The Man Who Killed Kennedy
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Kennedy friend Charles Bartlett also received preemptive word of the invasion through Castro’s former Washington lobbyist, Ernesto Betancourt. Betancourt told Bartlett that the CIA was making a mistake and that Castro knew of the plot.
Bartlett decided to relay this important piece of information to Allen Dulles.
“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about this. I’ll look into it and give you a call.’ So I get a call about five days later, but by then the boats were already going ashore. Dulles was really the wrong guy to tell.”15
In an internal investigation performed by the CIA, not released until decades after the operation, blame was lifted from the Kennedy administration after it was revealed that the operation had been poorly managed from the start. Of the many problems detailed, a report found that:
The agency failed to collect adequate information on the strengths of the Castro regime and the extent of the opposition to it. And it failed to evaluate the available information correctly.
The project was not staffed throughout with top-quality people, and a number of people were not used to the best advantage.
The agency entered the project without adequate assets in the way of boats, bases, training facilities, agent nets, Spanish speakers, and similar essential ingredients of a successful operation.16
The fallout from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion did not just put an early ugly mark on Cuban-US relations in the Kennedy administration—it completely ruined the relationship between the administration and the CIA. Kennedy saw the CIA as warmongers capable of bringing the world to total annihilation, while the CIA saw Kennedy as a wavering, irresolute panderer.
“The [Bay of Pigs invasion] failure was Kennedy’s fault,” Eduardo Ferrer, leader of the exile air force, would later say. “Kennedy was a little bit immature, a little bit chicken. Today, 90 percent of the Cubans are Republicans because of Kennedy, that motherfucker.”17
In late April, Bobby was sensing the damage the Bay of Pigs invasion would have on his brother and was more frequently attuned to the circling war hawks. At a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on April 27, Bobby sharply castigated a council report that recommended invading Cuba.
“This is worthless,” Bobby said at the meeting. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”
In the coming months, the Kennedy brothers would listen less and less to their military advisors and more to themselves. John, particularly, saw that his greatest failure in the Bay of Pigs invasion was not bringing his brother in when the serious decisions needed to be made.
Of the CIA, John Kennedy vowed to shatter the agency, “into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” He asked for the resignation of the Bay of Pig planners: Deputy Director General Charles Cabell, Deputy Director Richard Bissell, Jr., and Dulles, who, knowing the Soviets discovered the plan, was either looking to start a war, shame a president, or both.
Having dinner with Richard Nixon on the night the invasion fell apart, asking for a drink, Dulles exclaimed, “This is the worst day of my life!”18
Nixon was the right man to cry to. He was the man many wanted to win the 1960 presidential election, a strict opponent of communism who would have carried out the tasks of the CIA diligently.
Instead, Kennedy’s only feigned compliance to the CIA to get elected; the president’s adherence to the CIA agenda began and ended with the Bay of Pigs invasion. He would go on to make silent cuts to the CIA budget in 1962 and 1963 and, according to Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger, was “aiming at a 20 percent reduction by 1966.”19
“Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interest of the country,” John said to war pal and Secretary of the Navy Red Fay. “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.”20
The new president’s moves surprised and angered many powerful people. This head-fake would help cost him his life and give Lyndon Johnson willing co-conspirators.
Not able to trust his own government, Kennedy would turn to an unlikely ally, Nikita Khrushchev, as a secret partner for peace.
John, an effortless charmer, found it difficult to penetrate the steely personality of the Soviet prime minister when they first met at the June 1961 Vienna Summit.
James Douglass paints a bleak picture of the encounter in his book JFK and the Unspeakable:
The summit meeting with Khrushchev had deeply disturbed Kennedy. The revelation of a coming storm occurred at the end of the meeting. As the two men faced each other across a table, Kennedy’s gift to Khrushchev, a model of the USS Constitution, lay between them. Kennedy pointed out that the ship’s cannons had been able to fire half a mile and kill a few people. But if he and Khrushchev failed to negotiate peace, the two of them could kill seventy million people in the opening exchange of a nuclear war. Kennedy looked at Khrushchev, Khrushchev gave him a blank stare, as if to say, “So what?” Kennedy was shocked at what he felt was his counterpart’s lack of response. “There was no area of accommodation with him,” he said later. Khrushchev may have felt the same way about Kennedy. The result of their unsuccessful meeting would be an ever more threatening conflict. As Evelyn Lincoln thought when she read what the president had written, “‘I see a storm coming’ was no idle phrase.”21
It was no surprise that Khrushchev maintained a frigid presence. Kennedy was only five months in office and two months removed from the failed covert invasion of Cuba. To Khrushchev, Kennedy was surely another politicking functionary whose words meant little compared to his actions. Khrushchev had expressed his objections in a letter to the president written a day after the start of the Cuban invasion.
“It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped, and armed in the United States of America. The planes that are bombing Cuban cities belong to the United States of America, the bombs they are dropping are being supplied by the American government,” Khrushchev wrote. “All of this evokes, here in the Soviet Union, an understandable feeling of indignation on the part of the Soviet government and the Soviet people.”
In the coming months, the two men would find they were very much alike, held hostage by their own governments’ need to pursue a radical agenda in spite of rational understanding. Perhaps this is what spurred Khrushchev to take a risk by initiating the secret correspondence with Kennedy in late September 1961.
Khrushchev no doubt inferred from their confrontation in June that Kennedy might be someone whom he could get through to, noted by his positive impression of Kennedy’s ”informality, modesty, and frankness, which are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position,” which Khrushchev commends at the start of the letter.
Bulshakov delivered the letter to White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger at the Carlyle Hotel in New York with the specific instruction that it was for the president’s eyes only. Certainly, the subsequent history of the world might have taken a remarkably different course if those instructions had not been followed.
At times poetic, the letter expressed Khrushchev’s regrets for not pursuing a previous understanding and detailed his desire to do so. The letter stressed that neither he nor the people of his country desired war, and that the world might be on a devastating path. Khrushchev also pointed out that peace and disarmament should be human response, not bureaucratic reaction.
“If, Mr. President, you are striving toward that noble goal—and I believe that is the case—if agreement of the United States on the principles of disarmament is not merely a diplomatic or tactical maneuver, you will find complete understanding on our part, and we shall stint no effort in order to find a common language and reach the required agreement together with you.”22
Khrushchev closed the letter by reaff
irming the importance for a joint effort of the two men to work toward peace.
The letter was bold in its scope and sentiment, and Kennedy’s mid-October response was thoughtful and conciliatory, yet guarded—in sharp contrast to the intentions of his government. The letter lacked the strong personal conviction and intelligent emotion of his later correspondence, but got the point across.
The exchange helped facilitate a deeper mutual understanding of the nuclear situation. John Kennedy recognized that he and Khrushchev had “a special responsibility—greater than that held by any of our predecessors in the pre-nuclear age—to exercise our power with the fullest possible understanding of the other’s vital interests and commitments.”23
John let down his guard in his second back-channel letter to Khrushchev. He began to show interest in discovering the makeup of Khrushchev in order to identify with the leader and properly assess the perilous situation.
“I am conscious of the difficulties you and I face in establishing full communication between our two minds,” Kennedy wrote. “This is not a question of translation but a question of the context in which we hear and respond to what each other has to say. You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about our respective social systems and general philosophies of life. These differences create a great gulf in communication because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying common purpose. I cannot believe that there are not such common interests between the Soviet and the American people. Therefore, I am trying to penetrate our ideological differences in order to find some bridge across the gulf on which we could bring our minds together and find some way in which to protect the peace of the world.”24
Through a year-long secret exchange of letters now known as the “pen pal correspondence,” Khrushchev and Kennedy would attempt to understand each other and their respective countries. They examined the turmoil in Vietnam and Laos and their nuclear dilemma, and they tried to move slowly toward a test ban treaty.
Possibly the most important achievement of the correspondence is the letter exchange that took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis grew out of heightened tensions between the United States and Cuba following the Bay of Pigs invasion. Through its U2 spy plane program, the United States discovered that Russia and Cuba had begun building missile-launching sites in the island nation only ninety miles off the Florida coast and that missiles were en route on Russian ships. The thirteen-day nuclear standoff that was the result of a US naval blockade would be the closest the world would come to nuclear devastation.
During the crisis, John and Bobby would sort through the rhetoric of their advisors together and come to hard decisions based on the information available. The military advisors were pushing to attack Cuba, none more passionately than cigar-chomping General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, who was, years later, spoofed as fanatical warmonger Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War film parody, Dr. Strangelove.
“This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich,” LeMay charged, attempting to taunt Kennedy into action. “I just don’t see any other solution except direct military action right now … A blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.”25 (LeMay had close relationships with two of Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle: Dallas oilmen H. L. Hunt and Col. D. H. Byrd, the founder of the Civil Air Patrol. Robert Caro has written that the Joint Chiefs were later crying at JFK’s funeral. If LeMay was crying, it was probably out of sheer happiness because in his beyond-candid oral history with the LBJ Library, he describes the Kennedys as “vulgar,” “vindictive,” and “ruthless” with [low] “moral standards,” who were “cockroaches” who deserved to be stepped on by President Johnson post JFK assassination.)
When Vice President Johnson was asked for his opinion on weighing the options of talking it out with the Soviets or taking military action, Johnson wavered. “All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up, the only thing you could do was take a stick and chop its head off.” At another point in the crisis, Johnson would back the idea of a missile swap, removing US missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Russian missiles from Cuba, a compromise that eventually helped end the crisis.26 But at the peak of the crisis and with the world on the brink of nuclear war, Johnson sided firmly with the warhawks, telling JFK that he had to do something. The Kennedys later excluded LBJ from the meeting during which the final decisions were made.
The disarming of the Cuban Missile Crisis would also helped by John Kennedy answering one of two letters sent with Khrushchev’s name, the first on October 26 and the second on October 27. The former was in the tone of Khrushchev that John had gotten to know well—one of passion, strength, and understanding.
Assuredly, Khrushchev explained, the weapons positioned in Cuba had the same value that an American weapon would have—purely for defense and not to be used against the United States. These weapons were there to protect the people, not to attack another people. Khrushchev explained that the continued military and economic aid that the Russians provided Cuba during that time was only a humanitarian effort to stabilize the country. Most importantly, the message outlined that the aim of Khrushchev was still peace.
“If you are really concerned about the peace and welfare of your people—and this is your responsibility as president—then I, as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, am concerned for my people,” Khrushchev wrote. “Moreover, the preservation of world peace should be our joint concern because if, under contemporary conditions, war should break out, it would be a war not only between the reciprocal claims, but a worldwide cruel and destructive war.”27
The second letter was written in a sterile fashion, dealing with facts and devoid of the grim, human realities of the situation. Bobby and his advisors determined that it was not written by Khrushchev and counseled the president to only answer the first letter. Had the private letter exchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev not taken place, the first letter might not have been authenticated, and the crisis might have labored on.
The response to Khrushchev’s letter made a few suggestions, the most important being a removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for a vow from the United States to not invade the island nation. The letter worked, and a tentative peace agreement was again at hand. Years later, it would be revealed that over forty thousand Soviet troops and 270,000 Cuban troops were prepared for a potential US invasion.28
At the time, John Kennedy had told his teenage mistress Mimi Beardsley who was in the White House on the weekend of highest tensions, “I’d rather my children red than dead.”
Following the missile crisis, the conversation between the two leaders would continue, and they would progress the cause of peace, most notably with the Limited Test Ban Treaty in August 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater forever. In July 1963, President Kennedy discussed his proposed treaty in a nationally broadcast radio and television speech.
“But now, for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring. No one can say whether the time has come for an easing of the struggle. But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action, and this is the place to begin. According to the ancient Chinese proverb, ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’ My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”29
On November 22, 1963, as President Kennedy’s midnight blue limousine worked i
ts way from Love Field Airport to the ambush site of Dealey Plaza, he carried with him a speech he was to give at the Trade Mart in Dallas later that day. The speech would go unread, but the sentiment was one that he had fostered throughout his final months in office.
In that speech, Kennedy would write of a nation of great power and the responsibility that goes with it.
“That strength will never be used in pursuit of aggressive ambitions—it will always be used in pursuit of peace. It will never be used to promote provocations—it will always be used to promote the peaceful settlement of disputes. We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, good will toward men.’ That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: ’except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’30
In Kennedy’s last months, he became his own man with his own deep convictions, but in doing so, he paid the price to powerful men whose interests were threatened by those convictions. Vice President Johnson used this conflict to his advantage in order to bring the CIA into the assassination compact.
In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, Nikita Khrushchev, a man thought by many to be President Kennedy’s enemy, was inconsolable.
“He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze,” a Soviet official told Pierre Salinger.31 Four years later, Russian intelligence (KGB) would conclude that Lyndon Johnson was complicit in the plot to kill Kennedy.32
J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo on December 21, 1966, to President Johnson about this, and he copied the leadership of the FBI, including Deke DeLoach and William Sullivan. This blockbuster memo remained secret for thirty years until it was forced public by a declassification prompted by the Assassination Records Review Board.