The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [482]
Bobby called Walter Sheridan, who was down in Nashville prosecuting Jimmy Hoffa for jury tampering, and asked the Justice Department lawyer to check out Hoffa. The labor leader was another man of evil intent, his fury honed on Bobby’s own obsessive, vengeful justice. Then he called Julius Draznin, a labor lawyer in Chicago with knowledge of the mob, and asked him about the Mafia, and in particular Sam Giancana.
One way or another all these calls led back to Cuba, though the one possibility Bobby did not consider was that Castro himself might feel he had a right to kill the man who had tried to kill him. “Castro could have made a very strong case that what he did was justified,” said former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, then working on the Cuban Coordinating Committee. “We were attacking his country, and he was fighting an enemy. That’s different from an assassination in a pure sense of the word.” Everywhere Bobby looked, everywhere he turned, whatever he thought, he found more enemies, and every potential assassin he looked at this day was an enemy he himself had made, or had helped to make.
Bobby ran away from the deadly prospect of contemplation. He listened instead of talking, and talked instead of remembering, trying to give solace to the inconsolable. He was there when Air Force One flew into Andrews Air Force Base carrying his brother’s body, the president’s widow, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. He was there riding in the hearse, with Jackie still in her blood stained dress, hearing her tortured retelling of the murderous assault. He was there at Bethesda Naval Hospital that evening, talking endlessly on the phone, beginning to plan the details of the state funeral. He was there late in the evening at the White House trying to gently nudge the others off to bed.
Bobby finally lay down on the bed in the Lincoln Room, but his eyes would not close and sleep would not come, and he asked Spalding to join him there. “Listen, you ought to take a sleeping pill,” the president’s friend said, and left to seek the sedative. When he returned, the attorney general was still haunted with sleeplessness. “It’s such an awful shame,” Bobby said without a hint of emotion. “The country was going so well. We really had it going.”
Spalding said good night, shut the door, and turned to walk down the corridor. It was then that he heard sobs of sorrow. He thought that Bobby was saying, “Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?” Bobby cried until finally the pill took hold and he fell silent.
On the day John F. Kennedy was buried, the skies were dark. The leaders of America and the world walked in solemn procession the five blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Along the route tens of thousands stood paying their homage, while millions watched on black-and-white television sets.
The president’s flag-draped coffin sat on a caisson drawn by six gray horses. Then came a riderless horse. Behind walked Jackie, with Bobby on her right arm and Teddy on her left, and behind them world leaders who were nothing but a shuffling mass of mourners. There were mourners too throughout the world. Millions knew his name as a symbol of hope, not because of anything he had promised or could promise, but because he had become emblematic of a new spirit celebrating human aspiration and challenge.
Bobby walked beside Jackie to steady his brother’s widow in her time of need. But who would steady him as he plodded onward? “May Joe find solace in the unexampled triumphs of his son in the assurance