Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (3 page)

While he grew to manhood, his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, amassed a
considerable fortune. By age twenty-five, Joe Kennedy had gained control
of a bank in East Boston. By adroit investments in real estate, the stock
market, and the film industry-and perhaps some bootlegging moneyKennedy built an empire worth an estimated $250 million.

Jack, as the future president was called, attended only the best schools,
beginning with the Choate School in Connecticut, where he won an award
for best combining sports and scholastics. While he graduated near the
bottom of his class, he nevertheless was selected as the man "most likely
to succeed."

A bout with jaundice forced him to drop out of college, but upon
recovery, he joined his older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., at Harvard.
Maintaining only a C average, Kennedy concentrated on sports, particularly football.

A somewhat sickly child, Kennedy had continuing bouts with illness
compounded by a football injury that aggravated an already-weakened
spinal column. For the rest of his life, he suffered recurring back problems. In an effort to recuperate, Kennedy left school during his junior year
to travel in Europe, where his father had been appointed U.S. ambassador
to Great Britain after generous contributions to Franklin Roosevelt's election campaign. After war broke out, Ambassador Kennedy was forced to
resign because of his undisguised admiration for Germany's Nazi regime.

As a result of this trip and the contact he made with major British
political figures, young Kennedy returned to write a senior thesis about
England's complacent attitudes just before World War II. This thesis was
well received at Harvard and later was rewritten to become the best-selling
book, Why, England Slept.

He began to show interest in a writing career, but was interrupted by
joining the U.S. Navy two months before the December 7, 1941, attack
on Pearl Harbor by Japan. Early in the war, Kennedy served as an
intelligence officer in Washington, but was transferred to the South Pacific after J. Edgar Hoover told his father about young Kennedy's love affair
with a suspected Nazi agent.

In the summer of 1943, Kennedy was in command of a Navy patrol
boat, the PT-109. During a patrol in the Solomon Islands, the boat was
struck and broken in half by a Japanese destroyer, the only such incident
during the war. Although some negligence appeared to be involved,
Kennedy went on to become a hero after saving the life of one of his men
and helping to arrange his crewmen's rescue. He pulled his wounded chief
engineer, Patrick McMahon, to a nearby island by swimming for four
hours with the man on his back held in place by gripping a strap of the
man's life jacket between his teeth. Later, Kennedy arranged for local
natives to alert Navy officials to the groups' location in enemy-held
territory. Soon they were all rescued.

The story hit the front page of the New York Times and Kennedy's name
became well known in Boston. While recovering from his ordeal, Kennedy
learned that his older brother had been killed while flying a secret mission
over Europe. The political aspirations of his father now fell on Jack
Kennedy. After the war, a reluctant Kennedy ran for and won a House seat
from Massachusetts.

In later years, Joe Kennedy was quoted as saying: "I told him Joe was
dead and it was his responsibility to run for Congress. He didn't want to.
But I told him he had to."

With the Kennedy name and Kennedy money behind him, Kennedy
easily won two more elections to Congress. Then, in 1952, he defeated
Henry Cabot Lodge to become junior senator from Massachusetts.

In 1954, his back condition forced him to use crutches and Kennedy
underwent dangerous and painful back surgery. While recuperating, he
wrote Profiles in Courage, a book detailing how past senators had defied
public opionion. This book, actually written by associates such as Theodore Sorensen, helped identify Kennedy with political courage in the
minds of voters.

It was during this bedridden convalescence that Kennedy was conveniently absent during the stormy Senate debates on Joseph McCarthy's
censure. In fact, Kennedy refused to take sides on the issue.

Despite an uninspiring senatorial career, by 1956 Kennedy's name was
brought up as a possible running mate for Democratic presidential hopeful
Adlai Stevenson. Although edged out as vice presidential candidate by
Estes Kefauver, a graceful concession speech caused Kennedy's political
stock to rise to new heights.

With an eye toward the 1960 election, Kennedy and his supporters went
all out to ensure an impressive victory in his 1958 Senate reelection
campaign in Massachusetts. Indeed, he won by the largest margin in the
state's history. By 1960, Kennedy was ready for the Democratic presidential nomination, but there were hurdles to overcome. One of these was the
fact he was a Catholic and no Catholic had ever been elected president. He overcame this problem by entering-and winning-a series of state primary elections. In West Virginia, with 95 percent Prostestant voters,
Kennedy beat Senator Hubert Humphrey handily, thanks, according to FBI
reports, to large organized crime donations made through Frank Sinatra.

At the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy was
challenged only by conservative Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. Despite a late "draft Adlai Stevenson" movement, Kennedy won on the first
ballot by 806 votes to Johnson's 409. The pragmatic Kennedy immediately
knew that conservative Democrats were needed to win against Republican
Richard Nixon, so he forged a temporary coalition by selecting the defeated Johnson as his vice presidential running mate, despite objections
from labor and liberals. There was no thought of Johnson's qualifications
as president should anything happen to Kennedy. It was sheer spur-of-themoment political tactics.

In his acceptance speech, Kennedy set the tone for his campaign and his
presidency:

... we stand today on the edge of a new frontier-the frontier of the
1960s . . . Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and
space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of
ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
It would be easier to shrink back from that frontier, to look to the safe
mediocrity of the past ... But I believe the times demand invention,
innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be new
pioneers on that new frontier.

Nixon, and his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge (whom Kennedy had
defeated in the 1952 Massachusetts Senate race), tried to raise the issue of
experience during the ensuing 1960 election campaign. "Experience Counts"
was their slogan, despite the fact that both Nixon and Kennedy had been
elected to Congress in 1946 and that Nixon was only four years older than
JFK. The slogan mostly was to call attention to Nixon's role as vice
president to the popular Ike Eisenhower.

Again the issue of Kennedy's Catholicism came up. Fundamentalist
preachers regaled their congregations with the spectre of a Vatican-dominated
White House. The issue prompted Kennedy to tell a meeting of Protestant
ministers in Houston:

Because I am a Catholic and no Catholic has never been elected
president, it is apparently necessary for me to state once again-not
what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to
me, but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America
where separation of church and state is absolute-where no Catholic
prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and
no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.

Perhaps the real turning point in the 1960 election came in September
when Kennedy and Nixon met in the first televised debates in American
history. The four debates were viewed by nearly half the population of the
nation and no one denies that Kennedy emerged the victor-although radio
listeners judged Nixon the winner.

The debates were TV show business, prefiguring the slick marketing of
candidates of today. It was all image-Kennedy with a good makeup job
appeared robust and self-confident while Nixon, suffering from little makeup
and five-o'clock shadow, appeared uneasy and unsure of himself. Their
images aside, there was very little difference in the positions of the two
candidates on most issues.

Ironically, when Kennedy called for support of the Cuban exiles in their
attempts to regain Cuba from Castro, he was propounding the very program that Nixon had been pushing for many months. However, Nixon felt
compelled to attack Kennedy's suggestions as irresponsible since "the
covert operation [the Bay of Pigs Invasion] had to be protected at all
costs" and, thus, Nixon came out opposing his own plan.

On Election Day, Kennedy won, but by one of the slimmest margins in
American history. He polled 34,227,096 votes to Nixon's 34,108,546-a
margin of 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent. Affluent whites, college graduates,
women, Protestants, farmers, senior citizens, business and professional
people mostly voted against this eastern liberal.

On January 20, 1961, standing coatless in bristling twenty-degree temperature in Washington, Kennedy took the oath of office from Chief
Justice Earl Warren (who would later head the commission looking into his
death) and announced: "The torch has been passed to a new, generation of
Americans ..... Later in his speech, he issued his famous challenge:
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your
country." (His original text carried the word "will" but Kennedy had
marked it out and substituted "can.")

Oddly enough, Kennedy's highest ratings in the polls came just after the
disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion as Americans rallied to their president.
About 82 percent of those polled expressed approval of his handling of the
situation, which prompted Kennedy to remark: "My God, it's as bad as
Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get."

By the fall of 1963, polls showed Kennedy's popularity had dropped to
59 percent, largely due to his stand on civil rights. However, his desire to
negotiate with the communist world, his attack on the tax havens of the
wealthy corporations, and his attempts to regain civilian control over the
Pentagon and its intelligence agencies also engendered hatred and fear
among the most powerful cliques of this country.

Newsweek magazine reported that no Democrat in the White House had
ever been so disliked in the South. A theater marquee in Georgia adver tised the movie PT-109 with these words on its marquee: "See how the
Japs almost got Kennedy."

Kennedy supporters were looking toward the 1964 election, hoping for a
mandate that would give Kennedy's ambitious programs much needed
popular support. It never happened.

In the fall of 1963, he went to Texas.

Kennedy had carried Texas by the slimmest of margins in 1960, largely
through the efforts of Lyndon Johnson. He needed the state badly in 1964,
particularly if his hopes of achieving a large mandate were to be realized.
According to Texas governor John Connally, Kennedy first talked of
coming to Texas in the summer of 1962. He again mentioned it in the
summer of 1963.

According to former Senator Ralph Yarborough, he was contacted by
Kennedy aides in mid-1963 and was asked what could be done to help the
president's image in Texas. Yarborough told this author: "I told them the
best thing he could do was to bring Jackie to Texas and let all those women
see her. And that's what he did, although I thought it was premature. I
didn't think he was going to do that until 1964. "

So, in an effort to enhance his image and to raise money, Kennedy,
along with his wife, made the fateful journey to Texas in November 1963.
On November 21, they visited Houston and San Antonio, both cities with
heavy defense and space industries. There Kennedy came out strong for
defense and NASA expenditures. The crowds loved it. That evening, he
flew to Fort Worth, landing at Carswell Air Force Base and driving to the
historic Hotel Texas for the night.

In his hotel suite, original paintings by Van Gogh and Monet had been
hung on the walls in an effort to impress the Kennedys with Texas
sophistication.

The morning of November 22, Kennedy spoke at a breakfast in the hotel
sponsored by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Beforehand, more
than a thousand persons crowded in front of the hotel stood in light
drizzling rain to hear the President make brief remarks. As the presidential
party prepared to leave the hotel, Vice President Lyndon Johnson arrived
to introduce his sister, Lucia Alexander, to Kennedy. Reflecting on the
surprisingly warm welcome he had received in Texas, Johnson later was to
recall Kennedy as saying: "We're going to carry two states next year if we
don't carry any others: Massachusetts and Texas." Johnson wrote in The
Vantage Point that these were the last words spoken to him by Kennedy.

As the rainclouds were breaking up, Kennedy drove back to Carswell
for the fifteen-minute flight to Dallas. Fort Worth and Dallas are so close
that even before reaching its full climb, Air Force One began its descent to
Dallas. Looking out the plane window, Kennedy commented to Governor
Connally: "Our luck is holding. It looks as if we'll get sunshine."