by Thomas Maier
Church support for Kennedy’s actions never wavered, even when the Bay of Pigs’ failures were fully realized and its moral implications questioned. Soon after their release, the invaders were honored by their fellow Cuban exiles with a rally at Miami’s Orange Bowl. Both President Kennedy and Cardinal Cushing were invited. Although several Kennedy aides advised the president not to go, Bobby urged him to appear at the rally in order, as aide Kenny O’Donnell later put it, to “ease the President’s sense of guilt.” Defiantly and unrepentant at the rally,Kennedy spontaneously promised the crowd that someday Cuba would be free of communism.
Publicly, Kennedy accepted the blame for the Bay of Pigs failure. Privately, he resolved never again to depend solely on the military establishment’s small circle of advisors. Jack couldn’t hide his disappointment in CIA director Allen Dulles, who had overseen the ill-fated invasion plans and soon resigned. “The advice of every member of the executive branch brought into advise was unanimous—and the advice was wrong!”Kennedy fumed. The Bay of Pigs reminded Jack Kennedy to trust his own instincts, no matter how much he listened to the State Department and CIA. To ensure that his interests would always be represented in discussions about national security, he placed his brother, the attorney general, into the inner circle.“Now he realized how right the old man had been,” explained Lem Billings, “family were the only ones you could count on.” By the time of the next crisis over Cuba, Bobby Kennedy, the most virulent anti- Communist in the family, would be fully in place.
AFTER THE 1960 campaign, some Catholics were openly skeptical about John Kennedy’s promise that his presidency would adhere to a strict separation of church and state. These assurances to a predominately Protestant nation were necessary for obviously political reasons, but did the American people really want a leader whose conscience in time of crisis would be so purposefully divorced from his religious principles? As Ave Maria, a journal published by the University of Notre Dame, presciently asked: “It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the President elected in 1960 may well have to decide whether or not to instruct our Air Force to engage in obliteration bombing of a foe which has delivered a sneak attack on us. Can we realistically say that this decision may be reached apart from a President’s ‘private’ religious beliefs?” This hypothetical quickly turned into reality during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which raised all these ethical concerns and more.
The Kennedy administration’s obsession with Cuba after the Bay of Pigs became a personal crusade to eliminate communism in the Western Hemisphere, an overall goal given the blessing of American church leaders. (When Cardinal Spellman sent out a letter, seeking jobs and homes for 60,000 Cuban exiles in Miami, Moscow warned that “Spellman is trying to arm the criminals who fled from Cuba.”) To the Kennedys and the church hierarchy, Cuba’s embrace of Castro appeared unholy. During the twenty-month confinement of the Bay of Pigs invaders, Bobby took a personal interest in their plight and worked to clean this black mark against the political record of his brother. Cubans exiled in Miami had kept their faith in the church, but the rest of their country was imprisoned by a Communist tyrant—exactly the kind of ideological battle that Bobby, the Cold War warrior, relished. With his tough-minded arrogance and lack of historical irony, Bobby had little sympathy for a small island’s trying to exert its own independence over a large neighboring power. Communism was far too serious a threat.
Dissatisfied with Dulles, Bobby pushed his brother to appoint a new CIA director, John McCone, a wealthy Republican who had served in both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and shared their unbending view of communism. A convert to Catholicism, McCone went to Rome as Eisenhower’s representative, along with Claire Boothe Luce, for the funeral of Pope Pius XII. Similar to Robert Kennedy’s, McCone’s hard-line world-view against the Communists was deeply influenced by his religion. But even McCone was surprised by the degree to which the anti-Communist frenzy had grown in the Kennedy administration.
By then, President Kennedy’s anti-communism rhetoric was carried out in the covert actions of his brother, the attorney general, who was given wide and unprecedented latitude on national security matters. After the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy pushed the CIA to develop a secret plan, a bag of dirty tricks called “Operation Mongoose,” that would destabilize Castro’s government and be a way of declaring war without actually having to do so. “Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate,” Bobby concluded in one memo. In some plans, the CIA conspired with Cuban exiles who had ties to organized crime—the same entity Robert Kennedy was attempting to defeat as attorney general. One dubious notion of “Operation Mongoose” called for the CIA to promote the idea among Cubans that a second coming of Christ would soon occur. A U.S. submarine would shoot star shells into the night sky as a supposed sign to Cuba’s faithful, who then would throw off the godless yoke of Castro’s tyranny. Bobby’s bloodlust to get Castro led to a fascination with “counter-insurgency” programs and special forces units designed to fight these undeclared wars. During vacations at Hyannis Port, Bobby invited the Green Berets to show the young Kennedy kids how to swing from trees and overcome barricades, to become little warriors themselves. Sargent Shriver, chief of JFK’s “peace” army and a liberal Catholic, disliked the idea. When Eunice called for him to come outside and look at the paramilitary soldiers, Shriver said he “did not like the children watching— it was not a good influence.”
By far, the most controversial CIA plot featured the proposed assassination of Fidel Castro. A variety of guerilla methods—poisoning, explosives— were discussed and known to the attorney general. Some loyal Kennedy aides later minimized Bobby’s involvement in the Castro assassination plot, or didn’t mention it at all in their memoirs. But the evidence revealed by the 1975 Senate Select Committee investigating U.S. intelligence activities pointed directly to the attorney general.“Robert Kennedy ran with it, ran those operations, and I dealt with him almost every day,” Richard Helms, a key CIA figure involved in the plans, told biographer Richard Reeves two decades later. At the time, when McCone found out about the plot to kill Castro during an August 1962 meeting, he made it clear that he would not abide by such a murderous conspiracy and that assassination should never be discussed or condoned by American officials. “I think it is highly improper,” McCone declared. He said the very mention of assassination should be expunged from the meeting’s record. Unlike Bobby, McCone’s abhorrence of communism did have its limits, based on the same profession of faith. By his own understanding of Catholic doctrine, McCone concluded, “I could get excommunicated for something like this.”
Historians would debate whether President Kennedy ever approved such plans, though documents suggest he was aware that such murderous ideas were being considered by subordinates. As a matter of general policy, particularly after the CIA provided weapons to rebels who killed Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Kennedy issued directions prohibiting American involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders. But Cuba, only ninety miles away from Miami, was different. Castro was a millstone around Kennedy’s neck and the president was under intense pressure to do something. At social events, Jackie Kennedy warned friends and family that her husband didn’t want to discuss the subject at all. One former CIA official later claimed to have overheard Kennedy liken his dilemma with Castro to the question posed by Henry II about Thomas à Becket:“Who will free me from this turbulent priest?”
This covert war convinced Castro to avail himself of the Soviet offer to place nuclear missiles on his tropical island. When missiles were discovered by American spy planes in October 1962, the Cuban crisis escalated into an unprecedented threat of nuclear war. Kennedy demanded the Cuban missiles be removed and, when refused, he ordered a blockade around the island by U.S. Navy vessels. For several days,Americans and people around the world held their breath as they visualized the dark mushroom cloud of atomic devastation. Religious leaders around the
world, including those at the Vatican, decried its awful moral consequences. “Today, while ‘experts’ calmly discuss the possibility of the United States being able to survive a war if ‘only fifty millions’ (!) of the population are killed; when the Chinese speak of being able to ‘spare’ three hundred million and ‘still get along,’ it is obvious that we are no longer in the realm where moral truth is conceivable,” warned well-known Catholic writer Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain. In the White House, there was little indication that President Kennedy heeded church teachings that uncontrolled annihilation of human life was “not lawful under any title,” or that Catholics were obliged to strive for peace “with all means at their disposal.”Yet several cultural and religious references by Kennedy and his brother during the Cuban missile crisis suggest that their own brand of morality came into play.
As he prepared a nationwide television speech on the crisis, John Kennedy’s mind seemed to veer between the clinical tactician and a metaphysical philosopher. At times, he was coldly calculating the odds of nuclear war with the Soviets as one out of three; at other times, he sat on the back porch of the White House talking “not of his possible death,” as Sorensen recalled,“but of all the innocent children of the world who had never had a chance or a voice.”The almost incomprehensible number of deaths caused by a nuclear war—“very bloodcurdling” as Bobby recalled the projection of the U.S. death toll—seemed most vivid, to hit home most forcefully, only when illustrated in terms of the family, the most important social unit for the Kennedys.
With Dave Powers, his old friend and aide, Kennedy worried about the deadly consequences of his decisions.“Dave, we have had a full life,” confided the president, saying he had no fear of dying but dreaded the possible impact for his own children. When U-2 surveillance plane commander Major Rudolph Anderson Jr. was shot down by a Soviet-operated jet over Cuba, Kennedy was trying to relax in the heated White House pool.Grimly, he accepted the news, swam a few laps in silence and then looked up at Powers. “I wonder if the pilot had a wife and family,” Kennedy thought aloud. Before Kennedy could dry off and dress for another meeting on the crisis,Powers recalled, he learned that the missing and presumed-dead pilot had two sons, including one “the same age as John-John.”At one point during the missile crisis, Kennedy asked his wife, Jackie, whether she wanted to bring their children to an assigned evacuation center, just in case the worst happened. Jackie refused. If an attack came, she wanted them all to be together. Late one night, after dropping off some papers, Powers came upon the president reading a book to his young daughter, Caroline, and wondered to himself whether “it would be the last one he would read to her.” Trying to maintain a calm appearance during the crisis, Kennedy slipped into St. Matthew’s Cathedral and instructed his press spokesman, Pierre Salinger, to say he was merely observing the National Day of Prayer, though in fact it provided a few moments of prayer and reflection. At the darkest moments,Kennedy’s fatalistic sense of humor lightened the burden. Powers recalled how Bobby Kennedy, after meeting secretly with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, rushed back to the White House and debriefed the president with his gloomy assessments about avoiding nuclear war. As the two brothers conferred in an anteroom, Bobby ate a sandwich and Powers munched away on a bucket of chicken left behind by the chef.
“God, Dave, you are eating like it is ‘The Last Supper,’” the president suddenly told his aide.
“After listening to Bobby and you,” replied Powers, “I am not too sure it isn’t.”
The Cuban missiles became a crucible for the Kennedys, transforming their abrupt, action-oriented political style into a slower, more deliberative process, lest their hastiness result in mass destruction. Their strident and bellicose anti-communism became more conciliatory. As a result of this 1962 crisis, they were more willing to search for peace, as the Pope encouraged. Indeed, some tried to negotiate through Kennedy’s church as a back-channel means of finding peace. Father Felix P. Morlion, president of Pro Deo University in Rome and a close ally of Pope John XXIII, enlisted a friendly acquaintance, Norman Cousins, an American journalist close to the Kennedys, in a secret attempt by the pontiff to intervene with both sides to avoid a nuclear cataclysm. Cousins eventually became an intermediary for the Pope, the American president, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in their private negotiations. John Cogley, a Kennedy adviser during the 1960 campaign on the religious issue, also called the White House to suggest the Vatican be involved with a statement calling for calm.
Surprisingly, the most important ethical concerns expressed during the missile crisis came from Robert Kennedy, arguably one of the men most responsible for this confrontation in the first place. Some generals and White House top advisers urged an immediate, all-out invasion of Cuba— a move virtually certain to incite a war with the Soviets. During meetings of top presidential advisers, however, Bobby showed none of his old brashness and anti-Communist zeal that bordered on recklessness. Against the prevailing wisdom, he argued that an unannounced attack on Cuba would differ very little morally from the insidious Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the most defining moment of their generation.
“My brother’s got to be able to live with himself,” Bobby insisted.“If we did this, I don’t think America could, and I don’t think my brother could.”
President Kennedy heeded his brother’s advice. A ring of U.S. Navy destroyers—including the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.—was sent to “quarantine” the island until the Soviets agreed to return their offensive missiles to Russia. Rather than a full-scale war, the more limited and measured American response of a naval blockage afforded the Soviets enough time of their own to reconsider and retreat, saving face by declaring they had rescued Cuba from invasion. The world, aware of its closeness to the atomic abyss, never dared venture to those extremes again during the Cold War. President Kennedy understood “the terror and fear implanted in the human spirit by the constant threat of holocaustal atomic war,” Cardinal Cushing later explained.“JFK knew, in the words of Isaiah, that all too many members of the human family walked in darkness and ‘in the shadow of death’ because of the dread of the H-Bomb.”
On Sunday morning after the Russians backed down, Kennedy stepped out of St. Stephen’s Church and seemed to have an epiphany himself.“I feel like a new man,” he exclaimed to Dave Powers.“Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday?”
More starkly than his brother, Bobby Kennedy viewed this struggle against communism as a morality tale, good versus bad, those who believed in God and those who didn’t. To him, Khrushchev and the Russians were like Jimmy Hoffa and the crooked union officials that the Kennedy brothers had pursued years earlier on the Senate Rackets Committee. During the Cuban crisis, Bobby Kennedy recalled, the president reminded him that their Russian adversaries “were like the gangsters that both of us had dealt with, that Khrushchev’s kind of action—what he did, and how he acted— was as an immoral gangster who acts not as statesman, and not as a person with a sense of responsibility.”Years later, Murray Kempton wrote that the attorney general’s “Catholic conscience,” which served as “his zenith,” a clarion call for morality at a most perilous time, was in full force during these tense deliberations.“Thank God for Bobby,” the president told Dave Powers, out of earshot.
With the public approval rating soaring after staring down the Soviet threat, Jack indicated to his brother that the Cuban missile might be the greatest moment of his presidency.
“This is the night I should go to the theater,” the president quipped. It was a familiar reference to President Abraham Lincoln, who, after winning the Civil War and saving the Republic, was shot at Ford’s Theater by an assassin.
Bobby laughed along.“If you go,” he chimed in,“I want to go with you.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Conversion and Subversion
“It matters not how small a nation is that seeks world peace and freedom, for, to paraphrase a citizen o
f my country: The humblest nation of all the world, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY, IN A 1963 SPEECH TO THE
DAIL, THE IRISH PARLIAMENT
ON THE OPPOSITE END of the world, far away from Cuba, Vietnan burned with gunfire and napalm, another hot spot in America’s Cold War on communism during the early 1960s. As with Latin America, the confluence of Catholic and anti-Communist influences played a significant role in Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam, its embattled leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the direction of U.S. foreign policy.
The Kennedys had taken sides long ago. At a June 1956 Washington conference sponsored by the American Friends of Vietnam, one of Diem’s greatest friends in the Senate—John F. Kennedy—gave a lengthy speech titled “America’s Stake in Vietnam” praising the “amazing success” of Diem in running South Vietnam. The senator’s speech was pure domino theory, identifying the weakest link against the Communist “kind of revolution, glittering and seductive in its superficial appeal.” The speech would be a blueprint for future Kennedy administration policy.
“Vietnam presents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike,” Senator Kennedy explained. “Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam.”