Mary's Mosaic (57 page)

T
he Kennedy antipathy toward Lyndon Johnson was well known. “A dreadful mistake” had indeed taken place when Johnson manipulated himself into the position of vice president. Mary had to have known of both Jack’s and Bobby’s animosity toward him, and she likely knew they intended to dump him prior to the 1964 election. Lyndon Johnson had long since become a political liability. His involvement in scandals with his aide Bobby Baker and business tycoon Billie Sol Estes were about to make headlines. By 1963, Billie Sol Estes had been convicted on more than fifty counts of fraud. Leaks from prison suggested he had paid off the vice president on any number
of occasions. Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary, noting the implications, asked the president three days before Dallas (November 19) who his choice for a running mate might be. “He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, ‘At this time, I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.’”
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During the summer of 1963,
Life
magazine had been developing a major feature story concerning Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his scandalous dealings with Bobby Baker. The in-depth story was scheduled for publication in late November, right after the president’s trip to Dallas. The story, according to James Wagenvoord, at the time the chief assistant to
Life
’s Publishing Projects Director, Phil Wootton, had been researched and written by members of the senior staff at
Life
who had a direct line to Bobby Kennedy. The article would be published without bylines.

“It was all coming from Bobby,” recalled Wagenvoord. “It was going to blow Johnson right out of the water. We had him. He was done. Bobby Baker had taken the fall for Johnson. Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket, and would have probably been facing prison time.”
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In fact, on the very day of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the Senate Rules Committee on Capitol Hill was meeting, presided over by Senator B. Everett Jordan of North Carolina. During the proceedings, Senator John Williams of Delaware—who in October had already begun investigating the activities of Lyndon Johnson’s close aide Bobby Baker—was being given documented testimony from a panicked Don Reynolds, a close associate of Bobby Baker’s, who had been asked by Baker to arrange Lyndon Johnson’s life insurance policy. The Reynolds bombshell was that he had seen Bobby Baker with a suitcase containing what Baker alleged was a $100,000 payoff to Lyndon Johnson for his role in securing the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) contract for General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. Reynolds also stated that he had refused several attempts by Johnson to buy his silence. However, Reynolds’s testimony abruptly ended when news reached the committee that President Kennedy had been assassinated. What was clear was Reynolds’s information would not only have ended Lyndon Johnson’s political career, it also would have resulted in a criminal indictment.

In November 2009, former
Life
magazine chief assistant James Wagenvoord revealed to John Simkin at Spartacus Educational the logistics of what took place at
Life
immediately subsequent to the Kennedy assassination: “The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24th (the magazine
would have made it to the newsstands on November 26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death, research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film.”
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Wagenvoord further substantiated in an interview for this book how the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was controlling
Life
magazine at the time. “All of our people would always go down to Washington to be debriefed by the CIA after they did big world trips before they came home,” recalled Wagenvoord. “That was our news source. A lot of the high-level executives in publishing companies had been involved with the OS during the war. The whole publishing thing was hooked into the government so tightly, in the same way the Internet companies are now.”
⁶⁶

Edward K. Thompson, a senior editor at
Life
during 1963, was, according to Wagenvoord, a close friend of Allen Dulles’s. Wagenvoord remembered being introduced to Dulles in Thompson’s office, having been called to the office to deliver a $10,000 check made out to the former CIA director. “We paid Allen Dulles $10,000 for a nothing story,” recalled Wagenvoord. But that event paled alongside what Wagenvoord witnessed at
Life
’s offices on Sunday morning, November 24—
before
Oswald was gunned down on national television.

As James Wagenvoord stood outside his boss’s office, a man in a gray suit pushed through the glass door that opened from the elevator bank. He handed Wagenvoord a lumpy manila envelope. “This is Oswald material,” the man said, giving Wagenvoord the package as he flashed his FBI credentials, and then quickly left.
⁶⁷
Wagenvoord remembered opening the envelope and taking out a small, blue plastic reel that appeared to be a short 16-millimeter film, which he viewed later that day. The unsolicited footage, which had been shot months earlier by a New Orleans television news cameraman, was of Oswald handing out pro-Castro flyers on Canal Street near the World Trade Center in New Orleans, an event that had been staged to falsely portray Oswald as a Communist sympathizer, which, of course, he wasn’t. “An hour later [after the film arrived at
Life
] the Fat Lady sang an encore. Jack Ruby shot Oswald,” said Wagenvoord. The government’s second conspiracy, the cover-up, had already penetrated the major media outlets, including
Life.
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W
ithin seventy-two hours after the events in Dallas (and one day after the president’s funeral), President Lyndon Johnson signed a new National
Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 273) that initiated the escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The reader will recall from the previous chapter that President Kennedy had created a strategy for America’s extrication from Southeast Asia, which was formalized by the then top secret policy document National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), issued on October 11, 1963, ordering the removal of a thousand troops before the end of 1963, and the rest by the end of 1965.
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On the afternoon of Kennedy’s funeral, however, Johnson met in a closed-door session with Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA director John McCone, and Vietnam ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (whom President Kennedy had already planned to fire). “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” Johnson declared. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”
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A month later at a White House Christmas Eve reception, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Johnson told them, “Just let me get elected [in 1964], and then you can have your war.”
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As 1964 unfolded, Mary, along with the rest of the country, would witness a horrific sea change taking shape. In January, the Joint Chiefs sent their new president a memo urging him to formally increase the U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia, as well as to consider a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, ostensibly as a strategy to win the war more quickly. Johnson willingly complied. By year’s end, there would be more than twenty-three thousand troops in the region, well more than the sixteen thousand advisers present when Kennedy was assassinated. To get the bombing campaign against North Vietnam started, something else was needed: the perception by congressional leaders that it was warranted.

The so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident became the pretext to do just that—a contrived event during a stormy night in August in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, the destroyer USS
Maddox
, then operating within the framework of a program of joint U.S.–South Vietnamese covert operations against North Vietnam—the kind of covert actions encouraged and justified by NSAM 273—was attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats that were reacting to these covert operations by defending the territorial integrity of North Vietnam. This first of two reported events in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam was a light and inconclusive skirmish that inflicted no serious damage on the USS
Maddox.

Two days later, the USS
Maddox
and USS
Turner Joy
reported a second socalled torpedo boat attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. Following initial confusion on board the two ships, as well as in Washington, D.C., it was later ascertained
that the event reported on August 4 was a “phantom attack,” a nonevent in which the reporting vessels had mistaken low-lying clouds on their radar scopes during bad weather for enemy warships, and in which jumpy U.S. Navy sonarmen had imagined that they heard as many as nine torpedoes being launched against them by the “enemy.” President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara exaggerated the nature of the second “attack,” and falsely claimed U.S. Navy vessels, innocently operating on the high seas, had been attacked by Communist forces. This nefarious plan worked like a charm, to their everlasting discredit, and ultimately to America’s misfortune. A manipulated Congress, once again led to view the reported incident as an escalation in the global Cold War between East and West, responded with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—a blank check for President Johnson’s unlimited proliferation of a hot war in Vietnam. Sadly, a nonevent had been used as a casus belli to justify the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from a so-called technical advisory effort into a U.S.-led shooting war. With the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, President Kennedy’s 1963 policy of disengagement and withdrawal from Vietnam had irrevocably been overturned, just eight months after his assassination. Until its repeal in May 1970, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided the “legal” basis for all subsequent escalation and continuation of the Vietnam War by both President Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon.

Where was Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara—the ally who had so steadfastly stood with Jack Kennedy the previous October to formulate the end of such a senseless military debacle? What had happened to the brilliant, loyal tactician of Kennedy’s dream of peace in Southeast Asia? And why was he, McNamara, now walking obsequiously behind Johnson in his macho warmongering? McNamara, even in later life, when he realized it had all been so very wrong, would never answer that question. In an 2006 interview, author David Talbot confronted McNamara with the most singularly important question ever articulated regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964 and thereafter: “Why did he [McNamara] allow himself to become the brains of the war under LBJ after plotting with JFK to disengage from it?”

Despite a superficial public “mea culpa,” Robert McNamara would forever avoid any real accountability or responsibility. His answer to Talbot—”Oh, I don’t want to talk about that”
⁷²
—revealed once again his patronizing chief executive arrogance, as if the deaths of 3.8 million Vietnamese,
⁷³
as well as the deaths of more than 58,000 American combat soldiers (and an estimated
200,000 subsequent suicides of Vietnam veterans
⁵
) had no meaning in his equation. Such were “the best and the brightest” during the Cold War era.

That year, Mary could not have helped but witness McNamara’s betrayal of Kennedy’s peace agenda—a betrayal that permitted Lyndon Johnson’s reckless, destructive escalation to occur. It must have left her utterly demoralized to observe the White House, now inhabited by a ruthless, criminal cowboy, who, after a few years of being hammered by journalists—”Why were we in Vietnam?”—finally gave them his answer. At a private meeting with reporters, according to presidential historian Robert Dallek, President Lyndon Johnson offered his rejoinder: He casually “unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared, ‘This is why!’”
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It must have been so deeply reassuring for all those who would at some point meet their death in Vietnam, as well as for the ones who had already made “the ultimate sacrifice,” to finally comprehend the glorious, principled cause for which they were fighting and dying.

W
hatever her suspicions before the release of the Warren Report, Mary’s views had apparently made her a person of interest to someone. Author Nina Burleigh documented the fact that Mary’s “maid found the doors to the garden open on a January [1964] morning while Mary and her sons were upstairs asleep” in their house on Thirty-Fourth Street in Georgetown. Reportedly, Mary filed a report with the police. When she returned from being away the following summer, wrote Burleigh, Mary was sure someone had been in her house. There was also an incident in which Mary found a very heavy door ajar in her basement, “a door neither she nor her sons could open without help.” According to one Burleigh source, who remained anonymous, on more than one occasion Mary had wondered aloud, “What are they looking for in my house?” The incidents escalated throughout 1964. “She [Mary] did say to me she was scared about seeing somebody in her house,” said Mary’s friend Elizabeth Eisenstein in her interview with Burleigh. “She thought she had seen somebody leaving as she walked in. She was frightened.”
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