Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

A Note to Readers-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-17

Chapters 18-24

Chapter 25-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “April 17, 1961. Washington, DC/Bay of Pigs, Cuba. 9:40 AM.”

President Kennedy returns to the White House following a stressful weekend at Glen Ora, a family retreat in Virginia. He has authorized a US-backed invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, carried out by 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and supported by the CIA. The plan predates Kennedy’s administration. The president has misgivings about it, and he cannot get anyone, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to give him a straightforward assessment. Since Castro’s Revolution in 1959, Cuba has become a typical Communist police state. Under President Eisenhower, the CIA began training Cuban exiles in Guatemala. CIA director Allen Dulles is “obsessed with killing Fidel Castro” (49). In the midst of the Cold War, Kennedy cannot afford to appear weak on global Communism, but he also does not want the US directly involved in the invasion, and he does not like the CIA’s plan. In response to one of the president’s concerns, CIA planners change the location of the landing to an inlet called the Bay of Pigs. Still nervous about the entire operation, Kennedy tries to have it both ways: He approves the invasion but also withholds much-needed air support. As a result, the invasion fails.

In search of someone who will tell him the truth, the president phones his brother Bobby, who has a running feud with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, the two men cannot stand one another. The Bay of Pigs invasion marks the moment at which President Kennedy formally and permanently brings his brother into his sole confidence while excluding Johnson altogether. Bobby arrives at the White House to find the president upset over the failing invasion and looking for a way out of the fiasco.

The next day, April 18, President Kennedy finally authorizes air support, but CIA and US military officials botch the operation, and several planes are shot down. In the Cabinet Room, Bobby berates CIA officials and the president’s military advisers. On April 19, the invasion ends in defeat. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and the first lady witness the president weeping. President Kennedy gives a press conference and assumes full responsibility for the failure. Bobby begins attending all foreign policy meetings and becomes, in effect, the “assistant president” (60).

Surprisingly, Kennedy’s approval ratings rise following the failed invasion. Kennedy sends Vice President Johnson on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. The Kennedy brothers have learned that they are surrounded by enemies.

Lee Harvey Oswald prepares to return to the United States with his new wife.

Chapter 4 Summary: “February 14, 1962. Washington, DC. 8:00 PM.”

Jackie Kennedy, the enormously popular first lady, gives a nationally televised tour of the renovated and redecorated White House. Jackie’s script for the tour, which is being recorded for future broadcast, reveals her extensive knowledge of the building and everything in it.

Alas, Jackie also knows about the many women with whom the president has had affairs, including some of her own friends, which is why she usually leaves the White House each Thursday to spend the weekend at Glen Ora. Jackie feels rejected by her husband. She seeks out a doctor to help her self-image and to improve her sex life with the president.

During breaks in the recording of her White House tour, Jackie chain-smokes and drinks a good deal of scotch.

Chapter 5 Summary: “March 24, 1962. Palm Springs, California. 7:00 PM.”

The president is spending the evening at the home of entertainer Bing Crosby. Kennedy had planned to stay with his longtime friend Frank Sinatra but changed plans at the last minute. With Jackie on a much-publicized international tour, Kennedy has his sights set on Marilyn Monroe. This is nothing new. Some of the president’s more frequent sexual partners even have Secret Service code names.

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, the “pug-nosed and Machiavellian” FBI director (76), keeps files on everyone, including the president, whom Hoover’s agency has tracked since World War II. Before the president’s trip to the West Coast, Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that Frank Sinatra has deep connections to organized crime, in particular the mobster Sam Giancana. Bobby then instructed his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, a peripheral member of Sinatra’s legendary “rat pack,” to cancel the president’s planned visit with Sinatra, who fumed over the perceived slight. The president now pursues the intelligent yet deeply wounded Monroe, who spends the next two nights with him. At Madison Square Garden less than two months later, Marilyn sings “Happy Birthday” to the president “in the most salacious manner possible,” for she “has become so obsessed with JFK that she calls the White House constantly” (84-5). Jackie knows about Marilyn and is “disgusted” that her powerful husband would use a vulnerable woman in that way (84).

A few weeks later, on June 13, Lee Harvey Oswald returns to America with his wife.

Chapters 3-5 Analysis

President Kennedy’s behavior during the Bay of Pigs Invasion should be read in light of Chapter 1, which recounts young Lieutenant Kennedy’s harrowing experience in the South Pacific during World War II. O’Reilly and Dugard view the PT-109 ordeal as the moment at which Kennedy first embraced leadership. By 1961, nearly two decades have passed, and Kennedy is far more comfortable as a leader. Nonetheless, after authorizing the doomed Bay of Pigs Invasion, the president appears indecisive and rattled. O’Reilly and Dugard acknowledge that the situation requires some allowances for the president’s relative inexperience as commander-in-chief, for the invasion occurred less than three months into his administration. By establishing Kennedy’s past excellent performance as a leader under strain, however, O’Reilly and Dugard imply that factors other than inexperience worked against the president in April 1961. There seems little doubt, for instance, that during the Bay of Pigs fiasco Kennedy felt swept along by the force of events, triggered by an invasion plan that did not originate with him, while surrounded by national-security advisers he could not fully trust.

Chapters 3-5 introduce several sinister actors. The Bay of Pigs Invasion marks the moment at which President Kennedy became aware of hostile-to-him elements inside the US government. As well, O’Reilly and Dugard mention powerful organizations whose leaders developed intense animus toward President Kennedy and/or his brother Bobby: the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Cuban government under Fidel Castro. In later chapters, both Castro and the Mafia make periodic appearances, while the CIA and FBI play more prominent roles. All four of these Kennedy enemies, to one degree or another, will intersect with the life of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Early in the Kennedy presidency, the Camelot narrative is more myth than reality. The president’s extramarital affairs hurt the first lady, whose pain O’Reilly and Dugard never ignore for long. Their treatment of the first lady, however, reveals more admiration than pathos. She keeps her smoking habit and accompanying anxieties hidden from the public. During a televised tour of the White House, she somehow manages to come across as both elegant and down-to-earth. Despite her “quiet sadness about her marriage” (67), she exudes calm confidence and presents the world with an idyllic image of the life she wishes she actually lived. O’Reilly and Dugard focus on Jackie Kennedy and the Camelot theme because they are more interested in their story’s human dimensions than in the myriad questions raised by the assassination.