Legacy of Secrecy (60 page)

House and twenty at the Pentagon . . . President Kennedy’s plans

for removing Castro from power were ended. . . . 58

When Bobby met with Harry Williams to tell him about LBJ’s final

word, Harry took the news better than the Attorney General did. For

Bobby, LBJ’s refusal widened the already deep rift between them. Also,

Bobby wasn’t quite ready to give up the fight—though in light of LBJ’s

decision, he really had no options left. As Bobby struggled with his dis-

appointment, he indicated to Harry that perhaps private funding could

be found to keep Harry’s effort alive, in case LBJ changed his mind or

the situation in Cuba changed.

Harry had spent the last four years of his life in the fight against Fidel,

often putting his family and business aside while risking his life. Even

after suffering for a year in Castro’s brutal prisons, Harry had been

willing to put his life on the line yet again while he had the full support

of President Kennedy and his brother, whom he’d come to consider

a trusted friend. Now, that time had passed. Harry realized that LBJ

would never give the same degree of support to Castro’s overthrow as

the Kennedys had. He and Bobby had done their best, and given it their

all. Harry had sacrificed a lot, and Bobby even more, when JFK made

the ultimate sacrifice.

In light of all that, Harry told Bobby that it was time to move on, to

leave the task of bringing democracy to Cuba to others. Harry must have

felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Bobby

had burdens enough without Cuba, and soon he came to see it Harry’s

way. From that time on, Bobby abandoned plans to stage coups, topple

governments, and eliminate foreign leaders. He was beginning a new

journey, one that would see him start to view the world, and his place

in it, with a new perspective. It would also lead to his tragic murder just

over three years later.

PART THREE

Chapter Twenty-one

Bobby Kennedy devoted the rest of his life to the pursuit of two goals,

one very public and the other so private that it has become known only

in recent years. Bobby’s evolution into a champion of civil rights and

the poor, which eventually included his stance opposing the war in

Vietnam, has been widely chronicled. But another part of Bobby’s life

was conducted in secret and has not been fully documented until now.

This quest, known only to a few of his closest associates, was his vigi-

lant effort to discover who was behind JFK’s assassination and bring

them to some type of justice—without exposing Commander Almeida.

Revealing the JFK-Almeida coup plan would not only cost the lives of

the Commander and his allies in Cuba, but would also ruin the image

of the slain president and his brother, Bobby—ending Bobby’s chances

of ever attaining the presidency, the only position that could allow him

to conduct a truly thorough but secret investigation of JFK’s murder.

Bobby Kennedy’s deepening involvement in the civil rights movement

is inexorably intertwined with his sometimes tumultuous relationship

with Dr. Martin Luther King. Their relationship, which ended with

Dr. King’s death in 1968, lasted only eight years. It began during the

1960 presidential campaign, when Bobby and JFK may have saved Dr.

King’s life, while King helped propel JFK into office.
Newsweek
editor

Evan Thomas wrote that “just two phone calls—one by JFK and one by

RFK—decided the outcome of the election and determined the course

of racial politics for decades to come.”1

Two weeks before the 1960 presidential election, Dr. King had been

convicted for staging a lunch-counter sit-in in Atlanta, and given a harsh

prison sentence of four months at hard labor. According to Thomas, Dr.

King was “hustled off in chains to a state prison deep in the Georgia

backwoods.” King’s wife, Coretta, called a Kennedy aide and pleaded,

“They are going to kill him . . . I know they are going to kill him.”2

Mrs. King’s concerns were real, since she knew that violence against

292

LEGACY OF SECRECY

blacks and their leaders was all too common. In January 1956, a bomb

had been thrown at their home after King began leading a bus boycott

in Alabama. Eleven months later, following the boycott’s successful

conclusion, a shotgun blast was fired into their home. A year after that,

another bomb was thrown at their house.3 The legal system offered little

help, since Jim Crow laws limited the recourse of blacks; in addition,

much of the South was still segregated, and some in law enforcement

shared the racism of King’s attackers.

Mrs. King’s desperate plea reached JFK, who personally called to

reassure her that he would try to help. JFK’s call to Mrs. King during

the tight 1960 presidential campaign was politically perilous: While the

South was solidly Democratic, most Southern leaders were conserva-

tive and opposed civil rights. Yet as an issue of fairness and justice, JFK

and Bobby felt something had to be done to help Dr. King. Just a few

months earlier, Bobby had pushed for a pro–civil rights platform at the

Democratic National Convention, and now he had the chance to turn

those words into action.

Hurried, behind-the-scenes calls were made to Georgia’s governor

by JFK, and to King’s judge by Bobby. However, the next day’s news-

papers reported only that King had been released after Bobby’s call to

the judge. Sparked by the Kennedys’ actions, the shift of black voters

away from the Republican Party of Lincoln, which had begun under

Franklin Roosevelt, took a giant leap forward. Thomas writes that Dr.

King’s father, “an extremely influential Baptist preacher, openly shifted

his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy,” and that on election day Ken-

nedy carried “a half-dozen states in the East and Midwest . . . by very

narrow margins [and] black turnout made the difference.”4

After this promising beginning, the ensuing relationship between

Bobby and Dr. King was often rocky. Dr. King pushed for rapid change,

while the Attorney General and JFK moved cautiously, trying to lay the

groundwork for JFK’s reelection. Even slow progress was sometimes

met with violence. On the night of JFK’s June 12, 1963, televised speech

to the nation as he prepared to introduce his civil rights bill, Mississippi

civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot and killed.

The Kennedys had to prod J. Edgar Hoover into action on that case

and others. The FBI Director’s racism has been well documented: As

late as 1961, instructors at the FBI Academy used the “N-word” to refer

to blacks and called the NAACP a communist-front organization. It

was only pressure from Bobby that finally resulted in Hoover allow-

ing the first blacks to enter the FBI Academy, in 1962.5 FBI agents in the

South often stood by and watched when peaceful demonstrators were

attacked, sometimes by the police themselves. Hoover’s attitude set

the tone for the FBI, and a former Atlanta agent later testified to Con-

gress about the degree of racism he observed in the FBI’s Atlanta office,

particularly toward Dr. King.6 A far different former FBI agent, Arthur

Hanes (Sr.), was mayor of Birmingham in May 1963, when city authori-

ties unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators—

and Mayor Hanes blamed King for the violence.7

Hoover hated Dr. King and constantly tried to portray him and his

cause as communist. One of Dr. King’s advisors had previously dealt

with the American Communist Party, but even though Hoover knew

that affiliation had ended by 1962, the FBI Director still pushed Bobby

to approve phone taps on Dr. King. After Bobby tried unsuccessfully to

persuade Dr. King to end his relationship with the advisor, the Attorney

General finally gave in to Hoover’s demands and approved limited

phone surveillance on Dr. King in October 1963.

On November 22, 1963, Dr. King was at his modest Atlanta home

when he saw the first televised reports that JFK had been shot. Joined

by his wife Coretta, both watched in horror as the news filtered in. Dr.

King said, “This is just terrible . . . I hope he will live.” As JFK’s death

was announced, Dr. King could say only, “This is what’s going to hap-

pen to me.”8

After JFK’s death, Hoover started bugging some of Dr. King’s hotel

rooms, setting in motion a campaign to discredit King that would last

until the civil rights leader’s death. President Lyndon Johnson reached

out to King, meeting with him twice during LBJ’s first months in office.

However, while LBJ didn’t explicitly authorize the hotel bugging, he

also apparently didn’t shut it down when he became aware of it. As for

the Attorney General, whose authorization should have been required

for the extra surveillance, Hoover hadn’t bothered to ask Bobby.

In the early months of 1964, Bobby continued to be overwhelmed by

his brother’s tragic murder. Evan Thomas writes that Bobby’s lingering

grief left him appearing “wasted and gaunt.” He cites JFK aide John

Seigenthaler as saying that Bobby seemed “to be in physical pain, like a

man . . . on the rack . . . he walked for hours, brooding and alone.”9 Bobby

was consumed by keeping secrets he couldn’t fully share with anyone,

but decades later—after the Congressional disclosures of the 1970s—

a few of Bobby’s friends began to realize some of what he had gone

through. Harris Wofford, a Kennedy aide before becoming a senator,

294

LEGACY OF SECRECY

said that for Bobby, “keeping from the public facts about the CIA, the

FBI, and the Mafia crucial to the investigations of his brother’s [murder]

must have caused him special suffering.”10

Bobby undoubtedly heard about Chief Justice Earl Warren’s answer

to a question about whether all of the material from his Commission

would be made public. As the
New York Time
s reported on February 5,

1964, Warren said, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in

your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may

be some things that would involve [national] security. This would be

preserved but not made public.”11

Perhaps such a public statement was Warren’s attempt to encourage

officials to share sensitive information with the Commission, with the

assurance that it wouldn’t be released in the foreseeable future. If so, that

approach didn’t work with Bobby, who revealed nothing to the Commis-

sion about Almeida, the coup plan, or his suspicions about CIA-backed

exiles who might have sold out the plan to the Mafia. Bobby would make

one indirect effort to focus suspicion on Jimmy Hoffa, but he would be

stopped because of matters related to Cuba and Almeida.

Stymied in his pursuit of Marcello, Bobby had his prosecutors con-

tinue their trial of Hoffa in Chattanooga, with another Hoffa trial soon

slated for Chicago. For Bobby, the associates Hoffa shared with Jack

Ruby were too obvious to ignore. It’s not clear whether Bobby ever real-

ized that Ruby was probably the “Jack La Rue” he had searched in vain

for only four years earlier. However, it must have been obvious to Bobby

that Ruby had been involved in a murder that Bobby had mentioned

in his book
The Enemy Within
. Union gangster Paul Dorfman had been

implicated in that murder, and Paul’s stepson, Allen Dorfman, was on

trial with Hoffa in Chattanooga. Allen Dorfman’s name had also been

part of the Ruby-Chicago payoff rumor reported to Walter Sheridan just

hours after Ruby shot Oswald.

Hoffa was shocked and furious when Sheridan had Teamster official

Ed Partin take the stand against him in Chattanooga, because Hoffa

knew the secrets he had confided to Partin, including talk of assassinat-

ing Bobby Kennedy in the summer of 1962. However, Walter Sheridan

had warned Partin not to mention that during his testimony. Sheridan’s

fear was that in the wake of JFK’s assassination, any mention of an

attempt to kill Bobby (especially in a car) would be so prejudicial that

Hoffa might be able to get a mistrial. Hoffa’s lawyers realized the same

thing, and though they pressed, they were unable to get more than a few

words about it on the record, and nothing about the target’s being Bobby

Kennedy. Still, in an obvious attempt to intimidate Partin, someone fired

shots into his close associate’s Louisiana home.12

Hoffa also had secrets he could expose, especially since one of his

attorneys in Chattanooga was Trafficante’s confidant, Frank Ragano. At

one point when Partin was on the stand, he was asked about running

guns to Cuba and dealing with high-ranking Cuban military officials.

Bobby’s men quickly shut down that line of questioning. Hoffa, Partin,

and Ruby had all run guns to Cuba during the Revolution, but Bobby

wanted to avoid the entire subject, since one of the Cuban military offi-

cials receiving such arms was Commander Almeida, who was still vul-

nerable in Cuba.