Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Days before the invasion, when rumors about it were rampant in Washington, Kennedy made an unequivocal public announcement that “there will not be, under any circumstances, any intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces.”112 After the debacle, despite administration efforts to portray the operation as the work of Cuban exiles without American support, few in the world took this patent fiction seriously. During the pre-invasion week, James Reston of the New York Times thought that Allen Dulles was “lying like hell” when he denied CIA involvement. After the Cuban Foreign Minister reported air strikes on the island—and identified the planes as American—the United Nations scheduled an emergency session, during which Adlai Stevenson, the American Ambassador to the UN, promised that his government would do anything possible to insure that “no American participate in any action against Cuba.” Stevenson had not been informed that Americans were participating for all they were worth. When he learned the truth, the Ambassador considered his previous statement “the most humiliating experience” of his public life.

  If it was humiliating for Stevenson, it was an even greater personal disgrace for Robert Kennedy. Earlier, he had stifled administration dissension about, and even outright opposition to, the invasion. Now Bobby worried that the Bay of Pigs harmed his brother’s “standing as President and the standing of the United States in public opinion throughout the world.”113 He worried that, abroad, “The United States couldn’t be trusted,” for either honesty or competence.

  Until the invasion’s failure, Bobby Kennedy’s role in the administration had been somewhat limited. He was to fulfill his function as Attorney General, and to advise the president on a wide range of issues whenever the president solicited his opinion. The April failure prompted the president to retrench; to reach back to the kid brother he most trusted among his advisors; to elevate Bobby to the President’s right hand. Now Bobby would also advise on foreign affairs—and not only advise, but also implement action in some of the most sensitive matters.

  He was appointed to the Cuba Study Group, which included retired General Maxwell Taylor; Admiral Arleigh Burke, the Chief of Naval Operations; and Allen Dulles, the CIA Director. The committee met in a Pentagon basement, where Bobby took notes with an intense desire for action—in this case, to find out what went wrong in order to get it right the next time.114 During the next six weeks, the Cuba Study Group would interrogate 50 witnesses about the failure at the Bay of Pigs, and come to the conclusion the White House wanted to hear: that the chief cause had been the new administration’s reluctance to oppose plans proposed by President Eisenhower, America’s “greatest military man.” In support of that highly questionable judgment, Bobby asserted that not to have gone ahead with the project “would have showed that [President Kennedy] had no courage.”115 However, the Study Group also concluded that the proximate cause of the failure was the direct result of the inability to destroy Castro’s air force.116

  No matter how much Americans disliked Fidel Castro, the apparently greater Administration need was to demonstrate Kennedy’s courage by invading a sovereign nation. (The President himself manifested the same concern to Ted Sorenson days before the invasion. The longtime aide and chief speechwriter concluded that Kennedy would not listen to the plan’s critics at that stage because he was not going to be cowardly.)117

  Even more revealing was Bobby’s behavior at a meeting, less than a week after the debacle, of Kennedy’s Cuban advisors. Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles advised that, practically speaking, nothing could be done about Castro, as he was now firmly entrenched. Other aides such as Richard Goodwin agreed. However, when Bowles finished his presentation, Goodwin would write, “Bobby exploded” at the notion that nothing could be done to shake Castro from power. “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby screamed. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. . . We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”118

  That was not the language of Cabinet room discussions. Goodwin and the others blinked at the “harsh polemic. . . the embarrassing tirade.” The rest of the group sat silently, “stunned by the ferocity of his [Robert Kennedy’s] assault.” Bowles himself called the atmosphere “almost savage. . . The President and the U.S. government had been humiliated and something must be done.”119 Bowles also described the President at this time as being in “a dangerous mood.”

  Bowles was one of the earliest to sense what was happening. He pleaded with the President to not let the situation “deteriorate into a head-to-head personal contest between the President of the United States and Fidel Castro.” The seasoned, experienced Bowles, realizing that the Kennedys were newcomers to foreign policy matters, feared that they were easy targets for “military-CIA-paramilitary type answers.”120

  Bowles himself had less reason than others to be stunned by Bobby’s Cabinet room exchange. He had earlier felt Bobby’s fury—a fury that others described as without bounds. The episode occurred when Bobby concluded, wrongly, that Bowles was the source of a leak to the press about opposition to the invasion. Bobby was convinced that the purpose of the leak was not to save the country from a huge mistake, but to embarrass his brother. Encountering Bowles in a corridor, he lashed out at him with scathing remarks, emphasizing them with pokes to the chest with his finger. Bowles later denied that physical contact occurred, but the denial may well have been diplomatic. “His teeth hurt from that finger in his chest,” a Bowles friend later remembered.121

  Bobby’s rage at Bowles persisted. A few months later—in the summer of 1961—he would call Bowles a “gutless bastard” for obstructing a plan to land troops on the Dominican Republic in order to install a friendly regime there.122 Bowles wrote that Bobby was “slamming into anyone who suggested we go slowly.” But the thrust of Bobby’s anger at the Undersecretary came from Bowles’ opposition to the Bay of Pigs adventure—opposition greatly justified, it turned out—and for what he felt was insufficient anti-Castro militancy. Unlike Jack, Bobby frequently and unrestrainedly spit out his animosity. He had “a tremendous capacity for love and hate,” as William Hundley, chief of the Organized Crime division in Kennedy’s Justice Department, put it. “You wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side.”123 And Castro was as far on his wrong side as possible.

  General Edward Lansdale, a counter-insurgency expert who later worked intimately with the Attorney General trying to destabilize Communist rule in Cuba, joined almost every observer in concluding that Bobby felt the April defeat even more strongly, and even more personally, than Jack. “He was protective of his brother, and he felt his brother had been insulted at the Bay of Pigs. He felt the insult needed to be redressed rather quickly.”124 This is not to say that President Kennedy could not be vengeful, or that his friends never felt the “cruel whip” of his arrogance and self-absorption.125 During Bobby’s Cabinet room expression of fury, Richard Goodwin watched the seemingly calm, relaxed president tap the tip of a pencil against his teeth. Goodwin knew this as a sign that “some inner tension was being suppressed.” He also knew “there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.” He became certain that Bobby’s anger represented the silent President’s own feelings, which he had privately communicated to his brother in advance.126

  It is also not to say that Jack, in his own way, didn’t want to settle the score with Castro as much as Bobby. A CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence felt that both brothers were “deeply ashamed after the Bay of Pigs, and they were quite obsessed with the problem of Cuba. They were a couple of Irishmen who felt they had muffed it. . . and being good fighting Irishmen, they vented their wrath in all ways that they could.”127

  According to documents held for 35 years, Che Guevara, Castro’s second in command, met with Kennedy’s Latin America advisor, Richard Goodwin, at a cocktail party four months later in Uruguay. At Guevara’s insisten
ce, Goodwin was brought to the 2 a.m. session, where he was offered a Cuban olive branch. Guevara’s proposal was sweepingly attractive: Cuba was ready to foreswear any political alliance to the USSR, pay for confiscated U.S. property, and consider ending its support for communist insurgents in the area. All Castro wanted in return was a Kennedy pledge to cease hostile operations against his regime.128 According to Goodwin (who, playing hardball politics as he had during the 1960 election, advised Kennedy against the idea), “Guevara’s proposal was never pursued.”129

  Castro rankled Kennedy more than could be explained by any real threat to American interests. Of course, some threat was there, but it in no way justified the out-of-proportion U.S. response. Many analysts have pointed out that America shared responsibility for the mutual antagonism between Washington and Havana—by backing the corrupt dictator Batista for so long, by failing to see Castro in the tradition of Simon Bolivar, as an expression of a yearning desire for liberation, and by resorting to a boycott too soon after Castro’s Marxist professions. Cuba had become for Kennedy what Khrushchev liked to call his “bone in the throat.” Presidential historian Michael Beschloss put it this way, “What he [JFK] resented more were the costly political choices forced upon him by Castro’s rise to power and his alliance with Moscow. He told friends that sooner or later, every politician acquired an albatross: ‘I’ve got Cuba.’”130

  The Kennedy Dynamic

  In his autobiography, published just prior to his death in 1996, the CIA’s Richard Bissell refers to fear of failure, an oft-described Kennedy family dynamic, and how it manifested itself in Jack and Bobby on the subject of Cuba:

  The Kennedys wanted action and they wanted it fast. Robert Kennedy was willing to look anywhere for a solution. . . From their perspective, Castro had won the first round at the Bay of Pigs. He had defeated the Kennedy team; they were bitter and they could not tolerate his getting away with it. The President and his brother were ready to avenge their personal embarrassment by overthrowing their enemy at any cost. To understand the Kennedy administration’s obsession with Cuba, it is important to understand the Kennedys, especially Robert.131

  Joe, the Kennedy patriarch, had used questionable and unscrupulous means in his drive to amass an immense fortune, and inculcated in his children a singular stress on the importance of winning. Joe was no ordinary father in his ambition for his children. Even after making himself extremely rich, he remained extraordinarily compelled to assert himself, partly through them. He raised his sons under an extremely rigorous set of values. As one biographer concluded, “Failure was not to be tolerated, passivity was a disgrace.”

  Kennedy family members agree on the key point of Joe’s child-rearing philosophy. “The thing he always kept telling us,” remarked Joe’s daughter Eunice, “was that coming in second was just no good. The important thing was to win—don’t come in second or third. That doesn’t count—but win, win, win.”132

  By all accounts, Joe Kennedy’s mandate as family patriarch achieved its fullest expression in Bobby. Most agree with the views of RFK biographers Lester and Irene David, who wrote, “He was just like the old man, Joseph Kennedy.”133 In describing her husband, Ethel Kennedy once said of Bobby:

  “For him, the world is divided into black and white hats. The white hats are for us,’ the black hats are ‘against us.’ Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad. Good things, in his eyes, are virility, courage, movement, and anger. He has no patience with the weak and the hesitant.”134

  A number of RFK acquaintances have volunteered that Bobby’s headstrong focus on results displayed a classic case of “short man complex.” Physically, he had no reason for a Napoleonic complex — he stood over five feet, nine inches tall. But he was small in comparison to his siblings—which, of course, was the milieu in which he developed. “In a fiercely competitive family,” Richard Goodwin noted, “[Bobby] had to battle more ferociously, recklessly, in order to hold his own.” “Bobby grew up to be the runt,” biographer William Shannon observed, “. . . in a family where all the other men were six feet or taller.”135 Bobby’s mother Rose recalled a fear that he might grow up puny and girlish because he was the smallest and thinnest of the boys—but “we soon realized there was no fear of that.” In fact, he went the opposite way, becoming a young man who had to distinguish himself daily to a family of “provers.” Some thought Bobby tried the hardest and accomplished the least, intellectually as well as physically. But his overriding qualities derived precisely from the attempt.136

  As Jack’s presidential campaign manager, the younger Bobby channeled his own thrusting ambition into becoming the elder brother’s servant, protector, henchman—and, when he felt it necessary—hatchet man. As an old friend of Jack, LeMoyne Billings, once observed, Bobby had “put his brother’s career absolutely first; and [cared] nothing about his own career whatsoever.”137 As Attorney General, and de facto intelligence czar, Bobby Kennedy realized that part of his job was to deflect criticism of his brother. “The President,” Bobby once said, “has to take so much responsibility that others should move forward to take the blame. People want someone higher to appeal to. . . It is better for ire and anger to be directed somewhere else.”138

  Bobby became the caustic, ornery executive officer who cracked down on his shipmates in order to run a tight ship for his beloved skipper—beloved, in Jack’s case, because of his personal charm. The executive officer doesn’t care that he is hated, because that comes with the job. A high CIA official once said that Bobby “always talked like he was the President, and he really was in a way.”139 Bobby was much more than Jack’s right-hand man. He would also become the prime mover—inspirer and instigator—of some of the most secret (and dangerous) facets of the President’s personal foreign policy.

  “He’s always been a lightning rod for Jack, trying to take the heat away from the presidency. It’s not important what happens to him. What is important is what happens to Jack. I would say few men have ever loved a brother more.” So spoke Bobby’s successor, Ramsey Clark, Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson.140 From the standpoint of presidential deniability, this seemed to play nicely when Bobby took charge of the Cuban initiatives.

  On the difference between Jack and Bobby, Papa Joe once remarked, “Not that Jack isn’t just as courageous, but Bobby feels more strongly for or against people than Jack does—just as I do.”141 Another remark by his father was more direct: “Everyone in my family forgives—except Bobby.”142 This trait was also a chip off Papa Joe, who once said of himself, “When I hate some son of a bitch, I hate him till I die.”143 Jack was incomparably better than Bobby at controlling his expressions of displeasure, reducing them to a dismissal or cold stare. Bobby tended to get hot quickly, releasing his fury indiscriminately

  Jack, too, was competitive in his way, and could be quite aggressive. For example, newsman Walter Cronkite years later recalled how he felt JFK’s wrath during the 1960 campaign. Cronkite had asked Kennedy about the impact of his Catholicism on the election. Cronkite later learned that a furious JFK contacted CBS president Frank Stanton and bellowed, “When I become president, I get to name the members of the FCC, which controls your license [to operate].”144

  But Bobby’s competitiveness had a rawness to it, and Jack’s did not. This difference reflected itself in their domestic life styles. While the White House glowed with grace, elegance, and culture, Hickory Hill, Bobby’s estate in nearby McLean, Virginia, was a place where he challenged his guests to physical encounters. No one ever broke a bone visiting Jack, “but chipped fingers, wrist fractures, loosened teeth, torn muscles and ligaments, and even broken legs were not uncommon at Hickory Hill,” as one RFK biographer put it.145

  Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary, made a skillful stab at summing up the brothers’ dissimilarities. “The difference between Bobby and Jack,” Lincoln offered, “was this: Jack was evolutionary, Bobby was revolutionary.”146 Her observation was quite perceptive. A photographer coveri
ng Bobby once suggested to him that he was really a revolutionary. After some thought, Bobby acknowledged that the photographer, in a large sense, was right.147 He was a revolutionary in the way he attacked whatever issues were on his agenda at the moment. While Jack, the cool skeptic, was keenly aware of the value of good appearances, Bobby, the firebrand, often appeared disheveled, just like a good revolutionary should. While Jack liked ideas, Bobby preferred action. Kennedy aide Harris Wofford observed during his brother’s administration, “[Bobby] was always saying, ‘Don’t sit there thinking, do something!’”148

  These differences between the brothers were not absolute. But in terms of how they expressed their antipathy to “that guy with the beard,” as Bobby often called Castro, they were very important. They helped explain why the younger brother was “a man driven by demons” in the secret war with Cuba. “Bobby was emotional as he could be,” Ray Cline, Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, would remember. “He was always bugging the Agency about the Cubans.”149

  The personal differences also explained why the White House’s chief occupant could have been pictured as a man of peace—which he was in many critical ways not concerning Cuba—while his brother, his trusted right hand, was deep in Florida’s Everglades, on secret visits to personally supervise quasi-legal acts of war against Fidel Castro and the sovereign nation of Cuba. This was the Bobby who, with his heavy preference for action over contemplation, was “fascinated by all that covert stuff, counter-insurgence, and all the garbage that went with it,” as Undersecretary of State George Ball once put it.150 This was also the brother whom no one had to like because he wasn’t running for anything, or furthering his own ego, but merely serving Jack. And it was the brother so widely known as ruthless by those who worked with and under him.