Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
As a political matter, President Kennedy’s survival had taken an already uncertain electoral map and made it more fluid. Before Dallas, it had been assumed that the election would be close. Nothing had changed the White House perspective, even the bullets of an assassin.
One thing had taken a turn, however. John Kennedy had made separate comments to his brother, Kenneth O’Donnell and Theodore Sorensen that maybe he would surprise them all and “not go through it again.” It was a trial balloon, said without conviction, but still, it bothered them. They understood, however, that being shot at by professional assassins is something that changes a man.
Jacqueline Kennedy had been traumatized by Dallas even more than her husband. She could not accept any more public invitations until further notice, said her new social secretary Liz Carpenter in such a way that it seemed untoward to even think of asking a follow-up question. In reality, the First Lady had practically moved out of the White House by January 1, heading with her children to Wexford, the newly-constructed family home on 39 acres in the Middlesburg, Virginia area, a place where the President himself had only been twice before. After a week there, however, she felt the entire area had been too commonly identified as a Kennedy retreat, and she began a cycle of visiting several locations short-term, moving out almost before she and the family had settled in, trying to keep her whereabouts and those of her children a mystery. To calm her decidedly manic behavior, she had been prescribed sedatives by her husband’s personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell.
And so, it was against this backdrop that Jackie Kennedy told John Kennedy that she was going into virtual hiding and that she expected him to curtail his own public activities as well. He could still do his news conferences and Rose Garden activities with guests if he wanted, but only if Bobby approved of security. Most importantly, she instructed him to stop taking risks outside the gates. No more wading into crowds, no more convertibles, no more windows for assassins. “I started to argue with her,” Kennedy explained in a 1969 interview, “but I thought she was right.”
The First Lady further demanded of the President that there would be no planned travel or public appearances for either of them for the entire month of January. They needed time to assess the situation. The President pointed out that he had spent plenty of time lately assessing the situation. “Not with me,” she countered.
With her husband's agreement secured, Jackie left with Caroline and John Jr. The President instructed his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to make certain there was a daily note on his desk with the family’s current whereabouts. He also wanted to make certain he spoke to his wife and children every day. He instructed her to see to it that it was scheduled.
President Kennedy then turned his attention to the January 8 State of the Union speech he was mandated to give to Congress. It had only a short mention of Dallas in it, a reference to the strength of America being tested again, as the country again proved itself to be stronger than any adversity thrown in its path. He talked about his budget, cutting a full $1 billion in Defense Department spending, owing mostly to Secretary McNamara’s campaign for better procurement practices and a shutdown of unneeded military bases. The total number of Americans working to support the Cold War effort was 990,000, a number that represented cuts to the civilian employment in the Defense Department by seventeen thousand employees, so determined was Kennedy to bring that number below one million. The President also cut the Atomic Energy Commission, limiting production of enriched uranium by twenty-five percent and shutting down four plutonium piles. Kennedy also called for more attention to the nation’s impoverished citizens, swift congressional passage of a civil rights bill, and a tax cut.
It was a businesslike speech, not a great one, certainly not by Kennedy standards. If anything, the rapid criticism delivered by Republican officials did, however, show how fast the country was moving on beyond Dallas. Said House G.O.P. leader Charles Halleck: “I hope that the administration’s newfound enthusiasm for economy is as great in June as it is in January.” House Minority Whip Les Arends called the President’s speech “patently a 1964 political campaign document.”
With the Union addressed about its state, and Jackie and the children in motion, Jack Kennedy hunkered down in the White House. The entire inner circle began to refer to the Oval Office as “the Foxhole.” The President clearly displayed signs of what we call today post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He had tried to ignore or laugh off his feelings in November and December. Now, as the rest of the nation seemed to be turning a corner, he was turning inward.
A major snowstorm turned into a blizzard for portions of the northeastern United States between January 11-16 of 1964. All of the major cities from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia, New York City and Boston reported about ten inches of snowfall or more.
For those five days in Washington, D.C., it was so difficult to get around that the President could actually cancel nearly all of his meetings and obligations and just get some work done. Plus, he was in a lot of pain, and the cold seemed to aggravate his back. The bad weather did not, however, prevent one of Kennedy’s many lovers, Mary Pinchot Meyer, from stopping by twice, according to the testimony of Evelyn Lincoln, who had made sure the visits were not recorded in the White House log.
Jackie was snowed in up in Massachusetts, chain smoking L&M filtered cigarettes and trying to calm down. It didn’t help that on the first day of the blizzard, Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a report finding that cigarettes can cause cancer and urging all smokers to stop, advice the First Lady ignored.
Health issues were often hidden away from prying eyes in the Kennedy White House. What no one in America knew at the time was how important Dr. Travell had become to the health of the President and First Lady. During the fall of 1961, Travell had been giving the President up to several injections daily of procaine, a local anesthetic similar to Novocain. He was under her personal treatment for an adrenal ailment he lived with since his youth, constant high fevers, cholesterol levels that by today’s standards would be catastrophic, the inability to get a good night’s sleep, and colon, prostate and stomach problems.
The wide variety of pills and shots that Travell was administering to the President of the United States for these issues filled out the “medicine administration record” she kept. Yet it was not a complete accounting, not by far.
Dr. Max Jacobson had entered John Kennedy’s life back during the 1960 campaign. Known informally among patients as “Dr. Feelgood,” he had continued to make house calls to the White House and even shadowed the President on trips to foreign capitals, such as Paris and Vienna. Jacobson’s injections were also being enjoyed by the First Lady.
At Bobby’s request, the President's medications were submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for analysis. The agency reported back that Jacobson’s injections included amphetamines and steroids. The President told his brother, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”
Based on testimony of a nurse who had worked with Jacobson, the injections appear to have also included hormones, vitamins, enzymes and even animal cells. The result was what another client, author Truman Capote, called “instant euphoria,” a condition where one might feel he was flying like Superman, able to go seventy-two hours without sleep. The bottom line was that at least some of the “vigor” that was so embraced as a description of JFK’s activity level was chemically induced.
A future Congress eventually raised concerns about the potential national security consequences of such a concoction. These shots, while alleviating pain, made their recipients experience an exaggerated sense of personal power, something that Kennedy might have experienced often, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis, given that he took them throughout the years he’d been in office. Other side-effects included hypertension, impaired judgment and elevated anxiety. Between doses, mood swings were common. Over a long period, the dosages the President had been using could produce paranoia, schizophrenia, memory loss and even hallucinations.
In the beginning, both Jack and Jackie Kennedy were making use of the physician’s injections at least once a week and sometimes as often as three to four times weekly. Over the years, they had tapered off the regular use of Dr. Jacobson’s injections, at one point quitting altogether. It was too much. They needed to be in control.
But that was before someone had tried to kill him. JFK picked up the phone in the side office and told the operator to get him an outside line. Now he just needed to take the edge off and prepare himself for battle.
Feeling energetic thanks to a snowbound Washington, D.C., with a schedule that had been cleared by his wife’s decree, John Kennedy reached out to the usual suspects. He invited the team from Hyannis Port to the Oval Office for lunch. The subject was the 1964 election.
To a man, Robert Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell, Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, Dave Powers and Teddy Kennedy thought the President might be summoning them to tell them he would not be running for reelection. “First of all,” said the President, “I have made no decision yet on whether or not to run. I want to see where we stand politically.”
Before Dallas, when they did discuss the political situation, the Kennedys and their team of advisers believed the Republican nominee would be Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a plainspoken Westerner whom the right wing of his party adored. He had announced his candidacy on January 3, describing the choice ahead between the Democrats and Republicans as a stark one. “As a general rule, one party has emphasized individual liberty and the other has favored the extension of government power,” claimed Goldwater. “I’m convinced that today a majority of the American people believe in the essential emphasis on individual liberty.” Goldwater then famously added the impromptu words that would become his campaign slogan. “And in your heart, you know I’m right.”
What Goldwater could not possibly understand as he uttered those words was how much his likely opponent (and friend) John Kennedy agreed with him on the subject. Wherever Kennedy had been politically at the start of his term in 1961, by early 1964 he wanted to accomplish only one thing before he left office, whether it be a year later in 1965 or, God and voters willing, early 1969. As much as anybody in politics, he wanted to curb the power of government to defy civilian authority.
Goldwater still had to win the nomination from a Republican party that tended to support mainstream conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower over political ideologues like Robert Taft. This meant that New York’s liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller and moderate Governor Bill Scranton out of Pennsylvania had an outside shot at the nomination, too. O’Donnell said he wouldn’t put it past the Republicans to run Dick Nixon again either, although Nixon had lost the California governor’s race in 1962 and declared his retirement from politics.
“It’ll be Goldwater,” stated Bobby, cutting the debate short. “At least we have to plan as if it will be. How do we assess his… electability?”
The consensus was uncertainty. Before shots were fired, it was going to be possible to paint Goldwater as a reckless man who could only drag the nation into trouble. Now, on their watch, the Kennedy administration had dragged the people close to a nuclear war one year and barely avoided a public execution of the President the next. Goldwater might start to look like the conservative choice in more ways than one.
President Kennedy listened to it all and summed up. “We can beat Barry if we can keep things calm and keep the economic numbers solid. If Dallas becomes an issue, I don’t know. I think it could be as close as ’60, with a chance that one of us gets more electoral votes and the other gets more popular votes. The nation is stirred up and restless, and we’re in a street fight.” No one in the room disagreed with his assessment.
The discussion pivoted to what, if anything, needed to get done now, regardless of the President's reelection decision. Bobby said they needed to form a committee to run the campaign.
The President shook his head, bemused. “First, as someone with no use for committees, I formed all of you into a committee up in Hyannis Port, and then we formed Earl’s commission, and now we have reconvened the original committee to form a new committee. Maybe we should adjourn while we’re ahead, gentlemen.”
Bobby continued with the news that he had cleared a name just in case. It would be called the Committee to Re-Elect Kennedy. It was pointed out that the acronym sounded like CREEK, as in something you were up without a paddle.
The meeting adjourned when the President was called into an urgent national security briefing. Panama had just broken diplomatic ties with the United States. John Kennedy, always able to compartmentalize, dispatched the political meeting and was on to the next.
The reality of the United States presidential election was set by the calendar. Primaries and caucuses happened as the established order had set them, and the 1964 election would happen on Tuesday, November 3.
Woven into this tapestry of national politics were the parallel tracks of the investigation of the Dallas ambush.
Even as the Warren Commission began its work, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade moved aggressively to prosecute Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission and the district attorney’s office had been on a collision course, and neither one had blinked.
The nation was following the investigation like a soap opera narrative at odds with itself. On the one hand, there was the powerful, establishment-supported Warren Commission, quietly and soberly gathering its evidence within the reassuring confines of the nation’s capital. This was the cerebral approach.
The visceral side of the equation could be found in Dallas, where the loud trial of the assassin was boisterously in full bloom. Every day brought new attempts at headline- grabbing and new heights of grandstanding to get there. The stakes were life and death here in this rough-hewn Texas city.
One young man in a cowboy hat, driving a pickup truck slowly past the courthouse, said it best: “You screw up in Washington, all you get is spanked. But you mess up in Texas, you’re gonna fry.”
Robert Kennedy used back channels with the Soviet Union’s U.N. ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to craft a compromise during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He trusted the concept and, because he did, he made it work. Now, in 1964, it was about to use him.
It would be too harsh to describe John Kennedy as playing the Hamlet role (“To run or not to run…”) but he had not ended the speculation either. He refused to state that he would be a candidate for president in 1964, and because he wouldn’t, it left open the real possibility that he would take a pass. Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington were all positioning themselves to jump in if Kennedy bowed out.
Refusing to declare too early was a long-held tradition among incumbent Presidents, but this was different. It felt like Kennedy might just walk away, and if he did, who could blame him?
There were powerful men who watched this situation in early 1964 and found it too unsettled for their liking. And so they decided to move the process along through a back channel. They chose Edwin Guthman, press spokesman for the Justice Department and a close friend of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Guthman came to his boss on the morning of January 24. He told Bobby he’d been phoned by a man who refused to give his identity yet clearly came from the intelligence community based on whom he knew and details he knew about multiple operations. The man said that some “concerned patriots” had a message for President Kennedy and Guthman should be their point-of-access.
As Guthman explained the threatening conversation, President Kennedy had a week to announce his intention not to seek reelection. He could blame it on his personal feelings about what happened in Dallas or a desire to spend more time with his family. It made no difference. He just had to get out of the race fast.
“Please, Ed,” Bobby said with fierce irony, “let me know how my brother and I might have the pleasure of communicating with these new friends.”
Guthman informed Bobby no response was needed. The messenger had told him, “My friends and I will know whether he heard our message based on the President's actions, and we will react accordingly, in our best interests, exercising our Constitutional rights as free Americans.”
Kennedy took a moment to process this phrasing, thinking it sounded like the rhetoric of the extreme hard right, the way people like LeMay and his crowd would talk. He asked Guthman a series of questions designed to determine how real this message was. After all, the White House routinely received threats from all manner of cranks and dismissed them as the cost of doing business. Of course, this was before Dallas.
The attorney general immediately went to see the President in person. He laid out the circumstances of Guthman’s message and engaged in spirited speculation about who this messenger might be. When Bobby told him about the demand that he immediately take himself out of the presidential race, his brother’s stare grew hard.
“Nice of them to ask this time,” said President Kennedy.
Interviewed repeatedly about this moment, both under oath and in memoirs, JFK never deviated from his description of the impact it had on him. “I had been feeling better for almost a week at this point, starting to see some daylight,” said Kennedy. “This news from the attorney general, well, I hadn’t felt that way since the shooting happened.”
By February of 1964, not quite three months after Dallas, the deadline imparted by the conspirators to Guthman had just passed, and the President still had not decided what to do about it. He and Bobby discussed one option, that the threat should be made public, but rejected it because it would inflame the nation’s mood. Besides, it would be difficult to prove, and the White House would look paranoid and shaken — not exactly the image required for the times.
The President told his brother that he would think about it a bit longer. “If I don’t run, there’s no problem,” he explained. “If I do run, then we see what they do before we react. Nobody wins if all hell breaks loose. It’s possible they’re bluffing.”
Before Bobby left, JFK pointed at the
New York Times
front page. The Big Apple was in a turmoil over the arrival of a British rock-and-roll sensation called the Beatles. They’d be arriving in just days now to play on the
Ed Sullivan Show
Sunday night. The issue of the moment seemed to be providing security against mobs of screaming girls. To better understand this, the President called in Pamela Turnure and Mimi Alford, two young women with White House jobs, and had Mrs. Lincoln put on a 45 rpm record, a song called “Love Me Do,” that had been sent up by the mailroom at Pierre Salinger’s request. Both men teased the young women about how much they liked the music but admitted it did have a lot of energy.
The Beatles were coming to America whether America was ready for them or not. Predictions were everywhere that Ed Sullivan would attract the highest ratings in his show’s history, even higher than they had been for Elvis Presley’s appearances. There would be more security outside and inside CBS-TV Studio 50 (later renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater) than there currently was at the White House.
“Great,” said the President. “Maybe it would be safe for me to see them.” JFK had taken lately to complaining to his younger brother that he was a virtual prisoner in the White House, with the heavy security and his wife's declared moratorium on public trips. Now, JFK was looking to come out of his shell, even if Jackie and the security teams said he couldn’t. Bobby took this as a sign of progress, though in the brothers' typical way of joking with each other, he wouldn't show it.
“Don’t go to any theaters, Jack,” Bobby deadpanned. “You know what happened to Lincoln.”
And, yet, that is exactly what President John F. Kennedy did on February 9, 1964. He went to the theater.
The Beatles played two sets of their music that seemed the perfect medicine to lift the national depression. Sullivan smiled, girls screamed and, during the second set, Kennedy was escorted backstage, where he watched along with Bobby and Ethel.
The Kennedy brothers had decided to send the conspirators a message, publicly, that they, too, could keep a secret and pull off an operation. Kenny O’Donnell knew someone who knew someone, and discrete calls were made from secure lines. It came so fast and from so far out of left field that absolutely no one saw it coming.
Millions of Americans and nearly everyone under twenty-five, it seems, remembers the night when the President of the United States appeared on the
Ed Sullivan Show
to greet the Beatles after their second set as the greatest jolt of pop cultural intensity they’d ever experienced. Seeing the Beatles was beyond huge to millions and millions of people. Seeing the President smiling was an unbeatable relief. Together, the two images were off the charts. It was, said Sammy Davis Jr. to
Newsweek
, “magic times magic, man.”
“I wanted to come up to New York to welcome you young men to the United States,” grinned the President as the shocked Fab Four shook his hand on live television. “Now, which one of you is the leader?” Kennedy held out an over-large gold key that had been given him by a stage hand.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney exchanged glances. Neither one wanted to discuss this with the President of the United States. Lennon grinned back. “We don’t have a leader in the Beatles,” he declared.
Kennedy did not miss a beat. “Probably safer that way.” He winked and smiled and that photo of the President laughing with the Beatles as they all stood together seemed to instantly dispel the rumors that he was shaken and brooding in the Oval Office.
Later, after the show, the President posed for a photo on the stage with the Beatles that did not include the gold key. In fact, by this point, both George Harrison and Ringo Starr had already changed out of their trademark Beatle suits. This is the image that everyone remembers. Kennedy smiling broadly, surrounded by four slightly stunned Mop Tops, an arm on the backs of Harrison and his bandmate John Lennon. Heralding how “The Wild 1964 Election Begins,”
Top Story
ran it as the cover of its February 24 issue, which quickly sold out on the newsstand, went into a second printing, and sold out again.
Whether President Kennedy had just tweaked the treasonous conspirators who wanted him dead, it was clear he couldn’t have picked a better coming-out party. The record shows that the President of the United States did not look afraid at all and seemed to be enjoying himself as much as these four English lads from Liverpool.