Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (51 page)

Doubt and confusion about the assassination also reigned in Kennedy circles outside the Justice Department. In a newspaper interview, former White House press aide Malcolm Kilduff established his respectability by taking the obligatory swipe at conspiracy theories as “garbage,” but then expressed profound skepticism about the Warren Report’s magic bullet. Fred Dutton, JFK’s Cabinet secretary and later RFK’s behind-the-scenes campaign manager in his 1968 presidential race, told me shortly before his death in 2005 that he agreed with Bobby’s characterization of the Warren Report as a PR job. Dutton was convinced “there was more to it than we’ve gotten, and yet I don’t know what that is.” According to their sons, Larry O’Brien—JFK’s savvy congressional liaison—and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley—the Kennedys’ key political ally—also both suspected a conspiracy. “I would have put my dad in the camp of someone pretty suspicious of the Warren version,” Bill Daley says today.

But no former Kennedy administration official ever created a public furor over Dallas. It would become clear that if one wanted to remain a member in good standing in Washington political and social circles, it was wise not to say anything intemperate about the assassination. This expedient position was couched as doing what was right for the country, and helping it get on with its business. “I think he accepted the Warren Report, but did he believe it? That’s another matter,” said Carol Bundy, daughter of the late William Bundy, one of the cerebral, well-bred brotherly duo who served President Kennedy as foreign policy advisors. “I think he thought it was for the good of the country—this is what we put together and now we need to move forward. When I brought up the subject, he would say there’s probably a lot of evidence we don’t know about, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there was a plot. The point was to stabilize the country after the assassination—let’s get on with the ship of state.”

Despite his emotional ties to the Kennedy family, Robert McNamara took the same practical attitude as fellow Establishment figures like Bundy. Did the Warren Report get it right? “Well, you know, the answer is that I have made no effort to find out,” McNamara informed me. “The answer is I do believe it’s the most likely [explanation]. I just don’t know.” Then he laughed—a queer, uncomfortable laugh. So, in his mind, the case has been settled? “You know, it was a terrible loss. I think the world would be different today had not the two Kennedys been assassinated. But it’s done, it’s past. I can’t do anything about it.”

Arthur Schlesinger found his own sentiments on the subject harder to contain. Despite his avowal to Marcus that he would not look, he did look many times through the years. He would talk to Bobby about it; he would read the assassination books. In later years, he even gave a measured endorsement to one of the best such books,
Conspiracy
(later retitled
Not in Your Lifetime
), by investigative journalist Anthony Summers. But in public he would go no further than declaring himself “agnostic” on the question of whether Oswald acted alone. It was a position that even his own wife found inadequate. During a March 2001 conference in Havana to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, film producer and former John Kerry speechwriter Eric Hamburg found himself seated next to Schlesinger’s wife, Alexandra. At one point, she surprised Hamburg by leaning over and asking to look at his copy of
ZR Rifle
, a JFK conspiracy book by Brazilian journalist Claudia Furiati that draws heavily on Cuban intelligence files. “I used to have a copy,” she said, “but I’ve lost it. I’m sure this book is right. I’m absolutely convinced there was a conspiracy.” Then Alexandra Schlesinger nodded towards her husband and whispered confidentially, “He’s an agnostic, but I’m not.”

But Schlesinger’s wife made it clear that she had problems with one of Furiati’s charges—her allegation, credited to the Cuban State Security Department, that Richard Helms was “the ultimate author” of the assassination plot. “I can’t believe the part about Dick Helms,” she told Hamburg. “He was a friend of ours. We played tennis with him.”

The Kennedy circle’s overlapping relationships with the Georgetown CIA set made it hard for many of them to make this unnerving leap, to conclude that JFK’s assassination was—like the slaying of Julius Caesar—an inside job. Some of the Kennedy men, including Schlesinger, had known CIA officials like Helms since their days together in the OSS. Some drank martinis with them at Joe Alsop’s salons. Or played tennis with them. Or lived next door to them.

Long-time Kennedy friend Marie Ridder—who party-hopped in Georgetown with a young Jack before his marriage (“I’m the only person I know,” she quips today, “who went out with Jack and didn’t get propositioned!”)—is among those who cannot bring themselves to suspect the CIA. A spunky former Knight-Ridder newspaper reporter and widow of publisher Walter Ridder, Marie Ridder now lives in active retirement in a sun-dappled clapboard house on a rolling, green bluff overlooking the Potomac. She greeted me one day in rumpled slacks and blouse, fresh from her garden, and over a lunch of chilled sorrel soup and hamburgers on her backyard patio, reminisced about the Kennedys and her old Georgetown friends. “Jim Angleton was, of course, kind of an evil genius,” Ridder remarked at one point. “But I don’t think he’d be involved in killing his president. I really, truly don’t. He used to have the land over there,” she said, pointing to the lushly landscaped house next door. “He was a fabulous gardener. And a man who is a fabulous gardener is not going to kill off a president, I’m sorry.”

And Helms? “Helms was a very sweet, well-meaning man,” said Ridder. “He would not have been in a murder conspiracy,” she added, overlooking his confessed role in the plots against Castro.

With other Kennedy intimates, the very subject of the assassination is an emotional minefield that must be gingerly navigated. Theodore Sorensen quickly makes it known when the subject arises in conversation that it is still too painful for him to contemplate, even at this late date. An interviewer feels sadistic to press on. New Frontiersmen like Sorensen are in their autumn days now; they have lived long, eventful lives. But nothing filled them with as much pulsing sense of purpose as their time with Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Their eyes pool with tears as they relive those days, when they were the young and the chosen and were changing the world, before something was cut from their hearts.

Like Schlesinger, Sorensen says that he is “agnostic” on the question of Dallas. “I have never seen any hard evidence that contradicted the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald acted alone,” he tells me, making it clear that he would prefer to change the subject.

Sorensen seems weighted down with the melancholy burden of history. He knows that John F. Kennedy lived for a purpose; he just can’t bring himself to believe he died for one. “It’s terribly painful. You see, there’s emotion on both sides internally. On the one hand, if I can know that my friend of eleven years died as a martyr to a cause, that there was some reason, some purpose why he was killed—and not just a totally senseless, lucky sharpshooter—then I think the whole world would feel better. That brave John F. Kennedy, with all these courageous positions, went into Texas knowing that it was hostile territory, and he ended up dead. But I just think that’s a fanciful theory as of now, and comforting as it may be, I’m not going to embrace it, because there’s no evidence of it.”

But Kenny O’Donnell—Kennedy’s vigilant watchdog, the politically shrewd White House aide who wielded the most influence over the president—did see evidence of a conspiracy. He saw it with his own eyes in Dallas. And it would torment him the rest of his life. Among the Kennedy brotherhood, Kenny O’Donnell’s story looms as the saddest of them all.

KENNY O’DONNELL AND HIS
fellow Irish mafia warhorse Dave Powers were eyewitnesses to history on November 22, 1963. Riding immediately behind the president’s limousine in the Secret Service backup car, the two men saw it all that day. Before the motorcade began, JFK—attentive as always to political details—had asked them to take seats in the follow-up car so they could closely observe the reactions to him and Jackie from the crowds. The two men could never forget what they saw that afternoon. As the shots rang out, Powers blurted, “Kenny, I think the president’s been shot.” O’Donnell quickly made a sign of the cross. As both men stared intently at the man they had loved and served ever since he was a scrawny young congressional candidate, a final shot “took the side of his head off,” O’Donnell would later recall. “We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air. The impact lifted him and shook him limply, as if he was a rag doll, and then he dropped out of our sight, sprawled across the back seat of the car. I said to Dave, ‘He’s dead.’”

O’Donnell and Powers, both World War II veterans, distinctly heard at least two shots come from the grassy knoll area in front of the motorcade. But when they later told this to the FBI, they were informed that they must be wrong. If they did not change their story, it was impressed on the men, it could be very damaging for the country. So O’Donnell altered his account to fit the official version, testifying before the Warren Commission that the shots had come “from the right rear”—the direction of the School Book Depository. Powers, however, could not be fully shaken from his story. Even though one of the Warren Commission employees who took his statement kept interrupting him, Powers insisted that he “had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front” as well as from behind—which is probably why Powers was not invited to testify before the commission as the more amenable O’Donnell was.

Five years after the assassination, O’Donnell confessed to his friend, Boston congressman (and future Speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill, what he had dutifully hidden from the public—he heard two shots from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. O’Neill, who was dining with O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, was stunned. “That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” he said.

“You’re right,” replied O’Donnell. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”

“I can’t believe that,” said O’Neill. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”

“Tip, you have to understand. The family—everybody wanted this thing behind them.”

It’s clear from O’Neill’s account—and one given by Dave Powers, who suggested that Hoover himself pressured O’Donnell to change his account—that the FBI played a key role in this fateful distortion of the record. But it’s equally obvious that O’Donnell was also responding to signals from the Kennedy family, and that could only mean his close friend Bobby, the man with whom his life and career had been completely intertwined ever since they were Harvard roommates. The intensely loyal O’Donnell, who was as close as a brother to Bobby, would never have changed his story without first checking with Kennedy. And Bobby had made it clear that he was not ready to publicly question the official story about the assassination.

Whatever his reasons for hiding the truth about Dallas, O’Donnell’s decision weighed heavily on him. The Kennedys had been his life. Tough, taciturn, and utterly dedicated, he had put in slavish hours at the White House. But he laughed at the notion it was a sacrifice. “Tough job my ass. It was the best job I ever had,” he would say. Now the man he had served was gone. He wished the bullets had hit him instead, he told his wife. And instead of helping bring the president’s killers to justice, he was misleading the country. “The assassination was the end of his life,” his son Kenny Jr. told me. “He never was the same again. None of the men around Kennedy were. But especially him.”

O’Donnell confided what he really witnessed in Dealey Plaza to his son as well. “He said there was fire from two different directions,” recalled the younger O’Donnell. And his father would bitterly complain about his experience with the Warren Commission to his son. “I’ll tell you this right now,” he told him, “they didn’t want to know.” O’Donnell called the inquiry “the most pointless investigation I’ve ever seen.” Pulling out the records of his testimony to show Kenny Jr., he would point to a passage with disgust and say, “Look, this is ridiculous—they weren’t even looking for an answer to this.” O’Donnell might also have been disgusted with his own performance before the commission.

In the months after Dallas, O’Donnell would devote himself to helping Jackie. The two had clung to each other like old soldiers ever since the assassination. As they flew back to Washington that day, both were stained with Jack’s blood. Kenny and Bobby found solace by gathering friends at Jackie’s Georgetown house and entertaining her with old stories about Jack.

But O’Donnell could not put Dallas behind him. What he and Dave Powers witnessed that day continued to work inside them. O’Donnell experienced wrenching bouts of nausea for six months after Dallas. Powers began suffering violent headaches. The pain was focused in the same part of his skull where he had seen the bullet blow off the top of his friend’s head. He couldn’t get the “sickening sound” out of his own head—like “a grapefruit splattering against the side of a wall.”

O’Donnell began drinking heavily. When friends warned him to go easy on the stuff, the man nicknamed The Cobra would fix them with a cold glare and tell them, “Go to hell and mind your own business.” But he listened when Jackie and Bobby sat him down and talked to him. “It worked,” observed his daughter, Helen. “He seemed to step forward into human company again.”