The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (44 page)

Declassified FBI files from the period reveal that certain Texas interests had been busy accumulating dirt on President Kennedy. According to a top-secret FBI document, two men broke into Judy Campbell’s apartment in August 1962.
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One of the men, according to the account, bore “an identical resemblance” to the son of former FBI Special Agent I. B. Hale, who was then in charge of security for General Dynamics (the would-be manufacturer of the TFX) and indeed had driven away in a Chevrolet Corvette registered to I. B. Hale. Hale’s son Bobby had been married to John Connally’s daughter, a marriage that had come to an end when Connally’s daughter died from a shotgun blast to her head. A Texas grand jury had exonerated Hale of any complicity in what it ruled was a suicide.

Whether or not Johnson or Connally had any foreknowledge about the break-in is unknown. From the files it is evident that Hoover was pushing his Los Angeles office hard to link Campbell in some documented way (checks, expense receipts) to the president and to her friend “West Coast hoodlum” Johnny Rosselli. On November 4, for example, a memo to Hoover from his Special Investigation Division informed him that Judy Campbell was back in “telephonic contact” with the president’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, as well as with Rosselli and Giancana.
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The information was apparently derived from an FBI bug.

For the Kennedys, the time had come for an emergency cease-fire with their enemies — starting with J. Edgar Hoover. According to Anthony Summers, the attorney general placed an early morning call to the FBI director at his home on Monday, October 28. The idea, as Bobby later admitted, was to protect his brother by confronting senators and congressmen with FBI surveillance of their own sexual escapades: “I put together the information regarding all the girls and the members of Congress and the Senate who had been associated with the girls — and it got to be large numbers in both ways,” he told Anthony Lewis.
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The president approved of the plan, but it was Hoover who made it stick. In a secret meeting in Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s apartment at noon that day, Hoover briefed both Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen on the extent of his evidence of Capitol Hill philandering. That put a lid on it. There was no more private discussion, much less public debate, of the Rometsch affair by the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” But Hoover had a high price for his service: assurance from both the attorney general and the president (with whom he lunched on October 31) that he would be confirmed in his position as director. Further, he exacted from Bobby approval for four new wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr., a man both Kennedys, but particularly Bobby, had come to admire and respect.
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At precisely the same time as the Kennedys were mounting this ugly little rearguard action, they were desperately trying to manage a battle among senior policymakers over what to do in Vietnam. After nearly three years of advising and arming South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem — and increasing the number of American advisors from 685, which was what it was when Kennedy took office in 1961, to 16,732 by October 1963 — the administration was considering abandoning him. Diem had failed to take the fight to the Communist Viet Cong and instead had allowed his brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Nhu, to harass and murder Buddhist monks protesting his rule. Throughout the summer and fall of 1963, the debate of what to do about Diem — to discipline him or to effect his removal — turned bitter. On August 24, a top-secret cable (cleared by the president) was sent to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, giving a green light to the generals plotting Diem’s elimination. The cable had not been cleared, despite what the president apparently thought, with Secretary McNamara or General Taylor, much less with Vice President Johnson (who was fond of Diem). They all remonstrated furiously at the next meeting against the pro-coup trio of Ambassador Harriman, Under Secretary Ball, and Assistant Secretary of State Hilsman.
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“My God,” the president said to Charles Bartlett at one point, “my government’s coming apart.”
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It was time to bring in Bobby.

Bobby initially sided with those who wanted Diem gone. “If we have concluded that we are going to lose Diem, why do we not grasp the nettle now?” he asked. Later he seemed to abide the president’s view that a phased withdrawal from Vietnam and a Laoslike political solution was the way to go. Diem, if he survived, could be counted on to push the United States out. At the September 6 National Security Council meeting, Bobby openly spoke of withdrawal: “The first question was whether a Communist takeover could be successfully resisted with any government,” he wrote later. “If it could not, now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, rather than waiting.”
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The president himself had expressed a similar sentiment in April 1962 when he told his aides to “seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement” in Vietnam.
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However, in the view of the Kennedys in 1963, this could not be attempted before they won a second term. Truman had lost his presidency over the “loss of China,” which in turn had touched off the anticommunist witch hunts by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Troubled as Kennedy was about slipping into an Asian land war, he temporized on the method of disengagement. He wanted out, but didn’t know how to get out. And so he kept two policy tracks open — one military, the other political. In this instance, Dean Acheson’s essential criticism of JFK seems apt: he avoided decision.
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The preference to “keep options open” put events — not decisions — “in the saddle,” as George Ball later wrote.
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But beyond all questions of the president’s indecision regarding Diem was the greater strategic dilemma inherent in anticommunist containment. As General Douglas MacArthur had told the president in April 1961, “The chickens are coming home to roost and you are in the chicken coop.” The meaning behind the metaphor, which Kennedy repeated to his generals and policymakers, was that try as the president might, and should, to avoid an Asian land war, the consequences of a decade of anticommunist drum-beating made disengagement extremely difficult. Walter Lippmann had made the same point shortly after Truman enunciated the policy of containment in February 1947. It could only be attempted by “recruiting, subsidizing, and directing a heterogeneous array of satellites, dependents, puppets which will be prey to internal insurrection that they will beseech the United States to quell in the name of anticommunism. Confronted with such demands, the United States will have to abandon its puppets, which will be tantamount to appeasement, or support them at an incalculable cost with an unforeseen issue.”
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As Bobby put it in an interview in 1964, “Diem was corrupt and a bad leader. It would have been much better that we didn’t have him. But we inherited him. . . so what do you do?”
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Kennedy’s Vietnam policy drifted. Toward September, under pressure from the American mission in Saigon, the president veered uncertainly toward a decision about Diem: the United States would diplomatically wash its hands of any responsibility for Diem’s fate, silently countenancing his removal by the plotting generals. Early in the morning of November 2, the generals moved, overthrowing the regime and murdering Diem. General Taylor was in the room when Kennedy received word. “[The president] leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.”
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The reaction seemed reminiscent of Kennedy’s horror at receiving the news of Lumumba’s murder in February 1961.
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The difference was that with Lumumba it was regret; with Diem, guilt. The unease the president had so strongly felt about killing Castro — “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets” — was turning into a darker premonition. He had not stopped capital murder as an instrument of the state. This was not the America he had promised at Amherst — “an America. . . of moral restraint. . . which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.”

National Security Council staffer Samuel E. Belk III remembered a foreign policy exchange that took place that fall in the Rose Garden. He, Bundy, and six others sat on folding chairs in the late morning sun while Jackie Kennedy exercised a horse nearby. The briefing drifted on — Vietnam, the Congo, Soviet relations. Suddenly, five-year-old Caroline appeared and approached her father, saying that she wanted to tell him something. He told her to go watch her mother ride. She persisted. With a smile her father said, “Go ahead.” She began to recite a verse, looking directly at him:

It may be that he will take me by the hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath —
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with death. . . .
At midnight in some flaming town,
When spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Jack smiled. It was the same verse by Alan Seeger he had recited for Jackie after they returned from their honeymoon and Jackie, in turn, had learned it by heart to recite it to him.
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Belk recalled how momentarily mystified, even shocked, the rest of them were. It was if there was “an inner music” he was trying to teach her.
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Perhaps, as well, this was a part of poetry’s “cleansing” powers he had spoken of on that October day in Amherst.

November 17 — 20, 1963

Palm Beach, Florida; Washington, D.C.; Havana, Cuba

D
espite the dark turn of events in Vietnam and his near-miss in the Capitol Hill sex scandal, Jack remained serene. He spent the last weekend of his life in Florida, at his father’s house in Palm Beach. With him were his best friends Dave Powers and Torbert Macdonald, his former Harvard roommate and now a U.S. congressman.
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Aside from a trip to Cape Canaveral to watch the firing of a Polaris missile, they spent the weekend hanging around the house and watching football games on television. Powers recalled how relaxed Jack was, almost grateful to be a loafer.
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Jack bet on Navy in its game with Duke, giving Powers and Macdonald ten points. Navy won 38 to 25 on the passing and running of Roger Staubach, and Jack immediately collected. Sunday he bet on the Bears over Green Bay and won again. That evening the three watched a private screening of the movie
Tom Jones
, with Albert Finney, Susanna York, and lots of amorous rampage. Jack of course loved it. Before going to bed, he sang a song in his uneven voice:

Oh it’s a long long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November!
And these precious days I’ll spend with you
These precious days I’ll spend with you.

As serene as Jack may have been, Bobby continued to place himself at the storm’s center. As his brother’s enforcer on Capitol Hill and the scourge of White House journalists deemed “unfriendly,” Bobby thought the administration’s enemies had never seemed so numerous or open in their contempt. In August 1963,
Look
writer Fletcher Knebel, an erstwhile ally of the administration, did a harsh portrait of the hectoring style with which the Kennedys handled the press, a style that included threats of legal action and going over reporters’ heads to bring them in line.
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Bobby served as the point man on other apparently minor matters as well. On November 4, the attorney general had received a letter from Byron Skelton, the Democratic national committeeman in Texas, who was a leading attorney in the state and a strong Kennedy ally. Skelton wrote bluntly that the president’s safety would be compromised if he went to Dallas. Skelton copied the letter to Walter Jenkins of Vice President Johnson’s staff and then flew to Washington to press his case. Bobby Kennedy reacted strongly enough to the letter to forward it to O’Donnell on November 8.

The president himself sensed the trip would be ugly. In early November he told two of his aides that he wished he could cancel it. A month earlier, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been spat and set upon in Dallas by a right-wing rabbler after a speech about the United Nations. (“I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance,” Stevenson had observed as he wiped the spit from his face.) In the weeks before departure, when the trip to Texas was in its final scheduling phase, there were repeated appeals to cancel the visit to Dallas. During a flight to Little Rock, Senator J. William Fulbright plaintively advised the president that Dallas was “a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t
you
go.” Reverend Billy Graham, through an intermediary, attempted to convey the same message, as did Texas tycoon Stanley Marcus.
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Politically, however, Kennedy had no choice. He had won Texas narrowly in the 1960 election — by no more than 46,233 votes — even with favorite son Lyndon Johnson on the ballot. In the 1964 contest, Texas promised to be anything but a political given for the president. For one thing Johnson had become a forgotten figure in the state; for another Kennedy’s stand on civil rights had roused Dixiecrat disaffection; and third, there was a highly public dispute between the two leading Democrats in the state — Governor John Connally, a conservative, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, a liberal.