by Gerard Colby
In Guatemala, the U.S. military mission made no secret of its favoring the generals who had overthrown President Ydígoras in March. Ydígoras was considered unreliable and too corrupt to crush a new guerrilla insurgency. The elections slated for November, which Jacobo Arbenz’s predecessor, ex-President Juan Arévalo, was expected to win, were never held. Three years later, when escalation of violence in Guatemala and Vietnam was being justified as a Kennedy-originated response to communist subversion, columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who enjoyed access to the intelligence community, reported that “top sources within the Kennedy administration” had told her that Kennedy authorized the coup after a majority of the Latin American experts he consulted recommended it.45 But the purported participants not only denied Kennedy’s giving any green light, they insisted that the meeting never took place.46 Some experts believed that an Arávalo government, perhaps including Ydígoras’s ally Roberto Alegos, brother of the ambassador to the United States and host of the CIA training camp for the Bay of Pigs, was Kennedy’s preferred option to avoid greater unrest and prevent guerrilla war from spreading.47
Other patterns in the coups, including beneficiaries, were not so obvious. One of the beneficiaries was the New Orleans-based Standard Fruit and Steamship Company. Standard Fruit and United Fruit were the major figures in the “banana boom” in Ecuador that Nelson’s friend, President Galo Plaza, sponsored (with the advice of IBEC) as a substitute for lost oil revenues when Standard Oil and Shell withdrew from Ecuador in the late 1940s.
David Rockefeller’s Latin American Division of Chase Bank was Standard Fruit’s transfer agent for its stock. Standard Fruit owned more than 600,000 acres in the Caribbean-basin countries, not counting Cuban lands expropriated by the Castro government in 1960.
Standard kept offices in New York to oversee marketing. Its central offices, however, were in New Orleans. There, some directors and executives vented their rage against Castro by supporting CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles led by Manuel Artime.48
Artime, at the CIA’s insistence,49 had been selected head of the exiles’ brigade by the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), the official sponsor of the Bay of Pigs invasion. “His youth, his military experience, his political inexperience and his personal tractability,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Artime, “all recommended him to the CIA field operatives.”50 After the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, Artime became the CIA’s instrument for continued raids on Cuba. He was directly tied to the Agency’s “executive action” assassination plots against Castro through his association with mobster Santos Trafficante and Castro’s deputy intelligence chief, Rolando Cubela, an assassin code-named by the CIA as AM/LASH. Artime set up a CIA-backed guerrilla training camp at Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Standard Fruit employee Manuel Gil, a veteran of the CRC, was a key supporter of the camp through another CIA front, the Information Council of the Americas. CRC’s New Orleans office at 544 Camp Street, in turn, was in a building owned by the local longshoremen’s union controlled by mobster Carlos Marcello (who shared in the proceeds of Havana’s gambling empire and lost it all when came the revolution). Standard Fruit, which reportedly acquiesced in the Mob’s control over New York’s Pier 13, had long collaborated with the CIA in countries where it did business; like most American companies in the Third World, it put order at a high premium.51
The Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was a key financial backer of the Lake Pontchartrain camp. Somoza’s secret agents were active throughout Central America, particularly in Mexico City, and collaborated regularly with the clandestine activities branch of the CIA, headed by J. C. King, and with the intelligence-gathering activities of American corporations in Central America.
In 1963, the Somoza clan hosted Manuel Artime as he began to organize a second invasion of Cuba. This second invasion, like the CIA’s renewed assassination plots through AM/LASH, was never authorized by Kennedy and was in direct violation of the presidential ban on assassinations. Nevertheless, the Somozas provided Artime with a base in Nicaragua to which the Lake Pontchartrain trainees were to be sent. As late as October 1963, ignoring Kennedy’s ban against raids on Cuba “launched, manned or equipped from U.S. territory,” Artime launched a raid from Florida using the Rex, a Florida-based ship owned by the Somozas and skippered by Eugenio R. Martínez, a CIA operative and Bay of Pigs veteran who would later earn fame as one of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate burglars.
Although Kennedy secretly had authorized the Special Group to mount a CIA sabotage program against Cuba “to nourish the spirit of resistance” and pressure Castro to move Cuba’s foreign policy away from the Soviet Union’s, Artime’s raid was not among the approved projects.
The continued unauthorized raids on Cuba frustrated the Kennedy White House, and in October the culmination in Honduras of the great wave of military coups forced the administration to recognize that it had better change its policy if it wished to avoid embarrassment.
The net effect of these coups was the administration’s serious reevaluation of its emphasis on democratic governments, social reforms, and civilian authority as the bedrock for economic growth in Latin America. In October, Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Martin acknowledged that civilian rule could not be maintained by “keeping a man in office by use of [U.S.] economic pressure or even military force, when his own people are not willing to fight to defend him.” If the military did go beyond “the most constructive peacetime role of maintaining internal security and working on civil action programs” and carry out coups, then “we must use our leverage to keep these new [military] regimes as liberal and considerate of the welfare of the people as possible.”
Many would consider this policy a return to traditional U.S. acceptance of dictatorships in the region. Martin tried to mollify concerns by denying that Kennedy had abandoned democratic ideals. At the same time, he also defended the value of a more cynical Realpolitik that spared the administration defeats as the 1964 elections approached. “I fear that there are some who will accuse me of having written an apology for coups. I have not. They are to be fought with all the means we have available. Rather, I would protest that I am urging the rejection of the thesis of the French philosophers that democracy can be legislated—established by constitutional fiat.”52
Despite the sobering series of coups, Kennedy felt more confident about his chances for reelection. The Cuban missile crisis had given him such popularity that he now thought a thaw in the Cold War might be politically feasible for the first time since the CIA’s U-2 affair wrecked the 1960 Summit. In western states, the president found the normally conservative audiences surprisingly enthusiastic when he talked about peace and the test ban. He took this theme right into the supposed heart of Goldwater country, at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah, and got a five-minute standing ovation. It convinced him that the Far Right was overrated and that he could easily beat Goldwater.
Kennedy was convinced that he also could hold his liberal base against any Rockefeller raid; in fact, his trip west showed that he could widen his appeal for peace without fear. He had come to terms with himself, the Russians, and the American people. His suggestion in August that peaceful coexistence was possible had been hailed. His decision in October to sell wheat to the Soviet Union was accepted by most Americans as a profitable gesture of goodwill. His quiet reduction of the CIA’s budget in 1962 and 1963, which had been twice the size of the State Department’s when he arrived, had been achieved without flack, and he hoped for a 20 percent reduction by 1966.53 Although shaken by the murders of Diem and Nhu, Kennedy thought that the more liberal General Minh seemed to be taking control.
He felt confident. Too confident.
In the interest of Democratic party unity in Texas, a state that was crucial for a big victory over any Rockefeller or Goldwater southern strategy, he agreed to Governor John Connally’s plea that he go to Dallas.
The Dallas trip was vintage Kennedy, a far cry from Rockefeller’s tendency to be overcautious
when confronted by controversy. Nelson, hit by the issue that could cripple his candidacy—his divorce and remarriage—chose evasion. Rather than seize the issue and shape it by calling for liberal reforms of the state’s divorce laws, Nelson took shelter by calling the issue “a personal matter.” It won him no credit, especially when he took his pregnant wife on the campaign trail, as if his insisting that voters accept her presence was an effective way to address the issue. It was not.
Kennedy, on the other hand, had not hidden behind the “personal” when his 1960 campaign was threatened by the issue of papal edicts on Catholic behavior in civil life. He defined the issue as a political one, but on his own terms: the separation of church and state. Resting his case on solid constitutional grounds, he settled for most Americans the issue of religion in the campaign.
Now Kennedy would try to do the same with the issue of peace. He ignored the warnings from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been physically attacked in Dallas in September, and from Senator William Fulbright, who also had encountered ugly crowds. He also ignored the fact that the Secret Service had investigated thirty-four threats on his life from Texas alone since 1961.
Dallas was clear and sunny on November 22, when the Dallas Morning News appeared with a full-page advertisement charging Kennedy with having “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow.’”54 The advertisement, which listed a series of provocative charges that all but indicted the president for treason, had secretly been paid for by a group that included the local John Birch Society leader and Nelson Bunker Hunt, H. L. Hunt’s son.55 “How can people write such things?” Kennedy asked after seeing the ad.56
If Texas was the newest of the new-wealth states, Dallas was its capital in the raw, a booming oil city of white shirts with string ties and Stetsons, where the Stennis family set the example for real estate speculators by making a fortune off land deals and nonunion industrial parks, where the myth of machismo ran wild and the murder rate was twice the national average. It was in Dallas where a recently uprooted rural population, which had doubled the city’s citizenry since World War II, were besieged by a barrage of right-wing hysteria and Fundamentalist absolutism.
Kennedy shrugged off concerns, telling Jacqueline and aide Kenneth O’Donnell that there was little the Secret Service could do if a man wanted to get on a high building with a telescopic rifle. And any way, Dallas Mayor Earl Cabell had promised a cheerful reception.
The president planned to deliver a speech at Trammel Crow’s Trade Mart on the need for balancing a strong defense with a recognition of the world’s craving for social justice. Here, in the heart of the Dallas–Fort Worth military-industrial complex, he would make a plea for strength tempered by reason in a nuclear age.
Mayor Cabell greeted the president warmly, even though Kennedy had fired his brother, General Charles Cabell, as the CIA’s deputy director after the Bay of Pigs.
Secretary of State Rusk was flying to Japan for negotiations, when Air Force II suddenly lost all communication with Washington. At that moment bullets raced beyond sound in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza.
French journalist Jean Daniel, acting as Kennedys secret envoy to Havana, was with Fidel Castro when the news reached Cuba. Castro considered it a bad turn for his country. He had been eager to establish communication with the United States, using journalist Lisa Howard to pass the word on to the administration’s special U.N. adviser, William Atwood. Kennedy had cut the CIA out of the information loop, not wanting the Agency to know.57
“Did the CIA kill my brother?”58 Robert Kennedy confronted John McCone after the assassination. No, McCone assured him, ignorant of the CIA’s assassination plots after the Bay of Pigs, or so McCone would claim. But the attorney general remained skeptical. Right after the assassination, he had called the CIA to ask a startled duty officer, “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?”59
Years later, when he heard that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was about to bring indictments against CIA operatives whom Garrison claimed had known Lee Harvey Oswald, he sent an aide to investigate. Garrison charged that he had uncovered evidence that Oswald had been in league with three CIA operatives: Clay Shaw, a director of the New Orleans Trade Mart; George de Mohrenschildt, a Dallas oil geologist and White Russian émigré who befriended Oswald’s Russian wife; and David Ferrie, an instructor at the Lake Pontchartrain training camp when it was raided by the FBI and closed in September, in compliance with the Cuban Missile deal. Ferrie was also the pilot who had been hired to return Carlos Marcello illegally from El Salvador after the New Orleans Mafia chief’s deportation to Guatemala by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The younger Kennedy, skeptical of Garrison but intrigued by the possibility that his brother was a victim of conspiracy, asked press secretary Frank Mankiewicz if Garrison “had anything.” “No, but I think there is something,” said Mankiewicz. “So do I,” said Kennedy, nodding. “You stay on it.”60 But after Robert Kennedy’s own assassination in 1968, Mankiewicz had had enough.
Nelson Rockefeller was lunching with Thomas Dewey, preparing for a campaign trip to New Hampshire where the first presidential primary was scheduled for March, when he got word of Kennedy’s murder. He immediately ordered all flags on state buildings flown at half mast and canceled speeches for a month of mourning. Three days later, Rockefeller walked solemnly amid the crowd of dignitaries that followed the funeral procession escorting the young president to his grave.
Nelson called the loss a “terrible tragedy.” He left eloquence, however, to his friend, Alberto Lleras Camargo: “For Latin America, Kennedy’s passing is a blackening, a tunnel, a gust of cloud and smoke.”61
Only a few days after the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy, the children, and the late president’s personal effects were gone, spirited out of the White House with such haste that the attorney general had snapped at the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, “Can’t you wait?”62
Johnson was now firmly in power, accepting offers of help on Latin America from Adolf Berle and David Rockefeller. The new president, acting on the advice of CIA Director McCone, quickly replaced both Assistant Secretary of State Edward Martin and AID Director Teodoro Moscoso with Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, who had announced earlier, after rumors circulated that he had been involved in the planning of the coup in Guatemala, that he was retiring.
Johnson brought his fellow Texan in from the cold to combine both the Department of State and AID into one mailed fist for American business abroad. As Johnson quietly reversed Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam, Mann focused on Brazil. Both countries would become milestones in American history, Vietnam as a disaster, Brazil as a triumph. And with Brazil’s military coup, J. C. King would at last return to the shining dream of thirty years past: the Amazon.
VI
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.
—MATTHEW 2:16–18
28
TO TURN A CONTINENT
THE HARDENED FACE
News of John Kennedy’s murder sent a shudder through Brazil. Then came grief such as had not been shown for the death of any foreign leader since President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As then, Brazilians sensed that the world had taken a dramatic turn. A shroud had been hung over the face of the future, making the loss of Kennedy so unexpectedly personal. In Rio de Janeiro, rivers of grief swept through the streets as lines of people converged to mourn at the U.S. Embassy.
Ambassador Lincoln Gordon was startled by the emotional crowds and what they could mean for President Lyndon B. Joh
nson in Latin America. “The experience we had that Friday afternoon and evening and the following weekend, I suppose, was repeated all over the world,” he later recalled. “But in Rio it was a most dramatic thing. We opened a book at the chancery and another one at our residence, and over that weekend we had a line of people stretching for three or four blocks. It was continuous, day and night, of every class of person, every type, poor, rich, middle class, most of them weeping. It was a most extraordinary outpouring of emotion. So as a reaction to that, there would inevitably be some doubts about Kennedy’s successor.”1
There was no doubt in Washington’s higher circles, however, about Lyndon Johnson. The former Senate majority leader was no maverick like Kennedy. He was the classic insider among Washington’s power brokers. Ironically, Vice President Johnson was an outsider within the Kennedy administration, not only to the Kennedys, but even to conservative Texans who believed that he had betrayed them. He had not. But he could not tell them his true feelings without betraying President Kennedy and isolating himself further.
Nelson Rockefeller saw Johnson’s agony at the 1963 Governors Conference. Johnson “was a mighty discouraged man,” Nelson recalled. “I knew him pretty well and I really felt for him.… He was making a speech … that no more reflected his thinking than the man in the moon. He was given a speech which he had to give because it was the Administration’s position.”2 White House aide Arthur Schlesinger wrote of the differences: “The Vice President disagreed with administration tactics in 1963 on a number of points—on the civil rights bill, on the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, on selling wheat to the Soviet Union, on Vietnam.”3
Now, after three years of suffering in silence, Johnson wanted to show his own worth. And to do that, he did what came naturally: He listened to the wise men in the central core of Washington’s unelected state apparatus, men of wealth and influence and armies, who were accustomed to ruling while others merely held office.
