The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  The terms that Lansdale employed, such as “fractioning the regime,” were those he apparently used when he talked of assassination, and this memo is close to confirmation that the president and the attorney general were participants in the contemplation of murder.

  Six days later Bobby learned at a meeting of the Caribbean Survey Group that sabotage was decreasing in Cuba and the Communists were imposing increasing controls over the populace. After hearing this, he proposed that the tens of thousands of refugees flowing into Florida be “exploited” and “asked what are the chances of kidnapping some of the key people of the Communist regime?”

  Bobby had his own secret imperatives hidden from those around him, their details probably lost forever to history. Bobby was working his own covert CIA operative, Charles Ford, a tall, gregarious officer with the bulk and swagger of a college fullback. Ford was given the moniker “Rocky Fiscalini” and sent out to meet clandestinely with various Mafia figures who had Cuban connections. “His job was to follow whatever Bobby wanted,” recalled Sam Halpern, the executive director of the Cuban Task Force. “We liked to control the meeting sites and such, and we never knew how the arrangements were made for his meetings. Charlie was going in naked. His orders were to meet these guys and come back and report to Bobby. Whether it meant assassination or not, I have no idea because Charlie never talked to me about it and I never bugged him. Bobby had some reason for all this. What the hell he was thinking about beats the hell out of me.”

  Bobby’s main problem was that Operation Mongoose was not working. It had become by far the largest covert project in history, involving close to five hundred full-time CIA operatives, part-time agents, Defense Department, State Department, and USIA personnel, and several thousand Cubans as well. The Cubans had not sat by passively observing this assault on their sovereignty. After the Bay of Pigs, Castro did his own spring-cleaning, breaking up most of the CIA’s covert operations while imprisoning those thought likely to join the U.S. efforts. There was a renewed militancy in Cuba, and a national pride at having thwarted the hated Yanqui, making it easier for Castro to convince his people that spying on their neighbors was a mark of high patriotism.

  Castro was so successful that on the entire island the CIA had only twenty-seven or twenty-eight agents, only twelve of whom even communicated with their handlers, and then only rarely. On December 19, 1961, the agency attempted to add dramatically to that total by sending in seven more agents, but they were captured immediately, and two of them confessed on Cuban television.

  As the months went by, it became increasingly clear that once an anti-Castro revolt began, only the infusion of military power would bring an end to the regime. It was the Bay of Pigs scenario all over again, and the president’s attitude was much the same: backing away from the logical conclusion that a massive operation made no sense unless one day he was ready to involve American troops. In February 1962, Kennedy accepted that there would have to be contingent planning for an invasion, but he “expressed skepticism that insofar as can now be foreseen circumstances will arise that would justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action.”

  Bobby continued lashing the CIA forward, at times screaming at officials who did not jump as high as ordered or stay in the air until he ordered them down. For all the clandestine aura of the agency, these men were career civil servants who were not used to being yelled at as if that were the only way to motivate them. Bobby had his own desk at CIA headquarters, and he often showed up at Langley unannounced. “Bobby came over almost acting like the acting director of the CIA,” recalled Dino Brugioni, a senior officer at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. “He was a very arrogant guy. He looked down on government workers.”

  Bobby had a devastating impact on the morale of the men who attempted to implement his desperately flawed initiatives. He would have been dismayed to know that one of his many critics was General Maxwell Taylor, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I don’t think it occurred to Bobby in those days that his temperament, his casual remarks that the president would not like this or that, his difficulty in establishing tolerable relations with government officials, or his delight in causing offense was doing harm to his brother’s administration,” reflected Taylor.

  From his perch at the CIA’s Cuban desk, Halpern observed a swaggering Bobby who was as dangerous in his ignorance as Lansdale. Halpern happened to be in the office of William Harvey, when the new head of the Cuba Task Force was talking to Bobby on the phone. The obese Harvey was one of the CIA’s few full-blown characters. He fancied ivory-handled pistols stuck in his belt and masked his brilliance as a covert operative behind a flamboyant, foulmouthed manner. Harvey was the kind of daring character whom Bobby might have been expected to admire, but the attorney general had as low and disdainful an opinion of Harvey as Harvey had of him. On that score Harvey was the winner, for in calling Bobby a “fag” he had struck upon an epithet that Bobby probably dreaded above all others.

  The CIA had just run an operation in Cuba that had merited headlines in the Cuban papers and stories in Florida newspapers. Bobby had wanted the agency to blow up bridges and burn sugarcane fields, but without any notice. He not only blamed the CIA for the press coverage but was deeply suspicious that the agency had acted as its own publicist. Harvey despised Kennedy, but he sat there muttering “yes sir” and “no sir” into the phone. “If you’re going to blow something up, it’s going to make a noise,” Harvey said, as Halpern stood listening. “And if it makes a noise, you’re going to get publicity.”

  Bobby had relationships with a number of the Cuban exiles. This intense, passionate man cared not simply about the details of laws and legislation but about the details of individual human lives. Yet Bobby was like a doctor who was so emotionally involved with his patients that at times he could not distance himself enough to make dispassionate judgments.

  It was only natural that many of these patriotic Cuban exiles became involved with Operation Mongoose. It was only natural too that they would pick up the phone and talk to their friend Bobby. That they could do so created morale problems in Florida for those planning operations. Bobby, however, felt for these men and their struggle. In a sense, he was as much a hostage to these feelings as the Brigade 2506 members in Cuban prisons were hostage to Castro. Bobby cared about the brigade members languishing in Cuban prisons in a way the president did not—and truly could not given his immense concerns.

  By the end of July 1962, Operation Mongoose had managed to place only eleven covert teams on the island, less than half the projected infiltration plan. In the previous four months, nineteen of its maritime operations had either failed or aborted. As bright a veneer as the agency attempted to paste on its failures, the CIA admitted that even if it continued fomenting resistance at a high rate, there would most likely not be a revolt until the end of 1963, and that would be successful only with an American military force backing up the rebels. That distressing reality faced Bobby and his brother in the summer of 1962 as they were confronted with new civil rights dilemmas as well.

  “Which one is Meredith?” asked Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi as he stood blocking the entrance to room 1007 at the Woolfolk State Office Building in Jackson on September 25, 1962. James Meredith stood there with Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Doar and Chief of the U.S. Marshals Jim McShane. Sixty-four-year-old Barnett had much more in common with twenty-nine-year-old Meredith than with many men he called his friends. Both the governor and Meredith had nine brothers and sisters and came from dirt-poor, law-abiding farm families. Barnett had struggled upward, earning a law degree, developing a down-home, ingratiating courtroom manner that had helped him win the governorship in 1959. To Meredith, the air force had been his vehicle of advance. After nine years of service to his country, he had decided to enroll at the University of Mississippi and earn a college degree.

  Meredith was black, and the governor did not intend to allow a
man of another race to attend what he considered a white man’s university. Barnett read a proclamation that he did “hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.” The crowd beneath, listening on portable radios, heard the words and hooted and screamed as the three men departed. “Communist!” they shouted at Meredith. “Nigger, go home!”

  Kennedy had tried to use the law as the engine to advance civil rights. Again and again in these crisis-filled years, moments such as this arose, when the law of the land came up against customs that were considered higher law codifying an immutable social logic. Kennedy sought accommodation, not confrontation, but not at the price of turning back from what he considered the forward march of justice and freedom. He was a politician, however, and he knew that these spectacles of protest and defiance risked tearing apart the Democratic coalition. He could win all these battles except for the last one, his reelection in 1964. Thus, justice had to be meted out gingerly, with full warning given to allow those who opposed him to back off without penalty or strife.

  Those who believe that history provides a series of axioms to live by are as doomed to make mistakes as those who ignore the lessons completely. Bobby attempted to do in Mississippi what he had successfully managed in the Freedom Rider confrontations the previous spring in Alabama. At that time he had worked with a segregationist governor who realized that the high price of anarchy would be paid primarily by his fellow Alabamians. He had worked also with a few police officials to whom law and order was more than a slogan. In the end the mob had stepped back from the precipice of massive bloodshed, their anger boiling itself out primarily in taunts and shouts. Unfortunately, Governor Barnett of Mississippi was not Governor Patterson of Alabama, Colonel Thomas B. Birdsong of the Mississippi highway patrol was not Floyd Mann of the Alabama state police, and the rabble of Mississippi were far readier for a brutal, bloody confrontation than their counterparts in Alabama.

  There would be those who would view these protesters descending on the college town of Oxford as beady-eyed cretins pouring out of the thickets and the swamps, the trailer parks and shacks. The reality was that the student protesters were many of the proudest sons and daughters of old Mississippi. And it was the good citizens of their parents’ generation who loudly sang the song of anarchy, unlocking the doors to shadowy men willing to do their deeds.

  “Thousand Said Ready to Fight for Mississippi,” headlined the Jackson Daily News, as if this were 1861, not a century later. On Saturday evening, September 29, 1962, Barnett appeared in Jackson at Memorial Stadium, where Ole Miss played the Kentucky Wildcats. “I love Mississippi,” he shouted over the loudspeakers from the fifty-yard line. “I love her people.” And then, as the applause rose to a deafening ovation beyond even that merited by the triumph of Ole Miss on the football turf, the governor screamed: “I love our customs!” There were those in the stadium ready to march at that moment, and when they left after the game, they saw the rebel flag flying from homes and office buildings and turned on radio stations playing “Dixie,” a marching song not of nostalgia but of war.

  The following afternoon the president called Governor Barnett for the first time. As was often the case around the Kennedy men, there was jock bravado, a joshing, taunting air. “And now—Governor Ross Barnett,” Bobby said playfully, a fight manager pushing his champion to the center of the ring. “Go get him, Johnny boy.” The president picked up on enough of this atmosphere to play the moment as much to his brother and aides as to the Mississippi politician. As the phone rang, Kennedy performed his little comic routine, pretending to speak his first lines. “Governor, this is the president of the United States—not Bobby, not Teddy, not Princess Radziwill.”

  Kennedy spoke to Barnett much the way he had been talking to southern governors for years, as if they and he were secret comrades, faced with pesky problems that only they could solve. “Well, now, here’s my problem,” Kennedy said, as if he were confiding to a colleague.

  “Listen, I didn’t put him in the university,” the president went on, not even mentioning Meredith’s name. “But on the other hand, under the Constitution … I have to carry … that order out, and I don’t want to do it any way that causes difficulty to you or to anyone else.”

  What Kennedy was trying to signal to the Mississippi governor was that he could bluster and rant against Washington all he wanted as long as he upheld law and order. He could make whatever symbolic protests he needed to make as long as he saw to it that Meredith was registered and peacefully entered the university.

  Barnett had his problems too, and he wanted his fellow politician to understand just what they were. “You know what I am up against, Mr. President. I took an oath, you know, to abide by the laws of this state … and our constitution here and the Constitution of the United States. I’m on the spot here, you know.”

  The governor gave the president ominous warnings of calls he had received of citizens groups wanting to descend on Oxford. Barnett, however, was a glad-handing, favor-exchanging, soft-soaping southern politician, and he segued into a matter about which he felt far more comfortable. “I appreciate your interest in our poultry program and all those things.”

  Early that evening, federal officials escorted Meredith to an empty dormitory on campus to prepare to begin classes the next morning. For the men around Bobby, this represented something of a triumph, a sign that the worst was over. O’Donnell enthused that Bobby “should be Mandrake the Magician,” though this was a sleight of hand that fooled almost no one. By then most of the makeshift team of U.S. marshals, border patrol officers, prison guards, and other federal officials had taken up their posts at the Greek Revival-style Lyceum, the very heart and soul of the university, part of the building dating back to 1848. That gesture was as much a sacrilege as camping out in one of the local churches, a mark not so much of willful insensitivity as of old-fashioned ignorance and bad planning.

  If the milling students and their outside collaborators had needed a symbol to stiffen their resistance, they had one now. Within a few minutes, shouted epithets had given way to pebbles, and pebbles to stones, and stones to rocks whirling past the heads of the white-helmeted marshals. Under the cover of the gathering darkness, most of the Mississippi highway patrol officers disappeared into the night, leaving the protection of Meredith to men viewed by the crowd as foreigners. Molotov cocktails, Coke bottles full of flaming gasoline, sailed through the night skies, splattering at the feet of the marshals. A lead pipe struck an officer, dropping him to the ground. The marshals fired their first canisters of tear gas into the surging crowds, and among the first victims were those marshals who did not have gas masks. Then they fired more shells, and one of the casings hit one of the few remaining Mississippi patrol officers in the back. The officer had been caught between the students and the marshals, and he almost died there outside the Lyceum.

  As the president, the attorney general, and their aides sat in the White House, they were reluctant to face the reality that this crisis risked becoming an insurrection. Bobby was wistful in his hopes that Barnett would back down and the tide of rage would suddenly recede, even once the blood began to spill. Although the president and attorney general talked often to Barnett, there was an overwhelming duplicity to the dialogue. “Mr. President, let me say this,” Barnett had said earlier that day. “They’re calling me and others from all over the state, wanting to bring a thousand, wanting to bring five hundred, and two hundred and all such as that you know.”

  What Barnett did not say was that he was unwilling to step in front of these mobs to try to drive them back by word or authority. He wiggled, finagled, backtracked, sidetracked, and finessed his way back from agreeing to admit Meredith to the university. “I say I’m going to cooperate,” he told the president in another call. “I might not know when you’re going to register him, you know…. I might not know what your plans were, you see.” That was a slick bit of business, and when Barnett tried to back away from his words, Bobby gave him the mel
ancholy news that he had a tape of his conversations, and if he backed down, the president would be ready to tell the American people of his duplicity.

  While tear gas filled the air, the president was preparing to give a speech to the nation on television about the situation. Information is the most immediate power, and without it, the president risked looking like an ill-fated observer of a world he did not understand. Bobby knew just enough to have called for a postponement of the speech, or a quick-witted revision of the remarks, but he said nothing. He wore a blinder of optimism. So the president went on television at 10:00 P.M.. to talk confidently about how “the orders of the court … are beginning to be carried out,” while tear gas drifted across the bucolic campus. As the crowd of two thousand surrounded the besieged marshals, Kennedy’s words sounded pandering and silly. “You have a great tradition to uphold, a tradition of honor and courage,” he said as the rioters, perverted exemplars of this tradition, moved on the Lyceum.

  After the speech the president joined the attorney general and his advisers in the Cabinet Room, where they attempted to monitor events in Oxford. This was the attorney general’s arena, and for the most part Kennedy allowed his brother to manage the crisis. Bobby seemed unable to grasp the sheer magnitude of what he faced. He and his aides came up with the less-than-inspired idea of having Johnny Vaught, the revered Ole Miss football coach, address the students. Gunshots had begun to sound in the night, and even the most inspiring words would have gone unheard. A shotgun blast tore into a marshal’s neck. A shot from a high-powered rifle felled a patrol officer. These were not just students any longer, but a mob that held agitators willing to kill. In downtown Oxford, retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a right-wing fanatic, incited his supporters to become the new minutemen, standing up to the tyranny of the federal state.