Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (11 page)

There was a pungent air of ferment that night in August 1961 in Montevideo. Guevara surely knew it was his last chance to speak with Goodwin before the young Kennedy official returned home from a conference of Latin American finance ministers, where the new Alliance for Progress had been warmly endorsed by every representative except Che. The two men had been cautiously circling around each other during the twelve-day conference, which was held ninety miles away from the shabbiness of Montevideo, in a converted casino at the Uruguayan resort of Punta del Este. Guevara had noticed that Goodwin liked to relieve the tedium of the meetings by smoking cigars and he delivered a challenge to him through an Argentinian delegate: “I bet he wouldn’t dare smoke Cuban cigars.” When Goodwin relayed word that he certainly would if he could get his hands on some, the Cuban leader promptly sent him a polished-mahogany box, beautifully decorated with an inlaid Cuban seal amid a rainbow of national colors, filled with aromatic Havanas. With the gift was a typewritten note from Guevara: “Since I have no greeting card, I have to write. Since to write to an enemy is difficult, I limit myself to extending my hand.”

Coming just four months after the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, it was a remarkable gesture on the part of the revolutionary leader. When Guevara followed up the next day by inviting Goodwin to sit down with him for an informal talk, the Kennedy aide quickly got clearance from the chief of the U.S. delegation, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon. But on the final day of the conference, Guevara—who the press had already proclaimed was “stealing the show” at the conference, his impassioned oratory easily out-shining the businesslike efforts of the pinstriped, former Wall Street banker Dillon—delivered a fiery denunciation of the Alliance for Progress. He pointed out, with some accuracy, that Kennedy’s generous program should be credited to the Cuban revolution, since the United States had been blissfully unconcerned with Latin American poverty until Castro and Guevara’s bearded guerrillas paraded victoriously into Havana. He then denounced the Alliance as a futile effort to reform Latin societies because “one cannot expect the privileged to make a revolution against their own interests.” Real change in the medieval barrios and fields would come only through the armed uprising of the oppressed, as it had in Cuba. Dillon quickly responded with harsh words of his own, declaring that the United States eagerly awaited “the day when the people of Cuba once more have regained their freedom from the foreign domination and control to which they are presently subjected.” The meeting with Guevara, Dillon informed Goodwin, was off.

But Guevara was not easily deterred. He now had Goodwin cornered in the narrow confines of the Montevideo apartment. After the revolutionary made it known that he wanted to speak with Goodwin, the two men were introduced. Goodwin immediately told him that he would be happy to listen to whatever he had to say, but he had no authority to negotiate anything. That was fine with Guevara, and they retreated to a small sitting room where they could hear each other over the party’s samba music. At first Guevara sat on the floor, with Goodwin quickly following suit so Che could not “outproletarianize” the American. But when the Brazilian and Argentinian officials who were acting as intermediaries for the momentous meeting insisted the two men take the seats in the room, Guevara settled into a couch, and Goodwin sat facing him in a heavily upholstered chair. In a confidential memo on the meeting that Goodwin later wrote, he observed that “behind the beard Che’s features are quite soft, almost feminine, and his manner is intense. He has a good sense of humor.”

The Goodwin-Guevara encounter was loaded with political meaning. There they sat, their knees almost touching. On one side of the room was the man whose intense visage, with the dashing beret and beard, was already achieving iconic status—a man who had rejected the privileges of his affluent Buenos Aires upbringing to become a doctor for the destitute and scorned, and then, after observing first-hand how the CIA destroyed a progressive, democratically elected government in Guatemala, had dedicated himself to the armed liberation of Latin America. On the other was an idealistic young American, who believed—like the youthful president he served, a man who had also broken from the narrow interests of his wealthy background—that the oppressive oligarchies that dominated the region could be peacefully transformed if the forces of the democratic left in those countries received the powerful support of the United States. One was a legendary revolutionary. The other drew on revolutionary rhetoric to infuse the president’s speeches and policies with the same sense of passion. “We are the revolutionary generation in a revolutionary world,” Goodwin would proudly announce to a gathering of young volunteers for the Peace Corps, Kennedy’s international assistance program that would inspire imitative efforts by Fidel Castro.

Guevara broke the ice that evening with a sharp joke, thanking Goodwin’s government for the Bay of Pigs, since the stunning Cuban victory helped consolidate the Castro regime’s control over the country. Goodwin said perhaps Guevara’s government would return the favor and attack the U.S. military base at Guantánamo, a provocative act that Che knew would lead to an invasion of his country. In fact, as Che had accurately charged in a speech at the Punta del Este conference, some Washington officials wanted to stage such an assault as a pretext for war. “Oh no,” Guevara replied with a laugh. “We would never be so foolish as that.”

As the tensions in the small room lifted, Guevara got to the heart of the matter. He realized that a true understanding between the two countries was impossible, but he floated the possibility of a “modus vivendi.” To achieve this state of coexistence, Che suggested that his government would be willing to address the Kennedy administration’s two major concerns about Cuba. It would agree not to make any political or military alliances with Moscow, to ensure Washington that Cuba would not become the Soviet outpost it feared. His government would also reconsider its unofficial policy of aiding insurrections in other Latin countries, a policy that the Kennedy administration denounced as “exporting revolution.” In return for these agreements, Guevara said, the United States would promise not to support the overthrow of the Cuban government by force and would lift the trade embargo that had been imposed on the country.

It was nearly six in the morning when the discussion finally ended. Guevara and Goodwin rose and shook hands, promising not to reveal the meeting to anyone except their respective leaders, Castro and Kennedy. “I liked him a lot, actually,” Goodwin recalled many years later, over a pasta dinner at a favorite restaurant in a mini-mall not far from his home in Concord, Massachusetts. “We got along well, talking all night long, until dawn. He was hoping to find a way for our two countries to live together, he laid the whole thing out. He was very honest.” After bidding farewell to each other that dawn, the two men walked into the next room, where a few hardy couples were still dancing. The Kennedy aide then rushed back to his hotel and made notes of their remarkable conversation, before the presidential 707 carrying the American delegation flew back to Andrews Air Force Base.

When Goodwin returned to the White House and reported on his meeting with the infamous Che Guevara to JFK, the president showed no annoyance with his young aide’s act of freelance diplomacy, only curiosity about the charismatic revolutionary and what he had to say. While talking with Goodwin, Kennedy spied him holding the contraband box of Cuban cigars, which were outlawed under the U.S. trade ban. “Are they good?” the president asked. “They’re the best,” Goodwin replied, prompting Kennedy to immediately open Che’s gift and sample one of the Havanas. “You should have smoked the first one,” Kennedy told Goodwin. “It’s too late now, Mr. President,” he responded. Kennedy gave a sheepish grin, and continued puffing on the illicit Cuban export.

Kennedy asked Goodwin to “write up a complete account and circulate it to Rusk, Bundy, and the others.” The memo Goodwin produced for the foreign policy high command was properly restrained, but his enthusiasm for Guevara’s peace feeler was nonetheless obvious. And Che apparently felt the same excitement about the meeting. The morning after their nightlong talk, the Argentine diplomat who had helped arrange the meeting phoned Goodwin to say that “Guevara had thought the conversation quite profitable, and had told him that it was much easier to talk to someone of the newer generation.” This no doubt appealed to Goodwin’s boss, whose youthful restlessness often drove him also to circumvent his government’s clogged and cautious bureaucratic channels.

Goodwin sent a second memo to Kennedy on Cuba policy in the wake of the Punta del Este conference and his marathon conversation with Che. Don’t make Cuba a geopolitical obsession, the aide advised Kennedy—it only inflames anti-U.S. passions in the region and strengthens Castro’s hand.

The flurry of excitement in the Kennedy White House over the Cuban peace initiative was quickly doused by bitter political fallout from the meeting. Che was an electric rail in hemisphere politics, a crackling force that could not only ignite major upheavals in the anxiety-ridden ruling classes of Latin America, but also convulse the giant to the north. When word of the Che-Goodwin encounter got back to Washington, it set off a political storm. A Republican congressman denounced Goodwin’s “so-called chance meeting” with Guevara and charged that the young Kennedy aide was a “kid playing with fire.” Goodwin was forced to explain himself before a Senate subcommittee. Fortunately for the administration, it was chaired by a sympathetic Wayne Morse of Oregon, and Goodwin’s appearance quickly turned into a “pleasant session,” in the words of the
New York Times
. But the right would not let go of the incident, and months later attack dogs like Goldwater were still demanding Goodwin’s head. The conservative senator lumped the young aide together with other notorious administration liberals like Bowles, Stevenson, and Schlesinger, calling on President Kennedy to get rid of the men who had been “wrong from start to finish in their attitudes and recommendations for American policy in the Cold War.”

JFK’s right-wing opponents accurately sensed something ambivalent within the administration when it came to Cuba. If someone like Dick Goodwin was the White House’s point man on Cuba, what did that say about the administration’s anti-Castro resolve? Hard-liners suspected that the Kennedy brothers’ war of words with the Castro brothers was just that—words. Secretly the Kennedys were prepared to live with this Communist outpost, charged their conservative critics, no matter how inflamed their rhetoric grew or how loudly Bobby hectored the CIA to destabilize the Castro regime.

Chronicles of the Kennedy administration inevitably focus on the brothers’ so-called “Cuba obsession.” There is no denying that Cuba’s revolutionary government was a major focus for the brothers. But it was not simply a morbid one. John Kennedy had an intellectual and even playful curiosity about the Cuban experiment and its leaders that would eventually lead him to explore openings in the cold wall that had been erected between the two nations. Guevara’s August 1961 Montevideo peace gambit would prove premature, but it would not be the last time that President Kennedy would consider such a bold chess move with Cuba. In fact, he never shut off the option, as his right-wing critics suspected. Montevideo became a running theme of his presidency—the back-channel escapade, the valiant attempt to end-run the dead, bureaucratic forces of Cold War stasis and break through to a less dangerous world.

In the midst of the Guevara storm, JFK expressed irritation with Goodwin’s Cuban flirtation. But the truth is, Kennedy was just as fascinated by Cuba’s charismatic leaders. Journalist Laura Knebel, who like her husband, Fletcher, covered the Kennedy White House as well as the Cuban revolution for
Look
magazine, observed JFK’s personal obsession with Guevara. Knebel, one of the few women journalists whom Kennedy respected, had a bantering relationship with him. She often challenged him on his Latin policies, a special area of interest for her. He tweaked her for what he thought was her overly sympathetic coverage of the seductive Guevara. “When I’d talk to Kennedy, he would ask me about Guevara, and when I went to Cuba, Guevara would talk about Kennedy—as an imperialist, of course,” Knebel later recalled. “They were both cool, pragmatic, very smart characters. That’s when he said, ‘Something gives me the feeling you’ve got the hots for Che.’ That made me sore as hell. I felt put down. I protested. Hadn’t he seen the photo of me and Che arguing during the interview? ‘Yeah,’ said the president, ‘but that kind of hostility often leads to something else.’”

New York Times
reporter Tad Szulc, another Latin America correspondent who enjoyed good access to Kennedy, saw JFK’s fascination with Guevara’s boss, Fidel Castro, as well. The fascination was mutual, observed Szulc, who came to know the Cuban leader while writing a 1986 biography of him. Both men, wrote Szulc, “had superb minds and a vision of history. They had never met but were fascinated by each other as adversaries and as national leaders. I know it from discussing Castro with Kennedy in the short years when they were simultaneously in power…and discussing Kennedy with Castro over a quarter of a century later.”

As president, Kennedy felt politically compelled to keep the heat on Castro, whom national security hard-liners and the media (particularly Henry Luce’s hawkish
Time
and
Life
magazines) had succeeded in turning into a bearded bogeyman. But after the Bay of Pigs, JFK clearly preferred to clash with Castro ideologically rather than militarily. Kennedy was confident that he could compete with Castro’s charisma for the hearts and minds of the Latin American public.