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

by Talbot, David

  In the backyard was a vast, sunken private museum filled with the plundered treasures of Inca civilization, room after room with display cases of gold artifacts, breast plates, knives, shields. This is where the wealth of Peru’s Indian population had disappeared—buried in the backyard of one obscenely fortunate man.

  Kennedy’s growing sense of outrage began to focus on the strutting Latin generals, with their rows of self-bestowed medals, who acted as the enforcers for these corrupt regimes. “He had a deep distrust and abhorrence of the military in general,” observed Walinsky, “and of the kind of repressive military that you got in Latin America in particular.” Kennedy found it intolerable to see the blank-staring soldiers with their ominously pointed machine guns everywhere on the streets. As the crowds surged around Kennedy, the soldiers were always roughly shoving people and beating them with their gun butts. Once, in exasperation, Ethel punched a policeman in the stomach outside a reception where people were being brutally handled.

  Kennedy also turned his anger on the U.S. officials who served to prop up the exploitive system—a system from which American corporations reaped huge rewards. “I mean in Latin America what you were talking about basically was a kind of cabal between the Johnson State Department…and these companies to just basically rape the countries they were dealing with,” said Walinsky, reflecting Kennedy’s attitude.

  The senator knew that he was being carefully monitored by his own government during his trip. At U.S. embassy meetings, he would delight in calling on the CIA agents in the room to identify themselves. Once, in Recife, Brazil, a man actually did raise his hand. “Absolute fool,” spat Walinsky, who shared Kennedy’s disgust with the agency’s local representatives. Kennedy dismissed the CIA men they encountered on the trip as “just awful, just morons.”

  The CIA agent in Recife tried to scare Kennedy out of appearing at a local college, telling him the crowd would be “too dangerous, too left-wing.” Police had just arrested three local students for plotting to throw acid in the U.S. senator’s face—although the credibility of such official claims was always questionable under Brazil’s new military dictatorship. Kennedy blew off the CIA man’s warnings. The audience turned out to be “the mildest kind of students in the world, and 90 percent of them were girls,” Walinsky recalled.

  Kennedy was not greeted as a liberator everywhere in South America. In some places, the Kennedy name still meant the Bay of Pigs and the assassination attempts on Castro. “I’m tired of all these Latins attacking me for going after Castro,” he griped to Goodwin. “The fact is that I’m the guy who saved his life.” Kennedy was still in the dark about the CIA’s ongoing efforts to kill the Cuban leader, which continued even then, long after he and his brother thought they had put a stop to the plots.

  At Concepción University in Chile, a hundred Communist students in the audience heckled him, spit on his face, and threw eggs at him. They missed, splattering his aides instead. “If these kids are going to be young revolutionaries,” he told Seigenthaler as they emerged from the barrage, “they’re going to have to improve their aim.”

  But everywhere else he went, the crowds exulted over Kennedy. Later, in the streets of Concepción, the throng of people who pressed around him grew so frenzied that he clambered on top of a police car and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to calm them. They threw flower petals at him in Linares, Chile, and he was given a standing ovation by a hundred thousand people at a soccer game in Rio. It was not simply his reform brand of Catholicism that connected Kennedy to the South American crowds, said Walinksy—it was more his Irishness. It had to do, he said, with “that whole history of the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds…with that whole thing about what it was to come to this country Irish and to struggle your way up in Boston.” It was a heritage that had kept the younger Kennedys “from being a bunch of stiff rich prigs,” said Walinsky. “Understanding, really in your gut, something of what it was to have been poor and to have struggled up.”

  As he did later in South Africa, Kennedy came to see that he could profoundly shake up the South American societies he visited. “He really did conceive of this as a kind of international politics in which he was trying to bring about changes in policy inside those countries,” Walinsky said. “You may think that’s a great act of hubris, but indeed he had the potential to do it and to some degree he probably did.”

  But Kennedy knew that his power came from his brother’s legacy, and he could only complete JFK’s mission by embroiling himself in the growing political maelstrom back home. His brother’s ghost was everywhere he went in South America, from the moment he landed in Lima to the end of the trip. Walking off the plane with Bobby in Lima—to ecstatic shouts of “Viva Kennedy!”—Dick Goodwin dropped his luggage, overcome with the melancholy echoes of the past, when he had heard the same chant for another visiting Kennedy. The cheer was appropriate this time, thought Goodwin; after all, Bobby had the same name. “Yet it was not because of him that they were shouting; but because he was the blood heir to someone admired almost to the point of reverence.”

  In Brazil, on November 22, as he commemorated the third anniversary of his brother’s death, Bobby had a mournful day. Tears came to his eyes as he placed a wreath at a JFK bust in the small farming town of Natal, and he openly wept in Salvador when young women at a center for unwed mothers sang “God Bless America.” He told a group of shoeless kids at a community center named for JFK that his brother was very fond of children and, in a soft voice, he asked them to do a favor for the late president. “Stay in school, study hard, study as long as you can, then work for your city and Brazil.”

  If Bobby was haunted by the past, he was equally haunted by the future. He knew what awaited him as he faced the political crucible back home. Sitting in an outdoor café in Rio two days after the horrible anniversary, Kennedy was jolted from his seat by the explosive crackle of a backfiring car. Realizing it wasn’t gunfire, he settled back in his chair, but there was no relief in his face. “Sooner or later,” he told his companion. “Sooner or later.”

  Bobby and his advisors wanted to wait until 1972 to launch his inevitable campaign for the presidency, after Lyndon Johnson had served his final term and the way to the White House was clear. But, again, history would not wait for Robert Kennedy.

  AROUND 4:30 P.M. ON February 6, 1967, a bitterly cold winter afternoon in Washington, Bobby Kennedy arrived at the White House for a meeting on the Vietnam War with President Johnson. Returning to the White House always filled Kennedy with a disorienting sense of melancholy. But this occasion would leave him feeling more agitated than somber. Kennedy had just come back from a European tour, during which he had met with French president Charles de Gaulle, a strong critic of the war, and the French diplomat in charge of Asian affairs, who passed along a significant peace feeler from Hanoi to Kennedy. If the Johnson administration would extend the bombing halt it had recently declared, Kennedy was told, the North Vietnamese government would be willing to negotiate with the United States. Kennedy was eager to communicate this message directly to Johnson and he arranged for the White House meeting as soon as he arrived back in Washington.

  But Johnson was in no mood to hear about peace talks—particularly from an emissary like Kennedy. His political rival’s global wanderings in pursuit of a separate U.S. foreign policy were bad enough. But sticking his nose into the Vietnam War—which by then had become the central agony of Lyndon Johnson’s life—was more than the president could bear. Once again, Kennedy seemed to be running his own presidency, treating Johnson as if he were simply a squatter in the White House. LBJ remained silent as Kennedy presented Hanoi’s message and his own suggestions for how Johnson could finally bring the war to a conclusion. The senator argued for a permanent end to U.S. bombing and an internationally monitored cease-fire accompanied by negotiations. But as soon as Kennedy finished speaking, Johnson erupted. “Well, I want you to know that I’m not going to adopt any single one of those suggestions because we�
�re going to win the war, and you doves will all be dead in six months.” It was a sharp slap in the face. Kennedy knew LBJ meant politically dead. But he was infuriated by his insulting tirade. “I don’t have to take that from you,” Kennedy hissed, getting to his feet. Back in his office, he told his aides, “You know, what I have just been through is just unbelievable…. Do you know what that fellow said? That marvelous human being who is the president of the United States?” He later reported to Jack Newfield that Johnson had been “very abusive…. He was shouting and seemed very unstable.”

  The flooded dam of mutual resentment and hostility that Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had struggled for years to contain—for their own political reasons—was about to explode. Long engaged in covert political war, the two men were now on the brink of taking their brawl into the streets. Their epic battle was fueled by countless personal and political grievances. But at its heart was the ageless hatred of two contenders for the same throne. The wrong man was sitting there, in Bobby’s eyes. It was that simple. It should be Jack. And if not his brother, then it should be him. No one else could carry on the Kennedy legacy. Least of all, the braying Texan who had taken up residence in the White House. “When this fellow looks at me,” Johnson complained about Bobby to John Connally, “he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole through me, like I’m a spy or something.”

  In Bobby’s eyes, Johnson had taken the Kennedy dream of hope and freedom that had briefly made the United States a beacon around the world and dragged it through the mud of the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. And in Johnson’s view, RFK was an arrogant princeling whose diplomatic dabblings were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

  LBJ passed word to the press that Kennedy was little more than a Communist dupe who had allowed himself to be used in Hanoi’s “psychological warfare offensive.” And a week after their White House meeting, Johnson let the world know what he thought of Kennedy’s peace initiative by renewing the rain of bombs on North Vietnam. Kennedy told his aide Peter Edelman “that Lyndon Johnson was so insane that he would literally prolong the war simply because Bobby Kennedy was against it.”

  After the acrimonious White House meeting, Kennedy was unleashed. He no longer saw any reason to soften his criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Bobby began reaching out to antiwar movement leaders like Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd (the academic who had authored one of the earliest magazine critiques of the lone gunman theory). Kennedy—who had recently read the two men’s book on their trip to Hanoi, The Other Side—asked Jack Newfield, who had been encouraging him to speak with Hayden, to set up the meeting. To avoid the inevitable uproar from his pro-war critics, Kennedy asked the two men to slip quietly into his New York apartment on the early evening of February 13. It was a largely uneventful summit. At one point, Bobby, noticing a thick bank of smog rolling up the East River, jumped up to call Con Edison to complain about the pollution from the utility company’s Fourteenth Street power plant. The men’s discussion of the war was interrupted again when Lynd’s young son spilled some Coke on the carpet. “Don’t worry about that,” Bobby—as always, tuned in to kids’ feelings—told the boy. “It makes the rug grow better.” It was the deeper feeling of the conversation, more than anything that was said, that later stayed with the three men.

  Here was the most celebrated member of the U.S. Senate, a man with enormous political expectations on his shoulders, and he was meeting with two activists who not only belonged to the radical wing of the antiwar movement but had traveled to the enemy’s capital. It was the kind of political risk that no other American politician with an eye on the White House would have dared. But it showed how unmoored Robert Kennedy had become from the weight of political tradition. As the country fractured over both the war and racial conflict, and as the certainties in his own life fell away, Kennedy was a man in open, breathtaking flux.

  On March 2, 1967, Kennedy delivered a watershed speech about Vietnam on the floor of the Senate. All Washington had been anticipating his gunshot across Johnson’s bow. That morning—after Bobby stayed up until 3 a.m. polishing the speech with Goodwin, Walinsky, and Mankiewicz—Ethel greeted him in the kitchen at Hickory Hill: “Hail, Caesar.” Kennedy had crossed his Rubicon. He was now on his way into the lion’s den on Capitol Hill. The speech, which called for a bombing halt and negotiated settlement of the war, was full of beautiful Goodwin-Walinsky language. Though the war was a distant cannon and did not directly affect most Americans, Kennedy called upon his fellow citizens to imagine the horrors that were being visited on Vietnam in their name. War, he said, was “the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall from an improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend.” Who was America to play God in this way? Who were we “to play the role of an avenging angel pouring death and destruction” from above?

  Walinsky himself thought the speech did not go far enough, that it failed to question “the basic premises of the war, or the administration’s rationale.” Edelman, the other young dove in Kennedy’s office, called it “mushy.” Still, it was enough to inflame Washington hawks. Richard Nixon said Kennedy’s speech would have “the effect of prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy.” Barry Goldwater charged that Kennedy was out of control. “This is another case of getting his foot in his mouth. And if he doesn’t stop, he’s going to have an orthopedic mouth.”

  Johnson was enraged by Kennedy’s high-profile attack on his management of the war, charging that Bobby was proposing a “dishonorable settlement.” Many in the senator’s camp thought LBJ took revenge by leaking an explosive story to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, one aimed directly at Bobby’s most sensitive spot. On March 3, a day after Kennedy’s Vietnam speech, Anderson wrote, “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot [against Fidel Castro] which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” The syndicated story had so little foundation that the Washington Post and New York Post spiked it. But LBJ tried to turn it into a federal case by urging Attorney General Ramsey Clark to pursue an investigation and Dick Helms to make a full CIA report on the charges.

  No amateur when it came to playing Washington hardball, Kennedy immediately moved to shut down the story. He requested a copy of the FBI memo on the 1962 Justice Department meeting when he was first informed by the CIA about the Mafia plots, to prove his reaction had been withering. And then he phoned Helms to ask him to lunch. There is no record of what the two men discussed at this March 4 meeting. But it can be safely assumed that it was not simply a pleasant discussion of old times. The two men had a barely restrained loathing for one another, and a tense understanding of some sort was certainly hammered out. What is known is that on May 10, when Helms presented the CIA’s internal report on the Castro murder plots to Johnson in the White House, it did not pin the blame on Robert Kennedy.

  LBJ knew that Bobby Kennedy was a formidable political adversary. Over the years, Kennedy had amassed a vast amount of information about Johnson’s corrupt dealings. RFK was no doubt prepared to use this poison arsenal should their political battle ever escalate. This is what made Robert Kennedy such a rare and potent force in American politics—he was a man who could call on the higher instincts of our nature and he also knew how to fight with his bare knuckles.

  This time, Kennedy and Johnson fought each other to a standstill. Two weeks after the Anderson column ran, Bobby delivered a curiously effusive speech about LBJ at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in New York, calling him “an outstanding president.” And Johnson never again used the Cuba bombshell against Kennedy.

  But as the months went by, it became clear that Kennedy and Johnson were headed for a final political showdown. As Bobby edged closer to challenging Johnson for the presidency, he understood that he must be prepared for one of the most brutal campaigns in American history.

  It was an excruciating decision. Most of the old guard from th
e Kennedy administration—including Sorensen, Schlesinger, and Dutton—warned him not to enter the 1968 campaign, fearing he would tear apart the Democratic Party and ruin his long-term chances for the White House. The Washington press corps was hostile, interpreting his growing opposition to the war as a personal vendetta against Johnson. By running, Kennedy would not only be breaking sharply from tradition by challenging a sitting president in his own political party. He would finally and irrevocably be turning his back on his brother’s administration, since the key policymakers behind the war were holdovers from the Kennedy years—McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Rostow. But entering the race was also the only way to redeem his brother’s legacy, by showing the country—and the world—that Johnson’s disastrous Cold War policies were a violation of his brother’s ideals.

  Bobby was trapped in the swirling political passions around the war, torn at from both sides. His young aides and antiwar leaders beseeched him to take on Johnson, telling him the fate of the nation was in his hands. But still he hesitated. He knew that if he ran, he risked everything.