The Kennedy Half-Century (64 page)

Nonetheless, Ford started with a self-inflicted wound only a month after taking the presidential oath, a complete pardon for his disgraced predecessor for any and all crimes he may have committed in office. Having lost his honeymoon glow, Ford plummeted almost overnight from 71 percent to 49 percent in the Gallup poll.
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He then rode a roller-coaster of recession, oil shocks, foreign crises, and intraparty rebellion as he filled out Nixon’s term.

As did his predecessors, the new thirty-eighth president had a direct connection to the thirty-fifth. Ford had served on the Warren Commission and was an unwavering advocate of its conclusions during his presidency and throughout his long life.
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Nonetheless, Watergate had jimmied open the Pandora’s box of CIA and FBI horrors, raising suspicions about their possible role in the Kennedy assassination, and both the electorate and lawmakers demanded to know more. In part to try to head off more intrusive investigations, President Ford appointed a commission in 1975, headed by his newly confirmed vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, to “determine the extent to which the [CIA] had exceeded its authority.”
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The resulting, rather limited, report disclosed the CIA’s illegal mail opening and surveillance of dissident groups domestically. It also dealt with some lingering questions about John Kennedy’s assassination, though its findings were clearly designed to reinforce those of the Warren Commission. In addition to insisting that “there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement” in JFK’s murder, the Rockefeller Commission denied any CIA connection to Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.
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Further, the Rockefeller Commission took an extraordinary action in the wake of the March 1975 public screening of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie. Keep in mind that the Zapruder film had been kept out of the public domain for more than eleven years—something that would almost certainly prove impossible today in the Internet age, with its much higher public expectations for prompt disclosure. Conditions had been very different in the 1960s. Immediately after the assassination, Zapruder made several copies of his soon-to-be-famous 8-millimeter amateur film. He turned over one copy to the Secret Service and sold the original to Time-Life for $150,000 plus a percentage of future proceeds. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed the original from Time-Life during the trial of Clay Shaw, which led to the widespread distribution of bootleg copies among assassination researchers. In 1969, an optical technician named Robert Groden obtained a copy of the film and spent four years improving and enhancing its images. Groden’s extremely graphic version shocked the public when it debuted on ABC television in March 1975. In addition, the “back and to the left” movement of President Kennedy’s head when it was struck by the fatal bullet appeared to contradict the Warren Commission’s insistence that JFK had been shot from behind.
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So the Rockefeller Commission convened a panel of military and medical experts to refute the impressions left by the Zapruder film. They cited experiments “conducted at Edgewood Arsenal [Maryland] [that] disclosed goats shot through the brain evidenced just such a violent neuromuscular reaction … [A] head wound such as that sustained by President Kennedy produces an ‘explosion’ of tissue at the area where the bullet exits from the
head, causing a ‘jet effect’ which almost instantly moves the head back in the direction from which the bullet came.”
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At a time when the manifest sins of the federal government had been exposed in both domestic and international affairs, Americans were disinclined to accept such findings at face value. Moreover, the heavily Democratic Congress, just elected in the wake of Watergate, was unwilling to leave the investigation to the Republican executive branch. Shortly after the appointment of the Rockefeller Commission, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to create a special eleven-member committee to examine the CIA, headed by Idaho’s Democratic senator Frank Church.
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The Ford administration was not pleased, and pointed to Church’s presidential ambitions.
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Whatever political dimensions existed, the well-staffed Church Committee produced plenty of damaging revelations about the CIA—and more than a few about the Kennedy administration.
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The first indications of the Kennedy-authorized assassination attempts on Fidel Castro came from the Church Committee, encouraging the belief that JFK was killed by Cuban agents intent on retaliation.
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Moreover, a staff leak from the committee generated the first sordid story of Kennedy’s extensive, irresponsible White House philandering. JFK’s long affair with Judith Campbell, including her ties to mob boss Sam Giancana, was laid bare in December 1975 press reports.
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Kennedy’s secrets, carefully protected by his friends in the media for many years, started oozing out, shocking many Americans who had accepted the post-Dallas image of sainthood conferred upon the dead president.
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Other tales of Kennedy’s adultery reached the front pages, such as his two-year affair with socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, and the Kennedy family’s exertions to cover up JFK’s sexual shenanigans became controversial, too.
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By 1976, the political cartoonist Charles Brooks could publish a drawing, unthinkable in the 1960s, of a very full garbage pail labeled “John F. Kennedy’s Secret Sex Life While President” behind a phony castle marked “Camelot.”
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In the sixties, a barrelful of worshipful books about JFK were written by former Kennedy aides and friends and eagerly published to good reviews and sizable sales.
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Now revisionist history was taking hold, and new volumes told a fuller, seamier truth about John F. Kennedy. The cynical 1970s were a decade when illusions of all sorts would be shattered, and JFK was no longer immune from severe criticism and personal exposure.

This skeptical era as well as prevailing political conditions combined to produce a full review of the Warren Commission’s conclusions. President Ford was not in favor of it, but if anything, his opposition made Democratic congressional efforts to reopen the investigation more determined. The public’s
intense response to the Zapruder film—both to the gruesomeness of its 486 frames and the questions raised in viewing JFK’s and Connally’s physical reactions to the bullets—added to the demand for a new inquiry. So, too, did revelations that the CIA had gone to considerable lengths to counter and discredit some authors of books proposing conspiracy theories about November 22, 1963.
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In 1976 the House of Representatives established its Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), discussed in an earlier chapter. Because this was an internal House action, President Ford had no voice in the matter, and he was already distracted by a difficult and ultimately losing election campaign. It would take the committee three years to complete its work, concluding that a conspiracy of some sort had existed in JFK’s murder. The committee issued its report and twelve volumes of appendices in 1979.
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Eerily, given his Warren Commission membership, Gerald Ford became the target for the first fully executed assassination attempts on a sitting president since JFK. Both would-be assassins were women and both struck in California during September 1975. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the notorious Charles Manson gang that had brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969, tried to kill Ford in Sacramento on September 5. Fromme pointed a .45-caliber automatic pistol at Ford as he was shaking hands near the state capitol, but an alert Secret Service agent grabbed her just in time. She was a mere two to three feet from the president and might easily have fatally wounded Ford.
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Some two weeks later, on September 22, Ford was visiting San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore fired a .38-caliber pistol at the president from across a crowded street. She missed Ford by a few feet, mainly because a former Marine, Oliver Sipple, deflected her arm at the last moment.
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The bullet was a highly destructive one similar to a dum-dum, and after striking a planter box and ricocheting off the pavement, it wounded a taxi driver in the groin. Adding to the Secret Service’s frustration, Moore had been arrested only two days earlier for illegal possession of another gun, and she was questioned by agents to see if she was a threat to Ford. The gun was confiscated, and in a serious error, Moore was released the day before Ford arrived. Fromme and Moore were not known to the Secret Service prior to September 1975—though at the time, almost thirty-nine thousand Americans were in the Service’s active file of potential assassins, including three hundred considered so dangerous that they were under surveillance in an operation code-named Watchbird.
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In a fascinating twist, Ford’s fall 1976 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter planned to use the memories of these assassination scares—as well as a reference to the city where JFK was killed—to suggest that Ford was a survivor who had helped America turn the corner from a difficult decade. In a nearly five-minute commercial set to upbeat patriotic music entitled “I’m
Feeling Good about America,” Ford continued giving a speech despite a loud firecracker blast. The narrator said, “Neither the cherry bombs of a misguided prankster, nor all the memories of recent years can keep the people and their president apart.” The scene then shifted to Dallas; Ford stood and waved through the open top of his automobile, as the narrator continued: “When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there’s a change that’s come over America.”
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At the last minute, Ford’s campaign leaders, fearing adverse public reaction, got cold feet and substituted generic footage of Ford for the “cherry bomb” and Dallas segments of the advertisement before it aired.

Ford proved more durable than his presidency, living longer than any other American president and dying in 2006 at age ninety-three. But the nation looked back at his tenure with some fondness. Republicans saw that Ford helped the country, and their party, recover from the Nixon scandals, while Democrats focused on the social liberalism (pro-choice on abortion, in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment) embraced by Ford and his wife, Betty.

In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Foundation gave Ford, then eighty-eight, its “Profiles in Courage” award for putting the nation’s interests above his own career when he pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974—the highly controversial decision that almost certainly cost Ford an elective term of his own. Presenting the award to Ford was Senator Ted Kennedy, who in 1974 had said that the president’s pardon showed that he was “clearly out of touch with the vast majority” of Americans.
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Accepting the honor, Ford offered a telling observation that applied to JFK as well as himself:

To know Jack Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word [courage]. Physical pain was an inseparable part of his life, but he never surrendered to it—any more than he yielded to freedom’s enemies during the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. President Kennedy understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No adviser can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age-old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity’s approval.
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Ford also left behind a somewhat surprising call for the complete release of all classified documents relating to the Kennedy assassination—an entreaty yet to be heeded, since fifty-thousand-plus pages of information, including key CIA records, are still kept from the public.
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In a conversation with a trusted journalist, Thomas DeFrank, Ford gave permission to publish the following comment after his death, which DeFrank did in 2007: “The time
has come to do it, but you have to be forewarned: there are some stories that’ll come out that were never verified that could be harmful to some people … I’ll just say some people that are known. You know how that happens—somebody investigates, somebody asks questions, and they make a statement. They’re never verified, it’s rumor, et cetera. That’s gonna happen, and that’s too bad.”
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Unfortunate or not, the revelations are a part of history, and after fifty years of delay, few will disagree with Ford’s suggestion.

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According to LBJ White House aide James Jones, President Johnson was privately rooting for Rockefeller to become the next president. Nixon was an old adversary, so he would never have been Johnson’s preference, but the surprise was that Johnson preferred “Rocky” to his own Democratic vice president. “I think he felt that Hubert [Humphrey] was maybe too nice to be president,” Jones told me. “He thought [Rockefeller] was the most talented.” Personal interview with James Robert Jones, November 22, 2011.

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The Chappaquiddick tragedy would dog Kennedy throughout the rest of his life, and it did in fact help to sink the one presidential bid he would launch in 1980.

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Jackie had in fact refused repeated offers from President Johnson and Lady Bird to come back, though we will never know whether it was because of her opinion of LBJ or because the timing simply wasn’t right.