The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (46 page)

During the thirteen-minute flight from Fort Worth to Dallas, the weather began to clear. By the time the door of Air Force One cracked open at 11:38 at Love Field, the sun shone brilliantly. After the motorcade departed from Love Field, Jackie put on her dark glasses. Jack asked her to take them off; the crowd had come to see her, he told her. As the presidential party threaded its way through the cluster of downtown buildings on Live Oak Street, heading toward Main, the crowds grew to ten to twelve deep on the sidewalks. The shouting was deafening. “Jackie!” “Jackie!” could be heard over the din. Meanwhile in Dealey Plaza, Lee Bowers, a Dallas railroad veteran who was standing atop a train tower, saw three cars cruising around the railroad lot contiguous to the plaza. The driver of one of the cars was talking into what appeared to be a walkie-talkie. Bowers also later testified that there were two men behind the picket fence that went down the grassy hill toward Elm Street. The distance between them and Elm Street was about thirty-five yards.
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In Dealey Plaza, those waiting to see the president could hear the faint drafts of cheering in the distance and the snarl of the motorcycle escort. They were turned expectantly toward the east end of the plaza where the president’s car would enter. Overlooking this juncture was the Texas School Book Depository. Bystanders who later gave testimony to the FBI saw variously one or two men on the fifth and sixth floors. Two amateur photographers, Charles Bronson and Robert Hughes, took motion pictures of the building six minutes before the motorcade came into Dealey Plaza.
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These films show two men moving from window to window on the sixth floor. As the motorcade took a sharp left into the plaza, it slowed to 11.2 miles an hour. It was 12:30. Suddenly, there was a shot. Then another in rapid succession. The president was struck once through the back and neck, a serious but probably not fatal wound. Five seconds ticked by with the Secret Service detail behind the president’s car doing nothing. Jackie by this time had turned toward her slumping husband, who “looked puzzled” as he leaned toward her. Powers, watching the president from farther back in the motorcade, told O’Donnell he thought Kennedy hand been hit.

Mary Elizabeth Woodward was standing on the Elm Street curb watching the motorcade when, as she later said, “there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.”
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This was the picket fence area. Lee Bowers, the railroad man atop the tower, saw “a flash of light or smoke” from the same place. Powers and O’Donnell described the impact. “The third shot took the side of his head off. We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air. The impact lifted him and shook him limply, as if he was a rag doll.”
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Jackie had watched “this perfectly clean piece [of skull] detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and brains were in my lap.”

Inside the Lincoln, there was mayhem. Connally, wounded seriously, was shouting, “No! No! No!” as his wife tried to shield him. As the limo accelerated, Secret Service agent Clint Hill jumped up on the bumper and Jackie stood on the back seat and pulled him into the car. She then lay on top of her husband as the car headed toward Parkland Memorial Hospital. “Jack, Jack,” she said, moaning. “Can you hear me? I love you, Jack.”
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Bystanders on Elm Street and the motorcycle policemen trailing the motorcade headed immediately toward the grassy hill, from which at least one of the shots had come. When Dallas police officer Joe M. Smith, pistol drawn, accosted a man standing behind the picket fence, the man produced Secret Service credentials — though, according to Secret Service Chief James Rowley, there were no Secret Service agents in that area. Dallas police later found three “tramps” in a railroad area near the grassy hill. They were detained, questioned, and released but a photograph taken reveals that one of them was Charles V. Harrelson, a shooter for the Marcello family who was later convicted of assassinating federal judge John Wood in San Antonio, Texas. At the time of his arrest, Harrelson said he participated in the Kennedy assassination.
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Railroad signal supervisor S. M. Holland ran over to the place “where I saw the smoke come from and heard the shot. . . . Well, you know it’d been raining that morning and behind the station wagon from one end of the bumper to the other, I expect you could’ve counted four or five hundred footprints down there. It looked like a lion pacing a cage.”
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Analyzing a Dallas police recording from a police motorcycle near the presidential limo, acoustical experts concluded in testimony before the House Assassinations Committee that the third shot “with a probability of 95 percent or better” was fired from the grassy knoll.
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In Washington, Bobby Kennedy was holding an all-day meeting on organized crime in his Justice Department office. About forty top law enforcement officials had gathered to discuss the state of their battle against the underworld. Shortly after noon Bobby adjourned the meeting. He invited New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau and his assistant, criminal division chief Silvio Mollo, out to Hickory Hill for lunch. Kennedy took a quick swim in the backyard pool, changed into dry shorts and a T-shirt, and joined Ethel and his two guests around a table for a lunch of clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches. Workmen nearby were finishing construction on a new wing on the far side of the house. Morgenthau remembered watching one of the workmen hanging shutters with one hand and holding a transistor radio with the other.

From his fifth-floor office at Justice, J. Edgar Hoover placed a call to the attorney general’s office on the direct line. Angie Novello took the call. Seconds earlier, a UPI dispatch had reached the office, reporting the wounding of the president. Novello told Hoover that he should call the attorney general at home. A White House operator patched the FBI director to extension 163 at Hickory Hill. It was 1:45 P.M. Bobby Kennedy was glancing at his watch and suggesting that Morgenthau and his deputy accompany him back to his office. When the phone rang at one end of the pool, Ethel answered it and was told by the operator that the director was calling.

“The attorney general is at lunch,” she replied.

“This is urgent,” the operator said.

Ethel motioned to her husband. “It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she said.

Bobby took the phone just as the workman with the transistor radio to his ear began walking toward the pool, shouting.

“I have news for you,” Hoover said in his high, staccato voice. “The president’s been shot.”

Kennedy paused, then asked if it were serious.

“I think it’s serious,” Hoover replied. “I am endeavoring to get details. I’ll call you back when I find out more.” Kennedy hung up the phone and stared at Ethel and his two guests. He began walking toward them. Suddenly it hit him. He sagged as if every muscle in his body was contorted with horror. “Jack’s been shot,” he said, clapping his hand to his face.
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Ethel ran to him and embraced him. They went into the house and Bobby went upstairs to call Kenny O’Donnell at Parkland Memorial Hospital. When no one could locate O’Donnell, Bobby spoke with the person at the hospital who took his call. “And I asked if he [Jack] was conscious and they said he wasn’t, and I asked if they had gotten a priest, and they said they had. . . . And I said will you call me back and he said yes.” Presently, someone in the presidential party — probably White House attaché Tazwell Shephard — did call Bobby back. “The president’s dead,” he told him.

Within minutes, all four phones in the house began ringing. Bobby went from one call to the next, asking his brother Teddy to go to Hyannis Port to tell their parents, taking a call from LBJ, who wanted to know who could swear him in, and, most memorably, from Hoover, who coldly told him what he already knew — that his brother was dead. His close friend and press secretary Ed Guthman joined him as he fielded the calls. They then went outside and took a walk. “I thought they’d get one of us,” Bobby said to Guthman, “but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. . . . I thought it would be me.”
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Between 2 and 2:30 P.M., Bobby took a call from CIA director John McCone, who told him he would drive over from Langley. When McCone arrived, Kennedy went out on the lawn with him. “I asked McCone,” Kennedy was to tell his trusted aide Walter Sheridan, “if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me.”
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McCone was one of Bobby’s closest friends in the administration, and this extraordinary question revealed a deep and terrible suspicion about the CIA, something born of some knowledge, or at least intuition, and not simply the incontinence of grief. The picture that emerges of Bobby Kennedy during these first minutes and hours after the news of his brother’s death is that of a soldier who has taken a direct hit. The endorphins produced by the shock cause a high level of lucidity. The collapse would come later.

At around 4 P.M., Kennedy made a call to the Ebbit Hotel on H Street in Washington. The Ebbit (whose number shows up regularly on the attorney general’s phone logs) was used by the CIA to house Cuban operatives. Kennedy spoke first with his friend Enrique Ruiz-Williams, then asked to be passed to journalist Haynes Johnson, then working on a book about the Bay of Pigs. “Robert Kennedy was utterly in control of his emotions when he came on the line,” Johnson recalled, “and sounded almost studiedly brisk as he said, ‘One of your guys did it.’ ”
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He clearly was referring to embittered Cubans deployed by elements in the CIA. Asking McCone if the CIA was involved in such a way that “he could not lie” suggested that Kennedy thought the CIA operatives were acting at a deniable distance. Perhaps he had heard or read about the shooter in the Orange Bowl. Perhaps his constant communications with the anti-Castro Cubans had revealed to him their bitter despair as well as the ferocity of their CIA handlers. We cannot know for certain.

Within minutes of Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest for the shooting of officer J. D. Tippit (at about 2:10 P.M. Central Standard Time on November 22), Hoover called the attorney general at Hickory Hill. “I told him,” his notes from the exchange read, “that I thought we had the man who killed the president down in Dallas . . . a mean-minded individual . . . in the category of a nut who was an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union.”
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Bobby left for Andrews Air Force Base at 4:30 the afternoon of the twenty-second, arriving an hour before Air Force One was to land. He walked around aimlessly, avoiding the gathering crowd. Finding a deserted air force truck, he vaulted over the tailgate and sat on the bed in the darkness. When Air Force One finally arrived, Bobby ran up the ramp near the front entrance to the plane, straight past President Johnson and his staff, to the plane’s back compartment: “Hi, Jackie,” he said putting his arm around her. She replied, “Oh, Bobby.” He was always there when you needed him, she later said. But now the opposite was true: he needed her.
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Jackie insisted on riding with the body to Bethesda Naval Hospital in the gray ambulance. Bobby joined her. Jackie was still wearing her pink, blood-soaked dress. When someone on the flight home had suggested she change out of it, she had whispered fiercely, “No. Let them see what they have done to him.” Leaning on the coffin, she said, “Oh, Bobby. I just can’t believe Jack is gone.” She then recounted to him the scene of the murder and the noise and blinding light. He sat there for twenty minutes and listened to the horror of Jack’s destruction. The ambulance came within sight of the gleaming Capitol. He later recalled reflecting on his and Jack’s dramatic days together on the McClellan Committee.
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This and other memories cut into him but still he could not cry. His “motor reflexes,” as Theodore White once expressed it, continued to drive him forward, to seek some order in the chaos. Kenny O’Donnell later told Bobby about Jack’s “premonitions” about assassination on the Texas trip. Unlike Bobby, Jack had been ready to celebrate self “without self-pity,” as Archibald MacLeish had described Oedipus on that golden day in Amherst. He had seen something coming and he had accepted it. To be swept away at the glittering summit like Roland or Arthur was the rendezvous Jack had sensed. His youth, in the phrase he had copied down after Joe’s death, was now eternal. Jack would never know, Jackie wrote a few weeks later, “age nor stagnation, nor despair, nor crippling illness, nor loss of any more people he loved. His high noon kept all the freshness of the morning.”
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At about four the next morning, Jackie and Bobby rode back to the White House with Jack’s body, now in a flag-draped coffin, for a ceremony in the East Room. The priest blessed the body with Psalm 130: “My soul waits for the Lord more than sentinels wait for the dawn.” As Mrs. Kennedy drew away, Bobby asked that the coffin be opened to settle the question of whether there would be an open or closed casket. “I asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it. . . . When I saw it, I’d made my mind up, I didn’t want it open.” Others whom Bobby asked to view Jack agreed.

It was almost 5 A.M. when Charles Spalding, one of Jack’s oldest friends, walked with Bobby to the Lincoln bedroom. Spalding produced a sleeping pill, which Bobby took. “God, it’s so awful,” Bobby said. “Everything was really beginning to run so well.” Spalding bid him good night and closed the door. As he turned away, he heard Bobby break down — at last — and start to sob: “Why, God?”
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Stewart Udall spent time with the attorney general the next day, discussing the location of the grave site at Arlington. Udall, who subsequently dropped Kennedy off at Hickory Hill, sensed that Bobby was suffering from something “deeper than grief itself.”
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