by Larry Tye
He made news again in Berlin, another Cold War flash point. Arriving at Tempelhof Airport, he declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” a gesture of kinship to the isolated city that his brother would famously echo the following year. More than 150,000 West Berliners were waiting for Bobby in front of the city hall on a day so cold he could barely get his words out. “An armed attack on West Berlin is the same as an armed attack on Chicago, or New York, or London, or Paris,” he assured his listeners. “You are our brothers and we stand by you.” At the Potsdamer Platz, he got his first look at the wall of masonry and wire separating the city’s free and entrapped halves, and he saw several women peering back from windows in East Germany. “As I turned, several of the women slowly and carefully waved their hands without moving their arms,” he wrote in the inevitable book that grew out of the trip, this one called Just Friends and Brave Enemies.*7 “It was a poignant moment and I felt a chill in the back of my neck.”
The way he traveled said a lot about this attorney general and his times. He always flew on commercial carriers, and always first class. There was no security, but a handful of reporters tagged along. Bobby tried to sleep on the planes with the help of an eye mask that advertised his mischievousness: painted on the veil were one eye that was shut, as in sleep, and the other wide awake, giving the impression that he was permanently winking. “Passengers returning to their seats from the toilets were startled by this image of the Attorney General,” recalls Grove, “and probably voted for any Republican in the next elections.”
Bobby arrived back in Washington on February 28, after twenty-eight days abroad, having logged thirty thousand miles and touched down in fourteen countries. The press had always been beguiled by him, especially when Ethel was by his side, and journalists threw bouquets instead of asking why an attorney general was jetting around the globe. “The joyful Christian couple who are obviously enjoying every minute of their travels may help convince the world that it is possible to be happy and an American at the same time,” opined the columnist Mary McGrory. Republicans in Washington asked the questions reporters didn’t, sounding like embittered old men even when the words came out of the mouth of an ambitious young luminary like Congressman John Lindsay of New York. “We question whether it is necessary for you and your office to be either burdened or embarrassed by free wheeling foreign missions on the part of highly placed amateurs who do not have the background, training, language ability, or capability to carry on the enormous burden of diplomacy in the context of today’s long struggle,” Lindsay groused in a letter to Dean Rusk, who would later voice identical concerns in his memoir.
The boyish congressman and middle-aged diplomat missed the point. Bobby’s freedom from the cumbersome rituals of statecraft is precisely what let the attorney general take his resonant message to the jungles of Africa and the walled-in streets of Berlin. America was engaged in a struggle of cultures and visions with its Cold War nemeses, and Bobby saw that it would be won not by giving speeches at private embassy parties but by using a public megaphone to trumpet his fiery love of country. The United States had no more effective propagandist than its good-looking, irrepressible attorney general. Those who met him, including even the young socialist who ranted against him at Waseda University, would remember his visit half a century later and would be grateful he’d come. They remembered Ethel, too, whose instincts were even better than Bobby’s on whom to like and who was “just awful,” and whose spiritual nourishment energized him during their nonstop travels. Moreover, Bobby’s crusade didn’t end when he got home. When young Americans travel overseas they have a duty, he told them, to explain to everyone they meet that “the state exists for the individual.” Unless they know enough to talk about what is right and wrong in America they would do the country a favor if they “stayed in bed at home.”
If domestic opponents couldn’t see the difference he was making, the embassy staffs he’d run ragged did. In Japan, for example, his visit “commanded the attention of more people and elicited a more positive response from the Japanese public than any good will visit in Japan’s history,” the legation in Tokyo said in a confidential report to the State Department, even though the authors knew their words wouldn’t win favor with Secretary Rusk, who had made such a goodwill visit himself. “The initial (and perhaps also the most lasting) impression on the Japanese people at large was made less by what the Attorney General said than by what he (and Mrs. Kennedy) did, the pace at which they did it, and their attitude and personality—and by the unprecedented efforts that all Japanese mass communications media made to convey these things to their audiences. Japanese generally received a new and vivid sense of the dynamism and vigor of the United States Government and the American people.”
The change of mind went both ways. At the outset of the trip, Bobby had shared his father’s conviction that the State Department lacked the creativity and agility to deal with the crises it faced. His travels helped him see otherwise, in enough cases, to assume a more refined stand about not just the diplomatic corps but the planet. If standing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall hardened his views of the Soviet Bloc, the frightened hand wavers in East Berlin gave his enemy a human face. Likewise, the leftist students who accosted him in Tokyo made him determined to replace their diet of Soviet propaganda with New Frontier optimism. This was how he learned, the same way he had on his trip to the Soviet Union with Justice Douglas. World affairs, to Bobby, were less a global chess game than a latticework of bonds between humans, much as they had been for Ben Franklin two centuries before. The extraordinary outpouring of human response to him, quite apart from his charismatic brother, suggested to the young attorney general new possibilities for what he could do in the world.
He was growing personally, too, as Brandon Grove saw. It was Grove who had to absorb Bobby’s grousing about the unreliable CIA, his complaints about the fat and flabby State Department, and his sophomoric restlessness at having to stand in receiving lines behind chiefs of state from what he considered second-rate countries. In Islamic Indonesia, Bobby humiliated Grove by making him dance the Charleston in public, with an equally embarrassed friend of Ethel’s, to reward their hosts who had dazzled them with a traditional candle dance. The Kennedy entourage caught its flight to Saigon only because Grove took it upon himself to pack Bobby and Ethel’s bags, explaining to them in exasperation that “this is a real world with real people and real airplanes. Pan Am isn’t going to hold the plane for us!” Grove was therefore surprised and delighted when, back in Washington, “Ethel, with a sweet smile, slipped a small leather box into my hand and said, ‘Bobby and I want you to have this.’ Inside were two gold cufflinks, one inscribed ‘Real World,’ the other ‘Real People.’ On their backs were the initials BHG and RFK….He and Ethel were saying an affectionate ‘thank-you.’ ”
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IT WAS NATURAL to assume that Bobby Kennedy didn’t know much about life’s realities given his age—not quite thirty-seven in October 1962—and how boyish he sounded and looked. He was the youthful president’s kid brother, old Joe Kennedy’s pampered son. If experience was the measure, however, few in the cabinet or country could match Bobby’s. He had seen more of the world by his early twenties than many secretaries of state do in a career, thanks to his father’s money and insistence that his children be broadly informed. As a globetrotting attorney general he consorted with presidents and prime ministers, kings and autocrats, and a pope who would achieve sainthood. Yet for all his interest in domestic issues as pressing as civil rights and crime control, and foreign ones as far-reaching as East-West relations, it was that crocodile-shaped island in the Caribbean that would grip him, from the earliest days of the Kennedy administration to its very last.
That grip felt like a noose during the two crisis-laden weeks in October 1962 when the United States was demanding that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba and the Soviets took their time weighing whether to comply or face the likelihood of
war. The public was unaware of this brinkmanship until six days into the crisis, on October 22, when President John F. Kennedy went on national television with three sobering revelations: America had “unmistakable evidence” that the Russians were installing atomic warheads in Cuba capable of striking the Western Hemisphere; President Kennedy was insisting that Chairman Khrushchev “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat”; and, to show we were serious, American warships would set up a “strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment” bound for Cuba. Even as JFK was speaking, his government was placing all U.S. forces around the globe on high alert. The public reaction to the president’s words was a collective shudder. Parents emptied the shelves of supermarkets and gun stores as they outfitted their fallout shelters. Children tried to remember the duck-and-cover drills they’d learned in school, in which they were told to hide under their desks as a shield against falling glass and debris. The planet quickly picked sides, with the West backing America, 650 million Red Chinese standing by their comrades in Cuba, and Pope John beseeching the two superpowers to “save peace.” Everyone everywhere, God-fearing or not, prayed that America’s young president knew what he was doing as he faced off against the more worldly-wise Soviet leader.
They had to take the last part on faith since the next seven days of moves and countermoves took place out of public view. People could follow the debate playing out in the United Nations, but even the U.S. and USSR ambassadors who were spitting venom at one another in New York weren’t in on all the nerve-testing maneuvering in Washington and Moscow. It was entirely unlike more recent traumas such as the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, which viewers watched play out in real time on television. Not until October 28, 1961, the thirteenth and last day of the missile standoff, did America and the rest of mankind learn enough to finally relax. Khrushchev affirmed in writing that he would withdraw his missiles in exchange for the United States pledging not to invade Cuba. “In view of the assurances you have given and our instructions on dismantling,” the Soviet premier wrote in a four-and-a-half-page letter to the American president, “there is every condition for eliminating the present conflict.” President Kennedy, in a three-paragraph response, called the Soviet stand-down “an important and constructive contribution to peace.”
Having lived in the dark while its fate was being decided, it is no wonder that the world was so interested in the first-ever inside story of the crisis as told by Bobby Kennedy. His slender book Thirteen Days said that humanity had come even closer than it knew to the dreaded nuclear holocaust. (He put the odds at “one chance in five or so,” adding that “everybody thought there was a good chance of getting blown up.”) The presumptive star of Bobby’s narrative is President John F. Kennedy, who parsed conflicting advice, talking down the warmongers and settling on a less confrontational nautical quarantine of the island nation. The thinly veiled hero, however, was the author himself. In his account, Bobby played Lancelot to Jack’s King Arthur, deftly steering an exhausted cabinet toward an elusive consensus, acting as interlocutor with the Soviets, and offering his brother not just guidance but solace at the tensest junctures.
October 24, day nine of the crisis, was D-day. Shortly before 10:00 A.M. on the twenty-fourth, as Russian ships neared our line of destroyers and JFK and his counselors faced the fateful choice of whether or not to intercept, Bobby emboldened his commander in chief. “I sat across the table from the President. This was the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come. The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all and particularly over the President,” Bobby recalled in his book. “We stared at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the President.”
The brothers had never shared an experience like this. It wasn’t just the imminence of catastrophe, but how, when he wrote about it years later, Bobby for the first time claimed a major slice of the credit. He had consciously underplayed his role in steering Jack’s path to the White House, just as he did when he took the heat for miscues with the steel titans and melees over civil rights. During the impossibly tense days in October 1962 he once again acted as his brother’s moral bell ringer, only now he wanted everyone to know what he had done. As an early call was sounded for U.S. air strikes, “I passed a note to the President: ‘I now know how [Japanese prime minister Hideki] Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.’ ” Later, Premier Khrushchev boxed in the Americans by sending them contradictory messages—an encouraging private one on Friday, October 26, suggesting the Soviets would withdraw their missiles if the United States merely promised not to invade Cuba, and a public one the next day, “Black Saturday,” that upped the ante, saying the Soviet missiles would go only if the United States dismantled its atomic warheads pointing at Russia from Turkey.*8 It was Bobby, he told us, who suggested an elegantly simple way out: Accept the offer they liked and ignore the other one. “I said that there could be no quid pro quo” to swap missiles “made under this kind of threat or pressure.” The word “I” appears 158 times in Bobby’s 105 pages of text in Thirteen Days, alongside 231 “we”s. This unrivaled alliance of brothers, the author added, ensured that Black Saturday gave way to Sunny Sunday.
His account was riveting but not completely honest. Bobby portrayed himself as the artful pacifist in his book, an image first introduced by two journalist friends in a Saturday Evening Post article that called him the “leading dove” in the White House brain trust. In fact, he began as an outspoken hawk. In his first comments in the cabinet room on October 16, day one of the crisis, he doubted that an air strike on the missile sites would be enough and pondered whether it should be followed by an all-out invasion. Seeing war as inevitable, he wondered aloud if “we should just get into it, and get it over with, and take our losses.” He even suggested staging an incident at our Navy base in Guantanamo Bay—“sink the Maine again”—creating the kind of pretext that had ignited the Spanish-American War in 1898 after the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor.*9
By day five he began to waver, suggesting instead that we start with a blockade while making it clear to the Russians that air strikes would follow if they didn’t halt work on the missile installations. That would avoid a Pearl Harbor–like surprise, which to Americans had been the ultimate treachery, yet it would still allow for an attack. “Now,” he argued, “is the last chance we will have to destroy Castro and the Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba.” Once the president decided on the blockade, nobody did more to rally support than his brother, out of loyalty and knowing that his reaction would set the tone for the rest of the cabinet and even the military.*10 But ten days into the quarantine he was still asking whether it “might be better to go ahead and knock out the missiles with an air attack rather than confront the Soviets at sea.” Two days later the focus had switched to the missile swap deal that would, in just twenty-four hours, bring the crisis to an end, but Bobby remained unsettled. With half the president’s aides gone and those remaining indulging in gallows humor, Bobby said, “I’d like to take Cuba back. That would be nice.” An unidentified colleague responded, “Suppose we make Bobby mayor of Havana?”
We can track his push and pull not because of what Bobby wrote in his book, but because his actual words were picked up by microphones implanted in the wall of the cabinet room and connected to a tape recorder in the basement. The recordings were one of Bobby’s and Jack’s “non-sharables,” and nobody else had a clue they were being taped. The public didn’t find out until 1973, as part of Watergate-inspired disclosures, and it took another twenty-four years for the last of the Cuban crisis tapes to be released. Unlike Richard Nixon’s sound-activated recording system, this older set of tapes required the president to push a hidden button and let him turn the recorder on or off at his pleasure. The picture of what happened during those torturous thirteen days in 1962 was filled in over time thanks to memoirs
by Soviet and American leaders, anniversary gatherings of the participants, the declassification of government records, and the opening of the last of Bobby’s archives in 2014. The real story is more interesting if less heroic than Bobby rendered it, reflecting his shifting understanding of both himself and his relationship to his brother.
The Russians, it turns out, got precisely the quid pro quo that Bobby said they hadn’t, and that he initially was dead against. His proposal to accept Khrushchev’s offer of a no-invasion pledge and ignore his demand for a missile swap would be enshrined in history as an ingenious solution and given a lyrical name, the “Trollope ploy,” a reference to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope’s marriage-hungry maiden who interprets an innocuous squeeze of the hand as an offer of matrimony.*11 To the world, it looked like the Soviet leader was as desperate as Trollope’s maiden for a way to reconcile with the Americans, and the wily Kennedys exploited Khrushchev’s vulnerability. The true deception, however, was Bobby and Jack’s hoodwinking of some of the cabinet and all of the public into thinking it really was a Trollope ploy when in fact America had acceded to both demands made by the Russian premier. The two superpowers had stood on the brink, each looking for a way out. The attorney general offered it at a one-on-one meeting with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, who rode the private elevator to Bobby’s office at about 8:00 on the evening of Black Saturday. The Kennedys were convinced that a tit-for-tat on the missiles was inevitable, and that the Jupiter rockets the United States had in Turkey were inconsequential to Europe’s defense. They also knew an explicit swap like that would cause an uproar, not just among hawks in America but from the Turks and other allies. So they made Khrushchev the offer on the condition that Russia keep that part of the deal secret. They promised that America would unilaterally remove its Jupiters four or five months later, in what would be described as a modernization of the NATO nuclear deterrent rather than a payback to the Russians for withdrawing their nuclear warheads from Cuba.