The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (123 page)

The CIA ran its own covert operations parallel to what the Cuban exiles were doing ostensibly on their own. On June 19, the president approved a plan of dramatically increased covert actions starting “in the dark-of-the-moon period in July.” These plans included the “sabotage of Cuban ships outside of Cuban waters,” hit-and-run attacks on the island itself, and the support of covert operations run by Cuban nationals from outside the United States that “will probably cost many many Cuban lives.” The targets of these operations included sugarcane crops, the food, clothing, and housing industries, bridges, trains, and electric power plants.

Bradley Earl Ayers, a career army officer, was one of those assigned to train Cubans in Florida for covert missions and to accompany them at least to the shores of Cuba. Ayers was given a cover as a technical specialist doing classified research at the University of Miami. As Ayers led his Cubans out on their first missions, the whole nature of the missions was slowly expanding. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had been something of a joke at the CIA that when they had burned sugarcane fields, the Cubans could easily harvest the burned sugar. That was no longer the case. “We fixed that,” Ayers recalled. “We began to disseminate defoliants and herbicides, dumping it in the irrigation canals and wells pretty liberally in agricultural areas, doing a pretty good job of killing crops.” After a few months Ayers learned that they would soon be going against refineries, mines, and other major industrial projects. Until now, such facilities had been off limits in part because American corporations wanted their properties back intact.

Another of the major players in the Special Operations Division was
Grayston Lynch, who had won a certain notoriety by going ashore at the Bay of Pigs. Lynch began by training Cubans for missions that primarily involved supplying arms to those within Cuba, but he too knew that things were changing. He recalled receiving word that they were to “set Cuba aflame.”

On July 16, shortly before the covert operations expanded, Bobby attended the NSC Cuba Standing Group meeting. There were few actions he was not willing to pursue in destroying Castro’s Cuba. During the discussion Secretary of the Treasury Dillon said that an official had blocked Canadian funds in the United States equal to the amount of Cuban funds deposited in Canada. It was a blatant infringement on the sovereignty of one of American’s most esteemed allies. Bobby agreed with the others that the United States should stop such actions. Nonetheless, he said, he “hoped that it would be done in such a way as not to destroy the morale of the U.S. officer who had initiated the action…. There were too few officers in the U.S. Government who acted with comparable initiative.”

Another problem facing the group that day was an article that had appeared in the
Miami Herald on
July 14. “Backstage with Bobby” described in detail the attorney general’s meetings with Cubans planning to raid Cuba from Central America. Bobby said that the administration could handle the matter simply enough. “We could float other rumors so that in the welter of press reports no one would know the true facts,” he told the group. In this instance he was all for bringing the CIA’s disinformation campaign home, attempting to poison the free press with lies and half truths.

Although McCone agreed that they might do as Bobby suggested, he added “that in future dealings with Cuban exiles we must use cutouts and not deal with the exiles directly,” and warned that “there be no direct contact with them in Washington.” The CIA director was attempting to rein Bobby in, but it was that immediate, visceral contact with these men and the games of war that the attorney general sought. He could no more have walked away from that experience than from his obsession with Castro.

I
n early June, President Kennedy flew to San Diego to spend a night on the aircraft carrier
Kitty Hawk.
Kennedy was the commander in chief, but he was also a proud navy man who loved the rituals of his chosen branch of the service. At ten o’clock that evening the president sat in a leather-padded rocking chair on the bridge of this magnificent city of a ship watching small jets catapulting into the night. It was a scene of awesome splendor. The only sound was the admiral briefing the president on the details of the operation, talking into Kennedy’s ear.

“The president said very quietly, and with infinite fatigue, Admiral, I’m
afraid I can take no more,’ “recalled the journalist Alistair Cooke, who stood beside them on the bridge that night. “He grabbed the arms of the rocker and began to force himself in a twisted, writhing motion, to his feet. It took about a minute, and then two officers led him to his quarters. It was his back again.”

Later that month the president flew out of Andrews Air Force Base for what would prove the most memorable trip of his presidency, and in some ways the most emotionally powerful journey of his life. It was in Europe that young Jack Kennedy had had his intellectual awakening and taken up the themes of his public life. It was among European women that he had found two great loves in Inga Arvad and Gunilla Von Post, women whose subtlety and sophistication he found lacking in their American counterparts. It was in Berlin that he feared the monumental confrontation with the Soviet Union still might come.

Whatever difficulties Kennedy was having in Washington, among Europeans he found generous new constituents. He had transcended the common European stereotype of Americans as boorish provincials stomping across their heritage. He was returning to their continent bearing what are truly the greatest gifts in the world, hope and promise.

As his limousine moved slowly along the boulevards of Berlin, most of the residents had turned out to greet the American president, shouting his name, crying with happiness, cheering until they grew so hoarse that the name became little more than a whisper, pressing forward, seeking a touch, a glimpse, a wave, some souvenir of this moment. There had not been such an emotional outpouring in this city since Hitler had driven through the same streets and been greeted with cheers and Nazi salutes. Kennedy had been in Berlin in 1945 when the city was reduced to nothing but mounds of rubble and it was as if the earth had been salted and nothing would ever rise here again. But as he drove along, he could see behind the crowds a modern city that had at least a modicum of the élan of the old Berlin of the 1920s.

Kennedy went to the wall and contemplated this divided people. The wall had solved a problem, both for Khrushchev and for him, and it may have saved the lives of the very people who shouted that it should be torn down. It was not Kennedy, the cold war strategist, looking out toward East Berlin today, but a man of the spirit, and no man of the spirit could look at this wall without anger and dismay. When he talked to Sorenson about his speech, he told the speechwriter: “I need a phrase that will reflect my union with Berlin. What would be a good word for it? I really am a Berliner. Get me a translation. How do I say, ‘I am a Berliner’?”

The speech that Kennedy gave that day in Rudolph Wilde Platz was an
exhortation to liberty. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was
civis Romanus sum”
he told the massive crowd below. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is
Ich bin ein Berliner.”
The words resounded through the crowd with massive emotional resonance. These same people who a generation before had slouched onto the world stage as a force of evil now stood as heralds of liberty.

“There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future,” he said as he looked out on the hundreds of thousands before him crowding the plaza. “Let them come to Berlin!” As he spoke, the crowd ceased to be disparate individuals but was one immense mass, thinking the same thoughts, beating with one heart, and ready to move with one great strike. Most orators would have felt an awesome sense of their own power, running their tongues around each syllable, playing with such a throng. Kennedy, however, hurried on with his speech, the words bumping into each other. This day, he was not the orator he might have been, largely because he was not comfortable with arousing such emotions in his audience. As he spoke, he feared, as he told Ormsby-Gore later, that “if he had said, ‘And at this moment I call upon you all to cross into East Germany and pull down that wall,’ they’d all have gone, [that] the German people as such at this moment in history were not totally to be relied upon, and that this rather sheeplike instinct of theirs could be very frightening under certain circumstances and under the wrong leader still.” Kennedy feared not only the German masses but mass man anywhere, and where demagogic politicians might lead him.

H
is visit to Germany was an immense triumph, and he flew from there to the Ireland of his ancestors, but within whose heritage he had never felt fully comfortable. This Irish visit, however, was one of the transcendent experiences of his entire life. “Are you glad you came?” his Irish friend Dorothy Tubridy asked him when he was leaving. In private conversation he was not a man of flattering, meaningless pleasantries, and yet he told her, “These were the three happiest days I’ve ever spent in my life.”

There are few things worse than an economy in which a man must leave home so that his family may eat, and there was hardly anyone standing cheering along the Dublin streets who did not have a brother, a father, or a grandfather who had made that journey to America, Canada, or Australia in search of what some called a future. Kennedy, the greatest of all the scions of Ireland whose ancestors had gone abroad, was returning as the leader of the most powerful country in the world. And was it not fitting that he should return now, in this year of 1963, the first time more Irish were returning to Erin’s shores than were heading abroad?

One of those who accompanied Kennedy on his journey was the Irish ambassador to the United States, Thomas Kiernan. Before this visit Ambassador Kiernan had considered Kennedy “more British than Irish,” a president whose “first reaction would be, if there were any even minor dispute between Britain and Ireland, to side with Britain.” Kennedy had the quick wit, the verbal agility, and the protective self-deprecation of an Irishman, but when the diplomat discussed the partition of Ireland with the president, the cold, logical, British-hued mind took hold.

Kiernan had seen in America that anyone could become an ersatz Irishman, wearing the green on St. Patrick’s Day, drinking toasts to a heritage they neither knew nor understood. It was not all songs and shillelaghs, however, to those who were truly Irish-Americans. A hard bitterness was mixed with that heritage, and it struck Kiernan how often Kennedy mentioned the notorious signs that the Brahmins posted in Boston: “No Irish need apply.”

As the helicopter flew from Dublin to Galway, Ireland appeared to be a blessed, magical, verdant land far removed from the secret squalor and the ceaseless conflicts. As they soared above the land, Kennedy kept asking about the prices of houses and land. The ambassador sensed that the president was thinking about buying his own place here, a house where he would come occasionally and send his children to learn about their Irish heritage.

The president returned to New Ross and the Kennedy family homestead. As the helicopter headed to County Wexford, Malcolm Kilduff, the deputy press secretary, briefed the president. Kilduff told Kennedy about his experience working with Andrew Minahan, the chairman of the New Ross county council, in advancing the trip. Kilduff had involved the enormous, redheaded chairman in a myriad of details. The press aide told Minahan that the presidential limousine would pull in near the wharf. From there, Kennedy would be able to move easily up to the temporary speaker’s platform. The problem was the massive heap of cow dung waiting to be placed on barges. “You’ll have to move it,” Kilduff told the county chairman. “Christ, no,” Minahan said exasperatedly. “I’m going to pile it high and make that f’er think he’s crossing the Alps.”

When Kennedy’s helicopter set down in freshly mown hay, the backwash sent cow dung flying across the field and speckling the children’s chorus preparing to sing “The Boys of Wexford.” Another president would have berated Kilduff for not planning better, but Kennedy chuckled impishly, amused at this added spectacle. Kennedy could go in a moment from wry ironic amusement to the most heartfelt emotion, and so he did today as soon as the children began to sing a song that touched him so deeply. Then he moved on to greet the various dignitaries. When he came to the chairman of
the New Ross county council, he stopped for a special moment. “Mr. Minathan, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Kennedy began, waiting for the man’s chest to swell to twice its normal size. “What I’d like to know is, did you remove the dung or does this f’er have to cross the Alps?”

Kennedy drove out to the old Kennedy house in Dunganstown. In America when a man went to see his old family home, he often discovered that it was torn down long ago, or that it had acquired a new addition, aluminum siding, or at least a different paint job. He often ended up standing there wondering what was left of the past in America, his or anybody else’s. But the thatched house that the president came to along this dirt road was almost exactly what it was 114 years before, when Patrick Kennedy left for America. It was a small place, only forty feet by thirteen feet, with tiny windows no larger than fifteen inches by seventeen inches or the taxes would have been higher. Next to it stood a farmhouse. There was neither indoor plumbing nor a telephone.

The president’s cousin, Mary Ryan, and her two daughters, Mary and Josephine, stood there waiting to greet the president. Mrs. Ryan was a rotund woman who could have been one of the legions of Irish women like his great-grandmother Bridget who had cleaned the Boston Brahmin homes and washed their fine linens. She was the very image of the Irish peasant from whom his father had sought to distance himself. Mrs. Ryan hugged Kennedy and spoke to him with warm familiarity, as if he had grown up just down the road. At some times and in some places, Kennedy might have recoiled from such a gesture, but this time he embraced his cousin. When he talked to his relations, Mrs. Ryan’s daughter Mary was amazed at how well he knew the family tree. “I think he felt back home,” she recalled. Raising his cup of tea, he proposed a toast “to all the Kennedys who went and all the Kennedys who stayed.” Then, almost as suddenly as he had arrived, he was off, flying back to Dublin in his helicopter high above the emerald fields.