by Larry Tye
The abuse the Bay of Pigs prisoners were suffering became clear a month after the missile crisis, when one of their fathers visited the jail where the Castro regime was holding them. “I’m a cattleman, Mr. Attorney General, and these men look like animals who are going to die,” Alvaro Sanchez, Jr., warned Bobby. “If you are going to rescue these men, this is the time because if you wait you will be liberating corpses.” Bobby replied, “You are right. I think this is the moment.” It was the moment, too, to come to Bobby with a plea like that. He was anxious not just to make up for the botched Bay of Pigs fiasco, but to embrace a mission that put him back on the side of the angels after his relentless bids to depose Castro and clandestine trading of missiles. Once he told Sanchez what he wanted to hear, Bobby-the-evangelist showed it was more than a politician’s lip service. Nobody was better than the attorney general at mobilizing people. Drug firms were cajoled into donating the morphine and other medicines Castro demanded, and the Bureau of Narcotics said not to worry about dispensing controlled substances. Food companies were persuaded to kick in food supplies. The AFL-CIO paid the tab for operational expenses, while organizers packed cases of Budweiser, Castro’s favorite beer. The IRS did its part by ruling that all $53 million in donations were tax deductible, a decision it reached in two hours rather than the normal two months. Justice Department regulators said they would give the firms a pass, this once, for violating antitrust laws by collaborating on pricing and shipping. Castro rightfully suspected that the American companies would try to unload their expired baby food and moth-eaten bins of clothing, so he dispatched four agents to Florida to inspect the goods. Bobby let his team do its work, but he checked in twice a day, asking, “How much have you got in drugs? Can we get it to Cuba? What can I do? What can the president do?”
They called it Operation Habeas Corpus, a nod to its focus on springing prisoners. It was accomplished within three weeks and on the q.t., because U.S. critics were poised to pounce and Castro had threatened to up the ante again if he suspected the direct involvement of the American government. The Cuban leader also insisted, mid-deal, on the $2.9 million promised when the sick prisoners were released the previous year. Bobby made two phone calls that only he could make—to Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, a friend of Joe Kennedy’s who delivered $1 million that night, and to General Lucius Clay, the organizer of the Berlin Airlift, who signed a personal note guaranteeing the rest.*18 Castro, meanwhile, was fattening up his captives and showing them his Soviet-built fighter planes to convince them how easily he could repel any future attacks. The press knew some of the deal’s details but breathed barely a word until afterward, just as Bobby asked. He did tip off one refugee leader, telling him “that guy with the beard has accepted.”
Five aircraft carrying 1,113 liberated prisoners touched down in Miami on Christmas Eve 1962, with many of the grateful returnees kissing the ground as they deplaned. Mission accomplished, complete with holiday drama designed to mute any criticism and with more than two hundred journalists there to bear witness. As for his staff, Bobby offered a “Thanks, fellows, and Merry Christmas.” Pause. “Now let’s go get Hoffa!”
Not all loose ends could be tied up that easily, and not all the families were reunited with their Bay of Pigs veterans. In Pete Ray’s case, it took the government thirty-seven years even to acknowledge that he and his colleagues from the Alabama National Guard had been there. The CIA had selected the Alabama squad because it used B-26s similar to those flown by the Cuban Air Force, and the agency wanted to disguise the American planes to look like Cuban ones being flown by defectors instead of by U.S.-trained émigrés. The CIA got not just planes but Ray and other Americans who wanted to help at the agency’s secret bases in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The cover story was that wealthy Cubans had hired the Americans to fly cargo planes. They weren’t supposed to participate in the actual invasion, but they jumped in to relieve their exhausted émigré confederates. Ray was on his way to bomb Castro’s headquarters when his plane was shot down. He survived the crash and a gun battle with Castro’s troops, but was executed with a point-blank shot to his temple while he was lying on his back, says his daughter, Janet Ray, who has spent the past half century tracking what happened after her dad left home that day in 1961 when she was six years old.
Janet doesn’t blame the U.S. government for sponsoring the invasion, or for her dad’s involvement, but she remains outraged by the lies that followed. JFK couldn’t deny having trained the Cuban invaders, but he and Bobby were loath to admit that a handful of Americans were fighting alongside them even when Castro said he had the corpses to prove it. Janet says she discussed this with Richard Bissell, Jr., the CIA’s point man for the Bay of Pigs, just before he died. Bissell remembered very clearly what Bobby said upon learning that Pete Ray’s plane and another piloted by an Alabama guardsman had been shot down: “Those American pilots had better God damn well be dead or we’re going to have another Francis Gary Powers*19 on our hands.” Janet believed Bissell because his words were consistent with Bobby’s actions. “I think Bobby Kennedy did a very commendable job in getting the [Cuban] prisoners released,” Janet says, but she can’t forgive him for not retrieving her father’s remains. “The United States didn’t ask for the body back due to political reasons: to protect JFK, the 1964 elections, CYA [cover your ass].” Her family and three others were eventually paid compensation and even given medals, but they had to keep that secret for decades, not just to protect America’s security but to shield the Kennedys. “These four Alabama men’s reputations,” Janet says, “were sacrificed for political reasons.”
Politics also was likely behind Bobby’s preoccupation, nearly two years after the Bay of Pigs, with downplaying mistakes his brother had long ago put behind him. Had the president backed out on a vow to provide vital air protection for the invaders? “There never was any plan to have U.S. air cover,” Bobby told a Miami Herald reporter in one of several “exclusive” interviews he gave on the topic. “There never was any promise.” Bobby was nitpicking and reopening a controversy that everyone else considered closed. Having interviewed every witness and read every document as part of his review of the invasion, the attorney general knew that the refugees were convinced they’d been promised more air support. “Jets are coming!” brigade commander Pepe San Roman said he was told by his American contact in the midst of the battle, reassuring him of help that never arrived. There had also been a clash of views in the White House over what commitments had been made and how to keep them. Secretary Rusk said the promise was not to use American forces; the CIA and military said the reverse; and the president’s national security advisor argued midinvasion that “the right course now is to eliminate the Castro air force, by neutrally painted U.S. planes if necessary.” JFK decided on a compromise of having U.S. jets provide cover for the émigrés’ B-26s, but even that didn’t happen because the B-26s, including Pete Ray’s, arrived early and met with disaster. Senator Richard Russell, the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tried to fend off GOP attacks on the suddenly loquacious attorney general, but he admitted to being puzzled as to why Bobby would rehash “this sad episode” in newspapers and magazines. “I don’t think there’s any doubt,” the senator said, “that the people who made the invasion thought they had air cover arranged for.” Drew Pearson had his own explanation for Bobby’s fixation on the long-past invasion: that the Kennedy administration was “the most PR-minded in American history.”
Pearson was right, but he didn’t know the full story. Bobby was eager to paper over past mistakes, but he was also exploring creative and politically risky ways to defuse hostilities with Castro. Those subterranean initiatives started in the spring of 1963 and continued until the day JFK was assassinated. James Donovan, the New York superlawyer who had helped negotiate the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, used that relationship with Castro to probe the Cuban leader’s willingness to reconcile with America.*20 William Attwood, a U.S. official at the Unit
ed Nations, was trying to set up his own meeting with Castro, and Bobby suggested it be somewhere remote like Mexico to ensure privacy. The attorney general even used journalists to test Castro’s openness to negotiate. This “sweet approach” recognized that Castro was furious at Khrushchev for taking away his nuclear missiles without consulting him, and what a coup it would be to push Cuba out of the Soviet orbit. The president and his brother knew that anything but a hard-line approach to Castro would cost them votes in Florida and elsewhere, but they seemed willing to take the gamble in an anticipated second term. What would happen, they asked themselves for the first time, if they simply left Cuba alone? Better still, what if Castro could be remolded into another Tito, leader of not just Yugoslavia but of the twenty-five-nation Non-Aligned Movement?*21
In the days before his death, JFK made still more overtures. “Nothing is possible” in forging new relations so long as Cuba remains a Soviet pawn, he said during a speech in Miami, but if those ties were severed, “everything is possible.” The president also encouraged the French journalist Jean Daniel to raise the idea of rapprochement when he interviewed Castro in late November. Daniel did, and got a positive reception, but a Castro aide interrupted the meeting to report that Kennedy had been shot. Whether those explorations would have led to real détente is impossible to know, although Castro later said that “Kennedy would not have received a rebuff from us.” The Kennedy administration’s intent is tougher to read, since it was pursuing war and peace at the same time—simil-opting, in the jargon of security officials. “It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot,” the CIA inspector general reported later, “a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.”
What we do know is that after his brother’s death, Bobby pushed Secretary of State Rusk to lift the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba, arguing that it “would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.” As for a more history-bending initiative, Bobby said he and Jack had been “trying to work it out,” which is more than any subsequent American administration did until President Obama’s normalization agreement with President Raúl Castro in December 2014. Ethel Kennedy is convinced that Jack and Bobby could have achieved a comparable breakthrough with Fidel Castro, based on five or six private meetings she has had with him in recent decades.*22 Fidel, she says, saw her husband as a practical man with whom he could have struck a deal.
In the end, Cuba proved to be Bobby’s biggest misstep as well as a milestone in his turnaround. He helped the U.S. government recover from the Bay of Pigs fiasco but never understood that the fault for the invasion’s failure lay in its conception, not its execution. Operation Mongoose repeated those mistakes, in the process reinforcing Castro’s image as David doing battle with the American Goliath and pushing Russia to protect him with a missile shield. Bobby did help his brother find a way out of the missile crisis, but only after the president rejected the attorney general’s earlier call for an air strike. In rare moments, Bobby discussed his role with candor, although the story he generally told was more aspirational than factual. But he also matured during the Cuban crises—slowly seeing that a leader could be tough without being bellicose, finding his voice on foreign affairs as he had at home, and stepping out of his brother’s long shadow even as he remained his closest and most loyal confidant.*23 Each new role he assumed on Jack’s behalf was preparing Bobby to be his own man. The process wasn’t complete, but the course was set.
* * *
*1 Former defense secretary Robert McNamara would concede the point at a conference in Havana in 1992 attended by Castro as well as his former Soviet allies and American foes. Based on the Bay of Pigs attack, U.S.-backed covert operations, and the bellicose anti-Castro voices in Washington, the former defense secretary said, “If I had been a Cuban leader, I think I might have expected a U.S. invasion” (Blanton, “Cuban Missile Crisis Isn’t What It Used to Be,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin).
*2 The Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising of 1956, fortifying their control over the East Bloc but alienating Marxists across the world.
*3 Either way, Bobby was heard to say, “That son of a bitch has got to go.” Khrushchev got the message and recalled Bolshakov, which was just fine with the new Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, who felt he should be Bobby’s channel to Moscow. Before he went, Bolshakov warned Bobby that Dobrynin had been dangerously “undercutting” what Bolshakov was reporting to Moscow—including Bobby’s insistence that “the United States would fight under certain circumstances.” (Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 178; and RFK Oral History, February 13, 1965, 5, JFKL.)
*4 The Kennedy White House’s counterinsurgency bureaucracy was three-headed: Special Group was a committee, chaired by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, that oversaw covert operations. The Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) helped friendly foreign governments resist insurrection. The Special Group (Augmented) focused on Cuba. Bobby was a member of the last two.
*5 “I heard [my husband] talking to various people,” says Helms’s wife, Cynthia, about how “Robert Kennedy really wanted to get rid of Castro. Dick said he was adamant about this, and said you could see the welts on his back where he had been lashed by the Kennedys to get rid of Castro” (Author interview with Cynthia Helms).
*6 The ambassador to the Ivory Coast and three other former French colonies was R. Borden Reams, a career diplomat. “This played out,” Grove said, “by Reams’ returning home, retiring, and playing golf, at which he excelled” (Author email from Grove).
*7 That the word “enemy” made it into the title of two of his books was a sign of Bobby’s black-and-white take on his world. But this time it was a signal that he was recognizing subtler shadings, that his enemy was brave, whereas in his first book it was dark enemies like Jimmy Hoffa lurking within our unsuspecting society.
*8 Circumstantial evidence leads some historians to believe that several days before, Bobby had inadvertently signaled to Khrushchev—through a meeting between the Russian spy Bolshakov and two U.S. journalists briefed by Bobby—that America would be open to the missile swap JFK hoped to avoid, which emboldened the Soviet leader to add that as a last-minute demand (May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, 468–69).
*9 He’d been proposing a staged attack like that since at least August, when he asked a small group meeting in the secretary of state’s office “the feasibility of provoking an action against Guantanamo which would permit us to retaliate, or involving a third country in some way” (John McCone’s memo on the conversation, August 21, 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. X, 947–49).
*10 At times during the crisis the generals seemed out of control, Bobby said afterward: “If we hadn’t had [Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman] Maxwell Taylor over there we would have had a revolt, a revolution within the military” (RFK OH, February 13, 1965, 38).
*11 Llewellyn Thompson, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, was the one who came up with the Trollope approach, said Rusk. “Bobby got the credit because he proposed it at the ExComm meeting,” the secretary of state added, “but it was Thompson’s idea” (Rusk and Papp, As I Saw It, 240).
*12 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy remembered nine participants in that critical meeting, not six, adding that “we agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be informed” (Bundy, Danger and Survival, 432–33).
*13 After the crisis, Bobby said, Rusk approached him “and offered to resign. And was humiliated at the way he handled himself….The president knew he wasn’t effective but he was his own secretary of state and he was going to let him stay through to the election in ’64 and then replace him” (RFK OH, February 13, 1965, 30–31),
*14 Rusk gave Bobby one more reason to dislike him during the crisis: The secretary of state was the only key presidential adviser to consistently stand up to the attorney general during his hawkish phas
e. Bobby also disparaged Bundy’s performance during the crisis: “[He] flip flopped so many times in such an extreme way that—it was complete deterioration of an individual before one’s eyes.” (Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors,” A Critical Reappraisal, and RFK OH, February 13, 1965, 31.)
*15 The Soviets were impressed enough by his diplomatic skills prior to the missile crisis that they had floated the notion of his coming to the USSR as U.S. ambassador, an idea that JFK at least considered. But Bobby balked. “In the first place,” he said looking back, “I couldn’t possibly learn Russian because I spent ten years learning second-year French, and secondly…I don’t think the amount of good that it would have done would have remained” (RFK OH, April 30, 1964, 209–10, JFKL).
