The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Kennedy realized what they faced well before his brother did. He knew that these endless mishaps and seeming mismanagement were signs not so much of Bobby’s ineptness as of the nature of this crisis. “That’s what happens with … all of these wonderful operations,” he said. “War.”

  “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” the president mused ironically a few minutes later.

  “Since the day, what?” Bobby asked.

  “Bay of Pigs.”

  “The attorney general announced today, he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton Univers—,” Bobby said, making a mock announcement of his departure from Washington in the wake of this new disaster.

  In alluding to the Bay of Pigs, the president had come up with an appropriate metaphor. As in that misadventure, the administration had grievously misjudged the strength of its opponent. Representatives of the federal government had gone in with a weak force, and like the brigade on the Cuban beach, the marshals were running out of their most crucial ammunition, tear gas. In the end, innocent men died who should have lived. “I knew that he [the president] was concerned about how we were going to possibly explain this whole thing because it looked like it was one of the big botches,” Bobby told an interviewer in 1964. “I mean, if more people had been killed—I think we were lucky to get out of it.”

  As the night went on the news worsened. There were more tales of shootings and confrontations. At their maddening distance from it all, it was as if they were trying to make out images through the tear gas.

  “They’re storming where Meredith is,” Bobby said as he put down the phone.

  “Oh,” Kennedy said softly. “The students are or the …?”

  “They’re storming where Meredith is,” the attorney general repeated.

  “You don’t want to have a lynching,” O’Donnell said a moment later.

  They were on the verge of a disaster. Meredith dead. Students dead. U.S. marshals dead. Reelection dead. Bobby had been hoping that the federal officers would not have to fire their guns. “They better fire, I suppose,” Bobby said on the phone. “They gotta protect Meredith.”

  Meredith remained safe for the moment, but outside anarchy reigned. Three more deputies fell from gunfire, and then came the news that the body of a reporter from France had been found behind a women’s dormitory with a bullet in his back.

  Bobby no longer looked as youthful as he had when his brother entered office. The intensity of these moments and the endless pressures had etched themselves into the attorney general’s face. Despite what others thought, the Kennedys held no console of power in the White House from which they could merely press a button here, pull a lever there, and events moved and history was made.

  On this evening, Barnett, whom Bobby considered a weak man and “an agreeable rogue,” proved stronger than all the power of the presidency. The governor’s objective, as the attorney general saw it, “was the avoidance of integration … and if he couldn’t do that, then to be forced to do it by our heavy hand—and his preference was with troops.” Bobby’s objective was to get Meredith safely into the university without calling in federal troops. All these hours, and at a heavy cost, Bobby had sought to avoid calling in the army, to not invoke that terrible image of American soldiers marching against some of their own people. By midnight, though, he felt forced to call in federal troops.

  Bobby was a man of righteous anger, but he could not express one note of the rage he felt toward Barnett when he talked to him this endless night. Nor could he vent his full anger at General Creighton Abrams and the army for their slow-footed journey toward Oxford. Even before the main force of the soldiers had moved onto the campus, Bobby was musing about how this would all play out. It was not a picture to be placed happily in the administration’s scrapbook. Two men had died, the French reporter and another unfortunate bystander. And 160 of the marshals had been wounded, 28 of them by gunfire, a casualty rate like that of an invasion force. If Bobby had not refused to give the marshals the order to fire back except in defending Meredith, the casualty totals would have been far higher. That had been the most daring of gambles, for if any of the wounded marshals died, the finger of recrimination would have pointed squarely at him. “We’re gonna have a helluva problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better,” he thought aloud. “Well, I think we’re gonna have to figure out what we’re gonna say.”

  At dawn, the main force of the troops arrived in Oxford. Well-armed, perfectly disciplined soldiers marched down a street where minutes before rioters had danced. One of the protesters threw a Molotov cocktail in front of the troops, a barricade of flames lapping across the street. The soldiers marched on in perfect order through the flames, and the crowd backed off for good. In the end, an overwhelming force of twenty-three thousand troops entered the college town so that for the first time in history a black man could attend the university.

  27

  “A Hell of a Burden to Garry”

  In mid-August 1962, General Douglas MacArthur sat in the Oval Office pontificating about the world. This was one of the president’s more onerous obligations, listening to the great old men of other eras imparting their wisdom. The eighty-two-year-old general told the president that America should invent a new mini-atomic weapon to be given to every infantry soldier with an “atomic cartridge that would clear ten to fifteen yards in front of him.” The aged general droned on in the authoritarian manner of a man who had lived his life around subordinates. The further some men stood from power the wilder their schemes became, and MacArthur advised the president that he should begin guerrilla intrusions into China. “There also should be maneuvers by the South Korean army itself—”

  “Wait just a minute,” Kennedy interrupted. “My father is calling. He isn’t able to talk much, but every now and then he tries to make a call.” It did not matter who sat with him, or what issue consumed him, when his father rang, his son took the call.

  “He can’t speak … Hello there, how are you…. How are you getting along up there…. How is everything?”

  Joe spoke scarcely more than grunts, but Kennedy imagined a dialogue, willing his father into verbal coherence. “I’m sitting here with General MacArthur, and he wants to be remembered to you…. How are you getting on up there? Well, I’ll be up the weekend after next, and we’ll go out in the boat … good. Let me talk to Ann.”

  Ann Gargan had become Joe’s keeper, jealously protective of any who got too near, rationalizing whatever she did in the name of her charge’s health. Gargan took over the phone. “He seemed a little upset,” Kennedy said. “Tell him I’ll call tomorrow. All right. Good.”

  Kennedy hung up the phone. “What’s going on up there?” he asked more to himself than to MacArthur. There was a pain that the president felt over his crippled father that nothing could assuage. Joe had taught him that everything could be fixed, everything, it turned out, but his father’s condition. On one of his weekend trips to Hyannis Port that fall, he had learned that his father had a seizure when his mother came waltzing into the room showing off an exquisite gown she was planning to wear to a ball. Rose had apparently only been trying to get her husband to nod his approval, but her visit had affected him terribly.

  Kennedy had hurried up to Joe’s room when he arrived in Hyannis Port. He was incredulous when he discovered as he walked into the upstairs bedroom that no one was there, no doctor, no nurse, no maid, no one. The president was not a man who shouted often, but he had shouted that afternoon, his screams of anger and disbelief sounding through the house.

  “He’s a great fighter,” MacArthur said, an obligatory aside.

  “Yeah, he is, but he can’t speak anything, so he gets …” the president’s words drifted into the air.

  “The South Korean army should have several so-called grand maneuvers,” MacArthur began again, segueing back into his monologue.

  At the same time that Kennedy was listening to MacArthur, he faced the continued dilemma of Cuba
. A year and a half into his administration, Castro was as ensconced in Cuba as the day the president had taken office. Despite all the efforts at sabotage and subversion and attempts to isolate the Caribbean island from the world, General Maxwell Taylor had to admit to Kennedy that the American government was unable to “assess accurately the internal conditions” and that there was “no likelihood of an overthrow of the government by internal means and without the direct use of U.S. military force.”

  That analysis could have led to a self-critical evaluation of Operation Mongoose and America’s diplomatic strategy and a gut-wrenching acceptance of the possibility that Castro’s Cuba might be there for years. Instead, the administration, following Bobby’s lead and with the president’s approval, went forward with phase two of Operation Mongoose. Gone was the heady supposition that the CIA’s activities would lead to the overthrow of the Communist leader. Nonetheless, the scale of covert actions would be increased and the “noise level” would rise to such a level that “the participation of some U.S. citizens may become known.”

  The Cuban economy was hurting from both the natural weakness of socialist control and the artificial suffering caused by the American-led economic blockade. The CIA would attempt through selective sabotage to drive the Cubans further into economic despair. Beyond its own operations, the CIA would consider helping Cuban exiles and other Latin governments in running their own operations against Castro.

  In the first week of February 1962, Aleksei Adzhubei, the editor-in-chief of Izvestiya, arrived at the White House. To the Soviets, journalism was an adjunct to government, and Adzhubei brought with him the Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov, who was also editor-in-chief of USSR magazine. Even if Adzhubei had not been Khrushchev’s son-in-law, his discussion with the president would have been far more important than simply an interview with the most important Soviet journalist.

  Adzhubei had just returned from spending six hours talking with Castro, and inevitably the discussion turned to Cuba. For the most part, according to the American account of the lengthy meeting, the two men discussed the situation like acquaintances talking about a troublesome neighbor. The Soviet official “wondered whether the United States realized that by its unfriendly attitude toward Castro it was pushing Cuba farther and farther away.” The president, for his part, tried to make Adzhubei understand the American perspective. The United States had never had such an enemy so close to its borders, and when Castro yelled his disdain within shouting distance, Americans were bound to be upset.

  Kennedy compared the situation to Hungary, where the Soviets had put down the Hungarian revolution. The president may only have been trying to make a casual analogy, but if Cuba was America’s Hungary, then Castro would soon see American tanks in the streets. Kennedy later recalled that in the meeting after lunch, at which the American interpreter was not present, Adzhubei “wondered whether the U.S. would prefer Cuba to develop into a state like Yugoslavia or have it drift in the direction of China.” That was a startling analogy for the Russian to make, since Tito’s independent socialism was anathema to the Soviets. It suggested that the Soviets might not have wanted the burden of a quasi-satellite six thousand miles from Moscow. Adzhubei went on to complain to the president about all the money the Soviets were pouring into Cuba and all the unnecessary sugar they were buying, primarily because of their fears of an American invasion. The Russian asked the president whether he was planning to invade, and Kennedy said no, he was not.

  In diplomacy, words must be used with mathematical precision, their meanings universally understood. Khrushchev, for his part, often sounded like an intemperate blusterer, but a careful look at his words reveals that he usually said precisely what he wanted to say, making the Soviet position indisputably clear. Kennedy, despite his immense rhetorical gifts, sometimes said less or more than he meant to, sending signals he did not mean to send.

  Men could die for a word not said, or a message misunderstood. During a meeting in Moscow Salinger was told that the Soviets gave the English text to five interpreters. When the Russian text of the meeting was translated back into English by five other translators, they had five different interviews. Adzhubei’s own personal take on the meeting was the most important of all, and it was given directly to Khrushchev, his father-in-law. Life is in the nuances, and it was Adzhubei’s recollection of the tone of the meeting more than the words that mattered.

  “Have you changed your opinion that the April 1961 invasion was an American mistake?” Adzhubei said that he asked Kennedy. The president did not like having his nose rubbed in that odorous mess any longer, not by Americans and certainly not by Soviets.

  “At the time I called Allen Dulles into my office and dressed him down,” the president said, pounding his fist on the table. “I told him: you should learn from the Russians. When they had difficulties in Hungary, they liquidated the conflict in three days…. But you, Dulles, have never been capable of doing that.”

  Adzhubei may have exaggerated Kennedy’s comments, but by all accounts the president did in fact mention Hungary. That was a foolishly provocative analogy to throw out. By its covert activities and military provocations, the Kennedy administration had given Castro and Khrushchev every reason to believe that Cuba was about to be invaded. After reading his son-in-law’s report, Khrushchev took a serious new look at Cuban security, beginning by having the Presidium, the Soviet leadership committee, approve a new $133 million package of military assistance.

  In May 1962, the Soviet leader decided that he would further protect Castro by placing nuclear missiles on the island. In doing so, he would also buttress his nation’s position against an America far superior in military strength. Although historians debate why the Russian leader would propose such a daring and dangerous move, what remains indisputable is that the massive CIA operations in south Florida and the feints of Operation Mongoose provided profound political justifications. Without those ceaseless efforts and Castro’s legitimate fears that he was about to be invaded, Khrushchev would undoubtedly never have made such an offer, and even if he had, Castro very probably would not have accepted it.

  Castro was not a hand puppet moving every time Khrushchev wiggled his thumb or index finger, and the Soviet leader was right in believing that he would have to convince the Cuban leader of the efficacy of dotting the landscape of Cuba with such deadly weaponry. “Tell Fidel that there is no other way out,” Khrushchev admonished his delegation as they set out to Cuba. He would secretly place the weapons in Cuba. Then at the end of November, after the American elections, Khrushchev would arrive on the island, sign a new treaty with Castro, and announce to the world that Cuba was now safe from invasion. It was a provocative action, but Khrushchev and Castro had their justifications. In its way, politics follows Newton’s third law of motion: every action creates an equal or opposite reaction. Whether a man is a Communist or a capitalist, if you burn his fields, sabotage his ships, destroy his goods, poison his wells, and attempt to kill his leader, sooner or later he will react, and he will be a different kind of enemy than when it all began.

  Through its many sources, the CIA had been receiving information suggesting a major buildup of Soviet activity in Cuba. The United States had counted up to twenty Soviet freighters arriving with military equipment by August 22, and five more seemed to be on the way from Black Sea ports. Large numbers of Russian civilians had arrived as well. Secret military construction was going on in various places around the island. Since the Soviets were usually parsimonious with their client states in their economic commitments and military aid, the CIA concluded “these developments amount to the most extensive campaign to bolster a non-bloc country ever undertaken by the USSR.”

  On August 23, President Kennedy met with his top national security advisers to discuss the dramatically increased Soviet presence. CIA Director John McCone called for aggressive new action, including as the strongest alternative “the instantaneous commitment of sufficient armed forces to occupy the country, destroy th
e regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country which will be a member of the community of American states.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk came up with his own aggressive suggestion: to use the American base at Guantánamo Bay as a staging ground for sabotage.

  Kennedy and his associates mused about what this Soviet action might have to do with Turkey, Greece, Berlin, and other trouble spots. McCone brought up the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy that so rankled Khrushchev. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara listened to McCone and then made the point that even though these missiles had become obsolete and useless, politically it was difficult to remove them.

  Every day Kennedy received an endless stream of information. He read crucial secret reports known only to half a dozen people in the world. He perused reams of pedestrian facts churned out by the bureaucratic machine. Mixed into this meld was brilliantly orchestrated misinformation conceived by America’s enemies and sometimes by her friends, or even by those within the administration. As Kennedy pored through the endless pieces of paper, he remained deeply suspicious of the CIA and Joint Chiefs’ memos. As difficult as it was to mistrust what he read in their memos, Kennedy had learned the valuable lesson that even on these sheets of paper lay the world in all its duplicity, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.

  Since the day Kennedy entered office, conservatives had been condemning him for what they considered his cowardly acquiescence to Communist Cuba. On August 31, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, a moderate Republican, got up in the Senate and savaged the administration for its willful laxness on the Cuban issue. Keating’s speech was doubly troublesome, since he was not one of the wild men of the right, and he had what he called “ominous reports” that “missile bases” were under construction in Cuba.