Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (47 page)

This seems a sharply intuitive reading of Robert Kennedy’s mind at the time. As soon as RFK concluded his brother was the victim of a high-level plot—which he communicated to family members and even the Soviet government within days of the assassination—the very next thought that must have occurred to a passionate patriot like Bobby, someone who had dedicated his life to the service of his country, was surely enough to freeze his heart.
If I move against the conspirators at this point, with a slipping grasp on the machinery of government, it could spark an American inferno.
In fact, this is precisely what Kennedy later suggested to an old family friend. “If the American people knew the truth about Dallas,” RFK told him, “there would be blood in the streets.”

Once, Bobby had been renowned for his prosecutorial zeal. But now, emotionally and politically unable to bring his own brother’s killers to justice, he seemed hollowed out, drifting listlessly through his days. In his deepening gloom, he sought counsel—not from a psychiatrist, but in the Irish way, from a priest. Worried about Jackie’s state of mind, Kennedy had recruited his old friend, Father Richard McSorley, a liberal Jesuit theology teacher at Georgetown University, to talk with her, under the guise of giving her tennis lessons on the backyard court at Hickory Hill. Jackie confided in the priest that she was plagued by suicidal thoughts. Would she be punished in the afterlife if she committed this mortal sin, she asked McSorley? “Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? It’s so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?”

Bobby too tried to comfort his sister-in-law, but all he could offer her was stoic advice. “Sorrow is a form of self-pity,” he told her. “We have to go on.” He also chided his colleagues at the Justice Department about their downcast moods. “Robert Kennedy Defeats Despair,” proclaimed the headline of a January 9, 1964, article in the
New York Times
by his friend Anthony Lewis—as if by telling it to the press Bobby could make it true. But Father McSorley realized that it was not just Jackie who desperately needed help.

In a letter he wrote in early summer 1964, McSorley consoled Bobby for his irreplaceable loss: “Your grief goes as deep as your love. Because you were close to him, you received the impact of his rare personality more fully than others. Yours was the inspiration of constant, daily, personal contact.” But he then encouraged Bobby to turn grief into action, by picking up his brother’s fallen banner. “I look at you as [Jack’s] twin spirit,” wrote the priest. “No one is in a better position to lead those whose hearts have caught fire from his flame than you.”

But it would take time before Kennedy was ready to resume his brother’s mission. In the meantime, the man of action found solace in literature and philosophy. It was Jackie who helped guide him this time, giving him a copy of
The Greek Way
, the minor 1930 classic by retired headmistress Edith Hamilton that extolled the glory that was briefly Athens. Kennedy devoured the book during a trip he took with Jackie and a small group of family and friends to the island of Antigua in March 1964, retreating to his room in a borrowed seaside villa to read and heavily underline it. The tragedy of Athens—its 150-year reign as a cradle of democracy and art, before succumbing to the corruptions of empire—must have echoed his own gloomy thoughts about the perils of a life devoted to politics. And he took deeply to heart the ancient counsel of the great tragedians whom Hamilton celebrated, particularly Aeschylus—the poet who had once been a warrior, hero of Marathon, a man whose wisdom was born of life’s cruel strife. Kennedy found particular comfort in these lines from the playwright; they would guide him through his bleakest days: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

EARLY IN 1964, BOBBY
arranged to meet in Miami one last time with Angelo Murgado and his compadres, Manuel Artime and Manuel Reboso. Kennedy was closing his Cuban accounts. The farewell meeting between Kennedy and his Cuban intelligence team was deeply painful, recalled Murgado. “We sat down with him, and man, it was highly emotional. Everybody was in tears. It took us about five minutes to regain control. You should have seen the guy, Jesus Christ! He had lost weight. He was in such pain. He had just come down to talk about what happened and to say goodbye. And that was the last time we ever spoke.”

Murgado said he and his colleagues did not bring up the name of the man whose spectral presence loomed over the meeting, Lee Harvey Oswald—the man Kennedy had told them months earlier was safe to ignore, since he seemed to be under the direction of the FBI. “Why the hell would you put alcohol in the wound, you understand? He said goodbye and that was it.”

Murgado and his pro-Kennedy allies in the exile community had been stunned on November 22 when the man they had been tracking in New Orleans was suddenly identified as the suspect in the assassination of the president. “When that happened, we shit in our pants.” Afterwards, he and his fellow exiles anxiously huddled to try to make sense of the events in Dallas. They quickly came to the conclusion that the assassination was the work of their employer, the CIA. “When the thing happens, we sit down and we talk. We realized, ‘My God, we’ve been used like toilet paper. Who the hell is behind all this?’ And we knew that the plot could come from only one source—the CIA. The whole infrastructure, the logistics—it was the CIA. We all believed the same thing. It was a highly sophisticated operation. Look, they were so good at it that, even today, nobody knows exactly what happened. There’s only one enterprise that can pull off shit like that. It was the CIA, but not alone. It was the CIA plus something higher.”

Murgado uses the term “invisible government” to describe the high-level source of the plot. He believes these high officials eliminated Kennedy because he broke from their Cold War ranks: “JFK was another victim of the Bay of Pigs…he was ahead of his time.”

But Murgado won’t speculate on the names of people who might have been involved in the conspiracy, especially those of other Cuban exiles. “Anything you want to know about me, related to Bobby, I will tell you. The rest, forget about it. Because that would create a lot of static. And remember, in the Cuban environment, you don’t create a lot of static.”

In any case, said Murgado, it’s too late—those who could shed light on the plot are long gone. “Everybody is dead—or other guys have disappeared. And I respect that. You fade away and I respect that. I ain’t going to bring nobody out of the shadows to come up with the truth.” Murgado doubts that the American people even want the truth. “You know that line from the movie? It’s the best line I’ve heard for this country: ‘You don’t want the truth, you can’t handle the truth.’”

In the months after Dallas, Robert Kennedy seemed eager to distance himself from Cuba, the battleground that had once absorbed so much of his aggressive energy. It was also the cauldron of intrigue that he associated with his brother’s murder. Reminiscing about the Kennedy administration over dinner with Bill Moyers in spring 1968, soon before his own assassination, a wistful Bobby remarked that he “wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.”

Immediately after JFK’s assassination, the CIA and its Cuban assets began systematically promoting the idea that the Castro regime was behind the violent assault on the U.S. presidency. Robert Kennedy himself was one of the targets of this disinformation campaign. On November 27, 1963, someone identifying himself as Mario del Rosario Molina mailed a letter to Kennedy from Havana, informing him that a Castro agent in the United States named Pedro Charles had paid Oswald $7,000 to assassinate his brother. “Pedro Charles reached an understanding with Lee Harvey Oswald, an expert marksman, for the President to be killed and for an international scandal to be unleashed so that all the blame would fall on the racists and the extreme-rightists of the State of Texas,” read the letter. The mysterious communication had all the markings of the CIA’s anti-Castro propaganda campaign, and it failed to convince Bobby that the Cuban leader was behind his brother’s murder.

More important, Lyndon Johnson also resisted the intense pressures building within the government, refusing to be stampeded into declaring war on Havana. LBJ moved swiftly to defuse the ticking Cuba bomb, suspending CIA-sponsored raids on the island in January and making it clear to Erneido Oliva there would be no U.S.-backed invasion led by the Bay of Pigs veterans. At Johnson’s request, Bobby Kennedy accompanied Oliva to the White House the day LBJ delivered the bad news. The president wanted to make it clear there would be no more vague Kennedy promises of liberating Cuba. In a brusque, sixteen-minute meeting in the White House library, recalled Oliva, Johnson “flatly told me my program with the Cubans had to be terminated. Bobby didn’t say anything. You know they didn’t get along well. [Bobby] told me before that he had tried to persuade him…but he didn’t try and persuade the president of the United States in front of me. He was only listening, his head bowed, pretty sad.”

But the CIA would prove unresponsive to Johnson’s leadership, just as it was under Kennedy, continuing to sponsor unauthorized raids and assassination attempts on Castro. In February, the agency was soon back to its old game, trying to manufacture excuses to invade the island. This time it was reviving a scheme from the final days of the Kennedy administration.

On November 19, three days before he was assassinated, President Kennedy was startled when Richard Helms opened a canvas air travel bag in the Oval Office and pulled out a submachine gun. The weapon, Helms claimed, was part of a Cuban cache that had been found on a beach in Venezuela—dramatic proof of Castro’s brazen effort to subvert his neighbors’ governments. Helms’s message was all too predictable: it was time to get tough on Castro. But Kennedy seemed more disturbed by the fact that the CIA official had been able to blithely slip an automatic gun into the Oval Office unmolested by his Secret Service centurions. “It gives me a feeling of confidence,” he dryly told Helms.

After Kennedy’s death, the CIA resumed flogging the Venezuela weapons caper in hopes of driving a wedge between Cuba and the Organization of American States and establishing a pretext for war. The agency was having a hard time making its case, even within its own bureaucracy, where one official later declared himself “not too impressed with the evidence,” which struck him as suspiciously “manufactured.”

On February 28, 1964, Des FitzGerald paid a visit to Bobby Kennedy’s office to show him a copy of the “Spectrum Paper”—the latest CIA scenario for war on Castro—in hopes of enlisting his support. FitzGerald was under no obligation to seek Kennedy’s approval that day, since the new president had removed Cuba from RFK’s portfolio, but John McCone had suggested the visit, undoubtedly as a courtesy to the man who once spearheaded the government’s crusade against Castro.

As the attorney general perused the Spectrum Paper that day, it soon became clear he no longer had the heart for anti-Castro intrigue. He surprised FitzGerald by asking him whether the CIA’s Board of National Estimates “had ever directed its attention to the question of whether or not the United States could live with Castro.” The answer was obviously no—and the agency was not about to change now. And LBJ—to the agency’s delight—had made it clear he agreed with the agency, declining to pursue the back-channel peace negotiations initiated in JFK’s final months.

But FitzGerald found Kennedy strangely persistent. “[Kennedy] wondered whether it might not be a good idea for such [a peace assessment] to be produced,” FitzGerald later noted in his memo on the meeting. No, FitzGerald flatly told the attorney general, it was not a good idea to explore the peace option with Havana.

This post-Dallas picture of a wan and powerless Robert Kennedy is painful to behold. Here he is, facing a CIA official he once made tremble and all he can do is feebly suggest that the agency completely reverse its course on Cuba. FitzGerald and his colleagues back at Langley must have gloated at the fall of their rude overseer. The suspicions that Kennedy harbored about a CIA involvement in his brother’s murder must have made meetings like this all the more excruciating for him.

Kennedy did not suspect FitzGerald in particular of participating in any plot. In fact, the CIA official apparently shared RFK’s doubts about the lone gunman proposition. Watching TV with his wife on the morning of November 24 when Ruby suddenly burst in front of the cameras and shot down Oswald, FitzGerald began to cry. “Now we’ll never know,” he said. When FitzGerald dropped dead of a massive heart attack in July 1967 while playing tennis, Bobby Kennedy was among those who attended his funeral.

In the months after Dallas, Kennedy also seems to have maintained a civil relationship with CIA director John McCone, who often phoned Bobby at the Justice Department and invited him and Ethel to dine at his home. But this was not the case with other CIA officials.

Like McCone, Dick Helms—the real power at the agency—also strove to maintain close contact with Kennedy, offering to brief him on intelligence matters even though Johnson had ordered McCone to inform Bobby that he would no longer enjoy the same intelligence access in the new administration. On January 22, 1964, Helms wrote Kennedy a warm note, attaching a tribute to JFK that had been written by an editor of the
London Sunday Telegraph
. On March 4, 1964, Helms phoned Kennedy to congratulate him on the Hoffa conviction, making an appointment to see him the following week, without specifying the reason. The spymaster would call Kennedy’s office to see him at least twice more before he stepped down as attorney general in August. It is unclear why Helms continued to pursue a relationship with the lame-duck attorney general; it was certainly not out of affection for him. Helms had feared and reviled Kennedy when he reigned over the agency.