The Passage of Power (52 page)

And he made people have a broader, deeper idea of what the team should be doing. By the end of 1962, Justice had taken a newly active role in fighting not only organized crime but juvenile delinquency; once, testifying before Congress, the man who had been an arrogant prosecutor blurted out a sentence that wasn’t in his prepared testimony: “I think some of us who were more fortunate might also have been juvenile delinquents if we had been brought up in different circumstances,” he said. A broader role was being taken against many forms of social injustice. Looking back on his prosecutorial days, it was possible now to see that there had been hints of such concerns visible even then. In
The Enemy Within,
he described attending a Mass at a workingman’s church and seeing
“the
strong, stern faces of people who have worked hard and who have suffered.”

And there were other new shadings in the portrait. The moody and indifferent student now started to read, quite extensively, in history and biography. Since there weren’t enough free moments for the reading he wanted to do, he took the speed-reading course that Jack had taken. He began the practice, which he was to follow to the end of his life, of listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s plays while he was shaving and playing with his children in the morning. In 1961, he instituted a series of evening seminars at Hickory Hill at which leading thinkers discussed their areas of expertise. “They sound
rather
precious,”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, “but there was nothing precious about those lectures.” The questioning of the speakers was quite intense—and the most intense of the questioners was often the attorney general (even though, sometimes, his old pugnacity reappeared: “That’s the biggest bunch of
bullshit
I’ve ever heard,” he told one lecturer—who was, after all, a guest in his home).

An observer as acute as
Budd Schulberg, the novelist and screenwriter who in 1961 was asked to write a screenplay of
The Enemy Within
because his masterpiece,
On the Waterfront,
dealt with corruption in a labor union, saw the depth of these concerns. During their first meeting, over dinner at Hickory Hill, to discuss Schulberg’s ideas for the screenplay, there was for some time a noticeable lack of rapport between the two men. And then Schulberg blurted out that he wasn’t interested in writing a script merely about the labor rackets investigation, that he felt the movie’s broader theme should be that there was something at the core of America as a whole that had begun to rot.

Suddenly the man across from him was a different man. Yes, Robert Kennedy said, that was what he was interested in, too. In fact, he said, that “seems to me the only real reason for making the picture. If it comes out as well as
Waterfront,
it could help shake people out of their apathy.” He spoke in terms of his brother—“The creeping corruption, it is something the President hopes to check, to give the people a new sense of idealism, a sense of destiny that isn’t just money-making or pleasure-seeking”—but, Schulberg realized, it wasn’t just the
President whose feelings Bobby was expressing. Robert Kennedy spoke “with quiet fervor,” the writer was to recount. “He cared about it. He felt it.… He said he thought the next ten years would produce the turning point in our history—either an America infected with corruption or the rebirth of a spirit and idealism with which we had begun.”

The movie was never made—the producer who hired Schulberg died, and there were threats from corrupt labor bosses against studios that were considering making it—but during the year and a half that Schulberg was working on it, he spent days with Robert Kennedy at Justice, including the day the attorney general was directing efforts to get
James
Meredith enrolled, and he heard him say to one of his men in Mississippi, “I know it’s only
one—
but it’s the first one, and then two and then four, eight.… We have got to enforce the Constitution.… We’ve got to—it’s the
law,
it’s our moral obligation.” He hung up the phone, and then said, in a tone that Schulberg felt was a “human outcry,” “Oh, God, I hope nothing happens to Meredith. I feel responsible for him. I promised we’d back him up. I’m worried for the marshals. It seems so simple to us, and down there it’s bloody hell.” Having seen him up close, in that and other moments of crisis, Schulberg was to write that “No one can ever tell me that Bob Kennedy was merely going through the motions. When something struck him as wrong or evil, it was his nature to root it out, or to try like hell—not tomorrow, but now.”

And, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought out all these new elements in Robert Kennedy, made them clear and vivid; during those thirteen days in October, there was unveiled in the Cabinet Room a portrait of a master of compromise, of diplomacy, of diplomacy with a moral element, of diplomacy that was, in fact, in some ways grounded in “the moral question”: there was the insistence that “a sneak attack is not in our traditions,” that America was not “that kind of a country.” And there had been, as well, the passion with which Kennedy presented his arguments, the “intense but quiet passion” that moved one of the hardened, pragmatic men around the long Cabinet table to say that “as he spoke, I felt that I was at a real turning point in history.” So many elements in the portrait came together during those thirteen days—as if, as his biographer Thomas was to write,
“the
worst of times brought out the best in Bobby Kennedy.” An aide who came into his office during the crisis said, “Something’s different in here.”
“I’m
older,” Kennedy replied. But the difference was due to more than age. So dramatically had Bobby Kennedy changed that the men around the Cabinet table were startled—
“very
much surprised,” in
George Ball’s words. “He made believers of men who expected less of him,” Thomas says.

I
N SOME WAYS
, however, Bobby Kennedy had changed not at all. The old, dark hues—the rudeness, the anger, the belligerence, the “mean streak”—were sometimes still visible under the new, brighter colors.

Sometimes belligerence was employed as an instrument for his brother, a tool with a very rough edge, even when it was being wielded against grand (or formerly grand) old men of the Democratic Party establishment. The seventy-year-old railroad magnate
W. Averell Harriman, former ambassador to
Great Britain, ambassador to Moscow, expediter of
Lend-Lease, adviser at Yalta, not to mention governor of New York, found himself being ordered about at his own dinner table. Asked by Bobby about a report the President had requested, he said he was still doing research on it. “Well, get on it, Averell,” Bobby snapped at him, in a tone as cold as his eyes. “See that you do it tomorrow.” Said one of Harriman’s other guests, Rowland Evans, Bobby “couldn’t have cared less [who Harriman was] …. Bobby was giving an order, and it happened to be Averell Harriman; it could have been anybody.” Undersecretary of State
Chester Bowles, another former governor (of Connecticut) and a revered figure to American liberals, whose backing of Jack Kennedy in 1960 had been a key factor in softening liberal opposition to his candidacy, had not supported the
Bay of Pigs invasion, and after its failure, had let that fact be known. Suddenly confronting Bowles after a White House meeting, Bobby had snarled, “You should keep your mouth shut. As of now, you were
for
the Bay of Pigs”—and, to emphasize the point, had jabbed a finger into Bowles’ chest. Bowles was, in addition, too wordy and slow-moving for the Kennedys, who, following the Bay of Pigs, were looking for a way to remove
Castro from power. At a
National Security Council meeting with the President in the chair, Bowles delivered a summary of State Department reports that concluded Castro was now firmly in control of the island and could be removed only by the full-scale American invasion that the Kennedys were determined to avoid. Jumping to his feet, Bobby slammed the reports down on the table. “This is worthless,” he shouted. “What can we do about
Cuba? This doesn’t tell us anything. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the President.” He went on shouting for ten minutes. And then he glared directly at Bowles. “We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else,” he said.

As Bobby’s tirade continued, the President didn’t interrupt, but simply sat silently, tapping the metal rim of the eraser on his pencil against his front teeth. Watching from his seat against a wall,
Richard Goodwin
“became
suddenly aware,” as he was to write, that “there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.” He had no doubt that Robert Kennedy was “communicating exactly what his brother wanted said”—that the President wanted Bowles out of the Administration, but, because of his popularity in liberal circles, didn’t want to fire him, and that Bobby’s tirade was a way to force Bowles to resign (and, in addition, to deter him from leaking information that would undermine the Kennedy image; and to let the other officials watching the scene see what might happen to them if
they
leaked). Goodwin’s suspicion was confirmed when, not long thereafter, Bowles not having taken the hint, the President began easing him out of his job.

Sometimes, however, Bobby’s manners had nothing to do with the President, and were a reminder that there had always been that “mean”—cruel—streak in him. As the adulation from the press for the Kennedys, for their graciousness and charm, mounted and mounted, and Bobby’s face, boyish and open and grinning, became a fixture on newsstands, dissenting voices were drowned out, but they were there. If within his “band of brothers” there was a sometimes forced but nonetheless humorous badinage, he had lost none of his brusqueness with other subordinates; “Kennedy’s
most
obvious fault is rudeness,” wrote a young Justice Department staffer who was not a member of the in-group. “His face, when it lacks that boyish, photogenic grin, is not a pleasant sight. It has a certain bony harshness and those ice-blue eyes are not the smiling ones that Irishmen write songs about. It is with this stern visage that Kennedy confronts most of the world.… His friends call this shyness, but the historians of the 1960 campaign do not record that he was ever shy in pursuit of a stray delegate.” A CIA official giving him a report he didn’t like saw
“his
eyes get steely and his jaw set, and his voice get low and precise.” An Army general who tried to tell him that a request would be very difficult to meet was asked,
“Why
would it be difficult, General?” and, wrote a witness to the encounter, “learned that there are few experiences in this world quite like having Robert Kennedy push his unsmiling face towards yours and ask, ‘Why?’ ”

He had lost none of his insistence on the importance of winning. An autographed picture of heavyweight champion
Floyd Patterson hung on the wall of his office—until Patterson lost the title to
Sonny Liston. The next day, the photograph was gone. Even while Hickory Hill touch-football games were becoming fixed in American myth as boyishly friendly, visitors who played in one for the first time got a somewhat different view.
“Even
approaching forty,” wrote a Washington newsman, “Bobby was playing touch football with the callow ferocity of a fraternity boy.” Said another:
“I’d
like to hit him right in the mouth. Every time I went up for a pass, he gave me elbows, knees, the works. Then our team got within one touchdown of his team, by God he picked up the ball and said the game was over.”

“Just
when you get Bobby typed as the white hope, compassionate, he’ll do something so bad it’ll jar you completely, destroy your faith in him,” a journalist wrote. “And just as you’re ready to accept the excessive condemnations, to accept him as ruthless and diabolical, he’ll do something so classy it stuns you. The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist.” Said another,
“From
one day to the next, you never know which Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet.”

And he had lost none of the quality—the capacity for hatred—that had made Joe Kennedy begin to respect him. After his brother’s defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy’s determination to, in Bowles’ phrase,
“get Castro” was so intense that one of his key advisers on Cuba said he seemed to regard the failed invasion as
“an
insult which needed to be redressed rather quickly.”
“It
was almost as simple as goddammit, we lost the first round, let’s win the second,”
McGeorge Bundy was to say. “We were
hysterical
about Castro,”
Robert McNamara says. Setting up a special CIA operation, later code-named
“Mongoose,” Bobby kept pushing the CIA. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1961, he repeatedly telephoned CIA Director of Operations
Richard Bissell at home to tell him to “get off his ass” on Cuba. Following Bissell’s replacement by
Richard Helms, Kennedy made it clear to Helms, as he records, that Castro was “the top priority of the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, effort, money or manpower is to be spared.” That directive was followed, with the CIA ceaselessly trying to set up raids by Cuban exiles, blow up bridges and factories. There were efforts of another type as well. The CIA would carry out eight separate assassination attempts on Castro’s
life, continuing into 1965. Did Robert Kennedy authorize them, or know about them?
“The
Kennedys made clear their desire to ‘get rid’ of Castro,”
Evan Thomas wrote. But did they authorize his assassination?
“The
truth is unknowable,” Thomas concludes.

Despite his coolheadedness and caution during the Cuban Missile Crisis—and his delicate and successful negotiations beginning a month later to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners—Robert Kennedy’s attitude toward Castro didn’t change; in April, 1963, for example, he was proposing sending a five-hundred-man raiding party into Cuba, a proposal which somehow, luckily, faded away. Over and over during that year he would telephone Helms.
“My
God, these Kennedys keep the pressure on about Castro,” he recalls.