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

by Talbot, David

  The night before Attwood flew to Washington, Howard arranged for him to meet Lechuga at a cocktail party in her brownstone apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street, where the newswoman loved to entertain the likes of Che and Adlai Stevenson, impressing guests with her eighteen-foot ceilings, antiques collection, and leaded-glass windows. The two diplomats repaired discreetly to a corner of her living room, where Lechuga told Attwood that Castro had read Kennedy’s American University speech with avid interest. Attwood talked of spending time with Fidel in 1959, when the Cuban leader gave him a message for the American people—“Let us be friends”—before shoving some cigars into his shirt pocket and urging him to return one day. Lechuga suggested that Attwood finally take up Castro’s offer and come back to Havana to renew their conversation.

  The next day, Attwood reported all this to Bobby Kennedy in his office. Instead of pouring cold water on the rapprochement idea, as Stevenson feared he would, Bobby responded favorably. He thought it would be too risky for Attwood to visit Cuba, since it would probably leak out and create a political furor in Washington. But he nevertheless felt the peace dialogue was “worth pursuing” and he suggested that secret talks with Castro could be held in another country, such as Mexico, or at the United Nations.

  JFK was even more enthusiastic. At a White House meeting on November 5, Bundy told Attwood that the president was “more in favor of pushing towards an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the idea being—well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal.”

  Once again, Kennedy himself was the most forward-looking person on his foreign policy team. Years later, his Hollywood crony Milt Ebbins confirmed that JFK was intent on normalizing relations with Cuba. “He would have recognized Cuba,” Ebbins said in an interview for this book. “He told me that if we recognize Cuba, they’ll buy our refrigerators and toasters and they’ll end up kicking Castro out.” JFK sidekick Red Fay agreed that Kennedy was determined to make peace with Cuba. “Jack figured that once the missiles got taken out of Cuba, he didn’t think there was any reason why we should have a confrontation with Cuba,” the former assistant Navy secretary told me at his home in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, sitting in a study strewn with Kennedy memorabilia and nautical artifacts. “As a result of that, he felt we could settle the whole thing with Cuba and get it all behind us.”

  In the final days of his life, Kennedy sent two dovish messages to Castro. One was delivered in a November 18 speech before the Inter-American Press Association in Miami, when Kennedy declared that the only obstacle to peace between the United States and Cuba was Havana’s support for revolutionary upheavals in other Latin countries. “This and this alone divides us,” Kennedy emphasized. “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.” Schlesinger, who helped write the speech, later told Attwood that it was meant to help his diplomatic effort by signaling that the president was truly interested in opening a peace channel with Castro.

  But JFK always felt compelled to brandish an arrow as well as an olive branch when he spoke in public about Cuba. This was particularly true in Miami, hotbed of anti-Castro fervor. True to this double-edged strategy, Kennedy’s November 18 speech carried harsh rhetoric as well, maligning the Castro government as a “small band of conspirators” which “once removed” would ensure U.S. support for a democratic, progressive Cuba. Desmond FitzGerald took credit for injecting this militant language into the speech, and the CIA spun the president’s remarks to its friendly media contacts as a get-Castro tirade. “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup,” the Dallas Times Herald blared. And the CIA-cozy Hal Hendrix of the Miami News wrote that JFK’s speech “may have been meant for potential dissident elements in” Castro’s government. The fact that both Schlesinger and FitzGerald could claim credit for the same speech demonstrates how the administration’s Cuba policy was a battleground between competing factions.

  But the CIA was fully aware of which direction on Cuba Kennedy was tilting in his final days. Unknown to Lisa Howard and Bill Attwood at the time, as they worked the phones in her apartment on behalf of the JFK-Castro peace initiative, the agency was listening in. In one call to Havana, Howard was overheard excitedly describing Kennedy’s enthusiasm for rapprochement. The newswoman had no sense of the shock waves she was causing within the halls of Washington power. “Mother was very naïve, she was an innocent,” said Lareau. “She didn’t really understand all the dynamics. She was like a bull in a china shop—she just went all out for what she wanted, and she was not that concerned about the consequences.”

  The agency was determined to derail the administration’s secret peace bid. At a White House meeting on Cuba on November 5, Helms urged that the administration slow down the Attwood initiative, proposing that the government “war game” the peace scenario “and look at it from all possible angles before making any contacts” with Castro.

  Despite the agency’s resistance, the peace feelers continued. Kennedy’s second cordial message was delivered to Castro personally by French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newsweekly L’Observateur, on the day the president was assassinated. Before leaving for Havana, Daniel had met with Kennedy in the White House, where the president took a conciliatory line toward Cuba. Sounding like the Alliance for Progress crusader instead of the Bay of Pigs invader, Kennedy told Daniel that America’s Cuba policy during the Batista era was characterized by “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation,” adding, “We’ll have to pay for those sins.” If Castro stopped acting as the Soviet Union’s agent of subversion in Latin America, Kennedy suggested, the United States would lift its economic blockade of Cuba. Daniel later said that the president was clearly “seeking a way out” of the impasse between the two countries. When the French journalist met with Castro, the Cuban leader was riveted by his report on his White House meeting, asking him to repeat Kennedy’s remarkably honest assessment of America’s shameful policy during the Batista years. “He has come to understand many things over the past few months,” Castro mused aloud.

  But on the very day that Daniel was conveying JFK’s conciliatory message to Castro (and Kennedy would ride to his doom in Dallas), CIA officials were taking covert steps to strangle the peace initiative. On November 22, in a stunningly duplicitous act of insubordination—without informing the president, attorney general, or CIA director—Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald arranged for a poison pen to be delivered in Paris to a disaffected Cuban military officer named Rolando Cubela for the assassination of Castro. Like the agency’s plan to kill Castro with a toxic wet suit, hatched during the Donovan peace mission, the Cubela plot was clearly designed to snuff out the Attwood-Howard initiative. The CIA hoped that Castro’s assassination would trigger a military coup. But even if the Cubela plot failed and was exposed, it was certain to deeply embitter relations between the two countries.

  The agency’s dark intrigue bore out Stevenson’s warning to Attwood that “the CIA is in charge of Cuba.” In any case, Attwood grimly noted years later, that’s the way the spy outfit acted—“and to hell with the president it was pledged to serve.”

  The CIA tried to frame Robert Kennedy for the Cubela plot. When Cubela asked his agency contacts to meet personally with the president’s brother, FitzGerald took the extraordinary step of flying to Paris to falsely assure the assassin of RFK’s support. Meeting Cubela, who was given the code name AM/LASH, at a CIA safe house in the city, FitzGerald introduced himself as “Senator James Clark,” a personal representative of Kennedy’s. But the president’s brother had no idea the CIA was using his name. Helms and FitzGerald agreed that it would be “totally unnecessary” to inform Kennedy of their gambit. When later confronted with evidence of his duplicity by the Church Committee, in the 1970s, Helms was forced to explain why he had kept Kennedy in the dark. “It wasn’t that I was being smart or tricky or hiding anything,” Helms insisted, al
though that’s precisely what he was being. “I just thought this is exactly the kind of thing…he’s been asking us to do, let’s get on with doing it.” The intelligence czar later embroidered on his lie in an interview with journalist Evan Thomas, suggesting that he concealed the Cubela meeting from Kennedy for RFK’s own good, because the risk-taking attorney general might have flown to Paris to deliver the assassination tools himself. “Bobby wouldn’t have backed away [from the Cubela meeting],” said Helms. “He probably would have gone himself.”

  The CIA continued to plot with Cubela until 1966, when he was arrested by Cuban counterintelligence and sentenced to thirty years in jail. But as it turned out, it was Kennedy’s assassination, not Castro’s that terminated the efforts to reconcile the two countries. After Dallas, the Attwood back-channel talks sputtered briefly along, with Castro again using a Lisa Howard interview to express his continued interest in peace. But in January the Johnson administration pulled the plug on the talks, to avoid handing the Republicans a potential campaign issue in the 1964 election. In a memo written three days after JFK’s assassination, Gordon Chase, the White House point man on the secret negotiations, observed that “President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic heat [but] I’m not sure about President Johnson. For one thing, a new president who has no background of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists (e.g., President Kennedy in October 1962) would probably run a greater risk of being accused by the American people of ‘going soft.’” The other reason rapprochement with Cuba would now be “more difficult,” Chase noted, was that Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, “has been heralded as a pro-Castro type”—a portrayal of Oswald that was aggressively promoted by the CIA and its client groups in the Cuban exile community like the DRE, starting immediately after the shots were fired in Dealey Plaza.

  Howard doggedly continued her citizen’s diplomacy through early 1964, despite a growing disdain for her efforts in the Johnson White House and CIA, but her life took a tragic arc. In September, she threw herself in typically dramatic fashion into the New York Senate race that pitted Bobby Kennedy against Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating. Joining with other high-profile liberals who harbored resentments against Bobby, like Gore Vidal, Howard formed a Democrats for Keating group at a meeting in her apartment. Ironically, Keating had played a very belligerent role on Cuba, goading the Kennedy administration to take military action against the island and dismissing Castro as “just a puppet” of the Soviet Union after he appealed for peace in his first TV interview with Howard. But Howard, frustrated by the failure of her Cuba peace bid, focused blame curiously on Bobby, even though he had given the effort his approval.

  “She was trying to make peace and she was convinced Jack and Bobby wanted war,” recalled Vidal. “She was most resentful of it and she saw this would be a good opportunity to punish Bobby.” The Kennedys not only made enemies on the right with their two-track strategy towards Cuba—they alienated some on the left as well.

  Soon after her plunge into the Senate campaign, Howard was fired by ABC for her highly publicized partisanship. A network executive brusquely told the New York Times, “She’s being canned. She doesn’t fit. She’s a mystery girl. We just don’t want her on the staff.” The once high-flying TV correspondent was outraged by her abrupt excommunication from the airwaves. She filed suit against ABC, claiming that she had been “blacklisted” for her political activities. Deprived of her prominent TV platform, Howard seemed lost. “Lisa Howard Pleads to Be Visible Again,” read the plaintive headline of a New York Times story on her lawsuit. Her lawyer told the newspaper that monetary compensation could not offset the terrible damage done to Howard by depriving her “of daily exposure to her audience.”

  In April 1965, months after her dismissal, Howard crashed a New York Radio and Television Correspondents Association meeting held in the ABC corporate conference room where Bobby Kennedy was a featured speaker. She confronted Kennedy at the forum, questioning his effectiveness as a political leader. The next day, ABC public relations executive James C. Hagerty felt compelled to apologize for Howard’s behavior in a letter to Kennedy: “The report of her conduct towards you, as relayed to me, burned me up. This is just a note to express my personal regrets even though Miss Howard is no longer working for us—and that’s a story in itself…. I’m just sorry it happened while you were a guest in our building.” Kennedy himself took the incident in stride—at least Howard didn’t level the usual “ruthless Bobby” charge at him, he quipped. “My slogan next time,” he wrote in his reply to Hagerty, “is going to be: ‘Re-elect Robert F. Kennedy Senator—He is too inefficient to be ruthless.’ Anyway, thank you for writing. With the problems that exist for everyone,” Bobby added, his days still shrouded by Dallas, “Lisa Howard is rather inconsequential.”

  “Mother was basically having a mental breakdown by that point,” said Lareau. “She had lost the most important thing in her life—her career, her position. She was a public person, an exhibitionist—she loved being on camera, at the center of attention. So when all of this disappeared, she felt like her whole world was falling apart.”

  Her mother was also afflicted by an addiction to sleeping pills that began during her first trip to Cuba. “She used to stay up all night waiting for Fidel, and then she couldn’t sleep the next day, so she would take pills.”

  Howard’s spiral downward continued that summer when she suffered a miscarriage. On July 4, after being released from the hospital, she drove to a pharmacy in East Hampton, where she and her husband were spending the summer. She altered a sleeping pill prescription to read 100 instead of 10 and promptly downed most of the barbiturates with a Coke. Police found her wandering dazed and glassy-eyed in the drugstore parking lot, mumbling about her miscarriage. They drove her to a hospital but she collapsed and died before they could get her inside. A medical examiner said she had taken enough sleeping pills to kill five people. “It wasn’t a cry for help,” said Lareau. “She was determined to die.” Lisa Howard pursued death as aggressively as she had pursued life.

  IN CONTRAST TO HIS friend Lisa Howard, Bill Attwood’s career flourished in the post-Kennedy years. After serving as President Johnson’s ambassador to Kenya, he returned to journalism, becoming editor-in-chief of Cowles Communications, publishers of Look, in 1966 and then president and publisher of Newsday in 1970. But as the years went by, Attwood was increasingly haunted by the assassination of JFK. He began to wonder whether there might be a link between Kennedy’s secret Cuba peace efforts and his murder. In October 1975, he wrote a letter to Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, who, along with fellow Church Committee member Gary Hart of Colorado, had persuaded Frank Church to let them form a subcommittee to investigate the Kennedy assassination. “I think the Warren Commission is like a house of cards,” Schweiker announced to the press at the time. “It’s going to collapse.” In his letter, Attwood told Schweiker that while he found it “hard to disbelieve the Warren Report,” he had some suspicions about the possible involvement of anti-Castro Cubans in the assassination. And he encouraged Schweiker to investigate the back channel that Kennedy opened with Castro as a possible motive for his killing.

  As the years went by, Attwood’s suspicions deepened. He communicated with conspiracy researchers. He discussed the assassination with Castro during a February 1977 trip to Havana that was intended to revive his long-dormant peace mission, this time on behalf of newly inaugurated President Carter. During a lengthy conversation one evening in the presidential palace, Castro told Attwood that Kennedy’s American University speech showed that “he’d have been a great president had he lived.” The Cuban leader then recalled the exploratory peace talks between Attwood and his UN representative, Lechuga. “This is why Kennedy was killed,” Castro told him, pinning the blame on “a conspiracy of right-wing elements who could see U.S policy in Cuba and Vietnam about to change.”

  Attwood was beginning
to think along similar lines. He later gave an eyeopening interview to Anthony Summers, a former BBC journalist whose 1980 book on the assassination, Conspiracy, was a landmark in Kennedy research, applying rigorous reporting skills for the first time to the crime. Attwood told Summers that he suspected the phone calls he and Lisa Howard made to Havana from her apartment were tapped by the CIA. When word of Kennedy’s secret peace track filtered down the agency ranks, Attwood conjectured, to the level where zealous operatives worked with equally feverish exiles, the results might have been explosive. “If word of a possible normalization of relations with Cuba leaked to these people, I can understand why they would have reacted violently,” Attwood said, “This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the president.”

  Arthur Schlesinger concurred with Attwood’s assessment, telling Summers, “Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts, that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.”