The Kennedy Half-Century (27 page)

As the Rometsch case demonstrates, Kennedy’s unrestrained sexual appetite threatened his personal and political safety. It also alienated some of the men who were assigned to protect him. Larry Newman remembered the “morale problems” that the president’s indiscretions caused among his fellow Secret Service agents. “You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator or a door because the president was inside with two hookers,” said Newman. “It just didn’t compute. Your neighbors and everybody thought you were risking your life, and you were actually out there to see that he’s not disturbed while he’s having an interlude in the shower with two gals from Twelfth Avenue.” Newman also remembered joking with his colleagues about which one of them would testify on Capitol Hill if and when “the president received harm or was killed in the room by these two women.” Kennedy had affairs with scores of other women, including two White House interns nicknamed “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” Pamela Turnure (Jackie’s personal secretary, whom JFK had conveniently encouraged her to hire), and Mary Meyer, a prominent Georgetown artist who was the “niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester.”
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JFK probably also had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Although Kennedy’s strongest supporters have denied the relationship, pointing out there is no absolute proof, the behavior fit the president’s pattern, and he had opportunities to pursue it. Both Kennedy and Monroe discussed the encounters with friends, and they were in at least one secluded place together.
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The well-supported story of Mimi Alford, a nineteen-year-old White
House intern at the time of her involvement with JFK, is impossible to overlook.
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Initiated into JFK’s sexual world just four days into her internship, Alford lost her virginity to Kennedy as he conducted what can only be called a deeply inappropriate affair with a young charge; it even included a Kennedy-directed episode of oral sex with aide Dave Powers while Kennedy watched. This behavior, barely hidden from others within the White House and involving government resources to shuttle Alford to and from the traveling president, has caused some to question Kennedy’s basic fitness for the highest office. Many have tried to reconcile JFK’s high-minded, skilled public persona with his sleazy, reckless private self. It is simply impossible to match up the two sides rationally, and it is certainly inadequate to say that the rules of his time or a sometimes empty marriage permitted or justified these escapades. Any private citizen with modest responsibilities would be condemned for them, and as president, JFK risked his White House tenure, the welfare of his party, his policy goals, and everyone he supposedly held dear.
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Jackie was European in outlook, and while aware of some of her husband’s philandering, she apparently tried to tolerate it as Continental wives had done for centuries. The late Robert Pierpoint, the White House correspondent for CBS television during the Kennedy years, once recalled an episode that revealed Mrs. Kennedy’s matter-of-fact acceptance of JFK’s bold unfaithfulness:

I was sitting in the White House press room one day shortly after noon. And through the corridor came a French magazine correspondent who worked for
Paris Match
and he said, “Bob, I’ve just had a very unusual experience. I have to tell somebody about it.” He was somewhat agitated and said that he had been invited to have lunch with Jackie upstairs in the private area and the president joined them, and then after lunch the president said, “Jackie, why don’t you show our friend around?” She did, and brought him over to the west wing. Between the cabinet room and the Oval Office there is a small room where the secretaries sit. As she ushered him into that room she said in French, “And there is the woman that my husband is supposed to be sleeping with.” He was quite upset and didn’t know what to answer; it was kind of embarrassing for him.
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Although the president’s infidelities often put a terrific strain on his marriage, he and Jackie appeared to reconcile after their infant son Patrick Bouvier died in August 1963. Born with a severe lung problem, Patrick survived
for only two days. Afterward, a close friend saw the president—deeply distraught and openly weeping after his son’s death—holding Jackie in his arms, “something nobody ever saw at the time because they were very private people.” That autumn, close observers said they detected renewed affection in this most enigmatic of public-private couples. Though anyone would be skeptical, given long past practice, perhaps JFK’s views and behavior were changing in this realm as well. There would not be enough time to find out.

On October 28, 1963, the family attended a public worship service together for the first time at a church in Middleburg, Virginia, called St. Stephen the Martyr.
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Never an especially religious person—despite his strong public and political identification with the Roman Catholic Church—Kennedy might have contemplated the life of the man for whom the church was named: Stephen was murdered for defying the religious orthodoxy of his day. The president had always respected courage and admired people who were willing to sacrifice their careers and lives for their principles. While in the White House, Kennedy had shown courage in challenging the steel industry, the Soviet Union, his generals, and eventually, segregationists. President Kennedy was no saint like Stephen, but he had shown and earned grace during the better part of three tumultuous years in power. Three weeks after the worship service, he would proceed to his own martyrdom.
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In 1989, East and West Berliners tore down the wall that had kept them separated for so long, and to this day, residents of Berlin still celebrate the Kennedy speech that lifted their spirits during a dark time in their history. For the fortieth anniversary of the speech, they gathered in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg (city hall) in John-F.Kennedy-Platz to hear the president’s speech rebroadcast over giant loudspeakers.

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Alford had refused to talk for years, but in 2011, at age sixty-nine, she published a book about her relationship with the president.

7
Echoes from Dealey Plaza

Winston Churchill’s dictum about Russia fully applies to the murder of John F. Kennedy: It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The intrigue is part of the lasting Kennedy legacy. In fact, as cynical as it may sound, the assassination has taken a short presidency and made it the stuff of legend. The gnawing sense of incompleteness, the intense emotions of regret and grief felt simultaneously by almost everyone, and the overwhelming melancholia of unfulfilled dreams obliterated John Kennedy’s faults. They created in the slain president the image of a secular saint that has proven impervious to all sorts of lurid revelations over a half century.

Eerily, JFK foresaw the advantages of an early death. Much given to speculation about his possible assassination—he brought the subject up frequently with family and friends—Kennedy said to Jackie after his triumph in the Cuban Missile Crisis, “If anyone’s going to kill me, it should happen now.” The comment was made after a historian’s lecture on Abraham Lincoln, where Kennedy had asked, ‘If Lincoln had lived, would his reputation be as great?” The historian’s answer was obvious—no, because Lincoln would have had to struggle with the titanic problems of post–Civil War reconstruction. Instinctively, Kennedy understood that it is better for a leader to leave the stage in both a moment of triumph and the tragedy of too short a time than to face the inevitable, wearing controversies of many years’ leadership, being ushered out of office to a chorus of critical evaluations about his shortcomings. Such is the fate of most presidents.
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In any event, it is impossible to understand the Kennedy legacy without understanding the assassination—the sequence of events, as well as what most Americans
think
happened and why. Millions have never been, and will never be, satisfied with the official findings of two separate government inquiries—not least because the inquiries came to opposite conclusions on the critical question of conspiracy. The assassination dictated that JFK would not have the time to create a full record and make his whole claim on history. For fifty years the unfinished record of the man and his presidency has stirred Americans as
they mourned an unconscionable loss and wondered what might have been. This “ghost legacy” is as powerful as the real one.

Four days after JFK was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery, President Lyndon Johnson asked the Chief Justice of the United States to head a federal probe into the assassination. Earl Warren initially refused. He did not think that Supreme Court justices should be saddled with additional responsibilities when they already had a crowded docket; why not ask a retired judge to spearhead the investigation instead? Undeterred, LBJ summoned Warren to the Oval Office. The Chief Justice later recalled their meeting:

[T]he president told me how serious the situation was. He said there had been wild rumors, and that there was the international situation to think of. He said he had just talked to [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk, who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only way to dispel these rumors, he said, was to have an independent and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head it except the highest judicial officer in the country … He said that if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war. “You’ve been in uniform before,” he said, “and if I asked you, you would put on the uniform again for your country.” I said, “Of course.” “This is more important than that,” he said. “If you’re putting it like that,” I said, “I can’t say no.”
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LBJ signed an executive order later that day that created “a Commission to ascertain, evaluate, and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination.” The other members of what became known as the Warren Commission were Democratic congressman Hale Boggs, Senator Richard B. Russell, Republican congressman and future president Gerald R. Ford, Senator John Sherman Cooper, former CIA director Allen Dulles, and John J. McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war. (Three of the four congressional members, Russell, Boggs, and Cooper, only reluctantly supported all the conclusions and would later criticize parts of the commission’s final report; alone among the congressional members, Ford was an enthusiastic backer.)
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Among the staff hired by the commission was a future United States senator, Arlen Specter, who served as an assistant counsel.
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The Warren Commission was doomed from the start, because Washington’s
power brokers, led by the new president himself, were far more interested in preserving domestic tranquility than in finding the full truth. They wanted a report that would first calm citizens’ jangled nerves by reassuring them that a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald had acted completely on his own. Conspiratorial chatter, so the reasoning went, would only undermine public trust in government and perhaps even lead to war. Just thirteen months earlier, the United States had narrowly avoided a nuclear conflagration with Russia, and the Cold War was still freezing. The public was suspicious of Russia, Cuba, and more. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, 62 percent of the American people believed that their president had been killed in a conspiracy. Official Washington had to respond.
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On the Monday after the assassination, while most Americans were watching JFK’s funeral services on television, Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy attorney general, sent a memo to Bill Moyers, then an LBJ aide, that stressed two points: “1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald [who had been killed the previous day] was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. 2. Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists.”
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It was impossible for anyone to know, seventy-two hours after the assassination, exactly what had transpired in Dallas, much less that Oswald was the lone assassin and would have been convicted at a trial. Moreover, this memo puts far more emphasis on public relations, and on pushing a preconceived, sanitized notion of the murder of the president, than it does on an honest effort to uncover all the facts. In Katzenbach’s defense, his primary motive might have been to tamp down rumors of a conspiracy before they overtook the facts, which was not unreasonable. And this same course of action was recommended by others besides Katzenbach. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told another of LBJ’s aides, “The thing I am most concerned about … is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”
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Hoover had good reasons to be concerned. While presidential protection was the province of the Secret Service and not the FBI, his agency had also failed to notice disturbing signals from Oswald, a known Communist sympathizer who had defected to the Soviet Union for a time and had a history of instability and violent tendencies.
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In the weeks leading up to the assassination, James Hosty, an FBI agent working in the Dallas field office, had twice visited the house where Marina Oswald lived and Lee Oswald visited. Hosty questioned Marina but had not been able to find Lee on either occasion—though
Hosty was told a critical piece of information, that Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository. When Lee learned about Hosty’s visits, he flew into a rage and stormed into the Dallas FBI office, demanding to see Hosty. A receptionist told Oswald that the agent was at lunch, so Oswald left a note that apparently said, “If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don’t cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.” We have to take Hosty’s word for this because his boss, Gordon Shanklin, ordered him to destroy the note in the wake of Oswald’s death. An FBI supervisor ordered the destruction of significant material evidence in the murder investigation of President Kennedy. This story, like so many others, was missed by the Warren Commission. Many years later, Hosty was temporarily suspended when it became apparent he had misled the commission, but Hosty was a small cog in a giant bureaucratic machine that often cared more about good press than truth. Hosty took aim at J. Edgar Hoover in his 1996 book,
Assignment: Oswald
, noting that he (Hosty) “came to understand that one of our jobs was to protect the bureau’s image at all costs, even if it ran roughshod over individuals or principles.”
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