Killing Kennedy (14 page)

But beginning with his May 1961 Law Day address at the University of Georgia Law School, Bobby Kennedy made it plain he would use his Justice Department as a bully pulpit to enforce civil rights throughout America, particularly in the Deep South. He is taking up an exhausting, never-ending battle, one that originated on the day the first African slaves were brought to America in 1619. The Kennedy brothers do so with the knowledge that this intense fight will gain them a whole new group of very dangerous enemies.

Bobby Kennedy was instrumental in helping civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders travel by bus into the South to fight segregation in 1961. The Greyhound Company, fearing its buses might be vandalized, had initially denied the northern activists passage. Kennedy pressured Greyhound, and the company relented.

But RFK could not stop what happened next. As soon as the activists tried to get off some of the buses, they were beaten with pipes and clubs by angry mobs. Local law enforcement did little to stop the brutality.

Despite—or perhaps even because of—the violence, the civil rights movement continues to gain momentum, and Robert Kennedy is now paying close attention to one of its most prominent leaders, a thirty-three-year-old charismatic Baptist minister named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Reverend King is as intense and enigmatic as President Kennedy. He is a man of deep religious values who also sleeps with women outside his marriage. His speaking tone and rhetoric are bold and impassioned, but he advocates the same nonviolence to achieve his methods as Gandhi used in India. King also appears to be a Communist sympathizer. This puts Bobby in the unlikely position of having to monitor King to determine whether the reverend is indeed a Communist, while at the same time ensuring that King is protected from harm and guaranteed free speech as he pushes the cause of civil rights. One assassination attempt has already been made on King, when a deranged black woman stabbed him in the chest in 1958, and there are constant fears that the reverend will one day be lynched during his travels through the Deep South.

Truth be told, the civil rights movement is an enormous headache for Bobby Kennedy. His main enforcement arm, the FBI, has little concern for civil rights, or even for making inroads into Bobby’s other major legal concern, organized crime. Instead, J. Edgar Hoover is entirely focused on stopping the spread of communism. He is all too happy to play the part of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of racial bloodshed. In fact, in 1962 the FBI has only a handful of black agents in the field.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept dossiers on many civil rights leaders and even had a file on the president.
(Abbie Rowe, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Hoover, however, does take an interest in Reverend King—but only because of the widespread belief within the FBI that the civil rights movement is part of a larger Communist plot against America. One of the bureau’s division leaders, William C. Sullivan, will characterize King as “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

*   *   *

The truth—and Bobby Kennedy knows this—is that in large parts of the South, black Americans have little protection from prejudice and violence. Although the Kennedy tradition is to put politics above social concerns, the two brothers raised in affluent northern liberalism have become increasingly interested in righting the wrongs of racial injustice.

J. Edgar Hoover believes this preoccupation is folly and that Reverend King’s comments will one day be forgotten. For Hoover, civil rights are just a passing trend. So he will continue with the political game he’s played since he joined the Justice Department during World War I. He will endure Bobby Kennedy’s overeager style, just as he will continue to chronicle, yet keep silent on, the president’s indiscretions. First and foremost, he will keep his job.

But that doesn’t mean the FBI chief has to like the Kennedy boys—and he doesn’t.

Bobby knows that one of JFK’s first official acts after being reelected in 1964 will be to fire J. Edgar Hoover. So he soldiers on, investigating civil rights violations without the FBI director’s support. It’s tough going. Something as simple as getting a judge approved by the Senate for an open spot in a federal court is stymied when the senator in charge of the subcommittee orders that the proceedings be halted indefinitely. Not surprisingly, the judge up for approval, Thurgood Marshall, is black. And also not surprisingly, the senator who halted the proceedings is white.

But Robert Kennedy is the U.S. attorney general, sworn to uphold the nation’s laws. And as long as young men such as Emmett Till are being lynched for the color of their skin, Bobby has no choice but to wage this war.

*   *   *

It is brutally hot in Fort Worth, Texas, on August 16, 1962. FBI special agents John Fain and Arnold J. Brown, warriors in J. Edgar Hoover’s war against communism, have been waiting all day to see Lee Harvey Oswald. They sit in an unmarked car, just down the street from Oswald’s newly rented duplex apartment on Mercedes Street, right around the corner from the Montgomery Ward department store.

Special Agent Fain is just two months away from finishing his twenty years with the bureau. He’s going to retire to Houston. There, he’ll live off his pension while working for his brother, an orthopedic surgeon. This will mark yet another major career change for the veteran agent. Fain is a complicated man in his mid-fifties who taught school, ran for public office, and passed the Texas state bar before joining the bureau in 1942. The Oswald case is nothing new to him. Back when Oswald first defected to the Soviet Union, it was Fain who was assigned a minor investigation of Oswald’s mother because she had mailed twenty-five dollars to her son in the Soviet Union. When it comes to rooting out Communists, no stone is too small to be left unturned by Hoover’s FBI.

It is also John Fain who spoke face-to-face with Oswald just eight weeks earlier, on June 26, 1962. Oswald’s case has been designated as an “internal security” investigation, based on the belief that his defection might make him a threat to national security. Fain’s job is to find out whether the Russians have trained and equipped Oswald to perform a job against the United States. It is protocol with all internal security investigations to have two agents present, so that all statements can be corroborated.

Something about the first interview, which lasted two hours, doesn’t sit well with Fain. He doesn’t like Oswald’s attitude, thinking him “haughty, arrogant … and insolent.” And his answers to most questions seemed incomplete. Fain has in-depth knowledge of Oswald’s struggle to return to America and knows that the Russians originally would not allow Marina and the baby to leave with him. But Oswald refused to leave without his wife, and the Soviet authorities finally relented. The one question that Oswald has never answered in a completely truthful manner is whether the Russians demanded anything in return for letting him come to America.

John Fain needs that question answered. He’s a very thorough man and takes it upon himself to interview Lee Harvey Oswald one more time.

At 5:30
P.M
. the two agents see Oswald sauntering down the street, on his way home from his new job as a welder at the Leslie Machine Shop. Oswald lied on his job application, stating that his Marine Corps discharge was honorable when it was not. Oswald was kicked out of the Corps for a series of minor infractions. He also neglected to tell his employer about his time in the Soviet Union. And while he’s been on the job only a month, Oswald is already sick of the menial labor. He wants to quit and find better work in Dallas.

Fain drives up alongside the walking Oswald. “Hi, Lee. How are you?” he says out the car window. “Would you mind talking with us for just a few minutes?”

“Won’t you come in the house,” Oswald answers politely, remembering Fain from the last interview. Special Agent Brown is a new face. A different agent accompanied Fain back in June.

“Well, we will just talk here,” Fain responds. “We will be alone to ourselves and be informal, and just fine.”

Brown gets out to let Oswald into the backseat. Fain stays up front behind the wheel, but Brown slides in next to Oswald. Fain twists around to explain that they didn’t contact Oswald at work, not wanting to embarrass him with his new employer. And they don’t want to speak with him inside, for fear of rattling Marina. Thus the car.

The three men talk for a little over an hour. The car windows are open just enough to take the edge off the stifling humidity. But the men still perspire—particularly the G-men, in their coats and ties. Oswald has already put in a hard day of blue-collar labor, and the smell of his body odor wafts through the car. Despite the discomfort, Oswald is friendlier than before, less defensive. He explains that he’s been in touch with the Soviet embassy, but only because it is required for Soviet citizens such as Marina to inform the embassy of their location on a regular basis. When pressed on whether this involved discussions with Soviet intelligence officials, Oswald is coy, wondering aloud why anyone would want to discuss spying with a guy like him. “He didn’t feel like he was of any importance to them,” Fain will later testify. “He said that he would cooperate with us and report to us any information that would come to his attention.”

But Fain still is not satisfied. He presses Oswald again and again as to why he went to the Soviet Union in the first place. To the agent, it doesn’t make sense. U.S. Marines are known for their motto, Semper Fidelis, “Always Faithful.” Why would one of them willingly renounce America and take up residence in a nation that poses the greatest threat to the United States?

It is the one question Oswald doesn’t answer. He dances around it, talking about “his own personal reasons” and that “it was something that I did.”

At 6:45, Oswald is released from the car and goes inside his home. His time with the agents was actually a respite from tension in his household. He and Marina have been fighting, sometimes quite violently, for more than six months. The strife has become worse since they came to America. It used to be that Oswald was the only person Marina could talk to in America, because she doesn’t speak English. But now she’s made new friends within Dallas’s small local Russian expat community. Among these is a man named George de Mohrenschildt, who not only may have CIA connections, but also knew Jackie Kennedy when she was a child. De Mohrenschildt was a close friend of Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale. Marina’s new friends find her husband rude and take her side in their marital battles.

And the battles are many. Oswald likes to be “the Commander” in their marriage, dictating the details of their life and refusing to let Marina learn English, for fear he’ll lose control over her. She is embarrassed by her bad teeth and wants corrective dental work, but he puts it off. He often plays out his need for power by hitting his wife in anger.

But Marina is no shrinking violet. She screams at him for not making enough money and complains that he is indifferent to her. Their sexual relations are so infrequent that she accuses him of not being a man. She nags him constantly, and when he compares himself with the great men in the historical biographies he enjoys reading, she sarcastically derides him. Marina even writes to a former boyfriend in the Soviet Union, telling him she made a terrible mistake marrying Oswald. Unfortunately for her, the letter is returned for not having enough postage. Oswald opens and reads it, then beats her. Oddly, Marina condones Oswald’s violence. Even that little bit of passion, however misguided, is better than the cold side of his character that she finds so frustrating.

The marital friction, coupled with his surprise FBI interrogation, would normally be enough to send Oswald into one of his trademark rants—the kind where he rails on and on about suppressive governments. But tonight his new copy of the
Worker
, the newsletter of the American Socialist Workers Party, awaits him. Oswald settles in to read.

It is Special Agent Arnold J. Brown, not John Fain, who prepares the final report concerning the conversation in the car. The papers are submitted on August 30, 1962. But it is Fain, the twenty-year veteran, who will decide if there is any reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald is a secret agent for the Soviet Union, planted within the United States to do the nation harm.

Content with the answers Oswald has given them, and looking forward to retirement, Special Agent John Fain requests that the Lee Harvey Oswald internal security investigation now be considered closed. After all, Oswald doesn’t own a gun or otherwise appear to be a threat.

And so the case is closed.

But Lee Harvey Oswald and the FBI will soon meet again.

7

O
CTOBER 16, 1962

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE

8:45 A.M.

The president of the United States is rolling around on the bedroom floor with his children. Jack LaLanne is on the television telling JFK, Caroline, and John to touch their toes. Kennedy wears just a T-shirt and underpants. The carpeting and a nearby easy chair are cream-colored, providing perfect accents to the blue-patterned covers on the president’s four-poster canopy bed.