“Now Peace Is Up to You”
All autumn it had been cold and rainy in Washington. As Robert Kennedy recalled, by mid-November 1963, his brother was feeling “rather gloomy.” One reason for the President’s melancholy may have been that the bloom seemed to be fading from the rose of rapprochement with the Soviet Union.
Another source of gloom was Vietnam. As Kennedy had feared, the coup in Saigon was producing more turmoil. Soon he would have to decide how far the United States would go to defend South Vietnam. Still another source was the prospect of running for reelection against the John Birch Society and millions of others who were seething over civil rights and the Soviet détente.
Nowhere was the hatred more intense than in Texas, where the President was to make a “nonpolitical” tour. Whatever its billing, the trip’s main purpose was to raise campaign money and resolve a bitter feud between the state’s two senior Democrats, the conservative Governor John Connally and the liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough. Kennedy feared that the feud between the two men might harm his chances to win the state in 1964.
From Dallas, the President was to fly to a Democratic fund-raising dinner in Austin, where he would be introduced by his Vice President. Defensive about the second largest city in his home state, Johnson remembered that Stevenson had been spat upon during an October visit. He told aides that he intended to open his speech with a joke: “Mr. President, thank God you made it out of Dallas alive!”
Kennedy spent the last weekend of his life at Palm Beach with his Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald, with whom he had dined at the Carlyle on the eve of the Missile Crisis. Macdonald recalled, “It was like being back in 1939, when there was nothing of moment on anybody’s mind.”
Bundy sent the President weekend reading: “A paper showing the German military mind at work.… Zbigniew Brzezinski meets the press, and I think you may find it more interesting in that it shows a somewhat more balanced view than some other remarks of his.… George Ball’s views on the handling of less developed countries.… A good summary of the situation in Yemen.… The joys of public celebration in Indonesia.”
On Saturday morning, Kennedy and Macdonald flew to Cape Canaveral and joined Lyndon Johnson to watch a Polaris missile firing. Returned to Palm Beach the next day, the President bet his chum that the Chicago Bears would defeat the Green Bay Packers and collected his money after they watched the victory on television. That evening, they screened the new film of Henry Fielding’s bawdy classic Tom Jones.
Before Kennedy’s Florida trip, the FBI and Secret Service had received information that anti-Castro exiles might erupt in violence against him. During the Canaveral visit, the President had ordered a Secret Service agent to “keep those Ivy League charlatans off the back of the car.” This was the same occasion on which he overruled the agents and told his Vice President to “get in my plane,” laughingly asking, “Don’t you fellows want McCormack as President?”
On Monday, Kennedy returned to Washington on Air Force One. His back hurt. Lying on his stateroom bed, he summoned George Smathers from the front of the plane: “God, I wish you could think of some way of getting me out of going to Texas.… Look how screwed up it’s going to be. You’ve got Lyndon, who is insisting that Jackie ride with him. You’ve got Ralph Yarborough, who hates Lyndon, and Johnson doesn’t want Yarborough with him. Connally is the Governor.
“They’re all prima donnas of the biggest order, and they’re all insisting that they ride either with me or with Jackie. The law says the Vice President can’t ride with the President. I’ve got to start off my speech by saying what a fine guy Johnson is, then what a fine guy Connally is, and then Yarborough, and they all don’t like each other. I just wish to hell I didn’t have to go. Can’t you think of some emergency we could have?”
Smathers reminded him how the Vice President was looking forward to entertaining the President and First Lady at the LBJ Ranch at the end of the trip: “Even if you declared war, Johnson would never forgive you if you didn’t go.”
He recalled going with Kennedy to the ranch after the 1960 election. Johnson had roused Kennedy before dawn, after which he gave him a high-powered rifle and took him off in his white Cadillac. When a deer sauntered by, Johnson cried out, “Shoot! Shoot!” Kennedy used his rifle and rushed back to the car, trying to put the “defenseless beautiful deer” out of his mind. He later carped to Smathers, “That will never be a sport until they give the deer a gun.”*
On Tuesday, November 19, Bundy dropped by the Oval Office before flying with McNamara to Honolulu for a meeting on Vietnam. John, Jr., gave Bundy a mock serving of what he called his “cherry vanilla pie.” Bundy pronounced it “delicious” and said farewell to his boss.
That afternoon, Richard Helms and a CIA Latin America expert named Hershel Peake called on Robert Kennedy. As Helms recalled, “We had been for a long time looking for hard evidence that the Cubans were exporting revolution to Latin America.”
Now his men had discovered a three-ton Cuban arms cache left by terrorists on a Venezuelan beach, as well as blueprints for a coup against President Romulo Betancourt, whom Castro reviled as a “bourgeois liberal.” Starting with the strangulation of Caracas auto traffic, the plan was to seize control of Venezuela by halting the national elections scheduled for the first of December. So far, no American officials knew about the new evidence except for the CIA.
Helms knew that in response to the evidence Kennedy “wasn’t going to invade Cuba, for goddamn sure.” He presumed that any efforts the President was making for an accommodation with Castro were at best “a feint”: “Like most two-track policies, try everything.” He was certain that the administration’s “real energy” on Cuba was going into covert action.
Helms had brought Peake to provide technical details that would help him to make “an undeniable case.” He told the Attorney General, “You told me that the reason the President wasn’t pressing Castro any more aggressively was the lack of hard evidence. Well, here it is.” Helms produced one of the rifles from the arms cache. As he later recalled, Robert “didn’t fight me about it.” Instead he called the President and said, “I’m going to send these guys over.”
The two CIA men went to the West Wing and waited in the Cabinet Room, leaving on the long table the briefcase containing what Helms recalled as “this vicious-looking weapon.” At 6:15 P.M., they handed Kennedy the rifle. As the President scrutinized it, Helms showed him how its Cuban coat-of-arms had been sanded off.
At his press conference exactly one year ago tomorrow, Kennedy had settled the Missile Crisis by pledging peace in the Caribbean “if all offensive weapons systems are removed from Cuba” and “if Cuba is not used for the export of aggressive Communist purposes.” When they learned of this evidence showing that Cuba was being used to export communism, would his Republican critics demand that he disturb the peace in the Caribbean?
They were likely to press for fresh belligerent action against Cuba, perhaps renewal of the naval blockade, which would further sour the new relationship with Moscow. Kennedy knew that if he did nothing, word of the evidence from Venezuela would almost certainly be leaked to the press. With the election year one month away, his critics would demand to know why he was allowing Khrushchev to welsh on his promises without penalty.
The President was not about to discuss such political matters with the chief of covert operations. He let Helms see nothing but delight that the CIA had found evidence of Castro’s malign intentions for Latin America. He reminded Helms that he was leaving soon for Texas: “Great work. Be sure to have complete information for me when I get back from my trip. I think maybe we’ve got him now.”
On Wednesday, November 20, visiting his old political base in Kiev, Khrushchev received the Danish Foreign Minister, Per Haekkerup, who gave him a teak and black leather rocking chair and said he hoped that the Chairman would rock in the “same rhythm” as President Kennedy.
Khrushchev laughed; rocking in the same rhythm was “important.” Turning solemn, he warned that the West had underestimated the seriousness of the Autobahn incidents in early November: the Soviet position on Berlin was “very firm.”
That morning in the Oval Office, Kennedy greeted three high school students from West Berlin. Dillon called him to warn that the Soviet wheat deal was stirring up hornets on Capitol Hill. A letter arrived from Professor Barghoorn: “I am personally convinced that it was only because of your vigorous action that I was released.”
Sorensen brought in two copies of the speech the President would give at the Trade Mart in Dallas. With his sense of drama that rivaled his wife’s, he liked the idea of being Daniel in the lion’s den. Donning reading glasses, Kennedy sat in his rocking chair and read Sorensen’s text, which criticized voices “wholly unsuited to the sixties” which assumed “that vituperation is as good as victory and peace is a sign of weakness.”
He called in Michael Forrestal: “I want you to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top.”
That evening, he and Jacqueline held their annual reception for the Supreme Court and other members of the judiciary. Since the death of their infant son, she had eschewed Washington, planning to re-emerge at a state dinner for the new West German Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, on Monday night, November 25. But after a telephone call from her husband, she hastened back by chopper from Wexford, their new country place near Middleburg, to help him greet the seven hundred guests.
After performing as host, the President went to his office to look at cable traffic and then took the elevator to the family quarters. The Attorney General stopped by, just back from New York, where he had attended the premiere of the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Later that evening at Hickory Hill, he and dozens of friends would celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday.
The President told him that the political fights would make the Texas trip “more interesting.” But as Robert recalled, he complained of “how irritated he was with Lyndon Johnson, who wouldn’t help at all in trying to iron out any of the problems in Texas, and that he was an S.O.B.”
Another reason for Kennedy’s anger was his suspicion that Johnson was promoting himself for 1968 at his expense. The President had hoped that, as in 1960, Johnson would bring him the votes of Southerners who found Kennedy too liberal. Instead, the Vice President was speaking out for civil rights more than he ever had as a Senator from Texas.
Kennedy privately spoke of replacing Johnson with another Southerner, perhaps Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. While he might never have followed through on this threat, he knew that if Johnson felt he was in trouble, he might be more inclined to toe the President’s line in the months to come.*
That evening Kennedy reminded George Ball by telephone that Henry Cabot Lodge was flying back from Saigon to discuss the future course of American involvement in Vietnam. “I’ll be back from Texas Sunday. Come out to Camp David. Cabot Lodge will be there and we can go over these things.”
At Thursday noon, November 21, the President and First Lady flew to Texas. Sitting in his compact airborne office, Kennedy riffled through briefing books on the Erhard visit. He told O’Donnell and Powers, “You two guys aren’t running out on me and leaving me stranded with poor Jackie at Lyndon’s ranch. If I’ve got to hang around there all day Saturday, wearing one of those big cowboy hats, you’ve got to be there too.”
At the Rice Hotel in Houston, the President confronted his Vice President about his hostility to Yarborough and his failure to help resolve the Connally feud. As usual, Johnson controlled himself in Kennedy’s presence but, as someone noticed, he “left that suite like a pistol.” Jacqueline asked, “What was that all about? He seemed mad.” The President said, “That’s just Lyndon. He’s in trouble.” He later told her that Johnson was “incapable of telling the truth.”†
That evening, Schlesinger viewed From Russia with Love in the White House theater. Sorensen predicted that the President would enjoy it. He did not know that Kennedy had already seen the film in October with Ben Bradlee, who had noted that he “seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality.”
On Friday morning, November 22, Kennedy walked out of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth to address a rally across the street. In 1960, he had pledged a United States that was not first if but “first period.” Now he spoke in the cadences he expected to use in 1964. His administration had built “a defense system second to none.” The United States was “stronger than it has ever been in its history.”
Sounding like Khrushchev, he boasted about space and economics: “In December—next month—the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.… In 1962 and the first six months of 1963, the economy of the United States grew not only faster than nearly every Western country—which had not been true in the fifties—but also grew faster than the Soviet Union itself.”
At a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, he reminded his audience that the Pentagon was using planes and helicopters built in Fort Worth: “So wherever the confrontation may occur—and in the last three years it has occurred on at least three occasions: in Laos, Berlin, and Cuba; and it will again—wherever it occurs, the products … and the men of Fort Worth provide us with a sense of security.…
“I am confident, as I look to the future, that our chances for security, our chances for peace, are better than they have been in the past. And the reason is because we are stronger. And with that strength is a determination to not only maintain the peace, but also the vital interests of the United States. To that great cause, Texas and the United States are committed. Thank you.”
He returned to his hotel suite and read a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News: WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS. It asked why he had allowed “thousands of Cubans” to be jailed and wheat sold to those who were killing Americans in Vietnam: “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the Spirit of Moscow? … Mr. Kennedy, we DEMAND answers to these questions and we want them now.”
Jacqueline felt sick. Her husband shook his head: “We’re heading into nut country today.” Pacing the room, he said, “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a President.… There was the rain and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.”
She thought the fantasy an expression of her husband’s “Walter Mitty streak,” his way of shaking off the ad. She recalled that everywhere she had ever traveled with him, he had been bathed in affection. She could not even imagine someone throwing a tomato at him.
During the flight to Dallas, Kennedy asked O’Donnell, “What kind of journalism do you call the Dallas Morning News? You know who’s responsible for that ad? Dealey. Remember him? After that exhibition he put on in the White House, I did a little checking on him. He runs around calling himself a war correspondent, and everybody in Dallas believes him.”
In the President’s morning Intelligence Checklist were situation estimates on Saigon, Cyprus, and Korea, reports on Vietnam casualties and on Khrushchev’s warning in Kiev that the Soviet position on Berlin was “very firm.” To buoy the President’s spirits in this month of troubles, one of the CIA analysts had included the bullfighter’s verse that the President had recited at State on October 16, 1962, just after he was told about the missiles in Cuba:
Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous Plaza full;
But only one is there who knows,
And he’s the man who fights the bull.
Dean Rusk, five Cabinet colleagues, and Salinger were flying from Honolulu to Tokyo, where they were to arrange a presidential trip to Japan for early 1964. Bundy and McNamara were at the Pentagon working on the 1965 military budget for presentation to the President at Hyannis Port on the day after Thanksgiving.
Robert Kennedy had driven home for luncheon after a meeting about his war against organized crime. At State, George Ball was discussing the Soviet wheat deal by telephone with a Treasury official. At the Metropolitan Club, Llewellyn Thompson was lunching with Dean Acheson. In Moscow, Foy and Phyllis Kohler were dining at Spaso House.
At CIA headquarters in Langley, Richard Helms was sitting down to luncheon with John McCone. All morning, they had answered questions from watchdog members of the President’s intelligence oversight board. Now the grilling was over and they could unwind.
The two men and several colleagues took their meal in a small room next to the Director’s office that McCone called the “French Room,” perhaps in honor of a friendly intelligence service. Furnished with a round table, television, and easy chairs, the chamber was one of a maze of holding rooms designed by Allen Dulles so that visitors who did not wish to encounter one another did not risk doing so.
A door flew open. McCone’s aide Walter Elder cried out, “President Kennedy has been shot!”
Someone turned on a television set. McCone cried, “My Lord! I must get over and see Bob.” Despite their quarrels over Cuba and the test ban, he remembered how Robert and Ethel had looked after him upon the death of his first wife. He convened the CIA’s emergency Watch Committee’ and ordered himself driven to Hickory Hill.
Helms recalled, “We all went to battle stations over the possibility that this might be a plot—and who was pulling the strings. We were very busy sending messages all over the world to pick up anything that might indicate that a conspiracy had been formed to kill the President of the United States—and then what was to come next.”
CIA men were staggered to learn that they could not locate Nikita Khrushchev. They agonized over every imaginable conspiracy. Could there be a plot, perhaps by the Chinese, to murder the leaders of both superpowers? Was the Soviet leader staying away from Moscow in anticipation of an American nuclear strike in revenge for a Soviet plot against the President?
“We were very high in tension about any indicators which would support such a theme,” recalled Helms. “So if Khrushchev was missing from Moscow, we were worried about it.”
At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Secret Service agents sequestered Lyndon Johnson as doctors labored over the dying President. “In that little clinic where they hid me, I was scared,” Johnson recalled. “They were telling me that it could be a massive plot to kill the whole structure of government.”
When McCone walked into Robert Kennedy’s upstairs library at Hickory Hill, the Attorney General was anchoring his tie with a PT-109 tie clip, preparing to rush to Andrews and an Air Force plane for Dallas. Then the White House telephone rang. Robert said, “He had the most wonderful life.” Later: “God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.”
His principal mission since John Kennedy’s first Senate campaign had been the advancement of his brother’s career. Now the assignment had instantly shifted to his brother’s legacy. Even as he reeled from the Dallas news, he had the presence of mind to call Bundy and ask whether the personal letters and papers of a President who died in office belonged to his relatives.
Bundy obtained an affirmative opinion from the State Department and ordered that the combinations on the safes containing John Kennedy’s private files be changed immediately.
In Dallas, the new President was sped through red lights to the Dallas airport, Love Field. In the Secret Service’s haste to get Johnson out of Dallas, he was separated from General Clifton and the “bagman” carrying the satchel with coded instructions for nuclear attack.
If the Soviet Union now sent missiles and bombers across the DEW Line, it would have taken the two men at least thirty minutes to reach the President. An officer at the White House switchboard in Dallas informed the Pentagon that McNamara and the Joint Chiefs “are now the President.”
Over the Pacific, Rusk announced Kennedy’s death over the sound system of the Cabinet plane: “May God help our country.” As others sobbed, he ordered the jet to turn around and fly to Washington. Sealed in a tube thirty-five thousand feet high while his country was in trauma, he had never felt so helpless. He wondered aloud “who has his finger on the nuclear button.” The consensus aboard the plane was that the assassination was “the opening shot of a plot.”
At the Pentagon, General Taylor agonized over the fact that Johnson knew so little about what was in the satchel. On becoming Vice President, he had inexplicably refused to be briefed on its contents.* If an emergency was imminent, the U.S. nuclear arsenal would have had to be put on hold while the new President was led through the documents for the first time.
Llewellyn Thompson first dismissed the news from Dallas as a bad joke. Then he left Acheson to brood over Johnson’s sparse knowledge of foreign affairs and the Soviet Union. He recalled how the dead President had “drained me dry of all I knew. And on the rare occasions when there was a difference of opinion between us, he was right and I was wrong.” That evening he told Jane, “It was too good to be true.”
In Paris, Chip Bohlen felt “as though the future had retreated to the present:” “There was an unknown quality about Kennedy, despite all his realism, that gave you infinite hope that somehow or other he was going to change the course of history.”
As Air Force One flew to Washington bearing the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth Presidents, the skies of the southeastern United States were scanned for “unidentified, unfriendly” aircraft. Johnson was appalled to be reminded that six Cabinet members were over the Pacific. A member of the press pool, Charles Roberts of Newsweek, wondered, Will the Russians do anything while we’re in the air during this two-hour flight?
Before midnight in Moscow, Andrei Gromyko was given a TASS report on Dallas. He instantly thought of his final conversation with Kennedy just the previous month. He called Kohler at Spaso House, where a night duty officer had “bowled over” the Ambassador and his wife by bringing the news to their bedroom. Gromyko told him that his government would express condolences “at the highest level.”
In Washington, the Secret Service urgently asked the State Department if it had a file on one Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian, and returned to the United States in 1962. George Ball ordered up the large dossier. U. Alexis Johnson approved an investigation “to see if our handling of the case had been OK.”
They wondered whether the assassination had been ordered by the Kremlin. Thompson told them Communists did not work this way: the Russians might kill defectors but not chiefs of state. They would never set a precedent that might be awkward for them. Harriman agreed. Alex Johnson observed that Americans might react to Oswald’s professed Marxism by undoing all of Kennedy’s careful work for détente.
On the Cabinet plane, Rusk read teletype copy on Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union: “If this is true, it is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.”
In Paris, AM/LASH had been meeting with a CIA case officer, who had just given him a ballpoint pen containing a poison needle destined for Castro. Cubela thought the pen fit for an amateur. He told the CIA man that he was more interested in rifles with telescopic sights and explosives from which Castro could be killed from a distance. After the thunderbolt from Dallas, the two men adjourned.*
At the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy told Ed Guthman, “People just don’t realize how conservative Lyndon really is. There are going to be a lot of changes.” He and Taylor and McNamara took a helicopter to Andrews.
Landing in the dark at about five-thirty, Robert saw a crowd of newsmen and Washington officials gathering there to welcome his brother home. He wished to avoid the crowd but also to be at Jacqueline’s side as soon as possible. He found a deserted Air Force truck, jumped over the tailgate, and sat there among pieces of military equipment.
Suddenly he remembered the last time he had been at this spot—at Saturday noon, October 20, 1962, when Jack had returned with his “cold” from Chicago. It struck him that then he had been standing on the airstrip, waiting for his brother; now he was crouching in the back of a truck.
At the White House, before a wall-sized screen in the Situation Room, gimlet-eyed staff members were mesmerized by a network broadcast of videotaped highlights of the Kennedy Presidency. The slender young man on the screen was shouting to a million shrieking Germans, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
Aboard Air Force One, O’Donnell seized another Kennedy man by the arm and pointed at the broad shoulderblades of Lyndon Johnson: “He’s got what he wants now. But we take it back in ’68.”
The new President was met at Andrews by Bundy, Ball, and McNamara, with whom he boarded an Army helicopter, saying, “It was an awful thing.… Horrible.… That little woman was brave.… Who would have thought this could happen? … You fellows know I never aspired to this.… Kennedy could do things I know I couldn’t.”
In his congressional manner he asked, “Any important matters pending?” There were none. McNamara described the Pentagon’s worldwide alert; if the assassination proved to be the prelude to an enemy attack, the United States would be ready with an overwhelming counterstrike.
After landing on the South Grounds, Bundy walked with Johnson toward the West Wing: “There are two things I am assuming, Mr. President. One is that everything in locked files before two P.M. today belongs to the President’s family, and the other is that Mrs. Kennedy will handle the funeral arrangements.” Johnson replied, “That’s correct.”
The sirens of Washington wailed through the night. Dillon had trouble sleeping. Bundy could not put out of his head the German word Unsinn—absurdity. Later he wrote in his journal that the “real sadness” was “not at predictable moments—but whenever one got hit at some unguarded opening by a fresh thought of loss and change. I remember such starts in passing the Rose Garden, in coming to the elevator to the second floor, in admiring the new red rug in his office which he never got to see.”
At the White House, Schlesinger encountered Adlai Stevenson, who had flown down from New York. In 1952, the Harvard historian had written speeches for the Democratic nominee. Tonight he noticed that Stevenson’s “glee at Kennedy’s murder could not be suppressed. There was a smile on his face. It was a half smile. I was just sick at heart that night. I loved Stevenson, but I never felt the same way about him after that.”
In West Berlin, people carried blazing torches through dark streets. The city hall square was renamed John F. Kennedy Platz. In Paris, Charles de Gaulle said, “I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as though he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family.” Retired from office, Harold Macmillan remembered the “splendid, young, gay figure” in June stepping from the helicopter in Sussex.
Kennedy’s enemies were not silent. Peking schoolchildren applauded when told of the assassination.* A Chinese editorial cartoon showed the President lying on his face, his necktie stamped with dollar signs: KENNEDY BITING THE DUST. Madame Nhu declared, “The chickens have come home to roost” and wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy, “Extreme graciousness with communism does not protect from its tortuous blows.”
Called in Kiev by Gromyko, Khrushchev burst into tears. He was further staggered to learn that the President had been killed in the presence of his wife and that she had been “sullied” by her husband’s blood.
Adzhubei recalled the day as a “personal tragedy” for Khrushchev: “He didn’t know the history of America, of course, because he was not very well educated, but he knew that in the U.S. when it happened, it wasn’t for the first time. It was a shock.”
The Chairman realized that his absence from Moscow would fuel American suspicions. At a time of such uncertainty, he should not remain away from his capital. In light of his current problems with China, his conspiratorial bent may have led him to wonder whether Kennedy’s murder was part of a plot against both leaders working for a Soviet-American détente. He boarded a special all-night train back to Moscow.
Shocked by news of Oswald’s Soviet connections, Soviet officials feared that the Soviet Union was about to be blamed for the assassination. The Russians knew Lyndon Johnson as an emotional Texan and more thoroughgoing Cold Warrior than Kennedy; might the new President retaliate in some way?
Soviet troops around the world were placed in readiness. Soviet intelligence agents were sent out to question anyone who might have known Oswald in the Soviet Union. The Foreign Ministry was told to be “vigilantly circumspect” and “report anything, no matter how small.” During Johnson’s first hours in office, the Soviet government evidently received a private assurance from the new President that there would be no reprisals.
From the moment of Kennedy’s death, the Soviet press exerted itself to prove that the assassination had been inspired not by Communists but the American Right. Not only would this divert suspicions from Moscow, but if the American people blamed ultraconservatives for their President’s murder, it would undermine the Right’s ability to jeopardize American-Soviet relations.
TASS reported, “From the moment of Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas, small groups of ultra-right-wing elements had demonstrated in different sections of the city under Confederate flags and slogans hostile to Kennedy.… In the speech President Kennedy was scheduled to deliver at luncheon, the text of which was found in his pocket, he denounced his ultraconservative opponents.”
Izvestia: “All the circumstances of President Kennedy’s tragic death give grounds for believing that the assassination was conceived and executed by ultra-right-wing fascist and racist circles … displeased by any step aimed at relaxing international tension and improving Soviet-American relations.”
Pravda ran a large front-page photograph of the late President. As if the Berlin and Cuba confrontations had never happened, Pravda noted “Kennedy’s steps toward cleansing the international situation” and how they had “met with sharp attacks from American ‘madmen.’” Soviet radio played Slavic funeral dirges. Soviet television aired film of the Inaugural Address and the American University address.
On Moscow streets, Soviet citizens praised Kennedy for the Limited Test Ban and the wheat sale. An elderly woman said, “He was so young! Those wretches! In his own country! Wasn’t he protected?” Another Muscovite: “Here was a man who tried to do good and they would not let him live.”
Fidel Castro had been lunching with Jean Daniel at Varadero when told that the President was wounded. He said that if Kennedy could be saved, he was “already reelected.” Major Vallejo tuned in a Miami radio station and translated the English words: “Wounded in the head … pursuit of the assassin.… President Kennedy is dead.” Castro rose: “Everything is going to change.… At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed.”
After twenty minutes, he said, “They will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly. Otherwise you watch and see—I know them—they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.” Driving away, he and Daniel heard on the car radio that the suspected assassin was married to a Russian. Castro said, “There, didn’t I tell you? It’ll be my turn next.”
The radio announced that the suspect was a Castro admirer and member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Castro said, “If they had proof, they would have said he was an agent, an accomplice, a hired killer. In saying simply that he is an admirer, this is just to try and make an association in people’s minds between the name of Castro and the emotion awakened by the assassination.”
Castro canceled his engagements. Like the Russians, he worried that the United States might now use the excuse of Oswald’s admiration for him as a pretext—in his case, for the air strike and invasion so long sought by the CIA and the Pentagon.
He went on television to insist that he was not behind the assassination: despite Kennedy’s “hostile policies toward us,” the news of his death was “grave and bad.” The information about Oswald was “a Machiavellian plan against Cuba. Oswald never had contacts with us.… But in the dispatches he’s always presented as a pro-Castro Communist. This is all part of a defamatory campaign against the U.S.S.R. and Cuba.… What is behind this assassination no one knows.”
On Saturday morning, November 23, Kohler convened his staff to reminisce about the late President. The Foreign Ministry called to say that Khrushchev was coming to Spaso House. Shortly after noon, the red-eyed Chairman started up the stairs, followed by Gromyko and Smirnovsky. Even the stone-faced Foreign Minister had tears in his eyes.
Kohler took Khrushchev by the arm to a small table bearing a condolence book and a black-draped photograph of the late President inscribed to Kohler. A Marine stood at attention beside the table. The Chairman and Kohler did not say a word. The only sound in the room was the whirring of newsreel cameras. The Chairman put on his gold-rimmed spectacles and bent over to sign the book. Still silent, he posed for pictures with the Ambassador and their aides.
Then Kohler took his guest into a parlor with fireplace called the Fawn Room. As he recalled, “Khrushchev did all of the talking.” The Chairman took pains to demonstrate that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death. He told Kohler that his government had always deplored assassinations. The Mensheviks and Black Hunters had been the assassins in Russia—not the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, he said, had not favored political murder.
After he briefly reminisced about Kennedy at Vienna, Khrushchev and his entourage returned to their black limousines. Later that day, the Chairman wrote Lyndon Johnson that the “villainous assassination” was a “heavy blow.” Gromyko wrote Rusk that the “best monument to the deceased” would be to continue their efforts to ease world tension begun with the Limited Test Ban that Kennedy had “evaluated highly.”
Bundles of letters from Soviet citizens delivered to the U.S. Embassy broke through the arid language of diplomacy. One Comrade Babitchev wrote Johnson, “I am sure that you will continue the course of the late Mr. Kennedy who was so dear to all of us. His great deeds will live forever! … Death to the villainous butchers!!”
A Kharkov student wrote, “Let the American people be merciless and severe in the punishment of the assassins, who wish to sabotage the cause of peace between our people.” Tatyana and Yevgenya Shcherbakov of Bryansk wrote, “Let the thought that the grief is shared by one hundred million Russian women help Mrs. Kennedy to survive her grief.”
Vladimir Abrosichkin of Moscow sent Kohler a poem about the “villainous act of the mad reactionaries”:
He was endeavoring to meet us.
He was searching a way to secure peace.
The darkness of death has stopped his marching.
The lowered flags are silent.
The President’s throne has been rocking.
A flock of black crows whirls over Washington.
Terror and blackmail are in the order of things in that country,
Where money is law, power, and force.
Shame, America! You keep silent while they kill your sons.
A Muscovite named Lazarev sent more verse:
Chairman Khrushchev stood silent for minutes.…
He stood for us, the Russians.
The eagle’s pinions have wilted.
Damn the assassin, who took away his life!
All people’s friend is lost.
The star’s light has faded.
We see him off on his last journey.
Americans! Do find another one to substitute for him,
And let it be a new Lincoln.
On Sunday afternoon, November 24, Lyndon Johnson kept the dead President’s appointment with Lodge and told him that he was not willing to “lose Vietnam”: “Tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word.”
When Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death, Thompson considered it a diplomatic catastrophe—“just as the funeral was about to restore our foreign image.” Pravda asked, “Who led Ruby to the jail that was so carefully guarded? … There can only be one answer: It was done by the same people who prepared and committed the infamous assassination of the President, the same ‘ultras’ who are now trying to put the blame … on American Communists and … the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”
When Kennedy’s British friend Henry Brandon, of the Sunday Times, went to the Soviet Union a month later, he was startled to find the mourning was “almost more intense in Moscow than in Washington.” Time and time again he was asked, “Do you think Johnson organized the assassination?”
Khrushchev had first thought of sending Gromyko to Kennedy’s funeral but concluded that sending Mikoyan would make a stronger statement. On Monday, before the Washington ceremonies, Dillon was “scared to death that Mikoyan might be shot at.”
At Rusk’s request, Thompson insisted to the Soviet Embassy that Mikoyan had excellent reasons not to walk in the funeral parade: age, his recovery from surgery, and hepatitis. But the Armenian insisted on walking with de Gaulle* and other world leaders behind the coffin. In Moscow, a tearful Nina Khrushchev led members of the Soviet-American Friendship Society to Spaso House, where they signed the funeral book.
The President was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, on the slope below the Custis-Lee Mansion. Charles Bartlett had told the Secretary of Defense about the spring day in 1963 when he and Kennedy had looked through the Smithsonian’s air and space exhibits and then driven over to Arlington.
Shown through the old edifice at the top of the hill, the President had said, “Wouldn’t this be a fine place to have the White House? … I could stay here forever.” With tears in his eyes, McNamara said that the gravesite would be “almost a shrine.”
Robert Kennedy consoled Jacqueline by noting that “if Jack had been shot after the Bay of Pigs, he would have looked like the worst President.” After the burial, she stood in a White House receiving line. When the Duke of Edinburgh arrived, she reminded Angier Biddle Duke that while flying to London after Vienna, he had told her that the wife of a chief of state did not curtsy to royalty. Now, looking “like a dim, lost leaf,” she said, “Angie, I’m no longer the wife of a chief of state.”
Watching Mikoyan moving up the line, the widow noticed that he was trembling all over, looking “terrified.” By her later account, she told the Soviet official, “Please tell Mr. Chairman President that I know he and my husband worked together for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband’s work.” Rusk’s memory of what the widow said was more terse: “My husband’s dead. Now peace is up to you.”
Mikoyan blinked and covered his face with both hands. For the rest of his visit, he could not stop himself from repeating the widow’s appeal.
Lyndon Johnson asked Sorensen what he thought of the possibility of foreign involvement in the assassination. He showed him an FBI report, which Sorensen pronounced “meaningless.” The new President knew that if Kennedy had been murdered by another government, it could, as Rusk had feared, distort American foreign policy for years. Gallup found that many Americans thought that the Soviet Union, Cuba, or “the Communists” were involved.
George Kennan wrote Kohler that the key question was “not whether Oswald was the assassin, about which there seems not much room for doubt, but the curious background of his own murder. I am not by nature a suspicious person, but … I fairly bristle with doubts, and I think it terribly important, not least from the standpoint of our international relations, that the background of this affair be exhaustively examined and brought to light.”
Richard Helms found Lyndon Johnson distracted well into 1964 by his worry that Kennedy had been assassinated by conspiracy. As Helms recalled, the Agency was “very helpful to Johnson on this” and met the new President’s request for an independent CIA study. Motion pictures of the Dallas motorcade and autopsy photographs were sent over to the Agency.
A week after Dallas, Johnson persuaded Chief Justice Earl Warren to chair a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the crime. If the rumors were not halted and “the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev, there might be war.”
When the Warren Commission concluded in September 1964 that no foreign government was involved, the Soviet weekly Za Rubezhom published a summary of the report, along with quotations from Western papers doubting that Oswald acted alone. Soviets suspected that the President had been murdered by the CIA, which could not forgive him for the Bay of Pigs and the Soviet détente; the Mafia, which hoped to recover lost Cuban properties; or Johnson himself, who they presumed could not have come to power any other way.
In the spring of 1967, the first stories were published suggesting that Castro had caused Kennedy’s murder in retaliation for CIA murder plots against him. Johnson asked the FBI to investigate and called in Helms, by then CIA Director. He was shocked to be informed, as he later said, “that we were running a damn Murder, Incorporated, in the Caribbean.”
More than three years in the White House, reelected by a landslide, Johnson still suffered from comparison with the leader who was now so flawless in public memory. He seemed to have an almost psychological compulsion to believe that Kennedy had brought his tragic fate upon himself. He privately insisted that “Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him first.”
As early as December 1963, Johnson had told Helms that the assassination had been divine retribution for the murder of President Diem. He said the same to Salinger, who related to Robert Kennedy that Johnson had told him that someone he knew while growing up had run into a tree and struck his head, which made him cross-eyed: that was God’s retribution for people who were bad. You had to be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them.*
When Rolando Cubela’s rendezvous with the CIA was revealed during investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, some wondered whether AM/LASH was a Cuban double agent who had told Castro of American plotting against him and inspired a fatal counterplot. By then Cubela had been arrested by Cuban counterintelligence and imprisoned. Were he a double agent, he would have been unlikely to be sentenced, as Cubela was, to death.†
Interviewed in Havana by the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, Castro said, “Who here could have planned something so delicate as the death of the United States President? That would have been insanity.” He noted that murdering Kennedy brought to office a man who would have been expected to be tougher toward Cuba.
Castro argued that he did not intend his Brazilian Embassy warning in September 1963 about American conspiracies against him to be taken as a physical threat. The military power of the United States to retaliate against Cuba for an attempt against its President’s life was so great that such an action would be “suicidal.”
Beyond Lee Oswald’s peculiar brand of Marxism, his two years in the Soviet Union (and rumored connections to Soviet intelligence that were unproven aside from his marriage to a Russian woman said to be the niece of a secret police officer), and a possible visit to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City in September 1963, there is little evidence that the Russians had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination.
One might imagine a scenario under which some rogue element of Soviet intelligence or Soviet leaders might have had something to gain from Kennedy’s death. Enemies of Khrushchev’s détente might have presumed that Johnson would be a more doctrinaire Cold Warrior. Enemies of Khrushchev might have reasoned that a Kennedy assassination would rob the Chairman of the argument that he should be kept in power because of his indispensable personal relationship with the American President.
We know that in the early 1960s, Soviet intelligence agents and higher officials such as Brezhnev did not flinch from contemplating what they referred to as “wet operations” against political figures in the Soviet bloc, the Third World, and the West. But even these Russians would probably have been reluctant to assassinate a President of the United States and thereby risk an American retaliatory attack.
In January 1964, the CIA received a coded message from a KGB officer in Geneva. Member of a Soviet disarmament delegation, Yuri Nosenko was a defector-in-place from whom the Agency hoped to gain many years of information on Soviet intelligence. Now he told Langley that his superiors had ordered him home within five days. Anxious that his treason had been discovered, he persuaded them to bring him to the United States.
Of the assassination Nosenko told his CIA handlers, “I can unhesitatingly sign off to the fact that the Soviet Union cannot be tied into this in any way.” He said that as a counterintelligence officer against the Americans and British, he had supervised Oswald’s case when the twenty-year-old American came to Moscow in 1959: the Soviet government had known nothing about him until he was already in the country.
By Nosenko’s account, the KGB did not know that Oswald had been a Marine on the Japanese base from which U-2 planes flew into the Soviet Union and would not have cared anyway. Oswald had been found “mentally unstable” and not very intelligent. Nosenko said that when Oswald tried to kill himself rather than accept Moscow’s demand that he leave the country, Soviet intelligence had “washed its hands” of him.
Nosenko’s story strained credulity. It was difficult to imagine that the Russians would have been so indifferent to a man who was only the third American Marine to defect to Moscow and who knew at least a few details about the spy planes that for three years had defied the Russians’ desperate efforts to down them.
The Agency did not know whether to take Nosenko’s tale as evidence of Soviet innocence in the assassination or of Moscow’s desire to clear its name, which suggested that perhaps it indeed had something to hide. Nosenko’s performance under interrogation was not encouraging. He failed lie detector tests and proved ignorant of facts about the American presence in Moscow that an official of his professed background would have been expected to know.
The CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, suspected that the Russians had planted Nosenko not only to allay suspicion about its complicity in Dallas but to divert attention from Soviet agents within American intelligence. For four years, the Russian was locked into a sealed vault, denied reading material, human company, toothbrushes, and toothpaste, and subjected to hostile interrogation in an effort to break him down.
The effort failed. Helms said, “I don’t think there has ever been anything more frustrating in my life.” Nosenko was freed and given a new home and American citizenship. The CIA remained divided about whether he was a legitimate defector or not.*
In the fall of 1963, mobsters like the Louisiana and Texas chieftain Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and their associate James Hoffa were irate with the Kennedy brothers for prosecuting them more vigorously than ever before. When Hoffa heard the news from Dallas, he said, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”
They were also disgusted by the President’s understanding with Khrushchev after the Missile Crisis, which suggested that Castro might remain permanently in power, denying the Mafia franchises in Cuba that had been said to yield more than a billion dollars a year before 1959. Both Oswald and Jack Ruby had close connections to organized crime figures that were not apparent to the public in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.
During the spring and summer of 1963, Oswald stayed in New Orleans with his Uncle Charles “Dutz” Murret, who had long served as his surrogate father.* Murret was a New Orleans bookmaker and associate of local mobsters named Sam Saia and Nofio Pecora, both known for their closeness to Carlos Marcello. In August 1963, Oswald was arrested after a street quarrel over his championship of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and was evidently bailed out by one of Pecora’s associates.
As an adolescent on the West Side of Chicago, Ruby ran errands for Al Capone and later worked for Paul Dorfman of the local Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, whom Robert Kennedy later described in The Enemy Within as “a major operator in the Chicago underworld.” A staff member of the Senate’s Kefauver Committee, which examined organized crime in 1950, found that Ruby was “a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters.”
During the months before the assassination, Ruby was evidently in touch with Robert “Barney” Baker, described by Robert Kennedy as Hoffa’s “ambassador of violence,” another Hoffa lieutenant named Murray “Dusty” Miller, and the same Nofio Pecora who was affiliated with Carlos Marcello and Oswald’s uncle. In the early 1970s, John Roselli, the West Coast partner of Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante who was involved in the CIA’s plots against Castro, told reporters that Ruby was “one of our boys,” designated to keep Oswald from giving information to federal investigators that might implicate the Mob.
In 1959, Ruby had gone to Cuba one or more times to see Lewis McWillie, manager of the Tropicana nightclub, owned by a Trafficante associate, and perhaps to see Trafficante himself in a jail outside Havana.† Ruby was evidently also involved in Mafia gunrunning—first to Castro, with the aim of keeping the Mob on his good side, then to anti-Castro guerrillas after the Cuban leader evicted organized crime from Havana.
After the assassination, the CIA hastened to cover its own tracks. If even routine Agency monitoring of Oswald during his defection and return from the Soviet Union were fully revealed, it might have excited a nation raw with grief to suspect that Oswald had been hired by the CIA to murder a President who in 1963 was thwarting what were popularly thought to be the Agency’s cherished aims of removing Castro and keeping the Cold War at full throttle.
If the American people had learned in the last weeks of 1963 that the CIA had cooperated with the Mafia in an effort to assassinate Castro and that the scheme might have culminated in the death of the President, there would have been serious demands, as Kennedy had threatened after the Bay of Pigs, to shatter the Agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
By withholding this information from the Warren Commission, the CIA bought time in the hope that it could be kept from the public forever. This was not to be: the murder attempts against Castro were unveiled by the mid-1970s. In the same way that the Kremlin brought suspicion on itself by its elaborate efforts to deny involvement in the Kennedy assassination, CIA critics wondered whether the Agency had covered up its links to the Mafia and anti-Castro exiles because it had something more sinister to hide.
We will probably never know beyond the shadow of a doubt who caused John Kennedy to be murdered and why. So much conflicting and unverifiable information and disinformation has been generated by so many intelligence services and other groups for a thousand different reasons that, three decades later, it is almost impossible to imagine an explanation of the crime grounded on a single coherent body of evidence that will silence all but extreme skeptics.
Fascinated by political courage and by men dying young, acquainted more than most of his predecessors with the darker side of American politics and foreign policy, Kennedy knew that he was subjecting himself to physical danger by unleashing a vast effort to topple Fidel Castro and then restraining it, by electrifying Americans against the Soviet Union and then relaxing tensions—and, perhaps, by flirting with organized crime figures who wanted Cuban concessions back and then allowing his Attorney General to prosecute them more vigorously than ever before.
What is consistent with virtually every major serious explanation of who killed the President is that he was murdered, to one degree or another, as a result of his public policies. Kennedy never gave up his awareness of how intention could be sabotaged by accident and miscalculation. Contrary to most American leaders, he was always more willing to incur physical than political risks. Characteristically it was about his physical survival, not his political survival, that he said in the fall of 1963, “Whoever wants to get me will get me.”
Told about the suspected assassin, Jacqueline Kennedy lamented that her husband’s death had been robbed of meaning: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of dying for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist.” But if martyrdom is defined as dying in the pursuit of public purpose, then John Kennedy’s murder was martyrdom enough.
During her final fortnight in the White House, as Lyndon Johnson went to work in the West Wing, Mrs. Kennedy scrawled a letter to the leader of the Soviet Union. The letter was written on White House stationery in her stylish, looping hand that looked more like printing than script.
It closed the cycle of private correspondence between the two most powerful men in the world, begun with the surprise letter from Pitsunda in September 1961 that Georgi Bolshakov had concealed in a newspaper and delivered to the Carlyle. When the widow finished writing, she attached a note saying, “Important/Mrs Lincoln/This is my letter to Khrushchev to be delivered to him by Ambassador Thompson”*:
Dear Mr. Chairman President
I would like to thank you for sending Mr. Mikoyan as your representative to my husband’s funeral. He looked so upset when he came through the line, and I was very moved. I tried to give him a message for you that day—but as it was such a terrible day for me, I do not know if my words came out as I meant them to.
So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message. I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to his care in his mind.
He used to quote your words in some of his speeches—“In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.” You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.
The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight—I know that President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed—a policy of control and restraint—and he will need your help.
I send this letter because I know so deeply of the importance of the relationship which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness, and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna. I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline Kennedy
*After the Inauguration, Johnson had presented him with the deer’s mounted head and insisted that it go on the Oval Office wall. In a gesture that was a more gallant concession than the Vice President ever knew, Kennedy installed the trophy in a nearby room.
*As Robert Kennedy recalled, “They took a poll down in Texas, and Lyndon Johnson lost a great deal of his popularity … in the South and was a burden rather than a help.” John Connally years later recalled that Johnson was “very concerned” that the Attorney General would persuade his brother to dump him from the ticket: the Vice President implored him to make sure that Texas was “in line” for 1964.
†Of this meeting, Arthur Schlesinger later wrote in his notes, “Johnson’s st[oc]k was never lower—and he knew it.”
*Under Eisenhower, Richard Nixon was fully briefed.
*Years later Bundy, who insisted that Kennedy never authorized the CIA to kill Castro, said, “We thought … that the CIA at least after the Bay of Pigs was a disciplined part of the Executive.” He blamed the Cubela incident on “outrageous insubordination.… It was loose management, the worst single result of an administrative untidiness that in some other contexts was enormously constructive.”
*As they did in more than one school in Dallas.
*Arriving in Washington, de Gaulle said, “The people of France insisted that I come.” Later, when Lyndon Johnson asked him to proceed with the American visit in the spring of 1964 that de Gaulle had reluctantly promised Kennedy, the Frenchman infuriated Johnson by insisting that his attendance at Kennedy’s funeral had liquidated his promise.
*This may have referred to the fact that the late President’s left eye was off center.
†The sentence was commuted to thirty years by Castro’s personal intervention.
*The most extended published exposition of the theory that Oswald murdered the President on Moscow’s behalf was a 1977 volume subtly entitled Khrushchev Killed Kennedy by a British solicitor named Michael Eddowes, who claimed also to have refused a recruitment attempt in London by Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet agent involved with Christine Keeler and John Profumo.
Eddowes postulated that the real Oswald never returned from the Soviet Union and was replaced instead by a Soviet lookalike who assassinated Kennedy on Khrushchev’s orders. In the early 1980s he persuaded the Texas courts to open Oswald’s grave and find out who was really buried there. The answer turned out to be Oswald.
*Oswald’s actual father died before his birth.
† The Tropicana was where the young Senators John Kennedy and George Smathers had one year earlier met the singer Denise Darcel.
*In fact, the letter was delivered through normal channels.