by Larry Tye
Bobby’s fixation with keeping Communists out of Latin America was understandable in the context of the early 1960s, when America really was engaged in an ongoing undeclared war with the Soviet Union and the stakes seemed to be the very future of both capitalism and democracy. Castro represented not just a Russian toehold in our hemisphere but a launching pad for leftist revolutions as far away as the African Congo. His Get Castro vendetta, however, made Bobby lose sight of broader goals and values just as he had with his Get Hoffa campaign. Operation Mongoose was based on logic as flawed as the Bay of Pigs incursion—that the Cuban population would rally to the anti-Castro cause, and that America’s secret army of CIA-trained Cuban exiles could vanquish anybody. Bobby had spent enough time studying the failed invasion to know better. Yet he couldn’t see that every botched American bid to topple Castro made the Cuban leader more of a hero for defying the Yanqui imperialista. The attorney general was employing precisely the methods that he had condemned in actions by the Soviet Union: subverting another country’s government, underwriting guerrilla armies, and operating under the cloak of darkness rather than in the light of day, where Bobby said democracy did best. Rather than discouraging Moscow from backing Cuba, Mongoose—coming on the heels of the Bay of Pigs and other muscle flexing by the Americans—helped convince Khrushchev he was doing the right thing by installing missiles to defend the island against U.S. aggression.
Operation Mongoose mirrored the Bay of Pigs in one more key aspect: Both flopped. Instead of learning from the administration’s earlier mistakes, Bobby repeated them to the same inglorious end. Mongoose “proved to be a rather futile exercise,” says Richard Goodwin, who chaired a White House task force on Cuba and was close to JFK and Bobby. “Castro outwitted us at every stage.” Richard Helms reached a similar conclusion, saying that all the planning and scheming “never amounted to more than pinpricks.”
The result may have been pinpricks, but the intent was deadly serious, as Helms knew. The only way to bring down the Communist regime, most Mongoose planners agreed, was to eliminate Fidel Castro. The CIA hatched at least eight separate plots to do just that, Senate investigators reported in 1975 as part of a probe of assassinations of foreign leaders. Knowing how much Castro treasured cigars, the agency laced a box of his favorites with a strain of botulism so toxic he would have died hours after he smoked one. The Cuban ruler loved scuba diving, too, so there was a plan to give him a diving suit dusted with fungus that would produce a chronic skin condition and a breathing apparatus dusted with bacteria that would infect him with tuberculosis. U.S. spies also rigged a pen with a hypodermic needle that a high-placed mole in the Cuban government could insert into Castro without his noticing until he keeled over. It was the kind of stuff Ian Fleming, so admired by the Kennedy brothers, invented for his agent 007, James Bond. The CIA went so far as to recruit as assassins the same Mafia kingpins Bobby’s Justice Department was trying to put in jail. The Mafia plan was one of the few schemes to get beyond the planning phase, with teams bearing CIA-prepared poison pills dispatched to the island.
The question is, did Bobby Kennedy issue an order to kill Fidel Castro? The investigating senators could say that he was briefed about the Mafia plot, but after the fact and after he thought it was terminated. They couldn’t say whether he knew beforehand, but they were left with the same nagging doubt we have all these years later, about this and other of Bobby’s darkest secrets: How could he not have known? As Chairman Frank Church and his fellow senators put it, “The Attorney General indicated his displeasure about the lack of consultation on such assassination planning rather than about the impropriety of the attempt itself. There is no evidence that the Attorney General told the CIA that it must not engage in plots like that in the future.” A series of CIA officials insist his body language made clear what he wanted even if he never mouthed the words. “With all of the customary Kennedy ‘vigor,’ and in the most forceful language, Bob informed us that Castro’s removal from office and a change in government in Cuba were then the prime foreign policy objectives of the Kennedy administration,” wrote Helms. “The repeated blunt references to ‘eliminating’ Castro brought us once again to the moral aberration of political assassination in peacetime.”*5 Others are equally convinced that a man with Bobby’s religious conviction and moral clarity never would have gone that far, and never did. He told several aides, including Richard Goodwin, that not only hadn’t he endorsed Castro’s murder, “I saved his life,” although he never explained how. A Kennedy Library interviewer asked him explicitly whether the assassination of the Cuban president was attempted or even contemplated. Without hesitating, he answered no to both questions.
We know now that both answers were untruths, given the revelations about Mongoose and related operations. The U.S. Senate probe made that clear, as did the declassification of a secret document prepared eight years earlier entitled “CIA Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro.” It’s also clear that Senate investigators, Kennedy Library interviewers, and others who have sought answers the last half century have been posing the wrong questions. It’s highly unlikely that Bobby directly authorized Castro’s killing. He had learned well at least one lesson from the Bay of Pigs: Don’t leave fingerprints. The government left itself no deniability in that invasion, with evidence everywhere that Americans had trained, equipped, and encouraged the invaders, which is why the president had little choice but to accept blame. Bobby wanted to ensure that Jack never had to do that again. The question wasn’t even whether Bobby wanted Castro dead. There’s a chance that he didn’t, for moral or practical reasons. But intent isn’t necessary to establish culpability.
Bobby, an intrepid interrogator, never asked the CIA operatives who briefed him about their failed Mafia plot whether more deadly conspiracies were in the works, which they were. We also know, from what he said and did, that the attorney general never wavered on wanting Cuba’s revolutionary hero out of power—and that he knew that would never happen via the ballot box or other peaceful means. He knew deaths could result from schemes he did explicitly authorize, including blowing up bridges and refineries, and he got angry when the CIA couldn’t carry out more of them. War meant casualties. Nobody who worked for Bobby on Operation Mongoose doubted, as General Lansdale made clear from the first, “that we are in a combat situation—where we have been given full command.” Speaking on the attorney general’s behalf, the general was asking not just for “a change from business-as-usual,” but for scalps. None mattered more to their commander at the Justice Department, his men in the field knew, than Fidel Castro’s. Goodwin, the senior Cuba adviser, said that “it would have been like Henry II asking rhetorically, ‘Who will free me of this turbulent priest?’ and then the zealots going out and doing it.”
The Kennedys’ Cuba obsession and the underhanded tactics that it spawned became a legacy that long outlived JFK and RFK’s administration. Veterans of the Bay of Pigs and Mongoose operations would help engineer the 1972 Watergate burglary, the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all seventy-three passengers, the assassination that same year in Washington of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and a rash of other terrorist acts. The precedent of the Kennedys’ underwriting a secret war in Cuba emboldened future American presidents to pursue undeclared wars of their own. Richard Nixon did it in Laos and Cambodia; Ronald Reagan did the same in Nicaragua. Bobby “was out-CIAing the CIA,” worried Harris Wofford, who was helping launch the Peace Corps. The scariest suggestion of all, posited but never proven, is that the Kennedy administration’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro encouraged him or his zealous disciples, like Lee Harvey Oswald, to murder Bobby’s brother Jack.
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CUBA WASN’T THE only place where Bobby pushed the borders of his job as attorney general, advancing the president’s overseas agenda and broadening his own worldview. His first foreign mission their first summer in office seemed purely ceremonial. The o
ccasion was the celebration of the first anniversary of independence for Ivory Coast, which had come in such a headlong rush that there wasn’t time then for festivities. The land that Francophones called Côte d’Ivoire had spearheaded the anticolonial drive among, and remained a leader of, Africa’s dozen former French colonies, all of which generally sided with the West and against Soviet-friendly states such as Ghana. Sending not just the attorney general but the president’s brother to represent the United States conveyed a message to Africa and to Moscow: America was grateful to its Cold War friends. “Just as George Washington fought to free our country, President Houphouet-Boigny has rallied the people of this land to establish in the Ivory Coast a free and united nation,” the attorney general said in French. Travail bien fait.
Bobby’s Africa trip was aimed at an American as well as a global audience. He hoped the Freedom Riders and other civil rights supporters in the United States would recognize that the Kennedy administration cared about the problems of Negroes, at home and everywhere. “The United States government and the vast majority of people are trying to do something about this [racial] problem,” he said at a news conference in Abidjan that drew forty reporters from Africa and Europe. But as he would in every land he visited, he made it clear that America wasn’t alone in facing such intractable troubles, no matter what Soviet propagandists said. “Visiting your country and part of the world where there are tremendous problems,” he explained, “points up the fact that any time you try to overthrow a system or a set of mores you are bound to have problems.” It helped, in getting his messages across in Africa, that the press knew that Bobby had opposed restrictions on African diplomats at a fashionable club in Washington and would do the same with establishments throughout Jim Crow America. What the press didn’t know was that on visits like this, Bobby was gathering intelligence on what it took to “overthrow a system” that he would apply in Cuba.
His Africa travels, like all his international expeditions for the administration, were a whirlwind. Most embassy staffers had never been to the places he was determined to go. “We took Kennedy out of Abidjan into the real Africa. He loved being in a village in the rain forest where he was greeted by cheering crowds, even though few, if any, understood who Robert Kennedy was,” said Brandon Grove, the young foreign service officer who helped him execute this and other trips. “He waved, clasped hands, and passed out his brother’s PT-109 tie clips, which must have seemed mysterious to Africans who never wore neckties.” It didn’t matter: “They recognized charisma when they saw it.” Grove was torn. He had never met anyone in government so genuinely drawn to people, yet he’d never seen anyone with so little patience for officialdom. Things got done—“he was driven, tackling everything with New Frontier ‘vigah’ ”—but fellow diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador, whom Grove liked, got trampled on and eventually replaced, thanks to Bobby’s verdict that he was too stuffy and hidebound.*6
The attorney general was back on a plane early in 1962, this time heading with Ethel on a goodwill trip around the globe that began with fireworks in Japan. His visit came at a time of stress between the two countries. America had bombed the island nation into submission during World War II and then occupied it for seven years. In the ensuing decade, Japan had grown increasingly proud of its economic comeback and resentful of what it saw as ongoing U.S. domination. Japanese anger built to such a level that President Eisenhower felt the need to cancel his planned trip there in 1960, and President Kennedy was anxious to rescue the relationship. First, he appointed as ambassador Edwin Reischauer, a Harvard scholar who understood the respect the Japanese craved and set out to equalize the partnership. Next, he dispatched Bobby to take Japan’s pulse and smooth the way for a trip the president planned to make during the 1964 campaign, when he would dramatically reunite his PT-109 torpedo boat crew with that of the Japanese destroyer that sank it during World War II.
Bobby was a novelty to the Japanese. In Tokyo, he sat on the counter of a working-class bar and, after discussing world affairs with other patrons, serenaded them with “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Told of his drinking habits, the proprietress poured him two glasses of milk, but they remained undrunk as he opted for sake. At a steel mill, picketers outside the gates held signs saying KENEDY STOP OPPRESING CUBA (the misspellings were the same everywhere he went) while workers wearing yellow helmets cheered him with chants of “banzai!” He chatted with housewives, patted babies, ate whale meat and seaweed, and spoke a Japanese so crude that his audience assumed it was English and waited for the translation. The newspapers published everything he said. “They were interested in him because he is young—a point he kept emphasizing,” reported the New York Times correspondent A. M. Rosenthal, who was three years older than the attorney general. “All by himself Mr. Kennedy received more attention than did half the Kennedy Cabinet when it visited here in November. Part of the reason was that Mr. Kennedy jumped into the Tokyo frenzy, instead of encouraging the Japanese bureaucracy to take him off to a guarded mountaintop, as did Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his colleagues.”
The trip was primarily a charm offensive, but this statesman in the making chose just the right moments to demonstrate his tough side. One came at a meeting with the head of Japan’s four-million-member leftist labor union, whom Bobby challenged to see for himself whether America really was an “imperialist” land of “monopoly capital.” When the union man persisted in referring to J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and other robber barons of old, Bobby told him, “You are talking about the United States of a hundred years ago.” That was tepid compared to the set-to during his address at Waseda University, where Communist hecklers yelled, “Kennedy, go home.” He invited the group’s twenty-one-year-old leader to the platform, where the young man denounced the United States. When Bobby took back the microphone, someone pulled the plug and shut off the lights, creating chaos. Reischauer finally restored order, and, led by the school cheerleader, the audience of two thousand extended a gesture of conciliation by serenading the U.S. attorney general with its school anthem. Thanks to TV crews covering the talk, millions of Japanese viewers witnessed a reversal of stereotypes: a famously well-mannered country treating its guest rudely, while an American leader renowned for ruthlessness responded with what the Japanese called “low posture,” speaking softly and behaving courteously. “It was the best thing that happened in my trip,” Bobby said. “It was very, very successful from that point because everybody was so humiliated and embarrassed that I’d been invited and then couldn’t speak.”
If his trip to Japan helped cement a friendship with an old enemy, he used his two-hour refueling stop in South Vietnam to scope out a future adversary. Washington already knew Bobby as Mr. Counterinsurgency, and he saw Vietnam as a test of his approach. Would his tactics work better than France’s use of conventional warfare to battle an enemy it couldn’t see and didn’t understand? Bobby had sensed the futility of the French mission eleven years before, when he visited Indochina with Jack and their sister Pat. Now Bobby sought to buttress the president’s increasing involvement in Southeast Asia. Although a tight schedule prevented his leaving the Saigon airport, the attorney general found time to brief the press. “We are going to win in Vietnam. We will remain here until we do win,” he vowed. When a British reporter asked whether America approved of its boys’ dying in Vietnam, Bobby shot back: “I think the United States will do what is necessary to help a country that is trying to repel aggression with its own blood, tears and sweat.” But even as he hewed to the official line, he worried—the way he had after the Bay of Pigs—that he and his brother weren’t getting the full story. “He was supposed to be briefed at the airport terminal by the top members of the [U.S.] mission,” recalled the New York Times reporter David Halberstam, who would earn a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam. “ ‘Do you have any problems?’ [Bobby] asked. No, said everyone in unison, there were no problems. He looked at them somewhat shocked by the response. ‘No problems,
’ he said, ‘you’ve really got no problems? Does anyone here want to speak to me in private about his problems?’ And then one by one they talked to him at length and it all came pouring out.” While it took years for his critique on Vietnam to fully congeal, Halberstam said encounters like that helped cement Bobby’s reputation as “the best man in government to bring an unconventional idea to.”
Every stop posed unique challenges. In Jakarta he listened to Indonesian president Sukarno rail about why Dutch-held Western New Guinea was his. In The Hague he heard the Dutch rant back. In both capitals he counseled talking, not fighting. He saw the king and queen in Thailand, spent forty minutes with President Charles de Gaulle in Paris, and had a private audience at the Vatican with Pope John XXIII, who afterward blessed the “pens, hearts and tongues” of the newspapermen traveling with Bobby. Hong Kong was blanketed with fog when he arrived, but he still boarded a launch and visited four U.S. Navy ships in the harbor. Nearly everywhere he went he declined formal sessions with the mission’s country team and only thumbed through his briefing book, preferring private updates from the ambassador and CIA station chief. “He was an oral man who preferred face-to-face encounters,” explains Grove, his State Department aide. “He believed that having to listen to someone lecture him diminished him.” Free of the embassy, Bobby visited landmarks to understand a country’s history, talked to local officials to gauge its present thinking, and caucused with students to get a look into the future. A realistic optimist, he perceived what he called “a tremendous reservoir of goodwill toward the United States which will disappear if the potential is not realized.” The way to realize it, Bobby added, is by “keeping ourselves prepared militarily, but also building our strength in the domestic areas, such as civil rights, economic productivity and Social Security.”
