Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (41 page)

But Howard had something more weighty to convey to the president. She told Kennedy that Castro was clearly eager to open a dialogue with him. Howard, whose path to Castro had been paved by Donovan, was continuing the peace mission that the New York lawyer had begun the previous year.

The newswoman delivered the same message to the CIA when she discussed her Cuba trip with agency officials, a common Cold War practice among journalists returning from Communist outposts. But CIA officials were not as enthusiastic about Howard’s news as the president. Just as they had done with Donovan’s peace initiative, agency executives moved swiftly to short-circuit Howard. In a May 2, 1963, memo, McCone sternly advised that the “Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner” and “that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.” Administration hard-liners even considered trying to block ABC from broadcasting Howard’s interview. “Public airing in the United States of this interview would strengthen the arguments of ‘peace’ groups, ‘liberal’ thinkers, Commies, fellow travelers, and opportunistic political opponents of the present United States policy,” as well as provide Castro with a coast-to-coast audience for his “reasonable line,” cautioned an analysis sent to White House national security advisor McGeorge Bundy.

The memo’s fears were well-founded. When ABC broadcast the interview on May 10, Castro did indeed come across as a sympathetic and reasonable character. He applauded the Kennedy administration for taking “some steps in the way of peace,” including cracking down on the “piratical” raids on his country, and left the door open for a reconciliation with the United States. But with administration hawks blocking peace talks, Howard’s peace initiative soon stalled.

Lisa Howard was not easily discouraged, however. She brought the same single-minded determination to her Cuba mission as she did to her journalistic exploits. According to Howard’s daughter, Fritzi Lareau—who was a teenager at the time—her motivations were largely emotional. “She fell for Castro,” Lareau told me, recalling her “wild” and “iconoclastic” mother. Lareau remembered her mother bluntly asking her stepfather, film producer Walter Lowendahl, whether she should take her diaphragm to Cuba before she left on one of her frequent trips there. (Lowendahl agreed she should. According to Lareau, her stepfather was not happy with her mother’s adventures, but the German immigrant suffered his wife’s exploits with European equanimity.) “She liked powerful men. And Fidel was very macho. And, of course, the peace mission appealed to her dramatic sensibility, because it was very grand, it was on a world playing field. It was secretive and exciting.”

In September, seeking to revive the peace initiative, Howard enlisted her friend, UN diplomat William Attwood, a former journalist who, like the TV newswoman, had no qualms about crossing the lines into politics. Attwood, the Choate classmate of JFK who kept finding himself preempted by Kennedy when he took a young Mary Pinchot (later Meyer) to a school dance, had shifted back and forth between journalism and politics throughout his career. In 1959 he took a leave of absence from
Look
magazine, where he was the globe-trotting foreign editor, to write speeches for Adlai Stevenson, switching to Kennedy’s team the following year during his presidential campaign. After his election, Kennedy named Attwood ambassador to Guinea, which was seen as an important Cold War battleground in Africa at the time, and later made him a deputy to UN ambassador Stevenson.

Bill Attwood had a solid East Coast establishment pedigree—from Choate to Princeton to Army intelligence in World War II (he later became a captain in the Thirteenth Airborne Division) to a career in international journalism and diplomacy. But his years overseas gave him a more skeptical perspective than his elite contemporaries on the Cold War hysteria back home. He looked with dismay on “the creeping police state” mentality in Washington and called the cloak and dagger activities of the CIA “often ludicrous.” When Attwood interviewed the young, victorious Castro in 1959 for
Look
magazine—rambling over the Cuban countryside in a car with him, with the correspondent’s wife, Simone, squeezed onto the lap of a machinegun-cradling bodyguard—he saw a tragic hero rather than a pariah, a charismatic leader who could have chosen the West over the East if Washington had played it differently.

Attwood had a natural sympathy for Latin America’s underdogs, who were finally starting to bite back after years of exploitation. He understood why men like Fidel and Che had turned against America. He later recalled a story told by Guevara. When the future revolutionary was a young man in Buenos Aires, a U.S. navy ship steamed into port, disgorging hundreds of sailors. One “very large” American sailor grabbed Che’s girlfriend in a dance hall and when he objected, the man snarled, “Sit down and shut up, you little nigger.”

“Ever since,” noted Attwood, “the word ‘America’ made Che think of a huge hand pressing down on his head and the word ‘nigger.’ Thus are lifelong guerrillas often created.”

When Lisa Howard told Attwood that Castro would like to restore communications with Kennedy and offered to set up an informal meeting at her apartment between him and Cuba’s UN representative, Carlos Lechuga, the diplomat responded enthusiastically. In a memo he wrote for Stevenson and Averill Harriman—who he was told was the best direct channel to Kennedy—Attwood suggested that “we have something to gain and nothing to lose by finding out whether in fact Castro does want to talk.” If the peace bid succeeded, the diplomat observed, “it could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Stevenson was intrigued. But “unfortunately,” he sagely cautioned, “the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” Nonetheless, Stevenson took the proposal to Kennedy, who gave him clearance to pursue the dialogue. Harriman too said he was “adventuresome enough” to like the idea, but advised Attwood to also get the approval of Bobby Kennedy, the administration’s point man on Cuba. Stevenson was not keen for Attwood to meet with the attorney general, whom he still considered bullheaded on Cuba. But Attwood dutifully phoned the Justice Department, arranging to see RFK on September 24.

The night before Attwood flew to Washington, Howard arranged for him to meet Lechuga at a cocktail party in her brownstone apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street, where the newswoman loved to entertain the likes of Che and Adlai Stevenson, impressing guests with her eighteen-foot ceilings, antiques collection, and leaded-glass windows. The two diplomats repaired discreetly to a corner of her living room, where Lechuga told Attwood that Castro had read Kennedy’s American University speech with avid interest. Attwood talked of spending time with Fidel in 1959, when the Cuban leader gave him a message for the American people—“Let us be friends”—before shoving some cigars into his shirt pocket and urging him to return one day. Lechuga suggested that Attwood finally take up Castro’s offer and come back to Havana to renew their conversation.

The next day, Attwood reported all this to Bobby Kennedy in his office. Instead of pouring cold water on the rapprochement idea, as Stevenson feared he would, Bobby responded favorably. He thought it would be too risky for Attwood to visit Cuba, since it would probably leak out and create a political furor in Washington. But he nevertheless felt the peace dialogue was “worth pursuing” and he suggested that secret talks with Castro could be held in another country, such as Mexico, or at the United Nations.

JFK was even more enthusiastic. At a White House meeting on November 5, Bundy told Attwood that the president was “more in favor of pushing towards an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the idea being—well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal.”

Once again, Kennedy himself was the most forward-looking person on his foreign policy team. Years later, his Hollywood crony Milt Ebbins confirmed that JFK was intent on normalizing relations with Cuba. “He would have recognized Cuba,” Ebbins said in an interview for this book. “He told me that if we recognize Cuba, they’ll buy our refrigerators and toasters and they’ll end up kicking Castro out.” JFK sidekick Red Fay agreed that Kennedy was determined to make peace with Cuba. “Jack figured that once the missiles got taken out of Cuba, he didn’t think there was any reason why we should have a confrontation with Cuba,” the former assistant Navy secretary told me at his home in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, sitting in a study strewn with Kennedy memorabilia and nautical artifacts. “As a result of that, he felt we could settle the whole thing with Cuba and get it all behind us.”

In the final days of his life, Kennedy sent two dovish messages to Castro. One was delivered in a November 18 speech before the Inter-American Press Association in Miami, when Kennedy declared that the only obstacle to peace between the United States and Cuba was Havana’s support for revolutionary upheavals in other Latin countries. “This and this alone divides us,” Kennedy emphasized. “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.” Schlesinger, who helped write the speech, later told Attwood that it was meant to help his diplomatic effort by signaling that the president was truly interested in opening a peace channel with Castro.

But JFK always felt compelled to brandish an arrow as well as an olive branch when he spoke in public about Cuba. This was particularly true in Miami, hotbed of anti-Castro fervor. True to this double-edged strategy, Kennedy’s November 18 speech carried harsh rhetoric as well, maligning the Castro government as a “small band of conspirators” which “once removed” would ensure U.S. support for a democratic, progressive Cuba. Desmond FitzGerald took credit for injecting this militant language into the speech, and the CIA spun the president’s remarks to its friendly media contacts as a get-Castro tirade. “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup,” the
Dallas Times Herald
blared. And the CIA-cozy Hal Hendrix of the
Miami News
wrote that JFK’s speech “may have been meant for potential dissident elements in” Castro’s government. The fact that both Schlesinger and FitzGerald could claim credit for the same speech demonstrates how the administration’s Cuba policy was a battleground between competing factions.

But the CIA was fully aware of which direction on Cuba Kennedy was tilting in his final days. Unknown to Lisa Howard and Bill Attwood at the time, as they worked the phones in her apartment on behalf of the JFK-Castro peace initiative, the agency was listening in. In one call to Havana, Howard was overheard excitedly describing Kennedy’s enthusiasm for rapprochement. The newswoman had no sense of the shock waves she was causing within the halls of Washington power. “Mother was very naïve, she was an innocent,” said Lareau. “She didn’t really understand all the dynamics. She was like a bull in a china shop—she just went all out for what she wanted, and she was not that concerned about the consequences.”

The agency was determined to derail the administration’s secret peace bid. At a White House meeting on Cuba on November 5, Helms urged that the administration slow down the Attwood initiative, proposing that the government “war game” the peace scenario “and look at it from all possible angles before making any contacts” with Castro.

Despite the agency’s resistance, the peace feelers continued. Kennedy’s second cordial message was delivered to Castro personally by French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newsweekly
L’Observateur
, on the day the president was assassinated. Before leaving for Havana, Daniel had met with Kennedy in the White House, where the president took a conciliatory line toward Cuba. Sounding like the Alliance for Progress crusader instead of the Bay of Pigs invader, Kennedy told Daniel that America’s Cuba policy during the Batista era was characterized by “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation,” adding, “We’ll have to pay for those sins.” If Castro stopped acting as the Soviet Union’s agent of subversion in Latin America, Kennedy suggested, the United States would lift its economic blockade of Cuba. Daniel later said that the president was clearly “seeking a way out” of the impasse between the two countries. When the French journalist met with Castro, the Cuban leader was riveted by his report on his White House meeting, asking him to repeat Kennedy’s remarkably honest assessment of America’s shameful policy during the Batista years. “He has come to understand many things over the past few months,” Castro mused aloud.

But on the very day that Daniel was conveying JFK’s conciliatory message to Castro (and Kennedy would ride to his doom in Dallas), CIA officials were taking covert steps to strangle the peace initiative. On November 22, in a stunningly duplicitous act of insubordination—without informing the president, attorney general, or CIA director—Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald arranged for a poison pen to be delivered in Paris to a disaffected Cuban military officer named Rolando Cubela for the assassination of Castro. Like the agency’s plan to kill Castro with a toxic wet suit, hatched during the Donovan peace mission, the Cubela plot was clearly designed to snuff out the Attwood-Howard initiative. The CIA hoped that Castro’s assassination would trigger a military coup. But even if the Cubela plot failed and was exposed, it was certain to deeply embitter relations between the two countries.

The agency’s dark intrigue bore out Stevenson’s warning to Attwood that “the CIA is in charge of Cuba.” In any case, Attwood grimly noted years later, that’s the way the spy outfit acted—“and to hell with the president it was pledged to serve.”

The CIA tried to frame Robert Kennedy for the Cubela plot. When Cubela asked his agency contacts to meet personally with the president’s brother, FitzGerald took the extraordinary step of flying to Paris to falsely assure the assassin of RFK’s support. Meeting Cubela, who was given the code name AM/LASH, at a CIA safe house in the city, FitzGerald introduced himself as “Senator James Clark,” a personal representative of Kennedy’s. But the president’s brother had no idea the CIA was using his name. Helms and FitzGerald agreed that it would be “totally unnecessary” to inform Kennedy of their gambit. When later confronted with evidence of his duplicity by the Church Committee, in the 1970s, Helms was forced to explain why he had kept Kennedy in the dark. “It wasn’t that I was being smart or tricky or hiding anything,” Helms insisted, although that’s precisely what he was being. “I just thought this is exactly the kind of thing…he’s been asking us to do, let’s get on with doing it.” The intelligence czar later embroidered on his lie in an interview with journalist Evan Thomas, suggesting that he concealed the Cubela meeting from Kennedy for RFK’s own good, because the risk-taking attorney general might have flown to Paris to deliver the assassination tools himself. “Bobby wouldn’t have backed away [from the Cubela meeting],” said Helms. “He probably would have gone himself.”