Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  “What do I want from you?” he asked the attorney general. Then, answering his own question, he expressed his belief that “the power and influence of the federal government should be used where necessary to ensure compliance with the laws as interpreted by the proper authority.” In conclusion, Meredith said, “I simply ask that the federal agencies use the power and prestige of their positions to insure the full rights of citizenship for our people.”

  Over the next year and a half, legal battles were fought. The final result saw the Supreme Court upholding an appeals court ruling in Meredith’s favor. Despite this, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett remained staunchly resistant. “I won’t agree to let that boy go to Ole Miss,” he told the U.S. attorney general.

  Both Kennedys hoped to avoid the use of federal troops in the matter. President Eisenhower bringing them in to integrate Arkansas’s Little Rock High School in 1957 had left a bad history in its trail. They didn’t want to repeat it. Unfortunately, an eruption of ugly violence—one necessitating outside intervention—seemed all too likely, given the inflamed emotions now gripping the Ole Miss campus.

  The daily headlines mirrored the differing regional perspectives on the crisis: “U.S. Is Prepared to Send Troops,” announced The New York Times on September 26, while the local Jackson Daily News reported, “Thousands Said Ready to Fight.”

  Barnett now proposed an elaborate plan in which a large detachment of U.S Army troops would be deployed to escort Meredith onto campus. There, Meredith would be greeted by the governor himself, backed up by a line of unarmed highway patrolmen. Those would be supported, in turn, by a line of unarmed sheriff’s deputies; and behind them would be a third line of students and citizens. Barnett would next read a proclamation barring Meredith, which would signal the soldiers to draw their weapons. The scene had Governor Barnett, facing overwhelming odds and the danger of bloody clashes, to give up, calling nobly for law and order.

  Bob Kennedy refused to play any part in this Theater of the Lost Cause which Barnett had concocted. Fearing the strong possibility of a disastrous mishap—the all-too-likely chance a hothead might start shooting—Bobby rejected the governor’s scenario outright. In fact, he already had had a great many futile discussions with the governor, all attempts to find a face-saving way for him to admit Meredith.

  Finally, the decision was made to whisk Meredith onto campus that Sunday and register him the next day. But when Meredith made it onto campus, accompanied by U.S. marshals, a mob quickly began to grow in size and menace. The scene grew worse and worse.

  Representing the Justice Department at Ole Miss were Nicholas Katzenbach and Ed Guthman, the latter describing to his boss a scene he said was “like the Alamo.” More than a third of the marshals—160 in all—wound up injured, with twenty-eight hit by gunfire. Two civilians, including a French journalist, were killed in the mayhem.

  At ten o’clock that night, Katzenbach reported to Kennedy the army needed to be called in, that it might even be too late. He worried that the five hundred beleaguered marshals couldn’t hold off the rioting protesters until reinforcements arrived from Memphis, eighty miles away. The attorney general, understandably alarmed at what his assistant AG was telling him and concerned about Meredith himself, told Katzenbach to issue the order: “Shoot anybody that puts a hand on him.”

  Later, Bobby paid tribute to the courage of James Meredith in what he called “the mightiest internal struggle of our time.” He saluted as well the “500 United States Marshals, most of them from the Southern states, who remained true to their orders and instructions and stood with great bravery to prevent interference with federal court orders.” Meredith later saluted Kennedy’s leadership in the dangerous episode. “It seemed to me very clear that Bobby Kennedy was the main man. . . . Bobby sent the marshals. He could have sent just two. His decisions kept me alive.”

  Not until that night in Oxford did either Kennedy brother grasp the depth of opposition to racial integration in the Deep South.

  Bobby and Jack in the Oval Office.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TWO GREAT MEN

  “Every time they have a conference, don’t tell me about who is the top advisor. It isn’t McNamara, the chiefs of staff, or anybody else like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.”

  —LYNDON JOHNSON

  Bobby Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs. The least mention of “Cuba” would gnaw away at his sense of humiliation over the way the U.S. had been, in the eyes of the world, beaten.

  Moscow, for its part, very much wanted its strategic outpost in the Western Hemisphere to remain Communist. Yet the Russians could only assume that the Bay of Pigs might soon be followed by an all-out U.S. invasion. There was pride, too, in the alliance. “Cuba means a great deal to the old Bolsheviks like Khrushchev,” a Kremlin official told Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “This is the first time a country has gone Communist peacefully.” Unlike in Eastern Europe, the Red Army didn’t move in and take over.

  Bobby Kennedy’s feelings directly countered those of the Russian leader. He’d long hated Communism, now loathed having a Communist country as a near neighbor, and, above all, hated that the enemy looked strong when his brother so clearly had not. He also was one of those predicting that it was only a matter of time before the Soviets brought in nuclear missiles to the island nation. For all these reasons, he accepted the leadership of a special interagency task force focused on the problem. “It was almost as simple as, goddammit, we lost the first round, let’s win the second,” National Security Council adviser McGeorge Bundy said.

  Code-named Operation Mongoose—after the snake-killing animal—it would carry out anti-Castro acts of sabotage, paramilitary plots, and a wide range of black bag schemes, all of which repeatedly failed. The Communist leader remained in unchallenged command of his country. Unmistakable with his cigar, trademark fatigues, and patrol cap, he cut a figure that seemed to mock the superpower determined to remove him.

  Bobby was also drawn at that time to a different sort of below-the-radar mission. This was one aimed at establishing a back channel for communicating with Moscow. Within weeks of the Bay of Pigs, journalist friends, including Charlie Bartlett, had put him in contact with an information officer at the Soviet embassy, Georgi Bolshakov.

  At their first meeting, the pair spent four hours strolling the streets of Washington. Those were the weeks of 1961 before the president’s Vienna summit with Khrushchev. Bobby’s goal then was to transmit a single message to the Kremlin: don’t be misguided by the American president’s restraint in the Bay of Pigs. Don’t underestimate his toughness. If pushed, especially on West Berlin where the Soviets were again pressing the U.S. to evacuate, he will fight.

  Through the ensuing months, the liaison between the U.S. president’s brother and Bolshakov, a man known for his closeness to Khrushchev, achieved some useful if limited purposes. Mainly it allowed each leader to avoid irritating the other for no good purpose. It won a commitment from the Soviet leader to take no action that would influence the 1962 congressional elections. Both the White House and the Kremlin recognized that any instance of Soviet aggression could only play into the hands of the more hawkish Republicans.

  As the fall election campaign heated up, however, Republican New York senator Kenneth Keating began charging that nuclear bases were now under construction in Cuba, saying that he had information to prove it. The political firepower was enormous. It told voters that the Soviets were converting Cuba into a strategic base just off American shores.

  In early October, Attorney General Kennedy received Bolshakov at the Justice Department. Gone was their usual casualness. Bobby’s extreme anger was masked by a cold, all-business demeanor. Knowing the headlines and facing him across his desk, however, the Russian repeated the earlier Moscow commitment—made by Khrushchev in a letter to the president—that these weapons were purely of a defensive nature, surface-to-air missiles “intended for protecting the interests of th
e Cuban revolution.”

  On October 15, a U-2 spy plane—a reconnaissance aircraft built for high altitudes—discovered three ballistic missile launch sites near San Cristóbal, which analysts determined were of medium range. That meant they were capable of reaching targets 1,100 miles away, which would include such cities as Washington, D.C.

  Early the next morning, a Tuesday, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy entered the family quarters of the White House, carrying the photographs. The president was in his bedroom, still in his pajamas reading the newspapers, as he received the startling news. Quickly, he drew up a list for Bundy of those he wanted summoned to an emergency meeting in the West Wing.

  Next, he reached Bobby at the Justice Department.

  The attorney general was meeting that morning with the new CIA deputy director, Richard Helms, on a different matter. Asked to confirm what he had just heard from the president, Helms did just that. Bobby’s response: “Shit.”

  When Jack reached Bundy’s office, he found Bobby there waiting for him.

  “Ken Keating will probably be the next president,” Jack wryly commented after they’d studied the three large photographs taken from the U-2. Yet there was no clear answer to the question of how long it would take, now that they were in place, for the Russians to have them ready to launch. Given the estimate of two weeks, the president realized he had sufficient time to consider his options.

  The initial recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to deliver an air strike. Either that, they advised, or an all-out invasion. The Kennedys understood the danger that posed, that the Soviets could take any attack the United States might make on Cuba as a pretext to match it in Europe. This could mean Russian tanks advancing into U.S.-occupied West Berlin. Khrushchev had recently warned Jack that any Cuban incursion would bring a retaliatory move in Germany. Nonetheless, the danger of American inaction was equally a risk.

  To help steer him through the crisis, President Kennedy now set up a working group within the larger National Security Council, seen as too large and therefore too leak-prone. The Executive Committee of the NSC—ExComm, as it became known—would deliberate and suggest strategies to force the missiles’ removal while avoiding a nuclear showdown with the USSR.

  When he returned to his office, Bobby alerted Ed Guthman to the situation. “We kidded ourselves,” he admitted. “And the Russians have lied through their teeth.”

  Furious at the Russians’ deceitfulness, Bobby, in the first ExComm meeting, proposed a quick air strike, to “get into it and get it over with and take our losses.” That position, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted, made him the toughest hawk among them, “both in his head and in his heart.”

  The most senior adviser seated around the ExComm table was Dean Acheson, an old cold warrior who’d served as President Truman’s secretary of state. Like Bobby, he made a strong case for an immediate surprise attack. The alternative, he argued, would be to repeat the mistakes of the Western powers in the years before World War II. In his mind, allowing such clear provocation to go unchallenged would be tantamount to appeasement, another “Munich.” This, of course, was a sensitive topic with both Kennedys, but they could see its truth.

  Yet as the days passed, both Kennedys found themselves espousing more of a dove’s view, coming to the belief that a naval blockade presented a wiser strategic course. In their minds, the ExComm advisers pushing for swift retaliatory aggression were taking too short a view. They weren’t considering the possible Soviet countermove, which, catastrophically, could force a nuclear standoff over West Berlin. There was no way the U.S. and its occupying allies, Britain and France, could withstand a Soviet move on the Western enclave with conventional weapons. An attack would escalate within hours.

  By Thursday, the president feared that the Joint Chiefs and other hawks were gaining the upper hand. Pressure was growing in the ExComm to go all the way, to hit the missile sites with a full invasion to follow. “This thing is falling apart,” Jack confided to his brother. “You have to pull it together.” Contributing to the urgency were new photographs arriving Friday that revealed the arrival of intermediate-range missiles able to travel three thousand miles, able to target nearly every major city in the United States.

  The clock was ticking. At the ExComm meeting that same day, Bobby now made the case against a surprise air attack, citing the break it would make with American principles. A State Department staffer taking notes recorded his argument: “For 175 years we had not been that kind of country. A sneak attack was not in our tradition. Thousands of Cubans would be killed without warning, and a lot of Russians too.” He favored action, to make known unmistakably the seriousness of the United States’ determination to get the missiles out of Cuba, but he thought the action should allow the Soviets some room for maneuver, to pull back from their overextended position in Cuba.

  On Monday evening, a full week after first seeing those missile site pictures, President Kennedy addressed the country on television. The U.S. would proceed with a blockade, he announced, which meant any ships en route to Cuba would be stopped, searched, and turned back if found to contain any nuclear material. The main question, of course, was whether the Soviets would honor what the American leader chose to call a “quarantine.” In the same speech, he warned that any nuclear missile fired at the United States from Cuba would trigger an all-out U.S. nuclear attack on Russia. He was talking about the near possibility of a Third World War—a nuclear one.

  At the Kennedy house across the Potomac River, the mood, as it was throughout the country, was both somber and frightened. “I remember going into Joe and Bobby’s room,” Ethel recalled to me. “All the children were around their beds, saying their prayers. And then Bobby was saying they might have to evacuate Washington. And I said, ‘we’re not going anywhere without you.’ ”

  Her husband, still in search of other avenues of negotiation, now made cautious contact with Georgi Bolshakov through an intermediary. The deal he suggested to the Russians was this: the United States agrees to remove its offensive nuclear missiles, currently pointed as they were at Soviet targets, from Turkey. In exchange, the missiles would be taken out of Cuba.

  On Friday, October 25, a teletype message arrived in the White House Situation Room. Sent by Khrushchev, it offered a deal in which Russia would remove its Cuban missile sites if the United States promised not to invade the island. But the relief was short-lived.

  On Saturday a second message arrived from the Kremlin, this one dictating a further condition. For the Russians to remove their missiles from Cuba, the U.S. would have to do the same in Turkey. Had Bobby’s overture to Bolshakov played a role in that second, tougher Kremlin proposal? The fact is, this proposed Turkey-for-Cuba trade-off was being floated by others in contact with the president.

  Now, confronted by the two letters from Moscow, the decision was made to answer the first. Bob Kennedy and Ted Sorensen did the actual drafting to the earlier, more conciliatory approach from Khrushchev. If the missiles were taken away from Cuban soil, their response said, the U.S. would commit itself not to invade. In this reply, there was no mention of U.S. missiles in Turkey.

  More was to come, however. The president asked his brother to meet that evening with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and inform him that, as part of the arrangement, the United States would remove its Turkey missiles within five months. Most critically, Bobby was to make powerfully clear that none of this was to be made public.

  After their meeting, Dobrynin cabled his Kremlin superiors, telling them that the attorney general didn’t know how long his brother could hold back the hawks: “I should say that during our meeting R. Kennedy was very upset. I’ve never seen him like this before,” adding, “The generals are itching for a fight.”

  The next day, Soviet radio broadcast the official Kremlin statement that the missiles installed there were to be removed from Cuba. “In order to save the world, we must retreat,” it gravely declared.

  British prime
minister Harold Macmillan, watching the perilous situation hour by hour from Downing Street, was one statesman to give a historic verdict on the Kennedys’ handling of it. “Looking back on it, the way that Bobby and his brother played this hand was absolutely masterly,” he said in an interview later. “What they did that week convinced me that they were both great men.” Macmillan never learned of the role played by the Turkish missiles.

  The attorney general, for his part, still had a Cuban crusade of his own. For the rest of the year he applied himself steadily to the difficult task of winning the release of those 1,113 members of Brigade 2506 captured at the Bay of Pigs. To oversee the negotiation, he brought in James B. Donovan, a New York lawyer who’d been general counsel to the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and an assistant prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. It was Donovan who’d managed the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who’d been shot down over Soviet airspace in May 1960.

  Donovan convinced Castro that the ransom he was demanding—the sum first stood at $62 million, but was negotiated down to $53 million—could not, for political reasons, be raised in cash. Cold War feelings wouldn’t permit it. Instead, the payment for the prisoners, he explained, would have to be transmitted as baby food and medical supplies. Bobby himself approached the companies who wound up contributing.

  At the last minute, when the Cuban dictator suddenly asked for an extra $3 million in cash before turning over the men, the attorney general managed, personally, to raise it in twenty-four hours. Driving him was his awareness of the exiles’ grim fate back in their native land. Fearing execution when captured, they’d been held in filthy cells, inadequately fed, and contemptuously cared for. And yet, they continued throughout their imprisonment to refuse to cooperate with the dictator’s demands that they speak out against the United States and voice their support for Castro’s regime.