Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (28 page)

Her husband never believed the lone gunman theory of President Kennedy’s demise, said Evans Frankenheimer, widow of the director, who died in 2002. She said that John Frankenheimer would discuss his ideas about the assassination with Bobby Kennedy, with whom he drew close in 1968, while filming his presidential campaign ads. Both men agreed there were other forces at work in Dallas besides Oswald.

When President Kennedy read the advance copy of
Seven Days in May
that Knebel had sent him, in late summer 1962, he was confident that he could head off any such disaster before it befell the country. The day after reading the book, JFK went sailing on the
Honey Fitz
with his old World War II pal, Red Fay. As the assistant Navy secretary, Fay served as a window for the president into the hostile military culture. Fay too had read an early copy of
Seven Days in May
and he was eager to hear JFK’s opinion of the book. Could a military coup really happen here?

“It’s possible,” JFK told his sailing mate in a calm voice. “It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

Finally, said the president, “if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.” He paused, as Fay absorbed this chilling scenario. “But it won’t happen on my watch,” Kennedy added.

Just weeks later, however, the Kennedy administration would suffer two more shocks to the system, with one crisis following hard on the heels of the other. Both crises deepened the same jagged fracture lines in the government that the Bay of Pigs had first chiseled. They reinforced the conviction in some Washington quarters that this was a failing presidency. And, as Kennedy sensed would happen, there were now those who felt a patriotic obligation to do something about it.

“I HAVEN’T HAD SUCH
an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” President Kennedy dryly remarked. His brother was in an equally mordant mood. “The attorney general announced today he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton University,” he deadpanned. It was nearing midnight on September 30, 1962. The Kennedys were huddled in the Cabinet Room with a handful of their closest advisors, including O’Donnell and Sorensen. The president was nervously pacing the room, while Bobby crouched over a telephone connecting him to the University of Mississippi, where a race riot sparked by the arrival of James Meredith—who would become the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss—was rapidly blossoming into a full-blown Southern insurrection against the federal government.

As the night wore on, Bobby continued to monitor the deteriorating situation by phone, talking to his top two men at the scene, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Ed Guthman, who relayed increasingly frantic reports from a pay phone booth in the Lyceum, the old administration building where they were holed up. Outside the historic, colonnaded structure—where wounded Confederate soldiers had once been nursed—raged what some would call the last battle of the Civil War. A motley federal force—comprising a few hundred marshals and hastily deputized prison guards, border patrolmen, alcohol and tobacco agents, and the like—were desperately trying to hold off over 2,500 students, Klansmen, squirrel hunters, and even off-duty lawmen, who, armed with bricks, metal pipes, gas-filled Coke bottles, and shotguns, were trying to overrun the citadel. As they charged, they filled the warm night with blood-curdling rebel yells and cries to “lynch the nigger.” A majority of the federal marshals were Southerners themselves and were no champions of school integration. But under the command of the attorney general’s favorite New York Irishman, Jim McShane, they resolutely held their ground during the long, bloody siege, using only tear gas guns to repel the rioters. The marshals were under strict orders not to draw their sidearms, unless the mob came close to grabbing Meredith, who was passing the night, with odd serenity, on a dormitory cot not far from the Lyceum.

“Stay right by Meredith. Shoot anybody that puts a hand on him,” Robert Kennedy told his men.

James Meredith, an eccentric and visionary twenty-eight-year-old Air Force veteran, was possessed by a religious-like belief in his mission, which he described as a “Divine Responsibility” to end “White Supremacy” in his native Mississippi. He had been inspired to undertake this dangerous endeavor after hearing President Kennedy sound freedom’s trumpet in his inauguration speech. Meredith had the supreme equanimity of a man who didn’t much care whether he lived or died in the process. But the federal marshals were frantic to save his skin, as well as their own. And, as their tear gas supplies ran perilously low and the attacks on their thin line of defense outside the Lyceum grew more vicious, they were not confident they would succeed.

Inside the Lyceum, the scene was bloody bedlam. A young marshal from Memphis had been shot in the throat, severing his jugular vein, and he was dragged inside the building, jetting blood onto the walls and tile floor. (The marshal, Graham E. Same, would expire and come back to life four times that night, but would miraculously survive.) Dozens of other marshals with broken and bleeding limbs were splayed on the floor. Others were collapsed against the blood-splattered walls, crying inside their gas masks. There was no doctor at this point in the siege and few medical supplies. A persistent sniper was blasting away at the Lyceum’s windows. A swirling, eye-stinging haze of tear gas came drifting into the building from the ferocious battle outside.

Kenny O’Donnell, who at one point relieved Bobby on the phone in the Cabinet Room, was shaken by what he was hearing. “Guthman’s so scared he can’t talk. Helpless feelings on the other end of that phone.” And these were two men who had weathered the firestorm of World War II combat.

“How’s it going down there?” the attorney general asked Guthman when he got back on the phone.

“Pretty rough,” Guthman told him. “It’s getting like the Alamo.”

A pause. Then Bobby replied, “Well, you know what happened to those guys, don’t you.” The black Irish humor again. The exchange would be widely quoted in later reports on the battle of Ole Miss, as a way of underlining the Kennedys’ grace under pressure.

There were indeed flashes of Kennedy wit throughout the long night. But what comes across most vividly in listening to the tapes from the Cabinet Room and Oval Office that later surfaced, thanks to the secret recording system installed in the White House by the president, is the Kennedy brothers’ mounting rage. It started when they began puzzling over the Army’s ass-dragging pace that night, its strange failure to promptly relieve the bloodied and outnumbered federal marshals. It grew when mad-eyed, beetle-browed General Edwin Walker—recently forced into retirement—suddenly appeared in the college town, dressed in a natty black suit and his trademark gray Stetson, and showed up later at a Confederate monument on campus, where he rallied the ragtag army of race-haters. And it boiled over as Army officials offered a series of excuses for why their troops were moving so slowly to prevent the lynching of James Meredith and the slaughter of his federal guard. The question that comes searingly through these presidential transcripts is: Why is the military being so unresponsive to the commander-in-chief?

“General Walker’s been out downtown getting people stirred up,” Bobby Kennedy told the Cabinet Room group at one point. “Well, let’s see if we can arrest him,” he said over the phone connecting him to Oxford, Mississippi. “Will you tell the FBI that we need an arrest warrant?”

Mention of the mutinous retired general prompted a strong reaction from the president. “General Walker,” JFK said disgustedly to the room. “Imagine that son of a bitch having been commander of a division up till last year. And the army promoting him.”

The president’s comment raised the specter of a military coup in Sorensen’s mind. “Have you read
Seven Days in May
?” he asked the president.

“Yeah,” said Kennedy.

“It’s pretty interesting,” remarked Sorensen. “I read it straight through.”

Kennedy, a voracious and sophisticated reader, then subjected the book to a sharp literary critique. The novel was marred by “awful amateurish dialogue” and the portrayal of the president was “awfully vague,” but the treasonous General Scott made a strong impression on Kennedy.

His brother brought the group back to the disturbing reality of General Walker. “He’s getting them all stirred up. If he has them march down there with guns, we could have a hell of a battle.”

Later, gruesome reports from the blood-spattered Lyceum flowed into the Cabinet Room. Even the normally calm and collected Nick Katzenbach—who had gone down with his B-26 over the Mediterranean in 1943, spending the rest of the war in a German prison camp, from which he twice escaped—was starting to lose his cool, demanding to know when the Army was going to rescue them. Bobby Kennedy could not tell him. “Damn Army!” cursed RFK about a quarter past midnight. “They can’t even tell if the MPs have left yet!”

More than ninety minutes had now passed since the attorney general had ordered troops from the 503rd Military Police Battalion—the Army’s riot-control SWAT team—to move from Memphis to Oxford. But Army Secretary Cyrus Vance and Major General Creighton Abrams, who was in charge of the military operation (and would later command the war in Vietnam), seemed at a maddening loss to explain the soldiers’ delay. The president barraged Vance with at least fifteen phone calls that night, trying to find out what was going on with his troops. The army secretary, suffering from a ruptured disc, lay on his office floor as the president berated him. “Where’s the Army?” Kennedy shouted at Vance. “Where are they? Why aren’t they moving?”

Army officials would later explain that it was simply a case of bad planning, resulting from the Kennedys’ original desire to avoid a dramatic display of military force in the South and the Army’s inexperience in domestic operations of this sort. The 503rd’s frantic road trip that night produced the comic spectacle of Army officers in full battle gear rolling into backcountry gas stations in their jeeps and demanding Tennessee-Mississippi highway maps.

Henry Gallagher, a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant who was leading an Army convoy to Ole Miss, was so desperate to find his way there that he ordered his jeep driver to kidnap a Navy shore patrolman with a Southern accent who seemed to know the area. “I said that we were all from up north and didn’t have the foggiest idea where the town of Oxford was. I said that he had to come with us,” recalled Gallagher. “He was incredulous. ‘Sir, I can’t do that. I’m on duty here at this gate. My captain will go crazy wondering where I am.’ I said something to the effect that we were all under orders from President Kennedy and he had to go with us. I motioned to [my driver]. He came around and picked up the startled SP in a bear hug and placed him in the back of the jeep.”

But in the Cabinet Room that night, which throbbed with the taut nerves of a war room, the Army’s stumbling performance seemed more than a comedy of errors. It felt like insubordination. This was how far relations between the White House and Pentagon had sunk by this point in the Kennedy administration. In their high-anxiety mood, the Kennedy brothers and their advisors sensed something sinister in the military’s farcical incompetence. They were outraged by how indifferent the Army seemed to presidential orders.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch if the president of the United States calls up and says, ‘Get your ass down there,’” said O’Donnell, his Irish rising. “Yeah, I would think they’d be on that fucking plane in about five minutes.”

“I have a hunch that Khrushchev would get those troops in fast enough,” he added, with bitter sarcasm.

JFK expressed his disgust at once again being jerked around by men in uniform: “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.”

Robert Kennedy had never seen his brother so angry during his presidency—not during the humiliations of the Bay of Pigs and the Vienna summit, not during the nerve-wracking showdown over Berlin or tense negotiations over Laos. “People are dying in Oxford!” JFK erupted at General Abrams. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen in forty-five years. I want the military police battalion to enter the action. You are to proceed to the campus forthwith.” Bobby himself told a reporter the next morning that “last night was the worst night I ever spent.” He was his brother’s point man on civil rights, he was supposed to be in control of volatile situations like this. But the night seemed on the verge of exploding into the most spectacular nightmare of the Kennedy presidency, a racial bloodbath that would tear the country apart and savage America’s image abroad as a beacon of freedom.

O’Donnell later offered a riveting, you-are-there account of the rising feelings of calamity in the Cabinet Room as the Mississippi night burned on: “Clearly, we are very panicked by all this right now, that [Meredith] might be killed, federal marshals killed and troops potentially killed, [it’s] going to be a political catastrophe as well as a devastating set of events for everyone who is directly involved…. The implications both at home and across the globe are enormous…. Nick is on the phone from Oxford and Bobby is on the phone from the Cabinet Room. The president is pacing back and forth in the Cabinet Room listening to the conversation. He is as upset as I have ever seen him. The president is now seeing the full portent of this problem, all the implications if things go terribly wrong and a real fear that there will be a blood bath there…. The president and the attorney general were, to say the least, a little unhappy with the military. The president required a memorandum explaining to him in detail why they had failed to mention what was really critical information to us in deciding the strategy for deployment. The president was just livid, absolutely livid…. The tempo of violence is increasing minute by minute now in Oxford. It becomes clear that the most horrible possibility is now in existence—that the marshals will be overwhelmed and that Meredith and now really the president’s own men, meaning Nick and the others, are in danger of their lives. The marshals are clearly being overwhelmed and many of them have been very seriously injured at this point.