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

by Talbot, David

  The Joint Chiefs were not alone in trying to maneuver the United States into war over the Cuban missile installations. The CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis. CIA director John McCone, who was the first administration official to charge the Soviets were inserting missiles into Cuba, made no secret of his desire for a shooting war over the new threat. In the weeks before the crisis exploded, the agency began leaking information about the missiles to friendly reporters like Hal Hendrix of the Miami News—who later won a Pulitzer for his “scoops”—as well as to Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, who used the intelligence tips to politically embarrass the Kennedy administration.

  During the height of the crisis, President Kennedy instructed the CIA to immediately stop all raids against Cuba, to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration. But, once again, the agency asserted its right to determine its own Cuba policy, independent of the president’s will. In defiance of Kennedy’s order, Bill Harvey mobilized sixty commandos—“every single team and asset that we could scrape together”—and dropped them into Cuba, in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow. When somebody in the JM/WAVE station tipped off Robert Kennedy to Harvey’s reckless act, the attorney general hit the roof, ripping into the CIA official at a Mongoose meeting for risking World War III. An unrepentant Harvey shot back that if the Kennedys had taken care of the Cuba problem at the Bay of Pigs, the country would not be stuck in the current mess. The attorney general stormed out of the room. Years later, at his appearance before the Church Committee, the CIA man was still dismissive of Kennedy’s concerns, shrugging them off as “persnickety.”

  But for the Kennedys, it was one more demonstration of the intelligence agency’s cowboy nature. “Of course, I was furious,” Bobby later said, recalling Harvey’s wildly provocative act. He was astounded that a CIA official would risk nuclear doomsday “with a half-assed operation like this.”

  Watching the eruption between Kennedy and Harvey, McCone knew that the career of his Cuba point man had just imploded. “Harvey has destroyed himself today,” the CIA director told an aide. The Kennedy “tirade” against Harvey was “so severe,” according to an FBI memo, “that McCone felt it would be appropriate to move Harvey from Washington, D.C., for a few days.” Later, Dick Helms came to Harvey’s rescue, transferring him to the agency’s Rome station, where he would be out of Kennedy’s line of fire. The legendary spy would drink his way through his brief Roman exile, until he was brought back to CIA headquarters.

  Before Harvey departed for Rome, his colleagues threw him a bon voyage party, where they staged a dramatization of the life and death of Julius Caesar, with Harvey in the lead role. As the sketch concluded, someone shouted, “Who was Brutus?” In a flat voice, Harvey said, “Bobby,” a man whom by then he regarded as “treasonous.”

  His career was essentially finished. But throughout his decline and fall at the CIA, Harvey continued to stay in touch with his old Mafia comrade-in-arms Johnny Rosselli. The two men were spotted together in Florida, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., conferring over their usual refreshments—martinis for the spy and Smirnoff on the rocks for the gangster. When Harvey retired from the agency and set up his own law firm in Washington, Rosselli dropped by to see his old friend and threw him some business. The retired spy refused to distance himself from the mobster, even under pressure from the agency. Bill Harvey never apologized for the odd relationship. “Regardless of how he may have made his living in the past,” Harvey would later tell Senate investigators, Johnny Rosselli was a man of “integrity as far as I was concerned.” The gangster was loyal and dependable “in his dealings with me,” said Harvey. He had “a very high estimate” of the man.

  President Kennedy’s isolation within his own government was never so glaringly apparent as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the ExComm meetings (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) where Kennedy thrashed out his strategy, he could count on only his brother and McNamara for support. Bobby, who matured from a kneejerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat during the nerve-punishing crucible, played an especially critical role. “Thank God for Bobby,” Dave Powers heard the president remark one morning as his brother strode into another tension-filled ExComm meeting. The humanity-threatening crisis forced the younger Kennedy to confront a fundamental question about the use of power in the nuclear age. “What, if any, circumstance or justification gives…any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?” he asked himself. As Schlesinger later observed, it was a question few statesmen ever raised and few philosophers answered.

  Robert Kennedy was the key courier for his brother in the delicate back-channel negotiations that finally brought an end to the crisis, secretly meeting with Georgi Bolshakov until the Kennedys realized that their old Soviet chum had been used by Moscow to deceive them, and later Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev offered a startling account of RFK’s emotional conversations with Dobrynin, in which Kennedy stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on. It was not the first time in the Kennedy presidency that Bobby had communicated this alarming message to the Russians. But in this high-stakes moment, Kennedy’s plea struck Khrushchev as especially urgent.

  After the attorney general paid an unofficial visit to the Soviet embassy one evening, Dobrynin reported to Moscow that “Robert Kennedy looked exhausted. One could see from his eyes that he had not slept for days. He himself said that he had not been home for six days and nights. ‘The president is in a grave situation,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba…. President Kennedy implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the peculiarities of the American system. Even though the president himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will…. If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”

  On another occasion, Khrushchev wrote, Bobby Kennedy “was almost crying” when he phoned Dobrynin. “I haven’t seen my children for days now,” he told the Soviet ambassador, “and the president hasn’t seen his either. We’re spending all day and night at the White House; I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals.”

  Kennedy loyalists like Schlesinger—who prefer to see the brothers’ management of the crisis as certain and masterful, which in many respects it was—suggest that Bobby Kennedy’s emotional pleas to the Soviets were a tactic to win leverage in the negotiations. President Kennedy was never afflicted by doubts when it came to standing up to the Pentagon, Schlesinger observed recently: “JFK had a great capacity to resist pressures from the military. He simply thought he was right. Lack of self-confidence was never one of Jack Kennedy’s problems. We would’ve had nuclear war if Nixon had been president during the missile crisis. But Kennedy’s war hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men.”

  Still, as Schlesinger has acknowledged, Kennedy was not firmly in control of his own military. And the repeated references to coups and Seven Days in May scenarios that pop up in presidential transcripts and recollections about the administration make it plain that JFK himself, and his closest advisors, worried about the stability of the government.

  So did Khrushchev. “For some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” he later wrote, “and now he was admitting this to us himself.” Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that te
nsion in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”

  Thirteen days after the crisis began, Khrushchev announced that he would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. The Soviet decision was heralded as a major U.S. victory, a dramatic demonstration of the power of American resolve. The Kennedys encouraged this media spin, though they had secretly made their own concessions to end the showdown, agreeing to quietly withdraw aging Jupiter missiles from U.S bases in Turkey and pledging not to invade Cuba. This latter concession was particularly critical from the Soviet point of view, since it was the military threat hanging over Cuba that had prompted Khrushchev to install the missiles. Washington officials would later insist this pledge was not binding because Castro refused to allow U.S. weapons inspections of Cuba to make sure the missiles were gone. But Kennedy and future presidents would nonetheless honor the no-invasion pledge. It essentially ensured the survival of the Cuban revolution, and though Castro did not see it that way at the time, Khrushchev correctly called it “a great victory” for the embattled island.

  While the Kennedy media offensive successfully sold the story that “the other guy blinked,” Washington hardliners saw the resolution of the crisis differently. A few days after Khrushchev’s announcement, the president summoned the Joint Chiefs to the Oval Office to thank them for their role in the crisis, a particularly gracious gesture considering the friction between the commander-in-chief and his generals. But LeMay was in no mood to celebrate. “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” he thundered at Kennedy. “We should invade today!” The anti-Kennedy rage was widespread among the upper ranks, where it was felt the president had flinched at the perfect opportunity to dismantle Cuba’s Communist regime. “We had a chance to throw the Communists out of Cuba,” a disgusted LeMay later fumed. “But the administration was scared to death [the Russians] might shoot a missile at us.”

  Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who later became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy when the missile crisis ended. He was struck by the “fury” within the Air Force after the Kennedy-Khrushchev settlement. “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” Ellsberg recalled. “Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup—I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”

  The CIA also knew the missile crisis was a turning point on Cuba. When Kennedy gave Khrushchev “assurances against [the] invasion of Cuba,” CIA official George McManus wrote in a memo on November 5, “Operation Mongoose died.” Mongoose had always been more for show, McManus noted, a smoke and mirrors operation designed “to remove the political stain left on the president by the Bay of Pigs failure.” But now, the CIA bleakly concluded, the Kennedy administration was dropping even the pretense of overthrowing Castro.

  For those militants who were part of the massive juggernaut organized to destroy the Castro regime, the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis was a betrayal worse than the Bay of Pigs. They watched the U.S government go to the brink of launching a devastating assault on Cuba, only to see Kennedy nimbly sidestep the final reckoning at the last minute. It was the closest they would get to realizing their political dreams, and they had been crushed. “Talk about the word treason at the Bay of Pigs, this was even bigger for us, the people involved,” said Rafael Quintero, who was one of the sixty commandos recruited by Harvey to parachute into Cuba during the missile crisis.

  As the year 1962 came to an end, the world was in a safer orbit. Those thirteen sleepless days and nights had won John Kennedy his place of glory in history. “People no longer thought that world war between the Soviet Union and the United States was inevitable,” Sorensen observed years later. The young president had navigated his way through the most dangerous shoals ever faced by an American leader, tacking just enough one way to avoid impeachment or a coup and sailing just enough the other way to avoid nuclear annihilation. Afterward, there was a shift in the world’s mood, a hint of light through the iron clouds that had been darkening the planet since the start of the Cold War’s long, deadly slog. Like men elated by a narrow escape from death, Kennedy and Khrushchev felt emboldened to pursue peace with a new vigor.

  Kennedy and Khrushchev had drawn closer to each other during the thirteen-day ordeal, exchanging private letters and confidential messages. JFK was especially moved by one letter, a “cry from the heart,” as one U.S. diplomat called it, in which Khrushchev pleaded that the Russian people were neither “barbarians” nor “lunatics” and wanted to live as much as the American people. Therefore it was up to Kennedy and him to stop tugging on the “knot of war” before it became so tight that neither man could untie it. Khrushchev later said that he developed “a deep respect” for Kennedy during the crisis. “He didn’t let himself become frightened, nor did he become reckless…. He showed real wisdom and statesmanship when he turned his back on right-wing forces in the United States who were trying to goad him into taking military action against Cuba.”

  There was more understanding than ever between the two leaders. But both men were increasingly estranged from their own governments. As Khrushchev had steered his country toward a peaceful way out of the crisis, his military advisors had “looked at me as though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor.” But the Soviet leader had defiantly pursued his course. “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruin, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”

  It was a strange and perilous turning point in the Cold War, a time when the leaders of the two nuclear powers found themselves out of step with their own national security bureaucracies. Khrushchev was acutely aware that Soviet political history was an epic of blood and treachery, of sudden, violent exits from the stage. But he was not the only superpower leader who feared for his own safety.

  4

  1963

  A thunderous roar erupted from the stadium crowd as the glamorous president and first lady glided into the Orange Bowl in a gleaming white convertible. A sea of Cuban and American flags flapped wildly in the stands. John F. Kennedy strode briskly across the grass to the ranks of men in crisp khaki uniforms, greeting them and shaking their hands. Some of the men were on crutches, but they stood proudly erect in the dazzling Miami sunshine. It was Saturday morning, December 29, 1962. The men of Brigade 2506, survivors of the Bay of Pigs and Castro’s prisons, were finally free and Kennedy was there to welcome them home. Several of his advisors had strongly warned the president against going to the Orange Bowl ceremony, including Kenny O’Donnell, who worried about the political fallout from what would certainly be an emotionally volatile event. “Don’t go there,” he told Kennedy, when the president phoned him from the family’s Palm Beach mansion, where he was spending the Christmas holidays. “After what you’ve been through with Castro, you can’t make an appearance in the Orange Bowl and pay a tribute to those rebels. It will look as though you’re planning to back them in another invasion of Cuba.” But Bobby—always more febrile on the subject of Cuba than Jack—convinced his brother to go. It turned out to be a disastrous decision.

  When one of the Brigade leaders, Erneido Oliva, presented Kennedy with the rebels’ flag, which they had hidden during their imprisonment, the normally reserved JFK suddenly lost his cool. “Commander, I can assure you,” he declaimed in a rising voice, “that this flag will be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana.”

  The Brigade members, more than eleven hundred strong, instantly shot to their feet, cheering lustily. Shouts of “Guerra! Guerra!” and “Libertad! Libertad!” swept the stadium. Some rebels broke down in tears.

  Kennedy’s advisors were stunned. Goodwin, who had written the Orange Bowl speech, later said that JFK went “off script…that line about bringing back the flag to a free Cuba was not in the text. He was carried away by the moment.” But a declassified CIA memo dated December 28, 1962, rev
eals that the dramatic flag exchange was carefully choreographed in advance by Bobby Kennedy and exile leaders. In any case, JFK’s warlike cry was O’Donnell’s worst fear come true. The president’s eruption seemed to promise that the United States would back another invasion of the island. “Diplomatically, it was the worst possible gesture that a president of the United States could have made at that time,” he later wrote.

  JFK himself soon realized his mistake. A few days later, he met with reporters in his Palm Beach house to clarify his Cuba policy. His administration had no intention of supporting another rebel invasion or imposing a new regime on Cuba, Kennedy made clear, unless Castro committed his own dramatic act of aggression. Once again, the president had blown wind into the Cuban rebels’ sails, only to quickly deflate their billowing hopes. It was the same ambivalent pattern that had characterized administration policy since the Bay of Pigs. The Kennedys would talk tough about the Castro regime and stoke Cuban exiles’ passions, and then tug sharply backwards on the reins of war.

  The Kennedy two-step on Cuba contained a certain political logic—it was intended to restrain Khrushchev and Castro’s Latin American ambitions and defuse right-wing pressures at home, while stopping short of war. But it inflamed tempers in the Cuban exile community, where the Kennedy name became synonymous with betrayal. A violent rage began to fester in Miami’s political tropics, a shadowy world where shifting alliances of exiles, gangsters, and spies plotted labyrinthine conspiracies and dreamed of revolutionary glory. During JFK’s Orange Bowl appearance, a would-be assassin lurked in the crowd, carrying a duffel bag with a disassembled, scoped rifle. The Secret Service and Miami police were later tipped off about the suspect, who was described as a young Cuban male with a strong muscular build, but were unable to track him down.