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

by Talbot, David

  Kennedy was furious when he heard what had happened to his aide; he was also moved by his courage. “You did what was right,” Kennedy told Seigenthaler when he reached him by phone in the hospital. Still woozily recuperating in his hospital bed, Seigenthaler murmured, “Let me give you some advice. Never run for governor of Alabama.”

  It was Bobby who took on the most explosive issues for his brother’s administration, from civil rights to Cuba to organized crime. He always seemed to be in the thick of combat, and his own band of brothers at the Justice Department was right there with him. But despite his belligerent reputation, it was not the life that Robert Kennedy had imagined for himself.

  When his newly elected brother asked him to become his attorney general—at the urging of their shrewd, tribalistic father, who wanted someone Jack could utterly trust in the top legal post—Bobby initially resisted. He was tired of “chasing bad men,” he told his brother. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life doing that. Maybe he would go home to Massachusetts and do something there, maybe run for governor or become a college president. Bobby took Seigenthaler with him one bitter cold morning after the election to Jack’s Georgetown house, to give his brother his final decision over a breakfast of bacon and eggs. But in the end, of course, he dutifully took the job. “I need you in this government,” Jack told his brother. And Seigenthaler knew that was that. Bobby’s fate was determined. He would, in fact, end up doing precisely what he wanted to avoid—chasing bad men for the rest of his life.

  NO ONE OF HIS era came to know more than Robert Kennedy about the dark side of American power. As Arthur Schlesinger observed, Bobby knew how the country was really run—“the underground streams through which so much of the actuality of American power darkly coursed: the FBI, CIA, the racketeering unions and the mob.” He had learned from his father, who attempted to steer these streams for the benefit of the Kennedy family. He had learned as a crime-busting Senate investigator. He had learned as his brother’s tough, undefeated campaign manager. And he would learn, most of all, as the attorney general, when his crusades turned the full fury of these dark powers against the two brothers’ administration.

  The younger Kennedy threw himself into these dangerous battles with a mixture of bravery, arrogance, idealism, and Irish fatalism. “You won’t have any trouble finding my enemies,” he told a Life reporter in January 1962 with what struck the reporter as a satisfied smile. “They’re all over town.” Bobby’s bravado recalled his childhood days when he had forced himself to do whatever he feared most. Slow to master swimming as a boy, he had thrown himself off a yawl into Nantucket Sound to either sink, or finally swim. “It showed,” a bemused Jack would observe, “either a lot of guts or no sense at all.”

  When RFK became attorney general at age thirty-five, he was still very much a work in progress. Before the president-elect took him outside his Georgetown house to anoint him as his choice for attorney general in front of the press throng assembled on N Street, he had to tell his kid brother to go upstairs and comb his hair. Standing before the battery of news cameras next to his smoothly self-assured older brother, Bobby looked like a sheepish schoolboy getting an award he didn’t deserve.

  Compared to his cool-running older brother, he seemed a cauldron of youthful passions. The men who knew them both, like Charles Bartlett, did not see Jack’s subtlety of mind in Bobby. Ted Sorensen’s first impressions of the younger Kennedy were far from reassuring. He struck Sorensen as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat shallow in his convictions…more like his father than his brother.”

  As a thirteen-year-old, Bobby had summed himself up this way in a school composition titled “A Portrait of Myself”: “I have a pretty good character on the whole, but my temper is not too good.” It remained an accurate assessment after he became the second most powerful man in Washington. Even fellow Democrats tagged Bobby “Raúl,” after the younger Castro brother who was Fidel’s militant enforcer. Adlai Stevenson crowned him “the black prince.”

  “The great difference between Bobby and John F. Kennedy in those days was that everything was black and white for Bobby,” said Pierre Salinger, recalling the early years of the brothers’ political saga. “But John F. Kennedy had the facility to see the fact that life was not a black and white proposition, that there were a lot of gray areas in life.”

  Reflecting on the two brothers years later in his office at the Washington Post, retired editor Ben Bradlee said, “I think there was less hidden business in Jack. There was no inner turmoil in Jack. Bobby was always a crusader, campaigning against the people who hurt the people he loved.”

  The attorney general brought a messianic sense of purpose to his brother’s administration. Believing that men lost their juice for battle by middle age, RFK surrounded himself at the Justice Department with aides as young and dedicated as himself. Ed Guthman remembers looking around the attorney general’s expansive office, during a meeting there one afternoon in late 1961. Kennedy was sitting on his desk in a typical pose—no suit jacket, shirtsleeves rolled up, legs folded under him Indian-style. The sober government office had been transformed into a colorful salon decorated with his children’s wildly impressionistic crayon scrawlings on the walls, a varnished sailfish over the mantelpiece, and a stuffed tiger near the fireplace. The menagerie was completed by the attorney general’s lumbering, black 125-pound Newfoundland, Brumus—a beast of “passable intelligence and overwhelming love for mankind,” in the words of Look magazine journalist Fletcher Knebel, who “drools on everybody, including the boss, who frequently has to wipe one of his expensive New York-tailored suits after Brumus’s happy salivations.” Surveying Kennedy’s assembled staff that day, Guthman realized that, at forty-two, he was the oldest person in the room.

  Kennedy’s young staff responded to his crusading spirit, warm and open management style, and transparent emotions. In the eyes of most of his staff, Bobby’s passions made him temperamentally suited for the role of an avenging attorney general.

  The question that still haunts the Kennedy legacy, however, is did RFK’s righteous fervor push him, and his brother’s administration, to extreme lengths in their campaign against the Castro regime? After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the wily, charismatic dictator undeniably became an obsession of the Kennedy brothers, particularly Bobby, who was given the mission of solving the Cuba problem. “The bearded fellow,” as he contemptuously referred to him, would join his most wanted list, along with other “tyrants” like Jimmy Hoffa. The attorney general brought an intensity to the anti-Castro crusade that was not as evident in JFK, a passion that seemed born of the younger brother’s more visceral anticommunism and Catholicism. According to anti-Kennedy revisionists like journalist Seymour Hersh, Bobby’s mandate was clear: It was “to murder Fidel Castro and overthrow his government.”

  But there is no compelling evidence to support this. While Bobby did indeed browbeat CIA officials to do more to disrupt the Cuban government, assassination was not among the measures he urged upon the agency. In fact, the Kennedys’ views of the Castro regime became less and less absolutist as time went on. The administration would adopt a contradictory, two-track strategy toward the Castro regime, wielding not just sticks but carrots, as the Kennedy brothers attempted to navigate their way out of the crisis atmosphere that characterized their first two years in office.

  Dick Goodwin tells the story of the day in November 1961 when he led Tad Szulc, who was being considered for an administration job, into the Oval Office to meet with President Kennedy. The president stunned the New York Times reporter by asking him, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” The journalist told him he did not think the United States should be involved in this type of thing. Kennedy said, “I agree with you completely.” He then said he was under intense pressure from officials within his government to take this extreme step, but that he was “glad” that Szulc agreed with him because he felt that for “moral reasons” the United
States must never resort to this sinister activity.

  As with Bobby’s angry response to the CIA couriers who informed him of the Mafia plots, Kennedy critics charge that JFK staged this dialogue with Szulc to give himself cover in case the murder plots were later revealed. But Goodwin finds this far-fetched. “It struck me that if Kennedy were in fact involved in a plot to kill Castro, he hardly would have told that to a reporter from the New York Times, who the day after Castro was killed would be sitting on the biggest story in the world! I can’t go into his mind and find his motives, but I just don’t think that someone as media-savvy as Kennedy would do something like this.”

  When Goodwin brought up the Szulc discussion with Kennedy several days later, the president reiterated his opposition: “We can’t get into that kind of thing, or we would all be targets.”

  Years later, in 1984, Szulc talked about his remarkable Kennedy meeting with Castro himself. The Cuban leader listened with rapt interest, telling the journalist that it confirmed his belief that Kennedy had nothing to do with the CIA attempts on his life. He was convinced that if Kennedy had lived, they would have worked out their differences, he told Szulc.

  More recently, Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, raised the subject of the assassination plots with Castro during a visit with the Cuban leader in Havana. She waited until his translator had left the room before broaching the matter. Castro pretends not to be fluent in English, but he actually speaks it very well. When they were alone, Ethel addressed Fidel directly. “I want you to know something,” she said, looking up at the tall, graying figure whose story was so entwined with that of her family. “Jack and Bobby had nothing to do with the plots to kill you.” Castro met her eyes. “I know,” he said.

  But if President Kennedy thought he had shut down the Castro assassination intrigue, he could not be certain when it came to the CIA. “You could never be sure with the CIA,” Goodwin observed. “They were doing things on their own.”

  Goodwin recalled Kennedy’s anger when he informed him that the CIA had secretly supplied rifles to assassins who were plotting to kill Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. “Tell them no more weapons,” exclaimed Kennedy. “The United States is not to get involved in any assassinations. I’d like to get rid of Trujillo, but not that way.” But Trujillo was terminated that way, when his car was fired upon while driving on a deserted stretch of highway on May 30, 1961.

  The CIA’s defiance of Kennedy’s leadership was most flagrant when it came to Cuba. The agency felt increasingly whipsawed by the Kennedy brothers—flayed, on the one hand, to produce more results in their secret sabotage campaign against the island, but scolded when their actions created too much political fallout. Hard-liners in the agency and elsewhere in the government bitterly complained about what they regarded as a two-faced Kennedy policy.

  As Robert Kennedy struggled to master the Cuba problem, he was also straining to control the CIA, the agency that his brother had vowed to shatter into pieces, but which had only grown more powerful and unaccountable as it pursued its lavishly funded covert war with Castro. The intelligence organization, still bitter over the president’s handling of the Bay of Pigs, deeply resented the younger Kennedy’s intrusion into the Cuba arena and chafed under his management, which spy officials regarded as full of brash theatrics but largely ineffectual. At the same time the relentless RFK was badgering CIA officials to take more action against the Cuban regime, and abrasively challenging their authority, he and his cool-headed brother were imposing strict limits on what the agency could do. It was an unhealthy state of affairs. The relationship between the younger Kennedy and the intelligence czars grew increasingly poisonous. By the final days of the Kennedy reign, the brothers would find themselves more at war with their own national security regime than they were with the one in Havana.

  IN THEIR ATTEMPT TO take control of their government, the Kennedys often turned to mavericks who operated outside bureaucratic channels. When Dick Goodwin was forced out of the Cuba command post in late 1961, they selected another wild card, the legendary counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale, to fill the vacancy. By November 1961, the Kennedys had concluded that their quiet approach toward Havana was not working. Castro seemed to be hardening into a Soviet-controlled Communist dictator with revolutionary ambitions for the rest of Latin America, and the political pressure to do something about his regime was growing. That month the president inaugurated a new covert operation, codenamed “Mongoose,” that would be aimed at toppling the Castro regime from within by instigating a Cuban revolution. “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites and Communists,” read Robert Kennedy’s notes on the November 3 White House meeting where the president authorized Operation Mongoose. “Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”

  The Kennedys were convinced that the gung-ho Lansdale was just the man to serve as operations chief for Mongoose, reporting directly to RFK. A dashing-looking, mustachioed Errol Flynn type, he had become a Cold War celebrity in the 1950s by almost single-handedly helping Philippines leader Ramón Magsaysay defeat a left-wing insurgency and later creating and propping up Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in South Vietnam. Lansdale’s bold counterinsurgency strategy, which drew on his background as a California advertising man, was aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Third World populations. Though Graham Greene denied it, Lansdale was rumored to be the model for Alden Pyle, the fatally naïve do-gooder in The Quiet American, Greene’s prescient 1955 novel about the doomed American enterprise in Vietnam. But Lansdale proudly embraced his fictional portrayal as Edwin Hillandale—the American military officer at the center of the 1958 bestseller, The Ugly American, which was written by two acquaintances of his, William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Although the term later became an epithet for clueless, culturally insensitive Americans abroad, the protagonist of The Ugly American was actually a sympathetic character. Like Lansdale, who ventured into jungle villages where he entertained natives with his harmonica, Hillandale was willing to get his hands dirty in his counterinsurgency efforts—hence the “ugly American,” as opposed to the aloof “beautiful Americans” stationed abroad who never left the comforts of their U.S. embassy suites and remained blissfully ignorant of local customs and conditions.

  The book meshed with JFK’s activist foreign policy philosophy and he incorporated its themes into his 1960 campaign. And Lansdale would later strike Kennedy as the ideal choice to take on Castro, using the revolutionary leader’s own guerrilla tactics to bring him down.

  There was a romantic aspect to the Lansdale legend that strongly appealed to the Kennedys. He was brave and risk-taking and uninhibited by bureaucratic protocols. Though he initially enlisted in the Army during World War II, he had later been assigned to the OSS and he spent his subsequent government career floating between intelligence and the military, where he had risen to become an Army brigadier general. This gave Lansdale an aura that was independent of both the CIA and the Pentagon, neither of which fully trusted the lone ranger. A Lansdale-run Operation Mongoose, the Kennedys realized, had the potential to cut out the CIA hierarchy and Joint Chiefs of Staff, an obvious Kennedy aim when it came to Cuba. Lansdale played to RFK’s distrust of the CIA elite in a memo he wrote the attorney general soon after Mongoose was launched, suggesting that they go around “Dick Bissell” and “the CIA palace guard” and work with a middle-management CIA official named Jim Critchfield as their agency liaison, a man Lansdale thought they could rely upon.

  The freewheeling attorney general and his equally independent-minded point man on Cuba seemed intent on yanking the island away from the national security bureaucracy and creating their own special team to deal with it. In a December 7, 1961, memo, Lansdale complained that the CIA’s “smash and grab” raids on Cuba—which often utilized militant exiles who would not have met Robert Kennedy’s more exact
ing criteria, including men linked to Batista and the mobsters who helped prop him up—were out of step with the Mongoose philosophy, which held that sabotage expeditions should only be carried out when they helped build a popular movement inside Cuba against Castro.

  Lansdale invoked the democratic ideals of the American Revolution to justify the U.S. operation against Castro. “Americans once ran a successful revolution,” wrote Lansdale in a program review of Mongoose dated February 20, 1962. “It was run from within, and succeeded because there was timely and strong political, economic, and military help by nations outside who supported our cause. Using this same concept of revolution from within, we must now help the Cuban people to stamp out tyranny and gain their liberty.”

  But underneath the shiny, new democratic marketing, Lansdale’s overseas missions pretty much fit the old imperialist mold. In the Philippines, he had managed Magsaysay’s political career like a corrupt ward heeler, spreading around a suitcase full of CIA cash to ensure his man’s 1953 presidential victory and once slugging Magsaysay so hard he knocked him out when the candidate tried to deliver a speech written by a Filipino instead of one by his American handlers. The counterinsurgency wizard delighted in telling the story of how he terrorized the rebellious Huks into fleeing a part of the Philippine jungle where they had been strong by making the superstitious rebels believe the area was infested with vampires:

  “When the Huks came…the last man [of their patrol] was silently grabbed by the [government] patrol. When the Huks were out of the vicinity, the captured Huk was held down, two holes punched in his throat, held up by the heels, and drained of blood. The body was carefully placed back on the trail. The returning Huks found the body. The vampire evidence was compelling. The Huks deserted their strongly held jungle area before dawn.”