by David Talbot
In October 1966, Schlesinger again rushed to Dulles’s defense when The Secret Surrender was harshly reviewed in The New York Review of Books by revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz, who suggested that the spymaster had helped kick off the Cold War by going around Stalin’s back to cut a deal with Nazi commanders in Italy. “I was so irritated by the wild Alperovitz review that I sent [the magazine] a letter,” Schlesinger wrote Dulles. In his letter to the Review, Schlesinger ridiculed the attempt to blame the Cold War “on poor old Allen Dulles. . . . Nothing the United States could have done in 1945 would have dispelled Stalin’s mistrust—short of the conversion of the United States into a Stalinist despotism.” When it came to fighting the cultural Cold War, Schlesinger and Dulles were still brothers in arms.
It was not until many years later, long after Dulles was dead, that Schlesinger began to question his cozy relations with the Georgetown CIA crowd. By then, some of the skeletons in the CIA closet had come rattling out the door, when it was opened just a crack by post-Watergate congressional investigations. In 1978, seated at an awards banquet next to Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner—who was trying to at least straighten up the closet—Schlesinger listened wide-eyed as Turner regaled him with CIA horror stories. Many of the CIA director’s astonishing tales related to Jim Angleton, who—though deposed three years earlier—still cast a shadow over the agency. “Turner obviously regards Angleton as a madman and cannot understand a system under which he gained so much power,” Schlesinger later wrote in his journal.
In September 1991, Schlesinger found himself at the Sun Valley estate of Pamela Harriman—Averell’s widow—with fellow guest Dick Helms, with whom he had been friends ever since their days together in the OSS. Schlesinger characterized their relationship as a “rather wary friendship, since we both know that there are matters on which we deeply disagree but about which, for the sake of our friendship, we do not speak.” Still, he had socialized regularly with Helms over the years, sipping cocktails with him at the Wisners, swapping information with him over lunch during the Kennedy years, and later, during the 1970s, playing tennis and enjoying barbecues in the backyard of Dick and Cynthia Helms’s comfortable home near Washington’s Battery Kemble Park. One evening, Schlesinger’s son Andrew accompanied him to a Helms barbecue. “I remember feeling kind of weird about [being there] . . . but my father thought he was the most honorable of the CIA people.”
By 1991, however, Schlesinger had begun to question his assessment of Helms. He had recently read a series of articles about the CIA’s brainwashing experiments on Canadian medical patients, in which Helms had played a central role. “It is a terrible story of CIA recklessness and arrogance, compounded by an unwillingness to assume responsibility that went to the point of destroying incriminating documents,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal. “Helms was a central figure both in recommending the experiments and in getting rid of the evidence.”
Now Schlesinger found himself relaxing in Idaho’s alpine splendor with the man who had been convicted of one felony—lying to Congress—and undeniably should have been prosecuted for more. But the historian held his tongue. “In view of my long truce with Dick Helms and my liking for him, I certainly did not bring up the [CIA medical experiments]. But I did wonder a bit at one’s capacity to continue liking people who have been involved in wicked things. Bill Casey [Reagan’s CIA director and another old OSS comrade] is another example, though my friendship with Helms is considerably closer; [Henry] Kissinger, I guess, still another. Is this deplorable weakness? Or commendable tolerance?”
It’s a measure of Schlesinger’s decency that he could raise these painful, introspective questions. And it’s a sign of his weakness that he could never break with these “wicked” men.
In the 1990s, Schlesinger found himself dragged back into the Kennedy assassination swamp, with the release of Oliver Stone’s explosive 1991 movie, JFK, a fictional retelling of Garrison’s ill-fated investigation that proposed Kennedy was the victim of reactionary forces in his own government. On Halloween evening that year, Stone himself showed up at the door of Schlesinger’s New York apartment. The filmmaker had ignited a media uproar (stoked, in part, by the CIA’s reliable press allies), and Stone—looking for support in the Kennedy camp—was reaching out for Schlesinger’s support. The historian found the director “a charming, earnest man, but, I surmise, scarred into paranoia by his experience [as a soldier] in Vietnam and dangerously susceptible to conspiracy theories.”
In truth, Schlesinger had long been racked by his own doubts about the Warren Report. His second wife, Alexandra, firmly believed that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, but to her endless frustration, Schlesinger evaded the tough question by declaring himself an “agnostic” on the subject. As his son Andrew later observed, the historian simply didn’t have the “emotional resources” to confront the sordid facts surrounding the assassination.
Near the end of his life, when Schlesinger was weakened by Parkinson’s disease and withering away, Andrew asked him if there was one book he never wrote but wished that he had. His father got “a little agitated,” recalled Andrew. “He said he wished he’d written a book about the CIA. He felt the CIA was terribly corrupting our democracy. He emotionally was saying [this]. He believed until the end that the CIA was undermining our democracy.”
22
End Game
It was always difficult for Angelina Cabrera, the woman who managed Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s New York office, to grab a few minutes of his time. As the freshman senator from New York during the volcanic ’60s and the inheritor of his brother’s heavy legacy, Bobby was always in demand, always on the move, always in the middle of the growing debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for social justice. Cabrera was respectful of the time that the senator needed to himself behind his closed office door. And she was keenly aware of the shadow that always seemed to loom over him. “He was sad most of the time,” she recalled years later. “He was preoccupied most of the time about something—probably his brother. I had the thought that he would not make it. I was praying for him.”
The grief that clung to Bobby did not make him a remote figure in his New York office. He had a gentler aura after his brother’s death, and he created a sense of warm camaraderie among his staff. Aides felt they could challenge him, joke with him, and he responded in kind, with his dry and lightly teasing sense of humor. “The senator dearly loved Angie Cabrera and [his New York staff],” remembered RFK aide Peter Edelman. “He loved them very dearly; he just enjoyed being around them. . . . It was kind of a one big happy family thing.”
Cabrera would accompany Bobby to political rallies in Spanish Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Kennedy’s commitment to community development and empowerment made him an increasingly popular figure. Cabrera, whose parents had emigrated from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn Heights and who had worked as an executive secretary for the governor of Puerto Rico, helped connect RFK to his Hispanic constituents. In 1967, Bobby and Ethel invited her to fly with them to the island, where he was scheduled to speak in the old Spanish colonial city of San Germán. Kennedy was stunned by the size and exuberance of the crowds that greeted him in Puerto Rico. Everywhere he went, people celebrated him as if he were their best and brightest hope. He was the second coming of his brother.
One day, that same year, while working in the New York office, Cabrera barged through Bobby’s door with a timely item of business. She caught him as he was finishing what seemed like an intense phone call. “As I walked in, he thought I might have heard,” Cabrera later recounted. “Actually I didn’t hear what he said and I had no idea who he was talking to. But he thought that I did, and he trusted me. After he hung up the phone, he turned to me and said, ‘There’s something more to this. I’ve got to pursue who really killed my brother.’”
In the hours and days immediately following his brother’s assassination, Bobby had frenetically chased every lead he could think of, quickly concludin
g that JFK was the victim of a plot that had spun out of the CIA’s anti-Castro operation. But after this initial burst of clarity, Bobby soon sank into a fog of despair, unable to develop a clear plan of action. His depression came, of course, from the devastating loss of his beloved brother—the northern star on whom he had fixed his life’s course. But Bobby was also filled with despair because there was no clear way to respond to his brother’s murder. His mortal enemy Lyndon Johnson was in charge of the government and his own power as attorney general was dwindling so quickly that J. Edgar Hoover—another bitter opponent—no longer bothered responding to his phone calls. Meanwhile, Kennedy antagonists such as Hoover and Dulles were in control of the official murder investigation. If RFK tried to circumvent the system and take his suspicions directly to the American people, he risked sparking an explosive civil crisis.
The astute writer and political activist M. S. Arnoni, in fact, drew such a chilling scenario in a December 1963 article he published in The Minority of One, a publication to which Kennedy’s Senate office subscribed: “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.”
And so, for the most part, Bobby Kennedy maintained a pained silence on the subject of his brother’s assassination. In private, he dismissed the Warren Report as a public relations exercise. But he knew that if he attacked the report in public, it would set off a political uproar that he was in no position to exploit. When the report was released in late September 1964, Bobby was on the Senate campaign trail in New York. He tried to avoid commenting at length on the report by canceling his campaign appearances that morning. He was obliged to issue a brief statement, giving the inquiry his perfunctory blessing, but adding, “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” It was an impossible balancing act that Bobby would strain to make work for the rest of his life.
The CIA used Kennedy’s silence to bolster the Warren Report. “Note that Robert Kennedy . . . would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy,” the CIA instructed friendly journalists in its 1967 memo on how to rebut critics of the report.
But by 1967, emboldened by the growing campaign to reopen the JFK case and Jim Garrison’s investigation, Bobby began to refocus on Dallas. Before, he had deflected friends’ efforts to discuss their suspicions about the case, but now he tentatively began probing the agonizing wound. After seeing Garrison’s face on a magazine cover at an airport newsstand, the senator turned to his press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, and asked him to begin reading all of the assassination literature he could find—“so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” Meanwhile, Kennedy sent his trusted friend and longtime investigator, former FBI agent Walter Sheridan, to New Orleans to size up Garrison’s operation. The buttoned-down ex-G-man took an immediate disliking to the flamboyant DA and reported back to Bobby that Garrison was a fraud. Sheridan’s take on Garrison—which was reflected in the harsh NBC News special that Sheridan helped produce in June—foiled Garrison’s efforts to build an investigative alliance with RFK.
The Garrison camp implored Kennedy to speak out about the conspiracy, arguing that such a public stand might even protect his own life by putting the conspirators on notice. But RFK preferred to play such deeply crucial matters close to the chest. He would reopen the case on his own terms, Kennedy confided to his closest aides—suggesting that day would come only if he won the executive powers of the White House.
“One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious,” said RFK’s Senate aide, Adam Walinsky. “Serious people, when faced with something like that—you don’t speculate out loud about it. . . . He had an acute understanding of how difficult that kind of investigation is, even if you had all the power of the presidency.”
On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. He was motivated, he said, by his desire to “end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities” and to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country.” Kennedy left unstated another reason for his White House run—to finally close the case that still tormented his family and the nation.
RFK launched his presidential campaign in the same chandeliered room in the Old Senate Office Building where his brother had declared his bid for the White House eight years earlier. But a more somber mood hung over Bobby’s announcement. Not only was the country—and RFK’s own party—more torn by war and racial divisions than in 1960, but there was an acute sense that his own life might be at stake. After Richard Nixon and several aides sat watching Kennedy announce his presidential run on a hotel room television, the TV was turned off, and Nixon sat silently looking at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he shook his head and said, “Something bad is going to come of this.” He pointed at the dark screen. “God knows where this is going to lead.” A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy—who had begged him not to run—fell into a bleak conversation with Schlesinger at a New York party. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” she said. “The same thing that happened to Jack.”
Robert Kennedy—the father of ten children, with an eleventh on the way—was terribly aware of the risk he was taking. But, notwithstanding the youthful euphoria around Senator Eugene McCarthy’s “children’s crusade” for president, there was no political figure in America besides Bobby who had the ability to win the White House and heal the country. Kennedy spent many days—and long, anguished nights—wrestling with his decision. At one point, he sought the advice of Walter Lippmann, one of the last of his breed of Washington wise men. “Well, if you believe that Johnson’s reelection would be a catastrophe for the country—and I entirely agree with you on this,” said the sage, “then, if this comes about, the question you must live with is whether you did everything you could do to avert this catastrophe.”
Kennedy’s mere entry into the race was enough to panic LBJ into abandoning his reelection bid. But there still was Johnson’s surrogate—Vice President Hubert Humphrey—to contend with, as well as the specter of Nixon, rising from the ashes. Entering the campaign late, Kennedy threw himself into the primary race with raw determination, knowing that he was fighting an uphill battle against the Democratic Party establishment as well as competing with McCarthy for the antiwar vote. Bobby waded, virtually unprotected, into frenzied crowds on every stop of his campaign; his presidential race was perhaps the bravest, and most reckless, in American history. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told political reporter Jack Newfield. RFK was so moved by something Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that he copied it down and carried it with him: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Bobby’s courage gave strength to those around him, to those ambitious, idealistic men who had served his brother and were now following RFK on his perilous path. His heroism inspired their own. Men like Schlesinger, who could not bring himself to break from the establishment without a Kennedy leading the way; and Kenny O’Donnell, who had begun drinking himself to death, instead of telling the world what he had seen that day in Dealey Plaza with his own eyes; and even Robert McNamara, who had allowed himself to be debased by his allegiance to Johnson and the folly of his war. They now rallied around this new Kennedy crusade, and they were better men for doing so. They joined the battle for America’s soul, as if it were their own.
JFK’s assassins knew that Robert Kennedy was the only man who could bring them to justice. They had sought to keep him close after Dallas, with Dulles showering his condolences on the Kennedy family. “You have been much in my thoughts and Jackie, Ethel and you have my de
ep respect and admiration,” the spymaster wrote RFK in January 1964. He made sure that Bobby—as well as his parents and siblings—received complete, bound sets of the Warren Report. He fell all over himself, with unctuous eagerness, to respond to queries from RFK, including Bobby’s request that he sit for an interview with the Kennedy Library. In his oral history for the library, Dulles further disgraced himself and the memory of John F. Kennedy by singing false praises of the slain president.
But when Robert Kennedy announced his run for the presidency, he became a wild card, an uncontrollable threat. The danger grew as Kennedy got closer to his goal of winning the Democratic nomination. The June 4 California primary would be the make-or-break moment of his campaign. If he won the Golden State, the pundits declared, his momentum would be unstoppable.
Oh, God, not again.” That was the collective moan that erupted from deep within the crowd at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy’s victory, as he lay mortally wounded on the grimy floor of the hotel pantry. As in Dallas, official reports immediately pinned sole responsibility for the shooting on a troubled loner, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. The accused assassin was undeniably involved in the assault on Kennedy as the senator and his entourage made their way through the crowded, dimly lit hotel pantry on the way to a press briefing room. But numerous eyewitnesses—including one of the men who subdued Sirhan—insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy. Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot—which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain—was fired from behind. Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman. “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” Noguchi would flatly state in his 1983 memoir.
