When John F. Kennedy entered the presidential limousine at Love Field in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, he began his ride into history. That journey continues even today and we call it the Kennedy legacy. This course will explore the Presidency, assassination, and lasting legacy of President John F. Kennedy. Students will learn how JFK’s life, administration, and tragic death have influenced the general public, the media, and each of the nine U.S. presidents who followed. Understanding the Kennedy legacy and being able to identify elements of his legacy within the context of modern politics helps understand many of the vexing problems that developed over the last half century as well as many of the challenges that confront us today. November 22, 1963 was so powerful a moment that in the fifty years since the assassination, every U.S. President that followed JFK has used Kennedy’s words and actions in an effort to craft their own political image. Why does Kennedy’s influence persist, and will it continue? What are the effects? We’ll address these questions and more as we explore The Kennedy Half Century. Follow on Twitter: @JFKclass.
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The Kennedy Half Century
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From the lesson
The Kennedy Legacy Begins
Meet the Instructors
Professor Larry J. SabatoRobert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics
Director, UVA Center for Politics
[MUSIC]
During the five year course of writing the Kennedy half century, we interviewed
long forgotten assassination witnesses, and behind the scenes players.
Who shared some very interesting stories that add some details about November 22nd,
1963.
After publishing the first edition of the Kennedy Half Century,
I was contacted by a number of people,
who insisted that they had new information about President Kennedy's assassination.
I met, spoke by phone, or
exchanged correspondence with the most credible of them.
More than a half century later,
it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, in most circumstances.
And some intriguing leads simply proved impossible to confirm.
Because the principles refuse to cooperate or they were deceased.
I'll share a few fresh offerings that I was able to trace down and
check adequately, but I can't cover every detail here, so
I hope you'll refer to the new paperback edition of The Kennedy Half Century for
all of this additional information.
James Joseph Patrick McShane, a proudly Irish NYPD cop,
who was born on St. Patrick's Day, did his best to keep JFK safe.
His son, Michael McShane, a former political consultant, and
presidential advisor,
shared with me his father's experiences in that role with President Kennedy.
The elder McShane became friendly first with the Skakel family,
after investigating a robbery at their New York digs.
Daughter Ethel Skakel, of course, became Mrs. Robert F Kennedy.
And when it came time for the 1960 presidential race,
RFK asked McShane to head up security for his brother's presidential team.
In effect, to be the chief body guard.
There was no Secret Service protection for Senator Kennedy or any of the presidential
candidates, other than the incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon at that time.
So McShane improvised with a skeleton crew.
Usually the advancements served as adjunct security officers in each stop.
When word of a threat would reach the campaign,
McShane would simply call the local police chief and ask for reinforcements.
That's how informal the system was in that day, and one might say full of holes.
Occasionally, when the threat seemed especially credible,
McShane would order the candidate's plane, which John Kennedy had called
the Caroline after his daughter, and this was a relatively small Convair CV240.
He ordered the plane to park backwards,
so that JFK would exit away from the gathering crowd.
That was to protect him, obviously.
But it was also an arrangement that sometimes irritated Kennedy.
He understood its necessity, but he wanted to come out where the crowds were.
The press often wrote that the Kennedy's had a massive machine.
But the truth is, the entourage travelling with Kennedy during the campaign
was very small by today's standards.
The settings were quite intimate.
After Kennedy's election as President,
McShane took the newly arrived secret service agents aside, and
spent two hours bringing them up to speed on John Kennedy's likes, his dislikes.
His waking hours, his bedtime hours, incredibly that was the extent
of the security transition, from the campaign trail to president elect status.
For his work and loyalty, the elder McShane became Chief of the US Marshall's.
And that's the oldest Federal Law Enforcement service in America,
dating all the way back to 1789.
Ben Barnes, a state representative at the time of John Kennedy's visit and later
lieutenant governor of Texas, suggested that President Kennedy's motorcade
through Dallas was the result of some wrangling among Texas political rivals.
Particularly, governor John Connally, head of the conservative wing of the party, and
Texas US Senator, Ralph Yarborough, who was the head of the liberal wing.
Governor Connally opposed the idea of the Dallas motorcade,
because he wanted the president to spend the bulk of his time in Texas
with wealthy donors who could support the democratic party.
On the other hand, Senator Yarborough, who was really a populist,
wanted the President to be seen widely by the general public.
Yarborough insisted on his vision for the trip, and
he contacted then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy who sided with Yarborough.
Assuming Barnes' account is true, and we believe it is,
this memory may have added to Bobby Kennedy's grief after Dallas.
Since it was really Bobby Kennedy, who approved the Dallas Motorcade.
I interviewed the Associated Press's correspondent, Sid Davis.
Davis was grabbed at Parkland by members of the Presidential entourage, and
he was sped to Air Force One to witness Lyndon Johnson's swearing in.
He's the last surviving observer of LBJ's oath taking.
Davis appears in all the iconic photos, he's seen here, for
example, just to the right of Mrs. Kennedy.
Davis was acquainted with some of the key players in the Secret Service at
Parkland Hospital, and he understands their decision to wipe down
the bloody presidential limousine, which I've criticized in the earlier version of
the book, as destroying evidence at a crime scene.
Davis argued instead, that the Secret Service was protecting the reputation and
image of the presidency, and this particular president.
They didn't want the public to see the car in the manner in which it had been left
after the shooting.
And that is understandable.
I met with Dallas Sheriff Jim Bowles,
who was the police dispatcher at the time of the assassination in Dallas.
He's the one who helped preserve the famous Dictabelt recordings.
Jim Bowles asserted forcefully, that many accounts and
speculations about how Jack Ruby gained entrance to the police garage,
just before Lee Harvey Oswald's transfer on November 24th, 1963, are simply wrong.
He said, he claimed, Jack Ruby slipped into the basement,
because the officer who was working the main street entrance to the basement,
diverted his attention momentarily, really coincidentally,
as Bowle's said, sometimes goof-ups happen.
Bowles further explained it this way,
a lieutenant had to get his car out of the basement and he was backing the car out.
So the officer guarding the entrance where Ruby eventually walked in,
stepped into the street and stopped traffic on main street.
While he was putting his attention elsewhere for
just a tiny momentary period, Jack Ruby walked into the basement
just seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald was brought out into the basement.
Jim Boles admits his explanation will not convince most assassination devotees, and
he says he still gets letters and
phone calls regularly from people wanting to challenge him.
In November 1963, a highly reliable individual, the mother of one of my former
students at the University of Virginia, who requested that her name not be used
publicly, had just begun her job at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
She first reported for
work on November 18th, just 5 days before the assassination.
She was an analyst for the special projects group.
And as part of her assignment, she had access to CIA background files.
Most relating to Europe and Israel, but
with a scattering involving other countries including Cuba.
She estimated that the cabinets just outside her office,
could've contained hundreds, if not thousands of such files.
Since as she told me, they would've had a physical file on anybody
that had gone to Russia, or Cuba, or whatever.
At then end of her very first week at the CIA, she said someone came in and
told them that President Kennedy had been shot.
She shared the following with me.
I don't remember at what point I heard the name Oswald.
The first file cabinet closest to me contained the O files.
And I went over there and opened it, and there was Oswald's file.
>> I pulled the file and flipped it one back to the Q section.
Shortly thereafter, I went into James Angleton's office and
sat there literally overnight in the corner, on the floor.
>> When she finally returned to her own desk in the morning, she immediately went
to retrieve the file she had hidden in the Q section But it was gone.
It had been taken from the capital,
despite the fact that she'd attempted to obscure it.
This now retired CIA employee,
shared with me her own evaluation of her brush with Oswald's CIA file.
She suggested that the fact that the file was even available for
her, the most junior employee of the agency at the time,
was evidence that the agency was not involved in the assassination.
Otherwise, she said, why would they leave something like that
just before the assassination, with someone who had just started.
It's a good question.
And while there are grimmer alternative explanations, her's is the simplest and
most compelling.
Now, I noted in the first edition of the Kennedy half century,
within hours of the shooting,
agency administrators were doing what they could to shield their organization,
the CIA, from bearing responsibility for the death of the president.
At the same time, in my view, the CIA, as a governmental entity,
as opposed perhaps to an isolated CIA employee or affiliated individuals.
The CIA as an institution,
almost certainly had no role in President Kennedy's murder.
And finally, more evidence of the lax security accompanying President Kennedy.
Came from the form Costa Rica ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Orlando Garcia Valverde, who reached me from his current home in Costa Rica.
The son of a Latin American economist, who studied in the United States.
Garcia Valverde was educated at an American high school
is Lexington, Kentucky.
And then he attended the University of Costa Rico.
Afterwards, he became a Junior Staffer at the Organization of American States
in Washington, D.C. where on April 14th,
1961, just three days before the Bay of Pigs Invasion,
JFK delivered an address on U.S. Latin America cooperation.
Despite having been told by his superiors to leave the premises in advance of
the visit, Garcia Valverdi was determined to see John F Kennedy.
And so he ducked into a bathroom near the street level, and waited some
considerable time, before there was complete silence in the hallways.
To his surprise, no one from the Secret Service, or any other law enforcement
agency, ever checked the bathroom for intruders before the President's visit.
As the time approached for Kennedy's speech, he emerged from his hiding place
and walked to the lobby, greeted the federal agents on hand.
And then continued wandering around the building awaiting the President's arrival
in the lobby.
The front of the OAS building was heavily guarded, but
he found to his astonishment that the main doors on the back entrance which was
of only three access points to the OAS.
And was in fact used by many staff, and those were familiar with the building's
set up, that place was undefended, with a doorstop holding the doors wide open.
>> Number of Presidents of the United Sates have visited the Pan-American Union
since President Theodore Roosevelt Shared with Ambassador Nabuco of Brazil,
the honor of laying the cornerstone of this building over one-half a century ago.
It is an honor for me today, as President of the United States, to share
the platform with another distinguished ambassador from Brazil, Ambassador Lobo.
I doubt whether anyone in all those years, has had the privilege of listening
to a more thoughtful and wise speech, than the one that we have just heard
from the Chairman of the Council of the Organization of American States.
>> The former ambassador said that he had encountered intense opposition to
President Kennedy, among Cubans in DC, even before the Bay of Pigs.
He remains personally convinced the doors were propped open,
to permit an assassination plot to unfold.
Garcia Valverde told me, there's absolutely no doubt in
my mind that the open doors were a result of a plot to kill JFK.
We've been unable to find any evidence of that.
And that's no surprise, since 53 years have passed since that time.
But the important lesson here is that presidential security was
far from airtight in 1961.
The Secret Service depended upon, myth.
That dozens of agents were supposedly surrounding the President from every
vantage point.
That the presidential limousine was, bomb proof.
That the cars bubble top was bullet proof and so on.
None of these things were true.
In our time, they actually are true, but
the belief five decades ago that, an assassination won't or can't happen,
merely insured that sooner or later the assassination would happen.
From all these stories, what's clear,
more than a half century later, is that the interest in and controversy about
John F Kennedy's assassination shows no signs of fading away.
We're all waiting to see those thousands of pages from
unreleased government documents from the CIA for example,
scheduled to be released by October 2017.
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