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

by Talbot, David

  He had been raised to believe that “Kennedys don’t cry,” passing this stoicism along to his own children. But he found it hard to live by on the Senate campaign trail, even in public. At Columbia University, a student confronted him with the dreaded question. Did he believe the Warren Report’s conclusion about a lone gunman? For several minutes, Kennedy stood speechless, while the audience murmured nervously. Finally he responded irritably, “I’ve made my statement on that.” But as he began to rehash what he had said months earlier in Poland, Kennedy’s voice suddenly cracked. He dropped his head and tears began streaming down his face. The man whom colleagues found astonishingly honest could not bring himself to repeat what he did not believe.

  With Kennedy unable to shake free of his grief, his desultory campaign was headed for defeat. Paul Corbin—the ruthless political operator whom some called “Bobby’s dark side”—was the only one with the nerve to confront him. “Get out of your daze,” he scolded his boss. “God damn, Bob, be yourself. Get hold of yourself. You’re real. Your brother is dead.”

  “It was painful to watch him on the campaign trail—he was depressed and the crowds sensed it,” recalled Justin Feldman, the reform Democrat who first approached Bobby to run for the New York Senate seat and later worked as his campaign coordinator. Feldman urged him to go on the attack against Keating, but Bobby did not have the stomach for it. “He told me, ‘Well, he hasn’t been that bad of a senator, has he? Everybody says I’m so ruthless.’”

  Then, as Keating seemed coasting to victory, he made a “fatal mistake,” said Feldman. “And it made Bobby finally come alive.” At the end of September, trying to drive a wedge between Kennedy and the Jewish vote, Keating dredged up the old Nazi appeasement charges that had haunted the Kennedy family. He suggested that as attorney general, Kennedy had settled a World War II–era case in favor of a chemical company with Nazi ties in order to please his father. Bobby, the family protector, was outraged that Keating would use such a tactic. He had lost a brother and a brother-in-law to the war, he reminded voters. Left unsaid was that his family had just given another son to the country. “Bobby went nuts,” said Feldman. “He no longer thought Keating was this benign force in politics. He denounced his charges as outrageous demagoguery. After that, Bobby became a campaigner.”

  In the end, Kennedy won by over 700,000 votes. But he needed the coattails of his brother’s successor, who carried the state by two million more votes than Bobby won, to do it. Even in victory, Bobby seemed melancholy. Congratulated by his bodyguard Bill Barry during the raucous election night party, Bobby said, “If my brother was alive, I wouldn’t be here. I’d rather have it that way.” Later, sitting at the Johnson inauguration with his old friend Joe Tydings—who had also just been elected to the Senate from Maryland—Bobby grew teary watching the ceremony that should have ushered in his brother’s final term. “We quietly cried together when LBJ was sworn in,” said Tydings, “when, you know, President Kennedy should have been there.”

  UNLIKE HIS BROTHER TED, Robert Kennedy’s interest was not engaged by the day-to-day business of the Senate. But he quickly seized it as a platform to highlight the national and international issues that he deemed most urgent. “He thought that the way the Senate ran was archaic,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “He didn’t see it as a real action place. And I think he was rather restless with the Senate…. I’d go up and sit in the Senate office for four or five hours at a time. And he would spend most of his time talking to people on problems which were not at all directly related to his Senate duties.” Kennedy met with foreign dignitaries Salinger introduced to him such as French politicians Pierre Mendes-France and François Mitterand. And he would discuss the intractable problems of poverty with activists from Mississippi and the Indian reservations.

  Quietly, Bobby also began to show renewed interest in his brother’s assassination. On November 16, 1964, shortly after he won his Senate seat, RFK flew to Mexico City, where he spoke at the dedication ceremony for a workers’ housing project named after President Kennedy. At a press conference, he was again asked about the Warren Report and he again endorsed it—but this time he added an intriguing qualifier, saying he believed in its veracity, “as far as the investigation went.”

  Though he attended a flurry of events during his two-day visit and dined with U.S. ambassador Fulton Freeman at the fashionable San Angel Inn, Kennedy made it clear to embassy officials that he also wanted private time while he was in Mexico. But the visiting U.S. senator could not escape official supervision. Newly released Mexican government documents show that RFK was put under surveillance by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Mexico’s FBI—an agency with close ties to the CIA station in Mexico City. CIA station chief Winston Scott, who was kept informed of Bobby’s comings and goings during his visit, learned that the senator was gathering information about Lee Harvey Oswald while he was there. Scott noted in a memo for agency files that playwright Elena Garro de Paz, wife of novelist Octavio Paz, was among those trying to pass information about Oswald to Kennedy during his stay.

  Mexico City was one of the most intriguing chapters in Oswald’s murky life before his collision with history in Dallas. The alleged lone assassin had traveled there in late September 1963, according to the CIA, to get a visa from the Cuban embassy. But, as Hoover had informed LBJ, the evidence suggesting Oswald was urgently trying to visit Cuba was apparently falsified by the CIA. Was Oswald the object of a U.S intelligence operation or a Cuban operation? The Warren Report had left pressing questions like this about Oswald’s Mexico City trip unresolved. Bobby was interested in finding out more about Oswald’s mysterious trip during his own visit.

  In the months after his election, Kennedy also took time from his Senate duties to meet and correspond with assassination researchers. In August 1965, Ray Marcus mailed a packet of his Dealey Plaza photographic evidence to Kennedy. In his cover letter, Marcus apologized for sending the senator material that would certainly cause him “personal anguish,” but said he felt an “overriding obligation” to bring this evidence of a conspiracy to Kennedy’s attention. To the researcher’s surprise, Bobby responded in a letter dated September 16. “I just wanted you to know that your interest is appreciated,” wrote Kennedy.

  Bobby also agreed to meet in his Senate office with Penn Jones Jr., a crusading Texas publisher who had turned his small-town newspaper, the Midlothian Mirror, into a forum for assassination muckraking. Jones—a short, feisty former boxing champ at the University of Texas and World War II hero—realized there was something absurd about a cow-town newspaper taking on the political crime of the century. But he didn’t see the big media guns taking on the job and he refused to sit idly by. He became convinced that JFK’s murder was a “coup d’état” involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. Puzzled by Bobby’s silence about Dallas, Jones decided to fly to Washington to present his research to the senator and encourage him to speak out about the case. Greeting the publisher in his office, Kennedy told him, “Look, I’ll listen to what you have to say. I won’t necessarily agree or disagree, but I’ll listen.” Afterwards, Bobby autographed Jones’ copy of Profiles in Courage, next to the signature that JFK himself had scrawled in the book during his Texas trip. RFK then asked his limousine driver to take Jones to JFK’s final resting place at Arlington, which the publisher wanted to visit before returning home.

  In his speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, RFK had urged the delegates not to be swept away in the mists of the past, but to “look forward” as President Kennedy did. Bobby once chided Jackie for immersing herself in Kennedy Library work, telling her it was morbid to dwell on the past. But Bobby too could not forget. “The senator is still haunted by memories,” a New York Times reporter observed in June 1965, describing one corner of his Capitol Hill office as “a small shrine to President Kennedy—pictures, books, the restored image of the fallen leader.”

  Everywhere he went, Bobby carried Jack’s old overcoat. “He hardly ever wore it,
but he was always taking it with him,” remembered his aide Ronnie Eldridge. “He always forgot the damn overcoat, he’d carry it with him and then leave it in different places. So we were always scurrying around, looking for the overcoat.”

  Bobby’s friend Marie Ridder speculates that his ongoing interest in the assassination was part of his inability to let go of the past and accept his brother’s death. “I wonder how I can put this,” she said. “My first husband was killed in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. I went to Germany right after the war and I used to look at all the soldiers there to see if by chance Ben was there. I mean, I absolutely knew he wasn’t. I knew that. I had his clothes. But I emotionally couldn’t let go. I think that’s the nearest parallel [with Bobby’s belief in a conspiracy]…. It’s not rational, but I understand why he’d do it.”

  But the men in whom Kennedy confided his suspicions about Dallas did not regard them as irrational.

  “WE KNOW THE CIA was involved, and the Mafia. We all know that.” Dick Goodwin is speaking over the phone from his home in Concord. His voice is matter of fact. “But [exactly] how you link those to the assassination, I don’t know.” Goodwin has suspected there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK for more than four decades now. But who precisely was involved and how the plot was carried out—these crucial questions remain a mystery to Goodwin. He never investigated the case himself. Like other members of the Kennedy inner circle, he was waiting for Bobby to do that. And he remains convinced to this day that Kennedy would have done that, if he had made it back to the White House. “Whatever way he went about it, he would have tried to find out if there was more there, once he had the power to actually get information. That was always my assumption.”

  Goodwin was one of the few people with whom Bobby discussed his suspicions about Dallas. It took someone Kennedy trusted—and someone with Goodwin’s blustery personality—to force the conversation. It happened on the evening of July 25, 1966, at Kennedy’s fourteenth-floor UN Plaza apartment overlooking the East River, where Goodwin had returned with him following dinner to spend the night. Bobby used his six-room suite in the luxurious glass tower, which was also home to Truman Capote and Johnny Carson, as his crash pad when he stayed in New York, and it had more the feel of a hotel than a home.

  Goodwin was not one of the band of brothers whom Bobby had drafted into the Kennedy administration, and the two men were not particularly close during JFK’s presidency. After Dallas, there was some strain between the men when Goodwin decided to accept LBJ’s offer and stick with the new president as a speechwriter and civil rights advisor. Goodwin felt obliged to defend his decision in a letter to Bobby, arguing that by staying on, he would be able to help protect JFK’s legacy. “I feel strongly that I am doing a service—small as it is—not only to the president and the country, but to your brother whom I idolized,” he wrote. Goodwin was bemused by Bobby’s grudging response: “I wish you wouldn’t [take the job]. But I guess you have to. After all, if any one of us is in a position to keep him from blowing up Costa Rica, or something like that, then we ought to do it.”

  But as time went by, Goodwin developed warmer feelings for Bobby. Just before joining Johnson’s White House staff, he attended a reception at the Venezuelan embassy where he watched Kennedy deliver a brief speech thanking the Venezuelan government for its contribution to the Kennedy Library. “It is curious—he doesn’t have the intellectual depth of his brother,” Goodwin later jotted down in his notes on the evening—a perspective he would later change. “But he has a feeling for the needs and mood of other people which few politicians possess. I am constantly wavering in my opinion of RFK. He is, after all, only where he is because of birth. He has a great tendency to divide the world between the good guys and the bad guys. On the other hand he has intuitive understanding of the complexities and subtleties of other people’s motivations. His weakness is probably to act quickly, from emotion—to have too emotional a response to events, although when he has thought them out he is very good.”

  It was a description that in some ways matched Goodwin himself. And by July 1966, when the two men sat talking late into the night in Bobby’s apartment, with the lights of the vast sprawl of the outer boroughs of New York twinkling in the distance, they were fast friends. Goodwin would later call it the closest personal relationship he ever made in politics—“indeed, a friendship as important to me as any I ever had.”

  The day before, Goodwin had rocked the capital by writing a laudatory review in the Washington Post of Edward Jay Epstein’s systematic critique of the Warren Report, Inquest. Epstein’s book was a landmark in the assassination case. Like other Warren Report critics, Epstein found the blue-ribbon study deeply flawed and unconvincing. But Epstein, who had written the book as his master’s thesis for Cornell, took a dry, meticulous approach, seeking to avoid what he considered the pitfalls of other Warren Report commentary, which he characterized as either works of “blind faith” or conspiratorial “demonology.” In his review, Goodwin wrote that Epstein presented his case “with a logic and a subdued tone which have already disturbed the convictions of many responsible men.” The former Kennedy aide then dropped a bombshell. He called for an independent panel to review the Warren Report’s work, and if it was found defective, he proposed a new inquiry into President Kennedy’s murder. A startled New York Times observed that Goodwin was “the first member of the late president’s inner circle to suggest publicly that an official re-examination be made of the Warren Report.”

  It was not the first time Goodwin had displayed an interest in the assassination. Earlier that year, in March, he had mailed Kennedy a request, asking if he might be able to help him get a copy of a thirty-three-page letter written by Jack Ruby that had been sold at a New York auction. “P.S.,” he scribbled at the bottom of the letter, knowing Bobby’s acute sensitivity on the subject. “Don’t worry—I am not writing anything on this subject.”

  But the Epstein book did compel Goodwin to air his views. The evening after his review ran in the Post, Goodwin was eager to discuss his urgent misgivings about the government’s investigation with Bobby. Over nightcaps in Kennedy’s living room, he launched into his analysis of the Epstein book. But, as usual, Bobby instantly withdrew into a self-protective silence, twirling the Scotch in his glass and staring down at the floor while Goodwin spoke. Finally, he looked up and said, “I’m sorry, Dick, I just can’t focus on it.”

  Goodwin was acutely aware of how painful the subject was for Bobby. Most of Kennedy’s friends would stop as soon as they saw the anguished expression come over his face. But Goodwin decided to press on. “I think we should find our own investigator—someone with absolute loyalty and discretion.”

  Suddenly, Kennedy did focus. Goodwin was on the right track. It was precisely what he was contemplating. “You might try Carmine Bellino,” Bobby said. “He’s the best in the country.”

  It was a revealing suggestion. Like Walt Sheridan, Bellino was a key member of the elite investigative team that Kennedy had assembled during the Senate rackets probe and later kept on Hoffa’s trail at the Justice Department. But these were Bobby’s men, not Goodwin’s. There was no way that Goodwin could initiate an investigation without Bobby’s nod. Both men knew this. Goodwin understood that it was Kennedy’s way of saying, Let’s drop the subject for now. You know who will carry out the investigation for me when the time comes. But for now we have to wait. The conversation moved on to other topics—the Vietnam War, civil rights, the war on poverty and whether Americans were too selfish to enlist in it. (With the right leadership, Bobby thought they could be properly inspired.)

  As the two men finally rose from their armchairs at 2:30 in the morning and made their way down the hallway to their bedrooms, Bobby suddenly paused. “About that other thing,” he began, his eyes unable to meet Goodwin’s. His friend knew immediately what he meant. “I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved it was organized crime. But there’s nothing I can do
about it. Not now.”

  In his memoir, Goodwin wrote that he and Kennedy never discussed the assassination again. But Adam Walinsky remembered other times that Goodwin would raise the subject when Bobby was present. Walinsky was a young Yale Law graduate who had briefly served in Kennedy’s Justice Department before going to work in his Senate office as his legislative assistant. With his crusty demeanor, keen intelligence, and soft heart, Walinsky quickly endeared himself to the senator, who relied on his sharp young aide to keep him current on the most important new books, articles, and ideas. “I was his intellectual valet,” said Walinsky, smiling, in a recent interview.