Surrounded by Enemies (5 page)

Robert Kennedy did not go home the night of November 22. Instead, he took a fitful two-hour nap on a couch in Kenny O’Donnell’s office, covered by a crimson Harvard blanket that last saw duty at a frigid football game against Yale two years earlier.

On Saturday morning, November 23, Kennedy met with Mrs. Lincoln, in the Oval Office at 8 a.m. According to Lincoln’s testimony, Bobby Kennedy was highly agitated. “They’re going to look at everything that ever happened,” Mrs. Lincoln quoted him as saying. She said the attorney general went on to explain his fear that a wide-ranging investigation into the events of the day before was imminent.

As his first order of business, Bobby Kennedy asked for and took possession of Lincoln’s handwritten telephone log as well as President Kennedy’s appointment book. He also wanted to know where the records of people who had been upstairs to visit the President’s living quarters were kept and by whom.

In earlier administrations, these lists of personal visitors were considered public record. Chief White House usher J.B. West testified that he was surprised when the attorney general asked for them and was told they were needed for safekeeping. West, who thought they were safe enough in the White House, was told they would go to a “more secure place.” West surrendered the logs to Robert Kennedy who was, after all, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States at the time he asked for them. Evelyn Lincoln was not at the meeting between West and Kennedy, a man who understood that what no one else overheard, no one else could testify about. The attorney general also knew that there were some matters that he could not be directly involved in either.

One of those sensitive areas was a recent discussion with Secret Service agent Robert Bouck. On Saturday morning, Bouck was contacted by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, RFK’s number two man at the Justice Department. “If you have knowledge of any recordings of private Oval Office or telephonic conversations with the President of the United States that exist under your protection, Mr. Bouck — and I am not saying that I have confirmed personal knowledge of such existence,” he said, parsing his words, “those recordings would need to be securely stored on the third floor of the Executive Office Building immediately.”

When asked by congressional investigators if he felt any hesitation in obeying Katzenbach’s order, Bouck replied, “I believed he was speaking for the attorney general and that anything the AG had to say came straight from the President of the United States.” Bouck immediately collected the recording equipment and all the tapes at his disposal and took them to the discussed location in the newly constructed Executive Office Building, not far from the White House. That floor also headquartered the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, a bureau dedicated to finding ways and means of defeating Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam and elsewhere around the world. Because of its highly secret operations, armed guards patrolled the third floor around the clock.

After one of those guards tried and failed to relieve Bouck of his equipment and tapes, the two men placed them under lock and key with the logs that Robert Kennedy had confiscated earlier in the morning. There was no more secure depository for those vital records that the attorney general could have chosen, or at least none that were under his control.

All of this had been completed before President Kennedy presented himself for work the next morning at 9:32 a.m. He took coffee from Mrs. Lincoln, entered the Oval Office and closed the door. Chief of Staff Kenny O’Donnell was seated on the sofa, making notes. He said, “They won’t get away with this, Mr. President.” Then O’Donnell nodded toward the alcove where Robert Kennedy had spent the rest of his morning making phone calls on the secure line that had been installed there the year before. By the time lunch was served, the first twenty-four hours were over, but the work was just beginning.

At this point, although transfixed by the close call for President Kennedy and the related deaths, the public was already being told as fact that the would-be assassin had been caught. After all, every source from the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
to the nation’s three television networks seemed to be making that assumption based on apparently definitive information from the FBI. By the end of JFK’s first term in January 1965, of course, almost everyone said that they knew from the beginning that a conspiracy had sent assassins to ambush the presidential party, but that was clearly hindsight operating.

While the public watched an endless rehash of events on TV, the White House was heating up with most of the high-level officials there knowing in their bones there was much more to be concerned about than a lone gunman who had just been arrested. To a man, they seemed to understand that grave forces building up for years had just been ferociously unleashed on the streets of Dallas.

Indeed, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a man who had been through the thirteen days of danger that had come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, felt immediately that this situation was at least as dangerous. “If the President of the United States had been targeted by a conspiracy,” the man with the computer-like brain wrote in his 1992 memoir, “then the government was not secure, and if the government was not secure, then neither were the nation’s nuclear weapons.”

At first the halls of the West Wing were home to whispers about who could have truly been behind it all. Staffers up and down the chain of command knew that a duly elected President of the United States had been targeted for murder by forces that probably considered their acts reasonable and necessary and not treason. Everyone had a theory. The suspects included: the CIA, organized crime, Soviet agents, key members of the U.S. military going all the way to the Joint Chiefs, anti-Castro Cubans, Castro himself, and even Lyndon Johnson. Only one man, speechwriter Ted Sorensen, held out hope that Oswald could have actually acted alone, and his belief was, by his own admission, “more a matter of denial than conviction.”

What to do about it was equally confusing. Everyone wanted to obliterate this craven attempt to control U.S. policy through murder, but they knew the fight ahead had the potential to cripple JFK's presidency with as much finality as a fatal bullet would have.

There was much to fear. Most of the prime suspects could be prevented from gaining access to the White House to do actual physical harm to the President and his staff. There was one force, however, that could not be restrained — the military power of the United States. The nation’s military readiness had been advanced to DefCon 2 — one step short of actual nuclear missiles flying. The decision had been made without the sign-off of the commander-in-chief, who had been notified three hours later as an afterthought.

Kenny O’Donnell bluntly worried about the “
Seven Days in May
scenario” based on a popular book about a military coup in the United States. (The film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would be released only a few months later.) Well before Dallas turned up the paranoia, President Kennedy had told friends in private conversations after reading the book that he feared something similar could happen to him. He had experienced first-hand the insubordination of the Joint Chiefs, particularly the Air Force’s chief Gen. Curtis LeMay. Even Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the former chair and now Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, seemed to have a first response that questioned any order from the White House rather than simply following it.

Only one thing was crystal clear at this moment. The cold war that had been taking place within the Kennedy administration had gone searingly hot on the streets of Dallas. Things would not —
could
not — go back to normal.

By Saturday morning, no one had any doubt that the true target of Friday’s gun attack in Dallas was President John F. Kennedy and that Governor John B. Connally, Special Agent Clint Hill, Police Officer J.D. Tippit and even injured Special Agent Roy Kellerman were all just collateral damage. Most Americans never seriously considered any other scenario, even though Connally, like Kennedy, had his own share of dark forces that wished him ill.

Indeed, the hatred for President Kennedy in certain circles ran deep and dark. Those people kept their feelings to themselves for the most part, but they were of the strong opinion that it was a shame that the assassin or assassins had missed. Around the globe many citizens thought the fact that things like this happened in America was not surprising. Many observers were only surprised that Kennedy had cheated death, given the lethality of his enemies.

For most Americans, though, the idea that anyone should try to snuff out the life of the young, vital President seemed particularly outrageous. This may have been true in Dallas even more than elsewhere, amplified by the belief that the shootings had stained the city’s reputation, perhaps forever.

Police operators lost track of the number of telephoned death threats against Oswald. Some were explicit enough to alarm Dallas Police Chief Jesse E. Curry. For the first weekend, the suspect stayed in a maximum-security cell on the fifth floor of the Dallas Police Department. Fearing a possible lynch mob, Curry also called back off-duty policemen to help protect his besieged headquarters. Outside his window, Curry could see an angry mob demanding that justice be delivered to the man they assumed was the killer. They shouted curses and shook fists. One man threw a stone. A flying squad of police waded into the crowd, billy clubs swinging, and arrested him without challenge. Their bold action, and the implicit promise of more if necessary, squelched a potential explosion.

During this first weekend after the assassination attempt, the residence and workplace for the nation’s chief executive had an under-siege quality. Outside the gate, D.C. police patrolled in record numbers. A collection of military buses was driven in on Saturday night, forming a cordon around the White House fence. Looking inside at the grounds, you could see snipers on rooftops and extra security guards.

White House reporters spotted Attorney General Robert Kennedy coming and going on several occasions, always in the company of large, hard-faced men carrying briefcases and wearing jackets that bulged from shoulder holsters they made no effort to conceal. This was shocking because Kennedy had an aversion to security, thinking it intrusive. Even after receiving death threats in 1962, he had said “Kennedys don’t need bodyguards,” and gone on about his business of confronting organized crime and trying to jail its leaders.

Dallas had changed all that. The President of the United States had been targeted by a man who may or may not have been working alone, and probably by a larger conspiracy, the makeup of which he had not yet determined. No precaution was too much. Not now.

There had been calls to activate National Guard troops to watch over the White House in the first hours, but RFK had refused the offer. While others debated his motivation, the truth was that he did not want the Guard called in because he felt the country might well be in the middle of a coup attempt. If National Guard troops were deployed around the White House, treasonous leaders in the extreme right wing of the U.S. military might cause U.S. Army forces to move on them, spilling American blood in the worst fratricide since the Civil War.

The younger Kennedy was not in a trusting mood. He had first come to his brother asking permission to banish the Secret Service. In Bobby’s mind, the very organization trusted to protect the President’s personal safety had failed his brother miserably and might be compromised. When asked to sign an executive order dismissing them, the President did not hesitate. “I concur,” was all he said as he affixed his signature.

As savvy politically as any two people operating in the nation’s capital, John and Robert Kennedy knew they might be hurt by this decision to evict the Secret Service. The problem was, there would be no politics or scandal to worry about if they did not survive the next few days. That was central. They could not allow themselves to think of this any other way. They had families to protect and they were, said the attorney general, “surrounded by enemies.”

Yet Robert Kennedy could not turn to the federal forces at his true command as attorney general, those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had little use for the Kennedy brothers, spying on them and keeping files of all manner of indiscretion. Some of the incidents on file were concocted or overblown, but a good portion were true and incriminating enough to force President Kennedy to keep Hoover on the job when everyone else assumed he would fire him. The FBI under Hoover was compromised and not to be trusted.

Having rejected the services of the U.S. Army, the National Guard, the FBI and the Secret Service, the remaining list of capable security assistants was extremely short. In fact, it had only one name on it. Jim McShane.

Fellow Irish-American Chief U.S. Marshal Jim McShane ran the federal marshals. These people were loyal to McShane, and McShane was loyal to the Kennedys. He had started his career as a New York cop and had worked with Bobby as an investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee. He had even been a bodyguard for candidate John Kennedy during the 1960 election.

McShane and his marshals were called off their assignment protecting Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate early Saturday afternoon and told to come to the White House immediately, and to bring “other men you can personally vouch for” directly to the White House as well.

It is difficult to assess whether this action of embracing the federal marshals was needed or not. In the heat of the moment, all parties to these discussions have described over the years a sense of panic over personal safety that passed like an infection from one administration player to another. With the hindsight of fifty years, it now seems to have escalated a conflict that was already high to a level at least equal to the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The President of the United States, however, was not ready to speak or answer hard questions about this issue or any other, not just yet. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger got that assignment. His opening statement expressed that the President was shocked and saddened by the loss of Connally, Hill and Tippit. He fed the assembled journalists a tidbit about Jackie, describing her as “shaken but recovering,” noting that, unlike her husband, she had never seen combat.

The reporters, on the other hand, wanted to know if the White House’s use of federal marshals meant the administration was convinced the Secret Service and FBI were riddled with spies or conspirators.

Salinger, acting as the point man for the politically attuned machinery of the White House, cast the decision as a temporary reassignment and nothing more. It was designed to give the Secret Service a chance to concentrate on its internal review of the failure in Dallas and adjust, rather than focus on the demanding job of securing the White House, which others could do. Salinger tried to sell the idea that these agencies had their own problems to take care of, but nobody seemed to be completely buying it. In frustration, he blurted out the awful truth. “You try getting shot at,” said the usually gregarious talking head for the administration, “and see if you want to trust the people who were supposed to protect you.” Even the candid Salinger knew immediately he had said too much too soon.

Immediate polls showed that the public bought the administration’s argument. That was clearly a testament to John Kennedy’s power to evoke empathy, which would be his strongest asset in the years ahead. On the other hand, winning the debate was not winning the battle. Feeling shamed and humiliated, regardless of presidential explanations, agents who had routinely covered up an array of presidential misbehavior since they got the assignment to protect “Lancer” (JFK’s codename) suddenly felt a little bit less committed to the cause.

By the evening of Saturday, November 23, it was clear to those who were in Washington, D.C. that the White House was under siege. Even under these extraordinary circumstances, however, politics could not be put aside. The executive order banning the Secret Service from doing its job protecting the President was a tactical necessity that created a political storm. As soon as it had been signed, Republicans on Capitol Hill began whispering about this act as an overreaction. With an election less than a year away, Dallas had provided them with their first issue. The first battlefield would be the Sunday talk shows.