The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (122 page)

“Fifty-five miles an
hour?”
the president replied incredulously.

“Yeah,” Bobby said definitively. “And then they got a little smaller boat … put a small outboard on it, filled it with explosives, and ran up alongside the ship and started the outboard motor and ran it into the ship.”

“And where’d they jump off?” Kennedy asked, impressed with the derring-do.

“Well, either that or they ran it off, see, from their own little bigger boat. There were five of them. So they had some guts.”

The president and attorney general celebrated these acts of bravery against an evil foe, even if they concluded reluctantly that they might have to prosecute the Cubans. There remained a boyish bravado in both men, and an unwillingness to realize the immense danger in creating an international vigilantism in the waters off Florida. Russian ships were for the most part transporting food and medicine, not military goods, and were sailed by civilian crews who had not envisioned themselves as combatants in the cold war. The president at least always drew back from the precipice of action, held in check by the exigencies of power. Bobby, however, maintained his obsession; he stood so close to the problem that Cuba loomed monstrous in his mind, far out of proportion to its reality.

In the immediate aftermath of the missile crisis the president’s preeminent concern had been to make sure that the missiles and the Russian soldiers left the island, and once that happened, to make sure that the men of the brigade finally were freed. Bobby led the efforts to release the prisoners. The American government could not be perceived as paying a bribe for the men. Instead, Castro agreed to accept $50 million worth of drugs and medicine. The drug companies contributed not only worthwhile medicines but outdated drugs and a fortune in Ex-Lax, Listerine, Gill’s Green Mountain Asthmatic Cigarettes, General Mills powdered potatoes, and a rich variety of menstrual supplies. The Americans placed pallets of the finest pharmaceutical goods on the first planeloads and reloaded the ships with the worthwhile goods salted on the top. After Bobby came up with the $3 million in
cash that Castro demanded as a final payment, the 1,113 brigadistas flew out of Havana on Christmas Eve.

The president addressed the brigade in an emotional ceremony at the Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962. In a phrase that was not in the original speech, he told a stadium full of Cubans that they would indeed return to a “free Cuba.” As if on signal, the crowd began chanting “Guerra, Guerra.”

“The time will probably come when we will have to act again on Cuba,” the president told an NSC meeting on January 22, 1963. “We should be prepared to move on Cuba if it should be in our national interest.” The Joint Chiefs had already given Kennedy their invasion plans, and the CIA had outlined covert activities that included asking dissident Cubans to involve themselves in such activities as “putting glass and nails on the highways, leaving water running in public buildings, putting sand in machinery, [and] wasting electricity.”

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and his men had looked at the larger picture and contemplated the moral dimensions of their decisions. They were practical men of power, and they had discussed ends and means because they knew that they belonged at the center of their discussion. Now, however, such discussions had been stilled. No one in these meetings asked what would be left of international law and the president’s pledge not to invade if the United States attacked Cuba. No one asked about the cost to American democracy of running a secret war about which the citizens knew nothing. Nor did they ask, if Kennedy was not going to authorize an invasion, then what was the point of this endless, dangerous harassment of a neighboring state? If you reached out with a right hand proffered in peace and in your left hand cradled a knife, your neighbor was unlikely to come close enough to grasp your hand.

As Bobby looked out on the haunted faces of the freed prisoners, his belief in their cause grew even deeper. Many of these brigade veterans became his friends. He listened to their tales, and each sad recollection only reinforced his feelings. “He felt a very acute responsibility for the guys in the brigade,” recalled John Nolan, then a young lawyer helping with the negotiations to free the brigade. “He was their best friend in a way that continued for all of his life. He would do anything reasonable for any of the leaders particularly, not all of which turned out well.”

Bobby carried their cause to the highest counsels of government. No one in the administration was more militant, more relentlessly aggressive, than the attorney general. On April 3, 1963, Bobby called not for small covert actions but for the dispersal of a five-hundred-man raiding party into Cuba. In mid-April, at a meeting of the NSC’s Cuba Standing Group, Bobby proposed three studies. He wanted to look into “contingencies such as the death of Castro or the shooting down of a U-2.” He sought to look at a possible
“program with the objective of overthrowing Castro in eighteen months” and a “program to cause as much trouble as we can for Communist Cuba during the next eighteen months.” Bobby did not propose studying the possibility of trying to woo Castro away from Moscow or exploring the potential benefits of decreasing covert operations. In this meeting he did not talk openly about assassination, but he and his colleagues often talked about Castro’s death as part of their contingency planning.

As Bobby pushed for fierce action against Castro’s Cuba, he knew a great deal about the possibilities of exploring some kind of meaningful dialogue with Castro. Almost every week in the early months of 1963, under Bobby’s direction, James Donovan, a former top OSS official and seasoned negotiator, along with a second negotiator, the attorney John Nolan, flew to Cuba to meet with Castro. Ostensibly, their reason for being there was to achieve the release of twenty or so other prisoners, and they had been warned not to push any diplomatic initiatives. But Donovan was almost as garrulous as the Cuban dictator, and there were few limits on their endless discussions. Castro took his guests to the Cuban World Series and to the Bay of Pigs, reliving his victory and talking endless hours with the two Americans. Donovan and Nolan were not naive, impressionable men, but they realized immediately that they were not in the presence of the narrow ideologue of American stereotype, but a subtle, complicated man conversant with the world.

Donovan and Nolan had struck up a lively rapport with Castro, and they returned each week full of anecdotes and insight. Bobby, however, had no interest in learning details about the man whom he considered his nemesis. He found Donovan’s soliloquies tedious and merely wanted terse memos detailing how the prisoner negotiations were going. Neither Bobby nor the president spent extensive time with the two men.

Whenever Donovan and Nolan went to Cuba, they brought Castro a gift. On one occasion they gave the Cuban leader a Polaroid camera that he took with him on a trip to Moscow. Another time they brought a wet suit that Castro used when he went diving one day with his two American guests. It was not until many years later, during the Senate investigations into assassinations in the mid-1970s, that Nolan learned that the CIA had prepared a diving suit dusted with a fungus that would infect Castro with a serious skin disease and a breathing device laced with tubercle bacillus. Donovan and Nolan had unwittingly thwarted the CIA’s plans by giving the gift before the agency was ready. There had perhaps been some rules when the CIA began to try to kill Castro in 1960, but there were none now in 1963, not when the agency would place a deadly gift in the unknowing hands of two Americans serving a diplomatic mission.

In early March, the president expressed himself as being “very interested”
in Donovan’s meetings, saying “We don’t want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill.” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s top foreign affairs adviser, mentioned alternatives, including not only an invasion to overthrow the Communist government but “always the possibility that Castro … might find advantage in a gradual shift away from their present level of dependence on Moscow.” In his memo of April 21, 1963, Bundy went on to say that “a Titoist Castro is not inconceivable,” precisely the point that Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, had made to the president in February 1962.

Castro gave Donovan every indication that he wanted to initiate a serious dialogue with the United States, but the Kennedy administration backed away from any such discussion. To push such possibilities would have taken the president’s strong initiative. Instead, Kennedy expressed his “desire for some noise level and for some action in the immediate future.” The CIA proposed attacking “a railway bridge, some petroleum storage facilities and a molasses storage vessel,” then to move on to bigger, more important targets later in the year. At the same time the administration developed a number of contingency plans that were anathema to everything for which a free, democratic society supposedly stood. The administration discussed provoking the Cubans into an attack that would allow the Americans to stage an invasion. If the Cubans were slow to anger, the United States “might initially intensify its reconnaissance with night flights, ‘show-off’ low-level flights flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action … [or] perhaps the U.S. could use some drone aircraft as ‘bait,’ flown at low speeds and favorable altitudes for tempting Cuban AAA or aircraft attacks.” These were only contingency plans, but they were presented as reasonable alternatives, with no apparent awareness of the dangers of such provocation. For these were ideas meant not simply to provoke the Cubans but to deceive the American people, many of whom would probably die in a war that they thought Castro had instigated.

In a ten-hour interview on April 10, Castro told Lisa Howard of ABC that he sought a rapprochement with the United States. The United States and Castro’s Cuba would never walk hand in hand, but there was something disturbingly cavalier about the Kennedy government’s refusal even to employ secret diplomatic channels to seek a possible accommodation. There was consideration in the White House of attempting to block ABC’s broadcast of the 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 present United States policy,” an NSC analysis stated. These were the views of intellectual
cowards so afraid of Castro’s ideas and his articulate presentation of them that they would countenance limiting that dangerous thing known as liberty.

Castro was attempting to foster what he called a people’s revolution throughout Latin America and what the United States considered a subversion of sovereign states. While the Cuban leader fostered revolution elsewhere, his own people were imprisoned for their ideas. In contemplating censorship or staging an incident to set off an invasion, the United States was flirting with the same tools of totalitarianism that Castro employed.

The president had first noted this dilemma as a young man when the European democracies faced Hitler’s brutal regime. But Cuba was a pipsqueak of a nation, hardly set on a course of world domination. Castro’s attempts to subvert Latin governments were no more than irritating. The best attack against Castro was a foreign policy aimed at fostering democracy among America’s neighbors and aid programs that reached the desperate masses listening to Castro’s message. In the end the administration’s obsession with Cuba was fueled primarily by the Kennedy brothers’ anger over the Bay of Pigs and Castro’s taunts, the exaggerated rhetoric of American anticommunism, and the loud shouts of the Cuban exile community and the American right wing.

Operation Mongoose was dead. In its place had arisen what amounted to a private guerrilla army of Cuban exiles, of which Bobby was the architect and champion. These men were patriots, but they were equally what Castro called them, mercenaries, paid for by American coin. Manuel Artime, their leader, received $225,000 a month to run what was known as the Second Naval Guerrilla, or, by the CIA’s own estimate, a total of nearly $4,933,293, an amount that the Cubans claim was twice that size. This organization purchased two major ships, eight smaller boats, three airplanes, and tons of weapons.

They did most of their training in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, where the Americans had made an arrangement with President Luis Somoza, son of the murderous dictator Luis Somoza. And they ran their own operations, without scrutiny, the kind of daring ad hoc adventures that Bobby admired.

“I had many chances to talk with Bob Kennedy,” reflected Rafael Quintero, Artime’s deputy in Central America. “Bob Kennedy was obsessed—obsessed with the idea that they had been beaten by Castro, that the Kennedy family had lost a big battle against a guy like Castro. He had to get even with him. He mentioned that to me often and was very clear about it. He was not going to try to eliminate Castro because he was an ideological guy who wanted to do right in Cuba. He was going to do it because the Kennedy name had been humiliated.”

Bobby was the great patron of the anti-Castro Cubans, descending on them for secret visits, relishing their dangerous exploits, celebrating their courage. He showed up at their parties and drank with them, saluting a brotherhood of fearless men facing an implacable foe. It did not matter that so many of their actions risked hurting the innocent as well as their acknowledged enemies and did little more than stiffen the vigilance of Cuban Communists. They were on a sacred quest.

Bobby gave these men the illusion of equality, but there was always a moment when it became clear that he was a Kennedy and they were not. One of the men to whom Bobby was closest was Pepe San Roman, the brigade’s military leader. San Roman was more suited for poetry than war, and he had struggled emotionally after his release. Bobby had set him up in a small house near his own home in McLean, Virginia. One Sunday morning Bobby rode by San Roman’s home in riding clothes, looking a grand seignior. He dismounted to chat for a while, and when it came time for him to leave, he clicked his fingers, thrust his boot forward, and signaled San Roman to help him back into the saddle.