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

by Talbot, David

  In 2005, two independent researchers, Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, published a massive, 904-page book in which they argued that President Kennedy was indeed preparing to topple Castro, even naming the date on which the plot was to take place—December 1, 1963. According to the authors, the Kennedys were scheming with a high Cuban official to stage a coup and then invade the island to guarantee the installation of a friendly Havana regime. The book, Ultimate Sacrifice, was based on seventeen years of exhaustive research and it contained many shiny nuggets that shed light on the administration’s Cuba policy and the assassination of JFK. But its claim that Kennedy was backing a coup/invasion plan just days before his assassination was unconvincing.

  The authors can be forgiven for their erroneous conclusion. Throughout 1963, Cuba policy was wrapped in fog and shadow. Confusion seemed to be the point. While Bobby Kennedy was telling José Miró Cardona that the administration had no intention of invading Cuba, he was filling Brigade leaders Manuel Artime, Erneido Oliva, and Harry Ruiz-Williams with hopes that they would soon be in Havana. He encouraged Artime to set up training camps in Nicaragua, with the support of the dictator Somoza; he let Oliva believe that he would spearhead the invasion, leading the unit of U.S.-trained Brigade veterans from Fort Benning; and he told Williams that he would head the post-Castro provisional government, arousing so much anticipation in his Cuban friend that he began naming his Cabinet ministers.

  Bobby conferred frequently with exile leaders throughout 1963. They phoned the attorney general so often that in July he asked them to lay off “because of the increasing frequency of rumors linking him with certain enterprises against Cuba,” according to a CIA memo. RFK met with Artime, Williams, and other rebels as late as November 17 and was scheduled to meet with them again on November 21 or 22, stated an Army memo.

  In January 1963, soon after Artime and Oliva were released by Castro, Bobby invited them to Hickory Hill, where he assured the two exile leaders “that the administration was committed to the liberation of Cuba,” Oliva recalled. “We felt that this time victory would be the outcome.” That is why he continued to believe in the Kennedys, Oliva wrote years later in an article explaining why he had personally handed the Brigade’s holy relic, its banner, to the president at the Orange Bowl. Oliva, a former Cuban army officer, was one of the heroes of the Bay of Pigs. He led the 370 men under his command with brilliance and courage, at one point grabbing a 57mm cannon and standing down a Stalin tank rumbling directly toward his company. After he was captured, Oliva was visited one night in prison by Che Guevara. Cuba’s revolutionary leaders could not understand why Oliva, the Brigade’s only black leader, had joined the Yankee assault on their brave new society. Why did he leave Cuba? Che asked him. Because it had been taken over by Communists. Was he afraid of being executed? “Yes,” Oliva replied. He was “also afraid of the dentist when he took out four teeth.”

  Oliva never wavered in his belief that President Kennedy was going to invade Cuba, even after hearing about the deal JFK struck with Khrushchev after the missile crisis. “The president who failed us at the Bay of Pigs was truly and sincerely remorseful,” Oliva wrote years later. Up until the day JFK died, Oliva insisted, the president was working “to rectify his historic mistake and to free Cuba.”

  Perhaps Bobby Kennedy believed this as well. Maybe he really imagined that glory would finally shine on these exile leaders, the ones whose courage and values he so admired. The administration was certainly preparing for such an eventuality throughout 1963. Military contingency plans on Cuba went flying back and forth between government offices, elaborate documents that war-gamed how Washington would respond in the unlikely event that this or that occurred in Cuba—or in Berlin or Laos, since JFK was always prepared to make a move on the island if the Soviets made a threatening move elsewhere on the superpower chess board.

  But more likely, the deeply empathetic attorney general just could not bring himself to tell the truth to the rebel leaders: the Kennedys were simply not willing to go to war to liberate the island. Joseph Califano was in a prime position to witness Kennedy’s tortured efforts to assuage Brigade veterans. As Army Secretary Cyrus Vance’s young special assistant, he was put in charge of the effort to integrate the Bay of Pigs combatants into the U.S. military. Califano was disturbed by Kennedy’s inability to level with the exiles. “Most troubling (and greatly complicating my job),” Califano wrote in his 2004 memoir, RFK “could not admit to them, and perhaps even to himself, that the United States was unlikely to support another invasion.”

  Kennedy came closest to the truth with Harry Williams when he told him there would come a time when their interests would diverge. There will be a point when “the national interests of the United States and the interests of you people of Cuba who want to go back will not be in accordance,” the exile leader later recalled Bobby cautioning him. It was Bobby’s way of warning his friend, but it did nothing to dampen Williams’s optimism about the coming liberation of his homeland.

  Robert McNamara confirmed to me that President Kennedy had no serious intention of invading Cuba after the missile crisis, despite the contingency plans and training operations conducted by the military. Did Kennedy plan to invade Cuba in 1963? “No, absolutely not,” McNamara replied. “And we had given a guarantee to Cuba and the Soviets [after the missile crisis] that we would not invade. Now that guarantee was associated with Khrushchev’s agreement to remove the missiles, which he did, but under the supervision of the U.N., which he did not. Therefore, technically, we maintained there was no guarantee. But as a matter of fact and practice, there has been.”

  Dick Goodwin agreed that Kennedy had no desire to invade. Launching such an operation in 1963, he insisted, would have been a reckless and senseless act, the kind of folly Kennedy had no stomach for after weathering two crises in two years on Cuba. “Why would he have done it? Castro was really no threat to us anymore, once the Russians took their missiles out of there. I think the idea of trying to overthrow Castro just before the [1964] election is just absurd. Anything could go wrong. It would have been a breathtaking risk and an unnecessary one.”

  Bobby Kennedy succeeded in keeping alive the hopes of Artime, Oliva, and Williams, but the CIA looked suspiciously on all his conniving and dreamweaving with the rebels. The attorney general continued to bark at intelligence officials, demanding that they inflict more damage on the Castro regime, but they knew the Kennedys were not serious about bringing it down. Des FitzGerald—the handsome, tennis-playing, former Wall Street lawyer who had taken the drunken, disheveled Bill Harvey’s place—had a less poisoned relationship with RFK. But the brash attorney general still phoned him at home, haranguing the autocratic CIA blueblood as if he were a towel boy at the country club. FitzGerald’s stepdaughter Barbara Lawrence still vividly recalls the nerve-rattling weekend phone calls that her stepfather received from Bobby at their Virginia country home: “The phone would ring and it would be Robert Kennedy. I have a picture in my mind of my stepfather coming out to this sort of enclosed porch area that we had down at the farm, having just been on the phone with Bobby, and he was just pulsating.”

  FitzGerald raged against the way the president’s brother was micromanaging Cuba policy and running his own secret game with the exile leaders he favored. And the CIA man dismissed the Kennedy brothers’ actions on Cuba as showy gestures that would produce flying sparks and little else, comparing their theatrics to “tying a rock to a wire and throwing it across high-tension lines.”

  The Kennedys’ most extravagant bit of anti-Castro showmanship in 1963 was their decision to help build Artime’s private army. The brothers were prepared to generously support exile leaders like Artime as long as they agreed to set up their operations outside the United States, at a safe distance from Washington. The administration cut a deal with Nicaragua’s Somoza, the tyrant whom JFK had gleefully disparaged to Dick Goodwin soon after taking office, that allowed Artime to set up his training camps there. Kennedy was undoub
tedly aware of the irony—and cynicism—in doing business with one notorious dictator in order to get rid of another. But the brothers’ main concern was to contain the Cuban exile problem, and offloading the militants to Central America had a certain political logic.

  The CIA saw through the Kennedys’ plan and grew irritated with agency golden boy Artime when he did not. The more affiliated Artime became with Bobby, the less the CIA trusted him. The overseers of the agency’s Cuba operation stewed as they watched the administration funnel money and resources to Artime’s private army, suspecting that the attorney general was once again trying to cut the agency out of the action. When Artime, a slight young man with thick, dark eyebrows and a rasping voice, visited Washington, the CIA put him in a secure house in Maryland that was heavily bugged. The rebel leader’s exotic girlfriend aroused agency suspicions—she was a bisexual who had shared the beds of Batista and a Venezuelan dictator and had undraped her body for pornographic display. Langley worried that Artime’s colorful sex life could damage his reputation if somebody leaked the salacious details. And who did headquarters fear might do such a thing? Members of the CIA’s own Cuba task force, who resented Artime’s favored status with the Kennedys.

  There was another sexual affair in Washington on which CIA officials were avidly eavesdropping that season. This one concerned another sexually adventurous leader whose political and personal lives were of great interest to the agency: the president of the United States.

  ON FRIDAY MARCH 8, 1963, the president and first lady held what would be their last dinner dance in the White House. The guest of honor was World Bank president Eugene Black, but he was really just an excuse for the Kennedys to throw a big party for their friends. Not understanding his role as a convenient cover, Black invited so many people that the Kennedys had to tell their own crowd to eat somewhere else and show up for the dance at 10 p.m. This was when the fun really began. Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, whom Jackie once told were the first couple’s best friends, came upon their hosts in the upstairs hall. “Oh, Tony, you look terrific,” gushed the first lady in her breathy voice. “My bust is bigger than yours, but then so is my waist.” The spirits were flowing that night—thirty-three bottles of champagne and six bottles of more bracing stuff had been consumed so far by the hundred-odd guests, JFK reported to his friends. (The president was keeping close tabs because he suspected the White House liquor stockpile was being raided.) Kennedy was in a festive mood. Looking around the candle-lit Blue Room, where the dance was being held, he surveyed the luxurious supply of glamorous female guests (who had been “imported from New York,” Bradlee later observed) and sighed, “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.”

  Of course, Kennedy was running wild, though Bradlee would later insist he never knew. And among his many secret lovers, perhaps the most intriguing was Mary Pinchot Meyer, the sister of Bradlee’s wife. Meyer was a more formidable partner than any of the White House playmates JFK enjoyed and cast aside with careless, Rat Packlike ease. A free-spirited blonde in her early forties, she was the product of the eccentric, blue-blooded Pinchot family. After divorcing the brainy, intense CIA propaganda master Cord Meyer, she had refashioned herself as a Georgetown bohemian, setting herself up as a painter in a studio behind the Bradlees’ N Street house.

  Mary Meyer had arrived at the White House that chilly late-winter night in typically unconventional style, showing up among the sea of gowned women wearing a summer chiffon dress that had belonged to her great grandmother. At one point, Meyer disappeared long enough that people began asking, “Where’s Mary?” recalled her sister, Tony Bradlee. Finally, her escort for the evening, Blair Clark, an old Harvard classmate of JFK, went searching for her. When he found his date, her face was flushed and the hem of her dress was wet. “She had been upstairs with Jack, and then she had gone walking out in the snow,” remembered Clark. “So there I was, the ‘beard’ for Mary Meyer.”

  The president’s mistress was upset and left early that night. Some speculated that Kennedy had tried to break off the relationship. Bobby, the constant watchman, arranged for her to get home, steering her toward a White House limousine and helping her into the back seat. Earlier that night, Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s too gentle liberal adversary—a man used to receiving women’s confidences, while his younger rival took other favors—was taken aback when Jackie, his dinner table partner, began sharing intimacies with him about her marriage. “I don’t care how many girls” Jack has slept with, she told him, “as long as he knows it’s wrong and I think he does now. Anyway that’s all over, for the present.”

  But Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer was not over. She continued to see the president at the White House, mostly when Jackie was absent, and at convenient events like Joe Alsop’s Georgetown salons. (White House entry logs recorded thirteen visits by Meyer over a two-year period.) The relationship apparently started in late 1961 and lasted until the day Kennedy died.

  They had met when they were both in prep school—the charming, scrawny Choate senior had cut in on her while she was dancing with her date, William Attwood (who would later serve Kennedy on an important diplomatic mission), at a school dance in 1935. They met again in San Francisco after the war, when she accompanied her new husband to the United Nations’ founding conference, which Kennedy was covering for the Hearst papers. The two men took an instant dislike to each other, a mutual hostility that never faded away, even when the Meyers moved next door to Hickory Hill, which was first owned by Jack and his new bride before they sold it to Bobby and Ethel.

  Cord and Mary Meyer were a tragic golden couple out of the pages of Fitzgerald. A tall, strikingly handsome aspiring poet at Yale, Cord’s life had been shattered during World War II, when a grenade tumbled into his foxhole on Guam and exploded in his face. He survived, but his left eye was turned to “useless jelly,” as he later wrote in “Waves of Darkness,” a short story based on his war trauma that won the O. Henry Prize in 1946 for best first-published story. After he returned home from the war, his twin brother was killed in the savage fighting on Okinawa. Meyer vowed to honor those “who fell beside me” in the war and “to make the future for which they died an improvement upon the past.”

  Historical circumstances beyond his control had forced him to learn how “to destroy,” the sensitive young Marine had written in a plaintive diary entry during the war. But now he threw himself into the peace movement, helping organize the American Veterans Committee, a liberal rival to the American Legion, and becoming president of the United World Federalists, which envisioned a globe under the calm and rational dominion of one government. With his curled locks and resplendent smile, a visage made only more endearing by his war-scarred face, Meyer became the heartthrob of liberal campus coeds, who stuck his picture on their dorm room walls. He was someone to watch, voted one of America’s ten most outstanding young men by the Jaycees. (A young congressman from California named Richard Nixon was another.) And then, in 1951, he suddenly disappeared from the public eye. He joined the CIA.

  Meyer would always insist that he did not betray his youthful idealism by entering the Cold War’s dark underworld. He simply decided that as long as the forces of Stalin and communist tyranny stood in the way, world peace was not possible. His crusade remained the same, he told friends, even if he now operated undercover. Meyer was part of a wave of idealistic, anticommunist liberals who enlisted in the CIA after the war. He would rise to become the number two man in the agency’s clandestine operations—known by critics as “the department of dirty tricks.” Along the way, he secretly financed labor unions, youth groups, writers’ organizations, and literary journals—a mission he saw as building a bulwark against the global communist propaganda offensive. The once promising writer, who considered abandoning his intelligence career early on for a career in the book publishing industry, must have gained a private satisfaction from playing the role of secret patron. But when Meyer’s covert philanthropy was exposed in the late 1960s, his detractors charged
that it was an insidious corruption of the country’s liberal infrastructure.

  Cord Meyer never entirely let go of his youthful creative temperament. Even his close friendship with the CIA’s gaunt master of black arts, the legendary James Jesus Angleton—the deeply spooky figure in charge of keeping the agency pure of communist infiltration—made sense in this context. They were the agency’s bohemians. Before ascending to his exalted position within the espionage world, Angleton, like Meyer, had been a youthful Yale poet, editing a literary journal, Furioso, that published the work of e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief approached his work with artistic eccentricity, trying to divine the secret stratagems of world communism from within his sepulchral, heavily draped office at Langley. He would emerge at midday to take his customary lunch at the Rive Gauche in Georgetown, where he was often joined by Meyer, floating through the afternoon on a stream of cocktails, red wine, and cognac like a Left Bank libertine. It is not surprising that Meyer, with his visionary and artistic inclinations, would be drawn to Angleton. The half-Mexican, anglophilic spymaster was part of the WASPy CIA culture, and yet he hovered above it. With his sunken cheeks and burning eyes—a face his wife described as springing from El Greco—James Jesus Angleton seemed like the haunted prophet of American intelligence.