Surrounded by Enemies (16 page)

The heavy scrutiny for the past year had made the kind of communications that hatched the conspiracy in the first place even more difficult. Even so, chance meetings and hushed utterances began happening with a greater frequency after the election.

From the point of view of the conspirators, the situation was dire. Kennedy had been targeted because he was seen as taking America off a cliff. They had lain low for nearly a year after the failure in Dallas, covering their tracks, destroying evidence, even seeing that a few key witnesses met untimely ends. Even in their retreat, though, they had kept their objective in mind. Kennedy had been given a chance for a graceful exit and had refused it.

Seeing him campaigning for reelection was hard enough. When he began his new term in 1965 by naively reaching out again to the Soviet Communists, it was simply too much to bear. All bets were off now, the conspirators told themselves (as if hiring gunmen had been only a half-measure). Still, they were ever mindful that the direct tactic of assassination had failed and could not be tried again. In quiet moments inside shadowed offices, the conversation continued. Something had to be done and soon.

Two new books were being read by a lot of Americans, both punching holes in the lone-gunman theory. The first was F. Lee Bailey’s
The Puppeteers
, a work that seemed to be more about the San Francisco attorney than his client or even the men he claimed had conspired to use that client for the nefarious purpose of killing the President. None of this prevented the book from shooting to the top of the
New York Times
best sellers list the week it was released.

More threatening to the actual conspirators, however, was
Rush to Judgement
, a book that unabashedly presented strong evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone and, possibly, hadn’t even fired a shot at the motorcade. Authored by New York lawyer Mark Lane, it methodically assembled the case that the fingerprints of the intelligence community could be seen everywhere, from the moment those shots were fired in Dealey Plaza.

These powerful men (and, yes, they were all men) knew that the national discussion could not be allowed to focus on taking revenge against the people who had tried to kill their beloved President. Goldwater had floated the idea that Kennedy had brought the whole thing down on himself, but the charge had never gained traction. JFK seemed like one of those new frying pans, coated with that miracle substance Teflon that was becoming so popular. Nothing seemed to stick to the man. That had to change, too.

Equally worrisome was the fact that the Warren Commission, the only real chance for the cover-up’s success, had given way to a far less controllable congressional investigation. No one was naming names yet, but could that really be far behind?

A battle for the perception of the American people now loomed. John and Bobby were two of the most skillful political forces ever to come to Washington, but the conspirators had access to vast sources of experience in espionage, intelligence and disinformation. They had the will and the ability to change the subject.

There would be no more bullets, but Kennedy still had to go. There was more than one way to assassinate a man. It was time to change tactics.

From the beginning, Attorney General Robert Kennedy knew how to describe the difficulty in sorting out who did what before the ambush in Dallas. The term he used was first coined in counterintelligence circles to denote the feelings of paranoia and confusion that sometimes develop in the byzantine business of spy-hunting, when one is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is illusion. “It’s a wilderness of mirrors,” he would say.

Quietly, since December of 1963, RFK had been working with his gung-ho staff of young prosecutors on the Dallas case, all through the 1964 election and beyond. Often, they would gather late at night or early in the morning, when their absence from other work duties would not draw anyone’s attention. Because of their extreme discretion, the reality of their quest had leaked to virtually no one.

One such meeting took place at Bobby's Hickory Hill estate in mid-February 1965. The choice of location was convenient for the attorney general, and also held the advantage of being private and secure. No matter how often he had his Justice Department office swept for bugs, Bobby was always aware of the chance that J. Edgar Hoover’s prying ears might have worked their way inside. The need for secrecy and discretion was challenged by the sheer number of leads he and his team had to follow. Just the ones introduced at this meeting alone demonstrated the complexity.

One of these included the story of Richard Case Nagell, who claimed he got himself arrested for attempted bank robbery in El Paso, Texas on September 20, 1963 in order to avoid being made a fall guy in a CIA plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Nagell looked like a man who preferred to spend the next few years in jail if that’s what it took. There was also the rumored existence of a 201 (“personality”) file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a set of documents maintained by the U.S. government for members of the armed forces. It seemed that Oswald had been trained by the CIA and had actually been on the FBI’s payroll. He said he was a patsy. “It’s fifty-fifty that he was telling the truth,” RFK argued, “but the conspirators will use our institutions to prove he worked alone, so we must ask the other questions, the harder questions.”

Fueled by deli sandwiches and coffee, RFK and his six-person crew worked until almost eleven, at which point he sent them home with the understanding that they continue on their own in the days ahead, keeping in mind the same mandate he had described in his first crusade against organized crime in 1961. At that time, he had directed many of these same young prosecutors to stamp out “the conspiracy of evil” that the plotters represented. “Don’t let anything get in your way,” Bobby told them now. “If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.”

Inevitably, one of them asked the United States Attorney General who he thought was behind the attempt on his brother’s life. Kennedy believed the President had been the victim of a domestic conspiracy, he told his prosecutorial team. He did not believe it was the Soviet Union or the Cuban government that was involved. He believed others had concocted a trail of falsified evidence to lay blame on our Cold War opponents and trigger a new invasion of Cuba.

Both professionally and personally, Bobby Kennedy had obsessed on this issue for months now. He had mulled it over, studied the evidence and weighed the issues. His best guess now was that the hit had been planned and executed by elements of the United States intelligence community, exploiting elements of the Mafia, and anti-Castro Cubans, with key support from within the U.S. military, largely funded by Texas oil interests.

It sounded like a joke. The nation’s top law enforcement officer believed the answer to “Who tried to kill President Kennedy?” was “all of the above.”

RFK freely admitted his theory was based only on his gut suspicions and not yet on hard facts. He expected these prosecutors to get him those facts so they could make arrests and bring people to trial. He wanted to charge these conspirators with treason, the only crime specifically defined in the U.S. Constitution.

Kennedy had as little faith in JCAAP as he did the Warren Commission. He believed that the conspiracy would never be shattered and held accountable without the Department of Justice bringing charges against the suspects. It was only by shaking the trees that they could see what kind of interesting fruit might present itself.

What none of these eager avengers fully appreciated yet was how every lead would take them down a road that either turned into a dead end or splintered into a dozen new paths.

Political life in Washington was complicated by the fact that history was not taking a pause to let anyone sort out the past. There were two huge issues facing America that would not wait: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

There was no doubt that America’s troubled race relations were at the boiling point. Even Martin Luther King was having trouble keeping his flock united behind his idea of nonviolent resistance, particularly as their opponents continued to ratchet up their opposition with intimidation, beatings and even murder. Those who wanted to respond in kind, like the black militant Malcolm X, were under attack. Black Muslims had assassinated the fiery leader on February 21, proving that America was becoming a place where change was more often coming from the barrel of a gun.

Vietnam was turning into the nightmare that John Kennedy had always feared. He had talked tough during 1963 to placate those who warned against the dominoes falling in Asia; then, to win the 1964 election, he’d had to play it both ways, speaking of firm resolve while characterizing his opponent as a man over-eager to bring America to war. Now, in 1965, it was becoming clear that decisions needed to be made. Already Kennedy had authorized air strikes on North Vietnam in retaliation for guerrilla attacks against the 23,500 American military “advisers” now on the ground. That offensive did not prevent the American Embassy or the major American air base at Da Nang from being bombed. The President had on his desk a proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit two battalions of U.S. Marines to shore up protection.

In his 1974 book,
Flashpoints
, Robert Kennedy wrote that his brother’s thought process had been heavily impacted by Dallas, making him bolder on some issues and more tentative on others. In Vietnam, JFK had pulled back from his commitment to end American involvement completely, knowing full well that his intentions to do so, stated shortly before the assassination attempt, may have put his life in danger. On civil rights, however, he was more willing to line up behind decisive action, seeing the potential for a national race war if the government stayed aloof from the issue.

From March 25 to March 28, more than twenty-five thousand civil rights demonstrators embarked on a fifty-mile walk for freedom from Selma, Alabama to the state Capitol in Montgomery. Led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was a response to the mass arrests of Negroes protesting segregation and voting rights violations. And those protests were themselves a response to continued violent suppression of black Americans across the deep South. The ultimate civil rights violation, of course, is murder, and JFK’s own experience with it had changed his thinking about slow forward progress. He wanted action and he wanted it now.

President Kennedy had exercised federal authority before, but the move was always tricky. It immediately turned the U.S. government against state authorities, who used the controversy to fan the flames of their own political bases, inevitably resulting in even more violence. Kennedy was particularly upset at a pattern he saw developing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership, FBI agents assigned to the racial disturbances in the South were passive observers, taking notes and photos, but not acting when laws were being violated.

President Kennedy summoned Hoover to the Oval Office for a meeting on March 26, during the height of the march on Montgomery. Kennedy and Hoover had an awful relationship, but as officers of the government, they still needed to talk to get things done. Hoover was not happy when Attorney General Robert Kennedy joined them, but RFK ostensibly was Hoover’s boss and had a right to be there. At the beginning of the conversation, President Kennedy pressed a button beneath his desk, activating the White House recording system.

The agenda began with the Kennedys requesting a more active response from Hoover’s agents, stating that it was necessary to make certain this current protest march would not explode into violence and trigger even more violence around the country as a result.

“We don't guard anybody; we are fact-finders,” stated Hoover. He was told that he needed to broaden his definition but refused to back down. “The FBI can’t wet-nurse every Negro in the South or every do-gooder from the North who goes down there and tries to reform or educate them.”

Robert Kennedy was livid. He called Hoover “insubordinate,” a characteristic the director had maintained toward presidential authority since the beginning of President Kennedy’s term in 1961. Hoover shot back that both Kennedys were in “over their heads” and needed to “change their tune.”

As was his style, JFK watched this back-and-forth escalate. Clearly Bobby was speaking his brother’s mind, but the tactic allowed the President to weigh in at the end. By this point, the President could not suppress his own anger.

“If the President of the United States and the attorney general find their views in conflict with the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Hoover,” said Kennedy, “what remedy do you think should be pursued?”

Hoover shot back that he was only trying to protect the Kennedys from themselves, a favor he was granting them out of respect for their offices.

“Mr. Hoover, you have enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the service of your country. I am quite sure that history will record your sense of duty.” The President and the attorney general traded looks. They had talked about this moment as being inevitable, but they had not discussed that it was imminent. “Perhaps it is time to close that chapter honorably and allow new blood into your organization.”

There it was. The President of the United States had invited the man who had run the FBI like his own private business for decades to step down. Hoover’s response was curt. “I will not resign,” he said.

RFK tried to intercede. “There is no need for the nation to see conflict here. If you resign, both the President and I can sing your praises but if not…” He let the idea hang in the air.

Hoover ignored the younger Kennedy, addressing his remark straight to the President. “This is a bold gambit, Mr. President. Particularly for a man as… vulnerable… as you appear to be.” It was obviously a reference to the thick files the FBI director had maintained on the Kennedys going back to the 1930s.

The President did not flinch. “This country and the Soviet Union have not been involved in a nuclear war, because both sides understand that such a war would destroy their own countries and not just their enemy’s. We call this concept mutually assured destruction, and so far, it has kept the peace. Do you not believe that there are lessons learned from that policy that could be applied to our own situation?”

Hoover stood. “I will consider your ill-advised request and give you my answer.” The FBI Director left the Oval Office without waiting for the President to end the meeting as was the custom and protocol.