Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
The already distrustful relationship between the Kennedys and the Central Intelligence Agency was shattered completely when the shots were fired on November 22.
Ironically, at the beginning of his term, JFK supported the agency’s aim to accomplish strategic objectives without hurtling toward Armageddon. Spying was also far less expensive than actually fighting wars. Plus, the cloak-and-dagger had appealed to the new President’s dash and style. He was actually a James Bond fan of both the books and the new films,
Dr. No
and
From Russia with Love
.
The honeymoon had ended less than three months after JFK’s inauguration. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA plan that was a leftover from the previous administration. As presented by CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, President Kennedy had been open to it. The fact that it had supposedly been vetted by President Dwight Eisenhower, the general who had succeeded at D-Day, made it even more attractive. In reality, the President’s men hugging up their jackets against the November cold thought it had been a con job, a setup all the way.
In the aftermath of its failure, the Kennedys had come to think of the men who ran the Central Intelligence Agency as “virtually treasonous,” the same that the CIA apparently thought of them. President Kennedy, as angry as he had ever been in his life, threatened to break the agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Soon he had fired Dulles and two other key players, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. To say that Allen Dulles was embittered was a grand understatement. By all accounts, he felt a deep and powerful antipathy toward the man who had terminated his career so ignobly.
The President of the United States did not trust the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA did not trust JFK. They disagreed over many things ranging from the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the administration’s Castro policy and its vision for the future of the Vietnam conflict. To have bad blood exist with an organization that increasingly considered coups and assassinations as mere policy choices seemed particularly dangerous.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that November 22, 1963 was not the Secret Service’s proudest day. While the President had survived, his life was saved by agent Clint Hill and not by the organization. It was as if the entire group of agents had been asleep at the switch. The question was why?
It might have been unintentional sloppiness. The Secret Service detail assigned to Dallas had been incredibly “off-procedure” the night before, with multiple agents up until 3 a.m. drinking. None of those agents were likely to have been at the top of their game.
Or it could have been more than incompetence. Were they drinking because they knew what was going to happen and weren’t going to stop it?
The route had not been properly secured. Instructions to Dallas Police had not maximized their effort but minimized it. The motorcade at Dealey Plaza was traveling below the minimum speed. The agents in the President’s car reacted poorly, responding only after Hill, a man who had just been shot, shouted them out of their somnambulance. Certainly the driver, William Greer, would be called before investigators and asked for an explanation for his leaden reflexes behind the wheel of the President’s car.
There were so many loose ends. There was, for example, the issue of the decision not to go with the protective bubble-top glass for the President’s limousine. It was a Secret Service call, according to protocol, but Lyndon Johnson, as part of his trip-planning responsibilities, had asked directly that it not be used.
The head of the Secret Service James Rowley was no fan of President Kennedy either. He knew better than most that there were more than a few of his agents who had open disdain for the President. Unlike the CIA, their hostility was not about policy; rather this emotion came from seeing Kennedy’s personal behavior up close. It was a mixed bag. JFK had made friends with many agents, particularly the Secret Service’s first black agent, Abraham Bolden. The President always asked Bolden and others about their families, vacations and sporting affiliations.
President Kennedy asked that Bolden be brought into the White House security plans immediately. Bolden was loyal, yes, but he had also heard all the trash talk from other agents and, when asked, he would tell the Kennedy brothers what he knew.
There were reports of Secret Service agents showing identification cards in Dealey Plaza, although there were no such agents deployed, at least officially. The attorney general had heard from a source who heard from someone else that they were the work of the CIA’s Technical Services Division.
That would mean that there were CIA agents in Dealey Plaza doing the job of Secret Service agents, and Secret Service agents that had abandoned their own jobs by standing down in their defense of the President.
None of it was definitive proof of anything. The CIA may have learned of the plot and only been monitoring it from the sidelines, and maybe even working to stop it. The Secret Service may have had its agents intimidated and manipulated into adverse choices without support or knowledge of a full plot.
The conclusion was that some elements inside the Secret Service may have had a role among the plotters. As of now, with the information available, it was simply unclear.
While the jury was out on the Secret Service, virtually everyone who voiced an opinion had a greater suspicion of Vice President Johnson, a statement that by itself spoke volumes about the man and his reputation.
Johnson was considered to be a devious viper in the nest, the Brutus to Kennedy’s Caesar, who with the help of J. Edgar Hoover had blackmailed his way onto the 1960 presidential ticket and who knew he was about to be dumped from the 1964 ticket. Bobby Kennedy loathed Lyndon Johnson and the feeling was mutual.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, a potential scandal for Johnson was slowly building, as the Senate rules committee looked into the activities of the man whom Johnson had appointed to serve as his secretary for the majority of his days on the Hill. Bobby “Little Lyndon” Baker had resigned under pressure from the probe, but the scandal was growing, and it threatened to embroil Baker’s former boss.
Life
magazine had chronicled it all and, unlike prior press coverage, had tied the whole metastasizing mess directly to Johnson. The magazine had bigger targets in mind, too. That very morning, editors and reporters were meeting to discuss angles for a broader investigation, this one into the Vice President’s personal finances.
LBJ also had strong reason to believe he was about to be indicted and could very well go to prison for his provable role in the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes scandals. There was no doubt that the Texan’s lifelong lust and endless scheming for the presidency was relentless. But murder? There were rumors back in Texas about suspicious deaths that LBJ had connections to that a few of Robert Kennedy’s young turks actually thought were sufficiently grounded that a grand jury would indict the sitting VP if presented with the facts.
If this line of reasoning were correct, however, it would make Lyndon Baines Johnson the greatest conspirator since Brutus, who precipitated the death of the Roman Republic by helping to assassinate Julius Caesar. Brutus, it was worth noting, was forced to flee Rome to avoid the inflamed passions of the public and ended his own life in suicide.
There were other candidates, each one bending and twisting into a Mobius strip of suspicion. In addition to what had already been said, there were other questions:
Was it Big Oil, which Kennedy was threatening by eliminating the industry's depletion allowance worth billions?
Was it Big Money, which Kennedy was threatening by printing U.S. Treasury notes, thereby ending the Fed’s monopoly on currency?
Was it Big Steel, which Kennedy had stared down over price increases just a year ago and which never forgave him?
So many theories and possibilities existed that it truly seemed like a joke. How could anyone get into this and find success? Where would one even start?
Clearly there was the chance of some network of hostile adversaries who had come together to solve mutual problems by removing the President of the United States through extreme action. In fact, this seemed to be a far greater probability than the idea that the President would be attacked at the hand of a loser with no affiliations or connections to any of the other players. Still, until direct proof was offered to the contrary, Oswald remained the prime suspect.
The team gathered that November day at Hyannis Port strongly believed this brazen attack had to have been perpetrated with varying degrees of complicity, collusion and coordination from the highest levels of the CIA, the FBI and the Texas power structure.
Reluctant to use the actual word “conspiracy,” they pointed the finger of blame instead at what was called the “nexus.” The word would be used in place of conspiracy in White House meetings, particularly those that were recorded. Once things got ugly in 1965, the word “conspiracy” was openly used as a matter of policy by members of the Kennedy administration, including the President and the attorney general.
The recent past had showcased a sinister alliance to kill Fidel Castro. Under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, mob bosses had conspired with Cuban exile leaders to assassinate a country’s leader. That was fact.
The CIA, the Mafia and Cuba were already intertwined; it was no stretch of anyone’s imagination to consider that they might have worked together to eliminate a common enemy. John and Robert Kennedy thought they had shut down this CIA-Mafia merger when the agency had confessed it in May of 1962. But they also knew that defiance of legitimate executive authority was common in their government.
Dave Powers tried to lighten the mood. “Maybe we should just discuss who couldn’t have done it.”
“Davey,” said the President with a wink. “That might only include those of us who are freezing our asses off out here.” That statement gathered more consensus than any other this day, and the decision was taken to move inside for part two of the discussion.
Inside, fortified by hot chocolates made by the Kennedy children, the Hyannis Port collective turned its attention to the subject of who should serve as point man in sorting out the entire situation. The need was made critical by a press conference that Senator Everett Dirksen was now giving on live television.
Each of three TV sets was tuned to a different network, all featuring the Illinois Republican, a moderate only by the standards of his own party. JFK, who admired a winning performance, knew that Dirksen was good TV and that such a quality could always be dangerous. The Senate Minority Leader had curls that came close to rivaling Harpo Marx’s. And his voice was a pipe organ he could use for any sort of sound effect under the sun. He was, said Dave Powers, “the biggest ham outside an Armour can.”
Dirksen did not disappoint, calling for a Senate investigation that would, presumably, include himself or Mississippi Senator James Eastland in a key position. He also promised legislative leadership. “Why, gentlemen, do you know it’s not even a federal crime to assassinate the President of the United States or any other official of the government? That is a shame and a disgrace that we shall remedy shortly.”
He immediately ran into the same line of questioning the President had fielded at his recent primetime news conference. The issue was jurisdiction, and reporters wanted to know if Congress and the state of Texas wouldn’t be stepping all over each other to conduct what was essentially the same kind of investigation. He argued that the U.S. Congress was capable of casting a broader net with finer mesh. He implied that the Dallas Police Department might be good at investigating what happened in Dallas last Friday, but for what led up to it, for what led Oswald to do the deed — if, in fact, Oswald was the culprit — a federal investigation seemed more appropriate.
Having declared his jurisdictional intentions, Dirksen was asked whether the White House was encouraging him in his pursuit of a congressional investigation.
The senator rolled his eyes. “Any President naturally wishes Congress would roll over on its back and wave its legs in the air. The executive branch believes that to be our proper role. This administration seems no different.”
As the networks cut away from Dirksen's conference, the Kennedy team adjourned to the study. The President’s back was torturing him again, and he didn’t want to have to use crutches. Everyone packed into a space that was much smaller than was comfortable. Ethel sat outside the door to keep out interruptions.
As the men took their seats behind that closed door, Bobby shrugged: “Well?”
The first answer came from Kenny O’Donnell, who held up a yellow legal pad where had written one word: “Clusterfuck.”
After seeing the sensitivity of their situation over the last hour of conversation, everyone knew that jurisdiction was everything. It defined the winners and the losers that would need to be sorted out. It was clear that things could soon be spinning out of control, what with Dirksen making his play and that Dallas Police Chief What’s-his-name enjoying sticking it to Washington. JFK nodded his agreement: “We have to get in the game. We have to control the game.”
The single greatest asset the White House controlled on the day after Thanksgiving 1963 was what a previous occupant, Theodore Roosevelt, had called the “bully pulpit.” Americans generally wanted answers and soon on this matter of shooting at the President at high noon. But there was no consensus as to what should be done. JFK’s press conference on Tuesday had only added more fog to the confusion. The good news was that the White House was still the most legitimate entity to lead on the subject.
The question was: Lead where?
After the review of facts and suspicions, it seemed clear to everyone in this discussion that the nation and the government were at a tipping point. While there was lots of room for improvisation within the options, there were only three basic ways to look at the big picture, none of them particularly good.
Option One: allowing the Soviets and/or Cubans to be blamed. This was deemed unacceptable because it was likely not true and, in any case, stopping nuclear war — not encouraging it — had now become the mission of the Kennedy administration.
Option Two: taking on the conspiracy directly. This could quite possibly lead to a military coup that might destroy the country and would destabilize institutions that control nuclear weapons.
Option Three: covering it all up, at least temporarily. This too was unacceptable, because it required the President and members of the administration to subvert a potential congressional investigation.
Since all the options seemed equally unattractive, the President and his trusted allies were forced to examine each of them more deeply. The first one involved examining incoming intelligence that indicated Oswald was closely aligned with not only the Soviet Union but also the pro-Castro Cubans. This was the line coming in from the CIA. The agency had even produced evidence of Oswald at the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico just the month before. Yet Hoover himself had just told the President that the FBI analysis confirmed that man was not Oswald; neither the photos nor the recordings matched the suspect sitting in the Dallas jail cell.
Given the poor relationship the Kennedys had with the military, the CIA and the FBI, the idea that the CIA intelligence was accurate was given about a fifty-fifty possibility. Just as likely, it had been cooked up by the agency to cover up something the CIA itself had done or been complicit in. The bottom line was that, true or not, following where the intel was leading would force an invasion of Cuba, followed by the real possibility of a full-on nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
The second option meant grappling with the strong possibility that the facts would lead to an inside job, conceived and created by members of the CIA and the U.S. military to remove the elected president through assassination in order to take a more hawkish position in the Cold War. The team considered this to be the cold, hard truth of the matter. After all, JFK was engaging in peace initiatives with both Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev and had been privately talking peace and withdrawal from Vietnam. He was therefore not likely to be on Soviet or Cuban hit lists, but conspirators would benefit if the populace believed otherwise. The people would demand some kind of revenge against the Communists who had attacked our President.
It was a hard thing to swallow, this second option. It meant that high-level members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities had somehow hatched a plot that called for killing the President of the United States in a broad-daylight ambush and then blaming it on the Soviet Union and Cuba. This would give the plotters what they needed, a call to war, and it would remove the one man standing in the way of authorizing that war, the commander-in-chief.
To take on this cruel, awful reality would be terrible. If the first option placed the nation at war with the Soviet Union, this one placed the nation at war with itself. To push this fight out into the light of the public might tear the country apart as deeply as had the Civil War. It could lead to a classic military coup with tanks surrounding the White House. The men who had approved this plot, tacitly or not, would not go down easily. The gloves would come off, and they would fight to the end.
The third and final option was to buy time for tempers to cool and facts to be solidified by siphoning off the passion somehow, keeping a lid on the situation at least through the election, so it could be addressed out of strength in the next term. This one involved stopping with the arrest of Oswald, investigating in a way that the public knew was proper and dignified, and confronting the treasonous cabal that had done this deed in the shadows rather than in the headlines.
At the end, President Kennedy spoke. “Well, gentlemen,” he said as if summarizing the options on a dull farm support bill, “we seem to have a choice between nuclear war, a military coup or an illegal cover-up.” No one voiced disagreement.
“We have Chairman Khrushchev behind door number one,” began Bobby Kennedy, ticking off the possibilities on his hand. “Then we have the CIA behind door number two, and we’re behind door number three.” Everyone knew what he meant. It was a reference to a new game show on NBC and its young, agreeable host, Monty Hall.
“Uh, Monty,” said Dave Powers taking on the voice of a nervous housewife, “I’d like to take door number four.”
Alas, for the Kennedy team, there were just the three. To a man, everyone at this meeting preferred in his guts the second option of hunting down and putting on trial every single member of this unspeakable conspiracy. This contemplated hot war demanded that they strike back hard against the traitors — to protect the Kennedy presidency, yes, but also to protect the country from itself. These plotters who had so little regard for the Constitution of the United States had to pay a price. And yet once the floodgates truly opened, it seemed unlikely the President would escape being damaged in some way.
There was, first of all, the practical question of whether this situation could be held under control for the immediate future, specifically until the 1964 election, now less than twelve months away. After the next November, it would either be JFK’s problem or he could try to work with his successor by briefing him fully about what was going on.
President Kennedy had spoken only a few times in this discussion, but had listened carefully. He broke in with a call to “return to the issue of the Constitution.”
The President noted his oath of office called for him to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.” He reviewed the options as such. If the nation were to be destroyed in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the Constitution would be rendered meaningless. If the military were to seize control of the government from its legitimate civilian authority, that would be a direct violation of the oath’s objective. The third option, however unpalatable, risked neither the destruction of the nation nor the destruction of the Constitution. “Indeed, if navigated properly, it might be possible to buy a year to tack away from the calls for war,” posited the President, “get elected on that platform and, in the end, simply postpone the day of reckoning for the conspirators by kicking it down the road.”
If their decision to choose the third option was an overreach or in any way adverse to the Constitution, said the attorney general, the Constitution itself provided the remedy of impeachment by the House, and trial and removal by the Senate. If that remedy were to be required, the system would survive and the oath would be maintained. Abraham Lincoln felt that way about many of the measures he implemented during the Civil War that some considered unconstitutional. Lincoln felt that could all be sorted out after the war was over and so could be ignored in the middle of the conflict.
“I'm with President Lincoln on this one,” said the President.
“Contain and maintain,” agreed Kenny O’Donnell.
They reassured themselves that they would still seek the truth in time; their actions now merely meant that the truth could be managed to the benefit of the country, particularly in an election year. The President needed a nonpolitical body quietly investigating in order to assure the public. Either a House or Senate committee (or, God forbid, both) would be a circus of the kind not seen since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Bobby, who had worked for McCarthy and retained some affinity for those memories of the man if not his ideals, knew this better than most.
A congressional investigation into Dallas, complete with massive egos dying to get on TV at any cost, simply could not be allowed to happen. It would open doors during an election season that could escalate into political gridlock and chaos. That situation could be exploited by the conspirators and might trigger a coup. Worse, it could inflame Cold War adversaries in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to miscalculate. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been a terrible near-miss. “The world might not be so lucky a second time,” reminded the President.