Killing Kennedy

Afterword

Jackie Kennedy’s enormous grief, and the grace with which she handled herself after the assassination, only enhanced the public admiration she earned during her husband’s presidency. In 1968 she married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon on whose yacht she recovered from the death of her son Patrick. The paparazzi dubbed her “Jackie O,” and hounded her constantly, a practice they would continue for the rest of her life. Sadly, the sixty-nine-year-old Onassis died of respiratory failure just seven years after their marriage, making Jackie a widow for the second time at the young age of forty-six. After Onassis’s death, Jackie retreated from the public eye, eventually securing a job with Viking Press as a book editor in New York City. She quit that job three years later, angry and embarrassed that the company had published a work of fiction in which Ted Kennedy was the president of the United States and there was an assassination plot against his life. She then moved on to work for Doubleday for the remainder of her nearly two decades in publishing, editing the books of people as diverse as Michael Jackson, Carly Simon, and Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate. In the early 1990s, Jackie’s lifetime smoking habit finally caught up with her. She died on May 19, 1994, from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of sixty-four.

Caroline Kennedy grew up to attend Radcliffe College and later earn her Juris Doctor from Columbia University. She married Edwin Schlossberg, bore three children, and pretty much stays out of the public eye. In December 2011, singer Neil Diamond admitted that Caroline was the inspiration for his multimillion-selling song “Sweet Caroline.”

John F. Kennedy Jr. became a symbol for the tragic history of the Kennedy family. The image of him on his third birthday saluting his father’s coffin broke hearts worldwide. Erroneously thought to be nicknamed “John-John”—that name was fabricated by the press—John Jr. attended college at Brown and then went on to the New York University School of Law, which eventually led to a short stint in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In 1988, People magazine named John Jr. “The Sexiest Man Alive.” Like his mother, he was the subject of intense media scrutiny. On July 16, 1999, he was piloting a small plane when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The accident killed John Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren. He was thirty-eight years old. His ashes, and those of his wife, were scattered at sea.

Lyndon Johnson inherited no small amount of unfinished business from the Kennedy administration, most notably the Vietnam War. He masterfully cobbled together coalitions within Congress to help pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson, working closely with Martin Luther King Jr., framed the issue in terms of JFK’s legacy in order to gather support for the act. However, Vietnam was an inherited headache that proved to be his undoing. The Diem assassination was America’s point of no return in terms of involvement, and while there are many who debate whether or not the United States had a hand in his death, there’s no disputing that the situation only got worse from there. After winning the 1964 election in a landslide over Arizona’s Barry Goldwater (a Republican defeat JFK had predicted), Johnson began to mismanage the war in Southeast Asia. As the antiwar movement gained traction, LBJ, fearing defeat, chose not to run again in 1968. Upon leaving Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson returned to his Texas ranch, where he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four on January 22, 1973.

As with the death of John Kennedy, it was Walter Cronkite who broke the news of LBJ’s death to the nation. Cronkite himself remained a news broadcaster at CBS until 1980. In 2009 he died at the age of ninety-two, still bitter about being replaced by Dan Rather as the anchor of the CBS Evening News.

The man who took most advantage of Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for the presidency in 1968 was Bobby Kennedy. The former attorney general had been devastated by his brother’s assassination, but overcame his grief to mount a very successful campaign. However, like his brother, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by a disturbed lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Bobby in a Los Angeles hotel just moments after he had claimed victory in the California primary. He lived for twenty-six hours before dying on June 6, 1968, at the age of forty-two.

Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas, on November 25, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was interred at Arlington. In 1967, on the fourth anniversary of Oswald’s death, his tombstone was stolen by local vandals. Though it was eventually returned, his mother feared that the grave site would be robbed again, so she replaced the stone with one much cheaper and hid her son’s original tombstone in the crawl space beneath her Fort Worth home. After Marguerite Oswald died in 1981 at the age of seventy-three, the house was sold. When the new owners discovered the 130-pound slab in the crawl space, they quietly sold it to the Historic Automotive Attractions Museum in Roscoe, Illinois, for less than ten thousand dollars. The museum also houses the ambulance that transported Oswald to Parkland Hospital and the Checker Cab he hailed shortly after shooting JFK.

The museum’s owners, however, balked at buying Oswald’s original pine casket, which was replaced after his body was exhumed in 1981, saying it was too macabre.

One other anonymous individual disagreed, purchasing the coffin at auction for $87,468 in December 2010.

Jack Ruby, aka Jacob Rubinstein, argued that he shot Lee Harvey Oswald to redeem the city of Dallas for the assassination. Legendary San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli defended Ruby for free during his trial, but his arguments about Ruby being insane at the time of the murder did not sway the jury. Jack Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to death. After that, Ruby testified before the Warren Commission about the Kennedy assassination and was eventually awarded a new trial by the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, the judge buying the argument that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas, due to the enormous publicity surrounding the shooting. But before proceedings could get under way, Ruby was admitted to the now-legendary Parkland Hospital for symptoms of the flu. Instead, he was found to have cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain. He died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, at the age of fifty-five. Jack Ruby is buried next to his parents in Westlawn Cemetery, in Norridge, Illinois. It’s worth noting that Ruby may have known about his aggressive cancer before he shot Oswald.

Martin Luther King Jr. continued his civil rights crusading and became one of the world’s most admired men. On April 4, 1968, King was shot down in Memphis, Tennessee, by an assassin named James Earl Ray, a racist who escaped to Canada, and then to England, before being arrested for the murder of Dr. King. Ray was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, a term that was extended to an even one hundred as punishment after he again escaped, this time from the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. He was caught three days later. Some believe Ray had help in assassinating King, but this has never been proven. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, coupled with the drawn-out American involvement in Vietnam, led to a national sense of disillusionment that was the diametric opposite of Camelot’s hope and optimism.

J. Edgar Hoover survived the attempts of several presidents to replace him as director of the FBI. There were many rumors that Hoover was homosexual, based on his close relationship with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the bureau. Well after JFK’s death, Hoover continued his practice of providing presidents with lurid classified files containing the personal indiscretions of high-ranking and influential individuals. Lyndon Johnson took full advantage of this practice. Soon after ascending to the presidency, he requested thick personal dossiers on each of “The Harvards”: those members of the Kennedy administration who had once taken such great delight in taunting him. On an even larger scale, Johnson asked Hoover to dig up information on some twelve hundred real or imagined adversaries. J. Edgar Hoover, who like LBJ had felt personally humiliated by the Kennedys during JFK’s time in office, was only too happy to comply. Lyndon Johnson returned the favor by issuing an executive order precluding Hoover from compulsory retirement, thus allowing the director to remain in charge of the FBI until his death in 1972 at the age of seventy-seven.

John Connally survived his Dallas wounds and went on to serve two terms as governor of Texas before returning to Washington to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury. He switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and ran for president in 1980. However, his campaign floundered badly, and he was forced to drop out after securing just one delegate. John Connally died of pulmonary fibrosis on June 15, 1993. He was seventy-six years old.

Marina Oswald never returned to the Soviet Union. She is still alive and has lived in Dallas for many years. She remarried, briefly, and had a son by her second marriage, which ended in divorce. Like her daughters, June and Audrey (who now goes by the name Rachel Porter), the stigma of Lee Harvey Oswald has followed her since November 22, 1963. The girls even took the name of their stepfather, Porter, to avoid greater public scrutiny. Now and again Lee Harvey Oswald’s family makes television appearances, but otherwise their lives are largely private.

In March of 1977 a young television reporter at WFAA in Dallas began looking into the Kennedy assassination. As part of his reporting, he sought an interview with the shadowy Russian college professor who had befriended the Oswalds upon their arrival in Dallas in 1962. The reporter traced George de Mohrenschildt to Palm Beach, Florida, and traveled there to confront him. At the time, de Mohrenschildt had been called to testify before a congressional committee looking into the events of November 1963. As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood.

By the way, that reporter’s name is Bill O’Reilly.

One footnote: A year earlier, de Mohrenschildt sent a letter to George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA. In that letter, the Russian asked protection from people “following” him. That correspondence with Mr. Bush led to speculation that de Mohrenschildt had CIA ties—and also possessed undisclosed knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.

Another former director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, died of a severe case of the flu in 1969, at the age of seventy-five. To this day, conspiratorialists believe that Dulles was involved in the Kennedy assassination as payback for his firing in the wake of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Dulles also served on the Warren Commission, the panel that investigated JFK’s shooting.

Sam Giancana, the Chicago mobster, was also thought by conspiracy theorists to be tied to the Kennedy assassination. Giancana was due to testify before a Senate panel investigating whether the CIA and the Mafia had any ties to the murder. Before he could testify, Giancana himself was murdered in his home on June 19, 1975. His assassin shot him in the back of the head, then rolled the body over and emptied the rest of the clip into Giancana’s face. The killer was never caught.

Frank Sinatra became a Republican in the years after John Kennedy’s Palm Springs snub and was a well-known supporter of President Ronald Reagan. But the singer remained largely silent on his feelings toward JFK. Not so Peter Lawford, the man John Kennedy forced to make the phone call telling Sinatra that the president would be staying elsewhere during his Palm Springs visit. In 1966, Lawford divorced JFK’s sister Patricia and began making sordid accusations against the Kennedy family. Among them was that Marilyn Monroe had had an affair with Bobby Kennedy as well as JFK, and that Bobby was complicit in Monroe’s death. Those charges came at a time when Lawford had lost his acting career to philandering, drinking, and drugs—and remain unproven. Peter Lawford died in 1984 from cardiac arrest brought on by liver failure. He was sixty-one years old.

Greta Garbo lived to the age of eighty-four, dying in New York City on April 15, 1990. She was a recluse to the end of her life, never marrying or having children, and always living alone. The legendary actress, however, was fond of taking long walks through the streets of New York, most often wearing a pair of oversize sunglasses—a habit that her admirer, Jackie Kennedy, would also assume. Garbo was very good with her money, and though she had been retired for nearly forty years at the time of her death, she left an estate to her niece worth more than $32 million.

It has been argued that Camelot was a myth concocted by Jackie Kennedy to burnish her husband’s legacy. Whether or not the comparisons to Camelot were discussed in the Kennedy White House during the president’s lifetime is unclear. But the comparisons are apt and, as Jackie had hoped, the story of Camelot shaped how her husband’s presidency is remembered to this day.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is buried on a slope near the former home of Robert E. Lee, in Arlington National Cemetery, the place he so admired just a few weeks before his death. He is one of only two presidents buried there—the other being William Howard Taft, who died in 1930.

Jackie Kennedy was insistent that her husband’s funeral be as much like Abraham Lincoln’s as possible. Professor James Robertson Jr., director of the Civil War Centennial Commission, and David Mearns from the Library of Congress were enlisted to research Lincoln’s funeral in the short span between JFK’s assassination and his burial. The East Room of the White House was transformed so that it looked almost exactly as it did when it held Lincoln’s body in 1865. Also, the caisson and funeral procession through Washington, D.C., were copied from Lincoln’s final journey.

John Kennedy’s burial site at Arlington is lit by an eternal flame, at the suggestion of Jackie Kennedy. It burns at the center of a five-foot circular slab of Cape Cod granite. Jackie rests next to him, as do their two deceased infants, Arabella and Patrick. Television coverage of John Kennedy’s funeral transformed Arlington from the burial place of soldiers and sailors into a popular tourist destination. To this day, no place in Arlington is more popular than the grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A generation after his assassination, more than four million people a year still arrive at Arlington to pay their respects to the fallen president.

And also to the grand American vision that he represented.