by Larry Tye
*16 McNamara and Ted Kennedy worried that President George W. Bush was making a similar mistake by invading Iraq in 2003, and both tried unsuccessfully to warn him off. One of those who did understand the lessons of the missile crisis was Castro, whose long reign was in part enabled by the pledge made by JFK during the crisis, and honored by his successors, not to invade the island.
*17 Bobby underlined the point to a Kennedy Library interviewer: “The ten or twelve people who would participate in all of these [missile crisis] discussions were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst them the most able in the country, but if any one of the half dozen of them were president, the world would very likely have been plunged into a catastrophic war” (RFK OH, February 13, 1965, 39).
*18 A more modest contribution ($25,000) allegedly came from John “Jake the Barber” Factor, a notorious swindler and half brother of the cosmetics mogul Max Factor. Not long after that donation was logged, JFK—who knew of the mobster from his earlier largesse to the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign—pardoned Jake for a mail fraud conviction that would have resulted in his being deported to a prison cell in England (Touhy, When Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy, 250–54).
*19 Powers was an American pilot whose CIA U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Unable to activate the jet’s self-destruct mechanism, and unable (some said unwilling) to use his suicide device, he and his plane were captured, causing a crisis in U.S.-Russian relations.
*20 Donovan also negotiated the exchange of Francis Gary Powers for the Russian spy Rudolf Abel, a dramatic story retold in the 2015 movie Bridge of Spies.
*21 Castro did eventually try to become another Tito, taking on a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement and loosening but never severing his ties with the Soviet Union.
*22 At their first meeting, Ethel says, Castro “embraced me. And, you know, in the Continental way, he kissed both cheeks. And then, and then he held me away from him, and his eyes filled with tears, and then the tears came down his cheeks. He had a very tough time recovering.” His meetings with Ethel suggest how entranced Fidel is with the family, despite Jack and Bobby’s bids to eliminate him, and how he realizes that the Bay of Pigs and missile crisis were his defining moments (Author interview with Ethel Kennedy).
*23 One small sign of that maturation came in the summer of 1963, when Brandon Grove consulted Bobby on whether to accept Chester Bowles’s offer of a job in India, where Bowles was doing a second tour as ambassador. Kennedy had called Bowles’s performance during the missile crisis “whiny,” branded him a “gutless bastard” for not intervening in the Dominican Republic, and helped get him fired as undersecretary of state. Now, as Grove remembered, Bobby’s “surprising reply was: ‘Do it. [Bowles] is a good man’ ” (Grove, Behind Embassy Walls, 78).
Chapter 7
THE INTERREGNUM
THE NEWS THAT would shatter his world couldn’t have come from less sympathetic lips. Bobby had brought two colleagues back to Hickory Hill for lunch after an exhausting day and a half of meetings on how to ratchet up the war against the Cosa Nostra. Before heading back to the Justice Department he treated himself to a quick swim on what was an unseasonably mild afternoon for November 22. Then he changed into dry shorts and joined Ethel and their guests near the shallow end of the pool for a Vatican-sanctioned Friday menu of tuna fish sandwiches and creamy clam chowder. The calm was broken by ringing in the green wooden phone box that housed the direct line to the White House, a sound that generally signaled trouble. Ethel answered, hoping to shield her husband from the interruption, but when the operator insisted it was urgent she held out the white receiver and announced, “It’s J. Edgar Hoover.”
“I have news for you,” Hoover told Bobby. “The president’s been shot.” The FBI director’s monotone made his ghastly meaning difficult to fathom. Bobby’s mind hurtled back to two nights earlier, when he’d been laughing with Jack about the president’s impending trip to Dallas to forge a peace between feuding Democrats. After a moment of stricken silence he refocused to reply: “Is it serious?” Hoover: “I think it’s serious. I am endeavoring to get details. I’ll call you back when I find out more.” The director’s words and expression, as the attorney general would later say, were “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”
To Bobby, the news was cataclysmic. His hand instinctively clasped his mouth as his face stretched tight, telegraphing his horror. Ethel saw his expression from the far side of the pool and sprinted to his side, embracing him. “Jack’s been shot,” he choked out. “It may be fatal.” An emotional onslaught catapulted him between despair and disbelief even as he carefully realigned his countenance into an emotionless mask. The reflexes of crisis were by now a well-known body memory and he forced himself into action. There were too many roles to play, too much that only he could do. Grieving would have to wait.
Tensely, he dialed Defense Secretary McNamara on the black house phone and requested a plane to fly him to his brother’s side. Then he bounded up the stairs to change clothes and make arrangements. Everywhere he looked were framed reminders—Jack addressing a joint session of Congress, Jack holding hands with Jackie, Jack striking a pose with the rest of Rose and Joe’s brood. Bobby called the hospital in Dallas, peppering the Secret Service detail with queries. Were the president’s injuries serious? (Very.) Was he conscious? (No.) How was Jackie holding up? (Not well.) Had they summoned a priest? (Yes.) Dashing between phone extensions in the upstairs study, downstairs library, and outdoor pool and tennis court, Bobby muttered to himself, “There’s been so much hate.” Thirty minutes later, Taz Shepard, JFK’s naval aide, called back with word that the president had died.
In an instant, Bobby shifted from First Brother to First Son. His thoughts went not to his loss, but to his siblings’ and parents’. Ted had heard about the shooting and rushed home, but with the telephone exchanges jammed he had to ring the doorbells of neighbors he didn’t know until he found one with a working phone and could call Hickory Hill. “He’s dead,” reported Bobby, whose house was becoming an impromptu command center. “You’d better call your mother and our sisters.” The attorney general knew who was capable of what and handed out assignments. Ted and Eunice would fly to Hyannis Port, where he’d persuaded Rose to wait until they arrived to tell Joe about his son’s murder. Jean agreed to come to Washington to attend to her sister-in-law and friend Jackie. Patricia was tracked down in California, and Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, in London. Sargent Shriver was already arranging the funeral with help from another brother-in-law, Steve Smith. Ethel stayed close by her husband, squeezing out between tears, “Those poor children!” Bobby had been the de facto head of the Kennedy clan for two years, since his father’s stroke. With Jack gone, it became official.
Barely an hour after the Secret Service confirmed that the president was dead, his successor telephoned Bobby from Dallas. “A lot of people down here think I should be sworn in right away. Do you have any objections?” Lyndon Johnson asked, tone-deaf to his bad timing and adding another bone for Bobby to pick with him. At Hickory Hill, meanwhile, a crowd was gathering. Bobby asked John McCone for clues about the killer, but the CIA chief said he had none. To press aide Ed Guthman, Bobby confided, “I’d received a letter from someone in Texas last week warning me not to let the President go to Dallas because they would kill him….I never thought it would happen. I thought it would be me.” Guthman thought the same thing, and shortly after the assassination, he quietly posted a dozen Fairfax County police officers around the crowded Kennedy compound. His red-rimmed eyes concealed by sunglasses, Bobby bucked up his guests by saying, “We don’t want any gloomy faces around here.” He bear-hugged his children when they got home from school, reminding them that Uncle Jack “had the most wonderful life.” It would become his refrain.
By early evening his focus had switched to Jackie. A military helicopter whisked hi
m to Andrews Field, where he wanted to be on hand to meet Air Force One, which was carrying home his brother’s corpse and widow. Bobby jumped into the back of an empty Air Force truck and sat in the darkness, where he could avoid the swarming reporters. It was the same solitary setting where, thirteen months before, he had waited for Jack to fly home from Chicago during the tense early moments of the missile crisis. “Tears were streaming down his eyes, down his face, his cheeks. It really got to me, I had never seen the man cry,” remembers David Kraslow, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times who’d escaped the press cordon and found a hiding spot near Bobby’s.
The moment the plane touched down, Bobby ran up the steps even as they were being rolled into place, intent on finding Jackie. He barely acknowledged LBJ, which Johnson would remember. “I’m here,” he told his brother’s widow, draping his arm around her as millions of Americans watched on live television. “Oh, Bobby,” she whispered, reassured that, as always, her brother-in-law was there when she needed him. The two rode to Bethesda Naval Hospital curled in the back of the ambulance with Jack’s body. Jackie recounted every detail Bobby dreaded hearing about the motorcade, the assassination, and the aftermath. “It was so obvious that she wanted to tell me,” he would recall, “that whether or not I wanted to hear it wasn’t a factor.” Then he asked a Secret Service agent riding with them, “Did you hear they’d apprehended a fellow in Dallas….It was one man.” All day and night he was forced to deal with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. He made the key choices on everything, from the size of his brother’s bier and hearse to picking a Navy hymn for his funeral. When they arrived at the White House in the small hours of the morning there was one more question to answer: Should the casket be open or closed? Bobby asked everyone to leave the East Room so he could view the body. It was his first look at Jack since the shooting, and he nearly collapsed. “Close it,” he ordered. Cosmetics made the president look waxlike and made up, too little like the majestic leader America knew and the brother he wanted to remember.
The most pressing duties finally done, Bobby was alone for the first time since he took the FBI director’s call twelve hours before. An entire nation was mourning its president, but nobody—not Bobby’s mother or siblings, nor even his sister-in-law Jackie—would grieve as deeply or as long as Bobby did. None of the losses that had come before could prepare him for this one. Jack had taken Joe Jr.’s place as Bobby’s revered older brother, then Joe Sr.’s as a father figure. The two were closer than any brothers had been at high levels of government, talking in a private code, perpetually interrupting each other and finishing one another’s sentences. Gone now were the dreams of what they could accomplish side by side. Gone, too, was Bobby’s seat at the table of power—J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson had already made that clear. From his years with the Rackets Committee to his time at the Justice Department, Bobby’s career and life had been hitched to his brother’s. The sniper’s bullet that had penetrated Jack’s skull shattered Bobby’s own vision even as it broke his heart.
Such were the thoughts swirling in his mind as he headed to the Lincoln Bedroom, where he would spend the few remaining hours before dawn. Charles Spalding, a scriptwriter who was close to both brothers, looked for and finally found a sleeping pill for the attorney general. “It’s such an awful shame,” Bobby said softly. “The country was going so well. We really had it going.” Spalding closed the bedroom door and started to walk away, then turned to listen: “He just gave way completely, and he was just racked with sobs and the only person he could address himself to was ‘Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?’ ”
Bobby would never find a reason, but he would find a way to get it going again. His upbringing had instilled in him a steely drive. Joe Kennedy loved his boys, but he wasn’t a sentimentalist. He had trained them all for public service and high office and would not be denied. When he lost his firstborn, in whom he had invested his highest hopes, Joe saw to it that Jack stepped in to fulfill those dreams all the way to the White House. Now, by the laws of primogeniture, it was Bobby’s turn. Nobody had articulated the way the Kennedys worked better than JFK, who back when he was a senator said, “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate, and if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.” When he won the presidential nomination, Jack gave Bobby a cigarette box inscribed, “When I’m through, how about you?”*1
Bobby was readier than anyone realized. Jack had been training him to take his place from the start of his term, although he didn’t expect the succession to take place until 1968 at the earliest. He not only gave his brother the legal experience he had joked about, he let him try on more hats than anyone else in the administration. At various times Bobby had acted as the virtual secretary of defense and the CIA director. He had offered advice on political affairs, diplomatic affairs, and press affairs, and he had set so many policies on poverty and juvenile delinquency that the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare wondered aloud if Bobby wanted his job. So did the postmaster general, who knew that in the Kennedy administration, the attorney general was the true prince of patronage. Bobby had signaled his latest intentions before the assassination by ordering for his senior staff cufflinks with an inscription that marked his time at the Department of Justice as 1961 to 1963. The rumor floated around Washington that Angie Novello, his personal secretary, had already been to the State Department to measure the curtains and that Bobby was heading there to oversee U.S. relations with Latin America or perhaps the whole world.
It was not just affairs of state Bobby was privy to, but all of Jack’s dark secrets. Only Bobby had access to every segment of the president’s rigidly compartmentalized life. Now only Bobby knew how much truth lay behind the whispers about bids to steal votes from Richard Nixon or to assassinate Fidel Castro. He also knew enough about his brother’s marital and extramarital affairs to guess the rest. That’s why, in the midst of the two busiest and worst days of his life, Bobby took time out to quietly issue orders nobody would learn about until years later. The National Security Advisor changed the combinations on JFK’s locked office files and secured the rest of his personal papers. The Secret Service removed secret listening devices from the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. And doctors overseeing the president’s autopsy made sure not to mention embarrassing information like the state of his hotly debated adrenal glands. Here was the brutally efficient, fraternally devoted Bobby coexisting somehow with a man enveloped by a blanket of sadness.
Perhaps sensing his own vulnerability and his brother’s blossoming, Jack had drawn Bobby even closer near the end. Since the Bay of Pigs, his presidency had come as close to a collaboration as the nation had ever seen. It was visible in the battery of White House phones installed around Hickory Hill, from the study to the tennis court and swimming pool, compared to the single line to LBJ’s home. In the two days before he left for Dallas, the president was on the telephone to the attorney general seven times. Friends of both also noticed that the older brother had stopped needling the younger the way he had throughout their campaigns together. He was more respectful. Yet even as he had become Jack’s second self, Bobby was emerging as a prime force. He was growing up fast and putting aside the colder, tougher incarnation that he had assumed partly for the sake of his father and brother. With the president’s passing, that process continued with an intensity and in directions that would have surprised even John Kennedy. Relegated to a supporting role by birth order and his brother’s oversized presence, Bobby now would step into a limelight of his own.
—
AMERICA WAS AS one in its shock, outrage, and heartache over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Those who lived through it can remember where they were when they heard, and they will never forget the date November 22, 1963. But for most the pain subsided bit by bit as his casket was viewed by a select audience in the East Room of the White House, by hundreds of thous
ands who passed by as it lay in state at the Capitol, by millions who lined his funeral route, and by nearly everyone else in the country who watched on television the requiem mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral and the burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
For Bobby it was just the opposite. He was the steadiest of the stricken during the public observances, rallying to face the world and lending his hand in every critical decision. It was he who mediated between those who insisted the president be entombed in his native Boston and others who preferred the nation’s cemetery. He picked the precise spot, the hillside below Arlington House that his brother had visited and liked, announcing, “This is where we’ll bury the president.” He decided that Joe couldn’t handle the strain and kept him away from his son’s funeral. When Jackie dressed little John in white gloves, Bobby took them off, deciding it was unmanly even for a boy of barely two. Attentive to his own children, he took time the day he buried his brother to write to each, reminding them of their responsibility, as Jack’s nieces and nephews and as Kennedys, to serve their country. Then he reminded his siblings to pen similar letters to their own offspring. “It was natural for Bobby to take charge,” said his younger brother Ted. “He’s always been a sort of second father to us.”
Bobby stepped gracefully into the role of premature patriarch, having trained nearly his entire life to handle tragedy. At eighteen, he was at Hyannis Port that mild August afternoon in 1944 when chaplains broke it to the family that Joe Jr. wouldn’t be coming home from World War II. Nobody took the news harder than Bobby, who idolized his oldest brother. Four years later a plane crash took his big sister Kathleen. A stroke had banished his father to a wheelchair, and a failed lobotomy left his sister Rosemary under round-the-clock care in faraway Wisconsin. Both calamities were agonizing for Bobby. He had consoled Ethel through the loss of both of her parents in yet another airplane accident, and he comforted Jack and Jackie after the loss of their two-day-old son, Patrick. Tragedy struck the family so often that it acquired a name: the Kennedy curse. The very worst of times brought out the best in Bobby.