Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (5 page)

Despite his heroism, Hill was plagued for years afterwards by the fact that he had not reached the limousine sooner. In 1975, after retiring from the Secret Service, he agreed to be interviewed by Mike Wallace of
60 Minutes
. On camera, the former agent’s face was convulsed with pain. At one point, Wallace later recalled, Hill broke down in sobs, but he insisted on continuing with the interview. His eyes rimmed in red, his head jerking as he fought to choke his emotions, Hill dragged on a cigarette and forced himself back to Dealey Plaza. If he had only reacted a split second sooner, he could have taken the fatal head shot instead of Kennedy, said Hill.

“And that would have been all right with you?” Wallace asked.

“That would have been fine with me.”

“You got there in less than two seconds, Clint…you surely don’t have any sense of guilt about that?”

“Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It’s my fault…. And I’ll live with that to my grave.”

Remembering the interview years later, Wallace wrote, “I’ve never interviewed a more tormented man.”

It surely is one of the more poignant ironies of November 22 that a man who performed more bravely than anyone else there that day was one of the most severely punished.

ON THE MONDAY FOLLOWING
the assassination, Bobby put aside his investigative work to bury his brother. In his funeral tailcoat, he marched past the solemn crowds lining the streets, following the flag-draped gun carriage that carried his brother from the Capitol rotunda to St. Matthew’s Cathedral and then his final resting place in Arlington. Walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue with Jackie and Teddy, he retraced the steps that Jack had taken a thousand days earlier to begin his presidency. In the old news footage, the utter bleakness of the day is all written in Bobby’s eyes.

Ed Guthman and Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, had tried to prevail upon Bobby to ride in a closed limousine, for security reasons, instead of walking in the funeral procession. But he waved them off. It was the beginning of a recurring dispute between Guthman and Bobby over his safety that would drag on until the day he died. “He was never afraid. After his brother was killed, a bunch of us would talk to him about getting security, but he always brushed it off.”

By midnight, the friends and family who had filled the White House for the funeral had deserted it, leaving only the president’s brother and widow. “Shall we go visit our friend?” Bobby suggested. The two drove past the Lincoln Memorial and over the Potomac to the sloping lawn below the Lee mansion whose panoramic vista Jack had marveled at weeks earlier. In the night gloom, brightened only by the grave’s fluttering eternal flame, the two knelt and prayed.

The day after the funeral, the Kennedys began converging as usual for Thanksgiving at the family compound in Hyannis Port. Jackie arrived by plane with her children, Caroline and John Jr., after visiting her husband’s grave in the morning. Teddy and his family also flew to the compound, as well as his sisters Pat, Eunice, and Jean and their families. “It was a bleak day,” on the Cape that Thanksgiving, the
New York Times
reported. “The landscape, rust-colored with the dead leaves of scrub oaks, seemed more desolate than the gray, restless waters of Nantucket Sound.” The
Times
reported that when Jackie arrived, she went directly to her father-in-law’s house, avoiding her own, which was filled with mementos of the late president. One of the more touching, the newspaper observed, was a watercolor painting in the hall commemorating a happier family gathering, with a touch of Kennedy humor. It depicted a victorious JFK returning to his family’s cheers at the prow of his racing sloop Victoria—in a pose that called to mind “Washington Crossing the Delaware”—after winning his party’s presidential nomination in Los Angeles.

Bobby could not face Thanksgiving at Hyannis Port, with a clan now hollowed of the two men who had once been its center—Jack and Joe, the powerful patriarch who had been robbed of speech and confined to a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 1961. Instead, Bobby stayed at Hickory Hill for the holiday with Ethel and their seven children. About twenty people, the usual mixture of Justice Department colleagues and press friends, were invited for brunch. Bloody Marys were served. Bobby and Ethel “were putting up their usual good fronts,” recalled Sheridan, who had just returned from the Hoffa trial in Nashville. “But you could tell, looking at him, of the strain.”

Bobby steered Sheridan away from the party—he wanted to know what his investigator was finding out about the assassination. Sheridan suspected that the Teamster boss was involved. “I remember telling him what Hoffa had said when John Kennedy was killed…. I didn’t want to tell him, but he made me tell him,” recalled Sheridan. “Hoffa was down in Miami in some restaurant when the word came of the assassination, and he got up on the table and cheered. At least that’s what we heard.”

That weekend Bobby took his family to the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, where he gathered around him the band of brothers who had fought alongside him, from the 1950s underworld probes to the New Frontier crusades—including Sheridan, Guthman, and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. It was a wrenching weekend, with Bobby alternately possessed by numbing grief and savage anger. Salinger, the former San Francisco journalist whose life Bobby had forever transformed after recruiting him for his Senate rackets investigation, remembered the weekend years later with a shudder: “I mean, he was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life. He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself…. From time to time, he’d organize a touch football game…. But they were really vicious games. I mean it seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down. Somebody, in fact…broke a leg during one of those games. I mean they were really, really tough.”

Bobby also continued to be driven by investigative zeal that weekend. He conferred with Sheridan about Oswald and Ruby. Bobby asked him to fly to Dallas and make some private inquiries. “The key name was Marina Oswald [widow of the alleged assassin]—he wanted Walt to check in to see what she really knew,” Richard Goodwin, the JFK speechwriter and aide, told me.

“The thing about Bob was he was going to deal with the truth, whatever it was,” Guthman said. “He was going to work hard to find it out. And the people who worked for him, like Walter, that’s the way it was for them too. He was someone Bob trusted totally. He was a first-class investigator. It was always hard facts with Walter, there was not going to be any bullshit.”

After sending Sheridan to Dallas, Bobby dispatched another trusted Kennedy family intimate, Bill Walton, to Moscow, one week after the assassination. Walton carried with him a secret message for the Soviet government from Bobby and Jackie. It was the most astounding mission undertaken at the request of the Kennedy family in those astounding days after the death of JFK.

WILLIAM WALTON WAS THE
ideal man to play the role of confidential courier. There was no one the Kennedys trusted more. If Bobby had his loyal band of brothers, JFK attracted the devotion of his own circle of male friends. And none of these men enjoyed a more easy compatibility with the president than Walton, whom JFK fondly called “Billy Boy.”

“I was always surprised that he thought I was as close a friend as he did,” Walton recalled years later. “He kept drawing me into things. I was even in his bedroom in the White House. I never expected to be there. Finally we were totally intimate. I think he was deeply fond of me. I was of him. I haven’t had many male friends as close as he became finally.

“I was not subservient to him in the way you see so many people. My position was independent. And to tell you the truth, [when we first met], he thought I was a lot more famous than he was.”

Walton met Kennedy in the late 1940s in Georgetown, where the young unwed congressman was living with his sister, Eunice, and Walton was turning the second floor of his Victorian-style home into a studio, after leaving journalism to try his hand at painting. Walton, a former
Time
magazine war correspondent who won a Bronze Star after parachuting into Normandy with General James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division, had known JFK’s late brother and sister, Joe and Kick, in London. He flew one mission with Joe’s naval aviation outfit about a month before the eldest Kennedy brother died on a treacherous bombing run. Eight years older than JFK, Walton must have conjured memories of his heroic older brother in Jack.

But if Walton had the resume of a man’s man, he was equally at ease in the company of women, with whom his relationships tended to be “sweet and safe and jolly,” in the words of one such female companion, Martha Gellhorn, the distinguished war reporter and ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway. Walton also enjoyed a “sweet and safe” friendship with Jackie Kennedy.

He met her in Washington before she was married, when she was “just a wonderful-looking, kooky, young” inquiring photographer for the now-defunct
Times-Herald
. He immediately was drawn to her “fey, elfin quality” and her curiosity about books and art. She liked his bohemian style, with his fondness for wearing tight blue jeans and work shirts years before it became a popular look, and his love of gossip. Walton was twenty years older than the wide-eyed gamine, but he had a wonderful, boyish spirit and crooked grin that brought to Gellhorn’s mind “a clever and funny Halloween pumpkin.” Like other women, Jackie was also surely drawn to Walton’s valiant effort at single fatherhood, raising son Matthew and daughter Frances by himself after he was divorced from his mentally unstable wife.

After the Kennedys moved into the White House, the first couple made Walton a frequent sidekick, finally giving him an official role in 1963 as the chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, where he and Jackie joined hands to save Washington’s historic blocks from the wrecking balls of philistine developers. She sent him flirtatious notes on White House stationery, including a collage featuring a photo of Walton with the inevitable cigarette in hand and the inscription: “Hate cigarettes—but I simply can’t resist those Marlboro men! Will you be my Valentine?”

He was in a “unique position,” Walton later noted, because he was equally close to both Jack and Jackie. They each confided their secrets in him and they used him to communicate with each other. “I figured out later that I was a real link for both of them. You can well imagine how tough that period is in anybody’s life…it is the eye of the hurricane.” Walton—witty, worldly, dishy—helped ground them both. They could act around him as if they were still the young, carefree couple they had been back in Georgetown.

One summer day Walton brought an architectural model of his proposed renovations for Lafayette Square, which JFK had taken a strong interest in, to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys were vacationing. “[Jack] got down on the floor and just loved it. And played with it. And Jackie came in and said, ‘You two,’” Walton recalled with a laugh. “And later another time she caught us on his bedroom floor. He was supposed to be taking a nap, meaning he just had on his underpants, and it was like 2:30 in the afternoon. He’d had a little sleep, and then I’d been let in because I had a crisis on something that had to be decided that afternoon. We’re on the floor with another [model], and she went out and got her camera and took pictures and sent me a copy of it. And it said, ‘The president and the czar,’ because the newspapers had started calling me ‘czar of Lafayette Square.’”

“Bill thinks that Jack’s flirtatiousness with men is a part of his sexual drive and vanity,” Walton’s friend, Gore Vidal, recorded in his journal in September 1961. Vidal, who years later called his friend “the only civilizing influence in that White House,” enjoyed encouraging Jackie’s own naughty side.

That summer he teamed up with Walton to escort Jackie, with whom he had a family connection, on an adventure in Provincetown, already a gay mecca. “Jackie and Bill Walton arrive at the Moors Motel at 5:30,” Vidal wrote in his journal. “That morning Jackie had been pondering over the phone to me—should she wear a blond wig ‘with braids’ in order not to be recognized. Instead, she wears a silk bandana, a jacket, capri pants, and looks dazzling. Bill wears a dark blue sports shirt; and the usual lopsided grin…. They came into my room at the motel. No one about. Jackie flung herself on the bed—free!”

The first lady of the United States and her male companions then plunged into a night of frivolity that could surely never be repeated in today’s dreary, political climate, with its all-seeing media eye. They attended a performance of Shaw’s
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
at the Provincetown Playhouse—bad enough considering the scandalous history of the play about prostitution and the hypocrisy of Victorian high society, which was banned in Britain for eight years after it was written in 1894. But after the play, the merry trio then went bar-hopping, ending up in a dimly lit watering hole whose upstairs bar was frequented by lesbians. “Jackie was fascinated but dared not look in,” Vidal noted.

Bill Walton was very discreet about his sexual yearnings, which by this point in his life were decidedly homosexual. Friends like Vidal—who ran into him again that September in Provincetown “cruising the Atlantic House, very relaxed”—certainly knew, as did fellow JFK pals like Ben Bradlee, who assumed he was “gay as a goose.” Did JFK and Jackie know? The ever-discreet Walton, who died in 1994, never said whether he revealed his sexuality to the first couple. Walton’s son, Matthew, said he would “bet a thousand to one against it.” Still, the three shared sexual confidences and Jack was comfortable enough to ask Walton to squire his mistresses to White House events. If JFK was aware of his friend’s secret life, he was clearly self-assured enough about his own sexuality not to feel threatened by it. In fact, as Walton remarked to Vidal, he seemed to thrive on male, as well as female, adoration.