Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Chapters 6 and 7 are two of the book’s lengthier chapters for good reason. First and foremost, they explain in depth why the president acquired such powerful enemies in the FBI and the Washington, DC–based national-security establishment. Second, they identify a new enemy—Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR—while at the same time showing how the acquisition of this enemy, coupled with the broader events of late 1962, affected the life and troubled mind of Lee Harvey Oswald.

O’Reilly and Dugard devote the first half of Chapter 6 to three seemingly unconnected events: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to construct the Berlin Wall, Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s international travels, and the 1955 murder of Black teenager Emmitt Till by two white men in Mississippi. In the second half of the chapter, it becomes clear that O’Reilly and Dugard mean to draw the reader’s attention to Communism and the Civil Rights Movement, using Johnson to unite these disparate issues, for the vice president later became associated with both civil rights and the Vietnam War. The strange connection between Communism and civil rights existed primarily in the imagination of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who falsely believed that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist and thus became fixated on the civil rights leader. (In 1962, Reverend King sermonized that no good Christian could ever be a Communist [“‘Can a Christian Be a Communist?’ Sermon Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church.” The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, May 24, 2021].) Here is the point at which Hoover’s FBI emerges as an enemy of the Kennedy brothers. In an earlier chapter, O’Reilly and Dugard describe Hoover’s slimy machinations in furtherance of his own interests. By maintaining extensive files on the personal lives of all relevant public figures, including the president, Hoover used effective blackmail to protect his own job and the FBI as a whole. Though unsavory, these were defensive precautions. About Communism, however, Hoover was an aggressive fanatic, rooting out suspected sympathizers wherever he imagined them. The false connection between Communism and civil rights, therefore, coupled with the Kennedy administration’s gradual embrace of the Civil Rights Movement, made the president suspect in Hoover’s eyes.

The narrative of the Cuban Missile Crisis emphasizes the personal rivalry between Kennedy and Khrushchev. For days, the US president and the Soviet premier went back and forth, each accusing the other of brinkmanship and bringing the world closer than ever to nuclear catastrophe. O’Reilly and Dugard describe these developments in the context of Kennedy’s growth as a leader, which continues a narrative arc from Chapters 1 and 3. With clear perception of Khrushchev’s intentions, as well as sound judgment of the situation, Kennedy helped de-escalate the crisis. Averting nuclear war thus ranks as the president’s greatest achievement. The Cuban Missile Crisis also produces three important consequences in terms of the future assassination. First, Kennedy’s refusal to authorize a full-scale invasion of Cuba rankled warmongers in the Pentagon and CIA. Second, for several tense days, the Cuban Missile Crisis devolved into a personal contest with Khrushchev, who many times had proven himself more than capable of murder. Finally, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the first known hint of anti-Kennedy animus to the mind of devoted Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, though this point requires qualification. Here, O’Reilly and Dugard note that Oswald viewed Kennedy as the villain in the standoff, but in later chapters they explain that Oswald never felt any particular rancor toward Kennedy. Oswald’s ideology fueled his rage, but of far greater significance in late 1962 were Oswald’s encounters with the FBI and possibly the CIA. Once again, O’Reilly and Dugard mention these encounters but draw no explicit conclusions from them.