The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (120 page)

This was precisely Kennedy’s thinking. If he held firm to that position, a no-invasion pledge to the Soviets had immense political benefits. He would still keep a wary eye on Castro, but he could walk away from this dangerously parochial obsession with Cuba and get on with his work on the broadest, most significant scale.

These NSC meetings were attended by articulate, impassioned men with very different ideas. Bobby spoke in a sweetly tempered tenor voice, but often his words had steel to them. If the Soviets did not remove their planes, he wanted the group to consider alternatives, including “conducting surveillance in such a fashion that they would shoot at us and then we would then have an excuse for going in and dropping bombs on the IL-28s.”

“I think we’ve got a hell of a lot of cards in our hand,” Bobby said a few minutes later. Once the IL-28s were gone, the game was supposedly over.
Bobby, though, was holding a new hand that he would not easily put down.

In this new crisis Bobby played a central, complex, and contradictory role. He usually sat with the hawks at the NSC meetings, but to the Russians he often played the dove, a role that his colleagues celebrated as good acting. “Bobby’s notion is that there is only one peace lover in the government entirely surrounded by militarists,” Bundy joked to Kennedy. “Bobby is feeding him [Dobrynin] that stuff, Mr. President.”

O
n November 9, Bobby invited Bolshakov to his home in Virginia. There the attorney general once again began the private, second-track negotiations that during the past year and a half had been such a mixed blessing. The attorney general disliked all the pomp and posturing of diplomacy. He wanted to cut to the chase, in this case seeking a direct, immediate solution. His colleagues, however, did not always know what he was saying or how much he was giving away of their strategy. In this instance he gave what he called his “personal opinion” that if the Russians would remove the planes “as soon as possible,” the Americans would accept that solution, if “the USSR gave an undertaking that these planes would be piloted only by Soviet aviators” and not by Cubans.

Bolshakov had hardly had time to drive back to Washington when he received a call from Bobby at the White House, telling him that the president would accept only “the rapid removal of the IL-28s from Cuba.” This was the kind of snafu that would have gotten an ambassador sacked, but Bobby continued as an active player in this diplomatic game.

Bobby was his brother’s chosen emissary on the most sensitive missions. Three days later the attorney general took the newest proposal to Dobrynin, promising that if the Russians would agree to remove the planes within a “definite schedule … let’s say, in the course of thirty days,” the Americans would immediately end their shipping quarantine. He said that the president would agree not to invade Cuba, but that would remain a verbal agreement, not part of a signed protocol. In the end Khrushchev accepted the American proposal. “We have the firm impression that the Americans actively hope to liquidate tensions,” Khrushchev wrote Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Soviet Politburo. “If they wanted something else, then they had opportunities to get it. Evidently, Kennedy himself is not an extremist.”

In settling the immediate crisis, Kennedy could have pushed the Cuban issue to the back burner of international politics, turning it down to a simmer. He had an excellent device for doing so in his pledge not to invade Cuba. To be successful, he would have had to do precisely what he had done during the Cuban Missile Crisis: finesse the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and other
proponents of aggressive action almost as much as he attempted to finesse the Soviets. Instead, he diminished the scope and intent of the no-invasion pledge.

By authorizing extensive covert actions and making the threatening sounds of war, the Kennedy administration had some culpability in the Russian decision to place missiles in Cuba. Yet the president was willing to head back down that same dark road. He had signaled to the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and the exile community that he would not sit by letting Castro luxuriate in peace and security. There were strong, willful men waiting for that signal, men who would set out again to try to kill Castro, men who would seek to poison and burn Cuban fields, men who would try to become such a thorn in Castro’s side that he and his regime would bleed to death. Among these men, there was probably no one more determined, no one more willful in his resolve, no one more obsessed with Castro, and no one more committed to his downfall than the president’s own brother.

29
The Bells of Liberty

J
oe taught his sons that nothing mattered more than family loyalty. As the Kennedy brothers became men, they did not so much develop a newfound closeness as discover the ties that had always bound them. The three men shared a belief in public life as a man’s greatest sphere, a transcendent concern for the high destiny of their family and its name, and a love that in its intensity and purity was unlike anything they bestowed on anyone else, even their own wives.

The decision about whether Teddy should go ahead with his Senate race in Massachusetts was profoundly complicated, involving not only the highest political calculations but also the most intimate emotional bonds of family. The president was certainly in favor of Teddy’s advance in the world, but he did not like to spend his political capital unless he had some chance of receiving a return on his investment. If Teddy ran, many Americans might conclude that the Kennedys were not an exalted race of citizen politicians but an ersatz royalty believing itself entitled by right of birth to the highest offices in the land.

Teddy, a classic last son, was forgiven faults for which his brothers would have been harshly judged. Teddy’s life did not have the hard-won authenticity that his brothers had achieved. In his quest for credibility as a candidate, he traveled from country to country as if he were plucking exotic fruit, taking a nibble of Ireland here, a bite of Italy there, seeking not knowledge but votes. In the fall of 1961, he sat at the head table at the annual dinner of a society of Italian-American attorneys, an honor rarely accorded an Irish-American assistant district attorney for Suffolk County. After a speech in which Teddy celebrated the incomparable greatness of Italy, the group saw a film titled “Ted Kennedy in Italy,” an epic account of his “good-will mission.”
By the time the film ended, Teddy was already gone, on to his next public moment.

It was just as well that Teddy brought no film back from his monthlong tour of Latin America in the summer of 1961. When he left Panama, Walter Trohan of the
Chicago Tribune
asked Joseph P. Farland, the American ambassador, for his impressions of young Teddy’s short visit. “I can tell you what I told Teddy the next morning,” the ambassador said. “‘The harm that you have done in six hours will take me six months to undo.’ “The putative candidate cut a bold swath across South America meeting with all kinds of people, his excursions making American diplomats nervous. He was eclectic in his interests. In Rio, near the end of his journey, he took an interest in a beautiful young woman, not even attempting to keep the matter secret.

Teddy was a young man of prodigious energy; as late as he stayed up and as wildly as he caroused, he was the first one up in the morning, ready to get on with his explorations. Across the continent he was greeted not as another hustling American politician but as his brother’s surrogate. He had picked up the president’s most idealistic phrases and talked fervently about the terrible plight of the poor and their aspirations. When his brothers had made their youthful foreign journeys, they had gone off without entourages and friends walling them off from the experience they sought. They had either published articles themselves or written extensively in their diaries, and their travels had marked them deeply. Wherever Teddy went, ambitious young men latching themselves onto his future surrounded him. It was unthinkable that he would sit down and do the grunt work of writing about his travels or penning extensive notes in a diary to be read only by him. Instead, when he returned to Massachusetts, the
Boston Globe
ran a five-part series on Teddy’s journeys, with detail worthy of a president or a secretary of State and a notable lack of attention to his evening adventures; and celebrated his new insights, such as that “some 200 million human beings in Latin America are demanding membership in the 21st century.”

Bobby was the least enchanted with Teddy’s desire to run for the Senate. The attorney general was not only the most moralistic of the Kennedy men but the most moral, and the whole idea rankled him. He was the president’s protector, not little Teddy’s, and he was not about to sign on to an enterprise that might embarrass the president. Even Joe was not as determinedly behind Teddy’s candidacy as he had been in pushing the president-elect to name Bobby attorney general.

Before his stroke, Joe asked Clark Clifford, a man of astute political judgment, to make his own assessment. Clifford, though initially opposed, came around to the idea that Teddy should be allowed to make his race. “Bobby was opposed still,” recalled John Sharon, a Democratic Party campaign
organizer involved with the matter. “Teddy wanted to run, but he obviously saw that his family had pulled in this outside adviser.”

There were others criticizing the possible candidacy. Kenny O’Donnell worried about the damaging political implications of the race, as did Kennedy’s dear friend Chuck Spalding. “The only argument I ever had with Jack was once when we were going to Camp David when Teddy was being considered to run for the Senate,” recalled Spalding. “I thought it was possibly too much. Jack asked, ‘What is bothering you?’ He provoked me to say what I felt. I said, ‘You’re going to get all kinds of criticism. Teddy hasn’t done anything.’ Jack said, ‘He’s going to win in Massachusetts bigger than I did. And besides, Dad is interested.’”

Teddy went ahead and announced his candidacy on March 14, 1962, but one major obstacle remained if he was going to run the race he wanted to run. That was the Harvard cheating scandal. All across the Commonwealth there were whispers about a scandal at Harvard that the Kennedys had covered up. It had become a matter that, if not handled properly, could saddle Teddy with enough shame to doom his candidacy before it began. This was a matter of such importance that the president himself decided that he would be the maestro orchestrating every detail.

The Kennedys needed the proper publication, and that inevitably was the pro-Kennedy
Boston Globe.
Dick Maguire, the Democratic Party treasurer, called Bob Healy, the
Globe’s
Washington bureau chief, who happened to be in Boston. Healy was a fine reporter and a Kennedy partisan privy to many of the inner workings of the family. Maguire invited Healy to his suite at the Parker House. Over drinks, the Democratic leader broached the matter of the cheating scandal, asking the reporter just what he knew. The two men were well into the dance that politicians and journalists often perform when the phone rang. It just happened to be the president of the United States calling from Washington.

“Can you put it in a profile?” Kennedy asked, warming to the idea of sticking the story in the middle of a larger story, hoping that it would get lost in the rest of the article.

“No,” said Healy, a word that the president heard only rarely.

“What do you mean?” Kennedy asked.

“Because that would give you five stories on this thing, day after day,” he said. “I’m only going to do this piece if I can do it in one complete piece, the story at Harvard, everything.”

The president decided that he could not handle this matter in a phone call. So he invited Healy to the White House the next afternoon. There the two men spent an hour discussing how the
Globe
would break the story.
Healy laid out everything he would need, from the Harvard academic records to an interview with Teddy.

“How’ll you play the story?” asked Kennedy.

“I don’t know,” Healy said, though it seemed doubtful that a story of this magnitude would be anywhere but on the front page. “You know enough about newspapers that basically a story is played on the basis of the news.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Kennedy said, his irony intact. “I’ll get back to you.”

That evening the president called to say that he had decided to go ahead, and he wanted to meet with Healy again the next day. This time the president called in Bundy, who would arrange for the records at Harvard, as well as O’Donnell, Kennedy’s trusted political adviser, who remained opposed to Teddy’s electoral adventure. The four men discussed the smallest nuances and details of their agreement. When they had finally decided their strategy, O’Donnell turned to the president: “We’re having more problems with this than we had with the Bay of Pigs.”

“Yeah, with about the same results,” Kennedy quipped.

As Healy was leaving, Kennedy stopped him a moment to add an afterthought. “Hey, you better call Teddy about this, too.”

Two weeks after Teddy announced for the Senate, a front-page story appeared in the
Boston Globe
under the headline “Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident.” Healy insisted later that the publisher softened the article. It was a masterpiece of gentle euphemism in which words such as “cheating” and “expelled” never appeared. Teddy made his obligatory mea culpa (“What I did was wrong”), but there was a dangerous tone to the story, dangerous most of all to Teddy himself and his future. Cheating is a coward’s ploy, and he was cheating again now by refusing to face up to what he had done. He had not had the strength and the will to handle the matter himself. His brother, the president, had taken care of it. Then Healy and the
Globe
had done their part to take care of him again. There were always people taking care of Teddy.

The president’s prestige was on the line now, however, and it was simply unthinkable that Teddy would be allowed to lose in what was practically a Kennedy principality.