Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

A Note to Readers-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-17

Chapters 18-24

Chapter 25-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Jacqueline Kennedy and the Making of Camelot

In the popular imagination there lingers an idea of the Kennedy White House as a modern-day Camelot, a place where beautiful and courageous people enjoyed glamorous lives of adventure and idealistic public service. O’Reilly and Dugard characterize this idea as both myth and reality. In Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appears as the central figure in the Camelot narrative, as well as its chief architect. Camelot is both a representation of her deepest wishes and a reality that she helps will into existence.

As a myth, Camelot grows out of Jackie’s anxieties and pain. Unlike her husband, who craves action and attention, Jackie prefers keeping to herself. She does not trust easily, maintains a pack-a-day smoking habit to curb her anxieties, and already has endured the loss of two children, one by miscarriage and another to stillbirth. Most painful of all are the president’s frequent extramarital affairs. Jackie has known about her husband’s indiscretions for many years, and she remains outwardly stoic, but “her friends notice the quiet sadness about her marriage” and even her Secret Service protectors “can see that the First Lady is suffering” (67). The president’s fling with Marilyn Monroe leaves Jackie feeling “disgusted” (84) at her husband’s predatory behavior toward a vulnerable, twice-divorced woman.

Like most myths, however, there is also truth in the Camelot narrative of the Kennedy White House. The president and first lady bring youthful energy to a place recently occupied by Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, both in their 60s at the time. Two young children, Caroline and John Jr., play in the Oval Office. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis also helps make Camelot a reality. When the president phones the first lady to inform her of the prospect of nuclear war, she pleads with him not to send her to Camp David or anywhere else away from him, and he agrees. By early 1963, the president appears “a changed man since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” now “far more enchanted by Jackie than by other women—at least for the time being” (136). In April 1963, following the announcement that the first lady is pregnant, “the Kennedys seem to be living an idyllic life” (162). Of the president’s surprise birthday party in late May, Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill observes “that he’s never seen John and Jackie Kennedy having more fun together” (175). On November 13, 1963, nine days before the assassination, actress Greta Garbo spends an enchanting evening at the White House, an event O’Reilly and Dugard describe as “the last dinner party ever held in Camelot,” implying that Camelot, on such occasions, “is not a dream; it is reality” (239).

Even when describing the halcyon days following the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, O’Reilly and Dugard never forget the most ominous part of the Camelot stage musical Kennedy loved: “Queen Guinevere, the heroine with whom Jackie so identifies, ends up alone” (144). Tragedies mar the second half of 1963. Jackie gives birth to a son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who weighs less than five pounds and lives only 39 hours. The death of her infant son plunges Jackie into a deep depression. When she finally emerges from seclusion, she accompanies 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—and Jackie’s future second husband. As Jackie evokes public criticism for the first time, the narrative foreshadows what is to come through the allusive warning: “Things are darkening in Camelot” (222).

O’Reilly and Dugard conclude the story of the assassination not with an investigation into the president’s murder or with commentary on the controversial Warren Commission but with a short chapter on Jackie Kennedy’s “ongoing obligation to frame her husband’s legacy” (294). This includes her interview with Life magazine’s Theodore White, published two weeks after the assassination, in which the now-former first lady declares, “There’ll never be another Camelot” (294).

The Kennedy-Lincoln Connection

Abraham Lincoln’s name appears in the narrative with more frequency than those of most of President Kennedy’s contemporaries. These references to Lincoln serve two purposes: first, to note the odd coincidences in the lives and deaths of two presidents who governed a century apart; and second, to highlight issues on which Lincoln and Kennedy had similar views and experiences.

In the book’s Note to Readers, O’Reilly explains that since he and Dugard had success with Killing Lincoln (2011), “the progression to John Kennedy was a natural” (2). O’Reilly then notes several “amazing” coincidences: “Lincoln was first elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960,” “Their successors were both southerners named Johnson who had served in the Senate,” “The assassin Booth shot inside a theater and fled into a storage facility, while the assassin Oswald shot from a storage facility and fled into a theater” (2). Other similar correspondences include the fact that Kennedy had a secretary named Evelyn Lincoln and rode in a Lincoln Continental convertible—details that allow O’Reilly and Dugard to conclude that there are “echoes of Lincoln everywhere in his life” (131).

The Kennedy-Lincoln connection might have remained little more than a literary device based on historical curiosities were it not for some genuine, substantive similarities between the two presidents. Kennedy did not have to steer the nation through civil war, but he did clash with top military leaders and other national-security officials. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion, for instance, Kennedy sensed that both the CIA and the Pentagon had agendas that differed from his own. Kennedy learned, “as Abraham Lincoln also learned, that the decision to use force should not be determined by men whose careers depend upon its use” (56-57). The issue of civil rights also plays a significant role in Killing Kennedy, as it did in Lincoln’s day. O’Reilly and Dugard describe Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered while the “iconic white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln looms over King’s shoulder” (199). To emphasize their belief “that John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were indeed kindred spirits” (303), O’Reilly and Dugard add a scanned copy of a letter Kennedy wrote for the centennial celebration of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. While the complications of civil war made Lincoln cautious about decreeing an end to slavery, and while political considerations made Kennedy hesitate before aligning himself with King, there is no question that the overall trajectory of the two administrations moved in the direction of freedom and civil rights.

Finally, the two most notorious assassinations in American history ended with similar ceremonies. After John Kennedy’s murder, Jackie Kennedy insisted “that her husband’s funeral be as much like Abraham Lincoln’s as possible” (302), aligning Kennedy with the former leader widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of US presidents. She secured the assistance of professional scholars in researching the Lincoln funeral and making the White House’s East Room look as it did in 1865 for the mourning period.

The Troubled Mind of Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald appears in nearly every chapter, so the story of the president’s assassin runs parallel to the story of the president himself. O’Reilly and Dugard depict Oswald as a dedicated Communist determined to advance his cause, yet they also identify other motives for Oswald’s behavior that have little to do with global Communism.

By the time Kennedy takes the Oath of Office in January 1961, Oswald, a former US Marine, is living in the Soviet Union as a defector. Although he is unhappy with his menial job and soon returns to the United States with his new wife, Marina, he never abandons his Communist beliefs. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he joins the Socialist Workers Party “to show solidarity with the Russians and Cubans” (130). In April 1963, his “Communist rants” (153) cost him his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He tries to kill Major General Ted Walker, a staunch and nationally known anti-Communist. Oswald also considers killing Richard Nixon, former vice president and another famous anti-Communist. When rage and resentment fester inside Oswald, as they often do, he broods and retreats into extreme leftist literature.

At the same time, however, O’Reilly and Dugard describe Oswald as motivated by a sense of his own frustrated greatness. This anti-egalitarian impulse has little to do with the declared precepts of global Communism. While spouting the doctrines of universal and practical equality, Oswald quietly nourishes a belief in his own special mission: Oswald “considers himself a great man, destined to accomplish great things” (130). When he learns from newspaper and radio reports that his attempt on Walker’s life failed, he is “crestfallen,” for “he wanted to be special,” and yet still “he is anonymous” (160). On October 16, 1963, despite an IQ of 118, Oswald begins working as a book-packer at the Texas School Book Depository. Stuck in another menial job, “he longs to be a great man,” someone “whose name will never be forgotten” (242).

Whether defending Communism or aspiring to greatness, Oswald appears in Killing Kennedy as a confused young man plagued by irrational thoughts. For instance, Oswald left behind no evidence of particular animus against President Kennedy. In fact, while living in New Orleans, Oswald went to the public library and checked out Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage (1955), which only fueled Oswald’s “hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage” (186). Even as he plans the assassination on November 21, 1963, “Oswald does not hate the president” and “has no reason to want JFK dead” but simply “wants to be a great man” (248).

Finally, readers are left to grapple with Oswald’s famous post-assassination statement to the press: “I’m just a patsy” (287). This apparent attempt to deflect blame or at least to diminish his role in the Kennedy assassination does not square with the “crestfallen” man who bemoaned his continued anonymity after failing to kill Ted Walker. O’Reilly and Dugard acknowledge that Oswald’s “patsy” claim spawned numerous conspiracy theories, but they do not pursue that angle, choosing instead to focus on Oswald’s rage-filled delusions.