The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (96 page)

The Bay of Pigs was hardly a month-old memory, and Bobby was not only taking a lead role in the entire Cuban issue but was also involving himself in secret contact with a Soviet agent. Bobby had set up the meeting through an American journalist, Frank Holeman, who had known the Russian for a number of years and had served as a conduit between the Soviets and the Eisenhower administration. Holeman had been the one originally to suggest the meeting, and both men had agreed.

Bobby was entering into a chamber of echoes, where sounds bounced back and forth and words meant more than they seemed to mean, or less, or maybe nothing at all. He could not be sure just who it was he was talking to this spring evening, whether these words would reach Chairman Khrushchev, or if they did, whether they would be translated with all his nuance and intent. Nor could he know who might be secretly observing the two of them walking together, be it other Soviet agents or the CIA or the FBI. “We were appalled when Bobby had a [relationship with] known espionage agents who were in the Soviet embassy,” reflected the FBI’s former deputy director, Cartha DeLoach. “And it scared the hell out of us…. We knew about them because we were tailing those people. And we also had wiretaps on the Soviet embassy. It hurt us too, you know. Here we are breaking our butts working four and five hours a day overtime, and the attorney general of the United States, our proverbial boss, [is] going out and wining and dining these characters.”

Bobby began by warning the Russian that his nation must not dare trifle with America. “If this underestimation of U.S. power takes hold,” he warned, “the American government will have to take corrective actions, changing the course of its policies.”

The president did not need his brother to warn the Russians. Bobby was pushing forward an agenda for the summit, telling Bolshakov that the new administration was seeking a “new progressive policy … consistent with the national interest.” He said that the president had not lost hope for a test ban treaty and was willing to compromise so that the two leaders would have a document to sign at Vienna. He said that the two superpowers could sign an agreement on Laos as well, and that the new U.S. government would show a new face to the developing world, even borrowing “good ideas from Soviet aid programs.” America would reach out to the Third World. “Cuba is a dead issue,” he said. Bobby asked that Bolshakov tell his “friends” what he had said and let him know their reaction.

After the debacle in Cuba, the president needed to fly out of Vienna with
tangible agreements tucked under his arm. But in meeting with the mysterious Bolshakov, the Kennedys were taking risks that are rarely taken before such a crucial diplomatic encounter. They were letting the Soviets into their strategic thinking, allowing Khrushchev to know where the give was in the American positions. Beyond that, they were bypassing the entire government apparatus that dealt with the Soviet Union. The Soviet experts at the State Department were not pallid bureaucrats embedded in the past, hostile to the initiatives proposed by the administration, but some of the most deeply knowledgeable diplomats in government. Many of them were operating now without knowing that the Soviets had been given this unparalleled entree into the American positions.

In the Soviet Union, paranoia was the higher sanity, and no one in the Kremlin would have thought to take Bobby at his word. They had their own rich dossier on his 1955 visit to their country, and if ever a man was an enemy of the people, it was Robert F. Kennedy. He had, as the KGB learned in dogging his every step, “mocked all Soviets” and pointedly managed “to expose only the negative facts in the USSR,” photographing “only the very bad things … crumbling clay factories, children who were poorly dressed, drunk Soviet officers, old buildings, lines at the market, fights, and the like.” He had “attempted to discover secret information” and asked about those in labor camps and prisons. And he had shown another decadent capitalist weakness by asking his Intourist guide to send a “woman of loose morals” to his room.

When a man like this proffered an olive branch, either his arm was trembling in weakness or he held a pistol behind his back. The Soviets, however, prided themselves on not personalizing politics, and they saw Bobby as a representative of his class and time who was selling the latest American line. They instructed Bolshakov to meet with Bobby again, and rather than respond to the specific initiatives to offer him only the bland proclamations that were the tedious essence of their propaganda. He was to tell Bobby that on the crucial issue of Berlin, there would be no compromise: the Western powers would have to accept the fact that the Soviet Union was going to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, meaning in effect that West Berlin would be locked up within a sovereign state.

Bobby’s worst mistake was to say that Cuba was a “dead issue.” It was a dead issue to his brother around the White House; his aides had learned that the Bay of Pigs was “almost a taboo subject.” That was the Kennedy pattern, to move on and away from anything unpleasant or negative. But if the Soviets might risk placing nuclear missiles on the island, as Bobby had written his brother after the Bay of Pigs, then Cuba was one of the most crucial issues of all to be discussed at the summit. It was irresponsible and
dangerous to exclude the Cuban issue primarily because it was painful, immediate, and raw. Bolshakov’s bosses told him that they did not “understand what Robert Kennedy had in mind when he said that Cuba was a dead issue.” He was told to tell Bobby “if by that he meant that the United States will henceforth desist from aggressive actions and from interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba, then, without question, the Soviet Union welcomes this decision.”

Khrushchev had studied under the toughest of masters in his apprenticeship to power. As a Ukrainian miner, he had fought in the Russian Revolution when the armed might of the Soviets won the day. In World War II, it was neither diplomacy nor grand strategy that defeated Hitler, but a generation of Russian manhood throwing itself forward against Hitler’s lines. Khrushchev was righteously proud of the Soviet sacrifices, and his ideological suspicions of men like the Kennedys were only enhanced by a Russian mistrust of outsiders. Bobby’s meetings with Bolshakov may have reinforced Khrushchev’s conviction that this new young president was a man of weakness, not strength, a man who could be pushed and bullied and played.

I
t was one of those malevolent New England nights when the wind rattled the most secure shutters and the rain slashed down hard enough to keep all but the intrepid and foolish indoors. Inside the big house at Hyannis Port, Joe’s mood was as foul as the weather. He had become terribly conscious of his age, and worried that he was being shunted aside.

“Goddamn it!” the old man cursed in the half-light to Frank Saunders, the new chauffeur. “He’s the president of the United States! You’d think he could at least order somebody to make a telephone call and tell his family what goddamn time he’ll be home—wouldn’t you, Frank—goddamn it!”

Kennedy was coming home to Hyannis Port for the first time since he had taken office, to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and relax a bit before flying to Europe and the summit. Joe had never waited for anybody and was damned if he was going to begin now at the age of seventy-two for a son who did not value his counsel the way he had before he entered the White House. He had gone to the considerable trouble of placing nude and seminude pinups on the wall of Kennedy’s room, the bathroom, his pillow, and dresser, and his son wasn’t even here yet to see his efforts.

“The weather be damned!” Joe fumed in a manic rage inexplicable to the chauffeur. “He’s the president. I came all the way back here from France just to see him.”

The only reply was the rain beating in staccato rhythms against the old house. “The hell with him,” Joe said in disdain, “I’m going to bed.”

Joe was long asleep when the first headlights appeared out of the haze, the procession of black vehicles making its way to the door. A light went on in the limousine, and Kennedy stepped out into the rain wearing a felt hat and overcoat. Saunders grabbed the luggage and followed. “Send in the broads,” he thought he heard someone say, but did not turn back to look.

Kennedy walked into the guest bedroom on the ground floor, followed by Lem Billings, who bounced up and down on the bed, making excitable sounds. The chauffeur couldn’t understand, but this was the kind of moment for which good old Lem lived. Kennedy’s friends calibrated their time with him as if it were a precious elixir that could be bottled and sold. They cut their personalities to fit the role that he preferred. Lem had seen how the president-elect treated subordinates, and he was not going to accept anything so menial and time-consuming as a mere position, even as assistant secretary of Commerce. He much preferred the proud title that he had given himself of “first friend,” the perpetual guest who showed up each Friday, to Jackie’s dismay, to provide endless amusement. On weekends Lem happily donned a jester’s robes and spoke the fool’s lines rather than attempting one of life’s major roles. He was amenable, genial, charming, witty—whatever cartwheels of personality amused his friend. He was not a true court jester, though, who in rhyme and song and wit utters hard truths that none of the king’s men dare speak.

Lem disliked Red Fay, the new undersecretary of the navy, as much as Red disdained Lem. Red did his own routine of buffoonery, attempting to shove Lem to stage rear with a little reminiscing here, some posturing for the camera there. His wit, like Lem’s, had been honed so as never to risk pricking Kennedy’s skin.

“Frank!” the president exclaimed enthusiastically. “How about a glass of milk!” Allergies be damned. “And don’t mind Lem; he thinks he’s still in prep school.”

“Yeah, well, who’s asking for milk,” Lem quipped.

Jack took off his clothes and walked out into the kitchen in his shorts. “It’s good to be home, Frank,” the president said as he stood there chugging down the milk and rubbing his bad back. Frank did not want to stare, but he was startled when he saw Kennedy’s surgery scars.

The next day the president was supposed to go on a cruise on the
Marlin
and enjoy some fine New England lobsters, but the day was so blustery that he spent much of the time reading, sitting on the front lawn wrapped in a
Notre Dame blanket. His back was still bothering him, and Dr. Travell hovered nearby; her patient was hobbling around much of the time on crutches.

A
s the president prepared for the summit with Khrushchev, he was inundated with memos, briefing books, letters, and advice from all quarters. Unlike much of the intelligence he had been given on Cuba, this material was sophisticated and realistic, stripped of ideological cliché, flattery, and bombast. Washington’s five-year “National Intelligence Estimate” of the Soviet Union did not present an image of an irrational, expansive, chance-taking Russia, but described a country acting with “opportunism, but also by what they consider to be a due measure of caution.” Khrushchev seemingly could afford to wait. In January, the Soviet leader had given an address to the meeting of world Communist leaders in which he said, “To win time in the economic contest with capitalism is now the main thing.” The Soviet economy was growing at an extraordinary 8.6 percent a year. The Soviets were investing one-third of their gross national product back into the economy, as opposed to only 20 percent in the United States. Although the Soviet economy was less than half that of America, it was growing twice as fast. The experts believed that the Soviet military was already roughly on a par with the West. Politically, throughout the developing world, many of the most intelligent and idealistic young leaders looked toward socialism as their model and linked the United States with the other colonial powers of the West.

“From the particular vantage point of Belgrade, it is evident that [the] noncommitted world now stands at [a] very crucial parting of the ways,” wrote Ambassador George Kennan. “If some relaxation of over-all world tensions is not achieved, it seems to me very likely that there will be a serious split between that group of unaligned nations which is violently anti-Western and anti-American and that which would like to preserve decent relations with the West.”

The president was coming off the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. If he had not been the one to propose this summit originally, he would probably have postponed the event. The stakes for Kennedy were even higher: unlike most summit meetings, where some agreements have been worked out beforehand, the two leaders were arriving with nothing but a vague agenda, and it was possible that Kennedy would walk away with nothing but the echoes of rhetoric. He clearly could have used something more than generalizations about what to expect, but as the State Department rightly told him: “In an exchange of this type, particularly with so outspoken a leader as Khrushchev,
it is not practicable to expect that the course of the talks can be charted in advance.”

Such analyses, as realistic and thoughtful as they were, were not constructed to fill the young president with immense confidence. Of course, Kennedy’s advisers were not supposed to be trainers, massaging him and whispering encouragement to him. Yet many of the documents prepared for Kennedy were marked by a startling defensiveness and a fear of the future. These experts seemed not to understand that the Soviet Union had much more to fear in the future than did the Western democracies.

In February the president had met with his top advisers on the Soviet Union. He asked Llewellyn Thompson, the astute ambassador to the Soviet Union, what had to be done to win the war against Soviet communism. The ambassador had not replied with an arcane discussion of weapon systems, covert actions, and propaganda campaigns. He had talked about the human spirit. “First, and most important, we must make our own system work,” Thompson said. “Second, we must maintain the unity of the West. Third, we must find ways of placing ourselves in new and effective relations to the great forces of nationalism and anti-colonialism. Fourth, we must, in these ways and others, change our image before the world so that it becomes plain that we and not the Soviet Union stand for the future.”