Kenneth O'Donnell

Kenneth Patrick O'Donnell (March 4, 1924 – September 9, 1977) was an American political consultant and the special assistant and appointments secretary to President John F. Kennedy from 1961 until Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.

O'Donnell was a close friend of President Kennedy and his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy.

O'Donnell, along with Larry O'Brien and David Powers, was part of the group of Kennedy's close advisers dubbed the "Irish Mafia."

O'Donnell's older brother, also named Cleo, was a football star at Harvard during the 1940s.

O'Donnell graduated from high school during World War II and then served in the U.S. Army Air Forces (1942–1945), where he flew 30 missions as a bombardier in a B-17 squadron before being shot down over Belgium.

"He was imprisoned, escaped, and emerged with the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal with Four Oak Leaf Clusters."

Following the war, he studied at Harvard College (1946–1949) and met Robert F. Kennedy, where they were roommates as well as teammates on the Harvard football team; O'Donnell became team captain in 1948.

In 1946, Robert Kennedy enlisted him to work on the first congressional campaign of his elder brother, John F. Kennedy.

Following graduation from Harvard, O'Donnell attended law school at Boston College from 1950–51.

He later worked as a salesman for the Hollingsworth & Vose Paper Company and then the Whitney Corporation, both in Boston, from 1951 to 1952.

O'Donnell later worked in public relations from 1952 to 1957.

O'Donnell's friendship with Robert Kennedy led to his involvement with the Kennedy family's political careers.

In 1952, O'Donnell and Robert Kennedy campaigned together to get John elected to the U.S. Senate.

O'Donnell then went on to serve as John Kennedy's unpaid political observer in Massachusetts, until 1957, when he became assistant counsel to the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, where he worked for Robert Kennedy, who had been appointed chief counsel of the Committee.

In 1958, O'Donnell became a member of Senator John Kennedy's staff, where he was later a key organizer and adviser during Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960.

The following year, he became President Kennedy's special assistant and Appointments Secretary.

He later advised the President during the lead up to the Bay of Pigs invasion and during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

O'Donnell also served as an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1965.

O'Donnell arranged President Kennedy's trip to Dallas in November 1963 and was in a car just behind the president's limousine when Kennedy was assassinated.

Kennedy's death was an enormous blow to O'Donnell, who long blamed himself for the assassination.

On May 18, 1964, O'Donnell provided testimony to Norman Redlich and Arlen Specter, assistant counsel for the Warren Commission.

O'Donnell stated that it was his impression that the shots fired at Kennedy came from the right rear.

In their memoir of Kennedy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, both O'Donnell and David Powers reported hearing only three shots and did not offer any speculation as to their origin.

After serving as a presidential aide to Lyndon Johnson until early 1965, O'Donnell resigned in order to try to win the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts in 1966.

However, he lost by 64,000 votes to Edward McCormack in a race that was much closer than the polls had predicted.

He later served as an adviser to Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign.

O'Donnell was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and raised in Boston.

Both of his parents were Catholics of Irish descent.

He was the son of Alice M. (Guerin) and Cleo Albert O'Donnell, who was the football coach at the College of the Holy Cross Crusaders for two decades, and later athletics director for all sports activities.

The two remained close friends until Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

In 1968, he served as campaign manager for Robert Kennedy in his bid for the presidency.

Robert Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, was a more devastating blow to O'Donnell than the assassination of President Kennedy five years earlier.

He soon joined, as did many others in Kennedy's campaign, Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign, serving as campaign manager.

In 1970, he made another attempt to win the Democratic nomination for governor, but finished fourth in a field of four Democrats, with just nine percent of the vote.

In 1972, O'Donnell and David Powers co-authored a book about President Kennedy,"Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye": Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

According to a June 15, 1975 report in the Chicago Tribune, an unnamed "Central Intelligence Agency liaison man" told Congressmen that O'Donnell and David Powers had initially told assassination investigators that the shots that struck Kennedy came from a location other than the Texas School Book Depository, but that the two men were convinced, reportedly by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or his top aides, to alter their accounts to the Warren Commission to avoid the possibility of revealing the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro which might lead to an international incident.

Responding in a telephone interview, O'Donnell said he testified truthfully and called the allegations "an absolute, outright lie."

In his 1987 autobiography Man of the House, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill wrote that he had dinner with O'Donnell and Powers in 1968, and that both men indicated that two shots were fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza.

According to O'Neill, he pointed out to O'Donnell that he gave different information to the Warren Commission, and O'Donnell replied: "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family."

O'Donnell's son, Kenneth Jr., stated that his father privately called the Warren Commission “the most pointless investigation I’ve ever seen", and that he claimed shots came from two different directions.