The Impeachment of President Kennedy, 1967

John F. Kennedy grimaced in pain. He had never been in the best of health, and the years since the failed attempt on his life in Dallas had not been good to him. They’d been worse for the Secret Service men on the back of his car that day, of course, but one of Oswald’s bullets had grazed his neck and he still felt difficulty in swallowing.

They years had been good for the nation, he thought. He’d used the wave of sympathy after Dallas to push through a civil rights bill, and the embarrassment of the Bobby Baker scandal to get rid of Lyndon Johnson. After Dallas, no one in Texas was going to vote against him anyway. His debates with Barry Goldwater in 1964 had become legendary, and his decision to go jointly to the moon with Nikita Khruschev meant that he could avoid trouble in Vietnam and that the country could proceed upward.

All that had been very fine. Fineness wasn't helping very much today. A slight nausea from one of the many medical drugs coursing through his system was affecting his vision, and sometimes the oak panels of his desk seemed to be bending under the weight of his troubles.

Things had gone wrong. They always go wrong for second term presidents, of course. A backlash had set in in after he had federalised the national guard units of the South to carry through a voting rights act, and the constitutional amendments that he had proposed to end the poll taxes and discrimination there had stalled. George Wallace and Ronald Reagan were leading revolts in both ends of the country against what he kept reminding himself was not his rule.

And there was Lyndon. Always Lyndon; Lyndon working with Hoover behind the scenes, Lyndon and Connally strategising with Nixon, Lyndon complaining about the opening to Cuba. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think of Lyndon everywhere. He stroked the handle of the mug containing his chowder and thought of Lyndon’s jug ears; blood pressure gave him a rush of vertigo from his comfortable leather chair as he sank into it, and he thought of Lyndon declaiming loudly, towering above him.

The trouble, however, was hard to get away from. Kennedy had survived many things in his life, but finally, the dam had broken. Mimi, and Fiddle, and Faddle, and Judy, and Jo and all the other women who had been a part of his life—who’d shared the grip of the vice that had devastated and ridden and controlled him—stared back at him from the newspapers on his desk.

They were good girls, really. he never blamed them; the ghost of kick would never let him anyway. Odd to think of her now...

He hadn’t looked at a TV screen for weeks, and the occasional sideways glimpse of a newsstand set his stomach raging. Jackie spent her time crying quietly, or speaking a soft husky French to Malraux and a thousand other people whose calls she billed Kennedy accounts for. His skin stank to him when he held his children.

Kennedy fell deeper into the chair he had sunk into. The blue sky above reminded him of dallas, and though the heat was pleasant, he shrank from it. No Oswald here. No moonshot and no crowd either, though.

The white House solarium had been built by Herbert Hoover’s wife. He’d met Hoover once or twice, and called him after becoming president. Hoover had been a source of support, knowledge, a help, much more than Eisenhower. A man who’d rebuilt his reputation and survived an obloquy Kennedy was now probably going to know. Neither Bobby nor Larry would approve, of course, but now that it looked like war was a possibility in the Middle East and an oil shock was more than possible, it would be criminal to stay president. He didn’t have the votes anyway; the republicans had the house and Reagan was the darling of the moment.


Kennedy felt that there was more to this, and had to be. His hand went involuntarily to the rosary in his breast pocket; beneath it, and the cloth of his jacket and shirt and undershirt, the leather of his scapula tag, containing a relic, stuck limpidly to his skin. But the hand didn’t stay there. Wearily, his eyes followed it to the telephone that he’d dropped above the story of ken Keating’s speech on his impeachment. Mrs Lincoln answered straight away as the sun beat down. Maybe a Southern man would be better able to do what had to be done to stop the riots and to keep civil rights on the rails.


Did his voice slur or scrape these days? He could not tell. Still, it had to be done.

‘Please ask Vice President Sanford to come to the residence’.