Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (50 page)

One day, lounging in his swimming pool on the ranch, he brought up Dallas with his Secret Service guard Mike Howard, who he knew had some connection to the case.

“What do you think of this Oswald fellow?” Johnson asked Howard.

The Secret Service man dutifully gave the former president the official line: he was a “deranged young man who had delusions of grandeur.”

“So you think he did it by himself?” asked LBJ.

“I sure do,” said Howard.

Johnson squinted in the sun at the agent. “Uh huh.” That was all he said.

Historians have cautioned that not much should be made of Lyndon Johnson’s dark speculations about Dallas, since his mind was given to conspiratorial brooding. But he was not alone in Washington power circles in his suspicions. One of the most startling and little-known facts about this chapter in American history is how much of the political elite believed Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. While the country’s ruling caste—from President Johnson on down—muttered among themselves about a conspiracy, these same leaders worked strenuously—with the media’s collaboration—to calm the public’s fears.

LBJ’s suspicions about the Castro regime’s involvement in Dallas were fed to him by the CIA’s McCone and Helms. But it is uncertain whether he actually believed them. Abe Fortas—the trusted legal advisor Johnson asked to scrutinize the Warren Report and report back to him—was among those in the president’s inner circle who poured cold water on the theory. The CIA and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann—a hard-line Cold Warrior who came from the CIA-connected United Fruit Company—began spinning LBJ on the false story that Oswald was a Castro agent immediately after the assassination. But Hoover, whom Johnson found a more trustworthy source of intelligence, informed the president that the photographic and audio evidence the CIA was using to prove Oswald had visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City appeared to be faked—a disturbing piece of information that both men certainly recognized pointed back at the CIA itself.

Johnson knew that he was being hustled into war with Cuba by forces within his own government. The Warren Commission would become his way of heading off this military showdown, which he realized could lead to nuclear war. Johnson famously overpowered Chief Justice Warren’s resistance to chairing the assassination commission by painting a cataclysmic vision of the future if the hysteria about a “Red plot” was not put to rest—his picture of a scorched world with 40 million dead brought tears to the seventy-two-year-old jurist’s eyes. But it was not simply another melodramatic Lyndon Johnson performance. The president believed these were the stakes.

“Once you hear the conversations that Johnson had with Warren and Russell, you recognize the commission was not set up to search for the truth about the assassination,” remarks James Galbraith, political historian at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “Nonetheless, it had a very high purpose, which was to protect Johnson from the far right, from being stampeded into nuclear war. This is the haunting risk that keeps Johnson awake nights throughout his presidency.”

Lyndon Johnson was too shrewd a master of Washington power not to sense the dark forces at work that had resulted in his occupancy of the White House. The shadow over his ascension to the exalted office would forever plague him. Robert Kennedy was not the only haunted figure in Washington after the assassination. “Johnson was weighed down by a lot of guilt feelings too,” observed Katzenbach. To begin with, the despicable crime had occurred in his home state. “Of all the places in the world!” Katzenbach exclaimed. “Johnson knew that was the kind of thing that could start all sorts of rumors.”

Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were legendary antagonists. They warily circled one other, brimming with wounded emotions and scalding resentment. But, ironically, they shared similar suspicions about the events in Dallas. The only way that the truth about the assassination could have been wrung out of the government is if these two formidable personalities had joined forces to demand it. But considering their poisoned chemistry, and their lifelong predilection for secrecy, this was asking the impossible.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy band of brothers, following Bobby’s lead, also stayed largely silent about Dallas. They looked to RFK as the future king, convinced that his succession was inevitable. In the meantime, they waited. They were always waiting for Bobby.

BACKSTAGE AT THE CHANNEL
9 studio in Los Angeles, Arthur Schlesinger was having his makeup removed after being interviewed by local TV newsman Stan Bohrman for his afternoon talk show. Before he left the station, Schlesinger was asked by Bohrman if he would meet with a Los Angeles assassination researcher named Ray Marcus, who had brought some evidence to show him. It was 1967 and conspiracy theories about Dallas were now in full bloom. Schlesinger himself had long been a skeptic about the Warren Commission’s lone gunman conclusion, and had even called for reopening the case. But he had stopped short of joining the conspiracy camp. Still, the Kennedy court historian agreed to meet Marcus, who was waiting to see him in an adjoining room.

Ray Marcus, who was forty at the time, was a respected figure among the first wave of Warren Report critics. He ran a small business, distributing “Keep Off the Grass” and other household signs to retail stores, but was able to leave it in the hands of a trustworthy partner, allowing him ample time to delve into the case. In a later generation, the dedicated citizens like Marcus who threw themselves into the deep arcana of the assassination would have been bloggers. Some were frenzied—even decidedly mad—in their devotion to the case; others, like Marcus, were solidly grounded. He had been pulled down “the rabbit hole,” as some researchers called the labyrinth of their obsession, on the very first day. “I’ve always been a newshound and I was glued to the TV set on November 22,” he recalled. “I knew that when they began saying Oswald had acted alone, they were either telling a lie or saying something that could not possibly have been proven by that time.”

Working in the pre-Internet era, Marcus produced sober, well-documented monographs on the assassination, which he published and distributed himself. He also closely examined the photographic evidence from Dealey Plaza, cutting out frames from the Zapruder film that were published in Life magazine and the Warren Report and turning them into four-feet-long photo displays to graphically demonstrate how JFK must have been shot from more than one direction.

Like the other assassination critics, Marcus was tormented by the idea that the American people had been deceived by the government, the legal system, and the media. The Warren Report, he declared at the time, was “the most massively fraudulent document ever foisted on a free society.” Marcus conceded that his photographic analysis might be “completely unscientific. But my answer to people saying, ‘You’re no expert’ is ‘Where are the experts?’”

Marcus thought it was important for President Kennedy’s key courtiers to see his photographic evidence and he made a strong effort to contact them. When Bohrman, who knew of his work, offered to introduce him to Arthur Schlesinger, he jumped at the chance.

But when Schlesinger walked into the backstage room at Channel 9, he was not prepared for what he saw. After shaking the historian’s hand, Marcus directed his attention to the photo display that he had set up on a table. Included in the blow-ups was notorious Frame 313, where President Kennedy’s skull explodes in a halo of bloody mist. Schlesinger glanced at the photos and visibly paled. He turned immediately away. “I can’t look and won’t look,” he said. There was no further conversation. Schlesinger left the studio and Marcus never saw him again.

“I can’t look and won’t look”—it was a perfect summation of the attitude toward the horror of Dallas that was widely held in the Kennedy circle. Many of the president’s men were plagued by doubts about the Warren Report, but they could not muster the political and emotional fortitude to grapple with the case. Instead, they waited for Bobby. And while they waited, they mulled over the unspeakable crime quietly among themselves.

Courtney Evans, the FBI agent with the unenviable task of serving as RFK’s and Hoover’s go-between, recalled the intense discussions about Dallas among Kennedy’s Justice Department brotherhood. Evans was inclined to believe Oswald had acted alone, but not everyone agreed. “I still think Oswald was the assassin, a man who had fallen under the influence of certain groups and ideas,” Evans says today. “The old crowd at the Justice Department—Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark—we used to talk it over, the subject came up whenever we were together. There was ambivalence within the group about who was responsible for the assassination. But there just wasn’t much factually to prove there was a conspiracy.”

Why didn’t RFK’s elite Justice Department team—the young, hard-charging prosecutors, former investigative journalists, and loyal FBI men like Evans—use their formidable talents to solve the case? Evans said he was restrained by his boss. “Hoover kept me as far away as possible from the Warren Commission. He made sure I was kept busy with other tasks. Of course, he put nothing in writing—the subtle word was put out orally.”

Evans was one of the few FBI men who had clearly shifted his loyalty to the Kennedys. “I felt the Kennedys were trying to do a wonderful service for the country,” he said. “President Kennedy had a strong feeling that we should change the course of the country.” But after Johnson took over, realizing he had no future at Hoover’s FBI, Evans resigned from government service. “I was certainly disillusioned with Hoover and the bureau. He would have sent me to Anchorage. Obviously I was not going anywhere in the FBI. It’s been published that Hoover knew JFK was going to replace him in his second term—maybe he was taking that out on me.”

Oddly, despite the well-known strains between RFK and Hoover, the attorney general’s team trusted the FBI to investigate the assassination. According to former organized crime prosecutor Ronald Goldfarb, not even the mob-connected Ruby seemed to ring alarm bells. “You have to go back to those times,” he said. “It was a time we believed government, it was pre-Watergate and all that stuff.” And, like everyone else in the Kennedy circle, Bobby’s prosecutors were following his lead. “I remember people saying, ‘Who’s got a greater motive than Robert Kennedy to get his brother’s murderer?’” recalled Goldfarb.

To his Justice Department team, it seemed that Bobby had delegated the assassination investigation to Herbert “Jack” Miller, the chief of the department’s criminal division. But, Miller insists today, “Bob didn’t ask us to—he knew damn well we would.” Miller said that he and his staff investigated a possible Mafia connection to Dallas. “We ran all the traps we could and we found no evidence.”

But some of Kennedy’s prosecutors wondered why Miller was taking the lead on the investigation. He did not seem like the kind of bulldog Bobby would pick to go snuffling about the gutters—and suites—of America to find his brother’s killers. A lifelong Republican, Miller had been plucked by Bobby from the plush world of Washington corporate law because his legal background included a skirmish with the Teamsters. After his stint at the Justice Department, Miller would resume his lucrative law practice, representing such elite clients as Richard Nixon, for whom he won a presidential pardon.

“If Bobby was going to get the truth, I know who he would have chosen,” said Goldfarb. “He would have chosen Walter Sheridan. Because he trusted him, he was tough, they knew each other for a long time.”

What Goldfarb, and other Justice Department lawyers, did not know was that Kennedy had indeed tapped Sheridan—secretly—to dig into the crime. But the two close friends were biding their time, waiting until Kennedy had the political power to make their investigation official.

With Bobby keeping his suspicions about Dallas quiet, his circle of colleagues and friends were left to figure out their own views about the crime. James Symington, Kennedy’s former administrative assistant, had gone to work in Abe Fortas’s Washington law firm by the time of the assassination. Fortas, charged with reviewing the Warren Report by his longtime friend and client Lyndon Johnson, delegated the task to his young employee, dropping the massive tome on his desk with a thud. “I never talked to Bob about the assassination,” Symington told me. “I was not in his inner circle. But I had to read the entire Warren Report before it was released, and it seemed to me like an effort by people who were very anxious to put the case to rest without looking into every nook and cranny. It was a long and windy thing and was concerned mostly with Oswald’s background and showing that he acted alone. But I could never bring myself to think that—that he acted alone. Because of the way the bullets struck Kennedy and because Oswald’s motivation was never clear to me. Why the hell would he do that? It was never made clear. And then there was the totally unbelievable situation of Jack Ruby walking up to him in the police station and killing him. As if to make sure he would never talk. There were just too many loose ends.”

Nick Katzenbach is one of the Justice Department veterans who has consistently defended the Warren Report over the years. “I think the Warren Commission had the facts right,” he told me recently. “I have absolutely no doubt.” But even Katzenbach concedes the flaws in the official investigation. In his 1978 testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he was scathing in his description of how the CIA and FBI had manipulated the commission. “Cooperation?” he laughed bitterly at one point. “I don’t think the term is applicable. It’s unbelievable some of the stuff they concealed from the commission.” Katzenbach was “astounded” by how Allen Dulles—who he said was “obviously the CIA’s spy on the commission”—hid crucial information like the CIA-Mafia plots from the blue-ribbon panel. As for the FBI’s role in the investigation, Katzenbach testified, “Hoover was impossible in those days. His real talent was running over people and covering up in the process.” Today, Katzenbach even suggests that Oswald might have been backed by others. “I’m as certain as one can be there was no other gun shot,” he told me, characterizing as “silliness” views to the contrary. “But it’s not silliness to speculate that somebody was behind Oswald…. I’d almost bet on the [anti-Castro] Cubans. If I had the choice, if it had to be one of the three,” he said, referring to the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exiles, “I’d say the Cubans probably had the worst judgment.”