Killing Kennedy

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. What matters,” he says, is that “I am the responsible officer of the government.”
    One day JFK will look back and speculate that the Bay of Pigs blunder could have given the U.S. military reason to interfere with the civilian American government on the grounds that the president was unsuited for office.
    Six months later, however, it is CIA director Allen Dulles who is fired. The CIA chief is extremely bitter. The slight is one that the old spymaster and his agency will not soon forget.
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    A week after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy calls his advisers, including Bobby, into the Cabinet Room. Bobby’s attendance at a foreign policy meeting is unusual, and at first the president’s brother holds his tongue.
    The president leans back in his chair and softly taps a pencil against his teeth as Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles reads a lengthy statement that absolves the State Department from any blame concerning the Bay of Pigs.
    JFK can see that Bobby is seething. The two brothers find Bowles whiny and self-righteous.
    The president knows from a lifetime of observing his little brother in action that an explosion is coming soon. He has also authorized Bobby to speak for him. JFK waits, keeping his expression blank, listening, tapping that pencil against his teeth.
    Finally Bobby Kennedy takes the floor. He brutally tears into Chester Bowles with words designed to humiliate.
    “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left the foreign policy to someone else,” Bobby growls, his voice growing louder. The president watches, his face impassive, that pencil making just the slightest clicking noise on his perfect white teeth.
    “I became suddenly aware,” Kennedy adviser Richard Goodwin will later write, “that Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the president’s concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation. I knew, even then, that there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.”
    If Lyndon Johnson is the vice president, it will one day be written, then Bobby Kennedy is soon to become the assistant president—but only after the Bay of Pigs bonds the brothers and transforms the way JFK does business in the White House. From now on, when President Kennedy wants a contentious point made to his cabinet or advisers, he will rely on Bobby, who will then speak for the president and endure any subsequent criticism or argument so as not to weaken his big brother.
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    Amazingly, Kennedy’s approval ratings rise to 83 percent after the invasion, proving to the president that the American people firmly stand behind his actions against Castro. Behind the scenes, U.S. plots to overthrow the Cuban leader continue to be hatched, and Castro becomes openly defiant of Kennedy, further cementing the widespread belief that each man wants the other dead.
    Meanwhile, even as Kennedy’s approval ratings temporarily make him one of the most popular presidents of the twentieth century, he knows that something must be done to restore America’s prestige among the international community. In an interview with James Reston of the New York Times , Kennedy sets aside the Cuban situation. Instead, he candidly admits that “we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place.”
    Vietnam.
    Small, and until now almost completely overlooked by America, the Asian nation is in the throes of its own Communist uprising. Now President Kennedy deems it vital to American security. In May 1961, JFK tasks Vice President Lyndon Johnson with a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, sending him farther away from the Oval Office than ever before.
    The reasons have as much to do with national security as the president’s awareness of the toll that being powerless is taking on the vice president. “I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” JFK confides to one senator. “He just comes in, sits at cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up. Never says anything. He looks so sad.”
    When Kennedy’s good friend Senator George Smathers of Florida suggests Johnson go on an