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

by Talbot, David

  Howard wondered why the attorney general did not have FBI men to ferry him around. But he later learned that J. Edgar Hoover, who had once been eager to put FBI cars at Kennedy’s service, had cut off all amenities for the attorney general after his brother’s assassination. As Howard soon discovered, it was not just transportation Bobby needed that morning. It was the Secret Service men’s intimidating presence.

  Bobby asked the agents if they could stop at Dulles Airport on the way back to Washington, directing them to a remote spot on the tarmac where private planes landed. “I’ll need you to drive me out onto the air field and I’d like you to stay with me,” said Kennedy, and the two agents agreed. After the car was parked, Bobby got out and began walking toward a small plane that was sitting about fifty yards away, followed by Howard and his partner. About forty feet from the plane, Bobby turned to the agents and said, “Fellows, you wait right here.” As Kennedy approached, a fireplug of a man got off the plane followed by two hulking sidekicks. The Secret Service agents instantly recognized him: Jimmy Hoffa. To the agents’ amazement, Kennedy and Hoffa greeted each other and began conversing, as the attorney general showed a document to the Teamster leader, and Hoffa alternately nodded and shook his head. As the two men talked, Howard and his partner warily eyed Hoffa’s bodyguards. “One was built like a Green Bay Packer,” Howard recalled, “and the other wore dark shades and there wasn’t any doubt about what he had under both armpits—he was loaded.”

  Howard and his partner could not believe what they were witnessing. “We weren’t expecting something like this at all,” he said. “This wasn’t part of our routine duty. We weren’t even supposed to be there!

  “We could hear Bobby and Hoffa talking, but we couldn’t hear what was being said. But the thing that was a concern to us was what was going to happen. Hoffa had made it clear, at one time, that he would kill this son of a bitch if he got the chance. All of a sudden, I wasn’t sleepy anymore, I can guarantee you. We were wide awake, because we didn’t know whether there’d be a shoot-out right there or not.”

  Later, as Kennedy and the Secret Service men drove back to Washington, there was no conversation in the car. “He didn’t say a word about it—not a word,” Howard recalled. And the Secret Service men were too professional to ask anything about the extraordinary meeting. “That was something you didn’t do.”

  Why did Kennedy confer with his long-time nemesis that day? His Justice Department had finally won a conviction against the slippery Hoffa, on jury tampering charges in Nashville, and the following month it would put the Teamster boss on trial again, for defrauding the union’s Central States Pension Fund of $20 million. This might have been the subject of the two men’s conversation that morning on the landing field. But as investigative journalist Gus Russo has speculated, it might also have been Dallas. Perhaps Kennedy wanted “to look into Hoffa’s eyes while asking him if he had anything to do with his brother’s killing—as he had done with, among others, John McCone of the CIA.”

  It has long perplexed assassination researchers why Robert Kennedy did not put the formidable power of the Justice Department behind the probe of his brother’s murder. If anybody had the means and motive to solve the crime, it was the attorney general of the United States. Kennedy’s inertia is partly explained by the enervating gloom that settled over him in the months after Dallas. But another explanation is suggested by Howard’s remarkable story. When Kennedy did marshal the energy to pursue leads on his brother’s case, he could not rely on the government’s investigative apparatus. Kennedy’s official power began slipping away the minute his brother was killed. It was so weakened by March 1964 that he could not depend on the FBI to protect him during a nerve-twisting meeting with his top criminal target. There is something deeply poignant about the attorney general of the United States reduced to hanging around his sister-in-law’s kitchen in hopes of borrowing her Secret Service protection.

  Increasingly marginalized by Lyndon Johnson—a man he regarded as a usurper and who eyed him in return with burning suspicion—and the new president’s malevolent courtier, Hoover, Kennedy was powerless to mount a full assassination investigation in 1964, even if he had possessed the will. It was the FBI chief who moved quickly to bring the investigation under his control, ignoring the attorney general in the process.

  Hoover’s contempt for Kennedy’s authority became so blatant after Dallas that Ed Guthman, the tough newspaperman who was still serving as the attorney general’s press secretary, stormily confronted Hoover deputy Cartha DeLoach over lunch in early March. Guthman was outraged at the way that Hoover and his coterie—before “the president’s body was even cold”—had begun to snub the attorney general, communicating directly with the new occupant of the White House and feeding LBJ’s rampant paranoia with tales of Bobby’s disloyalty. “It pissed me off. I mean what the hell…to get fucked around like that by Hoover,” Guthman later told me. “As soon as President Kennedy was killed, Bob Kennedy might just as well not have existed as far as he was concerned.”

  After an initial exchange of pleasantries that afternoon, the lunch meeting soon grew heated. Guthman was blunt in his assessment of the FBI director’s behavior: it was “chickenshit” and “unmanly.” The words surely inflamed the hypersensitive Hoover when “Deke” DeLoach dutifully reported back to his boss—a man of “monstrous ego,” in the deputy’s own words, who ruled the FBI like “the Great and Powerful Oz.”

  Hoover and his men were clearly moving “to consolidate [their] position with President Johnson,” Guthman observed, “and went out of their way to really stick it in, and hard” against Kennedy. At a time when Bobby could barely function, lost in his fog of grief, Guthman found the FBI czar’s behavior “cruel and unnecessary…we had no illusions about what had happened or what changes in power [had taken place].” But Hoover needed to keep reminding Kennedy of his fall, to punish the young man—once called the second most powerful person in Washington—for his short-lived dominion over him.

  There was a time when Kennedy would have directly confronted Hoover himself. But in his final months at the Justice Department, sleeping and eating intermittently, he seemed to shrink even physically before the eyes of his friends and colleagues. Bobby took to wearing JFK’s old clothes, but wrapping himself in the comforting leather skin of his older brother’s bomber jacket, he seemed like a lost boy. “He looked to me like a man who is just in intense pain,” said his friend John Seigenthaler, after visiting Washington to check in on Bobby. “He looked to me like a man hurt, I mean, you know, just physically hurt.”

  Bobby Kennedy once charged through Washington’s bureaucratic fortresses like a blazing revolutionary, determined to inflame the government with a sense of Kennedy mission. The attorney general “was frequently an insurgent, and his country was the beneficiary of the insurgency,” Edward R. Murrow would tell Bobby in a wistful thank-you note after receiving a pair of the cufflinks that were given to the core members of the Kennedy administration on Christmas 1963. But without his inspirational leadership, Kennedy’s crusades at the Justice Department began to lose their fervor and some of his young prosecutors began to drift away.

  When Bob Blakey—who had served on his organized crime task force and would one day play a key role in reopening his brother’s case—dropped by Kennedy’s office to say goodbye, he was stunned by the transformation his once-dynamic boss had undergone. “He seemed absolutely devastated. He used to have these piercing eyes—when he was looking at you, you knew it. The day I came into his office, he was idly playing with that big dog of his, Brumus. He looked at me with vacant eyes. Instead of his usual vigorous handshake, his hand felt like a piece of meat.”

  To friends like Seigenthaler, it seemed as if Kennedy’s body-wracking grief after Dallas was intensified by something else, a haunting sense of remorse. It was as if he felt responsible in some way for his brother’s murder. “That must have been part of his agony,” Blakey observed. “This terrible sense—is ther
e something I did, or failed to prevent, that backfired against the president?” He was supposed to be his brother’s sleepless watchman, but he had failed him.

  There was something else that undoubtedly weighed on Kennedy in those dark months, another reason he seemed immobilized, unable to confront the truth about his brother’s assassination. It was first speculated about in a provocative monthly magazine called The Minority of One that was published by a brilliant, Polish-born survivor of Auschwitz named Menachem Arnoni.

  The Minority of One, whose board of sponsors included Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, lived up to its defiant motto: “the independent monthly for an American alternative dedicated to the eradication of all restrictions on thought.” Its founder, known to his readers as M. S. Arnoni, ran his magazine with the fearless abandon of a man who had “lived a thousand lives, and…died a thousand deaths,” as he declared in a 1965 speech on the Berkeley campus, where he addressed the audience in the striped uniform of a Nazi concentration camp inmate. With his tragic, European sense of the world, Arnoni inveighed against the dangers of militarism and the threat of a new and final world war, displaying a passion and intellectual acuity rarely evident in the American press. Long before Walter Cronkite signaled the mainstream media’s disaffection with the war in Vietnam, The Minority of One was regularly denouncing it as a moral disaster. And while the rest of the press was rushing to close the case on the assassination of President Kennedy, Arnoni insisted on raising sharp and disturbing questions about the official version, publishing the work of pioneering dissidents on Dallas like Lane, Sylvia Meagher, and Vincent Salandria. The monthly’s carefully documented dissections of the Warren Report and intriguing explorations into the identities of Oswald and Ruby would catch the attention of men in Bobby Kennedy’s circle, who read and corresponded with the journal.

  The most disquieting essay on the assassination ever published by Arnoni might have been one he wrote himself in the January 1964 issue. In the piece—which ran on the cover of the magazine under the title “Who Killed Whom and Why? Dark Thoughts About Dark Events”—Arnoni raised the chilling possibility that Kennedy’s assassination was a regime change engineered at the top levels of government. Deep into his essay, Arnoni made another disturbing conjecture—one that might further explain Bobby’s paralyzed condition after Dallas. “The possibility can by no means be dismissed that important men in Washington do know the identity of the conspirators, or at least some of them, and that these conspirators are so powerful that prudence dictates that they not be identified in public,” Arnoni suggested. “Let us make the ‘fantastic’ assumption that President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy know or believe that the murder was planned by a group of high-ranking officers who would stop at nothing to end American-Soviet negotiations. However strong their desire to avenge John F. Kennedy, what course would be open to them? To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.”

  This seems a sharply intuitive reading of Robert Kennedy’s mind at the time. As soon as RFK concluded his brother was the victim of a high-level plot—which he communicated to family members and even the Soviet government within days of the assassination—the very next thought that must have occurred to a passionate patriot like Bobby, someone who had dedicated his life to the service of his country, was surely enough to freeze his heart. If I move against the conspirators at this point, with a slipping grasp on the machinery of government, it could spark an American inferno. In fact, this is precisely what Kennedy later suggested to an old family friend. “If the American people knew the truth about Dallas,” RFK told him, “there would be blood in the streets.”

  Once, Bobby had been renowned for his prosecutorial zeal. But now, emotionally and politically unable to bring his own brother’s killers to justice, he seemed hollowed out, drifting listlessly through his days. In his deepening gloom, he sought counsel—not from a psychiatrist, but in the Irish way, from a priest. Worried about Jackie’s state of mind, Kennedy had recruited his old friend, Father Richard McSorley, a liberal Jesuit theology teacher at Georgetown University, to talk with her, under the guise of giving her tennis lessons on the backyard court at Hickory Hill. Jackie confided in the priest that she was plagued by suicidal thoughts. Would she be punished in the afterlife if she committed this mortal sin, she asked McSorley? “Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? It’s so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?”

  Bobby too tried to comfort his sister-in-law, but all he could offer her was stoic advice. “Sorrow is a form of self-pity,” he told her. “We have to go on.” He also chided his colleagues at the Justice Department about their downcast moods. “Robert Kennedy Defeats Despair,” proclaimed the headline of a January 9, 1964, article in the New York Times by his friend Anthony Lewis—as if by telling it to the press Bobby could make it true. But Father McSorley realized that it was not just Jackie who desperately needed help.

  In a letter he wrote in early summer 1964, McSorley consoled Bobby for his irreplaceable loss: “Your grief goes as deep as your love. Because you were close to him, you received the impact of his rare personality more fully than others. Yours was the inspiration of constant, daily, personal contact.” But he then encouraged Bobby to turn grief into action, by picking up his brother’s fallen banner. “I look at you as [Jack’s] twin spirit,” wrote the priest. “No one is in a better position to lead those whose hearts have caught fire from his flame than you.”

  But it would take time before Kennedy was ready to resume his brother’s mission. In the meantime, the man of action found solace in literature and philosophy. It was Jackie who helped guide him this time, giving him a copy of The Greek Way, the minor 1930 classic by retired headmistress Edith Hamilton that extolled the glory that was briefly Athens. Kennedy devoured the book during a trip he took with Jackie and a small group of family and friends to the island of Antigua in March 1964, retreating to his room in a borrowed seaside villa to read and heavily underline it. The tragedy of Athens—its 150-year reign as a cradle of democracy and art, before succumbing to the corruptions of empire—must have echoed his own gloomy thoughts about the perils of a life devoted to politics. And he took deeply to heart the ancient counsel of the great tragedians whom Hamilton celebrated, particularly Aeschylus—the poet who had once been a warrior, hero of Marathon, a man whose wisdom was born of life’s cruel strife. Kennedy found particular comfort in these lines from the playwright; they would guide him through his bleakest days: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

  EARLY IN 1964, BOBBY arranged to meet in Miami one last time with Angelo Murgado and his compadres, Manuel Artime and Manuel Reboso. Kennedy was closing his Cuban accounts. The farewell meeting between Kennedy and his Cuban intelligence team was deeply painful, recalled Murgado. “We sat down with him, and man, it was highly emotional. Everybody was in tears. It took us about five minutes to regain control. You should have seen the guy, Jesus Christ! He had lost weight. He was in such pain. He had just come down to talk about what happened and to say goodbye. And that was the last time we ever spoke.”

  Murgado said he and his colleagues did not bring up the name of the man whose spectral presence loomed over the meeting, Lee Harvey Oswald—the man Kennedy had told them months earlier was safe to ignore, since he seemed to be under the direction of the FBI. “Why the hell would you put alcohol in the wound, you understand? He said goodbye and that was it.�
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  Murgado and his pro-Kennedy allies in the exile community had been stunned on November 22 when the man they had been tracking in New Orleans was suddenly identified as the suspect in the assassination of the president. “When that happened, we shit in our pants.” Afterwards, he and his fellow exiles anxiously huddled to try to make sense of the events in Dallas. They quickly came to the conclusion that the assassination was the work of their employer, the CIA. “When the thing happens, we sit down and we talk. We realized, ‘My God, we’ve been used like toilet paper. Who the hell is behind all this?’ And we knew that the plot could come from only one source—the CIA. The whole infrastructure, the logistics—it was the CIA. We all believed the same thing. It was a highly sophisticated operation. Look, they were so good at it that, even today, nobody knows exactly what happened. There’s only one enterprise that can pull off shit like that. It was the CIA, but not alone. It was the CIA plus something higher.”

  Murgado uses the term “invisible government” to describe the high-level source of the plot. He believes these high officials eliminated Kennedy because he broke from their Cold War ranks: “JFK was another victim of the Bay of Pigs…he was ahead of his time.”

  But Murgado won’t speculate on the names of people who might have been involved in the conspiracy, especially those of other Cuban exiles. “Anything you want to know about me, related to Bobby, I will tell you. The rest, forget about it. Because that would create a lot of static. And remember, in the Cuban environment, you don’t create a lot of static.”

  In any case, said Murgado, it’s too late—those who could shed light on the plot are long gone. “Everybody is dead—or other guys have disappeared. And I respect that. You fade away and I respect that. I ain’t going to bring nobody out of the shadows to come up with the truth.” Murgado doubts that the American people even want the truth. “You know that line from the movie? It’s the best line I’ve heard for this country: ‘You don’t want the truth, you can’t handle the truth.’”