The Kennedy Half-Century (48 page)

A genuine plot unfolded in Palm Beach, Florida, in December 1960, when a disturbed seventy-three-year-old man, Richard Pavlick, carefully planned to kill President-elect Kennedy.
¹⁶
Pavlick was well known to the Secret Service
because he had written threatening letters to a series of presidents, and he was in the database of possible assassins used by law enforcement. But Pavlick lived in New Hampshire; no one had calculated that he might simply drive to Palm Beach and take up residence waiting for the right moment to strike. Angered by a belief that the president-elect’s father had bought the election, Pavlick wired his car with a considerable amount of dynamite, ready to crash it into the president’s.
¹⁷
The Secret Service later admitted the plan might have worked, since Kennedy was usually driven in a single car during this interregnum. As it happened, Mrs. Kennedy saved her husband from a prepresidential death. As Pavlick waited in his car just outside the Kennedy compound one Sunday, preparing to turn his car bomb into JFK’s path, Jackie came out with her husband. Pavlick’s twisted conscience was still sensitive enough to deter him, since he had no desire to kill Mrs. Kennedy.

The would-be assassin waited a week until Kennedy turned up at Mass at a nearby Catholic Church. A disheveled Pavlick wandered into the church to make sure JFK was there, spotted him, and made a beeline for that pew. An alert agent grabbed him and whisked him around—but let him go without a clear identification and without knowing whether the man was armed. Before Pavlick drove away, the agent did record the license number and description of Pavlick’s decrepit Buick sedan. An all-points bulletin was later issued, and four days later, Pavlick was found in his car, still dynamite-laden—close to the Kennedy compound yet again. As with FDR in 1933, the nation had come close to losing a president before he had ever served a day.
¹⁸

Even after JFK’s slaying, the nation was slow to recognize the full importance of security. There was little public or institutional pressure to protect presidential candidates until Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968. Shortly after RFK died, one fretful FBI agent sent a telegram to Hoover which read, PLEASE MAKE CERTAIN THAT TED KENNEDY GETS ALL THE PROTECTION HE NEEDS WE ARE DOWN TO ONE KENNEDY THANKS.
¹⁹
Robert Kennedy’s assassination brought Secret Service protection for future presidential candidates, though not early in the campaign.
²⁰
Protection or not, shortcuts have been taken on the campaign trail when aides to a candidate want a full auditorium but the lines behind the magnetometers is long.
²¹
The imperfect security arrangements have continued under Presidents Bush and Obama, according to some in and out of the Secret Service. Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, recounted an odd and potentially threatening incident that occurred during his boss’s first inauguration. Shortly before the inaugural parade began, a nondescript man managed to slip through the Secret Service cordon and press a religious message and medallion or “coin” (as Fleischer describes it) into the president’s hand. The interloper turned out to be a harmless preacher from California named Richard Weaver, but Bush’s bodyguards
eventually caught up with Weaver and banned him from attending future presidential events. The Secret Service, according to Fleischer, had some explaining to do to the new administration, especially when it was learned this same individual had slipped through security and confronted the first President Bush and President Clinton at various times.
²²

Unauthorized guests have also found their way face-to-face with President Obama at state dinners.
²³
As it happened, the intruders were just publicity-seeking party crashers, but who is to say the next ones could not be well-trained assassins? The Kennedy legacy ought to produce constant vigilance in the realm of presidential security, but failing memory and human weakness inevitably take their toll.
²⁴

President Kennedy’s preventable assassination on November 22 proved that we did not take the steps necessary to protect our leader, and we suffered in a thousand ways on account of it. One of the greatest, saddest lessons of JFK’s short White House tenure is that there are terrible costs when we fail to imagine and believe the worst could occur at any moment. Everyone is guilty, not least the partisans who would have pointed fingers at an “overprotected” chief executive had the Secret Service requested a major appropriations hike in order to better safeguard JFK. There was a precedent for such criticism. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln had taken reasonable precautions before his inauguration. Rumors of an assassination plot forced him to board a train to Washington disguised as an invalid, guarded by a heavily armed companion. Once in the District he slipped into his hotel by the ladies’ entrance. Lincoln was denounced as a coward and mocked for his prudence.
²⁵

Kennedy came to power just as inexorable forces in American life were colliding in a way certain to produce social upheaval during his term. Foremost was the civil rights movement. The dream of equality for black Americans could no longer be deferred, yet the clash with deeply rooted traditions of segregation, especially in the South, ensured considerable violence. Just as in the 1860s, the shedding of blood was a precondition for racial justice. An army of racists such as James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been gunning for JFK after civil rights legislation passed.

The Cold War had generated deep fears of Communism, especially on the right. Any attempt at compromise, any effort to decrease tensions between East and West was viewed by millions as betrayal. The leaflets distributed in Dallas for Kennedy’s visit that bore his photo and the caption WANTED FOR TREASON were just a hint of what might have come. Kennedy had made lasting enemies among an intransigent community of anti-Castro exiles who would never have forgiven him for the Bay of Pigs. Names from this group constantly appear on researchers’ lists of possible Kennedy assassins, as do organized crime individuals.

In addition, many in the defense and intelligence establishment, active and retired, eyed Kennedy with great suspicion, dismayed by what they regarded as Kennedy’s “weak” response to Cuba and Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these individuals would never have considered taking violent action against their commander in chief. The elaborate coup d’état theory of the Kennedy assassination, prominent in Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
, appears especially overwrought. However, rabble-rousers, such as retired General Edwin Walker (Oswald’s first assassination target), had thousands of extremist followers whose animus toward Kennedy was visceral; they could have grown to menacing proportions had JFK de-escalated the Vietnam conflict in his second term.

Lyndon Johnson avoided Kennedy’s fate for two obvious reasons. First, LBJ benefited from the lessons of the Kennedy assassination. The Secret Service was determined not to lose two presidents in a row, and the agency took security precautions for Johnson that had never been employed for Kennedy. Johnson’s first trip out of D.C. after the assassination was to attend the funeral of former New York governor Herbert Lehman. When Air Force One landed at New York’s Idlewild Airport on December 8, it was met by police helicopters and uniformed officers standing guard on the roof of the airport hangar and oil storage tanks overlooking the tarmac. Johnson rode to the funeral in a closed limousine escorted by thirty-five police motorcycles and dozens of Secret Service agents. James Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, rode in the motorcade. Two thousand police officers guarded the bridges and highway overpasses along the route. Mrs. Johnson was flown in on a separate plane—possibly at the request of the president—to ensure her safety.
²⁶

Just as important, Lyndon Johnson—as controversial as he came to be because of Vietnam and civil rights—was not John Kennedy. There was something about JFK that engendered in many Americans a loathing that was the full equal of the loyalty and love that others had for him. Indeed, this was true of the entire Kennedy family. JFK and his clan had everything—power, wealth, youth, looks, celebrity, style, and a soaring trajectory for the future that might have included a presidential dynasty. In the early 1960s, it was assumed in many quarters that Bobby Kennedy would try to succeed JFK in 1968, with Ted waiting in line to follow Bobby.
²⁷
It may even have been true. In the warped minds of some potential assassins, the gun might have been the only way to short-circuit old Joe Kennedy’s money and connections before they produced a long line of Kennedys in the White House.

Add it all together: JFK’s surfeit of enemies, racial turmoil greater than we had seen since the Civil War era, social upheaval that unsettled millions, the clash between the anticommunist right wing and those willing to negotiate
with the Reds, and most of all, a shockingly casual approach to presidential security based on utterly false assumptions. This toxic combination of trends and events made Kennedy appallingly vulnerable, an easy target for murder.

JFK was a marked man. If Lee Harvey Oswald had never been born, if the Texas trip had never been scheduled, John F. Kennedy would still have been in jeopardy every day of his presidency. Given all the factors threatening JFK’s safety, even without Dallas, Kennedy would have been very lucky to have been found next to a successor on the inaugural stand come January 20, 1969.

12
The Assassination and the Kennedy Legacy

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!

—SHAKESPEARE,
HAMLET

Hundreds of books and studies have been written about the Kennedy assassination. Alert readers have noticed that their authors often use the words “alleged,” “claimed,” and “supposedly”—just as I have done in this book. The debate over the Kennedy assassination is one of the longest-running sagas in American history, involving hundreds of subplots. Facts and quasifacts have dribbled out over five decades. Quite a few of these “facts” are unverifiable or only partially verifiable—which does not necessarily mean they are incorrect. Stories are told by respectable and dubious witnesses alike that are based on murky memories of long-ago events. Some legitimate evidence is contradictory. The cast of characters in this historical enterprise, many of them colorful and quirky, could fill a bookshelf of Shakespearean plays. The search for the truth of JFK’s assassination is like the quest for El Dorado, the mythical city of gold that tantalized European explorers in the sixteenth century. Inspired by vague clues and Amerindian legends, these explorers spent years in the wilderness hoping to strike it rich, but often died of disease and starvation instead.

This book is a synthesis of what we know after fifty years, not a misguided attempt to solve the insoluble. Too many cases are called “the murder of the century,” but other than the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked the death of millions in the Great War, the slaying of John Kennedy may well qualify for the twentieth century’s slot. Few would question that it is one of the most tangled, tortuous, and intimidating political executions of all time.

In these pages I have tried to do justice to the accumulated evidence, and I have attempted to weigh it fairly in evaluating the major theories about November 22 that have been proposed. This has been a difficult undertaking for two reasons. First, Americans did not get all the facts at the time when the assassination
might have been solved to most people’s satisfaction. Many powerful forces were determined to keep the public from learning the full story, and they handicapped the initial investigation lest it uncover the entire embarrassing truth. Everyone can now see that obscuring the government’s efforts to kill Fidel Castro (and perhaps other foreign dictators) was part of the motivation, but there was more. Whether these powerful figures simply wanted to avoid blame for having missed obvious signals about Oswald’s potential as an assassin, or were trying to obscure their outright culpability in a more direct sense, will be argued for years to come. Second, a comprehensive appraisal of November 22 is impossible because many government documents are
still
classified. The public has not been trusted with the entire record about the murder of the thirty-fifth president, when the forty-fourth is sitting in the White House. Many of these documents are finally scheduled to be released in 2017.
¹
Americans may or may not learn anything new at that time. One doubts that intentionally incriminating paperwork will be found intact at this late date. The true outrage is that it will have taken more than a half century for the people’s government to reveal these taxpayer-produced documents about a long-ago seminal event.
²

Advances in technology may eventually permit researchers to do more with the physical evidence that remains, such as the Zapruder film and the existing still photographs of the crucial moments.

One vital piece of evidence, the police Dictabelt recording that was thought to have preserved the sounds of the shots in Dealey Plaza, was my choice for advanced analysis. I briefly mentioned the Dictabelt earlier in the book. For a long time, the evidence appeared to suggest that, by accident (via a stuck microphone on a policeman’s motorcycle in the motorcade), the sounds of the assassination were recorded back at Dallas police headquarters on a Dictabelt—a recording device of the era that was primitive but fairly reliable.
³
The Dictabelt was preserved by the Dallas police because it recorded various instructions given by its officials during the motorcade. In 1976 a radio program director, Gary Mack, who was interested in the Kennedy assassination and had recently moved to Dallas, learned of the Dictabelt’s existence.
⁴
An audio specialist, Mack asked a question no one had thought to pose earlier: In addition to routine police commands, could this Dictabelt have also recorded the shots fired at JFK? If so, could the Dictabelt be the long-sought Rosetta stone that could at least reveal how many bullets had been fired and from what direction(s)?