Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Bobby Kennedy was not alone in his reservations about the president’s upcoming trip. Senators were prominent among those who, in turn, urged Kennedy not to go to Texas, and especially not to Dallas. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, made it plain that Kennedy should go nowhere near the city, especially after the Dallas Morning News fiercely attacked the president for his supposedly insufficient opposition to communist aggression. The editorial’s vehemence reflected the depths of loathing Kennedy could expect, Fulbright told the White House. Seven weeks earlier, on the day before Kennedy’s final trip-planning conference with Governor John Connally, Fulbright, of the neighboring state of Arkansas, virtually pleaded with the President to skip Dallas. Any political gain in the city wasn’t worth it, he urged.

  On U.N. Day, October 24th, almost exactly a month before the trip’s Thursday morning take-off, Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., had urged a fundamental reconsideration of the trip after right-wing extremists in Dallas had struck and spat at him. Stevenson was stunned; the malevolence in Dallas surpassed even what he had anticipated.3

  A week later, on November 4th, Byron Skelton, a sober Democratic National Committeeman from Texas, asked Robert Kennedy to earnestly consider dropping Dallas from the president’s itinerary. Skelton cited a prominent Dallas resident’s recent pronouncement that Kennedy was “a liability to the free world.” That, in addition to what the Committeeman had seen in the city while making preparations for the trip, convinced him that Dallas simply wasn’t safe. Skelton wrote Bobby Kennedy directly:

  I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas. . . A man who would make this kind of statement [“Kennedy is a liability to the free world”] is capable of doing harm to the President. [I would] feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. . . [Cancellation of the stop] should receive earnest consideration.4

  Bobby knew and trusted Skelton. He therefore took the letter seriously, forwarding it to JFK aide Kenny O’Donnell, who didn’t treat it the same way. Skelton then wrote LBJ’s right-hand man, Walter Jenkins, urging the same course. Skelton felt so passionately about bypassing Dallas that he flew to Washington to plead his case.

  Even Governor John Connally intervened, asking Kennedy to re-consider the stop in Dallas, where people, he warned, might be “too emotional.” Private citizens echoed these admonitions throughout October and November. Anne Brinkley, wife of newscaster David Brinkley, delivered her warning the evening before the trip, at a birthday party for Robert Kennedy. That happy gathering was otherwise noteworthy because Ethel Kennedy, Robert’s wife, dropped her usual bantering toasts for a solemn request that guests drink to the President of the United States.

  None of these people had access to the voluminous record of threats against JFK’s life. Secret Service files were spilling over with warnings, almost all issued by crackpots, but a dozen or so by men who thirsted for vengeance and consorted with professional killers. Kennedy’s friends and associates knew nothing about those potentially real threats, which should have been investigated with all possible means. They recognized only that Dallas was a dangerous place. The menace lay not in an uncounted number of lone, unknown Marxist assassins, but in known radical conservatives whose passions included a love of guns and a regular use of them.

  This belief in the possibility of danger was not the product of prejudice against the city. Many Dallas residents agreed with the assessment. Natives and residents of varied backgrounds, including members of the civic leadership and federal judges and attorneys, urged planners of the trip to call it off. The city harbored too much malice toward Washington in general and the Chief Executive in particular, they said. The danger couldn’t be exaggerated. That fact was driven home again and again, often just days before the Dallas trip.

  Early in November, the president’s visit to Chicago to attend the Army-Navy football game was dropped, ostensibly because the president needed the time to deliberate about the increasingly worrisome war in Vietnam. In fact, Secret Service officers had gotten wind of an assassination plot, soon traced to Cuban exiles excluded from the Kennedy-exile loop. Their plan had been to kill the President in Chicago Stadium.

  On November 9th, just two weeks before Kennedy arrived in Dallas, a right-wing militant in Miami specified how the presidential killing would be accomplished: from a high building during a motorcade in a city of the south or southwest, using gunfire from several locations, and channeling blame to a patsy. A FBI informant taped the eerie prediction. The threat was particularly vexing, because President Kennedy was scheduled to arrive in Miami in just over a week.

  The Kennedy trip to Florida nine days later, on November 18, was not cancelled. However, Kennedy’s planned time in the city was shortened and security was reinforced, especially at the airport, after more talk was overheard about an attempt to damage Air Force One. The Miami leg of the trip was complicated by a number of security problems, including more threats on the President’s life. During the Miami stopover, Harry Williams, the Cuban exile known as “Bobby’s Boy,” was assigned to handle a potentially dangerous situation. Williams recalled the incident in 1993:

  I was given a list by the Secret Service with the names of five people on it. They were members of the [2506] Brigade who said they were going to kill President Kennedy. I didn’t know the guys. I got into a car, picked them up, and took them to Key West, where we rented a motel and kept them there while Kennedy was in Miami. The Kennedys were definitely worried about the Cubans in Miami.5

  While in Miami, Kennedy delivered a speech in which he all but encouraged an overthrow of the Castro government, which he severely criticized and termed a “barrier” to any improvement in relations between Washington and Havana. The Miami Herald headlined its coverage of the speech, “Kennedy Invites Coup.”

  When AM/LASH’s case officer, Nestor Sanchez, met with AM/LASH four days later, he informed the potential assassin that the speech was, in fact, written by the CIA’s Desmond FitzGerald. The article and headline, planted in the paper via CIA source Hal Hendrix, were meant to signal not only Cubela (AM/LASH), but also internal Cuban dissidents, that the U.S.-supported coup was imminent.6 According to CIA officer Seymour Bolton, President Kennedy personally approved the secret-encoded message to Cubela. A decade after the fact, Bolton told a congressional investigator that he personally carried the key paragraph from CIA headquarters to the White House for Kennedy’s approval. Bolton told the investigator in the strongest terms that there was “no difference between Kennedy’s policy and the CIA’s policy.”7 (As he had so often, JFK was again following Eisenhower’s precedent. In advance of the 1953 coup in Iran, CIA Director Allen Dulles worked with White House speechwriters to insert a message in one of Ike’s speeches, providing a signal to their co-insurgents in Iran.)8

  Bobby Kennedy had begun to worry about his brother’s forays into hostile U.S. cities, but his older brother John, a politician to the last, was undeterred. He didn’t like this aspect of the job, but he knew it to be a necessity, and accepted the attendant risk.

  Kennedy and Death

  “It [death] didn’t really concern him. He never thought he was going to live to be an old man anyway.”

  —An anonymous JFK aide to New York Times reporter Tom Wicker9

  To his confidantes, Kennedy openly expressed distaste for his Texas chore. He told Senator George Smathers of Florida that he wished he could escape the “pain in the neck” trip to Texas. But it was more the inconvenience of having to raise money than the death threats that bothered the President. Kennedy was a legendary fatalist (some even ventured that he had a “death wish”), whose disdain of security protocols had given the Secret Service a three-year headache.

  It wasn’t unnatural for John Kennedy to have occasional thoughts of expiring before he left office. Two of his six siblings had died well before their prime, and one had been lobotomized to near mental-death. The family that was uncommonly lucky in
the procurement of great wealth kept getting the worst rolls of the dice on airplanes and in other personal matters.

  Kennedy dwelled on death more than occasionally—often enough to say it seemed sometimes to preoccupy him. Decor in his office included lines from one of his favorite poems, which concerned death. Jackie would later describe him as haunted by “the poignancy of men dying young.”

  Kennedy’s aides, always alert to the boss’ whims and moods, remembered his moments of reflection as much as the incidents that threatened him: the times when the President would observe that it could be all over now if the man at the back of the crowd were a fanatic or if the fan in the bleachers had a gun in his hand instead of a score card or beer can.

  More than anything, they remembered his tendency to joke about the danger, as about so much else. When a California admirer tossed a little gift into the president’s car, Kennedy quipped to Dave Powers, his longest-serving aide, confidante, and crony, that he, Powers, wouldn’t be around if that “admirer” actually had wanted to get rid of Kennedy. When another car sped past Kennedy’s in Virginia shortly before his Texas trip, he observed to another old friend: “They could have shot you, Charlie.” That was among the weaker demonstrations of Kennedy’s wit, but it displayed both his attention to the possibility of death at any time and his natural tendency to jest about everything. Except in extremis, he could not be solemn even about the most serious subjects.

  Returning from a trip, Kennedy would often remark that he’d been lucky enough, “Thank God,” not to have been killed that day. He said this with his customary conversational buoyancy, but psychological expertise is not required to suspect that dark thoughts prompted his black humor. JFK’s private conversations with friends and cronies were known to have included his queries about how they would like to die. When one of them thought to turn the tables and ask his preference, he answered without hesitation: in an airplane. Why there? Because it would be quick, replied the president.

  Even less avid readers of history know that Presidents are, in a sense, an endangered species. Two assassination attempts on his predecessors had failed; three had succeeded. Kennedy spoke of the act often enough for mystics to speculate that he had a premonition of being the next to die. He even composed a scene of how it might happen.

  In September 1963, he had, in fact, written and acted in a brief home movie about his assassination—not the imminent one, but a fictional episode, shot for amusement on Labor Day weekend, 12 weeks before his Texas trip. Following his own script while a White House photographer’s camera rolled for several takes, Kennedy disembarked from the “Honey Fitz,” the family’s yacht, and walked down a pier at the Rhode Island estate of his wife’s parents. Suddenly, he clutched his chest and fell to the boards. Jackie and a visitor casually stepped over him, as if he weren’t there. Paul Fay, an Undersecretary of the Navy and Kennedy’s buddy from World War II, then fell on the body, sending a gush of red liquid spurting from the President’s mouth. The few lines of dialogue were never revealed—for 20 years, the film’s existence was kept secret as well. Reporters and Secret Service agents who observed its production respected Kennedy’s wish for privacy.

  Kennedy’s attitude toward the security designed to protect him was a mixture of nonchalance and resignation, flavored with a pinch of morbidity and self-mockery. Given how aware he was that his life could easily be threatened or taken, his behavior, at times, had to be called cavalier, especially when considering his extraordinary sexual libido. He would often ignore all precautions and violate all rules in the pursuit of a “skirt.” On other occasions, he would be exasperated by what he termed overzealous measures, as when teams of Secret Service agents patrolled empty beaches. Sometimes, he even sent the agents away—U.S. law permitted him to at the time.

  Ordinarily, however, he tolerated the very burdensome precautions—which had Secret Service personnel all but accompany members of the family to the toilet—with passable humor, even while doubting that the most elaborate, expensive protection could save him against a truly determined killer. “If they’re going to get me, they’ll get me even in church,” he liked to say to Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary. Jackie’s attitude was even more fatalistic than her husband’s. “Oh shit,” she would say “They’ll get us one day.”10

  Kennedy was only partially right: he could indeed be killed even in church—but only if the killer had out-thought the meticulous security apparatus of the presidency, or was willing to die himself. There was no right way to balance the demands of politics, which required mixing with people, and of protection, which required keeping a distance from them; between living as the energetic, uncommonly inquisitive President liked to live, and existing in a cage.

  About 25,000 threats were reportedly logged during Kennedy’s 34 months as President (actual figures have not been released): again, the vast majority were made by crackpots, but some came from potentially real assassins. In 1976, the Secret Service released a report indicating that its “Security Index” listed one million people as potential threats to Kennedy at the time of his death.11

  The Fateful Trip

  “Oh God, how I wish we could change places.”

  —President Kennedy to Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon on November 20th, as Dillon began a trip to Japan

  Jacqueline Kennedy’s decision to accompany her husband on the Texas tour surprised the President’s advisors. Jackie disdained the posturing good politics required. Campaigning smacked of favor-mongering, which ran counter to her boarding school concept of good manners.

  Jackie’s upbringing had been amidst old money. There, she was taught that her duty lay in setting style and culture. Her milieu was the drawing rooms of Europe and the American Northeast. She observed the forms—as a well-trained political wife must—but when she volunteered to go into deepest, darkest Texas, where the gauche flower of new money could be found in its most pristine state, more than a few eyebrows were raised.

  There was no mystery behind her decision. Jackie had recently given birth to a premature infant. His death had reawakened both spouses’ human sensitivity, and the Kennedy marriage.

  During the Houston leg of the Texas trip, the presidential advance man in charge, Marty Underwood, observed, “They were all over each other. . . crazy about each other.”12 They made more public displays of affection than was typical of their relationship. Underwood, like others, attributed the warming of their tumultuous marriage to Patrick’s recent death. “It was the first time Kennedy knew love,” Underwood says.

  During the San Antonio leg of the trip, President Kennedy helped dedicate the Air Force School of Aero-Medicine. At one point, he turned to a scientist involved in oxygen chamber research. Kennedy asked him if his space-related work might lead to improved oxygen chambers for premature babies. “The death of his infant son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was still weighing on his mind,” wrote aide Kenny O’Donnell.13 In Houston, Jackie pledged to her husband, “I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”14

  The President’s delight about Jackie’s decision was obvious to all. “Jackie will show those Texas broads a thing or two about fashion,” Kennedy remarked.15 If Jack saw her as an ornament on this trip, it was a precious one. Revealing the importance he attached to it, he took unusual pains to please her so she would look and feel her best. Ordinarily, he did not involve himself at all in her choice of clothes. This time, before their departure, he reviewed her wardrobe and stressed the importance of looking splendid—in particular, “as marvelous” as any of the “rich Republican women” of Dallas, in their furs and jewels. “Be simple,” he prompted. “Show these Texans what good taste really is.”

  President Kennedy’s helicopter took him (and travel companions) from the White House grounds to Andrews Air Force Base in less than five minutes. Nine minutes after that, at 11:05 on Thursday morning, November 21st, Air Force One revved its engines and took off. Tanned from a brief visit to the Florida family compound earlier in the week, tone
d by two long swims in the White House pool the previous day, Kennedy looked ready and fit. Few knew how much he looked forward to the return flight four days later—just in time to celebrate young John, Jr.’s birthday.

  Once having decided to travel, Kennedy assumed his outwardly insouciant form. The presidential Boeing 707, designed by the celebrated Raymond Loewy, featured a comfortable double bedroom, with a bathroom in the suite. Forward of the bedroom, in the quiet, finely-appointed stateroom, the Chief Executive read from the five newspapers and 15 magazines to which Air Force One subscribed, scanned secret military and intelligence reports, and studied a briefing book for a state visit by West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, scheduled to arrive in Washington on Monday, four days hence. He also got up from his desk to talk with Secret Service agents and members of the White House press pool. Four veteran newsmen represented dozens of others in a chartered plane following closely behind. In the plush presidential plane, Kennedy was his usual off-stage self, exchanging wise-cracks with reporters, most of whom adored him.

  However, speaking at the huge Houston Coliseum later that evening, the President would be so nervous that his hands, which he had learned to conceal from sight, trembled violently.

  Texas

  “Don’t let the President come down here. . . I think something terrible will happen to him.”

  —A Dallas woman to Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s Press Secretary

  “If I did see him [Kennedy], I’d just spit in his face.”

  —A Dallas schoolteacher explaining to her students why, the next day, they wouldn’t be excused, as promised, to see the presidential motorcade