Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Camelot is a castle from the medieval legend of King Arthur, a young and accomplished mythological ruler of England during a long-lost golden age. This legend was the inspiration for the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot, which starred Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet. The musical won four Tony awards and became a favorite of the first couple. Jackie Kennedy associated the mythical Camelot with the Kennedy White House, and the association has stuck in the popular imagination. O’Reilly and Dugard use this Camelot narrative as one of the book’s major themes.

On May 3, 1963, more than a thousand Black schoolchildren marched for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s racist safety commissioner and a rabid segregationist, turned full-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on the children, sparking outrage in much of the US and prompting President Kennedy to take a stand in support of civil rights. The Children’s Crusade illustrates the indiscriminate brutality of arch-segregationists such as Connor, as do two other major incidents of violence against Black children that played a large role in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged nearly a century of segregationist legislation and racist attitudes in the American South, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Although racial integration of American institutions proceeded in a piecemeal manner shortly after World War II, highlighted by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, significant and organized opposition to segregation in the South dates to the mid-1950s, when Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a leader of the movement. Like much of the US, the Kennedy administration was slow to align itself with the protesters or with King, but by 1963, the president and his brother Bobby had established themselves firmly in the civil rights camp.

This term describes the decades-long rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union. From the late 1940s to the Soviet Union’s final collapse in 1991, the former World War II allies regarded one another with deep suspicion. The Cold War was, first and foremost, an ideological contest between Western-style freedom and democracy on one hand and Soviet-style totalitarian Communism on the other. The Cold War remained “cold” because the two sides never engaged in direct conflict, which many feared would lead to nuclear annihilation. Instead, the US fought regional proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam as part of an effort to contain the spread of global Communism. President Kennedy shared many of the Cold War Era’s basic assumptions and thus made enemies of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, though Kennedy also had grave concerns about US involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy’s reluctance to use military force in pursuit of Cold War objectives created enemies in both the CIA and Pentagon.

In October 1962, President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had built ballistic-missile sites in Cuba. Once armed with nuclear warheads, these missiles would threaten nearly all of the United States with destruction. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and prepared for a possible invasion. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who hitherto had regarded Kennedy as weak, waited for the president to back down. In the end, however, it was Khrushchev who blinked by agreeing to dismantle the sites, though Kennedy enabled de-escalation by promising to withdraw US missiles from Turkey. O’Reilly and Dugard highlight Kennedy’s growth as a leader during the crisis. They also note that hard-liners in the US national-security establishment resented Kennedy for his failure to invade Cuba.

In September 1862, during the US Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln announced his intention to free enslaved people in the Southern Confederacy by executive decree, effective January 1, 1863—the order was known as the Emancipation Proclamation. O’Reilly and Dugard highlight many connections between Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, including their positions on slavery and civil rights, respectively. The Epilogue features a letter from Kennedy marking the centennial of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Martin Luther King Jr. also noted the centennial in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

After President Kennedy was shot in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade raced four miles to Parkland Hospital, where surgeons tried in vain to save the president’s life. At 1:00 p.m., Kennedy was pronounced dead in Trauma Room One. Two days later, after being shot by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, Lee Harvey Oswald died in Parkland Hospital’s Trauma Room Two.

During World War II, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy commanded a patrol torpedo boat, PT-109. On the night of August 2, 1943, near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, PT-109 collided with a Japanese destroyer. In Chapter 1, O’Reilly and Dugard describe the days that followed, when Kennedy and his crew fought to survive. Kennedy swam great distances between small islands, evaded the Japanese, and finally got a message to the Allies that he and his men needed to be rescued. After the war, when Kennedy sought political office, the PT-109 incident emerged as an important part of his leadership narrative.

According to the US government’s official report on the Kennedy assassination, at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was an employee in the warehouse, which gave him a view of the presidential motorcade as it passed through Dealey Plaza. Oswald had worked at the Texas School Book Depository only since October 16. Ruth Paine, who met Oswald and his wife through George de Mohrenschildt, the man with CIA connections, referred Oswald for the job.

U-2 spy planes captured images of Soviet ballistic missile sites in Cuba, sparking the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, thanks to George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald got a job with Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a photographic firm that had access to classified U-2 photos.

From 1954 to 1965, the United States gave substantial aid to the government of South Vietnam in its fight against Communist North Vietnam. Although US combat troops did not arrive until 1965, American pilots, military advisers, and CIA operatives had already played a direct part in the war by the time President Kennedy took office in January 1961. Kennedy did not withdraw US personnel from Vietnam, but in private he indicated that he would like to do so following the 1964 election. He did not believe that the US had a reliable ally in South Vietnam’s tyrannical president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Nor did Kennedy believe the US would prevail in Vietnam. Kennedy’s reluctance to escalate US efforts in Vietnam rendered him even more unpopular with the US national-security establishment, including the CIA and Pentagon.