Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
It has become an axiom of political scandal that the cover-up is more damning than the crime. But in the articles of impeachment drafted to strip John Kennedy of his office, alleged crime and cover-up were both amply cited. Certainly the House Committee on the Judiciary wrote up a varied menu of high crimes and misdemeanors for the Senate to choose from when deciding whether to truncate Kennedy’s term.
The first draft of these articles became known as the “kitchen sink” impeachment by Democrats, who wanted to characterize the litany as a Republican fishing expedition. But no one doubted their chilling, dark power when rendered in the formal language of impeachment. They began directly:
These articles of impeachment are exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors. Resolved, that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.
The charges were broken into three categories: abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. The high crimes and misdemeanors, screamed the
New York Post
headlines, were “Sex, Drugs, Murder!”
There it was. The stakes were instantly back at Dallas levels of hysteria. The average person knew that John Kennedy screwed up, but a lot of people clung to liking him anyway. Their opinion wasn’t the issue now. Congress would take over, and many of its representatives believed that the President was guilty of something that was probably impeachable if they were in the mood to see it that way.
In retrospect, the articles as drafted were overkill, sloppily constructed, overlapping and unequal in importance. Yet, underneath the verbiage lay a chilling reality for the White House. Based on the Constitution itself, if only a single article made it out of the Judiciary Committee and was approved by the entire House of Representatives and then agreed to by the Senate, President Kennedy would be out of a job.
This came to be known in common terminology as “the sex article.” What the charges covered, however, were the improper relationships that jeopardized the security of the United States or even the life of the President through reckless behavior.
The abuse of power charges were, by far, the ones with the greatest traction among the public. They specifically included misuse of the FBI, something that was ironic at best, given the fact that the impeachment itself had been caused by the illegal leaking of FBI files against the President and, in some cases, the illegal wiretapping of citizens by the FBI. Still, on at least one instance, the bugging of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the President had authorized the wiretapping. He had done it to stop Hoover from leaking the very same files he had eventually leaked to damage Kennedy, but that was hardly an excuse. His only alibi, such as it was, was that he had given his approval through the attorney general, acting on his behalf, and no record existed of their conversation. The President of the United States had plausible deniability.
Kennedy was also accused of the misuse of the Secret Service, another irony given the organization’s poor job performance in Dallas in November 1963. The charges, however, predated that event for the most part, referring to the fact that Kennedy had forced the agents entrusted with his safety to look the other way when women were brought to the White House. Beyond even that, when prostitutes were brought in, it was argued that the agents were being asked to ignore personal knowledge of a crime being committed.
In the months since Dallas, Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden had become close to JFK, spending double-shifts more often than not. When asked about the other agents, Bolden replied, “There were agents that day in Dallas, who would not trade their lives for you, sir. I’m damn sorry to say that.” Kennedy replied that Bolden couldn’t be as sorry saying it as he was to be hearing it.
Beneath his usual wry veneer, the President was alarmed to hear his suspicions confirmed about some of the agents charged with protecting his life. What Bolden was suggesting went beyond simple dereliction of duty; it bordered on treason. Kennedy cared too much for Bolden personally to put him on the spot by asking him to name names, but he must have been visibly shaken. The following evening, he was surprised when the agent approached him at the entrance to the Oval Office, offering a folded slip of paper with three names handwritten inside. “If you need me to make some kind of a formal statement,” Bolden told him, “I’d be willing to do so, sir.”
Kennedy looked over the list, then regarded his friend warmly. “I don't think that will be necessary, Agent Bolden. Thank you for this.”
In the coming weeks, one of the agents on Bolden’s list was transferred to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he was assigned to protect former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower at the farm where she lived with her husband. Two others were sent out of the country to work indefinitely on a currency investigation in the Philippines.
At the same time, the President could only sit back and watch as a divided House committee pondered its response to the charges against him. Two specific relationships formed the core of the issue of whether the President’s behavior put himself and, by extension, the nation at risk: Ellen Rometsch and Judith Campbell. One was an alleged East German spy, and the other was an alleged Mafia girlfriend. Kennedy’s best defense on these issues was the obvious one that guilt by association was not part of our judicial system. He could simply deny knowledge of their connections.
Any one of those cases, if deemed substantive by the committee, would have been sufficient to send an abuse of power article to the floor of the House. There were also two more articles to be considered.
This became known as “the drugs article” because it dealt with undisclosed presidential medical conditions and treatments that could have affected the safety and security of the United States during times of crisis.
There were other counts on other matters, but this was the angle that held steady traction from the beginning. The President of the United States had serious ailments and was often taking powerful medications with serious side effects. Kennedy had taken an oath to perform the office of the presidency, “to the best of my ability.” Did that mean he should take any drug to boost his performance on the job no matter what the risk or side effect, or did it mean that he needed to be straight about his health issues and seek appropriate measures to avoid risking mood alteration and possible drug addiction?
The House of Representatives needed to decide if Kennedy’s medical treatment was a legitimate concern of the people and providing accurate details about the condition of his health was part of his oath. If it was, then the numerous times that the President had lied, covered-up, misled and hidden the truth, were attempts to stop the administration of justice and, thus, obstruction.
Both Dr. Travell and Dr. Jacobson had been compelled to testify about the drug cocktails they had personally administered to the President and First Lady. Both had also gone out of their way to prevent these ministrations from becoming part of the public record. Other medical experts had been brought in to testify about how such drug mixtures could have affected the President’s performance at crucial times. There was actual talk of calling Elvis Presley as a witness because he, too, had been a patient of Dr. Jacobson’s.
Article Two seemed to be a grab-bag of sins, some more serious than others, but all difficult to prove. They involved, in several cases, trying to assess the intent of the administration, for example, when it set up the Warren Commission. Was Kennedy’s appointment of that commission an attempt to delay the truth about Dallas, which the President would rather be kept quiet until after the 1964 election? Or, for another example, was the President’s testimony — or the testimony of his staff at his direction — incorrect or incomplete by design? These were difficult questions to answer, and certainly to prove. They demanded the interpretation of both intent and action.
The voters, however, knew what it meant to lie about your health. Most of them had done it at one time or another. Would they hold the President to a higher standard? Were his lies more significant? Enough to end his career?
This became known as “the murder article” because it involved presidential approval and encouragement of extralegal activities of the CIA that included alleged assassinations of foreign leaders. It was a supreme irony to blame this on John Kennedy, given his own close call in 1963, but it was a measure of the extreme times Americans were living through that it seemed to be just another thing that didn’t quite fit.
Kennedy stood accused of directly or indirectly through the Central Intelligence Agency targeting foreign leaders for death or coup. These targets included Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in January 1961; Prime Minister Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in May of 1961; and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in November of 1963. Those were the successful kills. There was also the matter of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a man both the CIA and the administration seem to have been bent on killing for years, though without success.
Incredibly, the CIA that had carried out these missions and pushed for them so strongly was now in a position to use them to hang Kennedy. Several key witnesses managed to make it sound like it was all the President’s idea. The bottom line still remained that Truman was right — the buck stopped on the President’s desk — and if Kennedy approved something, it was the same as if it were his idea.
The contempt of Congress interpretation had been agreed to because of the constitutional war powers that favor the action of the chief executive with congressional oversight and approval. By not consulting Congress before or after these actions, the thinking went, President Kennedy was preventing the Senate and the House from performing its constitutional duty and, thus, showing it contempt.
The article also contained a key count about the defiance of the committee’s subpoena by Dave Powers, who claimed to have destroyed certain documents and all of the Oval Office recordings by himself with no instruction from above. While hardly any member could believe this explanation as the truth, it was a far greater stretch to pin it directly on the President.
On December 17, 1965, the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives decided all three articles of impeachment by a sharply partisan vote. The President’s defenders called the committee’s mission a “witch hunt,” while the GOP insisted that they were merely performing their constitutional duty.
Committee chairman William Moore McCulloch, the Republican representing Ohio’s Fourth District, said, “The office of President of the United States is the greatest position of responsibility in the history of the world. It demands respect, particularly from its occupant.”
Leading Democrat Emanuel Celler, from New York’s Tenth District, countered, “This man, John Kennedy, was shot at on the streets of an American city just two years ago. I will not vote to put him on trial while the traitors who plotted his murder walk free.”
Within each of the three articles, subsections had been deleted. There were thirty-four members of the committee, divided in favor of the GOP, 18-16. The abuse of power article was approved by the largest margin, 19-15. The obstruction of justice article and the contempt of Congress article were each approved 18-16.
On the night that his impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee finally came to a vote, President Kennedy watched the final debate in the White House residence with his brothers, Bobby and Teddy, and others from his inner circle. Even before it was over, the President assessed the situation wryly: “It looks like Santa’s bringing coal this Christmas,” he said.
With two seats vacant and headed for special elections in February, the debate in the full House of Representatives was acrimonious and partisan, lasting nearly three days. The vote came on December 22, with Christmas recess on everyone’s mind.
Speaker Gerald Ford ultimately agreed with the overwhelming majority of his Republican colleagues that it was his solemn duty to support the articles of impeachment. He tried to maintain his independence by voting against several of the specific counts, but, in the end, he made certain that all articles got sent to the U.S. Senate for trial. Ford’s counterpart, Minority Leader John McCormack, no real fan of the Kennedys, mounted a public show of support but refused to trade valuable political capital he would need in 1966 to save the President. In that regard, both Ford and McCormack were united in a desire to get the impeachment out of the House and into the Senate.
In the end, the House approved the abuse of power article 227-206, with three GOP members and seven Democrats breaking ranks. The House approved the Obstruction of Justice article, 219-214, but approved the contempt of Congress citation by the slimmest of margins, 217-216.
Not all of the charges under each article were approved but at least one was. All three had passed.
With that, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became only the second President — and the first in almost one hundred years — to face a legal trial in the Senate. Afterward, on a freezing afternoon, the President forced the media to gather on the lawn near the Rose Garden, where he offered no hint he would resign. The vote margins had been thin and sharply partisan, he pointed out. His GOP foes, he said coolly, should find a way in the Senate to craft a “reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate” deal to avoid trial.
With more than sixty House Democrats standing behind him, Kennedy vowed to serve “until the last hour of the last day of my term in 1969,” when he would legitimately turn power over to the next President. The tableau on the lawn had one clear message: The President would make a deal, but he’d never quit. Yet, he had reason to worry. A Gallup poll taken in the next twenty-four hours showed that after his impeachment, 43 percent of the country felt he should resign immediately, compared to just 45 percent who felt he should stay and fight.
After the Rose Garden freeze-out, President Kennedy, his aides and dozens of congressmen retired to the larger Cabinet room for hot chocolate. The atmosphere, it was said, was eerily giddy, with the death-be-not-proud bravado of an Irish wake. The Kennedys toasted to a battle in the Senate, a place where they felt JFK’s service for eight years would be implicitly acknowledged in a friendlier forum. The President stepped forward. “I would give anything,” he said, “to keep you from being in the position you were in today, and for me not to have acted in such a way as to put you there.” Of course, he had acted that way, and the war would soon rage to judge the consequences.
In mortal political peril, however, his team knew that the next order of business was to make certain that no Democrats — inside or outside Washington — called for his resignation. Starting the next morning, President Kennedy would begin to roll calls with Mrs. Lincoln, and would not stop until he had spoken to each and every one of the Senate Democrats who would now sit in judgment of him.
At the same time, the idea was to stake out a bargaining position for an eventual deal. To that end, Kennedy would also call his two Republican opponents, Richard Nixon from the 1960 election and Barry Goldwater from 1964. He did not expect their support, but he was hoping they would work with him to craft a compromise deal, allowing him to accept censure and a fine to resolve the case.
Congress adjourned on Tuesday, December 23, 1965. Every senator who went home for the recess knew that his constituents would have a lot to say about how to vote in the new year.
It is perhaps only a sad side-note to impeachment that the once-vaunted Lunar Exploration Treaty binding the United States and the Soviet Union to a joint moon mission never even came up for a vote in the United States Senate. Perhaps it was a sign of Kennedy’s declining influence and his upcoming trial, or the reality that Khrushchev finally appeared to be on his way out in the Soviet Union, or both.
Many senators explained the death of the treaty on practical grounds, saying it had taken so long to get around to it that the United States would now have to give up far too much by approving it. We were already winning the space race and the moon race in particular. Just last December, two Gemini capsules had docked in space. We could have astronauts walking on the moon by the summer of 1969 if we kept our eye on the ball. The Soviets, it was widely presumed, were nowhere close.
President Kennedy accepted this calmly. He knew when he came home with the idea that his generals would fight it to the end. He might have beaten them as he did with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When that passed the Senate in 1963, he was as politically muscular as he’d ever been, and it took every ounce of strength to pull it off. Now, he was fighting just to keep his job.
If America was going to the moon, it was going solo. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas, NASA was pouring plenty into the economy. If it wasn’t for his ongoing efforts to keep scandal at bay, Johnson would have been sitting pretty.
LBJ knew in his gut that his benefactor and nemesis John Kennedy was going to get fired by his constituents in the next year. That, he knew, would open the door for the realization of a lifetime dream, a Johnson presidency.
According to a plea bargain statement later made by Johnson associate Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson had only one goal now, and it consumed his every waking hour. He had to hang on long enough to outlast Kennedy. The Congress would never impeach John Kennedy and then go after him, too. The public would never stand for it. He would be safe, finally.
During the Christmas recess, everyone in the Kennedy administration knew they were in a fight for political survival. One would have to be in absolute denial not to realize that things could end badly. If they did, Lyndon Baines Johnson would take over as the President of the United States unless he could be forced out first. This is something that John and Robert Kennedy wanted to avoid with almost the same passion as they wanted to avoid conviction in a Senate trial.
Fortunately, the attorney general’s young Turks had done their job well. They had accumulated enough testimony and evidence to take Johnson down. They had also, incredibly, found a plausible trail of suspicion that put Johnson in the middle of the conspiracy. He was not, to their way of thinking, definitively the ringleader, but they believed he had knowledge of what was going to happen well in advance of Dallas and had done nothing to stop it. At the very least, he had let John Kennedy ride into an ambush.
The suspicious behavior of LBJ generated its own kind of evidence. There was a classic photo of Johnson slumping so low in his limousine’s seat that he disappears, and it was taken two seconds
before
shots were fired. His involvement in planning the trip was extreme, and he had interacted negatively on several security issues. Comments like the one made by oilman Clint Murchison that “Lyndon don’t get no more ready [to be president] than he is now” looked particularly suspicious when they turned up in an FBI wiretap.
Robert Kennedy came to Lyndon Johnson’s office on the morning of January 3, 1966 and laid out the situation. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whom LBJ had always claimed to like, assisted him. “We both know that you’ve been involved in dirty business, Lyndon — far worse than anything President Kennedy has ever contemplated,” said the AG, obviously relishing the moment. “There is no way that you are ever going to be President of the United States. I hope we are absolutely clear on that.”
Johnson was not clear, and so Katzenbach explained it further. His team of investigators had the Vice President on bribery, extortion, influence-peddling and probably murder. He rattled off names. Not just Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker, but Malcolm Wallace, Edward Clark, Henry Marshall and Clifton Carter. He mentioned John Kinser and LBJ’s own sister, Josefa. Each name contained the story of an illegal act that could manifest in Johnson’s imprisonment.
Johnson exploded with rage aimed at Bobby. “Your brother’s about to be yesterday’s news around here, and you come into my office like that?”
“You have blood on your hands, Lyndon,” responded Kennedy. He waved a sealed indictment, handed down from a grand jury, in front of Johnson. It named the Vice President as a co-conspirator in the death of his own friend, John Connally, and the attempted murder of the President. “Let me explain what happens next.” Bobby instructed Johnson to write out two confessions: one for blackmail and influence-peddling in both the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes cases, and another for complicity in the assassination attempt on JFK and the deaths of Connally, Tippit and Hill.
LBJ said he would do no such thing, and the bargaining began.
“Much as I hate to do this,” said the attorney general, “I am here to offer you a deal. You will accept it while I am here in your office, or you will not accept it, and I will see that these matters are all turned over to the courts, including your involvement in this Dallas debacle.”
Kennedy informed the Vice President that by writing his two confessions he could spare his family the shame he had brought on them, at least while he was alive. Only the first confession would be used against him by the Justice Department. LBJ would resign immediately, and he would plead to multiple charges of extortion and bribery. The other confession would be sealed until ten years after Johnson’s death.
Johnson did not accept this fate easily. He fought back in every way he knew how. Yet the longer he disputed the conclusion that he had no choice but to sign, the more he realized that it was better to go to prison for some hardball politics and a kickback here and there than it was to be the man who tried to bump off the President of the United States so he could take his job.
The Vice President changed his tone from threats to pleas. “Those men were serious, Bobby,” he said. “They’d have killed me.” Kennedy was surprised and a little exalted to see Johnson fighting back tears. He tried to bargain, asking the attorney general to push back the unsealing of the second confession until twenty-five years after his death. The attorney general did not budge. Then Johnson asked if the President would consider pardoning him.
“Lyndon, you know the President cannot do that, given the situation in the Senate. Most particularly, he has hard feelings toward you now, as you might imagine.” The attorney general did agree to use his office to influence local authorities in Texas to stand down on their own investigations, given Johnson’s plea bargain with federal authorities. Plus, he would see to it that LBJ would serve his time in a medium security facility in Texas, if that was his wish. That was the best he could do.
Kennedy said the Justice Department would need LBJ to testify against the other plotters. Johnson responded that if he did that, he would be dead. And if that was the price of the deal, then there would be no deal. They should charge him right then and there.
Within the hour, Kennedy and Katzenbach had the two confessions, and Johnson’s letter of resignation. He would not cooperate on the mechanics of the assassination plot, but at least he would never, ever be President.