Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Read online

  He met her in Washington before she was married, when she was “just a wonderful-looking, kooky, young” inquiring photographer for the now-defunct Times-Herald. He immediately was drawn to her “fey, elfin quality” and her curiosity about books and art. She liked his bohemian style, with his fondness for wearing tight blue jeans and work shirts years before it became a popular look, and his love of gossip. Walton was twenty years older than the wide-eyed gamine, but he had a wonderful, boyish spirit and crooked grin that brought to Gellhorn’s mind “a clever and funny Halloween pumpkin.” Like other women, Jackie was also surely drawn to Walton’s valiant effort at single fatherhood, raising son Matthew and daughter Frances by himself after he was divorced from his mentally unstable wife.

  After the Kennedys moved into the White House, the first couple made Walton a frequent sidekick, finally giving him an official role in 1963 as the chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, where he and Jackie joined hands to save Washington’s historic blocks from the wrecking balls of philistine developers. She sent him flirtatious notes on White House stationery, including a collage featuring a photo of Walton with the inevitable cigarette in hand and the inscription: “Hate cigarettes—but I simply can’t resist those Marlboro men! Will you be my Valentine?”

  He was in a “unique position,” Walton later noted, because he was equally close to both Jack and Jackie. They each confided their secrets in him and they used him to communicate with each other. “I figured out later that I was a real link for both of them. You can well imagine how tough that period is in anybody’s life…it is the eye of the hurricane.” Walton—witty, worldly, dishy—helped ground them both. They could act around him as if they were still the young, carefree couple they had been back in Georgetown.

  One summer day Walton brought an architectural model of his proposed renovations for Lafayette Square, which JFK had taken a strong interest in, to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys were vacationing. “[Jack] got down on the floor and just loved it. And played with it. And Jackie came in and said, ‘You two,’” Walton recalled with a laugh. “And later another time she caught us on his bedroom floor. He was supposed to be taking a nap, meaning he just had on his underpants, and it was like 2:30 in the afternoon. He’d had a little sleep, and then I’d been let in because I had a crisis on something that had to be decided that afternoon. We’re on the floor with another [model], and she went out and got her camera and took pictures and sent me a copy of it. And it said, ‘The president and the czar,’ because the newspapers had started calling me ‘czar of Lafayette Square.’”

  “Bill thinks that Jack’s flirtatiousness with men is a part of his sexual drive and vanity,” Walton’s friend, Gore Vidal, recorded in his journal in September 1961. Vidal, who years later called his friend “the only civilizing influence in that White House,” enjoyed encouraging Jackie’s own naughty side.

  That summer he teamed up with Walton to escort Jackie, with whom he had a family connection, on an adventure in Provincetown, already a gay mecca. “Jackie and Bill Walton arrive at the Moors Motel at 5:30,” Vidal wrote in his journal. “That morning Jackie had been pondering over the phone to me—should she wear a blond wig ‘with braids’ in order not to be recognized. Instead, she wears a silk bandana, a jacket, capri pants, and looks dazzling. Bill wears a dark blue sports shirt; and the usual lopsided grin…. They came into my room at the motel. No one about. Jackie flung herself on the bed—free!”

  The first lady of the United States and her male companions then plunged into a night of frivolity that could surely never be repeated in today’s dreary, political climate, with its all-seeing media eye. They attended a performance of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Provincetown Playhouse—bad enough considering the scandalous history of the play about prostitution and the hypocrisy of Victorian high society, which was banned in Britain for eight years after it was written in 1894. But after the play, the merry trio then went bar-hopping, ending up in a dimly lit watering hole whose upstairs bar was frequented by lesbians. “Jackie was fascinated but dared not look in,” Vidal noted.

  Bill Walton was very discreet about his sexual yearnings, which by this point in his life were decidedly homosexual. Friends like Vidal—who ran into him again that September in Provincetown “cruising the Atlantic House, very relaxed”—certainly knew, as did fellow JFK pals like Ben Bradlee, who assumed he was “gay as a goose.” Did JFK and Jackie know? The ever-discreet Walton, who died in 1994, never said whether he revealed his sexuality to the first couple. Walton’s son, Matthew, said he would “bet a thousand to one against it.” Still, the three shared sexual confidences and Jack was comfortable enough to ask Walton to squire his mistresses to White House events. If JFK was aware of his friend’s secret life, he was clearly self-assured enough about his own sexuality not to feel threatened by it. In fact, as Walton remarked to Vidal, he seemed to thrive on male, as well as female, adoration.

  Bobby, on the other hand, did not share his brother’s casual polymorphous perversity. Vidal, who carried on a notorious feud with the younger Kennedy through much of the 1960s, sensed homosexual panic in Bobby’s taut, angry attitude toward men such as himself. “I couldn’t stand Bobby,” said Vidal, recalling the two men’s poisoned relationship years later. “There are certain visceral dislikes that surface in people. It surfaced in me certainly—and in him.” Vidal thought Bobby had the blunt personality of an Irish cop. “The two people Bobby most hated (a rare distinction, because he hated so many people) were…Jimmy Hoffa and me,” the author remarked.

  Despite the whiff of homophobia in Vidal’s nostrils, Bobby never seemed discomfited by Walton. They had worked closely together in the 1960 presidential campaign. “Bill had everybody’s ear—he had direct access to Jack and Bobby,” said Justin Feldman, a Kennedy organizer who loaned space in his New York law office to Walton during the campaign. “They completely trusted him. Bobby talked to him several times a day during the campaign. The Kennedys trusted him with the tough assignments. At one point, Bobby didn’t like the stories being written about Jack by a reporter in the New York Post. I was sitting with Walton in our office when he got Bobby on the speaker phone to discuss the situation. Bill told him, ‘Mission accomplished.’ Bobby said, ‘How did you do that?’ Walton said, ‘[The reporter] is coming to work for us. You’ll be paying him $1,000 a week.’”

  Bobby, the driving engine behind his brother’s campaign, valued loyalty to his family’s political cause above all else. And he knew Walton was deeply devoted. “My father was a believer,” Matthew Walton recalled. “You might call him an idealist in the sense that there was nothing in it for him—certainly not money. He never really believed in a political movement before JFK.”

  “Bill was disinterested—he was not out to get glory for himself, nor was he feathering his nest in the current tradition,” added Vidal. “He wanted nothing for himself other than to be amused, which he was, by court life.”

  When his service to Jack came to a stunning end on November 22, 1963, Walton was overcome. He was leaving the West Wing lobby with Pat Moynihan shortly before JFK’s death was officially announced, when Moynihan pointed to the White House flag, which had just been lowered: “Bill, you might as well see that.” Walton visibly sagged.

  “Let’s walk out the way he would have expected us to,” said Walton, trying to hold himself together. But he couldn’t. Moynihan had to help him into a cab at the Northwest Gate.

  But there was still the family, Bobby and Jackie. And they needed Walton again that week, after he had helped oversee a proper ceremonial departure for his friend. They were to entrust him with a final, highly confidential task. “He was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this,” said Vidal.

  BILL WALTON HAD BEEN scheduled to fly to the Soviet Union on November 22, at the request of JFK, to help open a dialogue with Russian artists. The artistic exchange mission was part of Kennedy’s peace offensive, which was gathering momentum that year, with
his eloquent olive branch speech at American University in June and the nuclear test ban treaty in August. Walton was to visit Leningrad and Moscow, where he was to oversee the opening of an American graphic arts exhibit for the U.S. Information Agency. Walton canceled his flight after hearing the news from Dallas. But Bobby later urged him to go ahead with his travel plans, and to carry a secret message from him and Jackie to a trusted contact in the Soviet government. On November 29, one week after the assassination, Walton took a Pan Am flight to London, and after connecting to Helsinki, arrived in Leningrad on an Aeroflot plane the following day. After touring the Hermitage in Leningrad, Walton flew to Moscow, where he would spend the next two weeks.

  Moscow was in the grip of its usual frigid winter, and Walton was fighting a bad cold, blowing his nose into a red handkerchief as he went unflaggingly about his busy schedule. He chatted with Russian artists at the USIA exhibit and visited their studios, the state-sanctioned variety as well as underground ones, to view their work. He went to a poetry reading in a crowded hall, where passionate young fans ran to the stage to scribble questions on bits of paper for the poets after they finished their recitals. “Poets in Moscow have fans as devoted as American bobbysoxers are to movie stars,” a bemused Walton later observed. “They debate the relative achievements of their heroes and heroines.”

  Walton was also invited to take tea with Mrs. Khrushchev at the House of Friendship, a government-sponsored club where foreign dignitaries were fêted. The wife of the Soviet leader immediately turned the conversation to Jackie Kennedy, whom she had met in Vienna during the 1961 summit. “She is so strong and so brave,” she said, her eyes welling up. “My heart aches for her and for the two children who probably won’t even remember their father.”

  Everywhere Walton went in Leningrad and Moscow, people wanted to talk about his dead friend. “When I arrived, he had been dead a week,” Walton later recalled. “Tough old bureaucrats would brush aside a tear as they spoke of him. In several studios the painters stood in one minute of silent tribute before we began our talk about the arts. In one house the cook, crippled by age, hobbled on crutches from the kitchen and with tears coursing down her cheeks gave me a handful of paper flowers to put on John Kennedy’s grave. The emotion was so genuine, the feeling so deep, that one wondered how this young man, in such a brief presidency, could have gotten through to the people of this distant land.”

  The Russians Walton met credited the young president with trying to ease the doomsday terror of the Cold War. “He was a man of peace.” This, observed Walton, “was the universal epitaph” for his friend as he traveled the land held in mutual nuclear bondage with the United States.

  “I could see that President Kennedy’s death was as disrupting to the USSR as to everyone else. With him the Russian leaders felt they had established personal contact. Over and over they emphasized how much more important personal connections are than cumbersome diplomatic contacts between great powers.”

  Among those Walton spoke with about the violent transformation of the U.S. government was Soviet journalist Aleksei Adzhubei, the son-in-law of Khrushchev. Over three glasses of throat-soothing hot tea and a cognac, Walton tried to reassure the well-connected Izvestia editor that America had not been taken over by a “reactionary clique.” He asserted that President Johnson “has indicated a real desire” to continue JFK’s policies. Walton must have “bit his tongue” as he passed along these assurances about LBJ, as one report of the meeting later observed, for he “detested” the new president, and the feeling was mutual. Like Bobby, he shuddered to think of the Texan occupying JFK’s office.

  Despite what he told Adzhubei over tea and cognac, Bill Walton had a much more disturbing secret message for the Soviet government, which he delivered as soon as he arrived in Moscow. Bobby had asked Walton to meet with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet agent formerly stationed in Washington, through whom the Kennedys had communicated confidential messages to Khrushchev at critical points in their administration, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. The squat, pug-nosed, jovial Bolshakov was a frequent visitor to Bobby’s Virginia home and to his spacious Justice Department suite, where he would sweep unannounced into the attorney general’s office, with Kennedy’s diligent secretary Angie Novello running frantically after him. So closely associated was he with Kennedy circles that Newsweek dubbed him the “Russian New Frontiersman.” Official Washington frowned on the back channel between the Kennedys and Bolshakov. But that did not deter Bobby from pursuing the relationship.

  “One time Bob wanted to invite Georgi to a party of government officials on board the presidential yacht, the Sequoia,” recalled James Symington, the attorney general’s administrative assistant, in a recent interview. “But McCone from the CIA said, ‘If he gets on the boat, I get off.’ McCone was appalled at the idea of swanning around with some Soviet agent. But Bob was looser than that. Bob had no illusions about Bolshakov—he had no illusions about anyone. He knew perfectly well what Bolshakov was. But he knew how to read him. And he knew he could be useful. It was impossible for JFK and Khrushchev to speak directly, so it was important for the Kennedys to have a back channel to communicate with the Kremlin.”

  Now Bobby was using Bolshakov one more time to relay a top-secret message to the Soviet leader. The attorney general instructed Walton to go directly to Bolshakov in Moscow, without first checking in to his quarters at the U.S. Embassy. Bobby did not want the new U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler, whom he regarded as anti-Kennedy, to know about the Bolshakov meeting. Kohler was a hardliner who thought Khrushchev was more dangerous than Stalin. “He gave me the creeps,” Bobby later recalled of Kohler, adding that he didn’t regard him as someone “who could really get anything done with the Russians.” Kohler was equally cool to Kennedy. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, when Kohler was the State Department official in charge of the Soviet Union, he remembered, “Bobby would sit there across the table with those cold blue eyes as if to say, ‘You son of a bitch, if you ever let my brother down, I’m going to knife you.’”

  Walton delivered his remarkable message to Bolshakov at Moscow’s ornate Sovietskaya restaurant. What he heard must have reminded the Russian of an unsettling encounter he had had with Bobby the year before in Washington. As Bolshakov came out of an August 1962 meeting with JFK at the White House, where he was asked to relay a conciliatory message to Khrushchev, Bobby heatedly confronted his Russian friend: “Goddamn it, Georgi, doesn’t Premier Khrushchev realize the president’s position? Every step he takes to meet Premier Khrushchev halfway costs my brother a lot of effort…. In a gust of blind hate, his enemies may go to any length, including killing him.”

  Now, in Moscow, Bobby Kennedy’s representative was reporting that the attorney general’s worst fears had come true. What Walton told Bolshakov over their meal at the Sovietskaya stunned the Russian. He said that Bobby and Jackie believed that the president had been killed by a large political conspiracy. “Perhaps there was only one assassin, but he did not act alone,” Walton said, continuing the message from the Kennedys. There were others behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun. J. Edgar Hoover had told both Bobby and Jackie that Oswald was a Communist agent. But despite the alleged assassin’s well-publicized defection to the Soviet Union and his attention-grabbing stunts on behalf of Fidel Castro, the Kennedys made it clear that they did not believe he was acting on foreign orders. They were convinced that JFK was the victim of U.S. opponents. And, Walton told Bolshakov, “Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime.”

  Despite this provocative remark, the Kennedy courier apparently did not mean to implicate President Johnson in the crime. But he shared with Bolshakov the Kennedys’ true scornful feelings about JFK’s successor. Johnson was “a clever timeserver” who would be “incapable of realizing Kennedy’s unfinished plans.” More pro-business than JFK, Johnson was certain to stock his administration with a legion of corporate representatives. The one hope for peaceful relations between the two countries was Robert McNamara. Wa
lton described the defense secretary as “completely sharing the views of President Kennedy on matters of war and peace.”

  Walton then discussed Bobby’s political future. He said he planned to stay on as attorney general through 1964, and then he planned to run for governor of Massachusetts, an idea Kennedy had already floated in the press. He would use this office as a political base for an eventual race for the presidency. If he succeeded in returning to the White House, he would resume his brother’s quest for détente with the Soviet Union. Some Russians he spoke with, added Walton, regarded Bobby as more of a hard-liner toward Moscow than President Kennedy. “This is untrue,” Walton assured Bolshakov. The younger brother might have a tougher shell than JFK had, Walton acknowledged. But “Robert agreed completely with his brother and, more important, actively sought to bring John F. Kennedy’s ideas to fruition.”

  The remarkable meeting between Walton and Bolshakov was first recounted in One Hell of a Gamble, a widely praised 1997 book about the Cuban Missile Crisis by Timothy Naftali, a Yale scholar at the time and now director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and Aleksandr Fursenko, chairman of the history department at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Though the book itself—which was based on secret documents from a variety of Soviet agencies and government bodies, including the KGB and Politburo—attracted wide coverage in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Nation, none of these reviews saw fit to highlight Walton’s extraordinary mission on behalf of the Kennedys, certainly one of the book’s more eye-popping disclosures.

  Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, a dean of Washington journalism, did zero in on the book’s account of the Moscow mission in his 2000 biography of Robert Kennedy, wagging his finger at Kennedy for this “irresponsible and potentially mischievous act of backdoor diplomacy.” But Thomas completely ignored the most provocative part of Kennedy’s communication—his views on the assassination—and focused solely on Bobby’s anti-Johnson sentiments and political ambitions. Bobby’s astonishing secret message to Moscow, one of the most revealing glimpses we have from those days of his thinking about the assassination, would disappear down the media hole as soon as it was made public.