Surrounded by Enemies (25 page)
Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
To the extent that the Kennedy assassination attempt was ever “solved,” it occurred on January 23, 1983, the day the confession of Lyndon Johnson was finally unsealed, ten years after his death. In the handwritten page, LBJ had stated, “To my eternal shame, I was aware of and may have
indirectly
encouraged the irresponsible actions of others to make an attempt on the life of President John Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.” He concluded dramatically, “May God have mercy on my soul. Lyndon Baines Johnson.” Critics of the way the confession was handled have argued that LBJ should have been forced to turn evidence against others, particularly Clint Murchison, something he had steadfastly resisted doing, saying that if he complied, his life in prison anywhere in the United States “wouldn’t be worth the ass-hair on my beagles.” In national polls taken since that day, LBJ has consistently placed at the top of the least liked politicians in American history.
That history can pivot in an instant has been made crystal clear by the case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He had come so close to losing his life in Dallas. Had that happened, it is more than likely he would have become an instant martyr, and his many sins would have remained unknown. Lyndon Johnson, rather than being seen as one of the men who let the ambush happen, would have become President Lyndon Johnson, and all the charges and investigations involving him would likely have been forgotten. After all, the nation would have just suffered the death of a popular President; it might have been too much to bear to see Johnson impeached.
With a Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office instead of a federal prison, the United States might have committed its blood and treasure to a losing cause in Vietnam. The 1960s might have been even more revolutionary than they were. Anything could have happened.
Instead, Lyndon Johnson is remembered today as a corrupt player of rough-and-tumble Texas politics who ended his life in jail when he confessed, more or less, that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination plot. If he was not a leader of the conspiracy, he was still its highest ranking member.
On Memorial Day in 2005, Strangelove’s identity, something that had become a national guessing game during and after the constitutional crisis, was finally revealed. The FBI’s Mark Felt was the source for Altman and Berkowitz. He was close friends with Hoover’s far closer friend, Clyde Tolson. Felt worked for Tolson since 1964 as the assistant director for the bureau’s training division. In coming out as the anonymous source, Felt talked about the emotional cost of his actions in 1965.
I have never been proud of my role in leaking the Kennedy papers. At the time I rationalized that I was acting on behalf of Director Hoover, which I was, but I never asked the questions about what was in these files, how the information had been gathered, and whether it was appropriate to use it as a destructive force. I simply did my job as I was instructed by Tolson. President Kennedy made a lot of mistakes that these papers describe in detail, but he was the American people’s elected President. Yet men in our own government tried to execute him, and then I was their assassin when it came to his character.
Felt managed to elude Altman or Berkowitz ever making his identity on the streets of Washington, D.C. by accepting a posting in Los Angeles before he leaked even the first document. He came forward near the fortieth anniversary of the Ali-Liston rematch and the “document dump.” Fighting pancreatic cancer, he said, “If I see President Kennedy wherever I’m going next, I want him to know what I’m doing now, and understand that the shame is mine.”
While Jack, Bobby and Teddy had agreed informally that none of them should pursue the presidency, pressure developed to see that at least one of John Kennedy’s children picked up his standard. Caroline was oldest, but she lacked the drive and ambition for a public life and, being a woman in those days, could realistically see that her chance of being elected President of the United States was small.
The same could not be said of the former President’s son, John Kennedy Jr. The nation had fallen in love with him as a little boy hiding under his father’s desk. He had celebrated his third birthday just three days after the ambush in Dallas. When his father passed away, John Jr. was just sixteen years old.
As he grew into young manhood, John Kennedy Jr. seemed to exhibit his father’s gene for risky behavior, but times were different and he was not married. In the mid-’90s, however, he entered into a relationship that changed his life when he began dating Princess Diana of Great Britain. She was already well on her way out of favor with the Royal family. At first, she and John tried to keep their relationship secret, but that turned out to be impossible for the two young celebrities.
Their celebrity, however, transcended anything that Hollywood could confer. He was the son of the charismatic thirty-fifth President, and she was the blonde commoner who became a fairy-tale princess. Together they were explosive, both personally and publicly. And yet, for reasons that can never be fully understood, it worked. They each knew what it was like to be famous because of the fame of someone else.
They wanted to date other people and did, off and on. JFK Jr. almost married former model and fashion-industry saleswoman Carolyn Bessette, but backed away at the last moment, literally breaking off an engagement two weeks before the ceremony. Diana nearly wed film producer Dodi Fayed, the son of an Egyptian billionaire. Yet by 1999, they were back together and by the end of the year they were married to each other. Some commentators believed that John had married a woman who reminded him of his mother, a classic beauty with intellectual passions of her own and only a passing tolerance for the formality of politics. “My parents stayed together,” he said. “It was hard, hard work, particularly for my mother. But seeing their final success, that made me believe that Diana and I could work out anything, and we have.”
The rest of their narrative. as they became the darlings of two continents, could easily fill a
Top Story
special edition. Diana campaigned with John when he ran for United States senator in New York in the 2000 election, where voters gave him a victory with an incredible 63 percent of the vote.
Senator John Kennedy Jr. was reelected in 2006 and 2012. This year, 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his father’s near murder in Dallas, Texas, he is being talked about as the odds-on favorite to win his party’s nomination for President in 2016. The nation has never had a First Lady from another country, but there is nothing to prevent it.
Asked about his feelings on the eve of this anniversary of the event that led to his father’s political undoing, Senator Kennedy said, “My father was my hero when he was alive, and now that he’s gone my feelings in that regard have only deepened. We were all lucky to know him.”
Had John F. Kennedy died from the bullets fired by his would-be assassins on November 22, 1963, it is possible his reputation today would still burn brightly. Yet in a preternatural display of anticipation, lightning reflexes and bravery, Secret Service agent Clint Hill sacrificed his life to ensure the President of the United States would escape with only a few scratches and bruises.
For Americans under age fifty, the wrenching agony of the assassination attempt on President Kennedy and the subsequent events that led to the premature end of his presidency are events from their parents’ past, things they’ve read about in history books. For those who lived through the political tumult of the mid-’60s, however, the memories brought to the surface by a phrase or a photo can be as stark and vivid today as they were so many years ago.
Two strands of political DNA were twisted together by the incredible events that transpired during the twenty-seven months between November 1963 and February 1966. The first was JFK’s battle with the dark forces of conspiracy. Could faith in our democracy be restored in the face of the powerful expansion of a national security state that would try to execute the nation’s elected leader? The second strand was Kennedy’s personal fall from grace, a monumental series of events, because we as a people had placed him on such a high pedestal.
Hatred of President Kennedy led powerful men to plot his public execution. Their plan could have come from the mouth of the Leonardo DiCaprio character in
Gangs of New York
: “When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark. You kill him where the entire court can watch him die.” Of course, there is another quote, widely claimed and attributed, that states when you plot to kill the king, you must in fact succeed.
Kennedy’s response to the failure of the conspiracy was to plot against its members in the same way they had plotted against him. Their counter-response was to try to change the subject away from their own shadowy crimes and place the issue of Kennedy’s intimately personal foibles before the public. That Kennedy was forced to pay such a high price, even as many of the men who sought his death walked free, was the ultimate irony of that turbulent period.
John Kennedy cheated death in Dallas only to face a fate that for him might have been even worse — the public exposure of his private double-life. Learning the truth was just as difficult for many Americans, who loved and admired him when they knew him less well. Being forced to face the whole picture — for Kennedy and for the nation — was something no one ultimately was prepared for, yet we all took the journey together.
The sense of denial, anger and tragedy which hung over those days leading up to February 1966 may even have caused some to have secretly wished that our charismatic and vigorous leader had died in Dallas, leaving only cherished memories.
Yet even through the dissolution of both his marriage and his political administration, John F. Kennedy found a way to give meaning to it all. He fought long and hard enough to ensure that all thinking people in the United States understood that far more importance hung on these matters than whether the President’s relationship with his wife was sound or his health perfect.
There is one matter on which all sources agree: On November 22, 1963, most of this nation admired John F. Kennedy and approved of his job performance. What has turned out to be so vexing about the post-Dallas revelations is how so many others could have wished him dead at a time when his personal popularity with the majority of the American people was authentic and solid. The collision of these two forces outside the Texas School Book Depository near the fateful overpass at Dealey Plaza reverberates to this day.
In the final analysis, the venal men who tried to kill President Kennedy with actual bullets in Dallas switched tactics to political assassination in Washington, D.C. They saw a chance to break his career into pieces with his own actions. This is not to make excuses for the President, or to argue for pardon, but only to state the obvious: He himself had given vicious enemies the weapons they would use against him.
John Kennedy survived his brush with death on November 22, 1963 and then suffered an almost unimaginable fate. He became a mere mortal.
T
his labor began with a love of President Kennedy, whom I shed tears for as a student in Laura Braden’s fourth-grade class at Peter Boscow Elementary in Hillsboro, Oregon. All students came to lunch learning the President had been hit by gunfire, and we left knowing that he was dead. Mrs. Braden, a tough old cookie, cried at the table and didn’t force us to eat our vegetables as she normally did. Then we went home and watched TV with our parents all weekend.
My father, Harvey Zabel, worked as a high school history teacher and left me a treasured thirty-five-cent paperback edition of
Profiles in Courage
with its underlined highlights and his handwritten side comments. Through his eyes and his library, I’ve been able to see how history often springs from a series of close calls that, had they gone another way, would have had dramatic and profound impact. Equally important to this literary exercise, however, was the influence of my mother, Lucile Zabel, who gave me permission from a young age to think differently than all the other kids.
After years of laying out the structure of this book, I approached the gifted alternative history writer Harry Turtledove about collaborating to bring it to market in the mid-2000s. Harry and I briefly worked together but deadlines and commitments pulled us apart, and I’ve carried on with his blessing. I’m grateful to Harry for his continued support, particularly of this final version, for which he has generously contributed an important Foreword. If you’d like to dive deeper into alternative history, I highly recommend Harry Turtledove’s work.
Author Richard Dolan provided a wonderful Preface that made me remember what a true pleasure it was to write our book
A.D. After Disclosure
together. He is a grounded force of reality in the sometimes lawless UFO community of opinions. If you want to know the ground truth about UFO history, read Richard Dolan’s work.
The first person to engage my passion for an alternative version of the Kennedy assassination was Brent V. Friedman, my creative partner on the primetime NBC series
Dark Skies
. Back in 1996, Brent and I co-created that series and produced twenty hours of television drama that made Jack Kennedy’s death and Bobby Kennedy’s life central parts of the story.
My mentor out in Hollywood, Bill Asher, was a close friend of the Rat Pack and, by extension, the Kennedys. Bill directed JFK’s inaugural party the night before his famous “Ask Not” speech and Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” performance. He also told me about being at parties where the President-to-be acted in ways that seem wildly dangerous from today’s perspective. He gave me a clear understanding of how those times were so different from today.
My thanks also go to Kennedy assassination expert Don Clark, who has been my true north on the issues of the conspiracy to change the leader of the U.S. government. To all the other researchers who have written about President Kennedy and the circumstances of his death over the years, it can only be said that anything published today is informed by your work and dedication. In this group I include everyone from author Mark Lane to filmmaker Oliver Stone, two men whose pursuit of clarity, justice and closure in the death of John Kennedy has made it easier for others.
My appreciation for making this book possible in crisp, clean, readable form extends to graphic artist Lynda Karr, who assembled the striking images that grace its cover and inside illustrations, and editor Eric Estrin, whose facility with language equals his sense of drama, story structure and character development. Both have been my collaborators on the film review site
MovieSmackdown.com
for years. Hillcrest Media (Publish Green and Mill City Press) brought a powerful team of talented professionals to the race, and they took these materials and made them ready for market in beautiful form, and in record time. My close partner in the hard work of telling the world about this project in a competitive media environment has been Jerry Lazar, a man whose experience and knowledge helped us find paths to publicity that are sometimes audacious, but always effective.
Finally, I’d like to thank my family for allowing me to keep my collection of
Time
and
Newsweek
in all its pre-digital bulk for all these years. Jackie, Lauren, Jonathan and Jared have indulged this storage challenge and so many other peculiarities I’ve brought into their lives, and I am eternally grateful. They have given me the motivation to carry on whenever doubts have threatened to overtake me and, always, courage.