Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (42 page)

The CIA continued to plot with Cubela until 1966, when he was arrested by Cuban counterintelligence and sentenced to thirty years in jail. But as it turned out, it was Kennedy’s assassination, not Castro’s that terminated the efforts to reconcile the two countries. After Dallas, the Attwood back-channel talks sputtered briefly along, with Castro again using a Lisa Howard interview to express his continued interest in peace. But in January the Johnson administration pulled the plug on the talks, to avoid handing the Republicans a potential campaign issue in the 1964 election. In a memo written three days after JFK’s assassination, Gordon Chase, the White House point man on the secret negotiations, observed that “President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic heat [but] I’m not sure about President Johnson. For one thing, a new president who has no background of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists (e.g., President Kennedy in October 1962) would probably run a greater risk of being accused by the American people of ‘going soft.’” The other reason rapprochement with Cuba would now be “more difficult,” Chase noted, was that Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, “has been heralded as a pro-Castro type”—a portrayal of Oswald that was aggressively promoted by the CIA and its client groups in the Cuban exile community like the DRE, starting immediately after the shots were fired in Dealey Plaza.

Howard doggedly continued her citizen’s diplomacy through early 1964, despite a growing disdain for her efforts in the Johnson White House and CIA, but her life took a tragic arc. In September, she threw herself in typically dramatic fashion into the New York Senate race that pitted Bobby Kennedy against Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating. Joining with other high-profile liberals who harbored resentments against Bobby, like Gore Vidal, Howard formed a Democrats for Keating group at a meeting in her apartment. Ironically, Keating had played a very belligerent role on Cuba, goading the Kennedy administration to take military action against the island and dismissing Castro as “just a puppet” of the Soviet Union after he appealed for peace in his first TV interview with Howard. But Howard, frustrated by the failure of her Cuba peace bid, focused blame curiously on Bobby, even though he had given the effort his approval.

“She was trying to make peace and she was convinced Jack and Bobby wanted war,” recalled Vidal. “She was most resentful of it and she saw this would be a good opportunity to punish Bobby.” The Kennedys not only made enemies on the right with their two-track strategy towards Cuba—they alienated some on the left as well.

Soon after her plunge into the Senate campaign, Howard was fired by ABC for her highly publicized partisanship. A network executive brusquely told the
New York Times
, “She’s being canned. She doesn’t fit. She’s a mystery girl. We just don’t want her on the staff.” The once high-flying TV correspondent was outraged by her abrupt excommunication from the airwaves. She filed suit against ABC, claiming that she had been “blacklisted” for her political activities. Deprived of her prominent TV platform, Howard seemed lost. “Lisa Howard Pleads to Be Visible Again,” read the plaintive headline of a
New York Times
story on her lawsuit. Her lawyer told the newspaper that monetary compensation could not offset the terrible damage done to Howard by depriving her “of daily exposure to her audience.”

In April 1965, months after her dismissal, Howard crashed a New York Radio and Television Correspondents Association meeting held in the ABC corporate conference room where Bobby Kennedy was a featured speaker. She confronted Kennedy at the forum, questioning his effectiveness as a political leader. The next day, ABC public relations executive James C. Hagerty felt compelled to apologize for Howard’s behavior in a letter to Kennedy: “The report of her conduct towards you, as relayed to me, burned me up. This is just a note to express my personal regrets even though Miss Howard is no longer working for us—and that’s a story in itself…. I’m just sorry it happened while you were a guest in our building.” Kennedy himself took the incident in stride—at least Howard didn’t level the usual “ruthless Bobby” charge at him, he quipped. “My slogan next time,” he wrote in his reply to Hagerty, “is going to be: ‘Re-elect Robert F. Kennedy Senator—He is too inefficient to be ruthless.’ Anyway, thank you for writing. With the problems that exist for everyone,” Bobby added, his days still shrouded by Dallas, “Lisa Howard is rather inconsequential.”

“Mother was basically having a mental breakdown by that point,” said Lareau. “She had lost the most important thing in her life—her career, her position. She was a public person, an exhibitionist—she loved being on camera, at the center of attention. So when all of this disappeared, she felt like her whole world was falling apart.”

Her mother was also afflicted by an addiction to sleeping pills that began during her first trip to Cuba. “She used to stay up all night waiting for Fidel, and then she couldn’t sleep the next day, so she would take pills.”

Howard’s spiral downward continued that summer when she suffered a miscarriage. On July 4, after being released from the hospital, she drove to a pharmacy in East Hampton, where she and her husband were spending the summer. She altered a sleeping pill prescription to read 100 instead of 10 and promptly downed most of the barbiturates with a Coke. Police found her wandering dazed and glassy-eyed in the drugstore parking lot, mumbling about her miscarriage. They drove her to a hospital but she collapsed and died before they could get her inside. A medical examiner said she had taken enough sleeping pills to kill five people. “It wasn’t a cry for help,” said Lareau. “She was determined to die.” Lisa Howard pursued death as aggressively as she had pursued life.

IN CONTRAST TO HIS
friend Lisa Howard, Bill Attwood’s career flourished in the post-Kennedy years. After serving as President Johnson’s ambassador to Kenya, he returned to journalism, becoming editor-in-chief of Cowles Communications, publishers of
Look
, in 1966 and then president and publisher of
Newsday
in 1970. But as the years went by, Attwood was increasingly haunted by the assassination of JFK. He began to wonder whether there might be a link between Kennedy’s secret Cuba peace efforts and his murder. In October 1975, he wrote a letter to Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, who, along with fellow Church Committee member Gary Hart of Colorado, had persuaded Frank Church to let them form a subcommittee to investigate the Kennedy assassination. “I think the Warren Commission is like a house of cards,” Schweiker announced to the press at the time. “It’s going to collapse.” In his letter, Attwood told Schweiker that while he found it “hard to disbelieve the Warren Report,” he had some suspicions about the possible involvement of anti-Castro Cubans in the assassination. And he encouraged Schweiker to investigate the back channel that Kennedy opened with Castro as a possible motive for his killing.

As the years went by, Attwood’s suspicions deepened. He communicated with conspiracy researchers. He discussed the assassination with Castro during a February 1977 trip to Havana that was intended to revive his long-dormant peace mission, this time on behalf of newly inaugurated President Carter. During a lengthy conversation one evening in the presidential palace, Castro told Attwood that Kennedy’s American University speech showed that “he’d have been a great president had he lived.” The Cuban leader then recalled the exploratory peace talks between Attwood and his UN representative, Lechuga. “This is why Kennedy was killed,” Castro told him, pinning the blame on “a conspiracy of right-wing elements who could see U.S policy in Cuba and Vietnam about to change.”

Attwood was beginning to think along similar lines. He later gave an eyeopening interview to Anthony Summers, a former BBC journalist whose 1980 book on the assassination,
Conspiracy
, was a landmark in Kennedy research, applying rigorous reporting skills for the first time to the crime. Attwood told Summers that he suspected the phone calls he and Lisa Howard made to Havana from her apartment were tapped by the CIA. When word of Kennedy’s secret peace track filtered down the agency ranks, Attwood conjectured, to the level where zealous operatives worked with equally feverish exiles, the results might have been explosive. “If word of a possible normalization of relations with Cuba leaked to these people, I can understand why they would have reacted violently,” Attwood said, “This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the president.”

Arthur Schlesinger concurred with Attwood’s assessment, telling Summers, “Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts, that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.”

It should have been front-page news when someone of Attwood’s prominence—backed up by a former Kennedy administration insider who was one of the country’s leading historians—raised such provocative questions about the assassination. But Attwood’s statement quickly disappeared into the media black hole where JFK revelations are routinely consigned.

Nonetheless Attwood continued to speak to the press about his suspicions late into his life. “We thought there was more to Dallas than we’d been told,” his widow, Simone, said in an interview.

In January 1986, Attwood repeated what he told Summers in a phone conversation with British TV producer Richard Tomlinson, telling him he suspected “disgruntled CIA operatives and Cuban exiles.” Attwood’s “theory,” Tomlinson wrote in his notes of the conversation, was “that the secret negotiations with Cuba were the last straw as far as the conspirators were concerned. It was then that they took the decision to kill Kennedy.” His “critical mistake,” Attwood remarked, was “to use phones which were tapped by the CIA. Until that point, only six people knew about the [peace] negotiations.” But “there were elements within the CIA which were violently opposed to rapprochement with Cuba.”

In the United States, the only reporter who took an interest in Attwood’s provocative statements about the JFK assassination was someone from the
Advocate
, his hometown paper in New Canaan, Connecticut. Attwood shared with him his dark speculations about Dallas. “I knew there were people in the agency—one of them worked with me later—who felt strongly that Kennedy had let them down by normalizing relations with Cuba. These were fairly nutty people.” Attwood concluded his interview in his local paper by urging his fellow citizens not to forget the crime of the century.

“If you don’t get to the bottom of these things, if you let it lie, then we’re all part of the cover-up.”

But when Attwood died of heart failure in 1989, at age sixty-nine, the truth was still out of reach, fathoms below in the cold, dark unknown.

P
resident Kennedy looked tired and somber as he stood at the lectern in the spacious State Department Auditorium on Halloween 1963. There were dark bags beneath his eyes and his shoulders stooped, as if from pain or fatigue. It was the second to last press conference of his administration, a forum in which he generally sparkled. These were occasions for the deft and charming president to show off, and he did so often, holding sixty-four news conferences in his 1,037 days in office. Though he was invariably well-prepared, he always seemed spontaneous and light on his feet. There was no sign of effort in his smooth replies and displays of mischievous wit. A reporter tried to break through his easy self-confidence at one press conference. “The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure,” he poked Kennedy. “How do you feel about that?” With a comic’s sense of timing, JFK waited for the nervous chuckling in the auditorium to fade before responding. “I assume it passed unanimously.”

But Kennedy seemed downcast at his October 31 news conference. The questions he was asked that day vividly demonstrated the pressures he was under: What were his intentions in Vietnam? Should U.S. generals stationed overseas be given the authority to order nuclear strikes, as Senator Goldwater has urged? Was the president expecting a white backlash against his civil rights policies in the forthcoming Philadelphia municipal elections? Castro has captured several CIA agents and is threatening to execute them—would he care to comment?

A woman reporter sensed the president’s heavy spirit. She reminded him that after the Bay of Pigs she had asked him how he liked being president. Now, prompted by his dark mood, she repeated the question. It was a choice opportunity for Kennedy to exhibit his wit, to neatly deflect the emotionally probing query with a joshing jab at his Republican opponents or a self-deprecating quip. But, instead, he grew philosophical. In a voice oddly meditative for a man soon to announce his reelection bid for the White House, he mused that he found the job “rewarding.” And then he invoked the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, as his brother would often do in seeking solace after he was gone. “I have given before to this group,” Kennedy told the 304 reporters assembled in the auditorium’s tiered seats, “the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again. It is the full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the presidency provides some happiness.”

It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the job. Despite his solemn mood, however, Kennedy was looking forward to the 1964 election. He predicted the race would pit him against Goldwater, a man with whom he had developed a friendly relationship in the Senate but who represented the opposite pole of the political spectrum. By fall 1963, JFK had settled on a peace theme for his reelection campaign—and he sensed that the American people, tired of being held captive by nuclear terror, would reward him with victory. The 1964 campaign would offer a stark choice—the emerging détente of the Kennedy-Khrushchev era versus the Cold War militance of the far right. In the final months of his life, he felt increasingly confident that he could carry his peace message even into Republican strongholds.

He did just that on September 26 before a Mormon Tabernacle assembly in Salt Lake City, declaring that America must learn to live in “a world of diversity” where no one power dominated global affairs. “We must first of all recognize that we cannot remake the world simply by our own command,” the president intoned. “When we cannot even bring all of our own people into full citizenship without acts of violence, we can understand how much harder it is to control events beyond our borders.” To the astonishment of the jaded Washington press pack covering the president’s speech, the conservative crowd cheered and cheered.

Nonetheless, Kennedy knew the 1964 campaign would be bitterly fought. He was aware of how polarized the country had become as a result of his efforts to end the Cold War and racial segregation. Because of his civil rights policies, the South was in hot flight from the Democratic coalition where it had resided since the New Deal.

Kennedy’s June 1963 TV address announcing the introduction of civil rights legislation in Congress was a moral high point of his administration. But it was the final insult to a traditional Southern order built on white supremacy. The president asked Sorensen to write the speech on the spur of the moment, after watching TV in the Oval Office as another Southern governor—this time Alabama’s George Wallace—defied federal orders to integrate a Dixie university. Swinging around in his chair from the television set, Kennedy said to Sorensen, “We better make that speech tonight.” The White House speechwriter had two hours to craft the history-making address. “Scramble is putting it mildly,” Sorensen said. “While I was typing away, the president came into my office—I believe it was the only time in his presidency that he came into
my
office—and said, ‘How’s it coming?’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m just finishing some revisions now.’ And he said, ‘Whew, I thought I was going to have to go on national television ex tem.’”

JFK’s TV address on civil rights, along with his Peace Speech that same month, defined where the administration was moving on the two burning issues of the day. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he told the American public with a stirring simplicity. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

The president had at last dropped his cautious, pragmatic pose on civil rights—his doomed strategy to hold together the old Democratic Party coalition—and addressed America’s original sin with the passion it demanded. And once again, he turned to Ted Sorensen—the Nebraska progressive who in his youth had formed the Lincoln Social Action Council to fight racism in his hometown—to help him find the right words to inspire the better angels of our nature.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

JFK told his brother, who had become the administration’s battering ram on civil rights, he feared the speech would be his “political swan song.” Because he had finally put his full eloquence behind the cause of equal rights, the president knew he was facing the mass defection of white voters not only in the South but in ethnic neighborhoods that were resisting integration in the North. A Gallup Poll in early November found that the president’s popularity had sunk to 59 percent, after hitting 77 percent following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Republican leaders gathering in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 9 confidently predicted that Goldwater would sweep the South in 1964, even taking Texas out of the Democratic column. George Wallace, who had theatrically faced off against the Kennedy administration on the steps of the University of Alabama, told a cheering Dallas audience on November 18 that “the American people are going to save this country next year” by removing Kennedy from the White House. The press began wondering whether Kennedy’s reelection was becoming less of a sure bet, with
Look
magazine declaring “JFK Could Lose” and
Time
speculating that “Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathlessly close race.”

Kennedy could lose most of the old Confederacy and still win reelection in 1964, but he could not afford to lose Texas, which he had narrowly taken in 1960 with the help of his wily Lone Star running mate, Lyndon Johnson. He needed the state’s twenty-four electoral votes and he needed to tap its riches for his campaign war chest and this is why he planned a two-day trip there in late November. The trip was a political necessity, but Kennedy and his staff dreaded it. “It’s a real mess,” Kenny O’Donnell told White House advance man Jerry Bruno in October. Texas’s increasingly conservative white voters had turned sharply against Kennedy’s liberal policies and open war had erupted in the state’s Democratic Party between conservative Governor John Connally and liberal maverick Senator Ralph Yarborough. Connally, Kennedy’s former Navy secretary, was well along the path that would eventually take him into the Republican Party. Fearing that the president could poison his own reelection chances in 1964, Connally made no secret of his opposition to the trip.

If Connally could not stop JFK from coming to his state, he was determined to control his itinerary, shuttling the president to exclusive fund-raisers and limiting his public exposure so Texas Democrats would not suffer from an anti-Kennedy backlash. Tall, well-groomed, and blessed with the jutting-jawed good looks of a cowboy matinee hero, Connally seemed cut from the same cloth as the wealthy ranchers and oil men whom he politically served. He tried to intimidate the fireplug-shaped Bruno, when Kennedy’s emissary met with him in the governor’s mansion to plan the presidential visit. Towering over Bruno in his cowboy boots and surrounded by his aides, Connally began dictating the schedule for Kennedy’s trip. If the president didn’t like it, he informed Bruno, he could stay at home. “At one point,” recalled JFK’s advance man, “they brought in lunch: a juicy steak for Connally, a sandwich for me. And I’ll tell you, if you’ve spent most of your life working with your hands, you know what they’re trying to tell you with a move like that.”

Connally was dead set against a presidential motorcade in Dallas, but the populist Yarborough lobbied aggressively for it. “Yarborough, the ‘People’s Senator,’ felt the trip was too heavy on visits with fat cats and didn’t provide enough of a chance for ordinary Texans to see the president,” recalled Texas politician Ben Barnes, a Connally protégé who helped him organize the trip. The White House sided with Yarborough on the motorcade and let Connally know where he stood in the chain of command. “The president is not coming down to be hidden under a bushel basket,” O’Donnell told Johnson aide Bill Moyers.

Privately, however, Yarborough and Kennedy’s aides had deep misgivings about Dallas. The frontier boom city was a vortex of all the whirling passions that had bedeviled the Kennedy presidency. When
Dallas Morning News
publisher Ted Dealey insulted the president to his face in the White House, telling him he was not “the man on horseback” the nation needed but a pantywaist “on Caroline’s tricycle,” he knew he was speaking for most of his hometown, which voted for Nixon in 1960 by the widest margin of any major city. In the final days of the campaign, even native son LBJ had come under assault, when he and wife, Lady Bird, were spat upon and roughly jostled by a “mink coat mob” of right-wing women in the lobby of the city’s plush Adolphus Hotel. A month before Kennedy was scheduled to visit Dallas, Adlai Stevenson—whose liberalism and UN ambassadorship made him a favorite target of the far right—was heckled off a stage in Dallas and then set upon by a mob outside the auditorium, who gobbed him, struck him over the head with a picket sign (which read “IF YOU SEEK PEACE, ASK JESUS”), and rocked his car as he tried to escape. “For a minute or two I thought we were going to be turned over,” recalled Dallas department store mogul Stanley Marcus, who was accompanying Stevenson that day. “I told the driver step on it…[blast] your horn and get out of here in a hurry, which he did, and fortunately we didn’t hit anybody [because] we were surrounded and I think we were in imminent danger of being manhandled.”

Dallas was the city of retired General Edwin Walker, the apocalyptic “Christian Soldier” who electrified his fellow citizens with his attacks on Kennedy’s “defeatist” foreign policy and “socialistic” domestic agenda. JFK, he declared, was rapidly turning the American eagle into a “dead duck.” It was a seething mecca for John Birchers, Minutemen, and Christian Crusaders.

Various people tried to warn JFK against going to Dallas, including Billy Graham, David Brinkley’s wife, Ann, and Stanley Marcus. On a flight to Little Rock, William Fulbright—the man who had spearheaded the administration’s Senate attack on the alarming politicization of the military—begged the president to cancel his trip, calling Dallas “a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t
you
go.” But Kennedy was determined to go. When Bobby and O’Donnell read a letter from a Democratic Party official in Texas imploring the president to stay away from Dallas because of the city’s extreme animosity toward him, they didn’t even pass it on to JFK. “If I had suggested cutting such a large and important city as Dallas from the itinerary because of [the] letter, the president would have thought that I had gone out of my mind,” O’Donnell later noted.

Riding through the streets of Dallas in an open car would later come to exemplify the legendary Kennedy recklessness. It was pointed to as a prime example of the family’s arrogant defiance of the fates. Joe Kennedy had brought up his children to be blithe daredevils, it was said, indoctrinating them with the powerful myth of Kennedy invincibility. But JFK would have strenuously rejected this interpretation of his decision to go to Dallas. Kennedy had long since stopped believing in the sublime exceptionality of his family. It was World War II that had destroyed this family myth, a young JFK wrote in a remarkably revealing 1947 letter to Claiborne Pell. The war had “savaged” his family, he confided to Pell, taking the lives of his older brother, sister, and brother-in-law. “It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions. We still, with the old battles long over, have great confidence: great Kennedy confidence, which is the main strength of our tribe. But we sons and daughters no longer have that easy, witless, untested and meaningless confidence on which we’d been weaned before the war. Our father had us pretty well trained to appear to ourselves and others as unbeatable and immortal—a little bit like Gods. Now that’s over with. Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us. And that’s a healthy thing to know.”