Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Martin Dugard is the author of more than a dozen nonfiction books on subjects such as running, exploration, and history. He has experience in both corporate marketing and journalism but has spent most of his career as a professional writer. Following the naming pattern of his coauthored Killing series, Dugard has published two solo history books, Taking Paris: The Epic Battle for the City of Lights (2021) and Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich (2022).

Dugard does not play a role in the narrative of Killing Kennedy. The chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, does refer to Martin Dugard’s father, US bomber pilot Captain Alan Dugard, who had his leave canceled when the Pentagon went to Defcon 2 in late October 1962.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States, serving from January 20, 1961, until his murder on November 22, 1963. His assassination is the focus of Killing Kennedy.

With the exception of an opening chapter on Kennedy’s harrowing brush with death in the South Pacific during World War II, Killing Kennedy focuses entirely on the Kennedy presidency. The president appears as a serious and thoughtful leader and also as a middle-aged playboy with a voracious sexual appetite. His numerous, reckless extramarital affairs make the Secret Service nervous and leave his wife Jackie wounded. As commander-in-chief, Kennedy stumbles early when he authorizes the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, though he learns through this experience and begins placing more trust in his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, than in the US government’s national-security establishment, where he makes a number of enemies. In foreign affairs, Kennedy grows as a leader. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis shows the president at his resolute best, defending the United States against an ominous threat while going all lengths to avoid a calamitous war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis helps define the Kennedy presidency, makes the president more introspective, and brings him closer to his wife and family. By early 1963, he also has become more careful, cutting off onetime friends such as Frank Sinatra, whose ties to organized-crime figures make him politically damaging. Likewise, from early 1963 on, O’Reilly and Dugard describe no extramarital affairs, focusing instead on the president’s increased devotion to Jackie. On the policy front, challenges remain. Kennedy, for instance, resists CIA- and Pentagon-led efforts to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., occupies much of the president’s attention in 1963. Thanks to the sinister and self-interested machinations of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who keeps surveillance files on the private lives of all relevant public figures and who regards the Civil Rights Movement as Communism in disguise, Kennedy acts with caution before supporting King. Prodded by his brother, the president finally enlists his administration in the cause of civil rights. The prospect of diminished support in the Deep South, however, convinces President Kennedy that he should make a fundraising trip to Texas. As part of that effort, he arrives in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, wife of President John F. Kennedy, served as first lady of the United States from January 20, 1961, until her husband’s assassination on November 22, 1963. Thirty-one years old at the time of the inauguration, she was the second youngest first lady in US History.

In Killing Kennedy, the first lady appears as both the source and focus of the Camelot myth. O’Reilly and Dugard describe Jackie Kennedy as deeply private, keeping secret most everything about herself, including her pack-a-day smoking habit. On the other hand, thanks to well-received television appearances and positive media coverage, the first lady is also beloved by the American public as a symbol of the Kennedy administration’s youthful vitality. Her grace and beauty make her an icon. The world sees the first lady raising two children in a White House she personally redecorated. It seems like an idyllic life. Privately, though, she is deeply wounded and suffering as a result of her husband’s marital infidelities. The Camelot narrative, therefore, is more myth than reality.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is a turning point in the book, in the Kennedy marriage, and thus in the story of Camelot. The president and first lady grow closer, and the first seven months of 1963 represent Jackie Kennedy’s happiest time in the White House. In August 1963, however, she prematurely gives birth to a son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who lives only 39 hours. A grief-stricken Jackie retreats into seclusion. When she emerges a few months later, she joins her sister on a trip to Greece, where she spends two weeks aboard a luxury yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis, one of the world’s richest men. She does not return to the White House until October. For the first time, she endures serious public criticism. At dinner on October 21, she agrees to accompany the president to Texas the following month.

On November 21, Jackie receives rave reviews for her appearance in Texas with her husband. The president is relieved because he wants the first lady to campaign with him in 1964. After arriving in Dallas the next day, Jackie accompanies her husband in the presidential motorcade through the city. She is seated to his left, in the back row of the three-row limousine. When he is killed, Jackie scrambles to conceal his exploded head from view. At the hospital, she forces her way into Trauma Room One and is present when the doctor pronounces the president dead. She returns to Air Force One with the president’s coffin. When Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as president, Jackie stands to his left. The book concludes with a brief chapter on Jackie’s post-assassination efforts to preserve the Camelot narrative of the Kennedy White House.

A former US Marine sharpshooter and Communist sympathizer who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States in 1961, Lee Harvey Oswald appears in the official US government report on the Kennedy assassination as the lone gunman responsible for murdering the president. Oswald was shot in the abdomen on the morning of November 24, 1963, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. He died later that afternoon in Parkland Hospital’s Trauma Room Two, across the hall from where President Kennedy had died two days earlier.

When the book opens, Oswald is languishing at a menial job in a Soviet electronics factory. He resents that the world does not recognize him as the great man he knows he can be, and this sense of frustrated greatness becomes a major theme in Killing Kennedy. Before returning to the United States, Oswald marries Marina Prusakova. The marriage proves tumultuous, and eventually Marina leaves the perpetually unemployed and increasingly rageful Oswald. As a defector to the Soviet Union, Oswald attracts the attention of the US government, having numerous contacts with the CIA and/or FBI pass.

In 1963, Oswald’s resentment deepens. He purchases a rifle. In April, he tries to kill Major General Ted Walker, a man with a national reputation for virulent anti-Communism. After he fails, Oswald tries in vain to defect to Cuba. When he returns to Dallas, he attempts to reconcile with Marina. For a time, there appears to be some hope. On October 16, he begins working at the Texas School Book Depository, which overlooks Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

On several occasions, O’Reilly and Dugard indicate that Oswald never expressed any particular animosity toward President Kennedy. Oswald chose to kill only because of his mounting conviction that he had to do something to ensure that his name would never be forgotten. O’Reilly and Dugard follow the official US government narrative of the assassination, in which Oswald, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, fires three shots at a moving target from a bolt-action rifle in less than nine seconds, and one of those shots inflicts President Kennedy’s fatal head wound. Oswald then flees the scene and murders a Dallas police officer before being apprehended inside a theater. Oswald, who presumably acted to ensure the world would know his greatness and never forget his name, later tells a group of reporters that he is “just a patsy” (287).

Robert F. Kennedy served as US Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy. After his brother’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy continued as attorney general for only another nine months, serving uneasily in the administration of his hated rival, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Bobby Kennedy plays two important roles in the book’s narrative, both of which bring him deeper into conflict with Vice President Johnson. First, in the early months of his brother’s administration, Bobby emerges as the president’s most trusted confidante. During the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, President Kennedy concludes that he cannot trust the CIA, the Pentagon, or anyone else associated with Washington’s national-security establishment, so he turns to Bobby, who becomes a kind of “assistant president” (60). Bobby chastises the invasion’s planners and later, in his brother’s presence, berates a sniveling State Department official for shirking responsibility. Even in areas where matters of state might intersect with the president’s personal life, Bobby intervenes. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, informs Bobby that some of the president’s associates have close connections to organized crime, so Bobby encourages his brother to separate from friends like Frank Sinatra. Bobby also runs interference on Marilyn Monroe after the president’s brief affair with the legendary actress.

Second, Bobby Kennedy takes the lead in aligning his brother’s administration with the Civil Rights Movement. Notwithstanding Hoover’s obsession with taking down Martin Luther King Jr. and exposing the Civil Rights Movement as a front for Communism—which Hoover falsely believes to be true—Bobby Kennedy nudges his brother toward leadership on civil rights. Bobby Kennedy even helps organize the March on Washington, where, on August 28, 1963, King delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In all of this, Bobby Kennedy constantly outflanks Lyndon Johnson, who craves power and views civil rights as an issue on which he can emerge as the Democratic Party’s frontrunner for president.

In 1968, Bobby Kennedy emerged as the Democratic Party’s frontrunner for president before he, too, was assassinated, shot by a lone gunman in a Los Angeles hotel on the evening of June 5.

Vice president under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson ascended to the presidency following Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. Johnson was in Dallas on the day of the murder and took the Oath of Office aboard Air Force One, becoming the 36th president of the United States. He then won a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. As president, Johnson secured several legislative achievements on civil rights and in other areas of his domestic agenda, but his administration was marred by the escalating war in Vietnam, an escalation for which Johnson was responsible. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek another term in office.

Johnson appears in Killing Kennedy as a disgruntled vice president who resents the growing power of his rival Bobby Kennedy, whom he loathes. A former Senate majority leader, Johnson craves power and longs for the day when he can wield it again. A Texas native and for many years the most powerful man in Texas politics, Johnson helped John F. Kennedy win the Lone Star State by a narrow margin in 1960, so his growing ostracism from the center of power in the Kennedy administration fuels his bitterness. On rare occasions when he is entrusted with a task, Johnson gives long-winded speeches and shows poor judgment. When Johnson embraces civil rights as an issue on which he can build his political fortunes, he seethes as Bobby Kennedy takes the administration’s lead on this same issue, outmaneuvering him.

On November 22, 1963, Johnson greets the Kennedys at Love Field in Dallas. He rides in the fourth car of the motorcade, two cars behind the president. At Parkland Hospital, half an hour after the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head, Johnson learns of the president’s death and is then whisked away by Secret Service to Air Force One, where he immediately moves into the presidential bedroom. Johnson waits for Jackie Kennedy to return with her husband’s coffin before taking the Oath of Office.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a nationally recognized leader of the Civil Rights Movement. King advocated Christian nonviolence and organized peaceful marches in protest of segregation. After helping to secure landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

Because O’Reilly and Dugard are writing from the perspective of the white political establishment of the 1950s and 60s, King appears in Killing Kennedy not as an acknowledged hero but as a politically dangerous figure whom the Kennedy brothers approach with caution. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reveals to the Kennedys that the Bureau maintains files on King, whose sexual indiscretions rival the president’s. King makes a visit to the White House, at which point the president informs the civil rights leader of the FBI’s surveillance and encourages King to be careful. King also organizes the May 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, a peaceful march that ends when segregationist authorities turn full-pressure water hoses and police dogs against the children. O’Reilly and Dugard also describe King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech of August 28, 1963, which earns a nod of approval from the president.

J. Edgar Hoover began serving as director of the US federal government’s Bureau of Investigation in 1924. In 1935, the Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover then served as FBI director until his death in 1972. During his long tenure, Hoover developed a reputation as one of the most sinister public officials in US history. He kept files on the personal lives of every relevant public figure and used these files to advance his own interests, in part by threatening sitting presidents with what he knew about them, and in part by sharing those files with presidents—Lyndon Johnson, for instance—who had no qualms about using them to intimidate their political opponents.

Hoover plays three major roles in Killing Kennedy. First, he informs Bobby Kennedy that the president has associates with known connections to organized crime, including singer Frank Sinatra. This prompts the president to sever ties with Sinatra and compels Attorney General Robert Kennedy to investigate some members of the Mafia, who hitherto had believed that they had a friend in the Oval Office. Second, Hoover reveals that the FBI has politically damaging evidence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s extramarital affairs. This is part of Hoover’s effort to poison the Kennedys’ minds against King, whom Hoover erroneously regards as a Communist. Finally, Hoover’s FBI tracks Lee Harvey Oswald as late as November 1, 1963, and learns that Oswald works at the Texas School Book Depository.