The End of Camelot

By Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

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It has been widely pointed out that the two men had much in common. In fact, the parallels are amazing:

• Lincoln was first elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.
• Both were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives. 
• Their successors were both southerners named Johnson who had served in the Senate. 
• Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon Johnson in 1908.
• Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, while Kennedy was elected to the house in 1946. 
• Both men suffered the death of children while in office.
• The assassin Booth shot inside a theater and fled into a storage facility, while the assassin Oswald shot from a storage facility and fled into a theater. 

Back in 1963, few Americans understood how profoundly the assassination of JFK would change the country. These days, history is a difficult thing to impart, especially because of political agendas. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 2)

Baughman is well aware of another chilling fact. Since 1840, every president elected in a twenty-year cycle has died in office: Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and Roosevelt. Yet no president has been assassinated for almost sixty years, thanks to the expertise of the Secret Service. Just last month, agents foiled an attempt on Kennedy’s life by a disgruntled former postal worker who planned to blow him up with dynamite. Nonetheless, Baughman is faced with a haunting question: Will the chain of presidential deaths be broken, or will Kennedy be its next link?

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 11)

Kennedy O’Donnell greets Kennedy in the Oval Office and quickly briefs him on the day’s schedule. The president then strides out through another of the Oval Office’s four doors. His path takes him past the desk of his loyal personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and into the Cabinet Room, where Secretary of State Dean Rusk awaits. 

A brilliant man, Rusk attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and served as a chief of war plans as an army officer in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II, organizing covert missions very much like the Bay of Pigs. The Georgia native sat in on the many planning meetings leading up to the weekend’s invasion. Yet he was not Kennedy’s first choice to head the State Department, and just three months into his new job, the new secretary of state remains tentative with his boss, wary of speaking his mind. At a time when Kennedy desperately needs solid advice, Rusk is unwilling to share his professional misgivings about the Bay of Pigs, including his belief “that this thin brigade of Cuban exiles has a snowball’s chance in hell of success.”

Rusk’s reluctance to advise him in an open and honest fashion is the least of the president’s troubles at this point. Nobody, it seems, will level with Kennedy. As JFK awaits word from the battlefront, he craves the company of someone who will tell him the unvarnished truth.

Sensing a crisis, the president picks up a phone and dials. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 45-46)

Corruption reached an all-time high under the American-friendly regime of General Fulgencio Butista, sparking rebellion among Cubans. After four years of fighting, Fidel Castro, the thirty-two-year-old bastard child of a wealthy Cuban farmer, led his guerrilla army into Havana and toppled Batista. (The general died of a heart attack in exile in Portugal, just two days before Castro’s team of assassins could complete its mission.) The United States responded to Batista’s overthrow by officially recognizing the new government. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 46-47)

The Cuban people soon realized that they were paying a high price for supporting the rise of Castro. But overseas, Castro’s popular facade as a revolutionary hero took hold. One British newspaper wrote that “Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.” In April 1950, Castro spoke at the Harvard University Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even though he had used his knowledge of the law to suspend Cuba’s writ of habeas corpus, and even though the January 12 massacre was reported in the New York Times, Casto’s Harvard speech was interrupted time after time by enthusiastic cheering and applause. 

On that same trip to America, the Cuban leader met with Vice President Richard Nixon, who was immediately impressed by Castro. In fact, Nixon wrote in a four-page secret memo to Eisenhower that “the one fact we can be sure of, is that he has those indefinable qualities which makes him a leader of men.”

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 47-48)

Inside the Washington Beltway, the CIA and its longtime director, Allen Dulles, have become obsessed with killing Fidel Castro. It will one day be estimated that they concocted more than six hundred plans to assassinate him, including such unorthodox methods as a Mafia-style hit and exploding cigars. On March 11, a year after Dwight Eisenhower authorized the training of rebel forces, President Kennedy was formally presented with CIA plans for a landing. The invasion would take place in daylight, and the location would be a beach code-named Tinidad. 

The operation presented Kennedy with a major dilemma. On the one hand, he had run for president on a platform of change, promising the nation a new start after the cold war policies of Dwight Eisenhower. On the other hand, he had fanatically ridiculed Eisenhower about Castro and knew he would look soft on communism if he did nothing to deter the brutal dictator. On April 7 the New York Times ran another front-page story, this one saying that the Cuban rebels were breaking camp and preparing to launch their invasion, prompting Kennedy to remark privately that Castro didn’t need spies in the United States – all he had to do was read the paper. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 49-50)

It was LBJ’s habit to take important guests deer hunting on his vast property, and Bobby’s visit was no different. At first, Bobby and LBJ got along extremely well – that is, until Bobby shot at a deer. The rifle’s recoil knocked him flat and opened a cut above one eye. Johnson, reaching down to help Bobby to his feet, couldn’t resist taking a swipe: “Son,” he told Bobby, “you’ve got to learn to shoot a gun like a man.”

No one speaks to Bobby Kennedy that way. Of such small moments are great feuds made. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 54)

Johnson, who privately refers to Bobby as “that snot-nosed little son of a bitch,” is already regretting leaving the Senate. LBJ is a man in decline. President Kennedy doesn’t trust him and barely tolerates him. The president is so dismissive of Johnson that he even wonders to Jackie, “Can you imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?”

Being vice president, noted John Nance Garner, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first VP, is like being “a pitcher of warm spit.” John Adams once described being in the position as “I am nothing.” Lyndon Johnson knows precisely what his predecessors meant. He no longer has a constituency, no longer has political leverage, and no longer has a whit of authority. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 55)

He has come a long way since his days as the young commander of PT-109. But he is still learning, as Abraham Lincoln also learned, that the decision to use force should not be determined by men whose careers depend upon its use.

But it was not the CIA or the Joint Chiefs who ordered the invasion; it was John Kennedy.

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 56-57)

More than 110 men would not have died if JFK had canceled the Bay of Pigs invasion. And more than 1,200 freedom fighters would not have been captured and sentenced to Castro’s brutal prisons. The Bay of Pigs not only exposed flaws in Kennedy’s international policy, but it also eroded the power the voters had given him – even if this was unbeknownst to them at the time. Kennedy was indecisive at a time when he should have been resolute. He allowed himself to be misled. It is impossible to ascertain why. But there is no question that in the first major test of his administration, Kennedy’s leadership failed. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 61-62)

Then Khrushchev’s message arrives. The letter’s wording is personal, an appeal from one leader to another to do the right thing. The Soviet leader insists that he is not trying to incite nuclear war: “Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die, could do this,” he writes. The Soviet ruler rambles on, questioning Kennedy’s motivations. 

Khrushchev concludes his letter by negotiating with Kennedy in a somewhat confusing fashion. The paragraph that draws the most attention states: “If you have not lost your self-control, and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot.” 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 127-128)

But Johnson is anything but gone, and anything but a hillbilly. During his time as Senate majority leader he was masterful at passing difficult legislation. His favorite biblical verse, Isaiah 1:18, exemplifies his passion for building coalitions: “Come now, let us reason together.”

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 149)

The destruction of Camelot might have begun with the Bay of Pigs, when John F. Kennedy made a permanent enemy of Fidel Castro and infuriated his own Central Intelligence Agency. 

Or it might have started that October night in 1962 when JFK severed his ties with Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra, and the Mafia, then stood back and did nothing as his brother Bobby zealously prosecuted organized crime. 

Camelot’s demise could have originated during the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK scored a decisive public relations victory over Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Empire, while at the same time frustrating his top generals and what Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” for refusing to launch a war. 

The destruction of Camelot could have begun in any number of ways. 

But in fact, it begins on November 18, when Special Agent Winston G. Lawson of the Secret Service advance team, Forrest V. Sorrels of the Secret Service’s Dallas office, and Dallas police chief Jesse Curry drive ten very carefully selected miles from Love Field to the Trade Mart. “Hell,” says Special Agent Sorrels, glancing up at the thousands of windows looking down on them, “we’d be sitting ducks.”

Nevertheless, the agents decide that this will be the presidential motorcade route. 

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 242-243)

Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps. 

All over the world, children love their parents and yearn for love in return. They revel in the touch of parental hands on their faces. And even on the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future-dreams that sometimes come true. 

Such is life.

Yet life can end in less time than it take to draw one breath.

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 262) 

Little do the horrified onlookers know, but historians and conspiracy theorists, as well as average citizens born years after this day, will long argue whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or perhaps had the help of others. Federal authorities will scrutinize ballistics and use a stop-watch to time how quickly a man can aim and reload a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano. A variety of people will become self-descrived experts on grainy home videos of the assassination, grassy knolls, and the many evildoers who longed to see John F. Kennedy physically removed from power.

Those conspiratorial arguments will become so powerful and so involved that they will one day threaten to overwhelm the human tragedy of November 22, 1963.

So let the record state, once and for all, that at 12:30 P.M. on a sunny Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is shot dead in less time than it takes to blink an eye.

He leaves behind a beautiful widow.

He leaves behind two adoring young children.

He leaves behind a nation that loves him.

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 269)

It is a little-known fact that it is not a federal crime to kill the president of the United States. It is against federal law to initiate a conspiracy to kill the president, which is why J. Edgar Hoover is now insisting that JFK’s murder was the act of many instead of just one. Hoover wants jurisdiction over the case. But at this point, he is not getting it. Jurisdiction falls to the state of Texas and the municipality of Dallas.

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 284)

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 sone’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.

(O’Reilly and Dugard 2012, 297-298)

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References

O’Reilly, Bill, and Martin Dugard. 2012. Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot. N.p.: Henry Holt and Company.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9666-8