“It’s becoming more and more clear that it was assassination, at least I think it was, and people around here do,” Hilsman went on. “Now, this is the cable which suggests that he [Conein] actually go to Big Minh [General Duong Van Minh] and really find out. But there’s some doubt in some of our minds whether we want to or not. Maybe we ought to just let it alone.”
As these men nervously discussed the bloody deed, McCone probably already knew precisely what had happened. “Big Minh offered Conein an opportunity to see the bodies, and he refused,” McCone said, in his bloodless, bureaucratic way. “The suicide story is out. Conein is pretty conscious that it was assassination, and he didn’t want to get involved with it. I would suggest that we not get into, into this story. Knowing it doesn’t do us any good.”
Regicide is the most horrible of murders, for if the king is not safe, then no one is safe. In the Cabinet Room these men usually discussed grand strategies, geopolitical considerations, theories of nuclear deterrence, counterinsurgency, and economic initiatives. They did not talk about a former friend lying in a pool of blood in the back of an army vehicle. There was an unsettling quality to their discourse, as if they had been condemned to look straight at where their ideas had led. Of all the men in the room, Kennedy seemed the most obsessed with what had happened. The president had always had a certain queasiness when it came to blood and death, and he was being led through a chamber of horrors.
“What happens if Conein asks to see the bodies and discovers there were a couple of bullets in the back of the … in the back, of this kind?” said Bundy. “We don’t gain much by that.” The former Harvard dean could hardly get a straight sentence out of his cultured mouth.
“I don’t think we gain anything by it,” McCone said, trying to push the men away from this deadly scene.
“It would look like a planned design to remain uninformed under the circumstances,” Rusk said, not optimistic about the administration’s chances of pleading ignorance.
“I think we’re going to hear about it in the next twenty-four hours,” Kennedy said. Although the president apparently knew less about what had happened than several of his advisers, he realized that the press was onto the story. He had his own curiosity about the details of the murders.
“If Big Minh ordered the execution, then, then, uh, I don’t know,” Kennedy mused. “Do we know that? Do we think he meant to?”
“Some suspect that,” said Hilsman.
“Some think he did,” said Bundy.
“He’s stupid then,” said Kennedy, half under his breath. No one would be able definitely to link the president to the assassination attempts against Castro, and there would always be uncertainty concerning exactly what he knew.
“I don’t think we should be informed in advance of everyone else on this so that the story gets to be our story,” Rusk said, seeking to push the deed further away from the door of the White House.
“I don’t know why they did that,” Kennedy said quietly, once again returning to the act.
Hilsman was a man who always had a ready answer. “Well, some of the reports show that the only time Minh got emotional was when Diem slammed the phone [down] on him.” It was a curious justification for murder, and the silence in the room signaled Hilsman to move on to a different subject.
“Sir,” Hilsman said, “this morning … this morning there was a discussion of a cable to go out tonight, getting on with the war.” The Americans had a war to fight, and they could not indulge in this speculation any longer.
Two days later Kennedy sat in the Oval Office. “One two three four five,” he said into a Dictaphone. “Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place.”
For a man who stood at the epicenter of power, the president was extraordinarily dispassionate, not only in the decisions he made but equally in how he viewed them afterward. In this private moment he did not attempt to polish his image. He was his own best historian, treating himself as but another player in the complex tragicomedy of life.
Kennedy went through the major players one by one, accurately outlining where each man had stood on the coup. At times great events were determined not by principles or ideologies but by nothing greater than personal pique. In Kennedy’s assessment, McCone had opposed the coup “partly because of an old hostility to Lodge, which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge’s judgment, partly as a result of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his station chief.”
If Kennedy ever wrote this history, he would have first filled his pen with irony. He saw his own culpability not in any strong, willful action he had taken but in nothing more dramatic than the sloppy drafting of a cable at the outset. “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup…. That wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent…. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.”
Kennedy went on to talk about the military situation. “Politically the situation was deteriorating,” he said. “Militarily it had not had its effect. There was a feeling that it would.” For all the president’s insights into the world of men and politics, and his ability to spot the justifications and self-promotion of those around him, he had fallen for McNamara and Taylor’s tragic fantasy that the war was going well, and that soon the Americans would be able to go home, leaving their victorious partner behind.
As Kennedy went on, John Jr. entered the room, his entrance signaled by a high-pitched squeal. “Say hi,” the president said.
“Hello,” John Jr. said, speaking into the microphone. “Naughty naughty, Daddy.” An endearing little boy to whom the White House was a great castle, John Jr. would be three years old later in the month and he already had the public presence of a child actor.
“Why do the leaves fall?” Kennedy asked, turning this moment into a learning exercise both humble and poetic.
“Because,” John said.
“Why does the snow come on the ground?” “Because.”
“Why do the leaves turn green?” “Because.”
“And when do we go to the Cape?” the president asked. Hyannis Port was the scene of the most profound and joyous moments of his family life, first as a child and now as a father.
“Summer,” John Jr. answered, though summer was far away.
When John Jr. left his father, he let out a whooping laugh. It was not like the laughs the president usually heard, calculated gestures modulated by what seemed to please him. This was a loving, taunting, wondrous laugh from a son who saw only the happiness of the world.
As his son left, Kennedy turned finally to the most painful matter of all, and he spoke of it without a hint of emotion:
I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nonetheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether … public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, etc., will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not-too-distant future.
While Kennedy looked eastward toward the jungles of Vietnam and fretted about his nation’s future there, Bobby continued to be consumed with Cuba. He was so disdainful of the structures of government that he had gone far toward privatizing the American policy. As attorney general of the United States, he had no institutional right to claim sovereignty over America’s Cuban policy. But he was the force behind the U.S.-funded “autonomous anti-Castro groups.”
There were already important bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua run by Manuel Artime, and a new operation headed by another exile leader, Manolo Ray, was beg
inning to establish its working base in Central America. The leaders were the attorney general’s friends, comrades he invited to his home, and against them on the island stood implacable enemies. By November 1963, they were ready to escalate their attacks. “Bob Kennedy, it seems, was the person who was pushing them [the CIA] and making them do it,” recalled Rafael Quintero, the deputy leader. “I mean, [he] put the Cubans in charge of their own operation—but they definitely didn’t want to do it.”
At the same time the CIA was preparing a series of dramatic initiatives of its own. That November a group of Cuban exiles led by an American CIA operative, Bradley Earl Ayers, trained for an operation against the major Cuban oil refinery in Matanzas Province. It was an ambitious enterprise in which teams of commandos were to sail from Florida on two fishing trawlers. The first group of commandos would make shore in Cuba in a small boat, to prepare the way for their comrades carrying rocket launchers. One of the men would climb the fence surrounding the refinery and enter a tin shed where a lone watchman sat. The commando would have a knife, a garrote, and a pistol with a silencer. He was to kill the watchman using the method of his choosing. Even though the night watchman was probably just an old man who needed a job, the plan made no mention of the possibility of merely tying him up.
Years later, when Halpern, the CIA Cuban desk officer, and Ayers, the on-scene CIA operative, were asked why this man had to die, they responded in precisely the same words: “We were at war.” And so they were, and whether the attorney general knew the details of this operation, it was Bobby’s war fought Bobby’s way.
Bobby was so much the symbol of uncompromising opposition to Castro that when Dr. Rolando Cubela Secades, a Cuban army major with access to Castro, was contemplating killing the Cuban leader and insisted on meeting with a top American official, it was the attorney general whom he wanted to see. Instead, Desmond FitzGerald, the head of the Cuban Task Force—now renamed the Special Affairs Staff (SAS)—met secretly with Cubela in Paris on October 29. FitzGerald was traveling, in the words of the agency contact plan, “as personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy.” FitzGerald insisted later that the agency had not sought Bobby’s permission to speak in his name, and that at the Paris meeting he had not talked about assassination. Cubela recalled otherwise: “He [FitzGerald] offered me on behalf of the U.S. government the support … for being able to carry out either the plot attempt against the prime minister of Cuba or any other activity that will put in danger the stability of the regime.”
Lies are most effective hidden in a bed of truth, but at the highest reaches of the CIA, lying was not dishonor but its opposite. In the end men like FitzGerald appeared to be dangerous renegades, but they were only carrying out what the Kennedys wanted them to do. The president recognized that perfectly well. “I have looked through the record very carefully, and I can find nothing to indicate that the CIA has done anything but support policy,” the president said in October 1963. “I can assure you flatly that the CIA has not carried out independent activities.”
While the CIA prepared again to attempt to kill Castro, the administration began a tentative, distanced approach to the Cuban leader by exploring the possibilities of normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations. At the president’s authorization, William Attwood, the former editor of Look and an adviser to the UN mission, met with Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban UN ambassador. The president was more optimistic about the possibility of achieving some measure of peace with Castro’s Cuba than was the State Department. Bobby, for his part, stated that “the U.S. must require some fundamental steps such as the end of subversion in Latin America and removing the Soviet troops in Cuba before any serious discussion can take place about a détente.” As for Castro, he set no conditions and was intrigued enough by the prospect that early in November he expressed a willingness to sit down for discussions with an American official.
In the next months the two sides would have to travel a treacherous pathway. Kennedy was facing reelection, and he could not melt down the swords of war as long as Castro shouted the shrill slogans of world revolution. The Cuban leader, for his part, was the leader of a young revolution, and he could hardly turn away easily from his ideals or his patrons in Moscow. Both leaders were far more realistic than their rhetoric and saw some measure of hope in these discussions. Peace is not won in a day, however, and death comes in an instant. The CIA’s FitzGerald was convinced that Castro would be dead by the end of 1963.
The president spent the weekend of October 20 in Hyannis Port. Kennedy was as restless of body and mind, and with his bad back, he rarely sat down longer than was necessary. He sat quietly with his father watching the football games on television. Kennedy was supposed to leave Sunday morning, but Joe had a cold and the president spent time sitting next to his bed, talking to him.
It finally came time for the president to leave. Autumn had already been hard upon the land, and it was far too cold for Joe to sit out on the porch to see the president off. His son came up to his bedroom and said good-bye. The president did not like to hug or kiss other men, but he kissed his crippled father, and then he hurried out of the room.
As soon as the president left, Joe motioned toward the balcony, insisting that his bed be moved there to watch the presidential helicopter depart. The world waited on his son now, the way it once had waited on him, but the helicopter did not lift off. Joe’s face twisted up in disbelief. As he sat looking down on the grass where his sons had so often played, he felt a touch on his shoulder. “Look who’s here, Dad,” the president said.
Kennedy had come to say good-bye again. He felt he had to touch his father one more time. He wrapped his father in his arms and kissed him. Then he was gone, and within a moment the helicopter lifted off into the leaden skies.
On Tuesday, November 12, Cartha DeLoach, the new FBI liaison to the White House, walked into the Oval Office. That first visit to the presidential office inspired a moment of awe in the most sanguine of men. Kennedy had just started wearing glasses except when he was in public, and he did not quite have the youthful, forceful look by which most Americans knew him. DeLoach introduced himself and listened to Kennedy, but he kept staring at the president’s hands. They were shaking. As the president continued talking, he put his hands under the desk as if he did not want DeLoach to see the uncontrollable tremor.
The following Saturday, DeLoach was in the auditorium when Kennedy gave a speech to the National Academy of the FBI. DeLoach tried to pay attention, but he kept looking at the president’s hands. “His hand was shaking terribly, and I couldn’t think that was from stress or the strain of the speech,” DeLoach said. “I thought it must be a disease of some kind.”
DeLoach was not the only one to notice that Kennedy’s hands often shook. The Boston Globes Bob Healy observed the trembling hands as well, though it was not something that he would consider writing about in his paper. Since Kennedy had entered the White House, the only major publication to write about his health problems in an important way was the scandal sheet Confidential, in an almost scholarly “special report” on the potential effects of Addison’s disease. Other than that July 1962 article titled “Medical Facts on President Kennedy’s Mysterious Malady,” the press had largely left the story alone.
Kennedy was heading into an election year in which he would have the punishing task of running for president while he continued to bear all the onerous burdens of office. The campaign would have tested the mettle and stamina of the healthiest of men, and it was a question whether Kennedy was up to such a challenge. It was not simply that his hands trembled, that he was corseted with a metal and cloth brace to protect his back, and that in privacy at Hyannis Port he often used crutches. The question was whether his regimen of drugs and all the endless tensions of his office had begun to break the man down. How much longer could he maintain the greatest of all his many illusions—that he was a vibrantly healthy young president?
Politics is always defined by endings, and as the political year concluded, Kenn
edy’s legislative program was in trouble. His tax cut bill was spat back at him by a vote of 12–2, and the Senate Finance Committee decided to table the matter until 1964. His civil rights bill was pushed back again, its delay fostered primarily by southern Democrats who could win in procedure what they would lose in votes. At least his foreign aid bill was passed, but the recalcitrant Senate stripped it of $800 million of the $4.5 billion he had requested, and that was still $200 million beyond what the House was willing to give him.
On the very weekend that this disastrous news led the nation’s newspapers, the White House could at least announce that Jackie would be going along with her husband on his trip to Texas on November 21. It was no small matter that Jackie had agreed to travel with him and become part of the still-unannounced reelection campaign. In the political scope of things, her involvement might weigh heavier than all his losses in Congress. In the first place, if Jackie backed away from politics much longer, she risked becoming a political albatross—a first lady who appeared to enjoy living everywhere but the White House.
Jackie’s European sojourn had created headlines that might please a king, but not a democratic leader—” Mrs. Kennedy Aegean Island-Hopping,” “Jackie Follows Script as Hollywood Wrote It,” “Jackie Sails in Splendor.” Betty Beale, a Washington social columnist, reported that Jackie’s European trip had caused “complaints … to pour in from all quarters and it may hurt politically.” Marianne Means, a Hearst columnist and reporter, wrote: “During her nearly three years in the White House, she has consistently refused all invitations to appear with the president at political functions and most public events, outside the realm of the arts. She did not once accompany him last fall as he campaigned for Democratic congressmen up for reelection. And she has never traveled with him on any of his trips around the country.”
Jackie had a radiant popularity all her own that would help create the almost frenetic excitement that would translate into votes next November. In 1960 Kennedy’s advisers had thought Jackie might be a liability; in 1964, in a close campaign, she might prove a crucial asset.
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