 1968 election, an article by Gore Vidal in Esquire magazine’s March issue picks him to win the Democratic nomination over Lyndon Johnson.

  Bobby Kennedy has become such a political force that even the vice president worries he is powerless to stop Bobby from winning in 1968.

  It all seems so easy: JFK until 1968, then Bobby takes the White House, and then wins again in 1972, and then maybe even Teddy in 1976 and 1980. The Kennedy dynasty is poised to control the American presidency for the next twenty years. It’s almost a sure thing.

  But there are no sure things in politics. And little does LBJ know that insidious forces are possibly targeting Bobby even now—plotting not only the attorney general’s downfall, but that of the entire Kennedy family political dynasty.

  * * *

  August 5, 1962. Marilyn Monroe lies naked facedown on her bed. She is dead. Police investigators see no sign of trauma. The Los Angeles coroner will later conclude that the actress died from an overdose of barbiturates. Yet her stomach is almost completely empty, with no pill residue whatsoever.

  The public instantly chalks up Marilyn’s death to a life of excess. The tabloids have firmly established that she is a substance abuser. So there is little public outcry for a closer look at what happened to the glamorous actress.

  But there is a darker theory circulating in the precincts of organized crime. Mafia lore suggests that the old Sam Giancana–CIA connection from the Operation Mongoose days is still quietly active. The theory holds that Giancana conspired to have Monroe murdered by a team of four hit men who entered her home, taped her mouth shut, and injected a lethal suppository of barbiturates and chloral hydrate into her anus. This was done to prevent the vomiting that often accompanies an oral drug overdose. The tape was removed from her mouth once she was dead, and Monroe’s body wiped clean.

  Giancana’s motivation was revenge for Bobby Kennedy’s ongoing Justice Department investigations into organized criminal activity. The intent of the killers, according to that same Mafia legend, was to implicate Bobby in the murder. However, their plans went awry when Bobby was tipped off by anonymous sources that Marilyn Monroe had unexpectedly died. The attorney general then ordered Peter Lawford to arrange for a private eye named Fred Otash to go over Marilyn’s home with a fine-tooth comb to ensure there was absolutely no evidence of her involvement with the president or the Kennedy family. The two men cleaned up well, even taking Marilyn’s diary.

  There was also, however, the issue of Marilyn’s phone records. These would show whom she was talking to in the last forty-eight hours of her life. The story goes on to say that Bobby Kennedy appealed to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to expunge those records. Not wanting to lose the chance to use Monroe’s death for political gain, the legend continues, Los Angeles police chief William Parker obtained a copy of those records and kept them in his garage for years, as blackmail evidence. The tapes, Parker would say, are “my ticket to get Hoover’s job when Bobby Kennedy becomes president.”

  Peter Lawford will later claim that Bobby was in Monroe’s home that night, having flown down from the Bay Area, where he was staying with Ethel and four of their children. Lawford’s story, not confirmed by anyone, alleges that Marilyn was going to reveal her former relationship with JFK to the press and that Bobby was present in Los Angeles trying to do damage control.

  The recollections of both Lawford and Mafia members have been dissected thoroughly. Neither has been proven true. Nor have the rumors that Bobby and Marilyn were having an affair of their own.

  The facts are that Marilyn Monroe phoned Bobby several times throughout the summer of 1962. She was distraught over the end of her affair with JFK and was openly gossiping about it in Hollywood. The press had begun asking questions about the alleged affair, and it appeared that the matter might surface during the 1964 election. Yet the Northern California ranch where Bobby and his family were staying on the night of Marilyn’s death was an hour from the nearest airport and a five-hour drive from Los Angeles. That makes it highly unlikely that RFK could have slipped away without being noticed.

  Any involvement by Bobby Kennedy in Marilyn Monroe’s death, whether it was suicide or murder, makes it a conspiracy theory without substance to this day.

  There is no question, however, that Monroe’s going public could have been enough to sink a presidential campaign. JFK was perceived to be a dedicated family man. Details of a sordid affair with the flamboyant Monroe would have ruined the image of Camelot.

  With family baggage all over the place, Bobby Kennedy knows he is anything but a sure thing for the presidency. Which m
eans he must work extra hard to discredit his main rival, Lyndon Johnson, before LBJ does the same to him.

  Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy is quietly backing away from his anti-Mafia investigations.

  No sense angering old friends unnecessarily.

  * * *

  LBJ is making new friends. He is thrilled by the presence of black voters at his St. Augustine dinner speech. It is a Monday evening, and the occasion is the five hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding, an event about which LBJ cares little. What matters are the symbolic reasons he flew to Florida in the first place: his courtship of black Americans.

  LBJ’s brown eyes scan the mostly white audience in the Ponce de Léon Hotel’s ballroom. Finally, he locates the so-called Negro tables. The vice president insisted upon this act of integration when accepting the speaking engagement.

  Johnson sees both tables right up front, a handful of black faces in a sea of white southerners. The people seated there nod their heads somberly as he speaks, appreciative just to be in the room. Tonight marks the first time that blacks have been allowed to eat in this fabled hotel, all thanks to LBJ. Two tables aren’t many, and the change is only for tonight, but at least Johnson can return to Washington bragging that he’s on the front lines of the battle for racial equality.

  It’s a powerful feeling. Yet back in Washington, LBJ has all but forgotten what power feels like. On the road, he’s a big deal. People defer to him. He meets with local leaders. He is quoted in the local papers. People want to touch him or enjoy one of his patented high-energy handshakes, the kind where Johnson wraps his meaty fist around another man’s, then holds on for as long as they talk, forging a friendship and, in the old days back in the Senate, winning their vote.

  But he is now invisible in Washington. For Johnson, the Kennedy White House is not Camelot. He compares the experience with another c word: castration. LBJ refers to himself as a “steer” or a “cut dog.” The president deliberately excludes him from important meetings, makes jokes about him behind his back, and ignores him at White House dinner parties—if he even bothers to invite him at all.

  The president isn’t the only one treating Johnson with contempt. Bobby Kennedy thinks LBJ is a political charlatan. Jackie Kennedy keeps her distance. And the White House staff can barely conceal their disdain. “The Harvards,” as Johnson calls them, make fun of his ill-fitting suits, his slicked-back hair, and the twang of his Texas Hill Country accent. When Johnson commits the faux pas of pronouncing hors d’oeuvres as “whore doves” at one party, he instantly becomes the butt of Washington jokes about his hillbilly ways.

  One derogatory nickname for Johnson is “Uncle Cornpone,” as if he were some irrelevant hick instead of the man who got Kennedy elected in 1960 by carrying the Deep South. Some refer to him as “Judge Crater,” for the New York City official who abruptly disappeared in the 1920s and was never seen again. One White House staffer was overheard at a dinner party joking, “Lyndon? Lyndon who?”

  But Johnson is anything but gone, and anything but a hillbilly. During his time as Senate majority leader he was masterful at passing difficult legislation. His favorite biblical verse, Isaiah 1:18, exemplifies his passion for building coalitions: “Come now, let us reason together.”

  Truth be told, the vice president is a complex man, whose tastes run the gamut from spicy deer sausage to Cutty Sark scotch to Viennese waltzes. And he is almost as sexually active as the president—only far more discreet about how he manages his affairs.

  This discretion carries over into politics. The gregarious Johnson has stifled his personality, disciplining himself to be completely silent in meetings in order to avoid offending the president. It’s killing Johnson that he has to endure a nonstop barrage of insults. The vice president has become anxious, depressed, and overeager to please. He barely eats. He has lost so much weight that his always-baggy suits look enormous on him. Even the vice president’s nose and ears appear proportionally larger—like how a political cartoonist might draw him in caricature.

  LBJ has almost nothing to do. His phone barely rings. From his office in the Executive Office Building, he can look out the window and see the comings and goings across the street at the White House. Sometimes the vice president will leave his desk to meander through the West Wing hallways, wishing for a meeting to attend or a decision to make. Other times, he’ll take a seat outside the door to the Oval Office, hoping to catch John Kennedy’s eye and be invited inside.

  But those occasions are fewer and fewer. The president and vice president will spend less than two hours alone in the year 1963.

  Still, Johnson puts up with the abuse. Because, without the vice presidency, he has nothing. There is no Senate opening in Texas for which he can run. And the former Kennedy insider John Connally filled the governor’s seat there just four months ago. But at the end of four more years, Johnson can run for the most powerful job in America.

  And why shouldn’t LBJ be president? He served twelve years in the House of Representatives, twelve more in the Senate, and ruled for six years as majority leader. He is versed in foreign policy and domestic legislation and can give a tutorial on the subtleties of backroom wheeling and dealing. There isn’t a more qualified politician in the land.

  LBJ is fighting for his political life as he locates the two token tables of racial integration in that St. Augustine hotel ballroom. And while the occasion may officially be the anniversary of the city’s founding, it also marks the day when Lyndon Johnson takes a public stand in favor of civil rights.

  The Kennedy brothers have deliberately kept him out of their escalating battle for racial equality. They know that as a southern politician, he could use the issue to gain power.

  Johnson understands this as well. And he does everything he can to be at the forefront of JFK’s civil rights campaign.

  For Johnson, civil rights has nothing to do with right or wrong. Taking this stand just makes good political sense.

  So LBJ waits, castrated and emaciated, hoping it will all pay off.

  * * *

  On March 4, just one week before Lyndon Johnson’s St. Augustine speech, Attorney General Robert Kennedy responds to the Esquire story by telling the press, “I have no plans to run at this time”—which the media know to be code for “I’m running.”

  But is he qualified? Bobby Kennedy is a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, and he’s an attorney general who got the job because of his father and brother. Since then, he has often ignored his duties at the Justice Department to serve as JFK’s mouthpiece and sounding board. And the CIA certainly doesn’t approve of his job performance. One popular bumper sticker at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters reads “First Ethel, Now Us.”

  But the world is changing drastically, and Bobby Kennedy reflects the youth and vitality of Camelot instead of the stodgy cold war values synonymous with the older Johnson. American culture is under siege by new influences.

  A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first album.

  A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.

  Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women’s movement with her book The Feminine Mystique.

  The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover’s world by creating a domestic operations division.

  Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.

  The one thing Bobby can’t stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.

  Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable man I know.”

 
And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.

  * * *

  Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.

  On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson’s speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it’s a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman magazine. The Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, model 91/38, was made in 1940 and originally designed for the Italian infantry during World War II. This is not a gun designed for hunting animals, but for shooting men. As a former Marine Corps sharpshooter, Oswald knows the difference, just as he also knows how to clean, maintain, load, aim, and accurately fire such a weapon.

  Of all the amazing things happening in the world in March 1963, this simple mail-order purchase would seem to have little significance. In fact, nothing will have a greater impact on world events than this nineteen-dollar Italian war-surplus bolt-action rifle.

  The weapon arrives on March 25. Marina complains that they could have used the money for food. But Oswald is pleased with the purchase and gets in the habit of riding the bus to a dry riverbed for target practice against the levee.

  On March 31, while Marina is hanging diapers on the clothesline to dry, Oswald steps into the backyard dressed all in black. His new pistol is tucked into his belt. He brandishes the rifle in one hand and holds copies of two Communist newspapers in the other. He demands that an amused Marina take photographs of him. He plans to send them to the Worker and the Militant to show that he is prepared to do anything to wage class warfare.

  On April 6, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His Communist rants have grown offensive to his coworkers, and his bosses claim that he has become undependable.