Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (10 page)

BOOK: Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)
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Kennedy grew more passionate, thinking about the carnage that would have resulted from an all-out U.S. assault on the island. “Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw [playing] here this evening? Do you think I’m going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn’t think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he’s crazy.”

In his fury, Kennedy threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds.” He did not follow through on this vow, but after waiting for a politically expedient interval, he did fire Dulles and Bissell. And shortly after the Cuba fiasco, when the Joint Chiefs urged him to respond to the advances of Communist insurgents in Laos by invading the remote Southeast Asian country, Kennedy did not hesitate to rebuff their advice. “After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had contempt for the Joint Chiefs,” Schlesinger recalled before his death in early 2007, over drinks in the hushed, stately rooms of New York’s Century Club. “I remember going into his office in the spring of 1961, where he waved some cables at me from General Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was then in Laos on an inspection tour. And Kennedy said, ‘If it hadn’t been for the Bay of Pigs, I might have been impressed by this.’ I think JFK’s war hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men. He thought Lemnitzer was a dope.”

But Kennedy was acutely aware of how formidable the institutional powers were that he confronted. While still reeling from the Bay of Pigs, the president took his concerns to an old family friend, liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. “The episode seared him,” said Douglas, recalling their conversation. “He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, president of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect…it shook him up!”

Since he had won the White House by the slimmest of margins, Kennedy thought it politically wise to retain icons from the Eisenhower era like Dulles in his administration, even though friends like journalist Ben Bradlee had urged him to replace the aging “godfather of American intelligence.” In the case of Dulles, his reappointment might also have been a reward for his discreet—and wily—political assistance to the Kennedy campaign. JFK “came into government the successor to President Eisenhower, who was a great general, a great military figure…. He retained the same people in all these key positions whom President Eisenhower had,” recalled Bobby Kennedy in a 1964 oral history. “Allen Dulles was there, Lemnitzer was there, the same Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t attempt to move any of these people out…. They had had the experience; they had had the background; they evidently were trusted by his predecessor. So he thought he could trust them.”

But when he realized he could not, Kennedy moved to get rid of this old guard or sideline them. After the cataclysm in Cuba, JFK pulled away from these national security “wise men” and began to surround himself with his most trusted personal advisors, men who had fought with him in the political trenches and were known for their intense loyalty as well as liberal passion: Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, Schlesinger, Galbraith. He asked Sorensen to start advising him on foreign affairs even though the young aide had never traveled beyond the country’s borders.

Above all, Kennedy turned to his brother. On the morning that the Cuba mission began to fail, Kennedy tracked down Bobby at a newspaper editors’ convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was speaking, urgently asking his brother to “come back here.” Like Sorensen, Bobby had no foreign policy experience, but he would move into the center of national security decision making for the rest of his brother’s presidency. Kennedy offered his younger brother the CIA, but Bobby thought it politically ill-advised. While he rejected the position of CIA director, however, the attorney general began to unofficially take on the responsibility of supervising the agency for his brother. At this juncture, it seemed JFK would have put Bobby in charge of every vital part of his government if he could have.

This is the point where the Kennedy administration began becoming “a family affair,” in the words of Berkeley scholar Peter Dale Scott, with the two Kennedys at the center, encircled by the small group of men they considered their band of brothers. “Kennedy couldn’t work through the CIA, the Pentagon or even the State Department. There was so little institutional support in Washington for the Kennedys’ policies. The bureaucracies were very committed to the Cold War,” Scott observed.

Their close relationship fortified the two brothers, gave them confidence that they could take charge of a government that was in many ways hostile to their enterprise. “They were totally loyal to each other,” recalled Fred Dutton, who served as JFK’s Cabinet secretary, in an interview not long before his death in 2005. “They almost didn’t need to communicate with each other, they almost knew what the other person was thinking and doing. Bob’s sole focus was to make sure everything was working for his brother. He gave him everything. He did all the unpleasant tasks for Jack…. Bob had no problem running interference for his brother, handling the messy things. He was willing to be Mr. Bad Guy.”

Cabinet members felt excluded from the meshing of fraternal minds that often replaced formal discussions, Dutton said. “The two brothers often held these sessions by themselves, they’d go off in the corner of the room away from the rest of the Cabinet and staff. During a crisis like the Bay of Pigs, you’d see them talking off to the side of the room. There was a level of conversation they engaged in that not even the senior staff was privy to.”

In the beginning, Bobby brought a militant energy to foreign policy councils, especially on Cuba, a reflection of his youthful anticommunism and his deep resentment over the humiliation his brother suffered at the hands of Castro. A government postmortem on the Bay of Pigs that Bobby spearheaded with General Maxwell Taylor in late spring 1961 declared there could be “no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor” and Bobby demanded in meetings about Cuba that the “terrors of the earth” be invoked against the dictator. But over time he would fall under the sway of his brother’s more temperate personality and philosophy.

John Kennedy was more viscerally antiwar than has been recognized in some quarters, where he has continued to be portrayed as an aggressive Cold Warrior, even a forerunner to Ronald Reagan. “I am almost a ‘peace-at-any-price’ president,” he once confided to Bill Walton.

“[JFK] brought into the presidency the knowledge of history that many presidents didn’t have when they became president,” recalled Robert McNamara during a fortieth anniversary retrospective on the administration at the Kennedy Library. “And I think his view was that…the primary responsibility of the president is to keep the nation out of war if at all possible.”

While Kennedy’s foreign policy councils included hawks like Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, what set apart his presidency from previous Cold War administrations was the surprising presence of pacifists like Sorensen and global visionaries like Chester Bowles, who sought to align the United States with the revolutionary nationalism sweeping the developing world. And it was these voices of peace and progressivism to which JFK seemed more attuned, as Acheson discovered during the 1961 Berlin Crisis when the president rejected his bellicose counsel, prompting Truman’s old, mustachioed secretary of state to harrumph about Kennedy, “Gentlemen, you might as well face it. This nation is without leadership.”

After Bowles, a liberal patrician from the Stevenson wing of the party, took office as Kennedy’s number two man at the State Department, he lost no time in recruiting other innovative foreign policy thinkers, including legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, George Kennan, and Roger Hilsman. The wave of progressive policymakers brought to Washington by the new Kennedy administration shook the centurions of the old order. J. Edgar Hoover tried mightily to block Murrow’s appointment as head of the United States Information Agency, digging as far back as his childhood to find subversive evidence about the television journalist, who had antagonized the FBI chief with his broadsides against the anticommunist excesses of Joe McCarthy. But Murrow finally was confirmed by the Senate, and with Kennedy’s backing he promptly began cleansing the agency of its hard-line Cold War propaganda and rehabilitating victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist by finding jobs for them in his agency.

As Murrow told senators during his confirmation hearing, the fundamental message that Kennedy wanted delivered to the world was “that we as a nation are not allergic to change and have no desire to sanctify the status quo.” When McCarthy’s old Senate ally Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa brought up Murrow’s muckraking CBS documentaries and asked why we couldn’t follow the Soviet lead and keep our propaganda more upbeat, the newsman, barely restraining himself, shot back: Because we live in a free society and you couldn’t convincingly “tell the American story” if you masked all its flaws.

To his deep disappointment, Murrow would never become more than a second-string advisor for Kennedy. But the president still valued his voice at National Security Council meetings, where he could be counted on to help JFK fend off the more alarming militaristic proposals. His advice on the Bay of Pigs—he was one of the few in Kennedy’s circle to warn against it, calling the venture unworthy of a great power and destined to fail—went unheeded. But Kennedy made certain his voice was heard on other issues, from nuclear arms control to Vietnam. Young foreign policy maverick Roger Hilsman would consider him “a staunch ally” in the movement within the Kennedy administration to shift U.S. policy from its regimented Cold War line.

Never before in the Cold War had Washington’s halls of power seen the likes of men like Sorensen, Bowles, and Murrow. These men’s very presence in high-level national security meetings, along with the president’s boyish-looking brother, was seen as an affront by the military and espionage chieftains, who prided themselves on having won a global war against fascist dictatorships and were now pursuing a Cold War victory over communist dictatorships. The national security elite regarded these Kennedy reformers as fuzzy-thinking intruders, out of their depth in the deadly serious arena of global hostilities.

One of the crusading liberals on the Kennedy team who attracted the most suspicion was Richard Goodwin, the thirty-one-year-old White House aide who had moved from his entry-level post as Sorensen’s speechwriting assistant to the president’s point man on Latin America. Goodwin had no foreign service or national security experience. He was simply a young Boston liberal who shared the president’s reform instincts when it came to Latin America. In the months after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy would signal his disgust with the national security establishment by making the freewheeling Goodwin his chief advisor on Cuba. Goodwin’s brief stewardship of the explosive Cuba issue is a colorful and little-known chapter in the Kennedy presidency. It vividly demonstrated the Kennedys’ ambivalent approach toward the Castro regime. And it soon provoked a sharp backlash.

 

CHE GUEVARA WAS STALKING
Dick Goodwin. Cuba’s economic minister, whose revolutionary charisma rivaled that of Fidel Castro himself, knew where the young Kennedy aide would be that night—at a birthday party for a diplomat that was being held in a small apartment in a quiet, dark residential neighborhood of Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital city. Guevara arrived at the diplomat’s party about an hour after Goodwin with two bodyguards in tow, wearing his trademark olive fatigues, black beret, and combat boots. The Cubans slowly circled the buffet table, sampling the heavy cream cakes that are a Uruguayan specialty. Women broke away from their tangos to swarm around the handsome, bearded revolutionary leader, a fate to which he was accustomed. But, as Goodwin later recalled, “I had no doubt he had come to talk with me. Had I been wiser and more experienced, I would probably have left. But what the hell, I told myself in the highest tradition of Kennedy-style machismo, an American didn’t have to run away just because Che Guevara had arrived.” If he got in hot water for meeting with the enemy, the White House aide rationalized, he could point out it was just a “chance encounter.” But the real reason he stayed, Goodwin admitted, “was curiosity about this romantic figure of revolution. I wanted to talk with him.”

Guevara had chosen his prey well. Goodwin was one of the young, progressive New Frontiersmen who seemed to be open to a dialogue with the enemy. To Washington hard-liners, he represented the worst of the administration—an intellectual, dreamy-eyed product of Harvard Law, who had rejected a sober career in corporate law to tilt at windmills on behalf of the American people. As a congressional investigator, Goodwin had helped expose fraud in popular TV game shows. He then was hired by the equally idealistic Ted Sorensen to work under him as a junior speechwriter for the White House–bound Senator John Kennedy. In the White House, Goodwin specialized in Latin American affairs, helping JFK develop the bold Alliance for Progress program that promised to shift U.S. policy away from propping up oligarchies and military dictatorships toward uplifting the poverty-plagued masses. The product of a Jewish working-class neighborhood in Boston, Goodwin, with his wild foliage of eyebrows and unruly hair, brought an ethnic brashness to Washington’s traditionally WASPy foreign policy councils.

When controversy began to swirl around JFK’s reform-minded Latin policy aides like Goodwin during the early months of the administration, the president came to their defense: “My experience in government,” Kennedy told a news conference in June 1961, “is that when things are noncontroversial, beautifully coordinated and all the rest, it may be that there is not much going on…. We are attempting to do something about Latin America and there is bound to be ferment. If the ferment produces a useful result, it will be worthwhile.”

BOOK: Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)
12.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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