The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (35 page)

Bobby went over to the White House around noon and had a long talk with his brother. When Bobby got up to leave, Jack said, “This is the night I should go to the theater,” apparently referring to the Ford Theater where Lincoln was assassinated. “If you go, I want to go with you,” Bobby replied.
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At their moment of triumph, it was as if Jack, fey and intuitive as always, felt the shadow of a coming event.

December 29, 1962

Miami, Florida

D
uring the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy had instructed CIA director John McCone to halt all covert operations aimed at Cuba. When Kennedy discovered a few days later that ZR/RIFLE chief Bill Harvey, with the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already dispatched three commando teams into Cuba to prepare for the invasion, he angrily summoned Harvey to the Pentagon and told him to countermand these sorties: “You’re dealing with people’s lives in a half-assed operation.” When Harvey replied that some of his teams were beyond recall, Kennedy stormed out of the room. “Harvey has destroyed himself today,” McCone observed.
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Harvey was relieved of his command of ZR/RIFLE several weeks after the conclusion of the crisis. On October 30, Ex Comm terminated “all sabotage operations” against Cuba. Consistent with the president’s secret commitment not to invade Cuba, Operation Mongoose and the executive body that ran it, Special Group (Augmented), were disbanded.

News of Harvey’s dismissal and the non-invasion pledge spread like a deadly epidemic among anti-Castro forces in south Florida. One prominent exile wrote: “For hundreds of thousands of Cubans eager to stake their lives to liberate their native land, it was a soul-shattering blow.”
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Suddenly, under Bobby Kennedy’s own order, there was a crackdown on the training camps, guerrilla bases, and commando sorties that had been the ramrod of the war against Castro. General Lansdale himself was sent down to Miami to make sure the anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA handlers obeyed the order. On December 4, United States Customs officers detained twelve anti-Castro guerrillas at No Name Key as they were about to embark on a raid to Cuba. Some, like JM/WAVE station chief Shackley, made the best of the bitter business of standing down. But others, like David Phillips, David Morales, and Frank Sturgis, now stripped of all legitimacy, surrounded by enraged Cubans, were moved to seditious resolve against the Kennedys.
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It was a package programmed to explode — and Johnny Rosselli, once again, was in the middle of it.

David Phillips, under the cover name Maurice Bishop, was already operating independently of the CIA station in Miami. A handsome man in his mid-forties, six feet two inches tall, two hundred pounds, with dark hair and blue eyes, Bishop had served as a CIA agent in Havana before Castro’s revolution. There he had become acquainted with Antonio Veciana, an accountant working at the Banco Financiero. Veciana later turned violently against Castro and attempted, with Bishop’s guidance, to assassinate the Cuban leader in Havana in October 1961. The attempt failed and Veciana escaped to Miami, where he resumed his partnership with Bishop and, along with an anti-Castro Spaniard named Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, formed a strike force called Alpha 66. In September 1962, the strike force began launching raids. On October 10, Alpha 66 commandos landed on the Cuban island of Isabela de Sagua and attacked and killed twenty people, including several Russians. On October 15, Alpha 66 struck again, sinking a Cuban patrol boat. Despite the order from Washington to cease all paramilitary activity after the missile crisis, Bishop, according to Veciana, “kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision, and the only way was to put him up against the wall. ”
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This meant attacking Russian ships and military personnel to provoke a new confrontation between the two superpowers. The situation was explosive, and it seemed imperative, after all the mixed signals the administration had sent to the anti-Castro Cubans, to avoid doing anything that might reignite all the bitter and unresolved passions.

Within three weeks of the Cuban missile crisis, however, Bobby Kennedy dedicated the administration to a new, and seemingly impossible, objective — to liberate the 1,113 captured Bay of Pigs fighters from Castro’s jails and recruit them into the American armed forces. It was an extraordinary notion, given the cruel and dangerous odyssey of Cuban-American relations to date. But Bobby felt deep remorse about the fate of these hapless men. Theodore White once characterized Robert Kennedy as “a moralist” in whom the “motor reflexes are predominant.” Once engaged, those “motor reflexes” made him indifferent to questions of risk and proportion. The rescue of the men of Brigade 2506 triggered a motor reflex.

On November 24, having viewed the prisoners in Cuba, Alvaro Sanchez Jr. of the Cuban Families Committee told Bobby: “I’m a cattleman, Mr. Attorney General, and these men look like animals who are going to die. If you are going to rescue these men, this is the time because if you wait you will be liberating corpses.” Kennedy turned to his aide Ed Guthman. “We put them there and we’re going to get them out — by Christmas,” he told him. Guthman said it was not possible. “We will,” Kennedy replied.
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Christmas was one month away.

For the year and a half since the Bay of Pigs, negotiations between Castro and the United States had bogged down in recrimination. Castro’s original proposal was to trade the prisoners for either 500 tractors or $28 million in cash. After the captured men were convicted in March of 1962, Roberto San Roman (the brother of 2506’s captured commander, Pepe San Roman) then appealed directly to Bobby; it was “like talking to a Brigade man,” he said. Bobby pledged his support. He told San Roman to call him ten times a day if necessary. At Kennedy’s instigation, the administration offered $28 million in foodstuffs for the prisoners. In April, Castro countered by asking for $62 million. Later that month, as a sign of good faith, Castro released sixty sick and wounded prisoners for $2.9 million, “on credit.”

At the airport in Miami, San Roman introduced Kennedy by phone to a former member of his heavy gun battalion, Enrique Ruiz-Williams. Williams, a geologist who had graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, had fought bravely in the Bay of Pigs.
“Un bicho malo nunca muere!
[A son of a bitch never dies!]” he had reportedly shouted after being hit in several places by shrapnel. Before being captured by Castro’s forces, he hid a pistol, which in near-delirium he tried to use the next day to shoot Castro. Castro calmly took it away from him. Within minutes of arriving at Miami International, San Roman called Bobby Kennedy and handed the phone over to Ruiz-Williams, who introduced himself to the attorney general as Harry.
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It was the beginning of a close friendship. At a face-to-face meeting later that month, Kennedy asked Williams if he could convince his fellow Bay of Pigs veterans to enlist in the U.S. Army. “First, of course, we’ll need to get them out,” Kennedy remarked with a smile. Williams pledged his help in that cause as well.

Throughout the summer, amid Republican flak for attempting a trade with the enemy as well as quieter entreaties from the State Department to drop the whole thing, Kennedy worked intermittently with Williams, San Roman, and Sanchez to get the talks with Castro going again. At Bobby’s suggestion, the exiled Cubans hired James B. Donovan, former general counsel to the OSS who had recently acted as a go-between in the deal to exchange Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. What initial progress Donovan was able to make in his first visit to Cuba in August 1962 was swept away by the missile crisis of October. Surprisingly, Castro still seemed open to the trade and appeared to appreciate Donovan’s jocular characterization of the situation: “You can’t shoot them [the prisoners],” he told Castro. “If you do, you’ll go down as one of the greatest butchers in world history. . . . If you want to get rid of them, if you’re going to sell them, you’ve got to sell them to me. There’s no world market for prisoners.”
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Once Bobby had decided to get the men home by Christmas, he immediately committed his already overworked staff to an around-the-clock push. Katzenbach and Oberdorfer headed the effort. Kennedy loyalist and Washington lawyer John E. Nolan Jr. assisted Donovan in his negotiations with Castro. Barrett Prettyman, another attorney and former campaign lieutenant, took on the formidable task of transportation. Kennedy himself took the lead in fund-raising and soliciting in-kind donations to meet Castro’s ransom. He held meetings with pharmaceutical medical supply executives to gather the $11 million worth of drugs and medical goods required. Oberdorfer’s office soon took on the feel of a campaign headquarters, with phones ringing, rushed conversations, ad hoc meetings, and so forth. As the donations and commitments steadily mounted, Donovan and Nolan left for Cuba. At their first meeting on December 18, Castro demanded the $2.9 million in cash in exchange for the sixty wounded prisoners he had previously released. Donovan assured him he would get it. Donovan and Nolan remained in Cuba for three days, drafting the specifics of a plan to exchange the prisoners for the cash and supplies.

President Kennedy was most interested in Donovan and Nolan’s estimate of Castro’s character and state of mind, particularly in the wake of the missile crisis. They reported him to be cunning, charming, and personable, a marathon talker and listener (he would materialize at their quarters late in the evening and converse all night), and reliable in terms of his commitments. To their surprise, they found Castro confident about his personal security. Nolan later described the fluid and masterful security detail that moved around Castro with drill-like precision. On the highway, two heavily armed vehicles weaved back and forth around his Jeep. Castro personally gave the two men a guided tour of the Bay of Pigs battlefield, then invited them to join him scuba diving. “What do you think?” Bobby later asked Nolan. “Can we do business with that fellow?” Nolan’s answer was a qualified yes.
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On December 23, on the eve of the exchange, the $2.9 million in cash had still not been raised. Bobby appealed to Cardinal Cushing, an old friend of the family, who raised $1 million in a few hours. General Lucius Clay, who had served on the original committee to negotiate the release of the prisoners, contributed the balance. The next day the airlift began, and by the afternoon of Christmas Eve the beleaguered men of Brigade 2506 were back in south Florida. As they stumbled off the planes, journalist Haynes Johnson described them as “earnest, bewildered, still in a state of shock at their sudden liberation, still nursing a bitter sense of betrayal at the manner in which they were sent ashore and abandoned, still torn between trust and cynicism, still in awe at the power of an American government that could . . . pluck them out of the darkest dungeons in Havana and on the Isle of Pines and deposit them back in Florida with their families by Christmas Eve.”

The president was enormously pleased and greatly impressed by the herculean effort of his brother and his lieutenants. Bobby spoke with Jack on Christmas Day and encouraged him to go down to Miami to greet the released men in the Orange Bowl. Everyone else in the administration was against the idea. Rusk argued it would only complicate U.S.-Soviet relations; O’Donnell was far more forceful: “Don’t go there,” he told the president. He tried to convince Kennedy that it would “look as if you’re planning to back them in another invasion of Cuba. ”
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The president concurred. “You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t do it.”

But Bobby insisted. He proposed that Jack first meet with brigade leaders in Palm Beach, and then at least consider welcoming the men at the stadium. Two days after Christmas, Jack spent an hour in Palm Beach with brigade leaders Manuel Artime, Pepe San Roman, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, and a half-dozen others. They invited the president to attend the Orange Bowl rally and to review the troops. Kennedy changed his mind and agreed. Kenny O’Donnell would later write that the president attended in order to ease his “sense of guilt,” but it probably went beyond that. He had always respected men who had endured combat. Moreover, Bobby had asked him to go.
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From a security standpoint, the appearance was problematic — the Secret Service had no more than two days to perform a security check. There were 40,000 spectators in the Orange Bowl that day. According to two interviews done for this history, there was also an assassin.
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In his duffel bag was a disassembled, scoped rifle. The Secret Service and the Miami Police Department were tipped off about his presence. They later got wind of the plot and tried unsuccessfully to pick up “A Cuban male, 25 yrs. 5’4”, 135—155 lbs, strong muscular build, known only as CHINO” for questioning.
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Down on the field, the president reviewed the lines of proud, emaciated men of Brigade 2506 and spoke to several of them before accepting the brigade’s flag. With the president and Mrs. Kennedy standing alongside, Manuel Artime told the cheering crowd: “Our plan is to return to Cuba. We will come back — when or where I cannot say — but we will return.” The crowd chanted, “Guerra! Guerra!” as the president stepped in front of the microphone. In the heat of the moment, he put aside his prepared text and spoke extemporaneously. “Your conduct and valor are proof that although Castro and his fellow dictators may rule nations, they do not rule people; that they may imprison bodies, but they do not imprison spirits; that they may destroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the determination to be free. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” The crowd stood and roared its approval. Many in the brigade began weeping openly. Then Jackie Kennedy took the microphone and made some remarks in her remarkably good Spanish. Referring to her son, John-John, she said: “He’s still too young to realize what has happened here but I will make it my business to tell him the story of your courage as he grows up. It is my wish and hope that someday he may be a man at least half as brave as the members of Brigade 2506.”
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