Killing Kennedy (39 page)

The museum’s owners, however, balked at buying Oswald’s original pine casket, which was replaced after his body was exhumed in 1981, saying it was too macabre.

One other anonymous individual disagreed, purchasing the coffin at auction for $87,468 in December 2010.

Jack Ruby
, aka Jacob Rubinstein, argued that he shot Lee Harvey Oswald to redeem the city of Dallas for the assassination. Legendary San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli defended Ruby for free during his trial, but his arguments about Ruby being insane at the time of the murder did not sway the jury. Jack Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to death. After that, Ruby testified before the Warren Commission about the Kennedy assassination and was eventually awarded a new trial by the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, the judge buying the argument that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas, due to the enormous publicity surrounding the shooting. But before proceedings could get under way, Ruby was admitted to the now-legendary Parkland Hospital for symptoms of the flu. Instead, he was found to have cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain. He died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, at the age of fifty-five. Jack Ruby is buried next to his parents in Westlawn Cemetery, in Norridge, Illinois. It’s worth noting that Ruby may have known about his aggressive cancer before he shot Oswald.

Martin Luther King Jr.
continued his civil rights crusading and became one of the world’s most admired men. On April 4, 1968, King was shot down in Memphis, Tennessee, by an assassin named James Earl Ray, a racist who escaped to Canada, and then to England, before being arrested for the murder of Dr. King. Ray was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, a term that was extended to an even one hundred as punishment after he again escaped, this time from the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. He was caught three days later. Some believe Ray had help in assassinating King, but this has never been proven. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, coupled with the drawn-out American involvement in Vietnam, led to a national sense of disillusionment that was the diametric opposite of Camelot’s hope and optimism.

J. Edgar Hoover
survived the attempts of several presidents to replace him as director of the FBI. There were many rumors that Hoover was homosexual, based on his close relationship with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the bureau. Well after JFK’s death, Hoover continued his practice of providing presidents with lurid classified files containing the personal indiscretions of high-ranking and influential individuals. Lyndon Johnson took full advantage of this practice. Soon after ascending to the presidency, he requested thick personal dossiers on each of “The Harvards”: those members of the Kennedy administration who had once taken such great delight in taunting him. On an even larger scale, Johnson asked Hoover to dig up information on some twelve hundred real or imagined adversaries. J. Edgar Hoover, who like LBJ had felt personally humiliated by the Kennedys during JFK’s time in office, was only too happy to comply. Lyndon Johnson returned the favor by issuing an executive order precluding Hoover from compulsory retirement, thus allowing the director to remain in charge of the FBI until his death in 1972 at the age of seventy-seven.

John Connally
survived his Dallas wounds and went on to serve two terms as governor of Texas before returning to Washington to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury. He switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and ran for president in 1980. However, his campaign floundered badly, and he was forced to drop out after securing just one delegate. John Connally died of pulmonary fibrosis on June 15, 1993. He was seventy-six years old.

Marina Oswald
never returned to the Soviet Union. She is still alive and has lived in Dallas for many years. She remarried, briefly, and had a son by her second marriage, which ended in divorce. Like her daughters,
June
and
Audrey
(who now goes by the name Rachel Porter), the stigma of Lee Harvey Oswald has followed her since November 22, 1963. The girls even took the name of their stepfather, Porter, to avoid greater public scrutiny. Now and again Lee Harvey Oswald’s family makes television appearances, but otherwise their lives are largely private.

In March of 1977 a young television reporter at WFAA in Dallas began looking into the Kennedy assassination. As part of his reporting, he sought an interview with the shadowy Russian college professor who had befriended the Oswalds upon their arrival in Dallas in 1962. The reporter traced
George de Mohrenschildt
to Palm Beach, Florida, and traveled there to confront him. At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a congressional committee looking into the events of November 1963. As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood.

By the way, that reporter’s name is Bill O’Reilly.

One footnote: A year earlier, de Mohrenschildt sent a letter to George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA. In that letter, the Russian asked protection from people “following” him. That correspondence with Mr. Bush led to speculation that de Mohrenschildt had CIA ties—and also possessed undisclosed knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.

Another former director of the CIA,
Allen Dulles
, died of a severe case of the flu in 1969, at the age of seventy-five. To this day, conspiratorialists believe that Dulles was involved in the Kennedy assassination as payback for his firing in the wake of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Dulles also served on the Warren Commission, the panel that investigated JFK’s shooting.

Sam Giancana
, the Chicago mobster, was also thought by conspiracy theorists to be tied to the Kennedy assassination. Giancana was due to testify before a Senate panel investigating whether the CIA and the Mafia had any ties to the murder. Before he could testify, Giancana himself was murdered in his home on June 19, 1975. His assassin shot him in the back of the head, then rolled the body over and emptied the rest of the clip into Giancana’s face. The killer was never caught.

Frank Sinatra
became a Republican in the years after John Kennedy’s Palm Springs snub and was a well-known supporter of President Ronald Reagan. But the singer remained largely silent on his feelings toward JFK. Not so
Peter Lawford
, the man John Kennedy forced to make the phone call telling Sinatra that the president would be staying elsewhere during his Palm Springs visit. In 1966, Lawford divorced JFK’s sister Patricia and began making sordid accusations against the Kennedy family. Among them was that Marilyn Monroe had had an affair with Bobby Kennedy as well as JFK, and that Bobby was complicit in Monroe’s death. Those charges came at a time when Lawford had lost his acting career to philandering, drinking, and drugs—and remain unproven. Peter Lawford died in 1984 from cardiac arrest brought on by liver failure. He was sixty-one years old.

Greta Garbo
lived to the age of eighty-four, dying in New York City on April 15, 1990. She was a recluse to the end of her life, never marrying or having children, and always living alone. The legendary actress, however, was fond of taking long walks through the streets of New York, most often wearing a pair of oversize sunglasses—a habit that her admirer, Jackie Kennedy, would also assume. Garbo was very good with her money, and though she had been retired for nearly forty years at the time of her death, she left an estate to her niece worth more than $32 million.

It has been argued that
Camelot
was a myth concocted by Jackie Kennedy to burnish her husband’s legacy. Whether or not the comparisons to Camelot were discussed in the Kennedy White House during the president’s lifetime is unclear. But the comparisons are apt and, as Jackie had hoped, the story of Camelot shaped how her husband’s presidency is remembered to this day.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
is buried on a slope near the former home of Robert E. Lee, in Arlington National Cemetery, the place he so admired just a few weeks before his death. He is one of only two presidents buried there—the other being William Howard Taft, who died in 1930.

Jackie Kennedy was insistent that her husband’s funeral be as much like Abraham Lincoln’s as possible. Professor James Robertson Jr., director of the Civil War Centennial Commission, and David Mearns from the Library of Congress were enlisted to research Lincoln’s funeral in the short span between JFK’s assassination and his burial. The East Room of the White House was transformed so that it looked almost exactly as it did when it held Lincoln’s body in 1865. Also, the caisson and funeral procession through Washington, D.C., were copied from Lincoln’s final journey.

John Kennedy’s burial site at Arlington is lit by an eternal flame, at the suggestion of Jackie Kennedy. It burns at the center of a five-foot circular slab of Cape Cod granite. Jackie rests next to him, as do their two deceased infants,
Arabella
and
Patrick
. Television coverage of John Kennedy’s funeral transformed Arlington from the burial place of soldiers and sailors into a popular tourist destination. To this day, no place in Arlington is more popular than the grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A generation after his assassination, more than four million people a year still arrive at Arlington to pay their respects to the fallen president.

And also to the grand American vision that he represented.

Epilogue

We began this book associating John F. Kennedy with Abraham Lincoln. And so shall we end it.

On February 10, 1962, JFK wrote a letter to Washington lawyer Ralph E. Becker. The letter was to be read at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout his presidency, John Kennedy often referenced Abraham Lincoln. There was a strong connection between the two men. The following letter is the best evidence that John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were indeed kindred spirits.

Sources

This book required both primary and secondary source research. Much of the primary material came from interviews and reporting that Bill O’Reilly has done over the years. In fact, he won a Dallas Press Club Award for his reporting on the JFK assassination while at WFAA-TV. Extensive new information was gleaned from a variety of law enforcement agents, in particular Richard Wiehl, the FBI agent assigned to investigate and debrief Marina Oswald after the shooting. We are grateful to Mr. Wiehl, who has never spoken before on the record about his findings.

The life and death of John Kennedy needs no embellishment. It stands alone as a riveting period in history. But since many of the events recounted in this book are so fantastic and also so horrific, and because so many of the details are rather intimate, it’s important to remind the reader that
Killing Kennedy
is completely a work of nonfiction. It’s all true. The actions of each individual and the events that took place really happened. The quotations are words people actually spoke. Those details are made possible in large part because JFK is a contemporary historical figure whose entire presidency was thoroughly documented by all manner of media.

This sheer volume of material available on the life and death of John F. Kennedy allowed for unexpected research delights when compiling the manuscript. Not only were there a number of first-person manuscripts that provided specific details about meetings, conversations, and events, but there is also extensive Internet video of JFK’s speeches and television appearances, which brought his words and voice to life during each writing day. For readers, taking the time to find and watch these will add immeasurably to learning more about John Kennedy. The reader is directed, specifically, toward the 1963 Galway speech as an example of the president’s wit, warmth, and presence.

To hear about life inside the Kennedy White House from Jackie herself, listen to
Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy
, a series of recordings she made not long after the assassination. It is remarkable to hear the candor with which the former First Lady speaks, particularly when she opens up about so many of the most famous and powerful figures in the world at that time. Like her husband, her wit, warmth, and sheer presence are palpable.

The authors owe a special debt to the team of Laurie Austin and Stacey Chandler at the Kennedy Library. No research request was too big or too small, and suffice it to say that it was quite a historical rush to receive, for instance, copies of John Kennedy’s actual daily schedule, showing his precise location, the names of different people at various meetings, and the time each afternoon he slipped off to the pool or to “the Mansion.” To read these schedules was to see the president’s day come alive and gave a vivid feel of what life was like in the White House. When in Boston, a visit to the Kennedy Library is a must.