Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (15 page)

I was a college student, and I was on my way from Colby College in Maine to New Haven to go with a boyfriend to the Yale-Harvard game. In a certain sense, the bus trip was a microcosm of what happened in the country because at first, when we found out about it [the assassination] by stopping at a gas station, everybody looked to one another for comfort and solace.

There was a real sense of camaraderie on the bus. Midway through, we found out he had actually died, and later that the Harvard-Yale game was going to be canceled. Then some of the feisty sporting guys on the bus got really angry: “Why are they canceling it just for this?” It was that whole mixture of emotions—from sadness, reaching out to one another, to where, by the end of the bus ride, I felt like I was just all by myself, all alone, experiencing this. I couldn’t wait to get back to college with my friends, where I would go right after I got to Yale, and
then go back home again so that I could be with them to deal with this whole thing.

RICHARD: I think what they [Kennedy’s cabinet] were trying to do to Castro was very foolish, and they obviously didn’t succeed in doing it. Castro outlived all of them and is still there; he’s still alive. There were attempts to assassinate him, and they didn’t work. Bobby did want to pursue the Cuban Communist government, and he was clearly involved in that. I was traveling with Bobby in Latin America, and Communist groups were demonstrating against him. He said to me, “God, I saved that guy’s life.” What he meant by that was somehow he had prevented Castro from being killed. I don’t know if that’s true of course, but that was Bobby’s reaction to the people demonstrating against him.

DORIS: Dick once met with Che Guevara, who gave him a box of cigars to bring back to Kennedy. Dick didn’t know that one of the ways they had considered for killing Castro was with an exploding cigar. He gave the box to Kennedy, who asked, “Are they good?” and he said, “Mr. President, they’re the best.” Kennedy took it, cut it off, and lit it. Then he turned to Dick and said, “You should’ve smoked the first one.” Only later did he come to realize what that meant.

RICHARD: I had no idea at the time. I was involved in it only at the very beginning, when we were beginning to set up a counter-Castro operation. After that I was involved with Latin America as a whole and had very little to do with the anti-Castro operations, which were looking silly then as they did now.

After Kennedy was killed, I thought there was a possible conspiracy there. There was a lot of hatred running around the country at the time, especially given his sympathy for blacks and civil rights, but in all the years that followed we’ve never come up with anything. Bobby Kennedy thought there might be something else there, and I think he said he would pursue it if he got to be president. I’ve read all the books and heard all the arguments. We’re unwilling to believe that a lone, crazed individual could have done this to our country, but the evidence is that that’s what it was. I’ll have to go with that.

DORIS: Bobby never wanted to talk about it, but he suddenly turned to Dick when they were in New York socially together and said, “If it was anybody, I think it was the Mafia, not the Cubans.”

RICHARD: “If anybody else was involved.” But it’s that “if.” Bobby had made deep enemies among some of the Mafia chiefdoms. They obviously hated him. But nobody was ever able to link it. And God knows enough people have studied it.

DORIS: Johnson would talk about JFK and rather with warmth toward him. Johnson hated being vice president, and he wasn’t happy at all in that role. But instead of blaming JFK, he much preferred blaming Robert Kennedy. Johnson hated Bobby, hated him with a passion. I think he projected all of his anger about being vice president and being impotent onto Bobby.

Johnson said, “JFK liked listening to my stories.” Every now and then he said, “You know, he was a young whippersnapper when I was the majority leader.” Kennedy had that yellow, jaundiced face when he was in the Senate. When he was swimming in the pool, telling those stories, you could tell Johnson loved the idea that at one point he’d been on top of JFK. I’ll never forget when Chappaquiddick happened; I was with Johnson at the time. At first he felt sad. How could this happen once again to the Kennedy family? It just seemed like fate was unkind. Then he turned around and said, “If I were in a car with a girl and a bumblebee stung the girl, I’d be in Sing Sing. This guy’s going to be a hero.” He didn’t turn out to be a hero for it, however.

Passing the Civil Rights Bill took both Kennedy’s death and Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of the Senate. It was an extraordinary thing LBJ did in that very first speech to the joint session of Congress: “No memorial could speak more eloquently to JFK’s death than the passage of this civil rights bill at the earliest possible moment.” He made it the test of his first year in the presidency, and that was a risky thing to do. Had he not succeeded in that between November 1963 and his own election in 1964, he would have been a failure. The chances of getting that filibuster broken were very slight in anybody’s mind. It had never been broken on the Civil Rights Bill.

But LBJ was at home on Capitol Hill. This is what he was made for. It was what he was born for. It became a deeper passion for him than I think it was for JFK. Johnson called senators in the middle of the night. He had them over for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. He loved it. I don’t think JFK loved putting his arm around these guys and doing the false things that you have to do. JFK was rational; he thought it was time for the civil rights movement. He would’ve done what he needed to, but I don’t think he would have put his whole soul and person, capacities, or talents into it. So that’s a huge thing that happened. The civil rights movement itself started it. JFK gave words to it, and that’s where JFK could summon the country in a way that LBJ wasn’t as easily able to do. But then LBJ got it done, and Johnson also did it pretty well with the Voting Rights Act.

RICHARD: Johnson was much more skillful dealing with Congress than Kennedy ever could’ve been. Johnson knew all these people. He lived among them on the Hill; he knew how to deal with them, and he was shameless when he did that.

When Johnson was president, I left the White House to go into opposition on the Vietnam War. Would Kennedy have continued it? I don’t think so, because John Kennedy was a profoundly rational human being. Bobby was much more guided by his emotions, but John Kennedy was guided by his reasoning and thought. The Vietnam War turned out to
be trying to do something that was impossible. It became totally irrational and very costly for the United States, and I think Kennedy would’ve stopped at that point. But nobody can know what he would’ve done if he was confronted with the reality of losing in Vietnam, which was going to come. I like to think he would have gotten out and stopped.

The only way to end the war was to get out, and it destroyed Johnson’s presidency because he didn’t get out. I prefer to believe that Kennedy would’ve realized that. I think he would’ve tried to get out of it, but I don’t know. That decision is lost to history. He also had the strength of the five advisors. He would’ve turned them around. When they saw what he wanted to do, they would move in that direction.

DORIS: The promise is big because it sets forth for people what might have been, not just for Kennedy but for the country, had that movement of caring about social justice and economic opportunity not been cut by the war. Three years isn’t a very long time to become a great president. Most of our great presidents have had two terms, not one—much less just three years.

I remember Dick telling me he had a discussion with Bobby Kennedy at one point. Bobby was lamenting that it wasn’t fair that his brother had only had three years, and how could he be a great president with only three years? Dick, trying to console him, said, “Julius Caesar only had three years.” Bobby looked at him and said, “Yeah, but it helps to have Shakespeare write about you.”

Among popular opinion, Kennedy still ranks up there among high presidents, which just shows the power of the memory and the power
of the pictures. Among historians, I would guess he’s probably an average president. I haven’t seen a recent poll, but I think the Cuban Missile Crisis will always be considered a huge turning point. The fact that he turned away from that and then gave the American University speech shortly thereafter will be a big thing. The fact that he was there when the civil rights movement was being pushed forward will help. But there just wasn’t time for his promise to be fulfilled, to allow him to become a Washington, a Lincoln, an FDR.

When you think about the eras of progressive change that America went through in the twentieth century, you had one at the turn of the twentieth century with the Progressive Era. You had the New Deal, and you had the 1960s. Those are eras when the country was moving toward its own ideals and trying to realize them: social justice, economic opportunity.