Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  It’s telling that Bobby turned to McShane and his band of federal irregulars in his hour of dread, and not Hoover’s more professional G-men. Even when his brother was still alive, Bobby had learned that Hoover’s men could not be trusted in the administration’s most dire showdowns, like those in the South. Nor did he turn to the Secret Service for protection that day. He was already trying to figure out why the agency entrusted with the president’s personal safety had failed his brother.

  With their youth, ambition, and deep sense of family entitlement, the Kennedys had come into office confident they could take charge of the federal government and put it at the service of their cause. But on November 22, Bobby Kennedy immediately suspected something had broken inside the government and that his brother had been cut down by one of its jagged shards. In these hours of unknown danger, Bobby followed his old tribal instincts, turning not to the appropriate government agencies, but to the tight band of brothers whom the Kennedys had always most relied upon. None of the intensely loyal men gathered around Kennedy at his home that day knew if Bobby’s life too was now in danger. Nor did they know for certain in these fearful hours where the threat might come from or on whom they could depend. But they were sure that they could count on Jim McShane and his men to give their lives for the surviving Kennedy. He was one of them.

  While McShane’s marshals staked out the front gate at Hickory Hill and fanned out along the perimeters of the estate, Bobby worked to put faces to the conspiracy that he suspected was behind his brother’s death—to find out who “they” were. No one knew more about the dark tensions within the Kennedy administration than he did. As President Kennedy struggled to command his government, clashing with hard-liners in his national security bureaucracy, he had given more and more responsibility to his brother Bobby. Among the items in the attorney general’s bulging portfolio were the CIA, which the Kennedys were determined to overhaul after the agency led them into the Bay of Pigs disaster; the Mafia, which Bobby had declared war on, telling his fellow Justice Department crusaders that either they would succeed or the mob would run the country; and Cuba, the island nation around which raged so much Cold War sound and fury. When it came to administration policy on Cuba, Bobby was “president,” General Alexander Haig, one of the Pentagon’s point men on the issue, would later say.

  The CIA, Mafia, and Cuba—Bobby knew they were intertwined. The CIA had formed a sinister alliance with underworld bosses to assassinate Fidel Castro, working with mob-connected Cuban exile leaders. Bobby thought he had severed the CIA-Mafia merger when the agency finally told him about it in May 1962. But he also knew the agency often defied higher authority. He would later describe CIA actions during the Bay of Pigs as “virtually treason.” It was this shadowy nexus—the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exiles—that Kennedy immediately focused on during the afternoon of November 22.

  After phoning Dallas, Kennedy made a call to CIA headquarters, just down the highway in Langley, Virginia, where he often began his day, stopping there to work on Cuba-related business and trying to establish control over the agency’s “wilderness of mirrors” for his brother. Bobby’s phone call to Langley on the afternoon of November 22 was a stunning outburst. Getting a ranking official on the phone—whose identity is still unknown—Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Kennedy erupted. Whatever the anonymous CIA official told Bobby that afternoon, it did not put his suspicions about the agency to rest.

  Later that day, Kennedy would take his question to the top of the CIA. John McCone, director of the agency, who was eating lunch in his Langley office when his aide Walter Elder burst in to tell him the news from Dallas. McCone immediately phoned Bobby, who told him to come right over to the house in McLean. McCone later recalled that he was with Bobby and Ethel in their second-floor library when Kennedy received the call telling him his brother was dead. “There was almost nothing we could say to one another,” recalled McCone. “We were seized with the horror of it.”

  After he called his mother, Rose, and brother, Teddy, to tell them Jack was gone, a “steely” Bobby (as McCone described him) took the CIA chief outside to the backyard and engaged him in a remarkable conversation that would extend, off and on, for three hours that afternoon. The attorney general of the United States wanted to know whether the country’s intelligence agency had assassinated the president of the United States. Bobby would later tell a close friend, “You know, at the time I asked McCone…if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”

  Bobby’s remarks about his conversation with McCone have caused intense speculation. McCone, a fellow Catholic, shared a deep sense of faith with Bobby, as well as with Ethel, both of whom had consoled him after the death of his first wife. He once took a rosary ring that he carried around in his billfold for comfort to Rome, where he had a copy made and had it blessed by the pope as a gift for Bobby. Perhaps Kennedy made McCone swear to tell him the truth, as one devout Catholic to another.

  In the days following the assassination, McCone would come to conclude that there had been two shooters in Dallas, in striking contrast to the official version of the crime as the work of a lone gunman, which was being ardently promoted by Hoover and the FBI. But there is no evidence that he ever came to suspect his own agency.

  Bobby accepted McCone’s assurance about the CIA that afternoon. But he also knew that McCone, a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, was not in firm control of his own agency. Kennedy himself knew more about the spy outfit’s sinister exploits, including the Mafia plots, than McCone did. His brother had replaced the CIA’s legendary creator, Allen Dulles, with McCone after the agency’s spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. But McCone never worked his way into the agency’s old boy network that dated back to its origins in the OSS during World War II. And there was a sense he preferred to be left in the dark on the more unpleasant stuff, that his religious principles would not countenance some of the agency’s black arts. Bobby would realize that while he had taken his question to the very top of the CIA, he had asked the wrong man.

  Kennedy also made inquiries about the Mafia that day. The young attorney general had built his reputation, before and after coming to the Justice Department, on a relentless crusade to crush the power of organized crime in America, which he felt was threatening to take control of the country’s economy through corrupt labor unions like Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters as well as local, state, and federal government through payoffs to politicians, judges, and elected officials. While Hoover was still focusing on the empty shell of the Communist Party USA as public enemy number one, RFK was convinced that the true “enemy within” was a corporate underworld that was gaining the power to overshadow the country’s legitimate democratic institutions. “Of course it’s a different era now, maybe terrorism is a greater threat these days than organized crime,” said Guthman recently, sitting in his cramped office at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, where he still lectures. “But if you look at what has happened in South and Central America, you can see Bob was right to worry about organized crime taking over our country. Where would we be if he hadn’t recognized the power and importance of the Mafia and the rackets? This was a time when the chief of the FBI, Hoover, was saying there was no such thing as organized crime.”

  By hounding the gods of the underworld in a way no other attorney general had ever done, Bobby Kennedy knew that he had drawn their fiery wrath. He knew about the death threats made against him by Hoffa, whose control over the Teamsters’ golden pension fund made him the Mafia’s favorite banker. But he was undeterred. His last item of business before breaking for lunch on November 22 was the prosecution of Chicago godfather Sam Giancana on political corruption charges. Before he got the call from Hoover, he was waiting to hear from New Orleans about the verdict in Mafia lord Carlos Marcello’s deportation hearing. And in Nashville, W
alter Sheridan, the ace investigator who led Bobby’s “Get Hoffa” squad, was monitoring the latest developments in the Justice Department’s jury tampering case against the Teamster boss.

  On the evening of November 22, Bobby phoned Julius Draznin in Chicago, an expert on union corruption for the National Labor Relations Board. He asked Draznin to look into whether there was any Mafia involvement in the killing of his brother. Draznin knew this meant Sam Giancana, who had been overheard on FBI wiretaps raging against a Kennedy “double-cross,” after claiming to deliver the Chicago vote to JFK in 1960. “We need help on this,” Bobby told Draznin that evening. “Maybe you can open some doors [with] the mob. Anything you can pick up, let me know directly.”

  But the man on whom Robert Kennedy relied more than any other to crawl into the country’s darkest corners was Walter Sheridan. A former FBI man who had left the bureau in disgust over Hoover’s methods, he had first proved himself with Bobby as an investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee where Kennedy served as chief counsel. A fellow Irish Catholic born on the exact same day as Bobby, November 20, 1925, he was as fearless as his boss in the crusade against crime and corruption. When the Kennedy Justice Department was escalating its drive against Hoffa, the death threats would not be directed solely at Bobby but at his right-hand man Sheridan as well. On these occasions, the Sheridan family home would be turned into an armed bunker.

  “There would be times when the house had numerous federal marshals in it with numerous firearms stacked up behind the front door, like they were expecting a whole army to show up,” recalled Sheridan’s son, Walter Jr. “Shotguns. They were expecting trouble. I was taken to school and choir practice and altar boy meetings by federal marshals—we couldn’t leave home without them. This was on two occasions, when Hoffa was on trial.”

  Ted Kennedy later recalled, “My brother loved to tease Walter about his mild demeanor and quiet manner. But as Bobby wrote in [his book about the Mafia] The Enemy Within, Walter’s angelic appearance hid a core of toughness. As any wrongdoer well knew, the angelic quality also represented the avenging angel.”

  It was Sheridan, said Ted Kennedy, to whom Bobby turned when the world was on fire. “You wanted Walter with you in any foxhole, and that is why he always seemed to get the most difficult assignments.”

  Sheridan was not in Washington on November 22. He was sitting in a federal court building in Nashville, where Hoffa was awaiting trial, when an associate came running in and told him, “Walt, there has just been a news flash that the president has been shot in Dallas!” Sheridan immediately phoned Bobby, but couldn’t reach him. But the two brothers-in-arms would soon rejoin each other. And when Sheridan returned to the East Coast, Bobby’s avenging angel would be given the most difficult assignment of his life: find out who killed the president of the United States.

  Robert Kennedy had one other phone conversation on November 22 that sheds light on his thinking that afternoon. He spoke to Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his closest associate in the Cuban exile community. Kennedy stunned his friend by telling him point-blank, “One of your guys did it.”

  The venerable Washington journalist Haynes Johnson is the source for this story. Then a young reporter for the Washington Evening Star, Johnson had come to know both Ruiz-Williams and Kennedy while researching a book on the Bay of Pigs. Johnson remembers almost coming to blows with Bobby, who wanted his book to focus on the Cuban heroes of the invasion like Ruiz-Williams and not the Kennedy administration’s controversial actions during the ill-fated operation. “We had a very difficult conversation one afternoon at the Metropolitan Club in New York,” recalled Johnson, sitting in the basement study of his Washington home. “He got very hard-eyed and didn’t want to give me any information, and I said something to the effect, ‘I’ll be around here a lot longer than you and your brother’ and he got very mad.” It’s a remark even more unnerving now than it must have been then. “I was young, foolish and arrogant myself at the time,” shrugged the journalist. Johnson started to storm out of the club, but Bobby jumped to his feet and grabbing him by the shoulders, told him, “Don’t go away, don’t go away.” It was the beginning of a warm relationship between the two men, the kind Bobby was in the habit of forming after first almost exchanging punches with a man.

  “He was sort of a hard, passionate parish priest, the avenger type—all faith and justice,” said Johnson. “I always thought of Jack, on the other hand, like an English lord.”

  On the afternoon of November 22, Johnson was planning to celebrate the completion of his book over lunch with Ruiz-Williams, who had been one of his principal sources. On his way to the Ebbitt Hotel, a drab establishment in downtown Washington where the CIA put up anti-Castro leaders like Ruiz-Williams, Johnson heard the news from Dallas on his car radio. As soon as Johnson reached Ruiz-Williams’s cramped, sparsely furnished room, they phoned Kennedy. It was Ruiz-Williams who spoke to him. “Harry stood there with the phone in his hand and then he told me what Bobby said…. It was a shocking thing. I’ll never forget, Harry got this look on his face. After he hung up, Harry told me what Bobby had said: ‘One of your guys did it.’”

  Who did Kennedy mean? When he first recounted the phone conversation, in a 1981 article in the Washington Post, Johnson assumed Bobby was referring to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, whose name might have been known to Kennedy by then since he was arrested in Dallas at 2:50 p.m. Eastern time. Later Johnson concluded that Kennedy was probably pointing his finger in the general direction of Cuban exiles. In either case, it’s important to note that Kennedy apparently never jumped to the conclusion that afternoon that Fidel Castro—the target of so much U.S. intrigue—was behind his brother’s killing. It was the anti-Castro camp where Bobby’s suspicions immediately flew, not pro-Castro agents. It seems that Bobby either immediately connected Oswald with anti-Castro Cuban exiles or suspected one of Ruiz-Williams’s fellow exile leaders in the crime.

  Bobby came to this conclusion despite the energetic efforts of the CIA and FBI, which almost immediately after the assassination began trying to pin the blame on Cuba’s Communist government. Hoover himself phoned Kennedy again around four that afternoon to inform him that Oswald had shuttled in and out of Cuba, which was untrue. In reality, Oswald—or someone impersonating him—had tried only once, without success, to enter Cuba through Mexico, earlier that fall. In any case, the FBI chief failed to convince Bobby that the alleged assassin was a Castro agent.

  Kennedy did not mean to implicate Harry Ruiz-Williams himself with his stunning assertion. The Cuban exile world was a “snake pit,” in Johnson’s words, of competing anti-Castro conspirators, some aligned with the Kennedys, some with the CIA, some with the Mafia, and some with mixed or mysterious allegiances. Bobby trusted Ruiz-Williams, more than any other anti-Castro leader, to bring order to this feverish world. “I want you to take charge of the whole thing,” Bobby had told Ruiz-Williams earlier in 1963. “I’m not going to see any more Cubans unless they come through you, because they make me crazy.” Throughout the year, Ruiz-Williams was in almost daily contact with Kennedy, as the two plotted ways to topple Castro, with RFK strongly backing his friend’s effort to form a coalition of the more responsible exile leaders.

  Ruiz-Williams had completely charmed Bobby. A U.S.-trained mining engineer, he joined the Bay of Pigs brigade though, pushing forty, he was older than most of the other volunteers. After the invasion, badly wounded, lying in a makeshift field hospital, he still tried to shoot a visiting Castro with his .45, but the gun clicked empty. Despite his ordeal, Ruiz-Williams came out of Cuban prison with a sense of proportion, unlike many of the other Bay of Pigs veterans, who were consumed with a poisonous hatred for both Castro and President Kennedy, whom they blamed for not coming to their rescue on the beaches of Cuba. He liked Bobby from the moment he met him, when he was invited to the attorney general’s office after his release. “I was expecting to see a very impressive guy, very well dressed,
and a big office and all that,” Ruiz-Williams later told Johnson. “And when I got into his office there was this young man with no coat on, his sleeves rolled up, his collar open and his tie down. He looks at you very straight in the eyes and his office is filled with things done by little children—paintings and things like that. I liked him right away.”

  The feeling was mutual. Bobby invited Harry to Hickory Hill and took him on family skiing trips. “Harry was an old-fashioned buccaneer type,” recalled Johnson. “He had these flashing black eyes and passion. And Bob Kennedy just liked him, he trusted him implicitly.”

  But the other Cuban exile leaders were a different story. Bobby, his brother’s vigilant watchman, knew he had to watch them. He sent Harry to Miami to help provide security for JFK before the president traveled to Florida in November 1963, after the attorney general was informed of death threats there against his brother. Even though the city had offered the Democrats $600,000, Miami had already been ruled out by the administration as a site for the party’s 1964 convention because it was feared that anti-Kennedy feeling among the Cubans there could explode.

  Another Bay of Pigs veteran, Angelo Murgado, said he was so alarmed by the murderous talk about President Kennedy in Miami’s Cuban exile community that he approached Bobby through anti-Castro leader Manuel Artime and offered to keep an eye on the more dangerous element and report back to the attorney general. Murgado said that he, Artime—the political leader of the Bay of Pigs brigade—and brigade veteran Manuel Reboso all met with Bobby at the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, Florida in 1963 to tell him of their concerns. “I was thinking we have to control and keep a sharp look on our Cubans, the ones that were hating Kennedy,” recalled Murgado. “I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy. Bobby told us to come up with a plan and do it…. He was fanatic about his brother, he would do anything to take care of him.”