President-elect Kennedy declaring the appointment of his brother as U.S. Attorney General.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FREEDOM FIGHTER
“At last, Bobby’s moral center seemed to stir.”
—HARRY BELAFONTE
“We’re going to do what we thought Eisenhower was going to do in 1952 and never did—bring a new spirit to the government,” Bobby Kennedy said just after the election.
He went on to explain what he meant: “Not necessarily young men, but new men, who believe in a cause, who believe their jobs go on forever, not just from 9 to 5; who believe they have a responsibility to the United States, not just to an administration, and who can really get things done.”
The big question was the obvious one. With a large debt to his own efforts, his brother was soon to be installed in the White House. What sort of place was Bobby imagining for himself in the Kennedy administration? “I wouldn’t take an appointment to Jack’s Senate seat,” he explained in a morning-after Newsweek interview. Nor would he, he said, look to assume any sort of chief of staff type role. “I’d want my own position with my own authority. But there you run into the relationship problem again. Jack and I discussed the whole thing briefly this week, but I really haven’t worked out the problems in my own mind.”
Meanwhile, Bobby’s friends were finding their way into the White House. One of the earliest to land there was Ken O’Donnell, his Harvard teammate. Jack gave him the coveted role of Oval Office gatekeeper, with the understated title of “appointment Secretary.” Over O’Donnell’s opposition, the president-elect then appointed Pierre Salinger, another of Bobby’s finds, to the front-line post of White House press secretary. Jack made clear to Salinger that it was Bobby’s appointment.
It wasn’t long before Bobby and Ethel’s house at Hickory Hill turned into a busy way station both for the new administration’s job vacancies and those seeking to fill them. According to Red Fay, the supplicants were “understandably reluctant to call the president-elect, with all his new responsibilities and obligations.” And so they turned to Robert Kennedy. “The phones—all four lines—rang continuously. It was not unusual to see all four buttons on the phone light up, pick up the phone and discover that a future Cabinet officer or ambassador had been patiently waiting, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes, to get Bob’s ear.”
Fay himself hadn’t been forgotten by his friend Jack, who slotted him to be under secretary of the navy. Then came a hurdle. The president-elect had accepted the demand of Robert McNamara, newly named defense secretary, for carte blanche in picking his sub-cabinet officials. Fay’s selection meant McNamara would have to be talked into making an exception. It was Bobby who made the successful appeal.
Bringing Arthur Schlesinger to Washington for a one-of-a-kind position was Bobby’s idea. Officially, he’d be an aide to the president, though unofficially regarded as the White House historian-in-residence. Many, however, would refer to him as its “intellectual-in-residence.”
Here’s Schlesinger, explaining: Bobby had “suggested to me the possibility of coming to the White House as some sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter. The proposed assignment could not have appealed to me more, and I said that I would of course be delighted to come. He said that he would bring this up with Jack.” The two had met when they’d found themselves seated together on a stormy plane ride to Pittsburgh during the Stevenson campaign. The man of action, the other of deliberation, became fast, if unlikely, friends.
Bobby also took on the tricky job of refereeing the disputes arising among his brother’s top aides. He delegated the day-to-day issues that came up to the supervision of a neutral figure, Fred Dutton, former chief of staff for Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown of California. As a special assistant to the president, Dutton was expected to deal with friction between the “Irish mafia” led by Ken O’Donnell and the more cerebral group presided over by Ted Sorensen.
Jack Kennedy simply hadn’t given much thought to such personnel matters. “For the last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected president,” he admitted, “that I didn’t have time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good president.”
Soon after the election, the new president had leaked to The New York Times that he was considering naming his brother attorney general. It was an obvious trial balloon, to see how it might fly with opinion leaders. But part of the trouble lay with Bobby. “I said I didn’t want to be attorney general,” he later recorded, citing as his reasons both the nepotism factor and that he’d already been chasing after bad guys for three years on the Rackets Committee. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.”
Nonetheless, Joseph Kennedy was of a single mind. It didn’t matter to him what his sons thought. They “listened as he explained why Jack needed someone in the cabinet in whom he had complete trust,” the senior Kennedy’s biographer David Nasaw has written. “The Kennedys would always be outsiders, unable to fully trust anyone but family members. Jack needed all the protection he could get; only Bobby was going to put his welfare first.”
Finally, Jack dispatched Clark Clifford—an urbane political adviser now at the head of the Kennedy transition team—to try to counter Joseph Kennedy’s conviction regarding where Bobby belonged in the new administration. “I do want to leave you with one thought,” the senior Kennedy said, after listening to Clifford, who was as much a pillar of the Washington establishment as Kennedy himself was not, make his case. “Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded, I’m going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave Jack.”
Whether pulled or pushed, Bobby wrote a letter in mid-December to syndicated columnist Drew Pearson: “I made up my mind today, and Jack and I take the plunge tomorrow. For many reasons, I believe it was the only thing I could do—I shall do my best and hope that it turns out well.”
“I need to know that, when problems arise, I’m going to have somebody who’s going to tell me the unvarnished truth, no matter what,” is how Jack explained it. “And Bobby will do that.”
Despite the criticism from editorial writers and columnists, one person, surprisingly, proved himself stalwart in backing the appointment: Lyndon Johnson. The new president had asked him to help his brother’s confirmation get through the Senate. And so Johnson, terming it a “real crusade,” took seriously the trust Jack was placing in him. “It’s the first thing he’s asked me to do, and it’s very personal with him,” he told an aide.
Johnson also understood how much the one brother relied on the other. He’d learned it the hard way. But he also knew who was the boss. “If I learned anything last year, it’s that Jack Kennedy’s a lot tougher, and maybe a lot smarter, than I thought he was. Bobby Kennedy won’t get to go to the bathroom unless Jack Kennedy feels like taking a pee.”
John F. Kennedy assumed office “with all flags flying,” as Chuck Spalding would often say of his friend. At home in Philadelphia, I watched my mother respond to exactly that notion as she proudly watched the ceremony take place.
On that icy clear January day when the world witnessed him taking the oath, what we all saw was a striking young leader, debonair and confident, and accompanied by his beautiful younger wife. The first couple seemed perfectly emblematic of “the new frontier” that he said beckoned us. His inaugural call to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” reached us at a place above politics.
• • •
Three months later, on April 12, Richard Bissell, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed Bobby on an upcoming U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba. This operation was the Cold War power play that, had it been carried out before the November election, Nixon hoped would bring him victory.
The secret action that Bissell now described was originally conceived by the CIA as a loud detonator, the chain reaction from
which would result in an overthrow of the newly established Castro regime. It was based on the following intelligence estimate: “The great mass of Cuban people believe that the hour of decision is at hand. . . . It is generally believed that the Cuban Army has been successfully penetrated by opposition groups and that it will not fight in the event of a showdown.”
Four days later, on Sunday the 16th, two World War II bombers with Cuban Air Force markings made emergency landings in Miami and Key West. They had just attacked the island’s airfields. U.S. Immigration took them into custody, then issued a statement that the pilots were defectors from the Cuban military. Adlai Stevenson, who’d been appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a statement confirming the official position. Speaking for the Kennedy administration to the world body, he said the aircraft were Castro’s “own planes that took off from Castro’s own airfields.”
None of this was true.
The next day, Monday, just hours after midnight, Brigade 2506—1,400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles trained, equipped, transported, and given limited air cover by the CIA—landed on the island’s south side near an inlet known as Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs. From the outset, the invasion faced strong resistance from government troops who met them on the beach.
“I don’t think it’s going as well as it should,” the president told Bobby, then giving a speech to a convention of newspaper editors in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Come back here.”
As the day went on, the situation on the ground at the Bay of Pigs grew more and more dire. “I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Bobby told Ed Guthman, now his press secretary. “The worst thing is that we’re caught in a lie.” That cover story, that the pilots had been Castro defectors, was now as incredible as bogus reports that the invaders were succeeding.
When Guthman inquired what was to be done now, Bobby told him, “You can start praying for those poor fellows on the beach.”
Two days later, with the invasion force utterly crushed, President Kennedy went before the country to accept, personally, full blame for the debacle. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he said in a press conference. “I’m the responsible officer of the government.”
Away from the cameras and microphones, he held a stronger view of whom to blame. “Those sons-of-bitches with the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work. I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards. How could I have been so stupid?”
It was now clear that the CIA had both deceived him and underestimated his willingness to stand up to them. They’d assumed Kennedy would send in U.S. forces to carry the day. This is what they promised the exiles, what they led themselves to believe as well. They thought that President Kennedy, at the critical moment, would buckle under the fear of defeat and approve a U.S. military attack on Cuba. But he didn’t.
It was this miscalculation that allowed Bissell and company to support a force of 1,400 civilians to land on a deserted beach where they’d have to face the arriving Cuban army. The rationale had always been that at the critical moment the United States would commit its armed forces and secure the victory.
Grasping all this too late, Jack Kennedy recognized that the CIA, in dealing with him, hadn’t understood for whom they were working. They’d kept information from him in order to better control him. It was a big mistake—for which he was now suffering.
As the full dimensions of the failed Cuban enterprise sank in, Bobby saw his brother trapped between advisers who’d deceived him and the enemy in Moscow and Havana, who now regarded him as a paper tiger. For Bobby, Castro, whom he saw as the villain behind Jack’s humiliation, had become not just a national threat but a personal enemy. Seeing him begin to make Cuba a base for hemispheric subversion, Bobby didn’t doubt that Castro was on the way to forging stronger and stronger Soviet ties. In fact, looking ahead, he predicted that the Cuban leader would be willing to accept the presence of Russian nuclear missiles pointed at the United States.
In other words, Castro had to be overthrown.
“There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” This conclusion came in a report compiled by Robert Kennedy and the others who’d been appointed by the president to a panel charged with performing an autopsy on the Bay of Pigs disaster. But participating in that intensive month-long study was only part of the attorney general’s newly broadened portfolio. As he described it, “I then became involved on every major and all the international questions.”
It involved an assignment close to his heart: to find the way to win release of the many hundreds of men now imprisoned in Cuba who had trusted America to help them free their island.
• • •
On May 4, thirteen “Freedom Riders”—seven black, six white—left Washington, D.C. Boarding two buses, their mission—launched by the student-led Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE—was to travel into the Deep South. The purpose of the journey was to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. Virginia, which had forbidden racial segregation of interstate transportation.
“During those days,” recalled civil rights leader John Lewis, himself one of the original Freedom Riders, “it was impossible for a person of color to get on a bus in the South without being forced to go to the back of the bus or go to a waiting room marked ‘Colored Waiting’ or use a restroom facility marked ‘Colored Men.’ We wanted to bring down those signs.”
Hostilities first erupted in South Carolina, with Lewis one of those attacked. But the worst violence didn’t begin until the buses crossed into Alabama. There, on Sunday, May 14, outside the city of Anniston, one of the buses had its tires slashed and then was firebombed, with the fleeing passengers beaten with baseball bats. The other bus reached Birmingham, where Klansmen viciously beat passengers with iron pipes, bicycle chains, and bats.
When Bobby Kennedy had first heard of the Freedom Rider plan, he’d immediately contacted Harris Wofford, their liaison with civil rights leaders. ‘‘Stop them!” he urged him. “Get your friends off those buses!”
All he could see was the likely embarrassment abroad. Just a month later President Kennedy was about to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for the first time at a two-day summit in Vienna. Bobby didn’t want this already sensitive occasion to be overshadowed by headlines of racial protest at home.
The new attorney general disapproved, in fact, of such acts of civil disobedience. He believed the correct path for achieving equal rights ran through the courts and the ballot box. Entertainer and lifelong social activist Harry Belafonte has offered this take on the Kennedy brothers’ attitude. “To them, the Freedom Riders were as much to blame as the angry mobs.” He said, “The last thing the White House needed was news footage of American Negroes being beaten by white policemen—perfect propaganda for the Soviet Union to make its case that the land of the free was anything but free.”
Bobby also felt a genuine concern for the safety of a second group of Freedom Riders, which was now poised to launch itself into danger. He sent John Seigenthaler, now his administrative assistant, to his home city of Nashville, from where this second group of activists were departing. His mission was to talk them out of it. Unsuccessful in that effort, he then dispatched Seigenthaler to see if Alabama governor John Patterson, who’d backed Jack Kennedy during the campaign, would be willing to help.
Bobby’s purpose was to keep people from getting hurt. When Patterson refused to deploy his state troopers, Seigenthaler threatened him with armed federal intervention. And “that’s the last thing you want!” he warned. Hearing this, Patterson banged the table. “If Marshalls or troops come into Alabama, blood’ll run in the streets!” Then, grudgingly, he agreed to protect the Freedom Riders with an escort of state police and National Guardsmen but only as far as Montgomery.
At the city limits, however, they departed the scene.
Seigenthaler and Assistant Attorney General John Doar were now together in a car following the bus from N
ashville as it made its way into the Alabama capital. When they reached the Montgomery station, they could hear the screams and knew there was trouble. “I just leaped out of the car,” said Seigenthaler. At this point two men grabbed him and spun him around.
“Get back!” he shouted. “I’m with the federal government!” Then he tried to turn away, but was hit on the head with a pipe. Seigenthaler lay on the ground for almost half an hour before the police took him to a hospital.
The next night, 1,500 people packed into Montgomery’s First Baptist Church to honor the Freedom Riders and hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. Surrounding the house of worship were now several thousand angry white demonstrators. Keeping them at bay outside were fifty U.S. marshals, summoned there by the attorney general in Washington.
King, who’d rushed there on hearing the news of the attack, had to calm those in the church once the tear gas used on the mob outside begin to seep through the doors and windows.
“Troops are on the way in from Montgomery now,” King reported. “They have requested that all of us stay in here for the time being, that nobody will leave. And may I make another personal request on behalf I think of all of us, that we must be sure that we adhere absolutely to nonviolence. Now it’s very easy for us to get angry and bitter and even violent in a moment like this. But I think this is a testing point. Now, we had to go out a few minutes ago and counsel with some of our own people who were getting to the point of returning to violence. And we don’t want to do that. We can’t do that. We have won the moral victory.”
Governor Patterson finally sent in the National Guard to relieve the marshals. And at dawn, the Justice Department negotiated safe passage out of the church for those being held hostage there. The Freedom Riders continued on to Jackson.
“Robert Kennedy became educated in a real hurry,” John Lewis recalled. “And I can tell you the thing that sealed it for him, perhaps more than anything else—after John Seigenthaler was beaten, someone he knew.” Seigenthaler himself would say, “I think everything he thought the administration of justice and law enforcement was supposed to be about had been violated . . . and that it was an outrage, a stain on law enforcement that we let that happen.”
Bobby Kennedy Page 18