Free If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History by Jeff Greenfield Page B

relentless pursuit of the Mafia and its allies, like the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, had brought no shortage of threats against John and Robert, plenty of declarations that “we’re going to take them out.” But when it came time to connect the dots between organized crime and Oswald . . . there were no dots. The same was true of the far right;
H. L. Hunt and company might take out full-page ads denouncing the President, might pass out leaflets along his motorcade route.
And all of these people might well have cheered the news that Jack had been shot,
Bobby thought,
might have raised glasses had he died, but a conspiracy to murder the President? That’s a reach.
    Besides, there was the undeniable factor of . . . sheer happenstance. Oswald had applied for two other jobs before finding work at the Texas School Book Depository; either of those jobs would have placed him far from the motorcade. And that job in the Depository? It was his landlady, Ruth Paine, who had a contact in thebuilding, who’d gotten the job for Lee . . . a job he’d taken weeks before anyone knew the route of the motorcade.
    It was the President, speaking from his Parkland Hospital bed, who had made the point to Bobby.
    “If you’re looking for a conspiracy, try 1865,” he had said. “Booth and his friends were out to get Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Seward; they were out to decapitate the whole federal government. But the man who shot McKinley? Czolgosz? A self-taught anarchist. Zangara, who almost killed Roosevelt? Same thing. That nut who tried to blow me up in Palm Beach—Pavlick? Just a lunatic who hated the Church and Dad. I know you’ll keep looking, Bobby. And maybe you’ll find something. But I doubt it.”
    In fact, Bobby had found something: not about who had tried to kill his brother, but what had been done—and not done—to try to stop it. What he found in Dallas was a level of carelessness, negligence, and ineptitude on the part of the CIA and the FBI that bordered on the criminal.
    The CIA had been tracking Oswald ever since his return from the Soviet Union in 1959. They were aware of his pro-Castro activities and, more important, his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City just a few months before the shooting of the President. Yet, somehow they had lost track of Oswald when he returned to Dallas. As for the FBI, their Dallas agent, James Hosty Jr., had had a direct exchange of sorts with the suspected shooter. After Oswald learned that Hosty had been interviewing his landlady, he’d stormed into the Dallas bureau and left a note for the agent, threatening to blow up the FBI and Dallas police headquarters. None of that information reached the Secret Service, which might have been interested in knowing that this individual worked in a building right along the President’s motorcade route.
    What
really
got Bobby’s attention was that, when he confrontedHosty three days after the shooting, the agent admitted that he’d destroyed the threatening note Oswald had written on the direct order of J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby nodded, said nothing, but left with a grim sense of satisfaction. For three years he and Hoover had dealt with each other with mutual, intense, barely concealed contempt. To Hoover, Bobby was an arrogant, spoiled brat protecting his degenerate brother. To Bobby, Hoover was a blatant racist and “a psychopath” to boot. And both were at the mercy of the other. Hoover knew too many details of John Kennedy’s private life. The Kennedys knew one big secret about Hoover’s private life. Neither could strike at the other without imposing fatal damage to himself. If, however, word got out that Hoover’s own bureau had been flagrantly derelict, and that Hoover had tried to cover up the failures, then the press and the Congress might drop their fawning adulation of the FBI director; might even insist that he follow the mandatory retirement age he’d reach in 1965. At the least, Bobby would have a