Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (4 page)

IT WAS AFTER 4:30
in the morning when Bobby and Jackie finally returned to the White House with the body of the president. Bobby walked upstairs with Jackie and her mother to make sure they could get to sleep. “A terrible sense of loss overwhelmed everybody who was present in the room,” remembered family friend Charles Spalding, “and Bobby was trying to calm everybody and get them to bed.” Later he asked Spalding to walk with him to the Lincoln Room, where he was going to sleep. His friend, realizing he was “terribly distraught,” urged him to take a sleeping pill, which he did. Then Spalding closed the door. “All this time he had been under control. And then I just heard him sobbing. He was saying, ‘Why, God? Why, God, why?’…He just gave way completely, and he was just racked with sobs and the only person he could address himself to was ‘Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?’”

After a brief, restless sleep, Bobby was up and walking the South Grounds by 8:00 a.m. that Saturday. The White House was now filled with family, close friends, and aides. Among them was actor Peter Lawford, husband of Bobby’s sister Pat, and his manager, Milt Ebbins, who had flown in from Los Angeles the night before. JFK had always enjoyed the two Hollywood men’s company, pumping them for show business gossip and taking them on impromptu White House tours to show off the pomp of his new domicile. “Did you ever think you’d be in the White House with the president of the United States looking at Gilbert Stuart’s painting of Washington?” a bemused Kennedy asked the Hollywood agent

Now Ebbins was back in the White House and witness to another historical tableau. The cavernous East Room had been transformed into a black-crepe-bedecked funeral hall, with the coffin of Ebbins’s friend at the center, resting on a catafalque modeled on the one that had held the body of President Lincoln. A madcap mood of Irish mourning gripped the White House. “We had dinner that night, it was like an Irish wake,” Ebbins recalled. “You’d never know there was a dead man upstairs in a coffin. Laughing, jokes, everything. At one point Ethel took off her wig and put it on me. That family just turns off death. They grieve alone, by themselves, I think.”

Ebbins later came upon Bobby, who did not participate in the frantic dinner party, standing alone next to his brother’s coffin. “I walked in and he had both hands on top of the coffin, with his head down. He was crying. I thought it was strange, because Bobby never showed his emotions.” Ebbins had always thought of the younger brother as a “cold fish.”

“Every time we met him, he was nice to me, but it wasn’t Jack. Oh, Jack, he was something else. They were so different. Bobby had his holy grail. He was out to do something. Jack was too, but you never knew it. Eventually you did, but he would never talk about it.”

But Ebbins was seeing another side of the younger Kennedy that weekend. His suffering seemed biblical.

Years later, Peter Lawford would tell a friend that during the weekend at the White House, Bobby revealed that he thought JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government’s secret anti-Castro operations. Bobby reportedly told Lawford and other family members that there was nothing he could do at that point, since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government.

During that gray, wet weekend, the tensions between the inner Kennedy circle and the national security team that had served the president continued to flare. Defense Secretary McNamara, who had convinced Jackie and Bobby Kennedy to lay the president to rest at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac from the capital, escorted groups of family and friends on four separate occasions to scout for a burial site in the cemetery. (O’Donnell and the Irish mafia, ever possessive of their fallen leader, were lobbying strenuously for Jack to be returned to the Boston soil from which he had sprung.) On his second trip, McNamara, unprotected by raincoat, hat, or umbrella, was soon soaked to the bone in a sudden downpour. None of the attending generals, safely bundled up in their own rain gear, made even a polite attempt to extend their civilian boss some cover. Artist and close family friend William Walton, who had been tapped by Jackie to help oversee the aesthetics of her husband’s funeral, was flabbergasted by the military retinue’s blatant show of disrespect for McNamara.

The sodden McNamara weathered the storm and oversaw the successful selection of a site, high on the slope below the white-columned antebellum mansion of General Robert E. Lee. The defense secretary was told that this was the same spot where President Kennedy had stood admiring the view, during a tour of Arlington Cemetery that he took a few weeks before his assassination. The young tour guide who escorted the president that day told McNamara that Kennedy had gazed across the Potomac at the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. “The president said that it was so beautiful, he could stay up there forever,” the guide recalled.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AT
12:21 Eastern time, the second shock from Dallas struck the nation—Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down on live television as he was being escorted through the basement of the Dallas police building. His murderer—a burly nightclub owner named Jack Ruby who shouted, “You killed the president, you rat,” as he shot Oswald mortally in the stomach—professed to be distraught about the pain that the alleged assassin had caused the Kennedy family. But the killing had the feeling of a gangland hit meant to silence the accused Oswald before he could talk. In fact, Lyndon Johnson aide George Reedy thought the TV channel he was watching had cut away from coverage of the Kennedy funeral preparations to play an old Edward G. Robinson gangster movie when he first saw the shooting out of the corner of his eye.

The brazen elimination of first the president and then his accused assassin sent a deep shudder through Washington circles. On the phone with Bill Walton, Agnes Meyer, the aging, blunt-spoken mother of
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham, growled, “What is this—some kind of goddam banana republic?” Even former President Eisenhower was put in the same bitter frame of mind. It reminded him of a tour he had made of Haiti’s national palace back in the 1930s when he was a young major. Reading the dates on the marble busts of the former heads of state that lined the wall, he was shocked to realize that two-thirds of them had been slain in office. His own country, he reassured himself, would never succumb to this type of political bloodlust. Now he wasn’t so sure.

It was a worked-up Lyndon Johnson who told Bobby Kennedy about the shooting of Oswald. Entering the Blue Room of the White House, the new president greeted the surprised attorney general by urging him “to do something…. We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United States a bad name around the world.” LBJ accurately predicted the world reaction—newspapers in the free and communist camps alike howled about the “grotesque” display in Dallas, as the
Daily Herald
of London described the back-to-back murders, and openly wondered whether Oswald “was killed to keep him from talking,” in the words of a Paris newspaper.

But it’s uncertain how sincere Johnson was in his appeal for Bobby to join him in taking action. At this point, LBJ was still resisting calls for even a decorous investigation along the lines of the future Warren Commission. The new president seemed more concerned about the public relations aspect of the debacle in Dallas than in its actual legal resolution. In any case, Kennedy, filled with loathing for a man he immediately regarded as a usurper, never accepted the new president’s challenge to work with him on the mystery of November 22. Such an alliance would have been the only way for the monumental crime to have been solved. If these dueling halves of the Kennedy legacy—antagonists out of a Shakespearean court drama—had been able to put aside their storied mutual contempt, history would have been different. But this would have been so far out of character for both men that it was never a possibility.

Later on Sunday, Milt Ebbins stood in the living room of the White House’s presidential quarters with Peter Lawford, watching in grim disbelief as the TV played the shooting of Oswald over and over again. “Bobby came in, looked at the television, and then went over and turned it off. He didn’t say anything. Just turned it off.”

Bobby didn’t want to dwell openly on the morbid spectacle in Dallas. But he wanted to quietly figure it out. It was a pattern established that first weekend, and he stuck to it for the rest of his life. He refused to cooperate with the two major public investigations of his brother’s murder during his lifetime—the Warren Commission and Jim Garrison’s probe—for reasons that are both understandable and perplexing. But he doggedly pursued his own secret avenues of scrutiny in a determined effort to find the truth. And Jack Ruby was one of his first investigative targets.

There was no one in America with more acute investigative instincts than Robert Kennedy when it came to organized crime. And Jack Ruby had mob written all over him. If Bobby could not have figured this out himself, anonymous tipsters quickly emerged to point him in the right direction. One week after Ruby blasted his way into the national spotlight, an unsigned communication was sent to the attorney general and former CIA director Allen Dulles, from an informer who claimed that Ruby was a mob “finger man” or hit man. “If my memory serves me right,” wrote the informer, “Jack Ruby was visiting Syndicate Members in San Diego between the last months of 1961 and early months of 1962. The meeting of the Syndicate Members was at ‘The Brass Rail,’ a bar-restaurant…. It is used as a homosexual bar, much as the New York Syndicate under the former Gallo gang used some dozen homosexual bars as ‘fronts.’”

Immediately after Oswald was gunned down, Bobby put his right-hand man, Walt Sheridan, on Ruby. An FBI memo dated November 24, 1963, shows that within hours of the shooting, Sheridan turned up evidence that Ruby had been paid off in Chicago by a close associate of Jimmy Hoffa. According to the memo, Sheridan reported that Ruby had “picked up a bundle of money from Allen M. Dorfman,” Hoffa’s chief advisor on Teamster pension funds and the stepson of Paul Dorfman, the labor boss’s main link to the Chicago mob. Robert Peloquin, an attorney in the Justice Department’s criminal division, was quickly dispatched to Chicago to check out the story about the Ruby payoff. Informed of this mission by the chief of the Chicago FBI office in a November 25 memo, an irritated J. Edgar Hoover scribbled on the document, “I do wish Department would mind its own business and let us mind ours.”

A few days later, Julius Draznin, the federal labor lawyer whom Bobby had asked to look into a possible Chicago Mafia role in the assassination, provided further evidence about Ruby’s background as a mob enforcer. Draznin submitted a report on November 27 that detailed Ruby’s labor racketeering activities and his penchant for armed violence. Later, Kennedy would remark that when he saw Ruby’s phone records, “The list was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee.”

Bobby opened up another line of investigation the weekend after the assassination. Still brooding about the collapse of security around his brother, he quietly asked family friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, to explore whether Hoffa had been involved and whether the Secret Service had been bought off. Bobby knew that Moynihan was not an experienced investigator like Sheridan, but with a background in the longshoreman’s union, the fellow Irishman was presumed to have some useful contacts and expertise about labor corruption. Moynihan would later hand Kennedy a confidential report stating there was no evidence the Secret Service had been corrupted.

Even before Dallas, Bobby Kennedy seemed to be losing confidence in the ability of the Secret Service to protect his brother against the numerous dangers that surrounded him. At the time of the assassination, Kennedy was backing a bill, H.R. 4158, which would have given the attorney general the authority to appoint the agents who protected the president, instead of the Secret Service. Rowley, the agency’s chief, acknowledged in his testimony before the Warren Commission that he was adamantly opposed to the bill, asserting that the transfer of authority to RFK’s office would “confuse and be a conflict in jurisdiction.”

On Tuesday, four days after the assassination, Kennedy spoke again with Clint Hill, following up the phone conversation he had with him on November 22 when the Secret Service agent was still in Dallas. There is no record of this conversation, but the security lapses in Dallas were so flagrant, Kennedy would certainly have wanted to know what happened from an agent like Hill whom the family deeply trusted. (“Clint Hill, he loved us, he was the first man in the car,” Jackie would later tell Theodore H. White.)

The Secret Service had selected an unsafe motorcade route through downtown Dallas, culminating in the slow, hairpin turn onto Elm Street where the president met his death. The tall buildings, grassy knoll, and overpass that turned Dealey Plaza into a perfect crossfire shooting gallery were not secured. Motorcycle patrolmen protecting the presidential limousine followed loosely behind instead of tightly surrounding the vehicle. There were no Secret Service men on the limousine’s running boards, and agents were also ordered to stay off the rear of the vehicle. The Secret Service later spread the story that it was JFK himself, anxious that the crowd’s view of the first couple not be obscured, who insisted on this. But this has been effectively refuted by researcher Vincent Palamara, who interviewed numerous agents, all of whom said the order came from Secret Service officials, not the president.

Clint Hill, riding in the Secret Service follow-up car, was the only agent to sprint for the limousine when the shots rang out. He did this despite being ordered to stay put by the agent in charge of his vehicle, Emory P. Roberts. Hill reached the limousine as the first lady was crawling onto the trunk, where, he realized to his horror, she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull. He clambered aboard the car and pushed Jackie safely back in.