Crossfire Read online

  But Dallas was instrumental in carrying Texas in a national election. So in late 1963, the city was included on a quick political trip by President John F. Kennedy.

  The Thirty-fifth President

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first US president born in the twentieth century. He was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, an unpretentious middle-class suburb of Boston. Contrary to later claims that the Kennedys were part of the liberal Eastern Establishment, he was the second oldest son of a family that began their American life with the immigration of Patrick Kennedy from Ireland in 1848. Both grandfathers were prominent Democratic Party ward bosses while a group of Irish leaders ruled the local party but were discriminated against by society’s rulers.

  At age forty-three, Kennedy became the nation’s youngest president, and at the time of his death at age forty-six, he had lived a shorter life than that of any other president.

  His brief presidency—1,026 days—stirred the emotions of nearly every American. Hardly anyone was neutral about Kennedy. They either loved him or hated him.

  Yet Kennedy seemed oblivious to the controversies surrounding him. Perhaps due to his privileged background, he increasingly appeared more concerned with great historical issues such as civil rights, war, and peace than with the parochial matters of business and politics.

  Jack, as the future president was called by his friends, attended only the best schools. At Choate School in Connecticut, though 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 US 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.

  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 US 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. He pulled his wounded chief engineer, Patrick McMahon, to a nearby island by swimming for four hours holding McMahon on his back 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 group’s location in enemy-held territory and they soon were rescued. Despite the loss of his command, Kennedy was hailed as a hero.

  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, Joseph Jr., had been killed while flying a secret mission over Europe. His father’s political aspirations now fell on Jack Kennedy. After the war, a reluctant Kennedy ran for and won a House seat from Massachusetts.

  In later years, Joseph 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.

  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 he was 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 Protestant voters, Kennedy beat senator Hubert Humphrey handily, thanks, according to FBI reports, to large organized-crime donations made through Frank Sinatra.

  At the 1960 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, thanks primarily to youthful supporters at the precinct level. 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. His selection of Johnson shocked Kennedy’s supporters as well as Johnson’s.

  Years later, Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln revealed that the FBI director had forced the appointment of Johnson as vice president under threat of revealing Kennedy’s sexual affairs. “It was blackmail,” she stated. “The malicious rumors were fed to LBJ by J. Edgar Hoover about his [JFK’s] womanizing. . . . LBJ and Hoover had boxed him into a hole.”

  There was no thought of Johnson’s qualifications as president should anything happen to Kennedy. It was sheer spur-of-the-moment political tactics.

  Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, 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 intended to call attention to Nixon’s role as vice president under the popular Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower.

  Kennedy’s Catholicism was attacked by some preachers who regaled their congregations with the specter of a Vatican-dominated White House. The issue prompted Kennedy to tell a meeting of Protestant ministers in Houston, “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.”

  The real turning point in the 1960 election apparently 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 nation’s population and no one denies that Kennedy emerged the victor. Interestingly enough, however, radio listeners judged Nixon the winner.

  The debates were TV show business, anticipating today’s slick marketing of candidates. 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 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 sug
gestions as irresponsible since, as he later wrote, “the covert operation [the upcoming Bay of Pigs Invasion] had to be protected at all costs” and, thus, Nixon came out opposing his own plans.

  Kennedy won the election, 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, and business and professional people mostly voted against this eastern liberal.

  Oddly enough, Kennedy’s highest ratings in the polls during his term in office came just after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 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.” His popularity soared further in the fall of 1962, when his negotiation with Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev brought an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, largely perceived in America as a victory over communist expansionism. In reality, it was a quid pro quo deal in which Russia withdrew its missiles from Cuba in return for America’s removing its missiles from Turkey plus pledging not to support any further Cuban invasions.

  But by the fall of 1963, polls showed Kennedy’s popularity had dropped to 59 percent, largely due to his stand on civil rights. His willingness to negotiate with the communist world, his attack on the tax havens of wealthy corporations, and his attempts to regain civilian control over the Pentagon and its intelligence agencies had engendered fear and hatred among the most powerful cliques in the United States.

  Newsweek magazine reported that no Democrat in the White House had ever been so disliked in the South. A theater marquee in Georgia advertised 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 the state’s powerful senator, 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.”

  Thus, 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 1,000 persons crowded in front of the hotel stood in light drizzling rain, which stopped just as the president made 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 Kennedy spoke to him.

  As the rain clouds were breaking up, Kennedy drove back to Carswell for the eight-minute flight to Dallas. Fort Worth and Dallas are so close that even before reaching its full altitude, Air Force One began its descent to Dallas. The flight to Love Field was necessary due to the rivalry between the two cities over Dallas’s Love Field (still operating) and Fort Worth’s Greater Southwest Airport (relocated and replaced by Dallas–Fort Worth International in 1969). Looking out the plane’s window, Kennedy commented to Governor Connally, “Our luck is holding. It looks as if we’ll get sunshine.”

  As Air Force One landed at Love Field, the sky had cleared and a bright sun brought Indian summer weather to north-central Texas. By the noon hour, many people were in their shirtsleeves. The occasional cool breeze from the north was welcomed by Texans weary of the interminable summer heat, which often lasts well into the fall. It was the sort of day that stirs the blood, causing people to seek action outdoors, whether by working in the yard or attending the local football game.

  This day there was another reason for wanting to get outside. The president was coming to town. The local media had been full of the news for days. The Dallas Morning News carried headlines that morning reading, LOVE FIELD BRACES FOR THOUSANDS and DETAILED SECURITY NET SPREAD FOR KENNEDY. That morning’s edition had even run a small map of the president’s motorcade route, which would take him from Love Field to the new, modern Trade Mart. However, this map indicated only that the motorcade would travel west on Main Street through the downtown area, through the well-known Triple Underpass, and on to Stemmons Freeway and the Trade Mart, where President Kennedy was scheduled to attend a 12:30 p.m. luncheon.

  The city’s other daily paper, the Dallas Times Herald, had given a more detailed description of the route. A story published the previous Tuesday, headlined YARBOROUGH GETS JFK TABLE SPOT, told how liberal senator Ralph Yarborough had been invited to sit with Kennedy at the head table during Friday’s luncheon. It also mentioned that the motorcade would “pass through downtown on Harwood then west on Main, turning back to Elm at Houston and then out Stemmons Freeway to the Trade Mart.”

  This was one of the only newspaper mentions of the zigzag in the motorcade route, which would violate Secret Service procedures and place the president in a small park named Dealey Plaza, an area surrounded by tall buildings on one side and hillocks with shrubs and trees on the other.

  The motorcade had been scheduled to pass through the downtown business section during the noon hour so office workers could watch the parade during lunch. This strategy worked well. Literally thousands of Dallasites turned out in the balmy sixty-eight-degree weather for a view of Kennedy.

  Texas politics were in disarray. The state’s Democrats had been aghast the previous year when a Republican, former schoolteacher and radio disk jockey John Tower, had been elected to fill Johnson’s Senate seat. Tower was the first Republican to win a Texas Senate seat since the War Between the States. With more than seventy Democrats vying for Johnson’s seat, the vote had been so split that Republican Tower won, much to the horror of state politicos. The Democratic Party, dominant in the state since Reconstruction, was split between conservatives, headed by senator Lyndon B. Johnson and Governor John B. Connally (a former Johnson campaign manager), and a small but noisy group of so-called liberals, led by Senator Yarborough. The party rift was serious. Yarborough and Connally were hardly speaking to each other. And Texas conservatives were highly vocal against Kennedy’s policies toward Cuba, civil rights, and a nuclear test ban with Russia, not to mention his plan to rescind the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, the foundation of Texas oil wealth.

  With Texas now a two-party state, unity within the Democratic Party was needed badly. With the 1964 election year approaching, everyone—even his enemies—agreed Kennedy seemed unbeatable. However, he still needed to win over a few key states to acquire the broad mandate he was seeking
. Texas was one of them. A presidential visit seemed just the answer.

  Houston was the oil capital of the state, while Fort Worth and San Antonio were big defense industry centers. It would be easy to tell those folks what they wanted to hear. Dallas was a problem. At that time, the city was totally controlled by Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Air Force General Charles Cabell, whom Kennedy had fired as deputy director of the CIA following the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and who had branded JFK a “traitor.” City politics were dominated by the mayor’s cohorts on the all-white Citizens Charter Association.

  No visit to Texas could ignore Dallas, yet the city had earned a reputation for being both politically bedrock conservative and intolerant of any deviation from that position. A month earlier, US ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson had been pushed, spat upon, and hit in the head with a picket sign while visiting in Dallas. Just the previous Tuesday, cashiered Army Major General Edwin A. Walker had made the news by shoving a TV cameraman during a Dallas speech by governor George Wallace of Alabama.

  Stevenson, along with others close to Kennedy, warned the young president not to journey to Dallas. But in early June, plans for a trip to Texas were finalized during a meeting between Kennedy, Connally, and Johnson in El Paso. In October, a motorcade was added to the plans.

  On November 22, apprehension within the Kennedy entourage concerning the trip was still evident, especially in light of a full-page newspaper ad that ran that morning in the Dallas Morning News suggesting the president was soft on communism and guilty of traitorous activities. A leaflet handed out along the motorcade route was not as subtle as the newspaper ad. It pictured Kennedy under a headline reading WANTED FOR TREASON.

  Yet after landing at Love Field about 11:45 a.m., the Kennedy entourage found the Dallas crowds large, enthusiastic, and friendly, even though a few Confederate flags flew in the background. With horns honking, radios blaring, and the shouts and cheers of the crowd ringing off the sides of the office buildings, the scene was chaotic despite what had been hailed as one of the tightest security efforts in recent memory.