SEYMOUR HERSH
The Dark Side of Camelot
For Elizabeth,
Matthew, Melissa,
and Joshua
CONTENTS
1. November 22
It was America’s blackest Friday.
President John F. Kennedy was gunned down on a Dallas street thirty minutes after noon on November 22, 1963. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had accompanied the president to Dallas, sped back to Air Force One and was sworn in with the bloodied widow of Jack Kennedy at his side. The presidential airplane soared away from murderous Texas to the safety of Washington.
Once Air Force One was airborne, some of the military and security men on duty were able to emerge from their despair and anger to begin asking necessary questions. Was Jack Kennedy’s death the first move in an international conspiracy? Was Lyndon Johnson now the target? These concerns were shared in Washington, as the bureaucracy began the slow turn from one presidential orbit to another.
But it was the man closest to John F. Kennedy who needed to put aside his grief and begin immediately to hide all evidence of Kennedy’s secret life from the nation—as well as from the new president, who could be sitting in the Oval Office by early evening. When word came of his brother’s shooting, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the second most powerful man in Washington, was at his Hickory Hill estate in suburban Virginia having a casual lunch of clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches with, among others, Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.*
In those first hours of horror, the president’s remarkable younger brother lived up to his reputation for pragmatism and toughness, notifying members of the family, worrying about the return of his brother’s body, answering legal queries from the new president, and, it seemed, losing himself in appropriate action. There would be time for mourning later. Now there was a state funeral to arrange and the president’s widow and children to console. Among his many telephone calls early that afternoon was one to McGeorge Bundy, the dead president’s national security adviser, who was told to protect Jack Kennedy’s papers. Bundy, after checking with the State Department, ordered that the combinations to the president’s locked files be changed at once—before Lyndon Johnson’s men could begin rummaging through them.
Bobby Kennedy understood that public revelation of the materials in his brother’s White House files would forever destroy Jack Kennedy’s reputation as president, and his own as attorney general. He had spent nearly three years in a confounding situation—as guardian of the nation’s laws, as his brother’s secret operative in foreign crises, and as personal watchdog for an older brother who reveled in personal excess and recklessness.
The two brothers had lied in their denials to newspapermen and the public about Jack Kennedy’s long-rumored first marriage to a Palm Beach socialite named Durie Malcolm. In 1947 Kennedy, then a first-term congressman, and Malcolm were married by a justice of the peace in an early-morning ceremony at Palm Beach. In an interview for this book, Charles Spalding, one of Kennedy’s oldest friends, broke five decades of silence