The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (132 page)

At the same time the CIA was preparing a series of dramatic initiatives of its own. That November a group of Cuban exiles led by an American CIA operative, Bradley Earl Ayers, trained for an operation against the major Cuban oil refinery in Matanzas Province. It was an ambitious enterprise in which teams of commandos were to sail from Florida on two fishing trawlers. The first group of commandos would make shore in Cuba in a small boat, to prepare the way for their comrades carrying rocket launchers. One of the men would climb the fence surrounding the refinery and enter a tin shed where a lone watchman sat. The commando would have a knife, a garrote, and a pistol with a silencer. He was to kill the watchman using the method of his choosing. Even though the night watchman was probably just an old man who needed a job, the plan made no mention of the possibility of merely tying him up.

Years later, when Halpern, the CIA Cuban desk officer, and Ayers, the
on-scene CIA operative, were asked why this man had to die, they responded in precisely the same words: “We were at war.” And so they were, and whether the attorney general knew the details of this operation, it was Bobby’s war fought Bobby’s way.

Bobby was so much the symbol of uncompromising opposition to Castro that when Dr. Rolando Cubela Secades, a Cuban army major with access to Castro, was contemplating killing the Cuban leader and insisted on meeting with a top American official, it was the attorney general whom he wanted to see. Instead, Desmond FitzGerald, the head of the Cuban Task Force—now renamed the Special Affairs Staff (SAS)—met secretly with Cubela in Paris on October 29. FitzGerald was traveling, in the words of the agency contact plan, “as personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy.” FitzGerald insisted later that the agency had not sought Bobby’s permission to speak in his name, and that at the Paris meeting he had not talked about assassination. Cubela recalled otherwise: “He [FitzGerald] offered me on behalf of the U.S. government the support … for being able to carry out either the plot attempt against the prime minister of Cuba or any other activity that will put in danger the stability of the regime.”

Lies are most effective hidden in a bed of truth, but at the highest reaches of the CIA, lying was not dishonor but its opposite. In the end men like FitzGerald appeared to be dangerous renegades, but they were only carrying out what the Kennedys wanted them to do. The president recognized that perfectly well. “I have looked through the record very carefully, and I can find nothing to indicate that the CIA has done anything but support policy,” the president said in October 1963. “I can assure you flatly that the CIA has not carried out independent activities.”

While the CIA prepared again to attempt to kill Castro, the administration began a tentative, distanced approach to the Cuban leader by exploring the possibilities of normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations. At the president’s authorization, William Attwood, the former editor of
Look
and an adviser to the UN mission, met with Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban UN ambassador. The president was more optimistic about the possibility of achieving some measure of peace with Castro’s Cuba than was the State Department. Bobby, for his part, stated that “the U.S. must require some fundamental steps such as the end of subversion in Latin America and removing the Soviet troops in Cuba before any serious discussion can take place about a détente.” As for Castro, he set no conditions and was intrigued enough by the prospect that early in November he expressed a willingness to sit down for discussions with an American official.

In the next months the two sides would have to travel a treacherous pathway. Kennedy was facing reelection, and he could not melt down the swords
of war as long as Castro shouted the shrill slogans of world revolution. The Cuban leader, for his part, was the leader of a young revolution, and he could hardly turn away easily from his ideals or his patrons in Moscow. Both leaders were far more realistic than their rhetoric and saw some measure of hope in these discussions. Peace is not won in a day, however, and death comes in an instant. The CIA’s FitzGerald was convinced that Castro would be dead by the end of 1963.

T
he president spent the weekend of October 20 in Hyannis Port. Kennedy was as restless of body and mind, and with his bad back, he rarely sat down longer than was necessary. He sat quietly with his father watching the football games on television. Kennedy was supposed to leave Sunday morning, but Joe had a cold and the president spent time sitting next to his bed, talking to him.

It finally came time for the president to leave. Autumn had already been hard upon the land, and it was far too cold for Joe to sit out on the porch to see the president off. His son came up to his bedroom and said good-bye. The president did not like to hug or kiss other men, but he kissed his crippled father, and then he hurried out of the room.

As soon as the president left, Joe motioned toward the balcony, insisting that his bed be moved there to watch the presidential helicopter depart. The world waited on his son now, the way it once had waited on him, but the helicopter did not lift off. Joe’s face twisted up in disbelief. As he sat looking down on the grass where his sons had so often played, he felt a touch on his shoulder. “Look who’s here, Dad,” the president said.

Kennedy had come to say good-bye again. He felt he had to touch his father one more time. He wrapped his father in his arms and kissed him. Then he was gone, and within a moment the helicopter lifted off into the leaden skies.

On Tuesday, November 12, Cartha DeLoach, the new FBI liaison to the White House, walked into the Oval Office. That first visit to the presidential office inspired a moment of awe in the most sanguine of men. Kennedy had just started wearing glasses except when he was in public, and he did not quite have the youthful, forceful look by which most Americans knew him. DeLoach introduced himself and listened to Kennedy, but he kept staring at the president’s hands. They were shaking. As the president continued talking, he put his hands under the desk as if he did not want DeLoach to see the uncontrollable tremor.

The following Saturday, DeLoach was in the auditorium when Kennedy
gave a speech to the National Academy of the FBI. DeLoach tried to pay attention, but he kept looking at the president’s hands. “His hand was shaking terribly, and I couldn’t think that was from stress or the strain of the speech,” DeLoach said. “I thought it must be a disease of some kind.”

DeLoach was not the only one to notice that Kennedy’s hands often shook. The
Boston Globes
Bob Healy observed the trembling hands as well, though it was not something that he would consider writing about in his paper. Since Kennedy had entered the White House, the only major publication to write about his health problems in an important way was the scandal sheet
Confidential,
in an almost scholarly “special report” on the potential effects of Addison’s disease. Other than that July 1962 article titled “Medical Facts on President Kennedy’s Mysterious Malady,” the press had largely left the story alone.

Kennedy was heading into an election year in which he would have the punishing task of running for president while he continued to bear all the onerous burdens of office. The campaign would have tested the mettle and stamina of the healthiest of men, and it was a question whether Kennedy was up to such a challenge. It was not simply that his hands trembled, that he was corseted with a metal and cloth brace to protect his back, and that in privacy at Hyannis Port he often used crutches. The question was whether his regimen of drugs and all the endless tensions of his office had begun to break the man down. How much longer could he maintain the greatest of all his many illusions—that he was a vibrantly healthy young president?

Politics is always defined by endings, and as the political year concluded, Kennedy’s legislative program was in trouble. His tax cut bill was spat back at him by a vote of 12–2, and the Senate Finance Committee decided to table the matter until 1964. His civil rights bill was pushed back again, its delay fostered primarily by southern Democrats who could win in procedure what they would lose in votes. At least his foreign aid bill was passed, but the recalcitrant Senate stripped it of $800 million of the $4.5 billion he had requested, and that was still $200 million beyond what the House was willing to give him.

O
n the very weekend that this disastrous news led the nation’s newspapers, the White House could at least announce that Jackie would be going along with her husband on his trip to Texas on November 21. It was no small matter that Jackie had agreed to travel with him and become part of the still-unannounced reelection campaign. In the political scope of things, her involvement might weigh heavier than all his losses in Congress. In the first place, if Jackie backed away from politics much longer, she risked becoming
a political albatross—a first lady who appeared to enjoy living everywhere but the White House.

Jackie’s European sojourn had created headlines that might please a king, but not a democratic leader—” Mrs. Kennedy Aegean Island-Hopping,” “Jackie Follows Script as Hollywood Wrote It,” “Jackie Sails in Splendor.” Betty Beale, a Washington social columnist, reported that Jackie’s European trip had caused “complaints … to pour in from all quarters and it may hurt politically.” Marianne Means, a Hearst columnist and reporter, wrote: “During her nearly three years in the White House, she has consistently refused all invitations to appear with the president at political functions and most public events, outside the realm of the arts. She did not once accompany him last fall as he campaigned for Democratic congressmen up for reelection. And she has never traveled with him on any of his trips around the country.”

Jackie had a radiant popularity all her own that would help create the almost frenetic excitement that would translate into votes next November. In 1960 Kennedy’s advisers had thought Jackie might be a liability; in 1964, in a close campaign, she might prove a crucial asset.

Joe Kennedy had long ago taught his sons that time was the most precious of commodities, and the president filled every cranny of his life as richly as he could, even the short helicopter ride from the White House lawn to Andrews Air Force Base as he left for Texas. “Where’s John?” the president asked his wife’s maid, Provi, as he moved through the second floor looking for his son.

“Well, I don’t know,” Provi replied defensively. “It’s raining, and Miss Shaw does not want him to go.”

“Go down the hall and make sure he’s dressed,” the president ordered. “I want to take him with me.”

John Jr. trudged toward his father wearing a raincoat and a sou’wester rain hat. The president hated hats, but he donned one for a moment as he and little John ran out in the rain to the helipad where three helicopters sat waiting. John Jr. would not be going on the long trip west, but spending time with his son was one of the president’s pure delights, even on the short hop to Andrews Air Force Base. The president could bid an especially happy good-bye to his son since, upon his return, on November 25, they would be celebrating his namesake’s third birthday.

Kennedy was relieved that Jackie was going with him, but as he sat in the helicopter waiting for her to arrive, he was once again reminded of a woman’s prerogative to be late even if her husband was the president of the United States. His son was with him but he beat out a tattoo with his fingers on his leg, while his aides scurried back into the White House to attempt to hurry
his wife. As he sat waiting on her, he apparently knew that on his return he had the most onerous and difficult of duties: to deal with the question of O’Donnell and O’Brien’s possible corruption. There were rumors in the White House that he was going to fire the two when he returned from Texas. That may not have been true, and while some former staff members are convinced that the men were fully culpable, others are not so sure. Still others who knew them outside the White House say that it was impossible that they would have sought financial benefits for themselves. Whether their still-loyal friends are correct, the matter had finally to be faced by a president who abhorred such confrontations and personal dealings.

Jackie finally arrived, and the craft rose up off the manicured lawn to fly southeast to Andrews Air Force Base. Below, the city appeared an exquisite rendering of geometric shapes. From the obelisk-shaped tower of the Washington Monument and the rectangles of the Mall to the dome of the Capitol, Washington seemed a city of perfect forms, patterns, and designs. Kennedy knew as well as any man that political Washington was nothing like that at all, but a city of dark labyrinths and twisted alleyways as well as grand streets and noble buildings. In the exercise of power, he traversed the whole political city, going places that few knew he went, leaving images of himself that sometimes had little to do with the man flying high above.

As
Air Force One
flew westward from the Maryland air force base, Kennedy was heading to a Texas that was a far different place from what it first appeared to be. From above, the state looked like a place of endless vistas and almost limitless horizons. As Kennedy well knew, political Texas was a narrow, convoluted, dangerous place rife with betrayals and mistrust. The Texas Democrats were feuding, wasting their energy fighting one another instead of their common Republican opponents. That was politics as it always was, an impossible brew of the sublime and the ugly, the passionate and the calculated, public idealism and private cynicism. Matters were so bad that the state’s liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and its conservative Governor John Connolly could hardly manage a civil conversation.

That was a matter that Kennedy would deal with, but he was traveling here primarily because a man who was running for president followed the scent of money, and Texas was big money. For months he had been pushing the Texas Democrats to set up a major fund-raiser, an event that would allow him to take home a million dollars or more, money that was fuel to power his campaign.

Every time Kennedy left the safe, confining presence of the White House, he had to know that someone might be out there looking at him with the eyes of a killer, if nor the hands and the will. Of the thirty-four presidents
who had preceded him, three had been assassinated, and attempts had been made on the lives of three others. During the first thirty-four months of his presidency, the Secret Service had noted twenty-five thousand threats against the president and listed one million names on its “security index” of those who represented possible threats.