Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot Part 17

It's a powerful feeling. Yet back in Washington, LBJ has all but forgotten what power feels like. On the road, he's a big deal. People defer to him. He meets with local leaders. He is quoted in the local papers. People want to touch him or enjoy one of his patented high-energy handshakes, the kind where Johnson wraps his meaty fist around another man's, then holds on for as long as they talk, forging a friendship and, in the old days back in the Senate, winning their vote.

But he is now invisible in Washington. For Johnson, the Kennedy White House is not Camelot. He compares the experience with another c word: castration. LBJ refers to himself as a "steer" or a "cut dog." The president deliberately excludes him from important meetings, makes jokes about him behind his back, and ignores him at White House dinner parties-if he even bothers to invite him at all.

The president isn't the only one treating Johnson with contempt. Bobby Kennedy thinks LBJ is a political charlatan. Jackie Kennedy keeps her distance. And the White House staff can barely conceal their disdain. "The Harvards," as Johnson calls them, make fun of his ill-fitting suits, his slicked-back hair, and the tw.a.n.g of his Texas Hill Country accent. When Johnson commits the faux pas of p.r.o.nouncing hors d'oeuvres as "wh.o.r.e doves" at one party, he instantly becomes the b.u.t.t of Washington jokes about his hillbilly ways.

One derogatory nickname for Johnson is "Uncle Cornpone," as if he were some irrelevant hick instead of the man who got Kennedy elected in 1960 by carrying the Deep South. Some refer to him as "Judge Crater," for the New York City official who abruptly disappeared in the 1920s and was never seen again. One White House staffer was overheard at a dinner party joking, "Lyndon? Lyndon who?"

But Johnson is anything but gone, and anything but a hillbilly. During his time as Senate majority leader he was masterful at pa.s.sing difficult legislation. His favorite biblical verse, Isaiah 1:18, exemplifies his pa.s.sion for building coalitions: "Come now, let us reason together."

Truth be told, the vice president is a complex man, whose tastes run the gamut from spicy deer sausage to Cutty Sark scotch to Viennese waltzes. And he is almost as s.e.xually active as the president-only far more discreet about how he manages his affairs.

This discretion carries over into politics. The gregarious Johnson has stifled his personality, disciplining himself to be completely silent in meetings in order to avoid offending the president. It's killing Johnson that he has to endure a nonstop barrage of insults. The vice president has become anxious, depressed, and overeager to please. He barely eats. He has lost so much weight that his always-baggy suits look enormous on him. Even the vice president's nose and ears appear proportionally larger-like how a political cartoonist might draw him in caricature.

LBJ has almost nothing to do. His phone barely rings. From his office in the Executive Office Building, he can look out the window and see the comings and goings across the street at the White House. Sometimes the vice president will leave his desk to meander through the West Wing hallways, wishing for a meeting to attend or a decision to make. Other times, he'll take a seat outside the door to the Oval Office, hoping to catch John Kennedy's eye and be invited inside.

But those occasions are fewer and fewer. The president and vice president will spend less than two hours alone in the year 1963.

Still, Johnson puts up with the abuse. Because, without the vice presidency, he has nothing. There is no Senate opening in Texas for which he can run. And the former Kennedy insider John Connally filled the governor's seat there just four months ago. But at the end of four more years, Johnson can run for the most powerful job in America.

And why shouldn't LBJ be president? He served twelve years in the House of Representatives, twelve more in the Senate, and ruled for six years as majority leader. He is versed in foreign policy and domestic legislation and can give a tutorial on the subtleties of backroom wheeling and dealing. There isn't a more qualified politician in the land.

LBJ is fighting for his political life as he locates the two token tables of racial integration in that St. Augustine hotel ballroom. And while the occasion may officially be the anniversary of the city's founding, it also marks the day when Lyndon Johnson takes a public stand in favor of civil rights.

The Kennedy brothers have deliberately kept him out of their escalating battle for racial equality. They know that as a southern politician, he could use the issue to gain power.

Johnson understands this as well. And he does everything he can to be at the forefront of JFK's civil rights campaign.

For Johnson, civil rights has nothing to do with right or wrong. Taking this stand just makes good political sense.

So LBJ waits, castrated and emaciated, hoping it will all pay off.

On March 4, just one week before Lyndon Johnson's St. Augustine speech, Attorney General Robert Kennedy responds to the Esquire story by telling the press, "I have no plans to run at this time"-which the media know to be code for "I'm running."

But is he qualified? Bobby Kennedy is a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, and he's an attorney general who got the job because of his father and brother. Since then, he has often ignored his duties at the Justice Department to serve as JFK's mouthpiece and sounding board. And the CIA certainly doesn't approve of his job performance. One popular b.u.mper sticker at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters reads "First Ethel, Now Us."

But the world is changing drastically, and Bobby Kennedy reflects the youth and vitality of Camelot instead of the stodgy cold war values synonymous with the older Johnson. American culture is under siege by new influences.

A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first alb.u.m.

A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.

Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women's movement with her book The Feminine Mystique.

The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover's world by creating a domestic operations division.

Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.

The one thing Bobby can't stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.

Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, "I can't stand the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but he's the most formidable man I know."

And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.

Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.

On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson's speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it's a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman magazine. The Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, model 91/38, was made in 1940 and originally designed for the Italian infantry during World War II. This is not a gun designed for hunting animals, but for shooting men. As a former Marine Corps sharpshooter, Oswald knows the difference, just as he also knows how to clean, maintain, load, aim, and accurately fire such a weapon.

Of all the amazing things happening in the world in March 1963, this simple mail-order purchase would seem to have little significance. In fact, nothing will have a greater impact on world events than this nineteen-dollar Italian war-surplus bolt-action rifle.

The weapon arrives on March 25. Marina complains that they could have used the money for food. But Oswald is pleased with the purchase and gets in the habit of riding the bus to a dry riverbed for target practice against the levee.

On March 31, while Marina is hanging diapers on the clothesline to dry, Oswald steps into the backyard dressed all in black. His new pistol is tucked into his belt. He brandishes the rifle in one hand and holds copies of two Communist newspapers in the other. He demands that an amused Marina take photographs of him. He plans to send them to the Worker and the Militant to show that he is prepared to do anything to wage cla.s.s warfare.

On April 6, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His Communist rants have grown offensive to his coworkers, and his bosses claim that he has become undependable.

On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides it's time to kill someone.

APRIL 9, 1963.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MIDDAY.

The man with seven months to live is talking to Winston Churchill.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy stands in the White House Rose Garden before a large, warmhearted crowd. Churchill, the ninety-two-year-old former prime minister whose inspirational courage helped save Britain during World War II, watches live by satellite from his home in London. The purpose of this Rose Garden gathering is to make Winston Churchill an American citizen-the only foreign leader since Lafayette to be so honored.

"A son of America though a subject of Britain," Kennedy begins his speech, referring to the fact that Churchill's mother, nee Jenny Jerome, was a U.S. citizen, "has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American nation."

Churchill's fifty-one-year-old son, Randolph, stands at JFK's side. Jackie Kennedy stands directly behind her husband. The Rose Garden is filled with diplomats and acquaintances from the United States and England. The president's father, Joseph, who served as amba.s.sador to Great Britain just prior to the Second World War, watches from a wheelchair inside the White House, the elder Kennedy having experienced a stroke two years prior.

But even as John Kennedy stands before this idyllic gathering, seeing the warmth and smiles that come with honoring such a distinguished and legendary world leader, his thoughts are never far from another "Churchill"-and another war that is gaining steam.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who first sent American soldiers to Vietnam to stem the flow of communism in Southeast Asia. But it was John Kennedy who ordered a gradual escalation in the number of troops since taking office, hoping to ensure that Vietnam did not fall to communism and thus perhaps begin a domino effect that would see other Asian nations turn their backs on democracy.

But Kennedy's good intentions have gone awry. The handful of American "advisers" in Vietnam has now swelled to almost sixteen thousand pilots and soldiers. American pilots are dropping napalm firebombs from the sky to destroy the Viet Cong army that is now fighting the U.S.-backed Saigon regime. Thousands of Viet Cong soldiers have been killed-as have thousands of innocent Vietnamese peasants. "The charred bodies of children and babies have made pathetic piles in the middle of the remains of the marketplace," the a.s.sociated Press reported after one such bombing incident.

American pilots fly hundreds of missions over Vietnam every month. A systematic process of defoliation has begun, with American airplanes spraying chemicals over the jungle to kill all vegetation that might hide enemy soldiers. Of course, the crops of many innocent farmers are destroyed in the process. This "scorched earth" policy will eventually come back to haunt the United States in a number of ways.

The CIA has joined in the fight in Vietnam, conducting covert search-and-destroy missions in the Communist north. Gunners aboard American helicopters have free rein to open fire on the peasants who turn and run when they see Hueys come sweeping in over the treetops. The a.s.sumption is that the farmers run because they are the enemy, not that they might be superst.i.tious and terrified about aircraft that have suddenly invaded the skies above their primitive villages.

John Kennedy believes that America needs to end the Vietnam conflict-though he is not quite ready to go public with this. "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam," he will tell Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Charles Bartlett off the record. "Those people hate us. They are going to throw our a.s.ses out of there at any point. But I can't give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to reelect me."