Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (23 page)

How did you feel about Dulles after this?

Well, he always liked Allen Dulles and, you know, he thought he was an honorable man, and Allen Dulles always had liked Jack. And I think Allen Dulles sort of cracked up. Oh, because a while later he went out of his way to have him to dinner—or to make someone—I know what it was. Or was it Charlie Wrightsman?
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Yes, Charlie Wrightsman and Jayne were in Washington, and they were coming to the White House. This was just a couple of weeks after Cuba, or a month—and always Allen Dulles had been their little lion. They'd have him down, and trot him out in Florida and everything. And Charlie Wrightsman was there, and he said he wasn't going to see Allen Dulles—usually when he was—when in Washington, he did—because of the way Allen had bungled the Bay of Pigs. Well, that just disgusted Jack so. He was so loyal always to people in, you know, trouble. And so he took me aside and said, "Have Dulles over here for tea or for a drink this afternoon." And he made the special effort to come back from his office and sit around with Jayne and Charlie Wrightsman, just to show Charlie what he thought of Allen Dulles. And, I mean, it made all the difference to Allen Dulles. I was with him about five minutes to ten before Jack got there. He just looked like, I don't know, Cardinal Mindszenty on trial. You know, just a shell of what he was.
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And Jack came and talked—put his arm around him. What's that thing about Morgan? "If you just walk with—through the bank with your arm around me, you don't have to give me a loan?"—or anything?
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Well, wasn't that nice? It was just to show Charlie Wrightsman. But it shows something about Jack. But I mean, he knew he—Dulles had obviously botched everything up. You know, he had a tenderness for the man. And then I guess right after that or Cuba, whenever, he got General Taylor.

Yes. First, he got General Taylor to head an investigation. Remember General Taylor and Bobby made a kind of inquiry into what happened. And then, then he brought General Taylor into the White House.

That's right.

As a kind of military adviser.

General Taylor always used to be in his gray suit then, and sometimes Jack would say, when there'd be a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, you know, that you could just feel these waves going out from them wondering about what Taylor would be like and what a difficult situation it was for Taylor.
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And it was to his amazement; it worked very well.

Had he known General Taylor before this?

I suppose he'd met him a couple of times because he was always talking about his book. And you know, and then he'd say, "Imagine, can you imagine Eisenhower doing that?"—whatever all the things were that made General Taylor leave. General Taylor and General Gavin both wrote books, didn't they?
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Yes.

But—and so he always thought so highly of him. He knew just where to turn the minute he needed his military adviser.

We in the White House staff felt very badly, quite apart from the general horror of the thing, but we felt that we'd served the President badly, and some had thought—some had been for the project and others had been against it. But all of us felt that we hadn't done the job that the White House staff ought to be doing in the way—that we'd been too intimidated by all these great figures and hadn't subjected the project to the kind of critical examination it was our job to do. Did he ever comment on that?

No, he never did—but, I mean, I don't think all of you should feel that way because look at what you did at the second Cuba. The thing was you were all cutting your teeth in there and nobody had warned you about this thing. And you—all these supposed experts when you come in fresh yourself, what can you do but sort of take their advice? That's why Lyndon Johnson's so lucky. At least he has a team of people who've been tried. And you hope to God that if the country's been run these past eight years and there'd been crises that those men would know something what they were talking about. So he used to talk later, never about his staff, but, you know, about who he was left, who he inherited to turn to for advice. And that's what he was rather bitter about.

And when the chips were really down, it was Bobby whom he turned to, wasn't it, more than anyone else to talk to and have counsel with?
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That's right. And I remember—and setting Bobby up with that committee
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and I think that's where Bobby and General Taylor's friendship started because I would say after Jack, General Taylor was the man in Washington that Bobby is the closest to, I think—I mean, besides his friends or people in the Justice Department. But there's this really mutual respect they both have for each other. And it's very touching—a very young man and a man who's at the end of his career.

PRESIDENT AND MRS. KENNEDY SPEAKING WITH RETURNED MEMBERS OF THE CUBAN INVASION BRIGADE, MIAMI, 1962
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

You said, in an earlier tape, that the times that you remembered the President being most depressed and under pressure really—the state committeeman fight in 1956 and the Cuban thing.

Yes, well, not depressed at the state committeeman thing. That was more nervous, apprehensive, he couldn't stop talking about it. You know, then he had to do something to win. This one was sort of blundering along. He wasn't running his own show as he was doing in the Massachusetts fight. And then the awful depression when it ended and caring so about those people.
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And I think the compassion that shows, well, the way he used to talk to me about Cardona afterwards, and the way—then he really felt obligated to get those prisoners out. That was—was that the Christmas later or two Christmases later?

Two Christmases later.

First there were the tractors and Bobby felt so committed to do that. And just at that time, there came an article about Bobby—remember those other boring ones, where they say he was ruthless? And I just thought, "If they could have known the compassion of that boy." You know, you just couldn't let those people molder away in jail. Probably it would be better if you could have, than people see that poor brigade staggering back and remind you all over—the whole country, all over again, of the big failure. But just this urgency to get them out. And then Jack would get so belted for the tractor thing. But he had to do whatever thing he could to get them back.
[tape machine turned off, then]
Should I tell about that?

Yes.

I have another—I just thought of something else about Bobby's compassion. It must have—last winter—you can find out when it was—that best spy we had in Russia was caught. Was it Penkovsky or Penovsky?
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Yes, Penkovsky.

Well, Bobby was coming out of a meeting in the White House, and he saw me in the garden, and he came over and sat down on a bench, just looking so sad. And he said he'd been out to see John McCone and he said, "It's just awful, they don't have any heart at CIA. They just think of everyone there as a number. He's Spy X-
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." And he said that he'd said to them, you know, "Why? This man was just feeding you too many hot things. He was just bound to get caught. And they'd keep asking him for more. Why didn't someone warn him? Why didn't someone tell him to get out? He has a family. A wife or children or something." Bobby was just so wounded by them—just treating that man like a cipher. I guess he even thought John McCone was rather—

Well, people get into a kind of professional sense about all this and they no longer see people as human beings. And one of the most outrageous things was the attack on the tractor deal. I mean, if there was anything that was something which this nation should have seen as its duty, it was to do everything possible to get those people out, and the attack on it was always a very bad thing to me.

I know.

Remember, Mrs. Roosevelt and Walter Reuther and Milton Eisenhower formed a committee to do that.
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And then everybody blasted it. And oh, the heartlessness of them. Well, anyway—

I think one reason the President felt so strongly about Miro Cardona and the members of that committee is that three or four of them had sons.

That's right. I know Cardona had a son, didn't he? Then when the Cuban brigade came in
1962
—I guess it was Christmas—to— Well, first they all came up in the afternoon to the Paul house in Florida.
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Just the five of them, or six. You know, Oliva
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and they all had these—they all showed us pictures of what they looked like before—they had in their wallets. They all had these wonderful, sort of El Greco faces. Really thin. When they pulled pictures out of what they looked like before, they really looked sort of like fat members of Xavier Cugat's band.
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I mean, they didn't have any pathos in their faces. And how they were with us—you know, there they were sitting with Jack—nothing bitter, just looking on him as their hero. You know, they were nice men too. Then they came—since November—they must have—when I was in this house—they came in February especially up to Jack's grave to lay a wreath, and Bobby brought them—one of them around to see me. And they all said that they were getting out of the army or everything—that now that Jack was dead, they had no more hope or idealism or anything. They'd just all go out and try to get some jobs because it was he they were all looking to with hope.
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They're the men that had got them into it. It's rather touching.

The President was deeply moved, wasn't he, at that Miami business?
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Oh, yes. That was one of the most moving things I've ever seen. All those people there, you know, crying and waving, and all the poor brigade sitting around with their bandages and everything.

I think he was carried away and said some things that weren't in the text of his speech.

[chuckles]
I remember his speaking, and then I had to speak in Spanish. You know, a wonderful man that you should speak to sometimes is Donald Barnes.
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Of all the interpreters Jack ever had, he was always the one with Spanish. He was so head and shoulders above any other. And he made you have a good relationship with the person. That man was in so many—I don't know, someone should interview him.

Is he, what, State Department?

State Department interpreter. Some of them weren't very good. The one we had in Paris was just hopeless. Poor Sedgwick,
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trying to say his sort of flowery eighteenth-century French, which no more sounded like a translation of Jack. Jack said the two best interpreters he'd ever seen were Barnes and Adenauer's interpreter, who he used in Germany instead of our own. He asked Adenauer if he could borrow his.

Did he ever talk about the future of Castro and Cuba? Did he think that—what did he think, do you think?

Gosh, I don't know what he thought. I remember asking him this fall—oh, yes, that day that I told you about—it was one day in October, when he woke up from his nap and he looked very worried. I said something and he said, "This has been one of the worst days of my life. Ten things have gone wrong and it's only two-thirty." And he named some of them, which I should have written down. Anyway, one I can remember was that some little raid on Cuba had failed.
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And I sort of said, "Well, what is the point of all these little raids?" But he didn't—he sort of talked—he didn't really answer that question. He obviously didn't want to sit down with me and talk about Cuba because it was a worry to him. So I don't know what he had in his head or what his thoughts were.

Jean—did you see the interview that Jean Daniel—
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