The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “In 1957 I was in Havana,” Jack said from the ABC studios in New York while his opponent debated him from the network studio in Los Angeles. “I talked to the American ambassador there. He said that he was the second most powerful man in Cuba.” That was a devastating admission of the true nature of the American role in Cuba. The seeds of Cuban communism had grown during the Eisenhower years in a soil of corruption abetted in part by American businesspeople, the American government, and American mobsters. As Jack had stated previously, the corrupt “dictatorship had killed over twenty thousand Cubans in seven years.” That was in large measure why so many Cubans cried out fervently against the hated Yanqui, not because they were the mindless dupes of communism.

  Jack criticized Nixon in the debates for traveling to Cuba in 1955 and “prais[ing] the competence and stability of the Batista dictatorship.” Jack, for his part, had treated the Caribbean island as a glorious playground. He had stood beside the dictator kissing babies and frolicked in the mendacious capital with seemingly nary a thought of the American role. And now, instead of trying to explain that government policies would have to change or American foreign policy would become a recruiter for the Communist movement, he played to the most narrowly chauvinistic instincts of the American public. “I have seen Cuba go to the Communists,” he said. “I have seen Communist influence and Castro influence rise in Latin America.”

  This was bad enough for him to say without a hint of context, but the day before Jack had told one of his new aides, Richard Goodwin, to prepare “a real blast at Nixon” on the Cuban issue. Sorensen and Feldman were brilliantly attuned to Jack’s thinking. Goodwin was a brash, pugnacious young man with the overweening confidence that can come from having served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Goodwin wrote a press release in the candidate’s name stating that “we must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista, democratic forces in exile and in Cuba itself who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

  One of the reasons Jack was so leery of academics and liberals in politics was that when they attempted to engage in what they thought was realpolitik, they were playing with weapons that often blew up in their own faces, and those of their friends, rather than hurting their enemies. When Goodwin called Jack at the Carlyle Hotel and learned that he was already asleep, the aide went ahead and issued the press release.

  The headline in the New York Times (“Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and Fighters for Freedom”) unsettled American liberals still uncertain about Jack’s bona fides. James Reston, the New York Times columnist, a man of studiously judicious opinions, wrote: “Senator Kennedy made what is probably his worst blunder of the campaign.”

  In the fourth debate Jack marked Nixon as an impotent bystander looking on hopelessly as Castro took over Cuba. Nixon said later that for the first time he felt personal animosity toward Jack. He knew that Jack’s remarks and his press release were even more unfair than they seemed to Republican loyalists. Since March, the government had been planning a large-scale covert action against Cuba run by Cuban exiles, an operation that he assumed Jack had learned about in his CIA briefings. Nixon was not only a fervent supporter but a prime mover of the action—an understandable position considering that, if the agency had kept to its original schedule, the action would have taken place a few weeks before the presidential election.

  The Eisenhower-Nixon administration that Jack was condemning for its weakness in fighting communism was the first peacetime American administration to mandate assassination as official government policy. Eisenhower had done so, or so it appears, at a National Security Council meeting on August 19, 1960, dealing with the left-wing Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Robert H. Johnson, the official note-taker, recalled that the president turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles “in the full hearing of all those in attendance and [said] something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated … there was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Within a few days, Dulles authorized $100,000 to kill the new president of the Congo. Dulles preferred hiding the sting in euphemism. He told Station Chief Lawrence Devlin that “we wish to give you every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position.”

  At the same time this action was going on, a CIA agent was meeting with Johnny Rosselli at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills, asking the mobster’s help in assassinating Fidel Castro. In Miami, Rosselli brought in a group of his associates that included Giancana, the Chicago syndicate leader, and Santos Trafficante, a Florida mob boss, who agreed to use their contacts in Havana to attempt to kill the Cuban leader.

  As Jack stood next to Nixon in these historic debates, he appreciated one of the conundrums of democratic government in the modern world. Time and again he had pondered how self-interested democratic man could possibly win against the regimented legions of totalitarian regimes. He knew that in World War II the magnificent qualities of his fellow Americans had come through, but would it happen again in the silent, twilight war against communism?

  The Eisenhower who had apparently chosen to authorize murder was a different leader from the greatest general of American’s greatest war, who led 150,000 men into combat at D-Day saying: “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.” This was a president apparently giving secret orders that allowed the CIA to send assassins to attempt to gar-rote, poison, shoot, or strangle Lumumba and Castro. Did the hopes and prayers of a liberty-loving people go with them as they sidled silently out into darkest night? Was this to be the fate of any mass leader around the world who rose up carrying a Marxist textbook in his hand while waving the flag of nationalism? If that was to be, was not this new statecraft easily learned? If would-be killers could stealthily make their way to the Congo and Cuba, couldn’t other killers rush the throne of power in Washington?

  No evidence exists that at this time Jack knew about the assassination attempts, but in this debate Nixon had good reason to condemn Jack for his duplicitous act of pretending to know nothing about the training of Cuban exiles. To do so would have blown the cover on the CIA operation, and that he would not do. Instead, Nixon decided to lie. “I think that Senator Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign,” Nixon said. “Now, I don’t know what Senator Kennedy suggests when he says that we should help those who oppose the Castro regime, both in Cuba and without. But I do know this: that if we were to follow that recommendation, that we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. I know something else. It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war, and possibly even worse than that.”

  In lying, Nixon had spoken the truth. This tragic misadventure whose existence he denied was everything Nixon said it was, though he was one of its major backers. As for Jack, his goading of Nixon was an unseemly business. Although Jack later asserted that he had not been briefed by the CIA about the invasion plans, he had probably learned of them from several other sources. Manuel Artime, the political leader of the brigade of Cuban exiles, met Kennedy in July 1960, when they almost certainly discussed the prospective invasion. In October, just before the final debate, John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, said that he flew to New York and at the Barclay Hotel secretly briefed the candidate about the members of the Alabama Air National Guard who were training the Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion. “I want you to promise me that you are never going to breathe a word about this to anybody if you do not know about it, because there are a lot of lives at stake,” he recalled telling Jack. A few weeks later, when President-elect Kennedy was formally briefed on the operation for
the first time, the CIA’s Richard Bissell realized that Jack was already knowledgeable about the invasion. “I think Kennedy had obviously heard of the project,” Bissell reflected. “Just how, I don’t know, but that wasn’t surprising; a fair number of people knew about it.” The CIA would admit later that “the project had lost its covert nature by November 1960,” and surely the Democratic candidate for president had been one of those to know about it.

  Jack won his debate points, but in doing so he helped to entomb himself in a prison of rhetoric out of which he and his administration would never fully escape.

  It said much about Jack’s marriage that in his acceptance speech in Los Angeles he had violated one of the most sacrosanct traditions by not even mentioning his absent wife. He had fit Jackie into a compartment in his complicated life, but now that he was running for the presidency, she had become a potential problem. “She … absolutely curled up at people shouting, ‘Hello, Jackie,’ who had never seen her before,” reflected Lord Harlech. “She’d just turn away, and you could feel a strong resistance to this kind of a life.”

  The Democrats did not know quite what to do with Jackie, an exotic orchid set among daisies and marigolds. They feared that Jackie lived so far outside the world of middle-class America that most voters would be uneasy having her in the White House. The Republicans trundled out their “Pat for First Lady” campaign. Presumably most Americans could identify more with this cloth-coated, modest matron, a veritable Betty Crocker of a politician’s wife, than the elegant, sexy, baby-talking, foreign-sounding Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. That contrast had not yet sunk in when the Democrats announced that the Kennedys were going to have a second child. A pregnant mother trumped even a Bible-touting, cloth-coat-wearing matron. But there were still cynical whispers in some quarters “that it [the pregnancy] was planned that way to keep that supposedly lethal glamour out of circulation.”

  Jackie’s seeming extravagance was such a problem that she appeared for one interview in a $29.95 maternity dress, wearing it as if it were a uniform of the middle class. “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon on clothes,” Jackie said, a subject that, fortunately for the Democrats, was not pursued.

  Jackie could not talk to Jack about just how difficult she found it being forced into the confining mold of a public person. She turned to Joe Alsop, whose insights into Washington social life were often deeper and truer than those found in his political columns. Alsop contrasted his cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, who in public managed “oddly humorous and even downright fantastic things,” with Pat Nixon, who created “false homey touches” that reeked of an “adman’s phoniness.” Alsop wrote Jackie of “things that can be done for public purposes without any departure from or falsification of your private self.”

  Jackie was seeking to maintain her authenticity and to preserve her rich inner life. “You have been of more help than you can imagine,” she wrote Alsop. “And there is one more thing you have taught me—to respect power. I never did—possibly because it came so suddenly without my having had to work for it—(power by marriage I mean). But if things turn out right—I will welcome it—and use it for the things I care about.”

  Jack would have preferred to spend his campaign days talking largely exclusively about foreign affairs, but there was one domestic issue that would not wait any longer, not for him or for anyone else. That was the continued disenfranchisement of black Americans. Bobby at least had played beside a black teammate on the Harvard football team, but except for his gentleman valet, Jack had practically no contact with Americans of other races. That made him no different from most men of his class, but he was neither intellectually nor emotionally attuned to the great domestic moral issue of his time. He was, moreover, the titular head of a party that included as a crucial element segregationist southerners.

  American blacks understood that fact full well, and in the 1956 presidential election, 60 percent had voted Republican, considering the party of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, if not the vehicle of their deliverance, then at least the lesser of two evils. They had voted Democratic during the New Deal, but that bond was now broken, and black voters appeared woefully slow in moving toward a Democratic Party that vowed to serve their interests. The prominent Atlanta minister Martin Luther King Sr. was one of a large number of the older generation of black southern preachers who had come out for Nixon, in large part in opposition to Jack’s faith.

  Martin Luther King Jr. had followed his father’s calling, but unlike many of that generation, he considered his faith not a substitute for justice but the very engine of its enactment. The Reverend King was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, the martyred Indian leader, and like his mentor, King was a man dangerous to all who looked on the world as it was and thought that was the way the world would always be. Despite what his enemies believed, in the first year of this new decade the Reverend King was not leading the black students across the South who had suddenly risen up, sitting in at lunch counters and picketing those who denied them their rights. He was wary of their endlessly confrontational politics and in some senses was pushed forward by the sheer energy and will of these young people. For King, the whirlwind of the 1960s had already begun.

  Over his political career Jack had learned that it was at times impossible to shake the hands of black and other ethnic leaders in equality when many of them offered nothing but outstretched palms. Louis Martin, the one important black aide in the campaign, said that the way to win the black vote was through his colleagues at black newspapers. “And I know those papers aren’t going to do a damn thing for you unless you pay us some money.”

  The most admired figure among the black minority was not the controversial Reverend King but the legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, and he had already endorsed Nixon. Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem congressman, was the most powerful political figure in black America, and the second-most-desired endorsement. His golden tongue could be had for a golden price, in this case an offering in the Reverend Powell’s collection plate of $300,000 cash to get out the black vote. Kennedy’s people knew that Powell would take most of that to get out his own vote, and they countered with $50,000 for ten endorsement speeches.

  King was a leader of a different kind. He sought a harder currency for speaking positively of Jack’s candidacy. King was a figure with various constituencies to satisfy, and strategies beyond the grasp of almost any of them. He couldn’t afford to squander his moral capital by publicly endorsing Jack. Still, he knew that for his people Kennedy was a far better choice than Nixon. He wanted the minions of youthful protest to lie low during the election campaign, or they might give Nixon the election.

  King asked for a meeting with Jack in the South, but Jack turned down that modest request when he learned that the civil rights leader felt that he should offer to meet with Nixon as well. “The hell with that,” Jack told Harris Wofford, a lawyer and campaign aide concerned with civil rights matters. “Nixon might be smart enough to accept. If he does, I lose votes. I’m taking a much greater risk in the South than Nixon, but King wants to treat us as equals. Tell him it’s off.”

  King had been looking for a worthy excuse to be out of Atlanta, where the new wave of protests had already begun and his absence was so evident.

  Jack’s intransigence led King to do what he did not want to do, to lead where he did not want to lead, and to become the leader he might not have become. He was left with no good excuse to stand apart from his young brethren in protest. On October 19, he joined eighty student protestors asking for service in the segregated Magnolia Room at Rich’s, Atlanta’s premier department store.

  That morning the Atlanta police arrested King, and for the first time in his life he spent the night in a jail cell. King refused bail, and the matter threatened to create an embarrassing dilemma for a candidate who was trying to draw southern blacks to his banner while holding on to southern segregationists.

  When Jack sought counsel on this matter, he turned to Sarge Shriver and Harris Wo
fford, who led the campaign’s civil rights efforts. Wofford reflected years later that Jack was not completely comfortable with his two “super idealistic” subordinates. Neither his brother-in-law Shriver, “a radical Catholic,” nor Wofford, who had become an advocate of Gandhian nonviolence in India, were likely to accede easily to the inevitable compromises of politics. Wofford wrote a strong statement for Jack to release in defense of King and condemning his arrest. Jack read the passionate statement with dismay. He had been talking to Ernest Vandiver, the governor of Georgia, politician to politician, and now, a few days before the election, Jack was not about to make such a statement.

  “Look, our real interest is getting Martin out, right?” Kennedy told Wofford. “Well, I’ve been told that if I don’t issue that statement, the governor of Georgia says, ‘I’ll get that son of a bitch King out.’”

  The Kennedys were not the only politicians worried that the political sky was falling. William Hartsfield, the mayor of Atlanta, deplored the dismal publicity his progressive city was receiving. He went ahead and arranged to have King and the other activists released and the charges against them dropped, an action he was taking, he said, only because Senator Kennedy had implored him to do so. Wofford had done all the imploring, and the Kennedy campaign staff backed away from the matter as best they could, lest they end up freeing King but losing the solid South.

  That would have been the end of it, but just as King was to leave Fulton County Jail, Judge Oscar Mitchell in Georgia’s De Kalb County had him arrested again on a bench warrant for violating his parole on a traffic violation and carried away in leg irons. On the following day, less than a week before the election, the judge sentenced King to six months at hard labor. The judge had hardly banged his gavel a last time before King was taken to Georgia’s toughest prison at Reidsville to begin to serve out his term.