A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first album.
A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.
Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women’s movement with her book
The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover’s world by creating a domestic operations division.
Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.
The one thing Bobby can’t stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.
Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable man I know.”
And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.
Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.
On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson’s speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it’s a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of
Of all the amazing things happening in the world in March 1963, this simple mail-order purchase would seem to have little significance. In fact, nothing will have a greater impact on world events than this nineteen-dollar Italian war-surplus bolt-action rifle.
The weapon arrives on March 25. Marina complains that they could have used the money for food. But Oswald is pleased with the purchase and gets in the habit of riding the bus to a dry riverbed for target practice against the levee.
On March 31, while Marina is hanging diapers on the clothesline to dry, Oswald steps into the backyard dressed all in black. His new pistol is tucked into his belt. He brandishes the rifle in one hand and holds copies of two Communist newspapers in the other. He demands that an amused Marina take photographs of him. He plans to send them to the
On April 6, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His Communist rants have grown offensive to his coworkers, and his bosses claim that he has become undependable.
On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides it’s time to kill someone.
10
APRIL 9, 1963
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MIDDAY
The man with seven months to live is talking to Winston Churchill.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy stands in the White House Rose Garden before a large, warmhearted crowd. Churchill, the ninety-two-year-old former prime minister whose inspirational courage helped save Britain during World War II, watches live by satellite from his home in London. The purpose of this Rose Garden gathering is to make Winston Churchill an American citizen—the only foreign leader since Lafayette to be so honored.
“A son of America though a subject of Britain,” Kennedy begins his speech, referring to the fact that Churchill’s mother, nee Jenny Jerome, was a U.S. citizen, “has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American nation.”
Churchill’s fifty-one-year-old son, Randolph, stands at JFK’s side. Jackie Kennedy stands directly behind her husband. The Rose Garden is filled with diplomats and acquaintances from the United States and England. The president’s father, Joseph, who served as ambassador to Great Britain just prior to the Second World War, watches from a wheelchair inside the White House, the elder Kennedy having experienced a stroke two years prior.
But even as John Kennedy stands before this idyllic gathering, seeing the warmth and smiles that come with honoring such a distinguished and legendary world leader, his thoughts are never far from another “Churchill”—and another war that is gaining steam.
It was Dwight Eisenhower who first sent American soldiers to Vietnam to stem the flow of communism in Southeast Asia. But it was John Kennedy who ordered a gradual escalation in the number of troops since taking office, hoping to ensure that Vietnam did not fall to communism and thus perhaps begin a domino effect that would see other Asian nations turn their backs on democracy.
But Kennedy’s good intentions have gone awry. The handful of American “advisers” in Vietnam has now swelled to almost sixteen thousand pilots and soldiers. American pilots are dropping napalm firebombs from the sky to destroy the Viet Cong army that is now fighting the U.S.-backed Saigon regime. Thousands of Viet Cong soldiers have been killed—as have thousands of innocent Vietnamese peasants. “The charred bodies of children and babies have made pathetic piles in the middle of the remains of the marketplace,” the Associated Press reported after one such bombing incident.
American pilots fly hundreds of missions over Vietnam every month. A systematic process of defoliation has begun, with American airplanes spraying chemicals over the jungle to kill all vegetation that might hide enemy soldiers. Of course, the crops of many innocent farmers are destroyed in the process. This “scorched earth” policy will eventually come back to haunt the United States in a number of ways.
The CIA has joined in the fight in Vietnam, conducting covert search-and-destroy missions in the Communist north. Gunners aboard American helicopters have free rein to open fire on the peasants who turn and run when they see Hueys come sweeping in over the treetops. The assumption is that the farmers run because they are the enemy, not that they might be superstitious and terrified about aircraft that have suddenly invaded the skies above their primitive villages.
John Kennedy believes that America needs to end the Vietnam conflict—though he is not quite ready to go public with this. “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” he will tell Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Bartlett off the record. “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to reelect me.”
To safeguard his chances for reelection, the president cannot, and will not, pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam until after the 1964 election. The war is still popular with voters. In the meantime, he hopes to contain U.S. involvement, reading his briefing books each morning and praying that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem doesn’t do anything stupid or irresponsible to inflame the situation.
Diem is a Catholic, just like the Kennedys. But his faith is almost fanatical, causing him to lose focus on fighting communism. He is now fighting a war on two fronts. The first is against the Viet Cong; the second is a holy war against Vietnam’s majority Buddhist population.
Yet it is Diem whom Vice President Johnson once famously praised as “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” The Kennedy brothers hate that gross exaggeration. Unlike the real Winston Churchill, Diem is not a firm and steadfast friend of the American people or the United States of America. He is a mass murderer, concerned only about his own glorification.
And that narcissism will soon doom him.
