America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  This game continued for days, so John and his small entourage used the opportunity to sightsee. They spent four days traveling around Havana and western Cuba in a minivan. Ironically, John went swimming in the Bay of Pigs, the site of his father’s biggest foreign policy blunder. In April 1961 President Kennedy signed off on an ill-conceived plan to orchestrate an invasion led by Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro government. But the plan proved to be “a secret” only in Washington. Castro’s forces were waiting for the exiles and slaughtered them on the beach.

  Although he enjoyed exploring the island, John grew increasingly frustrated that Castro was toying with him. At one point, he called home and divulged all the details to Carolyn. She was predictably furious about the way the Cubans were treating her husband. “You get on that fucking phone to whomever you need to,” she instructed him, “whether it’s a US diplomat or Castro’s guys, and you tell them that you are not going to sit around taking this shit. You came to see him, you are a Kennedy, you are a journalist with staff here, and if his office promised an interview, goddamn it, you’re not leaving until you get one.”

  It’s unclear whether John ever made that call, but the day before they were scheduled to leave, someone from the foreign ministry assured him that he would be meeting Castro for dinner that evening. There was a twist, however: though John came to conduct a formal interview, he was now told there would be no interview and no photographer.

  That night at eight thirty, the official from the foreign ministry appeared at the hotel. They went down to the hotel basement, walked through the kitchen to an underground parking garage, and climbed into the same minivan they had been using the whole trip. But this time, the curtains were closed. “Whether this was to stop people [from] looking in or to prevent us from looking out, who knows,” reflected Inigo Thomas, a George editor who accompanied John on the trip. Thomas vividly remembered the eerie blackness that night. “It was the darkest city at night I’d been to,” he recalled. “There were few streetlights, and cars only had one headlamp. We couldn’t have seen anything if we’d wanted to.”

  The dinner finally proceeded, as bizarrely as the rest of the trip. A handful of other government officials attended, including José Ramón Fernández, who had helped crush American-backed forces in the Bay of Pigs. “Are you the same height as your father?” Fidel asked John bluntly through a translator a few minutes into their meeting. “He was a little taller,” John replied, and “a little thinner.” After they had all been seated at a large table covered with an embroidered cloth, Castro launched into a five-hour monologue. John, who had a notoriously short attention span, tuned out the Cuban leader after a few minutes, but he stayed mesmerized by the uneaten shrimp perched on the tip of Castro’s fork. “That fucking shrimp,” he named it, recalling how Castro would use it to make points and then, just as he appeared ready to eat it, would jab it again into the air. John, who was a great storyteller and mimic, recounted that story with great gusto, often reenacting the scene using Castro’s accent.

  At the end of the evening, Castro brought up the subject of JFK’s assassination. Many of the conspiracy theories swirling around the assassination pinpointed Castro, claiming that he sought retribution for American efforts to kill him. Castro was acutely aware of these accusations and likely saw his meeting with John as a chance to reassure him that he had not been involved. “You know Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to get to Cuba,” he said. John nodded. Weeks before he killed President Kennedy, Oswald had been in Mexico City, shuttling between the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate in a failed effort to get a visa to enter Cuba and, likely, to return to the Soviet Union. “It was hard to allow Americans into Cuba at that time,” Castro explained. Again, John nodded but said nothing. John understood what Fidel was trying to accomplish, but he maintained his policy of not speaking about his father’s death. John never believed in Castro’s involvement, so he felt no need to engage him on the topic.

  John ended up disliking Castro almost as much as he did Oliver Stone, so when he returned to New York, he announced that Castro would not appear in the magazine. Pecker pleaded with John to write about his meeting, but he refused. “I don’t want him in my magazine,” John insisted. That last-minute decision, made as the magazine neared production, forced the staff to rush to fill the space.

  In August 1998 John traveled to Southeast Asia to meet with Vietnamese military hero Võ Nguyên Giáp. The eighty-seven-year-old general had been the mastermind behind the repulsion of the French in 1954; two decades later, he led North Vietnamese forces again to defeat the United States. Renowned photographer Robert Curran, who accompanied John on the trip, recalled that the plan was to interview Giáp and then spend two weeks touring the country. But the trip turned out to be more complicated than expected. The Vietnamese government, which had close ties to China, feared that Giáp, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, would say something that would complicate relations between the two nations. “The Vietnamese government told John that Giáp was senile and infirm and incapable of conducting a meaningful interview,” Curran recalled.

  While they tried smoothing things over with the government, John, Curran, and a handful of other friends traveled around, visiting sites that had played a central role in the Vietnam War. They trekked to Dien Bien Phu, where in 1954 Vietnamese and Communist Chinese soldiers forced the surrender of twelve thousand French troops. Their victory led to France’s withdrawal and opened the door to American involvement. The highlight of the trip was a four-day kayaking outing on Ha Long Bay in the Gulf of Tonkin. Even here John could not escape history. On August 4, 1964, while operating in heavy seas about sixty miles off the North Vietnamese coast in the Tonkin Gulf, the US destroyers Turner Joy and Maddox reported they were under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Lyndon Johnson used the skirmish to justify expanding US involvement in the conflict.

  John turned what could have been a peaceful getaway into a life-or-death adventure. Ha Long, which means “where the dragon descends into the sea,” was a popular destination for kayakers because of its peaceful waters and thousands of soaring limestone karst islets. John and his team arrived in the afternoon and spent a few hours assembling their portable kayaks. “We got the kayaks built around five or six, and it’s going to be sunset soon, but he wanted to set off,” Curran recalled. “We told him that it would be dark in a couple hours, but he still wanted to go. We voted him down and went the next morning.” After about three hours without a break from the boiling sun, some of them started to show signs of sunstroke. They found a little rocky outcrop to rest upon while John sent a few guys to hire a Vietnamese trawler to serve as a support boat for the rest of the adventure.

  While they were traveling, their local contact reached an agreement for the Giáp interview, but there was one condition: John had to have his picture taken with a newborn baby. The couple had close ties to the general, and they believed having the picture would bring their child good luck. Once that was out of the way, John finally got to meet with the general on a Sunday afternoon that also happened to be the general’s eighty-seventh birthday. “Contrary to what we’d been told,” Curran recalled, “the general was remarkably spry and quick witted.”

  After sitting down, John started asking him questions about the Vietnam War, using a translator, as he’d done with Castro. Over the next two and a half hours, Giáp told John that the war could have been averted if the United States had continued its policy during World War II of supporting the nationalist revolution. Rather than boasting about his own greatness, Giáp contended that “the Vietnamese people” had been the best general. “It was a war fought by the whole people,” he added. “This is a point that American generals and politicians didn’t understand.” Giáp revealed that he had told his Soviet allies that a guerrilla war was the only way Vietnam could defeat France and the United States. Moscow had wanted to know the ratio of American tanks and jets compared with hi
s army. The general replied to the Soviets, “If we were to fight your way, we would not last for more than two hours.”

  Giáp asked John why the United States decided to enter the war. John handed him declassified documents that shed some light on the American rationale for intervention. Giáp told him that he believed President Kennedy would not have sent ground troops to Vietnam, as his successor did in 1965. But Giáp wanted to focus on the future, not the past. “I think the cooperation and friendly ties between Vietnam and the US will be an important factor for peace, development, and stability in Southeast Asia,” the general assured John.

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  On Saturday, January 17, 1998, internet columnist and provocateur Matt Drudge published a sordid story about an affair President Clinton was having with an intern. The scandal presented both an opportunity and a challenge for George. The opportunity was obvious. The very man who had seamlessly woven together politics and popular culture, who helped inspire the magazine, was now trapped in an all-consuming sex scandal. But focusing on the sexual peccadilloes of public figures violated John’s philosophy of highlighting the positive attributes of politicians. “Why do people care so much about Clinton’s private life?” he asked me. The question was rhetorical.

  On Monday, John convened an editorial meeting. The editors thrilled over the possibilities. Clinton had inspired John’s desire to create a magazine merging politics and popular culture, and now he was providing them with even more fodder. The story pulled together the key ingredients defining the intersection between politics and entertainment: power, partisanship, and passion. Yet John seemed uncomfortable and stayed silent, fidgeting in his chair and staring out the window as his editors buzzed with excitement about potential angles. Richard Blow noticed the irony of the press hunting down an unfaithful president while “the magazine owned by the son of a famously libidinous president was racing to join the pack.”

  There is no doubt that John was also struck by this irony, especially in light of the Hersh book that spelled out his father’s sexual indiscretions in intimate detail. But John’s reluctance to pursue the story went even deeper. John enjoyed a close relationship with the Clintons. Just a few months earlier, following John’s presentation about the space program in the East Room, they had taken him on a private tour of the White House. The Clintons had helped raise money for the JFK Presidential Library and spent time with his mom, who also appreciated their company.

  Most of all, John genuinely believed that presidents should be judged by their policies and by how much they improved the nation. He thus felt buoyed by public polls showing the public was far more forgiving of Clinton’s mistake than the Washington establishment was. “The scandal,” John wrote in an AOL chat, “has revealed an important facet of the American people, which is that they are not swayed by endless naysaying regarding politics. They recognize real achievement. They want their leaders to produce and do well. They respect our government institutions, if not always the people who run them. And they have realistic expectations about what people in public life can and should accomplish.” In John’s opinion, an affair between two consenting adults was not illegal. It was a private matter between the president and his wife.

  John always shared an affinity for anyone being attacked by the media. “John felt that when people with pitchforks and torches came after Clinton, he needed to defend him from the mob,” reflected Ned Martel. Over the years, John had witnessed his uncle Teddy subjected to similarly unfair attacks. And although the media had usually treated him well personally, John remembered how it felt to be under siege after failing the bar exam. “John fought against the reflex to condemn somebody who was in the stockade of publicity,” said Martel.

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  Despite his sympathy for Clinton, John did not want to insert himself into such a high-profile and deeply partisan debate. But there was another person who John felt was being treated unfairly by the press and whom he rushed to defend: former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. John had loved boxing ever since he was a kid watching and idolizing Muhammad Ali. In June 1997 John was in the crowd at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for Tyson’s bout with Evander Holyfield, who had defeated Tyson the previous year to claim the heavyweight title. Holyfield vs. Tyson II, billed as “The Sound and the Fury,” did not last long: the referee disqualified Tyson in the third round after he bit off a piece of Holyfield’s ear. On July 9 the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspended Tyson’s boxing license, effectively banning him from the sport.

  Upon hearing the news, John took out a legal pad and started scribbling a letter to Tyson. Few people could have given the advice that John offered in this seven-paragraph letter, which he asked boxing promoter Don King to hand deliver to Tyson. (I viewed the letter while doing research for this book.) Speaking from his own experience, he reassured the disgraced boxer that he had special insight into the unique pressures of his life, saying, “I’m familiar with the demands of being a public figure.” He also told Tyson that he understood how it felt to be scrutinized by the press, which was clearly treating him unjustly. Yet John advised him never to allow the media to “dictate the decisions you make in your life.” Everything would be fine, he promised, if the boxer retained “the respect of those” around him. The people who fascinated the public, John continued, were “not the relentlessly good, but rather those who in their best efforts and worst failure, show themselves to be human.” That humanity was the reason, John claimed, the public remained so fascinated by his own family. The Kennedys were flawed, but human. He ended his letter by reminding Tyson to ignore what was being said in the press. “It’s here today, gone tomorrow,” he wrote. “They crucify saints and anoint fools as kings.”

  Two years later, Tyson faced more trouble, this time for assaulting two motorists following a traffic accident. On February 5, 1999, he was sentenced to a year in prison. Perhaps feeling helpless that he could do little to help Clinton, John made a dramatic gesture in support of Tyson. In March he visited the boxer at the Montgomery County Jail in Rockville, Maryland. Afterward, John held an impromptu press conference on the jailhouse steps. He announced to reporters that Tyson was a good man “trying to put his life together,” and he suggested that his one-year sentence was too severe. “By coming here and talking about it,” he said, “maybe people will start to believe” that Tyson deserved a second chance.

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  Media pundits and Washington politicians were still debating whether President Clinton deserved a second chance. According to early press reports, which turned out to be true, Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern, crawled under the desk in the Oval Office to perform oral sex on Clinton. That desk, the Resolute, was the same one that John’s father had used. In February, just one month after the scandal broke, John faxed a handwritten note to the president. “I was under that very desk 35 years ago,” he wrote. “I could tell you there’s barely room for a three-year-old.”

  At times, John felt that his editors pursued the story too aggressively and that their Clinton treatment ended up too judgmental. When preparing an issue ranking “best and worst” of politics in 1998, the editors chose Bill Clinton as the “least valuable politician.” John erupted, finally making the private thoughts he’d been having very public. “So what if Clinton fooled around with an intern?” he challenged them. “The media is doing to Clinton what it has been doing to my family for the past thirty years.” The president, John declared, worked hard and led admirably, so he should be judged by his policies, not his personal life. In fact, John pointed out, FDR had had a mistress as well. Applying the same logic to past presidents, he argued, FDR would have been listed as “least valuable” and “so would my father.” When asked by USA Today about the scandal, John responded similarly, “It’s making people really reflect on what matters in their leaders.”

  John knew that the magazine had
to cover the story, but he wanted to make sure that such coverage would not be salacious. “He thought it was destructive to our political message if we wasted time pursuing scandals,” Biz Mitchell recalled. “The real mission was to help readers understand how people thought and operated in DC. He wanted to offer a different reality: that most of the people in politics try to do something noble. You may not agree with them, but they do have a mission, and it’s worth understanding.”

  The scandal, with all its twists and turns, dominated headlines for the rest of the year. As readers and viewers learned throughout 1998, on the evening of November 15, 1995, Clinton allegedly invited Lewinsky into his private study for the first in a series of sexual rendezvous. The story and investigations that followed revealed the intrigue unfolding behind the scenes to torpedo the Clinton presidency. After their initial encounter, the president and Lewinsky continued their clandestine meetings for the next twenty months. After the lovesick Lewinsky was transferred to work in the Pentagon, a conniving Linda Tripp befriended her and cajoled her into sharing tales of her sexual trysts with Clinton. Eventually it emerged that Tripp had secretly amassed seventeen tapes covering twenty hours of conversation. Through an interlocking network of conservative lawyers and activists, Tripp managed to tip off the attorneys for Paula Jones, who had a sexual harassment suit pending against the president that claimed he had exposed himself to her at a Little Rock hotel when he was governor of Arkansas. She then turned the tapes over to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.