Surrounded by Enemies (11 page)

Campaigning in the Currier and Ives landscape of snow-covered New Hampshire, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater took on an issue that had been bothering him since the President’s State of the Union speech. It was the implication that Dallas was caused by hate and that the hate had been inspired by conservatives. The Arizona senator practically cried out his indignation: “Immediately after the trigger was pulled, a hate attack against conservative Americans was started by the Communists and taken up by the radical columnists and kept going. I never use the word ‘hate,’” he continued. “I think it is the most despicable word in the English language.”

The White House watched the Republican candidates carefully. He was clearly claiming communism was behind the ambush and that, by implication, if Oswald acted alone, it must have been out of his Communist sympathies. In order to move to the right, where the votes in the GOP primaries would be, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller actually managed to accuse his far-right opponent of being soft on communism himself. “My God,” said President Kennedy to an office gathering, “how can we resist this?”

JFK called his 1960 campaign manager, his brother, over the phone. “The issue we’ve been discussing,” he said, and Bobby knew what he meant, “I think we have to just go ahead with it. So I’m working with Ted now.” Working with Ted meant that the President was writing a speech or a statement with Theodore Sorensen, not Teddy Kennedy.

“If you’re in it, then I’m in it with you,” said Bobby. They discussed how he would need to stay out of politics and in the Justice Department and that, this time, Kenny O’Donnell would have to run the campaign by taking on the leadership duties at CREEK.

While his surprise appearance with the Beatles kicked off the election cycle’s charm offensive, it had also drawn its own fair share of criticism. There were complaints that it demeaned the office, that it took unfair advantage over political opponents, and that it showed the President as a person who was not as serious as the times demanded. These comments came largely from Republicans. The party of the Kennedys, the Democrats, said it just proved that the GOP stood for Grand Old Party-poopers and tried to laugh it off.

Still, the White House political team felt that an official announcement had to tack away from the criticism. All three network anchormen (Ron Cochran, ABC; Walter Cronkite, CBS; David Brinkley, NBC) were summoned to the White House for a discussion in the Oval Office. Seeing Kennedy taking their questions in his familiar rocking chair reminded viewers that the President still was on the job, and when he had something to say, the networks wanted to hear it and cover it. Goldwater and Rockefeller could not make that happen.

Under ordinary circumstances the partisan nature of all three networks giving primetime to a sitting president in an election year might have led them to decline the invitation. But this was a President of the United States who had been shot at on live TV, survived, and was back on the job. The American people had a right to see him and hear from him in this way. If a little politics seeped into this news, thought Pierre Salinger who had put the deal together, that couldn’t be helped, could it?

At one point, ABC’s Cochran, knowing his network was in a distant third place, went for the score, actually interrupting President Kennedy during an answer he was giving to CBS’s Cronkite. “Mr. President,” interjected Cochran, “you sound like a man who’s running for reelection. Are you?” While Cronkite glowered at Cochran off-camera, JFK bit his lip, then smiled.

“There are some people,” said the President, “who won’t be happy with what I have to say on that subject...”

The President paused for a full three seconds before speaking again, giving his plotters ample time to assume he had taken their threat seriously and was getting out of the race.

“I’m talking about the people we have working for us over at the Democratic party headquarters here in Washington who say there is a right way and a wrong way to handle these things. The right way I’m pretty sure involves a big, important speech with flags.”

The Kennedy inner circle appreciated this ironic twist. They knew for a fact that the people who would not be happy were the conspirators who had tried to kill this man and then threatened him again to leave office or else.

“But yes, let’s make it official. I intend to stand for reelection this year.”

There it was. Inside the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs of Staff had offices, there were reports of shattered drink glasses and cursing. More than a few CIA operatives narrowed their eyes and wondered how this was going to be handled. And at the Dallas County Courthouse, Lee Harvey Oswald told guard Chester Northridge, “good for him.”

“I’ll campaign hard and on the issues facing our country,” Kennedy said. He listed the pursuit of peace with our enemies abroad, cutting the budget, civil rights and addressing the growing poverty gap between America’s haves and have-nots. He did not mention arresting and trying alleged conspirators in an attempted presidential assassination.

Asked how the events in Dallas would impact the type of campaign he would be able to conduct, he replied, “As you know, Mrs. Kennedy and I have promised each other to avoid public spaces and events until such time as an entire review of security can be conducted. So whether that leads to a less public campaign than we had in 1960 or not will have to be determined later. However, I feel confident that will not be a defining issue. The people know who I am and what I stand for and that I stand with them.”

If the conspirators were watching this performance on their television sets that night, they knew that this man they hated, this man they had tried to kill, had just given them the finger.

On February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay, against all the odds, demolished the giant known as Sonny Liston with a seventh-round TKO and became the new world heavyweight champion. It all took place in Miami, Florida, the hotbed of the anti-Castro fervor that may have been a breeding ground for conspiracy and assassination.

The Kennedy inner circle watched the fight from a safe distance, that being the White House, thanks to a closed-circuit connection. After the first round ended with the clanging of a bell, both fighters continued to punch at each other for nearly seven seconds. Clay would not be the first to go to his corner.

“Cassius Clay is not afraid of that man,” noted Bobby. “If he wins this fight, we should take a lesson.” The lesson Bobby had in mind was that of the schoolyard: Any adversary could be taken down, and the most important action was to show him that you did not fear him. Fear was the advantage people thought Liston had going into the fight, but after the earlier weigh-in and now this first round, it was clear that Clay had taken that away from the champ.

In this analogy, the President had shown the conspirators he did not fear them or their threats. Going on Sullivan and summoning the network news anchors to the Oval Office were symbolic acts of a confident man. The issue of the moment was finding something to do that was actionable policy, something real, to show the traitors the Kennedys meant business.

“Lyndon,” said Bobby, and everyone knew what he meant.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a man held in such low regard at the White House that Kennedy’s team of advisers actually wondered if he might have been involved in approving or supporting the assassination attempt in his home state of Texas. The enmity between RFK and LBJ was particularly personal and harsh. On one level it was political, but on another it went back to 1958, when Johnson had invited the younger Kennedy to his Texas ranch and tried to intimidate him during a hunting trip. He had given RFK a 38-gauge shotgun, capable of blowing a deer in half, without warning him about the kick it would have. Bobby had been knocked off his feet, and the gun stock had opened a wound on his forehead. In response, LBJ gave RFK a hand up and noted that he was going to have to “learn to shoot like a man.”

The Kennedys were forced to let LBJ on the ticket in 1960. The details were tightly held by the brothers and Johnson and to this day are not clear. Historians now believe Johnson’s Georgetown neighbor, J. Edgar Hoover, had provided him damning evidence about JFK’s extramarital affairs, and that Johnson had used the information straight-out, Texas-style to get the number two spot he coveted.

Both John and Robert Kennedy made mental notes to avoid being in such a position again where they could be attacked with the weapon they had given an enemy. It had been impossible to keep that pledge entirely. The mere existence of J. Edgar Hoover in their lives assured that. Now, however, that dynamic would work in their favor. LBJ had given them what they needed to get rid of him.

The black eye of Dallas alone could probably not have toppled LBJ, but the VP’s choice of friends put him on shaky ground indeed.

Johnson’s close associate, Texas financier Billie Sol Estes, had just been tried and convicted of fraud against the U.S. government for a scandal that threatened to engulf the Vice President. The con man had been sentenced to twenty-four years in jail after enduring a corruption trial that followed a congressional investigation into his contacts with the federal government. More than eighty FBI agents had been assigned to look into the business dealings of Estes.

What they’d found so far was fraud against the United States government on the scale of $172 million in today’s dollars. There was also a mysterious suicide that looked like murder, and a trail of generous support for powerful Democrats including, most particularly, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now, with his fate swinging in the wind, Estes was said to be teasing grand jury testimony that would implicate Johnson not only in a direct cash-for-services bribery scandal but also, incredibly, in the murder of the dogged Henry Marshall who had been investigating the Billie Sol Estes case for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency starting in 1960. The next year, Marshall was found dead on his farm, shot five times by his own rifle. Although the death was ruled a suicide, there were many who were skeptical that it took Marshall five self-inflicted shotgun shells to kill himself in his car.

Feeling confident that even Lyndon Johnson would know when he was beat, President Kennedy already had a short list of replacements in mind. There was Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, the man he’d originally wanted on the ticket before LBJ’s power play. There was also Florida Senator George Smathers, a man JFK enjoyed socially and who had the discretion to attend parties with dubious guest lists and say nothing to anyone later. And, if Johnson’s southern roots were considered necessary to prevail in 1964, there was also Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina, who unlike Smathers, would be completely untainted by presidential skirt-chasing.

The only decision of the moment, however, was who would tell LBJ that the clock had run out on his prospects. All agreed it shouldn’t be the President, who must be kept out of the fray. Bobby would enjoy the job the most, seeing LBJ suffer after all the headaches Johnson had caused the Kennedys. But the President said Teddy should do it. “He’s got to get some experience at this someday,” is how he phrased it.

So it became the task of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers to tell Lyndon Johnson face-to-face that he was being dropped from the 1964 Democratic presidential ticket. The new senator from Massachusetts started the job by focusing on his talking points, only to be cut off by Johnson. “Your brother sent you to tell me I’m off the damn ticket,” said LBJ nailing it, “because he wants me to understand I don’t rate the President, I don’t even rate the attorney general. What I rate is some turd-blossom named Junior.”

Johnson stood toe-to-toe with Teddy, his face just an inch from the other man’s, and put an arm on his shoulder so he could not escape. “Now I don’t dislike you, Teddy, I know it’s hard for you, growin’ up with a couple of brothers like you got, but what makes you think that I should even entertain this proposition you’ve come to make?”

Teddy said it wasn’t a negotiation, that the President could certainly decide who his running mate should be. And there were the various financial scandals that made LBJ’s tenure untenable.

Johnson pursed his lip and glared at this “junior” senator. If he surrendered to the Kennedys now, Johnson thought, he faced a dismal future. He would be remembered only as the first Vice President sentenced to the penitentiary for tax fraud, extortion, illegal campaign funding, bribery, influence peddling and, if investigators were working under the thumb of Bobby Kennedy, just possibly his own involvement in a number of murders in his home state.

His heart had leaped when he heard the shots in Dealey Plaza. Had they connected with their target as intended, he would be the President now, and all these charges would have melted away in the interest of continuity and national security. Now, despite his hatred of the vice presidency, his only choice was to hold onto the office and force the Kennedys to see it was in their best interests to save him.

“You can throw all the ten-dollar words you want at me,” said Johnson, “but I’ve done nothing wrong but help my country, and no Senate committee or picture magazine is ever gonna say otherwise. You’ll see.”

Seeing that Johnson was not taking no for an answer and panicking at the large Texan’s physical proximity, Teddy said he would run Johnson’s position past the attorney general. Johnson blocked his escape from the office and handed him a telephone, calling out to his assistant for an outside line. Once Teddy had explained the situation to his brother, Johnson grabbed the phone from him and said, “Mr. Attorney General, whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty?”

Robert Kennedy replied that such a concept applied to the legal system but not to politics. The Democratic party simply could not afford to have LBJ’s situation flare up in the middle of a presidential campaign.

“The Democrat party loves me, Bobby, always has. What you mean to say is that you and your brother need a reason to say to me what you’ve wanted to say since 1960.” As he said this to Robert Kennedy, Johnson winked at the youngest Kennedy brother as if they were now a couple of kids having fun with the neighbor who was hard of hearing. After hearing RFK’s response, LBJ said, “That won’t be a problem. You tell the President how much I look forward to our campaign.”

Hanging up the phone, LBJ turned to Teddy, “It’s all worked out.” What the attorney general had told him was that he had two months to straighten things out and, if LBJ’s financial dealings had reached public scandal proportions, he would be expected to resign. What Johnson said to Teddy, however, was, “You don’t threaten to put the fucking Vice President of the United States behind bars. It’s goddamn disrespectful. This will bite your big brother in the ass if he doesn’t wise up.”

To his enduring credit, Teddy did not run for cover. He stared right back at the Vice President and said, “It is a very serious matter to threaten the President of the United States, particularly given the recent attempt on his life that has yet to be resolved. You wouldn’t be threatening the President now, would you, Mr. Vice President?”

Johnson smiled, knowing the point had been made. “No, I am not,” he said. “I support the President of the United States as any proud American does during this time of trouble for our nation.”