The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (20 page)

On May 22, in a memorandum sent to him by Hoover, the attorney general was told point-blank that the Mafia had been recruited to eliminate Castro. The FBI had stumbled upon evidence of the joint venture by accident. Giancana had induced the CIA, through Robert Maheu, to bug the Las Vegas hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan, who Giancana feared was having an affair with Phyllis McGuire. The man sent to wire Rowan’s room, Arthur J. Balletti, got caught, and the FBI was called in.
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Hoover demanded to know from Colonel Sheffield Edwards, CIA director of security, just why the CIA was providing such favors for Giancana. After Hoover was fully briefed, he prepared a memo for the attorney general:

Colonel Edwards said that since this is “dirty business” he could not afford to have knowledge of that action of Maheu and Giancana in pursuit of any mission for the CIA. . . . Mr. Bissell, in his recent briefings of General Taylor and the attorney general and in connection with their inquiries into CIA activities relating to the Cuban situation told the attorney general that some of the associated planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro.
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If any doubt remained in Kennedy’s mind as to precisely what “dirty business” or “associated planning” meant, a simple call to Bissell would have confirmed that the connection involved plotting to murder Castro. In view of the administration’s all-out attack on the mob, it might have seemed imperative for the attorney general to sever the CIA-Mafia joint venture, particularly since knowledge of it added ammunition to Hoover’s arsenal of blackmail. Instead, Kennedy simply penned into the margin a rather pro forma instruction to his FBI liaison, Courtney Evans: “Courtney, I hope this will be followed up vigorously.”
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A year later, in May 1962, Bobby would have another chance to terminate the Mafia’s role in plotting to kill Castro, but would only request that he henceforth be informed beforehand. Although he might countenance using the Mafia against Castro, Kennedy would again give them no quarter in his prosecutorial assault.

Why play such a dangerous double game? Bobby was clearly frustrated that all the deliberations at the State Department, White House, and CIA had produced nothing but endless harrumphing about the blight of Castro and no sense of what to do. On June 1, the attorney general wrote, “The Cuban matter is being allowed to slide because no one really has the answer to Castro. Not many are really prepared to send American troops in there at the present time but maybe that is the answer.”
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But with Khrushchev spoiling, at least rhetorically, for a showdown over West Berlin, for which the Soviets had mustered an overwhelming array of armor and men, it seemed senseless to be contemplating an invasion of Cuba. George Ball said as much during a Cuba Task Force meeting when he asked pointedly what it would take to invade the island: “A half-million men? One million men?” What if the Soviets seized West Berlin when the United States invaded Cuba? he asked. The attorney general bristled at this, but Ball pressed his point.
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And what of the costs in civilian deaths, or the bitter prospect of garrisoning the island and brutalizing its population, as the United States had done during its occupation of Haiti during the 1920s? Bobby Kennedy knew little if anything about Latin American history, much less about what was involved in an airborne or amphibious assault. In matters of foreign policy, he was willful but unschooled, the moralist at large. Even Averell Harriman, one of his best friends, later conceded in an interview: “He was totally wrong [on Cuba]. ”
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What chance there was for restraint in Cuban policy was lost after President Kennedy’s disastrous summit with Khrushchev in June 1961. Kennedy had come to the talks hoping to achieve some degree of peaceful entente with the Soviet premier, and maybe even to extract a nuclear test ban commitment. But Khrushchev simply mugged Kennedy. He engaged in open talk of war if the United States did not accept Russia’s position on access to Berlin. Kennedy left the last five-hour session “dazed,” in the observation of British correspondent Henry Brandon. James Reston gave an even starker account of Kennedy’s emotional condition in Vienna, describing him with his hat “pushed over his eyes like a beaten may.”

“Pretty rough, was it?” I asked.

“The roughest thing in my life,” Kennedy replied. “ I have two problems. First to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And the second is to figure out what we can do about it. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone so inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he beat the hell out of me.”
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Part of the problem was Kennedy’s own unrealistic expectations. As President de Gaulle had warned him only days before the meeting, Khrushchev was a demagogue, full of bluster but not meaning half of it. Back in Washington, however, Khrushchev’s rhetoric was read differently, and the hawks were soon circling over a Soviet-American showdown on Berlin.

On July 13, the president listened expressionlessly as former secretary of state Dean Acheson recommended that the United States be prepared to go to nuclear war over Berlin, and that it should avoid all negotiations “until the crisis is well-developed.” Kennedy’s own secretary of state, Dean Rusk, essentially agreed with this position.

But the president was troubled. “All wars start with stupidity,” he remarked to Kenny O’Donnell. “God knows, I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans about access on an Autobahn.”
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Later, at a top-secret briefing, an air force general analyzed the chances of nuclear war for the president and the national security council. Kennedy was so disgusted by the “kindergarten” quality of it that he got up and walked out. “And we call ourselves the human race,” he said in exasperation to Rusk.
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In a speech to the nation on July 25, Kennedy adopted a tough posture, announcing that he would call up 150,000 reservists and authorize a national civil defense program, but he alluded openly to his resistance to the hard-line position. “Miscommunication,” he said, “could rain down more devastation in several hours than had been wrought in all of human history.” As would be critically important in the missile crisis of the following year, Kennedy’s sense of historical irony and his visceral distaste for the military establishment ultimately confirmed him as a diplomatist.

Bobby, with his more red-blooded view, was meanwhile attending the marathon meetings on Cuba, which at one point in May — June 1961 were running four hours a day, five days a week.
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He increasingly sought the company of military men who might supply the forceful answers. General Maxwell Taylor, whom the president had summoned out of retirement to do the postmortem on the Bay of Pigs, was by any measure an exceptional man. The jumping general of the 101st Airborne was one of the most decorated officers of World War Two. He was also a linguist, and had the polish and demeanor of a European prince. Bobby and Taylor became close. Kennedy was to name a newborn son after the general.
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The other general mustered to do battle over Cuba, Edward G. Lansdale, was the opposite of Taylor — a noisy martinet who had more answers than there were questions. But Lansdale had something everybody was looking for in that angry summer and fall of 1961: a means short of invasion to stop communist revolution. It was called counterinsurgency. Nothing if not a legend in his own mind, Lansdale claimed to have the experience necessary from his anticommunist adventures in the Philippines and Indochina.

In
The Quiet American
, Graham Greene had likened his Lansdale-like character Pyle to “a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.”
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In 1961, operating out of his office in the Pentagon, Lansdale was back looking for his bell and spreading his infectious creed. This time, however, weaponry was being distributed on American soil in southern Florida. The problem that was arising was in many ways the same that had bedeviled Athens during the fourth century B.C., when the city-state democratically poisoned itself by unrestrained warmongering.

Lansdale was to develop thirty-three different ways to eliminate Castro: chemical attacks on the Cuban sugar crop, dumping counterfeit Cuban currency into Cuba, dropping “para-dummies” to panic the population, introducing “cheap marijuana” (or, alternatively, accusing Cuba of narcotics trafficking), announcing a “misfire” of an American nuclear missile that was heading toward Cuba, and so on.
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Lansdale’s own favorite, one he told the so-called Special Group (Augmented) he had used against the communists in the Philippines, was to spread a rumor within Cuba’s large Catholic population that the Second Coming was en route, and that Christ would “return to Cuba.” (The Book of Revelations does not report Christ in Cuba in the first place, but no matter.) The condition for Christ’s reentry was the removal of Castro, whose anti-Catholic activities had inspired divine rage. Once this rumor was circulated, an American submarine positioned off the Cuban coast would fill the night sky with exploding star shells, the sign of Christ extant. The frenzied Cubans would then overthrow Castro. Walt Elder, CIA director John McCone’s executive assistant, termed this “elimination by illumination.”
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Bobby Kennedy was a rapt apostle. He sent his new administrative assistant James Symington over to the Pentagon to commune with Lansdale. Symington thought Lansdale an idiot. He wrote the attorney general that Lansdale was “the 800-pound all-American gorilla,” a description that offended Kennedy. Bobby was smitten by the notion of counterinsurgency.
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He would import Green Berets for weekends at Hyannis Port, where they would demonstrate their prowess by swinging from trees and climbing over barricades.
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A green beret sat on the attorney general’s desk. The hard-bitten CIA and former U.S. Navy frogman Rip Robertson paid a visit to Hickory Hill and on his return to south Florida was able to report to his colleagues that Bobby Kennedy was “OK.” Harris Wofford later wrote that “the attorney general was the driving force behind the clandestine effort to overthrow Castro. . . . He seemed like a wild man who was out-CIAing the CIA.”

Ethel Skakel Kennedy too played her part. Her family’s business, Great Lakes Carbon, had maintained an office in Havana and sold filters to sugar refineries during the Batista regime. The Skakels had also wintered in seaside Varadero, outside Havana, and Ethel was acquainted with the children of several upper-class Cuban families. Shortly after Castro’s takeover in 1959, certain
fidelista
irregulars had tried to commandeer the Skakel’s 55-foot luxury craft. This incident sealed the family’s dire opinion of Castro. In the summer of 1961, Ethel took several young brigade veterans who had escaped from Giron under her wing. She even set up Blas Casares on a date with a good Catholic girl. As always, the Kennedys threw themselves into everything they did.

By October — November 1961, the CIA, in Richard Helms’s words, “was instructed to get going on plans to get rid of Castro by some device which obviously would have to be covert because nobody had any stomach anymore for any invasions or any military fiascoes of that kind.” Helms, then serving as the deputy director of plans at the CIA, described the atmosphere as “very intense. . . . Nutty schemes were born of the intensity of the pressure. And we were quite frustrated. . . . No doubt about it, it was white heat.”
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The interagency Special Group, which met every Thursday at 2 P.M., would metamorphose into the Special Group (Augmented), informally known as Mongoose, when the attorney general arrived, usually as the Special Group’s business was concluding. ZR/RIFLE chief Bill Harvey and General Lansdale routinely showed up for the Mongoose meeting and it was in this forum that a clear — if bureaucratically deniable — signal was sent to kill Castro. Certainly this is the conclusion of John Ranelagh, author of
The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA,
generally acknowledged as the most comprehensive history of its kind.
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When word of the decision (possibly via the attorney general) reached the president, he was deeply concerned. It was in this circumstance that he spoke to
New York Times
correspondent Tad Szulc of the “terrific pressure” on him to order the murder of Castro. Wofford’s judgment as to who in fact was behind this terrific pressure is persuasive:

If Robert Kennedy understood and supported this secret plan within the larger covert operation, he himself may have been the source of “terrific pressure” for the assassination. Nothing in the testimony before the Senate [Chuch] committee suggests that the circumlocutious and evasive leaders of the CIA would have put such direct pressure on the president. Then who did? “Terrific pressure” is what anyone, including his brother the president, would have felt if he tried resist a course strongly advocated by the Attorney General.
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A few days after the president’s exchange with Szulc, White House aide Richard Goodwin discussed the matter of assassinating Castro with the president. It was to Goodwin that Kennedy observed, “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets.”
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