The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Donovan and Nolan had struck up a lively rapport with Castro, and they returned each week full of anecdotes and insight. Bobby, however, had no interest in learning details about the man whom he considered his nemesis. He found Donovan’s soliloquies tedious and merely wanted terse memos detailing how the prisoner negotiations were going. Neither Bobby nor the president spent extensive time with the two men.

  Whenever Donovan and Nolan went to Cuba, they brought Castro a gift. On one occasion they gave the Cuban leader a Polaroid camera that he took with him on a trip to Moscow. Another time they brought a wet suit that Castro used when he went diving one day with his two American guests. It was not until many years later, during the Senate investigations into assassinations in the mid-1970s, that Nolan learned that the CIA had prepared a diving suit dusted with a fungus that would infect Castro with a serious skin disease and a breathing device laced with tubercle bacillus. Donovan and Nolan had unwittingly thwarted the CIA’s plans by giving the gift before the agency was ready. There had perhaps been some rules when the CIA began to try to kill Castro in 1960, but there were none now in 1963, not when the agency would place a deadly gift in the unknowing hands of two Americans serving a diplomatic mission.

  In early March, the president expressed himself as being “very interested” in Donovan’s meetings, saying “We don’t want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill.” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s top foreign affairs adviser, mentioned alternatives, including not only an invasion to overthrow the Communist government but “always the possibility that Castro … might find advantage in a gradual shift away from their present level of dependence on Moscow.” In his memo of April 21, 1963, Bundy went on to say that “a Titoist Castro is not inconceivable,” precisely the point that Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, had made to the president in February 1962.

  Castro gave Donovan every indication that he wanted to initiate a serious dialogue with the United States, but the Kennedy administration backed away from any such discussion. To push such possibilities would have taken the president’s strong initiative. Instead, Kennedy expressed his “desire for some noise level and for some action in the immediate future.” The CIA proposed attacking “a railway bridge, some petroleum storage facilities and a molasses storage vessel,” then to move on to bigger, more important targets later in the year. At the same time the administration developed a number of contingency plans that were anathema to everything for which a free, democratic society supposedly stood. The administration discussed provoking the Cubans into an attack that would allow the Americans to stage an invasion. If the Cubans were slow to anger, the United States “might initially intensify its reconnaissance with night flights, ‘show-off’ low-level flights flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action … [or] perhaps the U.S. could use some drone aircraft as ‘bait,’ flown at low speeds and favorable altitudes for tempting Cuban AAA or aircraft attacks.” These were only contingency plans, but they were presented as reasonable alternatives, with no apparent awareness of the dangers of such provocation. For these were ideas meant not simply to provoke the Cubans but to deceive the American people, many of whom would probably die in a war that they thought Castro had instigated.

  In a ten-hour interview on April 10, Castro told Lisa Howard of ABC that he sought a rapprochement with the United States. The United States and Castro’s Cuba would never walk hand in hand, but there was something disturbingly cavalier about the Kennedy government’s refusal even to employ secret diplomatic channels to seek a possible accommodation. There was consideration in the White House of attempting to block ABC’s broadcast of the interview. “Public airing in the United States of this interview would strengthen the arguments of ‘peace’ groups, ‘liberal’ thinkers, Commies, fellow travelers, and opportunistic political opponents of present United States policy,” an NSC analysis stated. These were the views of intellectual cowards so afraid of Castro’s ideas and his articulate presentation of them that they would countenance limiting that dangerous thing known as liberty.

  Castro was attempting to foster what he called a people’s revolution throughout Latin America and what the United States considered a subversion of sovereign states. While the Cuban leader fostered revolution elsewhere, his own people were imprisoned for their ideas. In contemplating censorship or staging an incident to set off an invasion, the United States was flirting with the same tools of totalitarianism that Castro employed.

  The president had first noted this dilemma as a young man when the European democracies faced Hitler’s brutal regime. But Cuba was a pipsqueak of a nation, hardly set on a course of world domination. Castro’s attempts to subvert Latin governments were no more than irritating. The best attack against Castro was a foreign policy aimed at fostering democracy among America’s neighbors and aid programs that reached the desperate masses listening to Castro’s message. In the end the administration’s obsession with Cuba was fueled primarily by the Kennedy brothers’ anger over the Bay of Pigs and Castro’s taunts, the exaggerated rhetoric of American anticommunism, and the loud shouts of the Cuban exile community and the American right wing.

  Operation Mongoose was dead. In its place had arisen what amounted to a private guerrilla army of Cuban exiles, of which Bobby was the architect and champion. These men were patriots, but they were equally what Castro called them, mercenaries, paid for by American coin. Manuel Artime, their leader, received $225,000 a month to run what was known as the Second Naval Guerrilla, or, by the CIA’s own estimate, a total of nearly $4,933,293, an amount that the Cubans claim was twice that size. This organization purchased two major ships, eight smaller boats, three airplanes, and tons of weapons.

  They did most of their training in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, where the Americans had made an arrangement with President Luis Somoza, son of the murderous dictator Luis Somoza. And they ran their own operations, without scrutiny, the kind of daring ad hoc adventures that Bobby admired.

  “I had many chances to talk with Bob Kennedy,” reflected Rafael Quintero, Artime’s deputy in Central America. “Bob Kennedy was obsessed—obsessed with the idea that they had been beaten by Castro, that the Kennedy family had lost a big battle against a guy like Castro. He had to get even with him. He mentioned that to me often and was very clear about it. He was not going to try to eliminate Castro because he was an ideological guy who wanted to do right in Cuba. He was going to do it because the Kennedy name had been humiliated.”

  Bobby was the great patron of the anti-Castro Cubans, descending on them for secret visits, relishing their dangerous exploits, celebrating their courage. He showed up at their parties and drank with them, saluting a brotherhood of fearless men facing an implacable foe. It did not matter that so many of their actions risked hurting the innocent as well as their acknowledged enemies and did little more than stiffen the vigilance of Cuban Communists. They were on a sacred quest.

  Bobby gave these men the illusion of equality, but there was always a moment when it became clear that he was a Kennedy and they were not. One of the men to whom Bobby was closest was Pepe San Roman, the brigade’s military leader. San Roman was more suited for poetry than war, and he had struggled emotionally after his release. Bobby had set him up in a small house near his own home in McLean, Virginia. One Sunday morning Bobby rode by San Roman’s home in riding clothes, looking a grand seignior. He dismounted to chat for a while, and when it came time for him to leave, he clicked his fingers, thrust his boot forward, and signaled San Roman to help him back into the saddle.

  The CIA ran its own covert operations parallel to what the Cuban exiles were doing ostensibly on their own. On June 19, the president approved a plan of dramatically increased covert actions starting “in the dark-of-the-moon period in July.” These plans included the “sabotage of Cuban ships outside of Cuban waters,” hit-and-run attacks on the island itself, and the support of covert operations run by Cuban nationals from outs
ide the United States that “will probably cost many many Cuban lives.” The targets of these operations included sugarcane crops, the food, clothing, and housing industries, bridges, trains, and electric power plants.

  Bradley Earl Ayers, a career army officer, was one of those assigned to train Cubans in Florida for covert missions and to accompany them at least to the shores of Cuba. Ayers was given a cover as a technical specialist doing classified research at the University of Miami. As Ayers led his Cubans out on their first missions, the whole nature of the missions was slowly expanding. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had been something of a joke at the CIA that when they had burned sugarcane fields, the Cubans could easily harvest the burned sugar. That was no longer the case. “We fixed that,” Ayers recalled. “We began to disseminate defoliants and herbicides, dumping it in the irrigation canals and wells pretty liberally in agricultural areas, doing a pretty good job of killing crops.” After a few months Ayers learned that they would soon be going against refineries, mines, and other major industrial projects. Until now, such facilities had been off limits in part because American corporations wanted their properties back intact.

  Another of the major players in the Special Operations Division was Grayston Lynch, who had won a certain notoriety by going ashore at the Bay of Pigs. Lynch began by training Cubans for missions that primarily involved supplying arms to those within Cuba, but he too knew that things were changing. He recalled receiving word that they were to “set Cuba aflame.”

  On July 16, shortly before the covert operations expanded, Bobby attended the NSC Cuba Standing Group meeting. There were few actions he was not willing to pursue in destroying Castro’s Cuba. During the discussion Secretary of the Treasury Dillon said that an official had blocked Canadian funds in the United States equal to the amount of Cuban funds deposited in Canada. It was a blatant infringement on the sovereignty of one of American’s most esteemed allies. Bobby agreed with the others that the United States should stop such actions. Nonetheless, he said, he “hoped that it would be done in such a way as not to destroy the morale of the U.S. officer who had initiated the action…. There were too few officers in the U.S. Government who acted with comparable initiative.”

  Another problem facing the group that day was an article that had appeared in the Miami Herald on July 14. “Backstage with Bobby” described in detail the attorney general’s meetings with Cubans planning to raid Cuba from Central America. Bobby said that the administration could handle the matter simply enough. “We could float other rumors so that in the welter of press reports no one would know the true facts,” he told the group. In this instance he was all for bringing the CIA’s disinformation campaign home, attempting to poison the free press with lies and half truths.

  Although McCone agreed that they might do as Bobby suggested, he added “that in future dealings with Cuban exiles we must use cutouts and not deal with the exiles directly,” and warned that “there be no direct contact with them in Washington.” The CIA director was attempting to rein Bobby in, but it was that immediate, visceral contact with these men and the games of war that the attorney general sought. He could no more have walked away from that experience than from his obsession with Castro.

  In early June, President Kennedy flew to San Diego to spend a night on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. Kennedy was the commander in chief, but he was also a proud navy man who loved the rituals of his chosen branch of the service. At ten o’clock that evening the president sat in a leather-padded rocking chair on the bridge of this magnificent city of a ship watching small jets catapulting into the night. It was a scene of awesome splendor. The only sound was the admiral briefing the president on the details of the operation, talking into Kennedy’s ear.

  “The president said very quietly, and with infinite fatigue, Admiral, I’m afraid I can take no more,’ “recalled the journalist Alistair Cooke, who stood beside them on the bridge that night. “He grabbed the arms of the rocker and began to force himself in a twisted, writhing motion, to his feet. It took about a minute, and then two officers led him to his quarters. It was his back again.”

  Later that month the president flew out of Andrews Air Force Base for what would prove the most memorable trip of his presidency, and in some ways the most emotionally powerful journey of his life. It was in Europe that young Jack Kennedy had had his intellectual awakening and taken up the themes of his public life. It was among European women that he had found two great loves in Inga Arvad and Gunilla Von Post, women whose subtlety and sophistication he found lacking in their American counterparts. It was in Berlin that he feared the monumental confrontation with the Soviet Union still might come.

  Whatever difficulties Kennedy was having in Washington, among Europeans he found generous new constituents. He had transcended the common European stereotype of Americans as boorish provincials stomping across their heritage. He was returning to their continent bearing what are truly the greatest gifts in the world, hope and promise.

  As his limousine moved slowly along the boulevards of Berlin, most of the residents had turned out to greet the American president, shouting his name, crying with happiness, cheering until they grew so hoarse that the name became little more than a whisper, pressing forward, seeking a touch, a glimpse, a wave, some souvenir of this moment. There had not been such an emotional outpouring in this city since Hitler had driven through the same streets and been greeted with cheers and Nazi salutes. Kennedy had been in Berlin in 1945 when the city was reduced to nothing but mounds of rubble and it was as if the earth had been salted and nothing would ever rise here again. But as he drove along, he could see behind the crowds a modern city that had at least a modicum of the élan of the old Berlin of the 1920s.

  Kennedy went to the wall and contemplated this divided people. The wall had solved a problem, both for Khrushchev and for him, and it may have saved the lives of the very people who shouted that it should be torn down. It was not Kennedy, the cold war strategist, looking out toward East Berlin today, but a man of the spirit, and no man of the spirit could look at this wall without anger and dismay. When he talked to Sorenson about his speech, he told the speechwriter: “I need a phrase that will reflect my union with Berlin. What would be a good word for it? I really am a Berliner. Get me a translation. How do I say, ‘I am a Berliner’?”

  The speech that Kennedy gave that day in Rudolph Wilde Platz was an exhortation to liberty. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum” he told the massive crowd below. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.” The words resounded through the crowd with massive emotional resonance. These same people who a generation before had slouched onto the world stage as a force of evil now stood as heralds of liberty.

  “There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future,” he said as he looked out on the hundreds of thousands before him crowding the plaza. “Let them come to Berlin!” As he spoke, the crowd ceased to be disparate individuals but was one immense mass, thinking the same thoughts, beating with one heart, and ready to move with one great strike. Most orators would have felt an awesome sense of their own power, running their tongues around each syllable, playing with such a throng. Kennedy, however, hurried on with his speech, the words bumping into each other. This day, he was not the orator he might have been, largely because he was not comfortable with arousing such emotions in his audience. As he spoke, he feared, as he told Ormsby-Gore later, that “if he had said, ‘And at this moment I call upon you all to cross into East Germany and pull down that wall,’ they’d all have gone, [that] the German people as such at this moment in history were not totally to be relied upon, and that this rather sheeplike instinct of theirs could be very frightening under certain circumstances and under the wrong leader still.” Kennedy feared not only the German masses but mass man anywhere, and where demagogic politicians might lead him.

  His visit to Germany was an immense triumph, and he flew from there to the Ireland
of his ancestors, but within whose heritage he had never felt fully comfortable. This Irish visit, however, was one of the transcendent experiences of his entire life. “Are you glad you came?” his Irish friend Dorothy Tubridy asked him when he was leaving. In private conversation he was not a man of flattering, meaningless pleasantries, and yet he told her, “These were the three happiest days I’ve ever spent in my life.”

  There are few things worse than an economy in which a man must leave home so that his family may eat, and there was hardly anyone standing cheering along the Dublin streets who did not have a brother, a father, or a grandfather who had made that journey to America, Canada, or Australia in search of what some called a future. Kennedy, the greatest of all the scions of Ireland whose ancestors had gone abroad, was returning as the leader of the most powerful country in the world. And was it not fitting that he should return now, in this year of 1963, the first time more Irish were returning to Erin’s shores than were heading abroad?

  One of those who accompanied Kennedy on his journey was the Irish ambassador to the United States, Thomas Kiernan. Before this visit Ambassador Kiernan had considered Kennedy “more British than Irish,” a president whose “first reaction would be, if there were any even minor dispute between Britain and Ireland, to side with Britain.” Kennedy had the quick wit, the verbal agility, and the protective self-deprecation of an Irishman, but when the diplomat discussed the partition of Ireland with the president, the cold, logical, British-hued mind took hold.

  Kiernan had seen in America that anyone could become an ersatz Irishman, wearing the green on St. Patrick’s Day, drinking toasts to a heritage they neither knew nor understood. It was not all songs and shillelaghs, however, to those who were truly Irish-Americans. A hard bitterness was mixed with that heritage, and it struck Kiernan how often Kennedy mentioned the notorious signs that the Brahmins posted in Boston: “No Irish need apply.”