The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  While this was going on Sunday evening, Bobby sat in his sports clothes in his office trying to barter some semblance of peace. His brother wanted his administration’s history to be written on a world stage in a bold, steady hand, not scribbled in blood by a racist mob who would gladly have set fire to that church or bludgeoned King and others to death. In that event, others probably would have also picked up the gun and written their own bloody pages in the history of the time.

  Governor Patterson was a segregationist and a savvy politician. The Alabamian was trying by word and act to tell the Kennedys that if they sought to impose what he considered liberal mores on his state, they would have an uncivil war on their unclean hands. Patterson no more wanted bloody streets and marching troops than did the Kennedys, but he could not afford to be seen as caving in to the hated northern intruders. As the governor saw it, King’s arrival on the scene increased the dangers tenfold, for the black troublemakers were now led by the most hated black in the white South.

  In the church hundreds of parishioners for whom the church was the sheltering center of their lives sat among the Freedom Riders and other activists. While King stood in the pulpit preaching to them words of faith and moral politics, outside danced a mad mob, dark, malevolent bearers of anarchy.

  Late that night Patterson agreed to send in the Alabama National Guard to protect the church. Bobby was immensely relieved, but for King, the sight of Alabama National Guardsmen instead of the hoped-for federal troops surrounding the church deepened his fears and dismay. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals!” King yelled at Bobby with such force that he pulled the telephone back from his ear. “Now, Reverend,” Bobby rejoined, “don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals, you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now.”

  Earlier in the evening Bobby had tried to strike up a rapport by finding a commonality: he talked with King about his grandfather Honey Fitz’s stories of anti-Catholic agitators burning nunneries in Boston. That may have resonated somewhat with the minister, but the obscure reference to Boston Irish history passed right by him. “What are Kelsey’s nuts,” King asked.

  Bobby’s night of listening to screaming, ranting players in this dangerous game was not at an end. “You are destroying us politically!” Patterson yelled at him a few minutes later. That was a charge guaranteed to resonate. Patterson had been a Kennedy supporter, and if he was destroyed, what malevolent figures might rise in his place?

  “John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically,” Bobby replied. This was true, but in the physical survival of the Reverend King and the Freedom Riders, the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policy survived as well. Bobby had shown himself an adept, determined negotiator in achieving that result.

  When the Freedom Riders had finished their journeys, the attorney general took the action that if taken earlier might have made the rides unnecessary. He directed the Justice Department to collect photographs and other evidence of the pervasive racial discrimination in the South. Then he prevailed upon the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue an order prohibiting all such discrimination. Within a year the Department of Justice reported that segregation in interstate public transportation had ended. It had been ended by a group of courageous young people deliberately confronting segregation and by the skill and determination of the attorney general acting under the president’s orders. What had started as dangerous tension between the administration and the civil rights movement had resulted in a successful meeting of popular protest and public power.

  As for the South, the region was far more complex in its peoples, and far more diverse in its reactions, than many northerners understood. “But when all has been said, we Montgomerians and Alabamians are left in loneliness and with a grievous problem,” the Montgomery Advertiser editorialized. “The agitators will be tried for defiance of Alabama law. But what of the mobsters who have defied Alabama law? They were not duly quelled and that failure is ours alone. In fact, the mobsters were encouraged.”

  Bobby had a heavy schedule dealing with civil rights, organized crime, and other legal matters that traditionally concern the attorney general. He was so obsessed with the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, however, that he became the crucial policymaker in the attempts to end Castro’s regime.

  Bobby was there at the crucial meeting on November 3, 1961, setting up “Operation Mongoose,” the multi-agency plan to harass Cuba and destroy the revolutionary government. When the attorney general took notes at the meeting, he named all the other participants, then wrote: “Lansdale (the Ugly American).”

  Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, the chief of operations of Operation Mongoose, had served in the early 1950s in the Philippines, where he was involved in anti-insurgency efforts against Communist Huk guerrillas. That experience became the subject of an adulatory fictional portrait in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 best-seller, The Ugly American. In those pages Lansdale became the idealistic Edward Hillandale, an air force colonel who is genuinely concerned about the lives of the people in a Filipino province threatened by Communist guerrillas.

  Lansdale had also been immortalized as Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s classic novel The Quiet American. The book is a primer on the dark side of the American character—the deadly innocent who sets out to do good, oblivious to the murderous devices he employs. Lansdale had served in the CIA in Vietnam in the midfifties, when Greene’s novel takes place. In Greene’s novel the protagonist is a CIA agent in Vietnam, a crew-cut, friendly fellow who, with all the best of intentions, “comes blundering in, and people have to die for his mistakes.”

  After the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers called on the celebrated counterinsurgency expert to lead where the CIA had faltered, taking over as chief of operations of the renewed efforts against Cuba. The Kennedys had no real trust in the CIA, and Lansdale ran the operation out of the Defense Department, using CIA and other resources. Although Bobby oversaw Operation Mongoose, he did nothing important without the clear direction and knowledge of the president.

  Bobby was enamored with the mythic Lansdale, though he was no more The Ugly American than he was The Quiet American. He was, however, a brilliant propagandist, among other things, and he promoted nothing better than himself. In that crucial meeting he was a sterling proponent of a passionate plan to have the Cubans fight their own battles, a plan that resonated perfectly with Bobby’s own thinking.

  “My idea is to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists,” Bobby wrote. “Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.” Lansdale took Bobby’s emotional imperative and turned it into a policy that seemed to embody all the can-do spirit of America.

  Lansdale condemned the CIA’s ineffectual “harassment” techniques with a flick of rhetoric. He wasn’t for imposing some American solution on the backs of the Cubans. As he said later, he was for having “the people themselves overthrow the Castro regime rather than U.S. engineered efforts from outside Cuba.” He was going to find leaders among the Cuban exiles who opposed both Batista and Castro, bold men who would lead their people to overthrow the Communist tyrant. He knew Communists and their ugly acts, and he was not about to “arouse premature actions, not to bring reprisals on the people there and abort any eventual success.”

  While Bobby listened to Lansdale, he also had before him a memo on Cuba from the Board of National Estimates, representing the best judgments of analysts from the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the State Department. It was a rational, realistic portrait of Castro’s Cuba, detailing not only the oppressive measures the state had taken but also the legitimate support it still maintained. The leadership had institutionalized the revolution in such a way that Castro’s death would not end the regime. The report concluded on
the deeply ironic note that “a dead Castro, incapable of impulsive personal interventions in the orderly administration of affairs, might be more valuable to them as a martyr than he is now.” That was a daringly prescient analysis, for when the revolutionary leader Che Guevara was executed by American-trained soldiers in Bolivia in 1967, he became in death a symbol to Cuba and a goad to revolution that he probably never would have been in life.

  Lansdale understood rightly that this report represented a profound challenge to his own aggressive, daring schemes. He warned Bobby that this “special intelligence estimate seems to be the major evidence to be used to oppose your project.” He criticized the report for drawing conclusions based on inadequate intelligence, but he had nothing to offer in its stead but rhetoric and unbridled passion.

  Robert Amory, the CIA deputy director for intelligence, believed that the past was a guide to the present. Amory pointed out at a later CIA meeting that “no authoritarian regime has been overthrown in the 20th Century by popular uprising from within without some kind of support—war or otherwise.”

  When Roger Hilsman, another expert and proponent of counterinsurgency, looked at Lansdale’s plans, even he had profound doubts. Hilsman wrote in February 1962, “we may be heading for a fiasco that could be worse for us than the ill-fated [Bay of Pigs] operation.”

  In listening to Lansdale’s entreaties, Bobby, then, willfully turned away from many of the best minds and judgments of his intelligence and diplomatic services to accept a policy based largely on one man’s deadly idealism. Operation Mongoose was, as Lansdale called it, Bobby’s plan, but it was also Bobby’s revenge, Bobby’s private war, a war that he staged to vindicate his brother, the president.

  Lansdale had always been terribly eclectic in the means he employed. On the one hand, he intended to train idealistic young Cuban students to infiltrate their homeland, and on the other hand, he would also employ some of the same Mafia figures who had already been involved in assassination attempts. “This effort may, on a very sensitive basis, enlist the assistance of American links to the Cuban underworld,” Lansdale wrote in a top-secret memo in December 1961. “While this would be a CIA project, close cooperation of the FBI is imperative.” It is simply unthinkable that Lansdale would even suggest such a thing if Bobby, his protector and champion, had not been fully conversant with the plans.

  Lansdale could speak bureaucratic language at White House meetings, but what appealed to the Kennedys was that the man was a democratic shaman, full of tales of how he had defeated communism by wit, magic, and endless courage. Whatever he did, Lansdale was to the Kennedy brothers’ thinking a brave, true man who had made the fight against communism his chosen field of combat, one on which he again and again proved his mettle and his manhood.

  Lansdale, who had started out in advertising before World War II, was an endless spinner of tales. One of the stories that embroidered his legend took place in the Philippines, where his men captured a guerrilla in an area threatened by the Communists. Lansdale supposedly ordered the men to puncture the man’s neck as if a vampire had latched onto him, to turn the corpse upside down to drain the blood, and then to set it out on the trail to be found by the Huk guerrillas. When the peasant soldiers came upon the gruesome corpse, they were so terrified that they moved out of the area.

  In February 1962, Lansdale set out a precise timetable that was as reliable as an Indian train schedule. He proposed the active fostering of revolution within Cuba to take place by October “with outside help from the U.S. and elsewhere.” The guerrillas would move into operation no earlier than August, leading to the revolt and overthrow of Castro in October. “A vital decision still to be made, is on the use of open U.S. force to aid the Cuban people in winning their liberty,” Lansdale noted, his plan as dependent on American involvement as was the CIA’s scenario for the Bay of Pigs. He showed no awareness that Castro might have been a popular leader and arrogantly assumed that most Cubans would welcome this new “revolution” imposed by the hated gringos.

  The new CIA station in Miami, code-named JM/WAVE, was set up at an abandoned naval air station in Richmond, just south of the city. It was fitting that JM/WAVE should be run from an old military base, for this was indeed a war that the CIA was running out of these office buildings and warehouses set on a secluded 1,571-acre plot. Its resources included ships and planes and hangars full of munitions, and above all, the Kennedy imperative to do something.

  The president and the attorney general had told Bissell “to get off your ass about Cuba.” His successor, Richard M. Helms, picked up that banner, as did the new director, John A. McCone, a conservative Republican and deeply religious Catholic. Bobby wanted the CIA operatives to stop their endless excuses for inaction and to get on with it, and he bludgeoned the supposedly slothful bureaucrats with Lansdale’s plan. Even four decades later, those involved at the CIA still remember Bobby’s voice on the telephone, berating them for laxness, lashing them onward. He rarely seems to have called with any specific directive but merely to whip them on. As they galloped blindly ahead, avoiding the lash, they ran down the innocent, the unaware, and the unlucky.

  “Bobby’s project,” as Lansdale called Operation Mongoose, involved in part taking young men from among the flower of the Cuban bourgeoisie, encouraging them with rhetoric and promises, and sending them on missions that at times would lead to their deaths. It is true enough that the roots of liberty are nourished by the blood of patriots, but this blood was being shed in futile, desultory, dangerous efforts whose only result was to further United States foreign policy to destabilize Cuba. As for the mobsters’ continued involvement with the CIA, there was no longer the dubious saving grace of innocence. The CIA knew their names now, who these men were, and what they did. If the agency insisted on trying to kill Castro, it did not have to do business with thieves and professional murderers. There were patriots who would have given their lives for a cause greater than reestablishing their casinos, brothels, and drug operations.

  Many of Lansdale’s proposed initiatives treated the Cubans like Latin hayseeds whom he and the other American tricksters could bamboozle with their magic and technology. One scheme was to use chemical weapons to sicken Cuban workers so that they could not harvest sugar cane. The plan was abandoned not because it was stupid and repugnant, but because it was deemed “unfeasible.” Another scuttled plan was to spread the word throughout Cuba that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and that Christ would not like Castro. A submarine was to appear off the coast and send star shells high into the sky, a light show that would be viewed by the superstitious Cubans as a sign that Christ had arrived.

  The administration did everything it could to isolate Cuba from the rest of Latin America, using its power over neighbor states to exclude the island from the Organization of American States and instituting a trade blockade as well. It was not only Cuba but the rest of Latin America that Lansdale considered rich territory for his initiatives. When these other governments seemed unwilling to follow the American lead against Cuba, he was all for enacting “a major psychological and political campaign within the country among labor, student and political groups to ‘force’ the government to change its mind.”

  “The top priority in the United States government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared,” Bobby admonished the top CIA leaders. “There can be no misunderstanding on the involvement of the agencies concerned nor on their responsibility to carry out this job…. It is not only Gen. Lansdale’s job to put the tasks, but yours to carry out with every resource at your command.” Bobby was there dominating meetings that proposed to destroy the Cuban sugar crops, poison shipments of goods coming to Cuba, and induce crop failures.

  In April, immediately after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy gave a speech in which he condemned a “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” that depended “primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion ins
tead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.” It was nothing less than tragic to those who cared about American democracy that though the president was describing communism, he might as well have been talking about Operation Mongoose.

  Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens,” Bobby wrote in his daybook, quoting Edith Hamilton on the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Bobby had a compelling need to be part of heroic endeavors, since only in such pursuits could he prove himself worthy. Life at Hickory Hill or in the summer at Hyannis Port was no sedate, mannered respite from the ceaseless battles of Washington, but another arena for challenge and adventure.

  One weekend on the Cape, Jose Torres arrived for a visit. Torres was the world light-heavyweight boxing champion, and after the standard regimen of football, tennis, swimming, and sailing, Bobby decided to mix it up with the champ. “Hit him in the head!” the children screamed, exhorting the champ to down their father. “Hit him in the belly!”