Surrounded by Enemies (13 page)

The Democratic ticket still included Lyndon Johnson. In a flurry of activity, mixing threats, bravado, payoffs and sycophancy, LBJ had managed to stand down both the investigation of the Senate Rules Committee and the articles that had been contemplated by
Life
magazine.

The Senate investigation disappeared, said LBJ, “like smoke from a barbeque after the steer’s been cooked.” This had less to do with Johnson’s innocence as it did with the second thoughts of a number of senior politicians in Congress whom LBJ promised would “rot in jail with me” if he had to take a fall. It also had to do with having Bobby Baker take the rap on his own, after receiving Johnson’s pledge that he would be taken care of and that it would be worth his while if he did.

The
Life
magazine article was not so much killed as ignored. By the time it was published, Baker was looking more and more guilty of deceiving not only LBJ but other astute politicians. Johnson made a public mea culpa about how disappointed he was to have been “sold out” by a good friend. He promised to be more careful in the future but implied that any mistakes that were made had occurred because he had focused on his political service at the exclusion of careful business practices. He had “paid more attention to the country than to myself,” he said. He added that if these matters were considered serious, he would expect the Congress to investigate, something he had already taken great pains to assure would never happen.

In the end, John Kennedy had given Lyndon Johnson two months to get his house in order, and it had taken LBJ barely half that time.

Johnson had been dispatched to hit the road on behalf of the Democratic ticket as soon as the clouds over him had cleared. Despite his campaign in 1960 and the fact that he was the nation’s Vice President, no one really knew him, and he provided a welcome distraction for the press.

The strategy was simple. John Kennedy would stay in the White House or travel discreetly, while acting presidential, and Johnson would find the party faithful in all the states that were likely to be in play in November.

Senator Goldwater ultimately picked Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton as his running mate. The moderate Republican had lost to Goldwater on the first ballot but had made it known he would accept the vice presidency. Goldwater needed an inroad into the Northeast, and Scranton would serve that purpose.

Everyone knew that no vice presidential candidate, even an incumbent one, would make a real difference. The nation had to decide if John Kennedy had been up to the job and, even if they had doubts, they had to consider replacing him with the untested Goldwater.

On June 19, 1964, just seven months after John Kennedy had been targeted in Dallas, death nearly struck the Kennedy family again, when the youngest surviving brother, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, nearly died in a small plane crash. He was only thirty-two years old and had won his seat just two years earlier (the one vacated by his brother’s election as president).

On the way to a campaign stop, the plane suddenly lost altitude and crashed in an orchard three miles short of the runway. Two people would die in this crash and Kennedy would break three vertebrae and two ribs and suffer a collapsed lung.

Both John and Robert dropped everything to come to his side at the hospital, as they had done earlier when their father had his stroke, and which the family had repeated for Jack the previous November. The idea of the Kennedys rallying around their own touched a national nerve. One media commentator wondered out loud if the Kennedys might somehow be cursed, given that the eldest Kennedy brother, Joe Kennedy Jr. and their sister Kathleen Kennedy had also both been killed in air crashes.

The general election was conducted against a backdrop of two news stories that told conflicting narratives about who Lee Harvey Oswald was and his involvement in the assassination attempt and related murders.

In the deep background, as always, resided the Warren Commission. It had chosen to present itself as the sober group of professionals going on about the great work of the nation. The commission's meetings were not public, and its members had strictly honored their vow to withhold comment for the duration. Thus, none could grandstand on his or her own behalf. Reporters and commentators speculated that they were doing a “deliberate” job, implying a slow and steady approach to the truth.

The Oswald death, however, was anything but slow and steady. It was fast and loud and accompanied by a small coterie of opinionated men who would shout from street corners and occasional TV shows about conspiracy. His beating was portrayed as a “warning” by guilty men, and his subsequent death was commonly accepted as a murder staged to look like suicide.

A slight majority of the jury, interviewed after the Oswald death, confirmed their belief that Oswald was what he claimed — a puppet. Still, they all believed he was guilty of firing on the presidential limousine in an attempt to murder President Kennedy. Most jurors felt he would have been convicted and fast, had the trial gone forward. Several of the most vocal jurors, however, believed that multiple gunmen were involved, and therefore, they were reluctant to convict on the actual murder charges of Governor Connally, agent Hill or Officer Tippit.

Attempts to study this jury’s statements and make sense of them have been a parlor game of sorts for almost fifty years now. The truth is that they were contradictory and changing. The defense had never presented its case asserting a full-on conspiracy, having been short-circuited by Oswald’s beating and overdose.

Although they never got the chance to see the trial through, members of the Oswald jury told reporters they might have convicted the ex-military drifter if they could have instructed the grand jury to bring charges against other gunmen they were sure must have been involved. Others deny that level of consensus. It seems that the jury might just as easily have ended up deadlocked had they gone all the way.

With the dismissed members of the Texas jury ending up on Sunday talk shows, Chief Justice Earl Warren met privately with President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy to brief them on the commission’s progress. He told them the preponderance of current evidence seemed to lead to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Still, he felt the death of Oswald and the federal intent to seize the prisoner (even though it had not been carried out) indicated the situation had clearly gotten out of hand. The Supreme Court would likely be asked to rule in the future on issues arising from this very battle, pitting the rights of states against those of the federal government. If that should happen, Warren would be unable to take part in one of the Court's most central decisions of his time. He should never have taken the assignment, he fretted, no matter how well intentioned, and now he realized the mistake. The chief justice said, “I must do the right thing, and I am compelled by a love of this country to do it immediately.” Warren resigned his commission, as it were.

The Kennedy brothers shared a brief glance. They both felt strongly that someone had gotten to Warren, but they knew they couldn't address that for fear of introducing the “paranoia” issue into the national conversation. Still, Bobby Kennedy took a hard stance: “Mr. Chief Justice, you know the political world well, and you know that it simply will not do for the nation to have its confidence in your mission undermined by your recusal,” he argued. “You must do no such thing as resign; it is imperative that you see this through.”

John Kennedy nodded his slow agreement. “I have to agree with the attorney general,” he told Warren. “None of us will win if our efforts to assess blame do not have the impartial power of the judiciary behind them. And it may be even worse if you leave before the job is done.”

Warren agreed to reconsider his position, went home to think on it, and sent over the following letter in the morning: “I resign, effective immediately, the chairmanship of this commission. I recommend that the commission staff work with congressional staff to support an appropriate congressional committee, operating under public oversight.”

With those words, Warren threw a bomb into the middle of America’s public square. He had left, and he had taken his commission with him. In the middle of a presidential election, the chief justice of the Supreme Court had told the White House not to investigate its own crime but to let the U.S. Congress do the job.

In a move that struck the White House as clearly choreographed, the moment Warren’s resignation and recommendation were released to the press, Senator Everett Dirksen was standing before the cameras, pledging his patriotic effort to follow Warren's sage advice.

Soon, even though it was a political autumn, both the House and the Senate had taken a seat at the table by creating the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President. It came to be pronounced, "J-Cap," and it would change everything.

The political cover that Congress gave itself when it created JCAAP was that it would take several months to fold the work of the Warren Commission into the congressional system, and so it would not begin its own fact-finding and deliberations until after the November election.

The non-congressional members of the Warren Commission (McCloy, Farmer, Murrow and Gross) were thanked for their service and dismissed. They were replaced by a contentiously assembled group of representatives and senators from each party. All were assembled under the election year mandate that the public needed to know there would be no cover-up and that their representatives would follow where the facts led. People in 1964 still trusted Congress, and many thought that, yes, their elected representatives probably ought to earn their paychecks and look into this.

With the Warren Commission leaning toward the lone-gunman theory, and the Dallas jury leaning toward conspiracy, JCAAP immediately became known as the “tiebreaker.” The first two rounds had been split, and now Congress would settle it.

While Congress stipulated, in an effort to appear nonpartisan, that public hearings would not begin in earnest until after the election, being selected for the committee clearly propelled six representatives and six senators toward reelection in November. The committee was composed of all the congressional names from the Warren Commission roster (Dirksen and Magnuson for the Senate; Boggs and Dwyer for the House), plus eight others — four Republicans and four Democrats.

Because the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House, the chairman of the committee became Democratic Senator Magnuson of Washington. It was the biggest political matter ever placed on his desk, and it would overwhelm him. On a ten-year anniversary panel about the JCAAP committee, Magnuson described the experience by saying he “had been driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown. It seemed so straightforward when we started, and it became so impossible so quickly.”

The fact that the assassination attempt had become what often seemed like a national obsession did not stop real events from needing presidential attention. The Cold War continually threatened to become hot. Always, there was the forward march of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy commitment to the cause of racial equality.

Also demanding a lot of President Kennedy’s attention was the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs had never given up pitching a beefier response to the Communist menace there. Lately, after Dallas, it seemed that their frustration grew greater and their impatience at the President’s restraint more visible. Kennedy did not believe in land wars in Asia and had said so often. He had been to Vietnam in the early ’50s, heard the advice from the diplomats there, and taken it to heart.

Then, on August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox, an American naval destroyer, got into a shooting incident with three North Vietnamese navy torpedo boats. The Maddox expended more than 280 shells, and four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter-bombers strafed the torpedo boats. Four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, but no Americans.

The upshot, however, was a “rally ’round the flag” effect and a demand for action. John and Robert Kennedy brought together a smallish new ExComm structure and sat all its members down in the Cabinet room. The military leaders all believed that the United States must stand ready to fight.

“Do I need a formal declaration of war to take offensive action?” the President asked his attorney general.

The answer was probably not. Nonetheless, Capitol Hill was alive with a Southeast Asia Resolution that conveyed full congressional authority to the commander-in-chief to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” It looked like it might even pass unanimously but, obviously, the White House would have to ask for permission before it could be granted.

Suddenly, Kennedy found himself with both the U.S. Congress and his Joint Chiefs of Staff pushing him toward deploying combat troops in Vietnam. He had already made up his mind to withdraw more or less completely after his reelection.

During a break, JFK brought Bobby to the outside patio. They had taken to doing all their talking there; it just felt safer. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire affair in the Gulf of Tonkin has been cooked up,” he raged, “and those men will not tell me the truth.” It was a tragic testament to the divide between the civilian and military leadership that the President would question the facts as they were brought to him. Yet he did question them, and deeply.

In the early afternoon, Vice President Lyndon Johnson joined the Executive Committee after cutting short a campaign swing through Illinois, a state that could have gone either way in the last election, and may in fact have been decided by voter fraud in both parties. The Vice President had visited South Vietnam only last year and had come back as a strong supporter of doing what was necessary to hold off the Communists.

“What would happen if I just said, ‘We assume it was an accident, and we also assume it will not be repeated’?” asked Kennedy. He could argue that if either of those assumptions were incorrect, he would act according to that new information. The administration, however, did not need, nor did it want, a statement backing military force. If it needed to act, it would do so, and Congress would then be brought into the picture. The administration did not wish for a blank check.

“Mr. President, the problem with that tactic,” said the Vice President, “is that you can’t keep splittin’ the damn baby, because half a baby’s no good for anybody.” He went on to clarify that he believed his boss had split the baby by giving the go-ahead to the Bay of Pigs invasion but withholding air power, and he had done it again with the Cuban Missile Crisis by putting a blockade around Cuba instead of taking out the Soviet missiles.

In the end, the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as did the Senate by a vote of 88-2. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two dissenters, called President Kennedy before the vote. “You do not need this resolution, Mr. President, and I will not support it.”

“I appreciate that straight talk from you, Senator Morse, and I fully expect you to offer your seasoned advice to me as you judge I need it.” Morse confided to friends that he wondered if the President wasn’t putting him in his place. The next time they met, he reminded himself, he would need to set that right.

President Kennedy told his circle of advisers at a meeting the next day not to be concerned. “Just because they said I can do whatever I want, doesn’t mean I have to do anything at all.”