Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (12 page)

The police had guards set outside the driveway into the police basement who supposedly weren’t going to let anybody in. But the crowd that Sunday consisted mainly of plainclothes detectives, police officers, and some reporters. The Warren Commission report later said that a mob of reporters had permitted Ruby to conceal himself, but he was standing next to police officers who knew who he was.

Dallas was very protective of itself on Monday morning. We were receiving an awful lot of criticism from around the world and throughout the nation, and that seemed to be acceptable because, after all, it was a horrible thing. But when you had people from Dallas saying that perhaps the climate we had here had something to do with it—the awful political climate, the extremist demonstrations and assaults they’d made on people like Stevenson and Johnson—those people came under serious immediate attack from the leaders of Dallas. They portrayed them as traitors to Dallas when they should have been defending the city.

That was the first reaction. A little bit later, the city leaders moderated. The Birch Society and the extreme right wing did nothing, and a sense of moderation took over. People like Stanley Marcus ran an advertisement in the
Dallas Morning News
called “What’s Right with Dallas,”
which really was an ad saying what had been wrong with Dallas. He was clever in giving it that title. He talked about some of the positive things in Dallas, but he also pointed out what we needed to do to have a tolerance for other viewpoints, to be more mindful of minorities and that sort of thing. That helped turn the tide; we started realizing that we needed to start accepting all viewpoints.

The mayor of Dallas was Earl Cabell. He resigned that office to run against the Republican congressman, Bruce Alger, who had been a leader of the right-wing forces in Dallas, and defeated Alger by a huge majority. Of our delegation in Austin for the Texas legislature, eight out of nine of those members were right-wing Republicans. Democrats swept the field against them that fall, and all the Republicans were defeated. You had that sort of political change happening in Dallas.

The relationship between Dallas and Fort Worth changed, which was a very important thing. The new mayor we had was Eric Johnson, who’d been one of the founders of Texas Instruments. Dallas and Fort Worth were under a directive to find an airport—midway between us—or they would find it for the two cities. Johnson, the new mayor, said, “We’ve fought it long enough.” He was alone in this among the Dallas leaders at the time. He was strong enough, though, and he persuaded them, “We’ve got to cooperate now.” That’s how he led the move to get Dallas and Fort Worth to agree on a mid-cities airport, and he became chairman of the airport board for the next eight years. Through the force of his personality, he was able to persuade all the people who were working on the project to build an extra-large airport. They were thinking of an airport of maybe six thousand acres or so; he went up to eighteen thousand acres. That was a terrific economic engine for the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

The city got a new federal building, which Bruce Alger had opposed. The establishment very much wanted a federal building here, and they got it. They got a new city hall designed by I. M. Pei, which was a spectacular building. All of that came about because Eric Johnson was mayor.

By and large, I believe that the city today has forgotten about the assassination. But as the fiftieth anniversary approaches, city leaders have become very mindful of it and have made very careful plans to have some sort of observance that’s respectful and proper.

The Dallas Cowboys were an important factor in making the nation and the world forget about the assassination when they thought of Dallas. They started thinking about the Cowboys, who were on TV all the time in the late ’60s with some great success. Another program started about that time, the TV show
Dallas
. [Note:
Dallas
began airing in 1978.] Those took some negative attention away from Dallas. Perhaps more important in taking away the city’s opprobrium was the fact that two other cities experienced assassinations in 1968—Los Angeles with Robert Kennedy, and Memphis with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Were we going to blame those cities for what happened there? Could we forgive Dallas now? I think that attitude prevailed.

The assassination ushered in this great period of uneasiness, of upheaval, including the disturbances of the ’60s and the civil rights movement. It made the youth disparage the establishment. What could they believe in if our president could be assassinated by an individual like that? It was a period of disillusionment. It shaped the ’60s and the ’70s. Indirectly it led to positive things. There was a change in the nation’s tenor, the sense that we’ve got to do better. Idealism arose among the youth, who started protesting and demanding certain things.

The civil rights movement picked up. LBJ became president with the goal of realizing the ideals of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which hadn’t gone very far, but LBJ carried them nearly to completion. Those sorts of things happened as a result of the assassination. LBJ did a wonderful job as president. He got a lot of legislation passed. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Act really liberated the African-American population to be able to participate in the American system.

I had always approved of Kennedy, as he was the first president I voted for. I thought the world of him. I thought he was a terrific president, and I was very distraught at the time of the assassination. I remember being in Zapruder’s office, looking out the window, seeing the School Book Depository, the crowds out there, and thinking,
It’s a good thing I’m working as a reporter; otherwise, I don’t know how I could go on
. It was really very distressing, but I did have things to do, and that kept me occupied that day. I was lucky to have that.

Joseph Califano

A thirty-two-year-old New York attorney in 1963, Joseph Califano was working as Pentagon general counsel. He went on to become special assistant to President Johnson and secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Carter before founding the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

I
was in the bottom of a dam in West Virginia. I was general counsel to the Army and was also responsible for all the civil works of the Army, and that’s where I was. Somebody from the Army shouted down, literally shouted down, so I came up out of the dam, and he said, “The president’s dead.”

I said, “Take me back to the Pentagon.”

When I got to the Pentagon, I first went right to Cy Vance, who was secretary of the Army, and said to him, “I’m going to leave and go back to New York. This is the best of my generation, and that’s why I came down here.”

Vance said, “No, stay here. You don’t know Lyndon Johnson. Things are really going to move. This is a different kind of person.” Vance had been Johnson’s counsel during the Missile Gap hearings that he held as senator. “In any case, I have something for you to do.”

I asked, “What?”

He said, “Jacqueline Kennedy wants the president buried in Arlington Cemetery.”

This is the same day, this is November 22. Jacqueline Kennedy wants the president buried in Arlington Cemetery. “I want you to go over tomorrow morning, meet Robert Kennedy over there, and pick the place.” I was responsible for Arlington Cemetery because I wore another hat for the Army.

I knew Bobby from the years I had been in the Pentagon, and I’d worked with him. He was going to pick out the burial site, but we were
going to do it together. I just was overwhelmed. I went home. I had two young kids, and my wife—I was just in shock. I guess I was like the rest of the country, but I knew I had things to do.

The next morning I met Robert Kennedy at Arlington Cemetery. It was pouring rain, pouring rain, and we walked around that plot, above the Lincoln Memorial Bridge. I had a little map of Arlington Cemetery, and I marked out the 3.2 acres, what turned out to be 3.2 acres, with him. He was shattered. I’ll never forget the way . . . he was hollow eyed. He looked like a truck had run over him and so different from the Bobby Kennedy I had seen dealing with the problems in the South and segregation. Then, almost in a whisper, he said, “This is where the president will be buried.” Then he left, and I went back to the Pentagon.

When I was back in my office, I got a call from Secretary [Robert] McNamara. He said, “I hear you picked the land,” so I assumed Bobby had talked to him. “I want to make sure we own that land. I want you to have a title search.”

I told Bob, “This is Arlington Cemetery.”

He said, “I want to make damn sure this land is locked up and we own it. Get a title search, and write an opinion.”

So I sent one of my lawyers and Ramsey Clark, who was then the
assistant attorney general for the Lands Division. They went over to the Alexandria courthouse on Sunday. We had to get the courthouse open because that’s where the records were. They did a title search. I came back to my office, worked Sunday and Sunday night, and we wrote an opinion. I prepared an order for the secretary of the Army to sign, setting aside that land forever. I brought it to Cy Vance, and he okayed it.

Then McNamara called again and said, “Jacqueline Kennedy wants to have a torch, a light, that will be eternal. I want you to go over there and make sure we set that up.”

I said, “OK.” He and I went over there with an Army general, and we plotted out roughly where the eternal light would be. We talked about getting copper tubing to put the wires in, making sure it was deep enough so that spiked heels didn’t break it. I said this can never go out because McNamara had told me, “Jacqueline never wants this to go out.”

McNamara said he wanted to sign the order. He had no authority over Arlington or the Army at that point, so we came up with an approve line for him. I went over later—either later Sunday afternoon or early Monday morning, I can’t remember which—and McNamara was in a car parked at that side of the Lincoln Memorial Bridge. He had gone over to make sure that the 3.2 acres, and where the grave would be set in there, was going to be exactly in the center of the bridge as you came across. I handed them the order, and he signed it.

He was, I think, shaken. But he was an efficient machine in many respects. He actually said to me: “I want you to make damn sure that a wire is low enough so that some woman doesn’t break it with her heels.”

I said, “Already done that.”

He said, “That’s a great job,” and then he said, “You stay around. We’re going to need people like you.”

I was home that day [of the funeral]. I was like every other American; I was watching every single thing that happened.

To see the burial site for the first time on television . . . We were really frozen in time, and this was sort of the greatest president—the only president I’d ever known anything about in an intimate way. I’d read about
Roosevelt and Eisenhower like any other kid growing up, but it was just fantastic. It was in a sense one of the greatest things I’d ever been part of. The Army was terrific with stuff like this. They got it right—and remember: All the stone and all that stuff wasn’t all set at that point in time. I went back there when Robert Kennedy was killed.

I was working for President Johnson, and we went over to the burial site at night when he came down from New York on the train. That’s probably the next time I saw it. At that point, I just never wanted to go over there. I’ve seen it several times since then. You drive across that bridge, and it’s fantastic. It’s great for the country. It’s not just great for President Kennedy and his family and Jackie, but it’s great for the country.

They were obsessed with getting rid of Castro. About a year after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, Robert Kennedy ransomed the Cuban brigade. I was then still general counsel to the Army working for Vance, and the Army was given responsibility for assimilating the Cuban brigade into American life. We brought them into the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. We wouldn’t let them fly planes because we didn’t want a plane going over Cuba.

President Kennedy created the Interdepartmental Coordinating Committee for Cuban Affairs. It was nominally chaired by a State Department fellow named Sterling Cottrell, but it was in fact chaired by Robert Kennedy. He ran that committee—and the object of that committee was to overthrow the Castro regime. Vance was the committee’s Defense Department member. He made me his alternate, and we planned, tried, to do all kinds of things: putting sugar in the gasoline, putting bad bacteria in petroleum, sabotage, everything.

Robert Kennedy was constantly saying, “This is the most important thing we’ve got to get done; we have to get rid of Castro.” Now, “get rid of” in that committee meant to overthrow the Castro regime. But at some point there was a discussion in the committee of assassinating Castro. A Justice Department lawyer named Joe Dolan, who was the Justice Department alternate, and I argued against that. Throughout this discussion, the CIA was totally silent.

I began to say, “There’s something else going on besides what we’re actually doing in this committee.” Vance was very disturbed about what he thought was an effort to assassinate Castro and almost resigned on that issue.

We had a meeting before President Kennedy at one point. It was the only time I was ever in a meeting with President Kennedy, Cy Vance, and a Marine general named Brute Krulak, who was the tough counterinsurgency, dirty-tricks guy, and some State Department people, because we disagreed.

We wanted to do much tougher things. We wanted to sabotage boats. We wanted to blow up bridges. We wanted to send people in who were trained by the CIA in sabotage. The State Department wanted a much meeker program of Latin American press and stuff like that. Vance laid out our arguments. The State Department laid out theirs. President Kennedy read a paper we had given him and just got up and left. He said nothing [except], “I’ll be back.” Kenny O’Donnell came in about fifteen minutes later and said, “The meeting’s over—these kinds of disputes should be solved by White House staffers, not by presidents.” Eventually we got approval for most of the things we wanted to do in the Pentagon. We got approval to send Cubans in to sabotage, to mess up the oil and the petroleum.

They were crazy things. I mean, this was Keystone Kops. I’ll give you one example, which I’ll never forget. At one point the chief of Naval Operations said, “One possibility is to fly over Cuba and drop an enormous number of bats on Cuba with incendiary devices tied to them. The bats will go down. They won’t want to be out in the daytime. They’ll go into buildings all over. We’ll have the incendiary devices timed so that they’ll go off that night, and we’ll have fires all over Cuba.” Rejected—not because it was a crazy idea but because the planes would have to fly so low; we were afraid Castro would knock one of them down and find out it was an American plane. The pressure was enormous to just do something, do something.

Then the CIA representative Dick Helms and Desmond Fitzgerald, who was their operations guy, said to me, “We would like you to identify a number of Cuban generals, if you can from talking to your brigade
people, who are still there around Castro so that we can get a better sense of what’s going on.”

But, as we now know and as we suspected, what they really were looking for were generals who might kill Castro. Indeed, in a briefing they gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Helms said, “We’re looking at the possibility of doing this, and we’re studying what Hitler’s generals did to Hitler, to see if there are any lessons there that we could use.” As we now know, they had given people a poison pen. They had given them a sniper’s rifle and everything in order to try and kill Castro. There’s no question in my mind that that was the objective.

Reflecting over the years, I think the paroxysms, the overwhelming grief, that Bobby Kennedy felt, that paralyzing grief . . . a large part of that was due to the fact that he suspected or worried—“worried” is probably the better word—that maybe the efforts to assassinate Castro had resulted in his brother getting killed, that there was a Cuban connection.

Lyndon Johnson said to me and to other people, “Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.” Remember, shortly before Kennedy was assassinated, or within a few months, the president had approved the coup in South Vietnam, which ended up in the killing of [Ngo Dinh] Diem, the head of South Vietnam.

Castro told the Associated Press, I think in September of 1963, “If the Americans think they can try and kill our leaders, their leaders aren’t safe.” So we’ll never know. I think we still don’t know the answer to that. The Warren Commission never interviewed me, never interviewed Cy Vance, as far as I know, never interviewed anybody who was involved in the Cuban coordinating committee. Why, I don’t know.