Killing Kennedy

has to like the Kennedy boys—and he doesn’t.
    Bobby knows that one of JFK’s first official acts after being reelected in 1964 will be to fire J. Edgar Hoover. So he soldiers on, investigating civil rights violations without the FBI director’s support. It’s tough going. Something as simple as getting a judge approved by the Senate for an open spot in a federal court is stymied when the senator in charge of the subcommittee orders that the proceedings be halted indefinitely. Not surprisingly, the judge up for approval, Thurgood Marshall, is black. And also not surprisingly, the senator who halted the proceedings is white.
    But Robert Kennedy is the U.S. attorney general, sworn to uphold the nation’s laws. And as long as young men such as Emmett Till are being lynched for the color of their skin, Bobby has no choice but to wage this war.
    *   *   *
    It is brutally hot in Fort Worth, Texas, on August 16, 1962. FBI special agents John Fain and Arnold J. Brown, warriors in J. Edgar Hoover’s war against communism, have been waiting all day to see Lee Harvey Oswald. They sit in an unmarked car, just down the street from Oswald’s newly rented duplex apartment on Mercedes Street, right around the corner from the Montgomery Ward department store.
    Special Agent Fain is just two months away from finishing his twenty years with the bureau. He’s going to retire to Houston. There, he’ll live off his pension while working for his brother, an orthopedic surgeon. This will mark yet another major career change for the veteran agent. Fain is a complicated man in his mid-fifties who taught school, ran for public office, and passed the Texas state bar before joining the bureau in 1942. The Oswald case is nothing new to him. Back when Oswald first defected to the Soviet Union, it was Fain who was assigned a minor investigation of Oswald’s mother because she had mailed twenty-five dollars to her son in the Soviet Union. When it comes to rooting out Communists, no stone is too small to be left unturned by Hoover’s FBI.
    It is also John Fain who spoke face-to-face with Oswald just eight weeks earlier, on June 26, 1962. Oswald’s case has been designated as an “internal security” investigation, based on the belief that his defection might make him a threat to national security. Fain’s job is to find out whether the Russians have trained and equipped Oswald to perform a job against the United States. It is protocol with all internal security investigations to have two agents present, so that all statements can be corroborated.
    Something about the first interview, which lasted two hours, doesn’t sit well with Fain. He doesn’t like Oswald’s attitude, thinking him “haughty, arrogant … and insolent.” And his answers to most questions seemed incomplete. Fain has in-depth knowledge of Oswald’s struggle to return to America and knows that the Russians originally would not allow Marina and the baby to leave with him. But Oswald refused to leave without his wife, and the Soviet authorities finally relented. The one question that Oswald has never answered in a completely truthful manner is whether the Russians demanded anything in return for letting him come to America.
    John Fain needs that question answered. He’s a very thorough man and takes it upon himself to interview Lee Harvey Oswald one more time.
    At 5:30 P.M . the two agents see Oswald sauntering down the street, on his way home from his new job as a welder at the Leslie Machine Shop. Oswald lied on his job application, stating that his Marine Corps discharge was honorable when it was not. Oswald was kicked out of the Corps for a series of minor infractions. He also neglected to tell his employer about his time in the Soviet Union. And while he’s been on the job only a month, Oswald is already sick of the menial labor. He wants to quit and find better work in Dallas.
    Fain drives up alongside the walking Oswald. “Hi, Lee. How are you?” he says out the car window. “Would you mind talking with us for just a few minutes?”
    “Won’t you come in the house,” Oswald answers politely, remembering Fain from the last interview. Special Agent Brown is a new face. A different agent accompanied Fain back in June.
    “Well, we will just talk here,” Fain responds. “We will be alone to ourselves and be informal, and just fine.”
    Brown gets out to let Oswald into the backseat. Fain stays up front behind the wheel, but Brown slides in