Killing Kennedy (21 page)

LBJ is fighting for his political life as he locates the two token tables of racial integration in that St. Augustine hotel ballroom. And while the occasion may officially be the anniversary of the city’s founding, it also marks the day when Lyndon Johnson takes a public stand in favor of civil rights.

The Kennedy brothers have deliberately kept him out of their escalating battle for racial equality. They know that as a southern politician, he could use the issue to gain power.

Johnson understands this as well. And he does everything he can to be at the forefront of JFK’s civil rights campaign.

For Johnson, civil rights has nothing to do with right or wrong. Taking this stand just makes good political sense.

So LBJ waits, castrated and emaciated, hoping it will all pay off.

*   *   *

On March 4, just one week before Lyndon Johnson’s St. Augustine speech, Attorney General Robert Kennedy responds to the
Esquire
story by telling the press, “I have no plans to run at this time”—which the media know to be code for “I’m running.”

But is he qualified? Bobby Kennedy is a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, and he’s an attorney general who got the job because of his father and brother. Since then, he has often ignored his duties at the Justice Department to serve as JFK’s mouthpiece and sounding board. And the CIA certainly doesn’t approve of his job performance. One popular bumper sticker at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters reads “First Ethel, Now Us.”

But the world is changing drastically, and Bobby Kennedy reflects the youth and vitality of Camelot instead of the stodgy cold war values synonymous with the older Johnson. American culture is under siege by new influences.

A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first album.

A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.

Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women’s movement with her book
The Feminine Mystique
.

The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover’s world by creating a domestic operations division.

Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.

The one thing Bobby can’t stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.

Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable man I know.”

And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.

*   *   *

Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.

On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson’s speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it’s a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of
American Rifleman
magazine. The Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, model 91/38, was made in 1940 and originally designed for the Italian infantry during World War II. This is not a gun designed for hunting animals, but for shooting men. As a former Marine Corps sharpshooter, Oswald knows the difference, just as he also knows how to clean, maintain, load, aim, and accurately fire such a weapon.

Of all the amazing things happening in the world in March 1963, this simple mail-order purchase would seem to have little significance. In fact, nothing will have a greater impact on world events than this nineteen-dollar Italian war-surplus bolt-action rifle.

The weapon arrives on March 25. Marina complains that they could have used the money for food. But Oswald is pleased with the purchase and gets in the habit of riding the bus to a dry riverbed for target practice against the levee.

On March 31, while Marina is hanging diapers on the clothesline to dry, Oswald steps into the backyard dressed all in black. His new pistol is tucked into his belt. He brandishes the rifle in one hand and holds copies of two Communist newspapers in the other. He demands that an amused Marina take photographs of him. He plans to send them to the
Worker
and the
Militant
to show that he is prepared to do anything to wage class warfare.

On April 6, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His Communist rants have grown offensive to his coworkers, and his bosses claim that he has become undependable.

On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides it’s time to kill someone.

10

A
PRIL 9, 1963

W
ASHINGTON,
D
.
C
.

M
IDDAY

The man with seven months to live is talking to Winston Churchill.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy stands in the White House Rose Garden before a large, warmhearted crowd. Churchill, the ninety-two-year-old former prime minister whose inspirational courage helped save Britain during World War II, watches live by satellite from his home in London. The purpose of this Rose Garden gathering is to make Winston Churchill an American citizen—the only foreign leader since Lafayette to be so honored.

“A son of America though a subject of Britain,” Kennedy begins his speech, referring to the fact that Churchill’s mother, née Jenny Jerome, was a U.S. citizen, “has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American nation.”

Churchill’s fifty-one-year-old son, Randolph, stands at JFK’s side. Jackie Kennedy stands directly behind her husband. The Rose Garden is filled with diplomats and acquaintances from the United States and England. The president’s father, Joseph, who served as ambassador to Great Britain just prior to the Second World War, watches from a wheelchair inside the White House, the elder Kennedy having experienced a stroke two years prior.

But even as John Kennedy stands before this idyllic gathering, seeing the warmth and smiles that come with honoring such a distinguished and legendary world leader, his thoughts are never far from another “Churchill”—and another war that is gaining steam.

*   *   *

It was Dwight Eisenhower who first sent American soldiers to Vietnam to stem the flow of communism in Southeast Asia. But it was John Kennedy who ordered a gradual escalation in the number of troops since taking office, hoping to ensure that Vietnam did not fall to communism and thus perhaps begin a domino effect that would see other Asian nations turn their backs on democracy.

But Kennedy’s good intentions have gone awry. The handful of American “advisers” in Vietnam has now swelled to almost sixteen thousand pilots and soldiers. American pilots are dropping napalm firebombs from the sky to destroy the Viet Cong army that is now fighting the U.S.-backed Saigon regime. Thousands of Viet Cong soldiers have been killed—as have thousands of innocent Vietnamese peasants. “The charred bodies of children and babies have made pathetic piles in the middle of the remains of the marketplace,” the Associated Press reported after one such bombing incident.

American pilots fly hundreds of missions over Vietnam every month. A systematic process of defoliation has begun, with American airplanes spraying chemicals over the jungle to kill all vegetation that might hide enemy soldiers. Of course, the crops of many innocent farmers are destroyed in the process. This “scorched earth” policy will eventually come back to haunt the United States in a number of ways.

The CIA has joined in the fight in Vietnam, conducting covert search-and-destroy missions in the Communist north. Gunners aboard American helicopters have free rein to open fire on the peasants who turn and run when they see Hueys come sweeping in over the treetops. The assumption is that the farmers run because they are the enemy, not that they might be superstitious and terrified about aircraft that have suddenly invaded the skies above their primitive villages.

John Kennedy believes that America needs to end the Vietnam conflict—though he is not quite ready to go public with this. “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” he will tell Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Bartlett off the record. “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to reelect me.”

To safeguard his chances for reelection, the president cannot, and will not, pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam until after the 1964 election. The war is still popular with voters. In the meantime, he hopes to contain U.S. involvement, reading his briefing books each morning and praying that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem doesn’t do anything stupid or irresponsible to inflame the situation.

Diem is a Catholic, just like the Kennedys. But his faith is almost fanatical, causing him to lose focus on fighting communism. He is now fighting a war on two fronts. The first is against the Viet Cong; the second is a holy war against Vietnam’s majority Buddhist population.

Yet it is Diem whom Vice President Johnson once famously praised as “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” The Kennedy brothers hate that gross exaggeration. Unlike the real Winston Churchill, Diem is not a firm and steadfast friend of the American people or the United States of America. He is a mass murderer, concerned only about his own glorification.

And that narcissism will soon doom him.

*   *   *

In the Rose Garden, Kennedy concludes his remarks. He now listens as Randolph Churchill reads from a speech his father has prepared. “Our past is our key to our future,” says Churchill, in words that make Kennedy and the British icon sound like two very similar statesmen. “Let no one underrate our energies, our potentialities, and our abiding power for good.”

*   *   *

But not every man believes in an abiding power for good.

John Kennedy is hardly a violent man. He dislikes guns and even abhors hunting animals. The same cannot be said for Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, on a hot April night, Oswald hides in the shadows of a Dallas alleyway. His new rifle is pointed at Major General Ted Walker, an avowed anticommunist.

Walker sits in the study of his Dallas home intently poring over his 1962 tax returns. The fifty-three-year-old West Point graduate is a closeted gay man and a famous opponent of communism. The date is April 10, and he is home alone on this Wednesday night, having just returned from a controversial trip around the country. The desk lamp is the room’s only light. A small window looks out into the darkness. Normally, Walker might crack the window to let in the sweet spring air, but it was a record-high ninety-nine degrees today. It’s still hot, even at 9:00
P.M
. Walker is running the air-conditioning.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s hiding spot in the alley is just forty yards away. He watches Walker’s every move through the telescopic sight of his Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The hum of the air-conditioning unit drowns out the sound of Oswald’s carefully choreographed movements. He is now concealed behind Walker’s back fence, the barrel of his rifle poking through the latticework. There is a church near Walker’s home, where the congregants have gathered for a midweek service on this Wednesday evening.

The oppression of the workingman courses through Lee Harvey Oswald’s veins. He finds strength in the ideals of communism and socialism. After almost a year back home in America, he has become even more enraged by what he perceives as the injustice of the capitalist system. He is angry enough to kill any man who speaks out against communism.

Which is why he is aiming his brand-new rifle with murderous intent at Ted Walker’s head. The former general is at the very top of the list of people whom Oswald despises. Eighteen months ago, Walker was asked to leave the army after telling a newspaper reporter that Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt were most likely Communists. He resigned his post rather than retire, a symbolic gesture of defiance that cost him his pension. Since then, the veteran of World War II and the Korean War has devoted himself to political causes. He ran for governor of Texas as a Democrat—an odd alignment for a man so politically far to the right, especially one living in Dallas, a violent city where Democrats are such a minority that many of them are wary of openly expressing their beliefs.

After finishing last in that election—which was won by John Connally—Walker traveled to Mississippi, attempting to block the integration of the University of Mississippi. Two people were killed and six U.S. Marshals were shot in the ensuing riot, after which Walker was temporarily sent to a mental institution and held on federal charges of sedition. It was Bobby Kennedy himself who ordered that Walker be charged for acts of violence against the civil rights of an American citizen.

But Oswald doesn’t care about civil rights. He has come to Walker’s home because the
Worker
, the Communist newspaper to which he subscribes, has targeted the general as a threat to its beliefs. And because of Walker’s recent participation in Operation Midnight Ride, a Paul Revere–like barnstorming tour to warn Americans about the scourge of communism. The Mississippi grand jury’s decision not to press charges against Walker was Oswald’s motivation for purchasing a rifle. Since the Mannlicher-Carcano’s arrival, Oswald has traveled frequently by bus to the area around Walker’s home. He has walked the streets and alleys, studying and sketching and learning the lay of the land, memorizing escape routes and the church schedule. Oswald took several photographs of the area and developed them at work before being fired on April 6. All his intelligence is stored in a special blue loose-leaf notebook.