Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

“The fact is that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy never fully reveals herself to anyone—not even to her husband, the president.”

O’Reilly and Dugard describe Jackie Kennedy as guarded. While the first lady does not manipulate or deceive, she does maintain a careful public image and keeps many things private, including her pack-a-day smoking habit. For a woman who does not trust easily, this is less a matter of public relations than of self-preservation. In the book, Jackie is the driving force behind the “Camelot” narrative of the Kennedy White House, which, in light of the president’s numerous extramarital affairs, might reflect Jackie’s wishes as much as her reality.

“By the time the Bay of Pigs is over he will count among these enemies not only Castro but also one of the highest-ranking officials of the US government: the wily CIA chief, Allen Dulles.”

Less than three months into his presidency, Kennedy authorized a CIA-backed invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The plan, inherited from the previous administration, called for CIA-trained Cuban exiles to land on the island and overthrow Castro. The invasion proved disastrous when Kennedy balked at providing the necessary air support. During and after this debacle, known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy came to regard as hostile many high-ranking members of the US defense and intelligence establishments, including CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy later fired. Dulles later sat on the Warren Commission. While O’Reilly and Dugard make no specific accusations, they do point out the CIA’s curious presence in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“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.”

O’Reilly and Dugard often highlight Kennedy’s growth into the role of president. During the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, however, because the president is “still learning,” he is carried along with much reluctance by the force of events. Officials from the CIA and Pentagon, “men whose careers depend upon” the use of force, have foisted this invasion plan on a president who, less than three months into the job, does not yet understand even the basic pro-war assumptions on which these powerful federal agencies and departments operate. This quotation also features one of many comparisons between Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln.

“The harrowing days of April 1961 taught the Kennedy brothers an indelible lesson: they are on their own. Their advisers are not worth shoe polish. In order to restore America’s power position, the Kennedy brothers will have to find a way to defeat their enemies, both abroad and, especially, in Washington, D.C.”

The key word here is “especially.” President Kennedy did make enemies in the international arena, none of whom hated him more than Cuba’s Fidel Castro, whose removal from power was the object of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev also came to regard President Kennedy as a rival. The administration’s worst enemies, however, hailed from inside the US government. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, for instance, loathed Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother, who emerged during the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a kind of second-in-command to the president himself. High-ranking CIA officials despised both John and Bobby Kennedy.

“The file is Hoover’s idea of job security.”

J. Edgar Hoover, the “pug-nosed and Machiavellian” (76) director of the FBI, kept files on every major public figure of interest. In this case, the source of Hoover’s “job security” was the FBI’s file on President Kennedy, which dated to the 1940s. Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that the president had associates with strong ties to organized crime, including singer Frank Sinatra. O’Reilly and Dugard assess the controversial FBI director’s motive as self-interest, working to ensure that “the FBI will never be diminished” (76). Much like the CIA, the FBI was ubiquitous in both the Kennedys’ lives and the life of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Jackie, once again, is not in attendance, but she knows all about Marilyn. She’s not so much hurt as disgusted, correctly sensing that the president is taking advantage of an emotionally troubled woman who is easy prey for such a powerful man.”

Jackie was “not in attendance” at Madison Square Garden, where Marilyn Monroe famously sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in the “most salacious manner possible” (84). The president’s recent tryst with one of Hollywood’s legendary sex symbols underscores the mythical aspect of Camelot, at least in the first two years of the Kennedy presidency. It also highlights the president’s recklessness in his extramarital affairs.

“And best of all, LBJ believes this. Johnson was raised in poverty himself. He knows firsthand the ravages of neglect and substandard living conditions. In many ways, the vice president has a far deeper emotional connection with the unwashed crowds along the side of the road than with the wealthy diplomats who host him.”

On an international tour, Vice President Johnson makes a stop in Beirut, Lebanon, and talks about the American Dream, the thing in which he “believes” from “firsthand” experience. In Washington, DC, blue bloods such as the Kennedy brothers often mock Johnson and his Texas twang. The vice president bristles at the condescension while craving real power. This passage represents one of the few occasions on which O’Reilly and Dugard depict Johnson in a positive light.

“Bobby knows that one of JFK’s first official acts after being reelected in 1964 will be to fire J. Edgar Hoover.”

J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime FBI director, had an obsession with hunting suspected Communists and cared nothing about civil rights. In fact, he often assumed that civil rights leaders were Communist sympathizers. By contrast, Bobby Kennedy took the lead on civil rights in his brother’s White House. Thus, Hoover and the FBI emerged as two more in a long line of Kennedy enemies.

“It is Marina Oswald’s Russian friend George de Mohrenschildt who arranged for Oswald to be hired there. If the FBI, in all its zeal to stop the spread of communism, is concerned that a former Soviet defector has access to such top secret U-2 data at the peak of cold war tension, it’s not proving it by paying attention to his case.”

This is the book’s second mention of George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian expatriate with CIA connections who got Lee Harvey Oswald a job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, a photographic firm with US government contracts and access to classified photos from U-2 spy planes. Marina Oswald’s estrangement from her volatile husband led her to seek friendship elsewhere in Dallas’s small, Russian-speaking community. By including de Mohrenschildt and the FBI in the same passage, O’Reilly and Dugard highlight the unmistakable presence of the two most powerful federal agencies in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The president and First Lady have never been more popular than they are right now, and never more synonymous with America herself.”

By “right now,” O’Reilly and Dugard mean January 1963, the beginning of what appeared to be a promising year. During and after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the president and First Lady drew much closer to one another, and the president showed leadership that endeared him to much of the nation. If the Camelot myth ever approached reality, it was in this period of the Kennedy presidency.

“John Kennedy believes that America needs to end the Vietnam conflict—though he is not quite ready to go public with this.”

For modern readers who know how the story of America’s involvement in Vietnam ended, it may be surprising to learn that during the Kennedy presidency, before the US had committed combat troops, withdrawal from Vietnam would have been politically unpopular. Kennedy’s private determination to get US personnel out of Vietnam has often been cited as a possible motive for his assassination, at least by those who argue that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in murdering the president. O’Reilly and Dugard do not make this claim, but they acknowledge a confluence of powerful, anti-Kennedy officials inside the US government, all of whom wanted to escalate the Vietnam War.

“Despite the triumph, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Fitzgerald Kennedy are not on the same page. In fact, they are on a collision course.”

This dramatic-sounding passage refers to the spring 1963 civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama, which proved a victory for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement when public opinion turned against the arch-segregationists and their brutal tactics. President Kennedy sympathized with the protesters, but he also distrusted Martin Luther King Jr., whom he had not yet met. The FBI had files on King’s personal life, details of which were nearly as salacious as the president’s. J. Edgar Hoover also erroneously suspected King of Communist sympathies. While “collision course” overstates the Kennedy-King encounter that O’Reilly and Dugard ultimately describe, there is no question that the president at first regarded the civil rights leader with suspicion.

“Bobby Kennedy is winning this war. The more Lyndon Johnson realizes this, the sicker and more depressed he will become.”

By summer 1963, the attorney-general was “winning” the “war” for recognition as the Democratic Party’s white standard-bearer on civil rights. O’Reilly and Dugard suggest that Johnson, for political reasons only, had tried to position himself as the party’s civil rights leader, outflanking the younger Kennedy. As long as Bobby Kennedy had his brother’s confidence, however, Johnson could never ascend to that position.

“Sixty-five miles to the south, Jackie is also overcome with agonizing grief.”“Sixty-five miles to the south, Jackie is also overcome with agonizing grief.”

In August 1963, at a hospital on Otis Air Force Base, Jackie gave birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, a premature baby who weighed less than five pounds and lived only 39 hours. At Boston’s Children’s Hospital, where Patrick was transferred, the president held his son’s hand to the end, while Jackie recovered. The loss of her infant son plunged the first lady into a prolonged grief from which, by the time of the assassination little more than three months later, she was only beginning to emerge. Patrick’s death adds oft-forgotten context both to the Camelot narrative and to the assassination’s human tragedy, which O’Reilly and Dugard emphasize.

“Paine is a Quaker housewife who was introduced to the Oswalds by George de Mohrenschildt, the well-educated Russian with possible CIA connections whom Oswald met in the summer of 1962.”

After leaving her husband, Marina Oswald lived at the home of her friend Ruth Paine. Unbeknownst to Paine, Oswald stored his rifle in Paine’s garage. Paine did not trust Oswald, but she did give him a “kindly reference” (220) for a menial job at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

“Things are darkening in Camelot.”

After emerging from grief-induced seclusion, Jackie took a much-publicized trip to Greece. Notwithstanding the recent loss of her infant son, the first lady came under fire for this “self-indulgent” (222) excursion, which included two weeks aboard Aristotle Onassis’s luxury yacht. The president sensed this turn in public opinion, which gave fresh urgency to his planned Texas fundraising trip in late November.

“Thus ends the last dinner party ever held in Camelot.”

Maintaining the Camelot theme, O’Reilly and Dugard describe actress Greta Garbo’s evening at the White House on November 13, 1963. The party ended when Garbo left for her hotel room. In addition to being the last such party at the Kennedy White House, which of course no one knew at the time, the Garbo dinner represents the kind of event that fueled the Camelot narrative, particularly in retrospect.

“The Dallas motorcade route violates every one of these principles.”

On November 18, 1963, Secret Service agents collaborated with the Dallas police to map out the motorcade route for the president’s visit in four days. O’Reilly and Dugard note what the agents knew but somehow ignored: A “perfect motorcade route” lacks “high windows” and features “alternative routes,” “wide streets,” and “few, if any tight turns” (243). None of this describes Dealey Plaza below the Texas School Book Depository Building.

“But the fact remains that two of the shots did not miss.”

This refers to two of the three shots fired at President Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bolt-action rifle. O’Reilly and Dugard indicate early in the book that they intend to base their account only on known facts. They present copious amounts of evidence from which conspiracy theories have sprung, but they neither embrace nor dismiss those theories except by implication in this one instance. By describing as “fact” the contention that Oswald fired both of the shots that struck the president, including the fatal head shot, O’Reilly and Dugard give credence to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone.

“Hill realizes something. It’s bad enough that she is seeing the man she loves with his head blown off, but she doesn’t want anyone else seeing him like that. And as the media descend onto Parkland Hospital even in the midst of Jackie’s lonely Pieta, there is no way in the world Jackie will allow John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be photographed in this state.”

Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill was responsible for protecting the first lady. After the president sustained the fatal head wound, Jackie scrambled toward the back of the limousine, instinctively reaching for remnants of her husband’s shattered skull. This moment is caught on the now-famous Zapruder film. In that home-movie recording, Hill is the agent shown rushing to the limousine from the trailing vehicle. What is not captured on film is what Hill later described: the ensuing four-mile ride to Parkland Hospital and the first lady’s refusal to let go of her murdered husband or even to allow anyone to see him. In later years, a traumatized Jackie Kennedy would not be able to recall the moments immediately following the fatal shot.

“Jackie leans up and presses her cheek to that of Dr. Clark. It is an expression of thanks. Kemp Clark, a hard man who served in the Pacific in World War II, can’t help himself. He breaks down and sobs.”

Inside Trauma Room One, Dr. William Kemp Clark, chief neurosurgeon at Parkland Hospital, informed the first lady that President Kennedy had suffered a fatal head wound, to which she replied, “I know” (278). Jackie’s gentle “expression of thanks” reflects her strength and grace even in the worst moment of her life. The neurosurgeon’s grief highlights the day’s human tragedy, which O’Reilly and Dugard emphasize as a fact often obscured in the swirl of conspiracy theories.

“There he moves into President Kennedy’s personal bedroom, takes off his coat, and sprawls on the bed while he awaits Jackie Kennedy’s return to the plane.”

“He” is Vice President Lyndon Johnson, now acting president and soon to be sworn in as the 36th president of the United States. At 1:26 p.m. on November 22, 1963, less than half an hour after President Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Johnson moved into the presidential bedroom aboard Air Force One. Jackie Kennedy was on her way from the hospital along with her murdered husband’s casket. Like everyone else on that day, Johnson had no idea how to behave at such a moment. Nonetheless, O’Reilly and Dugard describe Johnson as miserable in the role of vice president and thirsting for more power. Johnson’s apparent eagerness to move into the presidential bedroom supports that narrative.

“I’m just a patsy.”

Late on the night of November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, now in custody for murdering President Kennedy, spoke these words to a group of reporters at Dallas’s police headquarters. The word “patsy” suggests that Oswald believed—or wanted reporters to believe—that he was a fall guy for a crime he either did not plan or commit alone. This statement helped spawn numerous conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. O’Reilly and Dugard portray Oswald as a resentful and rage-filled loner obsessed with proving himself a great man, but they do not explain Oswald’s “patsy” comment, which seems an attempt to diminish himself, in that same context of frustrated greatness.