Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Walinsky shared Goodwin’s skepticism about the Warren Report, whose ballistics theory he found “completely tortured and strange.” But, following his boss’s lead, he learned to keep his suspicions about Dallas to himself. Goodwin, on the other hand, “would talk openly about the assassination,” said Walinsky, launching into an imitation of his distinctive mumbling growl. “‘It was the CIA, the Mafia…’ The senator would be in the room or around. But he was always extremely guarded. One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious. Serious people, when faced with something like that—you don’t speculate out loud about it. You might ask a question. That’s all. It’s a matter of mental discipline.”

  Until he could win the White House, Kennedy was convinced, there was nothing he could do to solve his brother’s assassination. And even then, Bobby realized, his task would be daunting. “He had an acute understanding of how difficult that kind of investigation is, even if you had all the power of the presidency,” Walinsky said. “If there is something there, you can’t possibly find it out unless you’re the president of the United States. And even then you may not, but that’s the only chance.”

  And so Kennedy bided his time, waiting for his opportunity to return to power. But, in the meantime, events started to rush past him. By 1967, a decisive majority of Americans—60 percent—believed that President Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy. Public opinion had shifted dramatically since the publication of the Warren Report, when only 31 percent of the country suspected a plot. This was largely the result of the tireless assassination critics, whose voluminous work Kennedy’s staff struggled to stay up with. “We were drowning in it,” Walinsky recalled. “You can’t believe how much of that stuff there was. I had a big shelf with all that stuff. But we never discussed it. Never.” Everyone in Kennedy’s office knew the number one goal: to get him elected president. Until that was accomplished, nothing was possible.

  Still, the pressures mounted on RFK to comment on the Warren Report. A London Observer review of the Epstein book, reprinted August 13, 1966 in the San Francisco Chronicle, pointedly commented, “How long the dead president’s political heir can manage to maintain even a non-committal attitude is perhaps the most intriguing question in American politics today.”

  Bobby was asking himself the same question. In October 1966, drinking into the wee hours with Arthur Schlesinger at P.J. Clarke’s saloon, his favorite New York watering hole, RFK wondered “how long he could continue to avoid comment on the [Warren] Report,” Schlesinger later noted. Bobby believed the report was “a poor job,” the historian observed, but he was still “unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic business.”

  Kennedy’s silence on the issue was used by Warren Report defenders to fend off critics. Surely if the president’s own brother—the top lawman in the country at the time—did nothing to pursue the case, there must be nothing there, they said. It must have been particularly galling for Bobby to hear this from one of President Johnson’s advisors. John P. Roche, a Brandeis University professor on leave as LBJ’s “intellectual in residence” at the White House, denounced conspiracy researchers as “marginal paranoids” in a widely publicized letter to the London Times Literary Supplement, arguing that RFK’s support for the Warren Report was proof of its validity.

  If he had known about it, Kennedy would have found even more grotesque a secret CIA document that recommended using his silence on the Warren Report to counter critics. The January 1967 memo—which was distributed to CIA media assets at the New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, and elsewhere—suggested ways of “countering and discrediting the claims of conspiracy theorists,” whose growing impact on public opinion at home and abroad the agency found alarming. “Innuendo of such seriousness affects…the whole reputation of the American government,” the memo grimly noted—including that of the CIA itself. “Conspiracy theorists have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.” The memo listed a number of arguments that could be used by CIA-friendly journalists to knock down the work of conspiracy authors. Among them: “Note that Robert Kennedy, attorney general at the time and John F. Kennedy’s brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy.”

  At least one of Bobby’s friends in the press, CBS News producer Don Hewitt, found the nerve to confront him on the growing controversy over the assassination. Hewitt—who produced the legendary Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 and later created 60 Minutes—was drinking iced tea with Kennedy one morning in the backyard of Hickory Hill when he decided “with more guts than brains to ask him the big one, the million dollar question—‘Bobby, do you really believe Lee Harvey Oswald, all by himself, killed your brother?’

  “He dismissed the question with almost studied indifference,” Hewitt later recalled, giving the TV newsman his usual conversation-stopper. “What difference does it make? It won’t bring him back.”

  But the savvy journalist knew when he was being handed a line. “I never believed that Bobby believed ‘What difference does it make.’ I’ve always believed that he knew something he didn’t want to share with me or anyone else.”

  Hewitt himself came to suspect that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy—because of “things I’ve learned since,” he told me recently. “Like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were not strangers. Ruby was a gangster of sorts who was asked by Oswald’s uncle to take good care of his nephew. I’ve always believed that Ruby went to that police station on a mission to make sure that Oswald didn’t talk…. So many things [about the case] just don’t add up.”

  The broadcast news veteran speculates that “disgruntled CIA types” might have been behind the assassination. “I have heard from some of those White House plumber types that their real bitch with Jack Kennedy was denying air cover for their comrades at the Bay of Pigs, and maybe someone decided to get even for that. That’s the best theory I can come up with.” Unknown to Hewitt at the time, Bobby was thinking along similar lines.

  Hewitt is certain that Kennedy would have gone after his brother’s killers with a vengeance when the time was right. “Bobby was relentless in his pursuit of wrongdoing,” he said. “When he said that to me about it not making a difference, I couldn’t help thinking, Bobby, you’re fucking lying to me.”

  In 1967, a gaudy Louisiana legal spectacle would make it harder than ever for Kennedy to keep his silence.

  7

  NEW ORLEANS

  As New York’s junior senator, Robert Kennedy continued to draw on the services of the Irish mafia loyalists who had long served him and his brother, like political aide Joe Dolan. But his Senate staff included some new faces as well—men who were neither Boston Irish nor Harvard intellectuals. One day, during a meeting in his Capitol Hill office, Kennedy gazed at the men around him. Frank Mankiewicz. Adam Walinsky. Peter Edelman. Jeff Greenfield. There was not a Catholic among them. “You realize, fellows, that I’m the only one here who is going to go to heaven,” he dryly observed.

  He inspired an intense devotion among his staff. He was tough, but had a wounded vulnerability; he was demanding, but returned their unstinting loyalty. He combined a shrewdness about American politics with a soaring view of the country’s possibilities that his aides found utterly unique and intoxicating.

  Mankiewicz—who had gone to work as Kennedy’s press secretary at age forty-two, making him one of the older staff members—first fell under RFK’s spell in 1965 during a State Department meeting where Bobby discussed his forthcoming trip to Latin America. Mankiewicz was head of the Peace Corps’ Latin American division at the time. He had abandoned a promising career at a Hollywood law firm to join JFK’s New Frontier. “My wife, Holly, and I decided that if I stayed with the firm, within ten years we’d have this terrific house and a lot of money, but nobody would care if we had lived or died, except perhaps our mothers,” Mankiewicz later recalled.

  After JFK’s
death, Mankiewicz stayed on with the new administration, but his heart was with the Kennedy cause. At the State Department meeting, RFK and President Johnson’s Latin American team—headed by a prickly bureaucrat named Jack Vaughn—stared frostily at one another across the conference table. Bobby inquired what he should say when he got to Brazil and was asked about the brutal CIA-backed military coup that had recently overthrown the elected government there. The Brazil desk officer, consulting a piece of paper, responded, “You could say, ‘While we regret that a great power has decided to temporarily suspend democratic liberties—’” Kennedy quickly cut off the bureaucratic cant. “I don’t talk like that,” he said firmly.

  Mankiewicz, who had been pushed to the left by his Latin American experience, was impressed by Kennedy’s refusal to mouth the administration line. At the Peace Corps, he had found that the young volunteers were always on the side of social change in the medieval societies in which they were assigned to work. “But whenever people in Latin America tried to emulate the American Revolution,” Mankiewicz observed, “the U.S. government tried to emulate George III. It radicalized me.” Now, sitting before him was a political leader who shared his views about the role the United States should play in poverty-stricken Third World countries. Shortly after the State Department meeting, Mankiewicz signed on with Kennedy as his press spokesman.

  The balding, rumpled Mankiewicz had an unusual background for a Senate aide. He came from a legendary Hollywood family. His uncle, the writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, won an Academy Award for All About Eve and produced other screen classics like The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year. His father, Herman, won an Academy Award for writing Citizen Kane. Herman Mankiewicz had come west to make his fortune after working as the drama editor for the The New Yorker. “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots,” he notified his friend and fellow journalist Ben Hecht in a telegram. “Don’t let this get around.” Notoriously boozy, and belligerent to his Hollywood paymasters, Mankiewicz sought refuge from the crass torments of the movie industry by recreating his old Algonquin Round Table in his Beverly Hills home. Luminaries like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, James Thurber, and Orson Welles traipsed through young Frank’s childhood.

  “Nobody would give you an argument if you said my father was a self-destructive man,” Mankiewicz would later remark. To ensure that the screenwriter completed the masterpiece that would make them both legends, Citizen Kane director Welles had his often thirsty co-creator locked away in a cabin in the dreary desert town of Victorville. Nonetheless, the elder Mankiewicz instilled in his son the values that would draw him to Robert Kennedy. “He was a gambler, and he probably was an alcoholic, but those are not sins,” Frank recalled about his father. “He never stole from the poor, he never fired anybody on Christmas. He was a good man. Most of all, he was funny and furious. I thought he was a terrific father. He told me what things were important. I believed him. I still do.”

  With Kennedy, Mankiewicz could dream about all the ways the country might change, and since Kennedy was widely assumed to be in line for the throne, there was always the expectation it could all come true. “As a senator, Bobby got a deeper and deeper sense that race and poverty were tearing apart the country, how these problems could destroy us,” Mankiewicz said recently. He was sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the Watergate building, overlooking the Potomac. In his mid-eighties now, he wears hearing aids in both ears; grayer and rounder, he huffs as he hefts his body around in his swivel chair. But he still works every day as a Washington lobbyist, holding the title of vice chairman at Hill & Knowlton, the public relations powerhouse. It’s the longest job he’s ever held down, but he knows that when he dies, the headlines will identify him as a “Kennedy aide” and that will be fine with him. On the walls, next to posters of Citizen Kane and other movies written by his father, are framed memorabilia of his years with Bobby, including a Camus quote that was a Kennedy favorite: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”

  “Every once in a while, at the end of the day in the Senate, when Bobby didn’t have to rush off somewhere, we would drift into his office and sit and talk,” Mankiewicz continued. “He’d ask us, ‘What’s going on? Frank, what are you reading? Adam, Peter, who’s doing the best work on education these days?’ I remember when the race riots were raging in Newark and Detroit and LBJ was calling for a day of mourning—as if that were going to do anything. And we asked him, ‘If you were president, what would you do?’

  “He thought about it and then he said, ‘I’d call in the heads of the three TV networks and I’d sit them down and tell them what a terrible problem this was for the country and I would tell them that they should devote a whole month of prime-time programming to what it was like to be black in America, what it was like to live with two or three generations of poverty, to have your brother be the first one to graduate from school and still not be able to get a job, to wake up in the morning and see rats around your baby’s crib.’ He said that you could show all that graphically on TV, and it might be able to change things.”

  Though Mankiewicz had not been one of Kennedy’s band of brothers at the Justice Department, he soon established himself as one of his trusted inner circle. The Californian was the type of man whom Bobby felt he could rely on, with the requisite combination of brains, guts, and heart. Despite his privileged background, Mankiewicz had served as an infantryman in Europe during World War II. “Very few people there were from Beverly Hills,” he remarked. He later worked briefly as a journalist before studying law at Berkeley and becoming an entertainment industry lawyer. Kennedy trusted his press aide’s shrewd instincts.

  When the controversy around the Kennedy assassination reached a fever pitch in early 1967, as news broke that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was reopening the investigation, Mankiewicz was one of the select few to whom Bobby turned to help him get a better grasp of the case. One day, walking together through an airport, Kennedy and Mankiewicz were confronted with the suddenly omnipresent face of Jim Garrison—his wide-set eyes burning with a messianic intensity—on a newsstand’s magazine racks. Bobby pointed at the magazine covers and asked his aide, “Does that guy have anything?”

  “I’m not sure that he does, but there is something there,” Mankiewicz replied. Kennedy’s aide had never accepted the Warren Report. “I just didn’t believe that a high-school dropout could’ve planned the whole thing.”

  “I want you to look into this, read everything you can,” Kennedy instructed Mankiewicz, “so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.”

  Mankiewicz turned himself into “an assassination buff,” he later recalled, poring over the piles of books and monographs on the subject and quizzing conspiracy researchers like Ray Marcus, who brought big blowups of his Dealey Plaza photos to Mankiewicz’s Maryland home. “I came to the conclusion that there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue CIA agents,” said Mankiewicz. “Every so often I would bring this up with Bobby. I told him who I thought was involved. But it was like he just couldn’t focus on it. He’d get this look of pain, or more like numbness, on his face. It just tore him apart.”

  Mankiewicz’s conclusions about the assassination mirrored those of Kennedy himself. Hearing them voiced by a trusted aide must have made them starkly real for Kennedy. And they must have, once again, filled him with an immobilizing sense of guilt, since the conspiracy described by his aide grew out of the very groups he was supposed to be controlling for his brother. The prospect of confronting this conspiracy, with its powerful government connections, was clearly still paralyzing for Kennedy.

  In public, Kennedy continued to deflect questions about the assassination with an icy resolve. Joe McGinnis, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist at the time, observed the senator during one such painfully awkward moment in December 19
66. After a long day of visiting antipoverty centers, Kennedy was waiting on the platform at the North Philadelphia train station to ride back to New York. As usual, there were no bodyguards to fend off overly friendly or threatening intrusions. It was just Bobby, standing without a topcoat on the frigid platform, brushing back his shock of wind-swept hair. “He looked small and cold and, for just those few seconds, like a little boy who was lost,” McGinnis observed. Suddenly, a radio reporter pushed his way through the small circle gathered around Bobby, and after exchanging some idle remarks with Kennedy, he inched his way toward the inevitable question. McGinnis knew what it was “and it made you want to leave because you knew what was going to happen would be awful.”

  Taking a deep breath, the radio reporter began, “Senator, with all the recent criticism of the Warren Commission…”

  Kennedy immediately cut him off. “I don’t discuss that.” His voice, hard and sharp, would have silenced all but the most persistent journalists. As Kennedy batted away the question, the muscles in his clenched face visibly twitched. But, horribly for everyone witnessing the spectacle, the radio man pushed on. It was his job, and he was gutsy to do it.

  “I know you haven’t discussed it in the past, but our district attorney here, Arlen Specter—” The reporter got no further than invoking the name of the former Warren Commission attorney (and future senator from Pennsylvania) who helped concoct the magic bullet theory. Again, Kennedy cut off the reporter. “I said I don’t discuss that. At all.” And this time his voice was full of such barely suppressed rage that even the dogged reporter fell silent.

  Everybody looked down at their shoes until the train “mercifully” came, recalled McGinnis. And then, as he stepped forward to board the train, Kennedy did something to pull the reporter out of the hole where he had banished him, “even though,” observed McGinnis, “he must have wanted to put the radio man’s head on the tracks and let the train run over his mouth.” Kennedy stretched out his hand to the man, and looking him directly in the eyes, said, “Goodbye. Nice to have seen you.”