Killing Kennedy

by O’Reilly, Bill

  J. Edgar Hoover survived the attempts of several presidents to replace him as director of the FBI. There were many rumors that Hoover was homosexual, based on his close relationship with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the bureau. Well after JFK’s death, Hoover continued his practice of providing presidents with lurid classified files containing the personal indiscretions of high-ranking and influential individuals. Lyndon Johnson took full advantage of this practice. Soon after ascending to the presidency, he requested thick personal dossiers on each of “The Harvards”: those members of the Kennedy administration who had once taken such great delight in taunting him. On an even larger scale, Johnson asked Hoover to dig up information on some twelve hundred real or imagined adversaries. J. Edgar Hoover, who like LBJ had felt personally humiliated by the Kennedys during JFK’s time in office, was only too happy to comply. Lyndon Johnson returned the favor by issuing an executive order precluding Hoover from compulsory retirement, thus allowing the director to remain in charge of the FBI until his death in 1972 at the age of seventy-seven.

  John Connally survived his Dallas wounds and went on to serve two terms as governor of Texas before returning to Washington to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury. He switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and ran for president in 1980. However, his campaign floundered badly, and he was forced to drop out after securing just one delegate. John Connally died of pulmonary fibrosis on June 15, 1993. He was seventy-six years old.

  Marina Oswald never returned to the Soviet Union. She is still alive and has lived in Dallas for many years. She remarried, briefly, and had a son by her second marriage, which ended in divorce. Like her daughters, June and Audrey (who now goes by the name Rachel Porter), the stigma of Lee Harvey Oswald has followed her since November 22, 1963. The girls even took the name of their stepfather, Porter, to avoid greater public scrutiny. Now and again Lee Harvey Oswald’s family makes television appearances, but otherwise their lives are largely private.

  In March of 1977 a young television reporter at WFAA in Dallas began looking into the Kennedy assassination. As part of his reporting, he sought an interview with the shadowy Russian college professor who had befriended the Oswalds upon their arrival in Dallas in 1962. The reporter traced George de Mohrenschildt to Palm Beach, Florida, and traveled there to confront him. At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a congressional committee looking into the events of November 1963. As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood.

  By the way, that reporter’s name is Bill O’Reilly.

  One footnote: A year earlier, de Mohrenschildt sent a letter to George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA. In that letter, the Russian asked protection from people “following” him. That correspondence with Mr. Bush led to speculation that de Mohrenschildt had CIA ties—and also possessed undisclosed knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.

  Another former director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, died of a severe case of the flu in 1969, at the age of seventy-five. To this day, conspiratorialists believe that Dulles was involved in the Kennedy assassination as payback for his firing in the wake of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Dulles also served on the Warren Commission, the panel that investigated JFK’s shooting.

  Sam Giancana, the Chicago mobster, was also thought by conspiracy theorists to be tied to the Kennedy assassination. Giancana was due to testify before a Senate panel investigating whether the CIA and the Mafia had any ties to the murder. Before he could testify, Giancana himself was murdered in his home on June 19, 1975. His assassin shot him in the back of the head, then rolled the body over and emptied the rest of the clip into Giancana’s face. The killer was never caught.

  Frank Sinatra became a Republican in the years after John Kennedy’s Palm Springs snub and was a well-known supporter of President Ronald Reagan. But the singer remained largely silent on his feelings toward JFK. Not so Peter Lawford, the man John Kennedy forced to make the phone call telling Sinatra that the president would be staying elsewhere during his Palm Springs visit. In 1966, Lawford divorced JFK’s sister Patricia and began making sordid accusations against the Kennedy family. Among them was that Marilyn Monroe had had an affair with Bobby Kennedy as well as JFK, and that Bobby was complicit in Monroe’s death. Those charges came at a time when Lawford had lost his acting career to philandering, drinking, and drugs—and remain unproven. Peter Lawford died in 1984 from cardiac arrest brought on by liver failure. He was sixty-one years old.

  Greta Garbo lived to the age of eighty-four, dying in New York City on April 15, 1990. She was a recluse to the end of her life, never marrying or having children, and always living alone. The legendary actress, however, was fond of taking long walks through the streets of New York, most often wearing a pair of oversize sunglasses—a habit that her admirer, Jackie Kennedy, would also assume. Garbo was very good with her money, and though she had been retired for nearly forty years at the time of her death, she left an estate to her niece worth more than $32 million.

  It has been argued that Camelot was a myth concocted by Jackie Kennedy to burnish her husband’s legacy. Whether or not the comparisons to Camelot were discussed in the Kennedy White House during the president’s lifetime is unclear. But the comparisons are apt and, as Jackie had hoped, the story of Camelot shaped how her husband’s presidency is remembered to this day.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy is buried on a slope near the former home of Robert E. Lee, in Arlington National Cemetery, the place he so admired just a few weeks before his death. He is one of only two presidents buried there—the other being William Howard Taft, who died in 1930.

  Jackie Kennedy was insistent that her husband’s funeral be as much like Abraham Lincoln’s as possible. Professor James Robertson Jr., director of the Civil War Centennial Commission, and David Mearns from the Library of Congress were enlisted to research Lincoln’s funeral in the short span between JFK’s assassination and his burial. The East Room of the White House was transformed so that it looked almost exactly as it did when it held Lincoln’s body in 1865. Also, the caisson and funeral procession through Washington, D.C., were copied from Lincoln’s final journey.

  John Kennedy’s burial site at Arlington is lit by an eternal flame, at the suggestion of Jackie Kennedy. It burns at the center of a five-foot circular slab of Cape Cod granite. Jackie rests next to him, as do their two deceased infants, Arabella and Patrick. Television coverage of John Kennedy’s funeral transformed Arlington from the burial place of soldiers and sailors into a popular tourist destination. To this day, no place in Arlington is more popular than the grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A generation after his assassination, more than four million people a year still arrive at Arlington to pay their respects to the fallen president.

  And also to the grand American vision that he represented.

  Epilogue

  We began this book associating John F. Kennedy with Abraham Lincoln. And so shall we end it.

  On February 10, 1962, JFK wrote a letter to Washington lawyer Ralph E. Becker. The letter was to be read at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout his presidency, John Kennedy often referenced Abraham Lincoln. There was a strong connection between the two men. The following letter is the best evidence that John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were indeed kindred spirits.

  Sources

  This book required both primary and secondary source research. Much of the primary material came from interviews and reporting that Bill O’Reilly has done over the years. In fact, he won a Dallas Press Club Award for his reporting on the JFK assassination while at WFAA-TV. Extensive new information was gleaned from a variety of law enforcement agents, in particular Richard Wiehl, the FBI agent assigned to investigate and debrief Marina Oswald after the shooting. We are grateful to Mr.
Wiehl, who has never spoken before on the record about his findings.

  The life and death of John Kennedy needs no embellishment. It stands alone as a riveting period in history. But since many of the events recounted in this book are so fantastic and also so horrific, and because so many of the details are rather intimate, it’s important to remind the reader that Killing Kennedy is completely a work of nonfiction. It’s all true. The actions of each individual and the events that took place really happened. The quotations are words people actually spoke. Those details are made possible in large part because JFK is a contemporary historical figure whose entire presidency was thoroughly documented by all manner of media.

  This sheer volume of material available on the life and death of John F. Kennedy allowed for unexpected research delights when compiling the manuscript. Not only were there a number of first-person manuscripts that provided specific details about meetings, conversations, and events, but there is also extensive Internet video of JFK’s speeches and television appearances, which brought his words and voice to life during each writing day. For readers, taking the time to find and watch these will add immeasurably to learning more about John Kennedy. The reader is directed, specifically, toward the 1963 Galway speech as an example of the president’s wit, warmth, and presence.

  To hear about life inside the Kennedy White House from Jackie herself, listen to Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, a series of recordings she made not long after the assassination. It is remarkable to hear the candor with which the former First Lady speaks, particularly when she opens up about so many of the most famous and powerful figures in the world at that time. Like her husband, her wit, warmth, and sheer presence are palpable.

  The authors owe a special debt to the team of Laurie Austin and Stacey Chandler at the Kennedy Library. No research request was too big or too small, and suffice it to say that it was quite a historical rush to receive, for instance, copies of John Kennedy’s actual daily schedule, showing his precise location, the names of different people at various meetings, and the time each afternoon he slipped off to the pool or to “the Mansion.” To read these schedules was to see the president’s day come alive and gave a vivid feel of what life was like in the White House. When in Boston, a visit to the Kennedy Library is a must.

  Special recognition must also go to William Manchester’s Death of a President, which was written shortly after the assassination and built around first-person interviews with almost everyone who was with JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Manchester’s work was written with the complete cooperation of Jackie and the Kennedy family. The level of detail is fantastic for that very fact and proved invaluable as the ultimate answer to many questions when other resources conflicted with one another.

  The backbone of this book are books, magazine articles, videos, the much-maligned but always fascinating Warren Commission Report, and visits to places such as Dallas, Washington, Galway, and the Texas Hill Country. The authors owe a debt of gratitude to the many brilliant researchers who have immersed themselves in the life and times of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. What follows is a detailed reference to sources. This list, however, is not exhaustive and includes only those works used for the heavy lifting of writing history.

  Prologue: Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Karen Price Hossell’s John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Speech, and Thurston Clarke’s Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America. Todd S. Purdum’s February 2011 Vanity Fair piece on the inauguration was also very helpful, as were the National Archives database and the Warren Commission Report.

  Chapter 1: John Hersey’s 1944 New Yorker story about PT-109 provided the best account of the ordeal. Lance Morrow’s The Best Years of Their Lives, which is a quick and fascinating read, nicely counterbalances Hersey’s sometimes fawning version of events. Details about the Gold Star Mothers speech and the birth of the Irish Mafia can be found in William Manchester’s One Brief Shining Moment.

  Chapter 2: The White House Museum website offers a fine map of the entire building, along with its history in words and pictures. Also, Robert Dallek’s writing on JFK’s myriad medical woes was very helpful in our getting a handle on the many medications the president was required to take. The Kennedy Library’s website is a great source of detail on life in the White House. Information on Jackie comes courtesy of Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power.

  Chapter 3: William R. Fails’s Marines and Helicopters details the evolution of presidential transportation, while Dallek’s An Unfinished Life and Humberto Fontova’s Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant lend detail to the Castro atrocities. The weather comes courtesy of the Farmers’ Almanac, while Manchester’s Brief Shining Moment adds behind-the-scenes comments on the president’s thoughts on the Bay of Pigs. Other notable resources: Dean Rusk’s As I Saw It, Edward R. Drachman and Alan Shank’s Presidents and Foreign Policy, Michael O’Brien’s John F. Kennedy: A Biography, Thomas G. Paterson’s Kennedy’s Quest for Victory, Jim Rasenberger’s The Brilliant Disaster, James Hilty’s Robert Kennedy, Richard Mahoney’s Sons and Brothers, and Richard Goodwin’s excellent Remembering America.

  Chapter 4: The reader is directed to go online and watch Jackie’s excellent White House tour, particularly the body language between the president and First Lady at the end. Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot was only too happy to spill the secrets of White House infidelities, while Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power, Christopher Andersen’s Jack and Jackie, Laurence Leamer’s The Kennedy Women, and C. David Heymann’s A Woman Named Jackie seem more intent on understanding the reasons why.

  Chapter 5: The JFK Library and Jackie’s own words in Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy speak to the topic of Camelot, as does Sally Bedell Smith’s May 2004 Vanity Fair piece, “Private Camelot.” Randy J. Taraborrelli’s The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe; The Sinatra Files, by Tom and Phil Kuntz; and the FBI’s dossier on Sinatra add compelling detail to the goings-on in Palm Springs. Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy provides insight into RFK. Hersh’s Dark Side of Camelot was also invaluable. JFK’s comments about the chase came from the U.S. News and World Report (May 9, 2004) interview with Sally Bedell Smith. The Gallup Poll’s website offered information on approval ratings, while Sam and Chuck Giancana’s Double Cross provided background on the various potential Mafia plots against Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers.

  Chapter 6: The Kennedy Library’s website has a feature that allows you to browse the New York Times by date. This provides much of the background information on the travels of the president, the atrocities in East Berlin, and the world’s interest in matters such as Soviet cosmonauts and the revolutionary radio telephone. Robert Caro’s Passage of Power was a treasure trove of information about the habits of Lyndon Johnson, particularly his travails as vice president. Details about life in the Deep South come from FBI reports documenting that period, while the story of Emmett Till came directly from his killers’ Look magazine article, along with other sources that add more dimension, and from the Ebony magazine photograph showing his battered and flattened head. Dave Garrow’s Atlantic Monthly piece of July/August 2002 documents the FBI’s fascination with Martin Luther King Jr. FBI special agent Fain’s recollection of Lee Harvey Oswald comes from Fain’s Warren Commission testimony.

  Chapter 7: Photographs of JFK’s bedroom can be seen at www.whitehousemuseum.org, and further detail can be found in Manchester’s Brief Shining Moment. More White House history can be found at www.whitehouse.gov; Jackie Kennedy speaks a great deal about their life there in Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. Specific conversations during the Cuban missile crisis can be found in The Kennedy Tapes, by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, and in Ted Kennedy’s True Compass. Also of note: Stern’s The Week the World Stood Still; the archive file of Dean Rusk’s meeting with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko; Charles Tustin Kamps’s The Cuban
Missile Crisis; Jackie, Ethel, and Joan, by Randy J. Taraborrelli; The Mind of Oswald, by Diane Holloway; Khrushchev, by William Taubman; and The Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, by the late Soviet dictator. Robert Dallek’s Atlantic story about Kennedy’s medical woes (December 2002) was also very helpful.

  Chapter 8: Believe it or not, the Mona Lisa’s unveiling can be found on YouTube. Fascinating stuff. Mona Lisa in Camelot, by Margaret Leslie Davis, sheds light on this improbable chapter in our nation’s history. The glossary of Manchester’s Death of a President provides the Secret Service code names, while the Warren Commission Report includes a solid summary on the history of presidential assassination and the need for a Secret Service. The Secret Service’s own website shows this, too. Much of the behind-the-scenes information about the various agents and their details can be found in Clint Hill’s Mrs. Kennedy and Me, and in Gerald Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail. Edward Klein’s All Too Human was also very helpful.

  Chapter 9: Caro provides more great detail on LBJ in Passage to Power. The Giancanas’ Double Cross goes further into the Mafia conspiracies. These conspiracies are not presented as facts in this book, but as theories—and Double Cross lays out these possibilities very nicely. Also of note in this chapter: Evan Thomas’s Bobby Kennedy, Burton Hersh’s Bobby and J. Edgar, Edward Klein’s All Too Human, Jim Marrs’s Crossfire, and the LBJ Library’s website.