Killing Kennedy (25 page)

The vice president does so by speechifying, proving to the civil rights leaders that he is their ally. Lyndon Johnson keeps his mouth shut as often as possible when the president presides over a meeting. It’s his way of keeping a tight rein on his passion for grand speeches. But now that he’s in charge, Johnson rambles on and on about civil rights, an issue for which he has become passionate since his speech in St. Augustine. He followed this up with another address, on Memorial Day, at the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Bobby Kennedy was the driving force behind the president’s new stance on civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders are shown here with Bobby and the vice president on an official visit to the White House in 1963.
(Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

That eloquent speech was a triumph. Coming at the end of May, it had the effect of placing Johnson in competition with the Kennedys for leadership on the civil rights issue. Upon his return to Washington, Johnson had begged for “fifteen minutes alone with the president,” in order to build on that success. Kennedy granted that request. Johnson used that time to wedge himself further into the civil rights battle.

Lyndon Johnson’s long-winded Cabinet Room speech does not please Bobby Kennedy. Civil rights are
his
issue, and it was largely at his urging that his brother joined the cause. Bobby doesn’t just want Lyndon off civil rights; he wants him out of the White House altogether. With Johnson’s political power in the South rapidly declining, the Kennedys might not need him on the ticket in 1964. There is a good chance they can win the state of California, whose thirty-two electoral votes more than make up for losing the twenty-five that Johnson might have delivered with Texas. There is also growing evidence that Johnson has become so weak in his home state that Texas will be lost, even if LBJ remains on the ticket.

There is even talk of a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964.

So Bobby is fearless as he sits across the Cabinet Room table from Johnson—fearless enough to be rude.

The attorney general crooks a finger, beckoning Louis Martin, a black newspaper publisher. “I’ve got a date,” he whispers as Martin comes to his side. “Can you tell the vice president to cut it short?”

Martin is terrified. He knows both men are capable of great rage. Martin diplomatically returns to his place along the wall.

Bobby doesn’t waste any time. He beckons Martin again. “Didn’t I tell you to tell the vice president to shut up?”

Now Martin has no choice. He owes Bobby Kennedy a favor—a very big favor. When Louis Martin’s good friend Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for civil rights demonstrations in 1960, Bobby swung support to King’s cause by placing a sympathetic phone call to the reverend’s wife, Coretta. Of course, that phone call also helped the Kennedys politically, swinging the black vote behind JFK.

The room is not big enough to hide Martin’s discomfort. It’s obvious to everyone around the table that something is going on. Lyndon Johnson is speaking from his bully pulpit in the chair with the headrest, while Bobby has now twice called the fifty-year-old Martin to his side.

Martin is held in such high esteem that he will one day be known as “the Godfather of Black Politics.” So this is not a minor underling whom Bobby has summoned. This is a man known to everyone. And the attorney general has clearly whispered some angry words in Louis Martin’s ears.

Martin carefully maneuvers between the many bodies and chairs. Lyndon Johnson pretends not to notice—even though he’s a man who notices everything.

Martin is cautious. His progress around the table is not fast, and no one takes his eyes off him.

Lyndon Johnson is speaking as if nothing odd is happening. It’s true that all eyes are upon him—but only because Louis Martin is finally standing behind him.

Martin bends over and places his lips near Johnson’s ear. The vice president never stops talking.

“Bobby has got to go and he wants to close it up,” Martin whispers.

Johnson turns his head so that his eyes bore directly into Louis Martin’s. The vice president gazes at him icily but never once stops talking.

In fact, much to the rage of Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson rambles on for another fifteen minutes.

This battle for control of the White House is not about the ten days JFK will be in Europe but about that all-important spot on the ticket in 1964. And while Lyndon Johnson may have finished his speech, Bobby’s move let everyone know who held the real power in the room.

Bobby Kennedy is winning this war. The more Lyndon Johnson realizes this, the sicker and more depressed he will become. Reversing his previous weight loss, LBJ will grow very fat over the course of the summer as a result of this despondence. His face will become mottled, leading some to think he has begun drinking heavily.

The Kennedy brothers have broken the man who once considered himself Washington, D.C.’s ultimate power broker.

*   *   *

Lee Harvey Oswald has two passions in the summer of 1963: reading and lying.

He spends the month of June working as a maintenance man for the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans. Oswald collects unemployment even though he has a job. He writes to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York about all he is doing on its behalf. He prints business cards in the fictitious name of A. J. Hidell that list him as president of Fair Play, and even submits a passport application with false information. Lee Harvey Oswald has become an ardent Communist, with the intention of committing yet another bold act to further that political cause.

Oswald’s employers are not thrilled with his job performance, complaining that he spends too many of his working hours reading gun magazines.

Marina lives with him in yet another apartment she can’t stand. The family sleeps on pallets, and she sprays a ring of bug repellent on the floor each night to keep away the cockroaches. She knows that her husband is applying for a visa that could return them to the Soviet Union, even though she doesn’t want to go. In fact, because he is applying separately for his own visa, it appears he may be trying to send the pregnant Marina and their daughter, June, back to Russia without him.

Lee Harvey Oswald is far from the great man he believes he will one day become. Right now he is a drifter who spends his off time trying to make wine from blackberries, barely clinging to employment, and treating his family like a nuisance.

Reading fuels Oswald’s rage. He devours several books a week. The topics range in subject matter from a Chairman Mao biography to James Bond novels. Then, as summer 1963 concludes its first weeks, Oswald chooses to read about subject matter he’s never before explored: John F. Kennedy.

In fact, Lee Harvey is so enchanted by William Manchester’s bestseller
Portrait of a President
that after returning it to the New Orleans Public Library, he checks out Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
.

The collection of essays, which won John Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, is about the lives and actions of eight great men.

Even in the midst of the squalor and depression that define the Oswalds’ New Orleans summer, Lee Harvey Oswald reads JFK’s carefully chosen words and is inspired to hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage.

*   *   *

On day seven of his trip to Europe, John Kennedy rides in an open-air convertible through the narrow, twisting streets of Galway, Ireland. The crowd is manic and presses in close toward the Cadillac. The many tight turns force the president’s driver to slow the car to a crawl. Some Secret Service agents believe that seaports such as Galway are higher-risk environments than inland cities because of their large immigrant populations, but as is always the case when a motorcade route causes the president’s car to slow down for a turn, the intersection has been thoroughly prechecked by an advance team of agents.

But the tight turns are not the only potential hazard: the buildings lining the route are mostly two stories tall. The distance between their upper windows and the president’s motorcade is a third of the distance between General Ted Walker and the alley where Lee Harvey Oswald hid on the night of April 10, 1963.

In fact, John F. Kennedy is traveling through the ideal kill zone. One man with a gun could squeeze off a shot and escape into the throngs in a matter of seconds. And the president is clearly aware that such a thing might happen. He has been thinking quite a bit about martyrs lately and has become fond of quoting a verse by Irish poet Thomas Davis:

We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go;

And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s cruel blow—

Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky—

Oh, why did you leave us, Eoghan? Why did you die?

But today the specter of death doesn’t seem to matter. It is Saturday, June 29, 1963. An estimated hundred thousand Irish citizens line the streets of that raucous port city on the west coast of Ireland. Six hundred Gardai, police, are there to hold back the cheering crowds.

Due to Jackie Kennedy’s history of troubled pregnancies, she did not make the trip to Europe, as she so famously did two years ago. John Kennedy has the adulation of the crowds all to himself.

Many questioned why the president would go to Europe at such a volatile time. The title of an editorial in last Sunday’s edition of the
New York Times
asked, “Is This Trip Necessary?”

“In the face of much adverse comment and good reasons not to go,” the editorial went on to say, “President Kennedy is proceeding with his trip to Europe at a most inauspicious time.”

But John Kennedy knows the power of good political timing, and the trip has been a smashing success. At a time when the civil rights controversy has threatened to damage his presidency, the European trip proves that he is clearly the most popular and charismatic man in the world. More than a million Germans lined his motorcade route in Cologne when he arrived there a week ago. Twenty million more Europeans watched him on television. And another million greeted him in West Berlin. There, to chants of “Ken-ne-DEE,” he won over the crowd with a powerful prodemocracy speech. “All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin,” said the president. “And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”

The crowd went wild.

JFK’s Berlin speech was a security nightmare for the Secret Service. The president stood alone and unprotected on a podium as thousands looked on. The crowd wasn’t checked for weapons, and many watched from rooftops or open windows. John Kennedy, in the words of one agent, was a “sitting duck.”

Or, in the words of another agent: “All it takes is one lucky shot.”

*   *   *

In Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearing that Kennedy’s popularity would lead to an erosion of support in East Berlin, quickly flew to that divided city to reassert his nation’s claims. He and Kennedy did not meet. In fact, crowds a fraction of the size that greeted Kennedy even noticed that Khrushchev was in town, underscoring JFK’s amazing popularity and sending a clear message that Khrushchev’s power was on the wane.

John F. Kennedy’s European presence even affects the arrogant French president, Charles de Gaulle. From his perch in Paris, de Gaulle has become the bully of Western European politics, but he has more than met his match in JFK, prompting an amazed
New York Times
writer to marvel that “for the first time, President de Gaulle had been confronted by a Western leader whose ideas on that future are as firm as his own, whose confidence in the ultimate triumph of his ideas is as great and who, finally, speaks for the most powerful nation in the community.”

Kennedy and de Gaulle do not meet on this trip, but the French leader watches every move the president makes.

*   *   *

And then comes Ireland.

“If you go to Ireland,” Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell pointed out when Kennedy adds it to his European itinerary, “people will just say it’s a pleasure trip.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” the president replied. “A pleasure trip to Ireland.”

He has been lauded everywhere he has traveled in the small island nation, hailed as a victorious returning son.

Galway comes on his fourth day in Ireland, and it’s clear by his easy smile and the playful way he interacts with the locals that the pressures of domestic affairs, foreign problems, and the impending birth of his third child seem a million miles away.

Three hundred and twenty children from the Convent of St. Mercy greet the president’s helicopter as it lands on a grassy seaside field at 11:30
A.M
. Each of the children is dressed in orange, green, or white, and arranged so that together they form the Irish flag.

Then it is into an open-top limousine for the short drive to Eyre Square, at the center of the city. At one house, Kennedy orders the driver to stop so that he can spend a few minutes talking with the women standing out front.