The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  “You won the nomination as president last night as a knight on a white charger,” O’Donnell said to John. “Now, in your first move after your nomination, you’re going against the people who backed you.”23

  Kennedy’s response would be haunting.

  “Get one thing clear, Kenny,” John said, angered by the criticism, “I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for president in the country, and I’m not going to die in office.”24

  For Johnson and his cronies, who believed he could control the presidency through the vice presidency, it was a rude awakening when he was relegated to an almost dormant position.

  “If Jack Kennedy gets elected,” Johnson said shortly before Election Day, “you can be sure that the man closest to the president will be the man closest to the Senate. I’m going to be a working vice president.”25 A successful, visible term or two as vice president in Johnson’s mind would set him up as the most viable candidate for president, a fate that might not be possible had Johnson remained in the Senate.

  The truth couldn’t have been any more stark in comparison, and the reality did not take long to sink in. Johnson would be marginalized throughout President Kennedy’s first term, and he was humiliated to have to answer to “that little shitass” Bobby Kennedy.26

  Shortly following the election, President-elect Kennedy visited the LBJ ranch and would be taken on a hunt similar to the one provided for Bobby. Kennedy bagged a deer and was later presented with the stuffed deer head as a gifted trophy. Johnson suggested to Kennedy that it be in the Oval Office, but was slighted when the head was hauled and displayed in the Fish Room of the White House, which today is the Roosevelt Room.

  “The three most overrated things in the world are the state of Texas, the FBI, and hunting trophies,”27 Kennedy said privately.

  President Kennedy though, who worked with Johnson in the Senate, recognized the enormous ego of the man and made attempts to temper it. Only a year earlier, as majority leader, Johnson had ruled over the Senate and the nation. Kennedy, who had worked alongside Johnson, remembered the opulent trappings of the Johnson Senate. Johnson, feeling his office in the Capitol was much too small for his tremendous self-importance, had enlarged his work-space, expanding to other offices like Nero clearing land for his Domus Aurea, until he had, in the words of a reporter, a “seven-room spread of offices.”28

  Robert Caro, biographer of Johnson, details LBJ’s additional appropriation of Senate space in his book Master of the Senate:

  Grand as this suite was, it was still too far from the Chamber floor for his liking, but on the same level as the Chamber floor, and conveniently near it, was a suite of two huge rooms that had been the staff and meeting rooms of the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee. He commandeered that, too. On its high ceilings, above its big crystal chandelier, were frescoes (as soon as he chose the office, painters began touching them up) of boys carrying baskets of flowers and young maidens reclining on couches: a Roman emperor’s banquet. Reporters began referring to it as “the Emperor’s Room” before coining another name, which stuck: “The Taj Mahal.”29

  Upon seizing this new office, the majority leader hung a life-size portrait of himself reclining against a bookshelf, which greeted people as they entered. The refurbishment, to meet Johnson’s standards, had cost taxpayers in excess of $100,000.30

  Kennedy, anticipating the dark mood of Johnson that would come in his less-powerful position, dispatched aide Kenny O’Donnell to massage the vice president’s ego.

  “Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader of the United States Senate,” Kennedy told O’ Donnell. “He was elected to office several times by the people. He was the number one Democrat in the United States, elected by us to be our leader. I’m president of the United States. He doesn’t like that. He thinks he’s ten times more important than I am—he happens to be that kind of fellow… . Elected officers have a code, and no matter whether they like each other or hate each other … You have never been elected to anything by anybody, and you are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man, with a huge ego. I want you to literally kiss his ass from one end of Washington to the other.”31

  O’Donnell and President Kennedy had a system for helping Johnson feel important. When Johnson complained to the president, Kennedy would call O’Donnell into his office and scold him in front of the vice president. O’Donnell would be the goat, and Johnson would walk away satisfied.

  “Damn it, Kenny, you’ve gone and done it again,” Kennedy said on one occasion while disciplining O’Donnell. “Lyndon, you go ahead and tell him yourself what’s happened this time.”32

  President Kennedy also gave Johnson special privileges and assignments to quell his rancor. Johnson was assigned to chair the National Aeronautics and Space Council and also given the benefit of descending the White House stairs with Kennedy to commence formal occasions.

  To further ease Johnson’s dejection, Kennedy had LBJ make a number of foreign visits including Pakistan, South Vietnam and Lebanon, representing the United States.

  Later, Johnson would recall “trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, [and] chairmanships of councils, but in the end, it is nothing. I detested every minute of it.”33

  Johnson was also tasked to command the Committee of Equal Employment Opportunity, but the assignment failed to raise his self-worth in the administration, and constant criticism from the attorney general only amplified the damage done to Lyndon’s psyche.

  “That man can’t run this committee,” said Bobby. “Can you think of anything more deplorable than him trying to run the United States? That’s why he can’t ever be president of the United States.”34

  When Lyndon Johnson embarked upon his vice presidency, he had vision of succeeding John Kennedy and becoming the thirty-sixth president of the United States. As that aim became more of an apparition, Johnson’s nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, seemed more and more the likely front-runner for the office. Where Johnson had foreseen himself giving advice to the president, it was Bobby who had John’s ear. Where Johnson saw himself pulling the strings of the presidency, it was Bobby who was given the duty and credit of backing the president.

  “Nothing big goes on without Bobby being in on it,”35 a staff member said.

  Johnson, who was used to brokering deals with a mix of brute force and Southern charm, was disheartened by the tact of the brothers, believing, with his experience, that they were ignoring a vital asset to help enact legislation.

  To his assistant Bobby Baker, Johnson lamented, “those kids … from the White House [who] start yelling ‘frog’ at everybody and expect ‘em to jump. They don’t have any idea of how to get along, and they don’t even know where the power is.”36

  When President Kennedy acknowledged “the second most powerful man in the world,”37 he was referring to Bobby.

  Early in the Kennedy administration, there was already talk of Bobby as John’s successor and no talk of the powerhouse who once was Senator Johnson. By the third year of Kennedy’s presidency, with Johnson on the vice presidential cutting block, LBJ was an afterthought.

  “The public … has already forgotten the dynamic Lyndon Johnson who was once master of the Senate,” wrote Gore Vidal. “Eight years of vice presidential grayness will have completed his obscurity.”38

  If LBJ thought that Bobby would sympathize with Johnson’s exodus from the heights of power to the fringe of the Kennedy administration, he was ill prepared for the insults of the attorney general.

  The parties at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s large brick mansion in Mclean, Virginia, coursed with bad-mouthing of the vice president.

  An incident there early in November 1963 detailed in Jeff Shesol’s book, Mutual Contempt illuminated the perception of Johnson within the administration:

  The mocking tone of the Hickory Hill gang became so routine, so reflexive, that it was difficult to drop even in Johnson’s presence. In November 1963, at a stag party for a recent Kennedy a
ppointee, two mid-level officials stood in animated conversation. Ron Linton, a Kennedy campaign hand now working at the Pentagon, was talking excitedly to John J. Riley, JFK’s nominee to chair the Federal Trade Commission, when Linton sensed a third party hovering at his side, awaiting a break in the conversation. Perhaps thoughtlessly, the two men continued chatting. When Linton finally turned his head, he saw the tall figure of Lyndon Johnson walking away dejectedly. “John,” Linton said to Riley, “I think we just insulted the vice-president of the United States.”

  “Fuck ‘em,” Riley blurted. And Lyndon Johnson, halfway across the room, froze in midstep and wheeled around to face the men. The vice president stood stiffly and stared, indignant and proud. But he said nothing and quickly lost himself in the crowd.39

  A month earlier at Hickory Hill, Bobby had been presented with a Johnson voodoo doll, imbued with the significance that Lyndon would now further bend to Kennedy’s will. Kennedy and his wife Ethel mockingly called Lyndon and Lady Bird “Uncle Cornpone and Mrs. Pork Chop.”

  Robert Kennedy was not the only Kennedy with misgivings about Lyndon Johnson. Years later, Jackie Kennedy would make a comment during the time period of the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation into the JFK assassination. One of JFK Jr.’s best friends at the Phillips Academy was Meg Azzoni. In the Spring of 1977, she and John Jr. went to visit his mother, Jackie, while sister Caroline was at Harvard. Meg says “Jackie told John and I at the ‘break-the-fast’ breakfast, ‘I did not like or trust Lyndon Johnson.’ No one said another word the whole meal in memorial contemplative silence.”41

  The insults hurled at Johnson during his decline were not the apex of Bobby’s plan for Lyndon. Bobby was accumulating intelligence on Johnson’s illegal endeavors that he planned to use later to oust and perhaps even send Johnson to jail.

  So what did Lyndon Johnson have in store for the Kennedy brothers? Robert Caro has the answer right in front of his eyes, but he is unable to add a) the fantastic hatred of Johnson and the Kennedys with each other to b) the machine gun-riddled Warren Report and draw an obvious conclusion.

  Robert Caro:

  At the end of that long afternoon, after he had stepped down from the chair in the Biltmore corridor on which he stood to make his acceptance statement, he came back into his suite, and closed the door behind him, and cursed Robert Kennedy. He called him, Bobby Baker was to write, “‘that little shitass’ and worse.” Perhaps much worse. John Connally, who during long days of conversation with this author was willing to answer almost any question put to him, no matter how delicate the topic, wouldn’t answer when asked what Johnson said about Robert Kennedy. When the author pressed him, he finally said flatly: ‘I am not going to tell you what he said about him.’ During the months after the convention, when Johnson was closeted alone back in Texas with an old ally, he would sometimes be asked about Robert Kennedy. He would reply with a gesture. Raising his big right hand, he would draw the side of it across the neck in a slowing, slitting movement. Sometimes that gesture would be his only reply; sometimes, as during a meeting with Ed Clark in Austin, he would say, as his hand moved across his neck, ‘I’ll cut his throat if it’s the last thing I do.’

  “President Kennedy worked so hard at making a place for me, always saying nice things, gave me dignity and standing,” Johnson said to reporter Helen Thomas. “But back in the back room they were quoting Bobby, saying I was going to be taken off the ticket.”42

  Bobby smelled blood in the water and was moving to attack.

  In 2003, Phil Brennan wrote an article for Newsmax confirming that the Kennedys were going to use the media to politically execute Johnson. At the time, Brennan worked on the Hill and was also writing a column for the National Review under the pseudonym Cato. Brennan had intimate knowledge of both a Senate Rules Committee investigation into LBJ and the RFK media war on LBJ. Brennan:

  “A few days later, the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, called five of Washington’s top reporters into his office and told them it was now open season on Lyndon Johnson. It’s OK, he told them, to go after the story they were ignoring out of deference to the administration.

  And from that point on until the events in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s future looked as if it included a sudden end to his political career and a few years in the slammer. The Kennedys had their knives out and sharpened for him and were determined to draw his political blood—all of it.

  In the Senate, the investigation into the Baker case was moving quickly ahead. Even the Democrats were cooperating, thanks to the Kennedys, and an awful lot of really bad stuff was being revealed—until November 22, 1963.”

  Seymour Hersh found out about the “RFK destroy LBJ” plan when he interviewed Burkett Van Kirk, who in the fall of 1963 had been a chief counsel for the Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee led by Senator John Williams, who loved to expose corruption. Van Kirk said that RFK had assigned a lawyer to feed the Rules Committee all the dirt he had accumulated on Johnson’s corrupt dealings and financial transactions.

  “The lawyer,” Van Kirk told Hersh “used to come up to he Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn’t know, and two, give it to me.” Some of the Kennedy-supplied documents were kept in Williams’s office safe, Van Kirk said, and never shown to him. There was no doubt of Bobby Kennedy’s purpose in dealing with the Republicans, Van Kirk said, “To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the east.”

  On November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson’s political career, reputation, and his life were hanging by a very thin thread … and Robert Kennedy was about to clip it with scissors.

  At the outset of the administration, a photographer asked him: “Well Bobby, what are we supposed to call you now? Is it Bobby, or attorney general, or general, or sir?”43

  Kennedy’s response would no doubt be agreed upon by enemies of the young attorney general. “Just call me son of a bitch because that’s what everybody else is going to be doing.”

  NOTES

  1. Martin, Seeds of Destruction, pg. 304.

  2. Caro, Master of the Senate, pg. 647.

  3. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 109.

  4. Ibid, pg. 10.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid, pg. 39.

  7. Ibid, pg. 40.

  8. Martin, Seeds of Destruction, pg. 236.

  9. Firing line, June 6, 1966.

  10. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 12.

  11. Smith, Bad Blood, pg. 71.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 52.

  14. Ibid, pg. 53.

  15. Ibid, pg. 54.

  16. Ross, www.youtube.com/watch?v=POmdd6HQsus.

  17. Summers, Anthony, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, p. 272.

  18. Hersh, Seymour, The Dark Side of Camelot, pp. 124-25.

  19. Hersh, Seymour, The Dark Side of Camelot, pp. 124-25.

  20. Hersh, Seymour, The Dark Side of Camelot, p. 126.

  21. Stans, Maurice, The Terrors of Justice, p. 134.

  22. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 57.

  23. O’Donnell, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, pg. 6.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Shesol, pg. 60.

  26. Shesol, pg. 56.

  27. Smith, pg. 86.

  28. Caro, Master of the Senate, pg. 1018.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Smith, Bad Blood, pg. 60.

  31. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 87.

  32. O’Donnell, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, pg. 7.

  33. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 75.

  34. Smith, Bad Blood, pg. 96.

  35. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pg. 74.

  36. Ibid, pg. 100

  37. Ibid, pg. 72

  38. Ibid, pg. 111.

  39. Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pgs. 104–105.

  40. Smith, Bad Blood, pg. 2.

  41. Azzoni, Meg, John F. Kennedy Jr. to Meg Azzoni, 11 Letters: Me
mories of Kennedys & Reflections on His Quest, p. 52.

  42. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and his Times, pg. 624.

  43. Smith, Bad Blood, pg. 94.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOOVER

  J. Edgar Hoover had been long burrowed in the Justice Department, living off the dirty secrets and information that oozed down from the powers above. To him, who had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation almost two full years longer than his new boss had been on the planet, it was a no-brainer to welcome the unseasoned Bobby Kennedy to the position of attorney general.

  Hoover had controlled many an attorney general before Kennedy and, through his connections to Joe Kennedy, no doubt thought Bobby’s power would be even easier to curb. In the director of the FBI’s office was a framed letter from Joe Sr, which detailed the elder Kennedy’s strong feeling that Hoover would make a first-rate president of the United States.1 The director was one of the first to express his approval of John Kennedy’s appointment of Bobby to the position of attorney general.

  According to former FBI agent Cartha DeLoach, Hoover had informed John Kennedy that he would “need one person in your cabinet who will be loyal to you, who will give good advice to you.”2 That man would be his brother Bobby.

  Later, Hoover would intimate to polemic newspaperman George Sokolsky that his recommendation to appoint Bobby to attorney general was “the worst damned piece of advice I’ve ever given anybody in my life.”3

  If Hoover thought Bobby would come into the appointment as Joe Sr. did to Roosevelt, pants around his ankles, begging, he was mistaken. Hoover’s authority would be blunted in the Kennedy administration, and he would be treated by the Justice Department as a byproduct of a bygone age, as antiquated as the John Dillinger death-mask morbidly on display in the anteroom outside of the director’s office. Hoover had raised the prestige of his bureau with the capture of big-name criminals, the public enemies, individual Midwest bank robbers developed by circumstances of the Great Depression.