Surrounded by Enemies (6 page)

That Sunday morning, November 24, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ran the bases of all three network talk shows, an unprecedented feat that has since been matched only a few times (less successfully by Susan Rice, trying to spin the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya). He taped CBS’s second-place
Face the Nation
first, sped across town to open up NBC’s top-rated
Meet the Press
, and then closed out the hour with ABC’s third-place
Issues and Answers
. All shows drew record numbers of viewers to their broadcasts.

“We are keeping all lines of communication open between the various law enforcement jurisdictions,” he told CBS moderator Paul Niven, as if this were breaking news. On the security issue, Kennedy stated the administration’s premise that there was no need to surround the nation’s residence with actual troops from the Army or the National Guard, that the Secret Service needed to focus on its internal investigation, and that the FBI had its hands full running point on the investigation that he had begun at his brother’s direction. He tried to describe the federal marshals as the logical choice. Niven did not contest this analysis, and the attorney general was out the door into a waiting limousine before the newsman could think of a follow-up.

The big show was
Meet the Press
. Moderator Ned Brooks, it was later learned, had spoken to an insider at CBS who told him about the
Face the Nation
intervew, and he was far more confrontational as a result. Brooks burrowed in almost immediately on the Secret Service issue and what that said about the administration’s analysis of the national security situation. Kennedy stated and restated his position, not budging or giving his questioner what he wanted.

When the answers could not be parsed any further, Brooks asked, “What did you and the President discuss when you first talked?”

Bobby Kennedy clearly had not thought this one out. “My, uh, only concern, at that time, uh, of course, was his, uh, safety,” he stammered before gaining his footing. “And his was that the American people should pray for Governor Connally and Special Agents Hill and Kellerman and Officer Tippit and all their families.”

On the way to the ABC studios, Kennedy wrote out his response to this question in long-hand on a yellow legal pad in order to better field it if it came up again. Moderator Howard K. Smith, however, had already interviewed potential Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona while waiting for the attorney general to show up. The conservative Goldwater had a reputation for never pulling any punches and had gaffed badly. “This administration is on a hair-trigger,” Goldwater had said before Smith gave him a chance to rephrase his criticism.

This gave Kennedy the opening, however, to act offended. “This is no time for partisan politics or launching campaigns,” he said. “Senator Goldwater needs to think before he speaks. President Kennedy knows this from deep experience, and that is why he is studying the situation now and gathering information before he briefs the American people.” Later that day at the White House, JFK summoned up the gallows humor he so often enjoyed when he told his brother he should have called Goldwater's unfortunate choice of words a “cheap shot.”

Goldwater’s self-inflicted wound was widely covered and soon forgotten but it did allow the Kennedy administration to change the subject and defuse the issue before it gained real traction. It also added to the already great public sympathy for the President of the United States, whose job approval rating was measured at 79 percent, the highest it had been since after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. Privately, Republicans groused that the worse things got for President Kennedy, the more the public seemed to like him. It was a premise that would eventually be tested to the limit.

Robert Kennedy’s trio of television appearances on Sunday only half-completed the White House strategy. Next on the itinerary was St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, where the Kennedys worshiped. The big, cross-shaped red-brick building with the weathered, green copper dome was a conspicuous landmark and would prove to be an excellent backdrop for a family show of support.

Bishop Hannan celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass for the Kennedy family in sonorous Latin, but when he preached his sermon, Hannan switched to a language all could understand:

While Hannan spoke, Chief Marshal McShane was outside the cathedral, directing the security operation on this exterior perimeter, plus coordinating five undercover marshals inside the building. Almost pitiably, the Secret Service dispatched a unit as they always did, but this time they stood on the side, quietly fuming and smoking cigarettes.

As the Kennedy family exited into the watery November gloom, they were swarmed by reporters. Washington was afloat in them now. Every national media outlet had sent someone; international reporters were arriving by the hour; even local papers and TV stations had their own teams in both Dallas and Washington to cover the assassination attempt and its aftermath. Kennedy ignored the questions the Johnny-come-latelies shouted at him. He engaged with some of the regular press corps, though. The chief executive understood his relationship with the media better than any of his predecessors, even FDR. He knew reporters wanted to be in his field of vision, literally and symbolically, and they would often slant stories to stay in favor at the White House. JFK had created a club everyone wanted to join.

Standing next to each other, both dressed for Sunday services, the President and First Lady provided quite a contrast from the bloody examples they had been only forty-eight hours earlier. “Today we mourn the victims as is appropriate,” said the man who had nearly been among them. “Tomorrow we will return our attention to finding the guilty parties and holding them accountable.”

Pierre Salinger visibly winced from the sidelines. Particularly when reporters shouted the obvious question: “When you say ‘guilty parties,’ are you saying you believe this was a conspiracy?”

“I’m withholding judgment until the facts are clear. It’s irresponsible to speculate,” concluded the President, even though that is exactly what he and his inner circle had been doing almost nonstop for two days.

Jackie Kennedy, seeing Salinger’s discomfort, pulled at her husband’s arm. “If you’ll excuse us,” she said to the press in her now trademark whisper, and she pulled the President away, allowing herself to be used as a human shield.

At this point, Salinger was set upon by the reporters. He clarified that President Kennedy had been using the term “guilty parties” only in a generic sense, that they were aware that the early investigation seemed to be focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone gunman. He promised a news conference where the President would take all questions. Pressed on a date, he offered Tuesday as a likely candidate, buying time under the pretext of needing to bury the dead.

The federal marshals around President and Mrs. Kennedy were a collection of clean-cut men in off-the-rack suits, eyes constantly shifting. As several escorted the first couple toward a waiting Lincoln limousine, others moved quickly to put themselves in front of the pack of reporters, roughly shoving them back.

The President and First Lady got into the waiting Lincoln. It was a closed car, not a convertible like the one in Dallas. Never again would such an exposed vehicle be used by an American president. Motorcycle cops fore and aft, it sped away. Even those uniformed officers had been personally approved by RFK’s right-hand man at the Justice Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, that morning before church. He had asked for a dozen local police officers to be sent over, from which he randomly selected four at the last possible minute. When it came to personal security, no one was taking any chances.

Across town, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a member of the Disciples of Christ, sat in the front pew of the National City Christian Church with his wife Lady Bird Johnson. The Vice President looked ravaged. Every so often, Lady Bird would touch his hand or pat him on the arm. He kept shaking her off. His outsize features showed outsize anxiety. Years later, it seems clear he was not concerned for the Kennedys or the Connallys but for himself.

Later, at his own impromptu news encounter, Johnson was asked about his emotions and said, “I am sadder than I know how to tell you.” Johnson’s fleshy face twisted into a Texas mask of tragedy. “John Connally was a friend. I’ve known him since he was a very young man, and liked him and admired him, too. He worked for me for a spell and he made a wonderful, just a wonderful, governor of Texas. I looked to see him on the national stage one day before too long. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him run for President, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him win.”

More than a few reporters noted Johnson’s focus on Connally without mentioning Kennedy but reasoned that Connally was dead and the President still among the living. It was an oversight that could easily be made by a man enduring profound grief for a friend and fellow Texan. And they noted Johnson’s invoking the presidential chances of his protégé when his own were always on his mind. All in all, it felt tone deaf but, to those who knew him, that was LBJ.

Was Johnson upset because he had come within half a second of being the President of the United States? Or was he aware that with Kennedy’s survival and continued viability in the 1964 presidential election that, he, Johnson, might now more easily be dumped from the ticket he had blackmailed his way onto in 1960?

Or did it go beyond even that?

An astute politician, LBJ knew that if he was now going to run for President, he’d have to wait until 1968 whether JFK kept him on the ticket or not. He’d be sixty by then — not too old, but not young either, particularly with his record of heart troubles. If he ran, he probably wouldn’t run unopposed. Bobby Kennedy seemed unlikely to wait in line while somebody else succeeded his brother. “That ruthless little shit doesn’t wait for anybody, except maybe Jack,” LBJ had told his young assistant, Bill Moyers. “Bobby Kennedy's the kind of guy who gets into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front.”

All that was interesting, but not for today. Even the 1964 election lay almost a year away, and a politician’s year was longer than a dog’s.

Johnson did not need a heart attack or an imposing opponent to cause him concern, however. There was also the growing scandal that had begun last summer over Johnson’s protégé, Bobby "Little Lyndon" Baker, one that involved trading money and women for votes and government contracts. And if that weren’t enough, another Johnson associate, Billie Sol Estes, was up to his ears in a scandal from the year before that threatened to send Johnson to jail amid charges involving suitcases of money and implications of being an accessory to murder.

As it turned out, on the very day that LBJ was watching the carnage from his own limo in the presidential motorcade, a Senate Rules Committee in Washington, D.C. was hearing testimony in closed session from a Donald B. Reynolds about a $100,000 payoff that had been made to Bobby Baker intended for Johnson.

Possibly just as threatening for LBJ was the fact that in the New York offices of
Life
magazine, managing editor George P. Hunt had convened a gathering of nine reporters, all working on a story about Johnson’s path from poverty to wealth while pursuing a life in politics. Several of these reporters had just returned from Texas with information that was going to be split up and investigated by the entire team.

The news of the assassination attempt in Dallas had refocused priorities in both the Senate committee and at
Life
magazine. Suspicious financial practices by the Vice President hardly merited attention when the President’s life had just been threatened.

With the world watching what was happening at the Dallas Police Department, Chief Jesse Curry fretted in his office on Sunday morning about a promise he’d made to the media that wasn’t sitting well with him. He had agreed to allow them to film the transfer of Lee Oswald to the county jail. In order to do that, the accused assassin would be led through the parking basement of the headquarters on Sunday at 12:30 p.m., nearly two days to the hour that he was alleged to have shot at the presidential motorcade. Curry sat in his office, drinking coffee from a thermos that his wife had handed him on his way out the door at 6 a.m. After watching all the morning news shows, he'd started to have buyers’ remorse. After all, the White House was treating security as a national priority. Could he do any less?

Detective James Leavelle presented himself at the chief’s door and asked if he could have a moment. Leavelle was to be the man handcuffed to Oswald for the transfer, something that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the logistics. He made a strong case to Curry that the elevator at the Dallas Police Department should be stopped on the first floor where they should take the prisoner off, put him in a car on Main Street, and whisk him off to the county jail before the media in the basement even realized he’d been moved.

Curry considered this carefully. “You want me to lie to the press?”

“Only if our priority is to keep the prisoner alive long enough to give him the death sentence,” answered Leavelle.

Curry thought about it. He’d been an all-district tackle for Dallas Technical High School and led their football team all the way to the state finals back in 1933. “A feint might be just what we need here.” Curry gave Leavelle the go-ahead and they agreed that the press would be told only after Oswald was already on the way. Sure, the TV networks with their live cameras down in the basement would be furious but they didn’t run the show, he thought. He was still in charge.

The decision to move Oswald in this way may have saved the accused gunman’s life. A Dallas bar owner, Jack Ruby, was apprehended in the basement with a loaded handgun at the exact moment Oswald was supposed to be coming out of the nearby elevator. The officers who detained Ruby did not immediately arrest him. Instead they called Chief Curry.

Ruby, it turned out, was no stranger to the Dallas Police Department. He ran a local nightclub, and he made sure police officers felt comfortable there. He was friendly enough with local cops that no one had thought to stop him from watching the prisoner transfer that day.

Under questioning, the nightclub operator said he’d come to the basement on the spur of the moment, wanting to kill Oswald for darkening the good name of Texas and terrorizing the Kennedy family. Curry would normally have let Ruby go with a warning and thanked his lucky stars that things had gone no further. But there were so many reporters who witnessed Ruby’s detention that it could not be ignored — particularly since the fifty-two-year-old was described as waving the gun in a way that most reporters and officers on the scene found impossible to miss. Curry ordered that Ruby be arrested and booked.

Only one thing bothered Curry. Ruby had a reputation for being mobbed up with deep contacts in the organized crime underworld. What if he wasn’t telling the truth about his motives? What if Jack Ruby had been sent to silence Lee Harvey Oswald from talking?