The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  This was not the notorious Hoover of the liberal imagination leading the innocent attorney general down the path of unrighteousness, but a petulant Bobby going ahead on his own. If Hoover had been simply an evil manipulator trying to ensnarl Bobby in some illegal acts, he would have immediately ordered his teams to begin their secret work. Instead, in that meeting Evans warned Bobby about the dangers of wiretapping King, telling him “there was considerable doubt that the productivity of the surveillance would be worth the risk because King travels most of the time and there might be serious repercussions should it ever become known that the government had instituted this coverage.” Nine days later Bobby decided to follow Evans’s advice and backed off from the King wiretap. The FBI went ahead immediately with the Jones wiretap, an act far beyond the pale of a legitimate investigation. Jones was an attorney who talked on his phone with clients such as King. Beyond that, there were no allegations that Jones was a Communist. His mistake was to have raised Bobby’s ire by saying nothing at the infamous Baldwin meeting and then approaching the attorney general to compliment him on all the good he was doing.

  In a democratic society, if wiretapping is used at all, it must be limited to the most serious of cases in which there is strong evidence, and the results must be held within the smallest possible circle of officials. Bobby read the transcript excerpts from Hoover as if they were tabloid entertainment, passing on the juicier bits to his brother. The Reverend King heard on these tapes was at times not the saintly leader revered by his followers. He was a bawdy gossip talking about sexual adventures of his own and discussing the sexual mores of his colleagues with immense relish. He worried that one of his colleagues, Bayard Rustin, might indulge his homosexuality too openly, get drunk, and “grab one little brother.”

  Bobby was so peeved by what he was reading that he spoke publicly about matters that could only have come from these tapes. “So you’re down here for that old black fairy’s anti-Kennedy demonstration?” he assured Marietta Tree, the American delegate at the UN. “He’s not a serious person. If the country knew what we know about King’s goings on, he’d be finished.”

  A very different Martin Luther King stood before a quarter-million black and white Americans in August at the March on Washington, giving one of the great speeches in American history. “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood,” he told the vast audience. “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” There were no foul manners among these protesters spread out across the broad expanses of the Mall, no violent rhetoric, no uncontrollable mob, only American citizens who wanted the justice they had not received and a place in America that they knew must be theirs.

  Afterward Kennedy met with King and the civil rights leaders at the White House. Kennedy had feared that if there were not a riot, then only a paltry crowd would turn out at the Lincoln Memorial, helping to doom the troubled civil rights bill. Instead, there was a massive, unprecedented turnout. King had given what Kennedy, that student of language, considered a speech of immense power. The president knew that the equation of power had changed, that these men and women here before him had something they had not had previously. He honored them not with flattery and applause, but with his hard-won political wisdom, and for him that was the highest honor of all. He let them in on just how hard it was to work the civil rights bill through Congress, running down the congressional tallies senator by senator, and state by state. These people before him had a crusade, but he had a problem, and he wanted them to understand it.

  Walter Reuther, the labor leader, talked about amending the civil rights bill with even more guarantees. Kennedy listened to the articulate Reuther, and then interrupted. “This doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been talking about,” he said. “But it seems to me, with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community, that we could emphasize, which I think the Jewish community has done, educating their children, or making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.”

  In King’s glorious words, there had been not one sentence about what blacks should do for themselves. The overwhelming burden of black oppression lay elsewhere, but the civil rights leaders risked fostering a disquieting sense of entitlement. Kennedy understood the limits of government in changing the spirit of human beings, and he never would have suggested, as King did, that on some miraculous day the shackles of injustice would be broken and all men would walk free as brothers. Kennedy’s comment was lost in all the talk of programs and strategy, but he had struck at something deep to which he might one day have returned.

  The Reverend King had become one of the most important leaders in America; the spiritual and political guide to black Americans, he was admired by millions of white Americans as well. In October, when Hoover placed a request on Bobby’s desk to wiretap the civil rights leader, the nature of the enterprise had changed entirely. Bobby had a multitude of reasons to look on the request skeptically. The FBI had already been taping Jones and Levison and had come up with nothing even hinting of subversion. It bothered the attorney general that despite everything he and his brother had told King, he still was unwilling to back away from Levison. It did not seem to have occurred to Bobby that if Levison were indeed a Communist agent, he would probably have communicated surreptitiously with King and not become known as his closest white friend.

  The attorney general believed Hoover’s worst accusations against Levison. In 1964 Bobby wrongfully called him “a secret member of the Communist party” and a member of the “Executive Committee.” And so, primarily as a way of getting information on Levison, he signed the documents that allowed the FBI to wiretap King.

  It was a shameful day for American civil liberties. Bobby’s apologists have blamed his actions on everything from Hoover’s manipulations to Bobby’s concern for passage of the civil rights bill. That may all have been true, but it did not account for the attorney general’s visceral mistrust of King, an emotion only exacerbated by the unseemly sexual revelations he had already heard on the wiretaps.

  The attorney general may also have been so tired out by the endless struggles of government that he had begun to make bad judgments. Few cabinet members in American political history have taken on the range of activities and concerns that Bobby had during these years. He was a man who had to touch and feel before he could think and act.

  Early on in the administration, Bobby had gone up to Harlem to visit young gang members. He didn’t travel with a large entourage. He didn’t have journalists with him. He sat on the curb listening to members of the Viceroys talking about their lives. Bobby was seeking to learn how the federal government could help combat juvenile delinquency, and he sought answers not in written reports, expert testimony, but in these individual troubled lives. He wanted to learn, and though he left these gang members to live just as they had before, he saw that beneath these lives that were such tragic admixtures of bravado, resignation, cynicism, and despair, there were flickers of hope.

  When Bobby talked about black children, it was not enough to look at studies and slides. Instead, he might call in his old friend and aide Dave Hackett, and they would visit a D.C. school where he could take children in his arms and hear their dreams. In the Justice Department he developed the government’s first major program for dealing with juvenile delinquency. He learned that there were twenty-three lawyers in the Justice Department working on reparations to Indians for land stolen from them years before, and he not only pushed that forward but met with American Indians and celebrated their lives and ways in a manner that few officials had done before. He kept up his push against organized crime, though involving men like Giancana in the Castro assassination attempts had made prosecution far more difficult.

  Bobby had tim
e for his Cuban friends and their attacks against Castro, and he was the secret goad and force behind these efforts. His brother called him on a multitude of issues, from trade to foreign policy, and he made his own firm mark on most of the major initiatives in the White House. He had his family too, Ethel and now eight children, and he was there for his children, out tossing a football, playing games.

  At times Bobby displayed a mindless bravado. In May, when the first Americans climbed Mount Everest, Bobby’s reaction was, if they could do it, he could do it too. Justice Douglas called him to talk about a climb. “I’ll talk to Ethel about it,” he said in what was a joke and not a joke. “Maybe we can work it in for a week in July after the baby comes.”

  Bobby was living on the natural adrenaline of action. But his face was gaunt, and he was so tired that he may not have realized how tired he was. He had always been abrupt, but he was more abrupt now. At a party celebrating Bobby’s thirty-eighth birthday on November 20, one of his aides, John Douglas, thought that the attorney general seemed “quite depressed.” That was an emotion that had always seemed foreign to Bobby. As fatigued as he was, the election lay ahead. And over in the White House sat his brother, about whose health and well-being Bobby knew far more than any man.

  31

  To Live Is to Choose

  Kennedy’s preeminent concern these days was his reelection. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator and Kennedy’s most likely opponent in the 1964 election, was far behind the president in the polls. Goldwater, though, was becoming better known and slowly rising in popularity, giving credence to the president’s prediction that he would have a “long, hard fight to the White House” in 1964. The Republicans had already begun to step up their criticisms of his presidency as full of promises and rhetoric but few accomplishments. “The New Frontier is a little like touch football,” Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan told one Republican gathering. “It touches everything and tackles nothing.”

  Kennedy stood well ahead of any Republican opponent, but he knew that he was dependent on the will and whim of a fickle electorate. Like any president in the last months of his first term, he had put aside most of his risky ventures. Almost every single initiative and piece of paper coming out of the White House was dedicated to the reelection of the president. His aides thought they were profoundly committed, but he was even more attuned to the subtlest nuances of politics, whether it be matters of life and death, international politics, or some trivial local political squabble.

  When Governor Harold Hughes called wanting the president to review a clemency request for a murderer about to be executed, Kennedy sensed immediately that if he reprieved the man, the citizens of Iowa would not be happy, particular in Dubuque, where the victim had resided. “Of course, they are anxious, I suppose, to have the sentence carried out, are they?” he mused, sensing the political danger in saving the man’s life, a danger he was not prepared to take. As he hung up, he asked, “Is your call to me, is that known?”

  When Kennedy talked to Treasury Secretary Dillon about narrowing a tax deduction, he did not wonder about the equity of the decision but about the political costs. “I don’t know how much money we are going to collect as a result of all this, and whether it is worth the heat that these people are able to put on,” he said. When Red Fay called from the Pentagon to discuss closing down navy bases in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Boston, the president didn’t press the undersecretary of the Navy about the economic feasibility or the military purpose of doing so. Instead, he told his old friend bluntly: “We might just as well go home ourselves, then. If you like it down here, you better not close down … any of those yards.” And when he was contemplating sending Sam Beer, a Harvard professor, to Latin America as an ambassador, his concern was that Beer would be gone during the election year when he might be needed to placate the liberals “to keep them from going off the deep end.”

  As Kennedy tried to tidy up his political shop, placing the most inviting items in the window, he was bedeviled by one matter that threatened to overwhelm everything else. That was Vietnam, an issue that he had hoped would stay dormant until after his reelection in 1964. Of all presidents who dealt with this issue, Kennedy had the least right to plead ignorance of the realities of the situation in Southeast Asia. He had followed these realities since at least 1951 when during his visit as a congressman, Kennedy had seen that however much the French pretended they were fighting a noble cause in Vietnam, they were essentially defending a corrupt colonial empire. He had also seen that an American government that thought it could help its ally by paying in dollars, not in blood, might one day learn that it had to pay in that harder currency as well.

  Both the previous postwar presidents had treated communism like a dreadful infectious disease that had afflicted part of the world body and had to be contained or it would destroy the world. Every time it broke out, it had to be excised, driven up the Korean peninsula, bottled up within Cuba, locked behind the Iron Curtain. For a decade and a half, at enormous cost, the regimen had worked, and throughout his entire political career, Kennedy had been a vociferous proponent of this theory. He knew that a president who contemplated withdrawal from Vietnam risked being accused of political malpractice, of allowing the virus to spread across Southeast Asia and the world.

  A quarantine, though, is not the only way to treat an infectious disease. In these months Kennedy was like a doctor contemplating radically different treatments. In April, he scribbled a note on a pad in the White House: “withdrawal from Vietnam as requested.” That was one prescription. The other was an escalation, of unknown size and duration, in American involvement. Three weeks later, in a meeting with Secretary of State Rusk, the president penned a few more notes, decipherable only by himself. “Military aid … aid etc … 4th corps, province … Cut off aid to Colonel Tuan … Congress resolutions … Congressional resolution … Politically conscious Americans.” The problem was that whatever he prescribed would have horrendous side effects that would have to be treated as well, and while he contemplated his treatment, the patient was in continual agony.

  Kennedy beseeched his subordinates to tell him the hard truths about whatever issue he faced. In Vietnam, however, the truth disappeared like the Communist Viet Cong soldiers, firing a volley or two, and then fading away into the vast jungles. Everyone from the ambassador to the military to the CIA put forth self-serving versions of what was happening. What these scenarios shared, for the most part, was a malignant optimism, based largely on not facing what had to be faced.

  In January 1963, General Paul Harkins, the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), proposed to fulfill McNamara’s pledge to end American involvement by late 1965, not by phasing out American military operations but by dramatically increasing support, including doubling the air force’s role. When Paul Kattenburg, a perceptive and daringly candid Foreign Service officer, addressed the Ex Comm meeting on August 31 about his Vietnamese experience, with most top officials present except for the president, he came away with the feeling that “they didn’t know Vietnam. They didn’t know the past. They had forgotten the history. They simply didn’t understand the identification of nationalism and Communism, and the more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and I thought, ‘God we’re walking into a major disaster.’ “By October, the Pentagon had begun the self-deluding process of winning on paper what they were not winning on the ground, concluding that the South Vietnamese were making “progress” against the Viet Cong, though the hard statistics suggested the opposite.

  For the president, much of the discussion had a tiresome familiarity. In 1954, three years after Kennedy had visited Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem had become the first postcolonial leader of South Vietnam. Conservative Catholic Americans felt a special affinity for the prime minister. A man of the deepest Catholic faith, Diem had lived in the United States in his years of exile. He had spent years at a seminary in New Jersey and was a daily communicant.

  O
ne of Kennedy’s seminal insights during his 1951 trip to Asia was how dangerous politics was in much of the world, and how often assassination stalked those who ascended to power. Diem’s own elder brother, a provincial governor, had been murdered by the Viet Minh. Diem himself had almost been killed in 1962, and the scent of blood was never far from the palace.

  Diem was no tailor of democracy who could sew the many peoples of South Vietnam into even a patchwork quilt of a country. Diem trusted few beyond his two brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, his political counselor, and Ngo Dinh Canh, who ran the northern regions. The brothers established the Can Lao Party, a secret society that dominated the country’s economic and political life. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow described it in 1959 as “an authoritarian organization largely modeled on Communist lines.”

  After nearly ten years in power, Diem had come around to where he began, a Catholic mandarin isolated not only from his own people but also from the Americans who thought him in part their creation. On July 11, a Buddhist priest immolated himself in front of the Cambodian embassy in Saigon, protesting the repression of his co-religionists and the deaths of eight Buddhist demonstrators who had sought to display the Buddhist flag. This was an act of moral witness that transcended all logic, all the nuances of policy and procedures, and created its own imperative. Diem’s support in Vietnam had been eroding since almost the day he assumed office, but it took this immolation and the Buddhist civil rights protests to make the men in Washington realize that things could not go on this way with Diem, not when men were burning themselves alive and, in a Buddhist land, only Catholics could freely profess their faith and politics.