Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Bobby knew that this bill—more than anything he did in Mississippi, Alabama, or anywhere else—would define the administration’s legacy on civil rights. Much as conflict was his natural state, he was tired of managing crises. He was as much a dreamer as he was a realist, and here was a chance not just to imagine a brighter future but to bring it into being. He hadn’t lost his determination to take down the Mob and Jimmy Hoffa, but nothing consumed and inspired him more now than civil rights. To Jack, racial justice was an abstract ideal. To Bobby, it was about the real lives of flesh-and-blood people. He was his brother’s superego as well as his alter ego, the way Eleanor Roosevelt had been for Franklin. “These are moral issues, not legal ones….The stifling air of prejudice is not fit to be breathed by the people of a nation that takes pride in calling itself free,” he told his audience at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in June. “This is a national crisis, and it is immediate.” In July, testifying before the Senate, Bobby posed a question that echoed the one the young activist Jerome Smith had asked him two months before in James Baldwin’s drawing room powwow: “How can we say, to a Negro in Jackson: ‘When a war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi and we can’t help you’?”

  Being on the warpath the way Bobby was, he naturally made enemies. There were constant reminders that segregationists blamed him, more than they did the president, for the assault on their color-coded way of life. In Anniston, Alabama, Bobby was hanged in effigy alongside three FBI agents and a civil rights leader, with his dummy bearing the moniker “Robert Bobby Sox Kennedy.” In Birmingham, the outgoing mayor said of the attorney general, “I hope that every drop of blood that’s spilled he tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it.” And in tiny Winona, Mississippi, policemen cursed Bobby’s name aloud as they beat a civil rights worker until her head was bloody, her tooth chipped, and her eye knocked out of alignment. A person, Bobby would tell his oldest daughter Kathleen, could be judged by the enemies he made. Still, he was baffled by the intensity of the hatred his foes felt toward him.

  By the end of his tenure, Bobby Kennedy had become the kind of attorney general that the Baldwin group had urged him to be, and that Martin Luther King had had faith he would become. The ideologue in him was yielding more to the idealist. Asked to chart Bobby’s growing awareness on civil rights, Burke Marshall shot his right arm sky-high. “The more he saw,” said Marshall, “the more he understood.” King recognized that potential sooner than most, and patiently endured the slow way in which Bobby’s growth was stoked by the furnace of experience. No matter that Bobby was neither as patient nor as trusting with King, and had never even sat down with him one-on-one. “Somewhere in this man sits good,” the preacher told his lieutenants early on. “Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause.” But neither Marshall nor King had suffered the way Jack O’Dell did from Bobby’s shortsightedness, which made the civil rights soldier pay for his past flirtations with Communism by derailing his career as a King confidant. Fifty years later, O’Dell has forgiven Bobby for all of that: “I saw him mature to something different. We are all human and we all start somewhere.”

  * * *

  *1 At the end of his term the share of black children in the South attending integrated schools was up dramatically from when he started, but it still stood at just 2.25 percent (Southern Education Reporting Service, 16th rev., 1966–1967, Nashville).

  *2 The Kennedys originally offered Marshall just a federal district judgeship, and they were offended when he turned it down. Bobby: “It’s this or nothing.” Marshall: “All I’ve had in my life is nothing. It’s not new to me, so, good-bye.” Later, Marshall confided to an interviewer that “Bobby was like his father. He was a cold, calculating character. ‘What’s in it for me?’…he had no warm feelings. None at all. With that big old dog of his, walking around, cocking his leg up on your leg” (Tushnet, Thurgood Marshall, 484–85).

  *3 The hospital in Anniston refused to treat them and, with an angry mob gathering outside, they were rescued by a caravan of civil rights workers who drove up from Birmingham (Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 98–99).

  *4 Kelsey’s nuts were the secure nuts-and-bolts attachments on wheels made by the Kelsey Wheel Company. In its colloquial usage, “Kelsey’s nuts” originally referred to someone who was thrifty to the point of stingy. But Bobby, Richard Nixon, and others used the phrase to mean someone who was powerless and sometimes deceased.

  *5 This Falkner’s family didn’t change the spelling of the family name to Faulkner.

  *6 Over the course of the evening, Bobby’s men on the scene used that phone line to relay what they were seeing and hearing to Burke Marshall, Bobby, and even President Kennedy. The connection was clear enough that listeners in Washington could hear the amplifying violence in Mississippi. “In a very real sense,” Katzenbach said, “it became our lifeline” (Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun, 77).

  *7 Eisenhower had an advantage the Kennedys didn’t: The mayor of Little Rock had invited him in.

  *8 One old theory, fleshed out in a new biography of this “hidden Kennedy daughter,” is that the obstetrical nurse helping with Rosemary’s home birth was determined to wait until the doctor arrived even though Rose was in labor. The nurse reportedly held the baby’s head and forced it back into the birth canal for “two excruciating hours,” which could have resulted in a damaging loss of oxygen (Larson, Rosemary, 3–4).

  *9 Harry Hopkins was in charge of the Lend-Lease program, Benjamin Cohen co-crafted the Lend-Lease legislation, and Averell Harriman helped coordinate that plan and other U.S. war efforts. Charles Harold Fahey was assistant solicitor general.

  *10 While Joe acknowledged that “it is still possible that Hitler went far beyond his necessary requirements in his attitude towards the Jews,” it was his fellow Catholics that Kennedy was most worried about. “If [Hitler] wanted to re-unite Germany, and picked the Jew as the focal point of his attack, and conditions in Germany are now so completely those of his own making, why then is it necessary to turn the front of his attack on the Catholics?” (Kennedy and Smith, Hostage to Fortune, 133).

  *11 It was a sign of the bigoted times that Hoover, who himself was sexually closeted, would be telling homophobic jokes to the president and spreading raw gossip about people’s alleged homosexuality, including the Kennedy brothers’.

  *12 Lerner had other connections to the family: He was Jack’s boyhood pal at Choate and Harvard, and he wrote the lyrics to “Camelot,” which would become a metaphor for the Kennedy administration.

  *13 There is an ongoing debate over whether Wallace said “out-segged” or “out-niggered.” Wallace defenders insist it was the former, but others who heard him have no doubt he used the more offensive wording. (Berger, “George C. Wallace,” Anniston Star; Trammel, George Wallace, 5; and author interview with Edwin Bridges of the Alabama Department of Archives.)

  *14 What was first conceived as a March for Jobs was expanded to Jobs and Freedom.

  *15 Bobby and Jack almost surely would have fired Hoover at the start of a second Kennedy administration. Knowing that, Hoover used all his wiles to gather material on the brothers that he could use to control them and his own fate.

  Chapter 6

  CUBA AND BEYOND

  THIRTEEN DAYS, BOBBY Kennedy’s memoir of the Cuban missile crisis, is the inside story of the most nerve-shattering two weeks in human history. It tells how the Soviet Union, spinning “one gigantic fabric of lies,” smuggled half of its entire stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles onto our island enemy a mere ninety miles south of Florida. It recaptures the dread our nation felt in realizing that “within a few minutes of their being fired eighty million Americans would be dead.” It reminds us that in the final days of October 1962, the world abruptly found itself poised at a crossroads where Armageddon seemed not just possible, but likely.

  Fortunately, America’s most lionhearted men took charge. Deliberating ar
ound an egg-shaped table in the president’s cabinet room, with George Washington peering down from his picture frame, steely-eyed peacemakers outargued and outvoted fire-breathing generals. There would be no bombing raids on the missiles and no invasion of the Communist archipelago. We would begin with a naval blockade, keeping out new weapons and demanding the withdrawal of those already there. But would the Soviet vessels steaming toward our armada of warships reverse course? “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared when the blockade held and the Soviets acquiesced to U.S. demands. So riveting was the tale Bobby told, and so artful was his narration, that it became the basis not just for the acclaimed docudrama Missiles of October, but for how a generation of Americans understood its scariest moment. A generation of Russians, too.

  His story, however, is laced with fictions. As with much of Bobby’s public take on history, Thirteen Days is a fundamentally self-serving account that casts him as the champion dove he would like to have been, rather than the unrelenting hawk he actually was through much of those two weeks. To reinforce that scenario, he mischaracterized many of his fellow deliberators and concealed the fact that U.S. leaders had ignored repeated warnings about the Russian missile buildup. It was the kind of embellishment and misdirection that might be excused if the consequences hadn’t unsettled America’s foreign policy for years to come. It also was the sort of skillful myth building that Bobby had learned from mentors like Joe Kennedy and Joe McCarthy.

  The biggest deceit in Bobby’s narrative of the missile crisis is his failure to level with readers about how we got into it. The actual confrontation wasn’t a story of the devious Russians acting out of the blue and guileless Americans responding with what Bobby called “shocked incredulity.” The buildup was a predictable response to American aggression. In April 1961, just three months after President Kennedy’s inauguration, we had armed, trained, and bankrolled an army of émigrés who tried to reclaim Cuba by staging an invasion at a swampy inlet on its southern coast known as Bahía de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs. When that failed, Bobby personally steered a campaign to sabotage Cuban agriculture, incite political upheaval, and chart new schemes for invading the island and deposing its leaders. The myopic attorney general failed to consider how his plotting would be perceived in Havana and Moscow. Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro logically concluded that the United States was hell-bent on eliminating his regime.*1 It was foreseeable that his primary protector, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, would come to his aid, especially when doing so would underscore Soviet resolve in other Cold War hot spots like Berlin and Laos. “We had to think up some way of confronting America with more than words….The logical answer was missiles,” Khrushchev wrote in a memoir spirited to the West for publication in 1970. “The installation of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government.” It worked. America should have understood that sort of gambit, since we had signed similar mutual defense pacts—backed up by nuclear weapons—with our allies in Europe.

  While the Cuban missile crisis wasn’t Bobby’s shining moment, as his book suggested, it did transform him. He hadn’t yet shed his cold-warrior instincts, but spending thirteen days on the brink of extinction sobered him forever. He proved so adept at appropriating other men’s wise ideas that it barely mattered how few were his own. He learned as he went, as he had in Montgomery and Oxford, with the same growing pains. His foreign policy portfolio, which was there from the beginning of the administration, swelled in a way not seen before or since in the office of the attorney general.

  The change that mattered most, yet was least noticed at the time, was how those two weeks in October helped Bobby become his own man even as he continued serving as his brother’s adjutant. That process of separation and self-realization had started with his father’s stroke ten months earlier and would accelerate with the death of his brother fourteen months later. “Exposure to danger strips away the protective covering with which each of us guards his inner thoughts—it quickly and dramatically displays a man’s character,” Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense back then, wrote in an introduction to Bobby’s book. The missile crisis had precisely that effect on the attorney general. He perceived more clearly than ever the essential parts he played for Jack—as sounding board and stand-in, guardian and conscience—and imagined in a way he never had before one more role for himself: successor.

  —

  THE SEEDS OF the missile crisis were planted two Octobers earlier, before the Kennedy brothers even announced Jack’s bid for the White House and before they or anyone else had heard of the Bay of Pigs. President Eisenhower was growing increasingly anguished about developments in Cuba, where Fidel Castro and his guerrilla bands had deposed the president-turned-dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year’s Day in 1959. At first the U.S. administration wanted to believe that Castro would be a democrat and a capitalist, and he fostered those beliefs, but both knew it wasn’t to be. Batista had mortgaged his country to American mining firms, utilities, agribusiness, and mafiosi who had remade it into what a Harvard professor rightly called “the whorehouse of the Western Hemisphere.” Castro’s revolution was more concerned with reclaiming Cuba’s culture and redistributing its wealth than with open elections or free speech, and he realized early on that he would find more support for that in Moscow than in Washington. In October, Eisenhower signed off on a State Department proposal to quietly back Castro’s homegrown opposition. By the end of March 1960, the president had given the green light to a Central Intelligence Agency plan to train and equip a paramilitary force of exiles that would be deployed to the island nation to recruit an army of resistance. Secrecy was paramount, insisted Ike, who knew how to run a war: “Our hand should not show in anything that is done.”

  Eisenhower’s anxiety about Cuba was political as well as strategic. As worried as he was about protecting American multinationals and keeping the Russians from gaining a foothold, he was at least as concerned about the Democrats. When the Republic of China was remade into the People’s Republic while Democrats occupied the White House, Republicans demanded to know “Who lost China?” Now, Ike knew, tough-minded Democrats like the Kennedys would ask the same about Cuba. Jack proved him right early in that fall’s campaign, attacking the incumbent administration for letting “a Communist menace…arise under our very noses, only ninety miles from our shore.”

  While it was fair for the Kennedys to ask why President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon hadn’t pushed their friend Batista to redress the complaints of the Cuban people, Jack and Bobby knew full well—from official CIA briefings and unofficial leaks—that the administration was trying to unseat Castro. But smart politics dictated that the Democrats make it seem that the Republicans had no such plans, and the need for secrecy kept Nixon from saying otherwise. “If you can’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” Kennedy asked of his Republican opponent in an October speech. Days later he ratcheted up the rhetoric, charging that “these [anti-Castro] fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

  Their hard line helped the Kennedy brothers win the White House, but it boxed them in once they got there. They knew they had to do something, and a force of Cuban expatriates already was being trained in Guatemala courtesy of the previous administration. JFK got his first full briefing on the scheme just eight days after taking office, with regular updates thereafter. The new president was determined to act, both because he believed Cuba needed rescuing and because he’d publicly promised he would. All of which made him ignore the red flags raised by his civilian aides and even some military men. For one thing, the well-meaning army of refugees—aristocrats and chauffeurs, students and soldiers, disillusioned Castro allies and Catholics who deplored his suppression of the Church—was too ragtag and out of touch to prevail on the battlefield or in the struggle for Cuban hearts and mind
s. The only way to win was with more planes, beach craft, and troops than JFK was willing to commit, and with more realistic contingency plans than the rose-colored ones drawn up by the trigger-happy CIA. There was no way to keep the U.S. role secret, with The New York Times speculating about it and Castro anticipating it. As for the Cuban strongman, he was more entrenched militarily—and more popular—than the exiles or the CIA would admit. Even Vice President Nixon had recognized Castro’s appeal when the two met in Washington back in 1959, telling Eisenhower that the new Cuban prime minister “has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men.” White House aide Arthur Schlesinger laid out all the reasons for caution in a memo to President Kennedy on April 5, 1961, warning that JFK would be branded the aggressor if he went ahead with the invasion and worrying that “Cuba will become our Hungary.”*2