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

  Bolshakov immediately delivered a report on what Walton told him to his superiors at the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. It undoubtedly added to the gloom at the Kremlin, where the Kennedy assassination was already viewed as a backlash by hard-line elements in the U.S. national security establishment against JFK’s bid for rapprochement with the Soviets. When Khrushchev heard about Kennedy’s death, he had broken down and wept. “He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze,” a Soviet official told Pierre Salinger.

  Robert Kennedy’s post-Dallas, back-channel message to Moscow is a stunning historical footnote. The man who bared his soul to the Soviets that week is, after all, the same man who had served as counsel for the notorious red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. The man who led the administration’s relentless drive to overthrow Fidel Castro and stop the spread of Communism in Latin America. The man so enthralled by the adventures of James Bond, the supremely elegant and implacable foil of Soviet skullduggery, that he wrote fan letters to Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.

  Robert Kennedy’s views of the Soviet threat had, like his brother’s, become more complex with time and experience. But the Soviet Union was still his country’s most feared enemy, with whom his brother had parried and thrusted all over the world, from Berlin to Cuba to Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the ground beneath his feet had given way for Bobby Kennedy on November 22. The world was, in an instant, deeply different. The enemy lines no longer seemed so certain that week. Suddenly the attorney general of the United States regarded the government of our leading enemy as less alien than our own. He was eager to share his darkest suspicions with Moscow, taking pains to hide this extraordinary communication from the U.S. embassy there. What is even more remarkable than the fact that Kennedy engaged in an “irresponsible act of backdoor diplomacy” is the fact that such an intensely patriotic man, someone who was viscerally anticommunist, felt driven to do so.

  There is no other conclusion to reach. In the days following his brother’s bloody ouster, Robert Kennedy placed more trust in the Soviet government than the one he served.

  Why did Kennedy feel so estranged from his own government that he was willing to take such an extreme step? To understand his conspiratorial frame of mind in the days after Dallas, we must understand the inner workings and tensions of the Kennedy administration in the years leading to the assassination. John F. Kennedy’s body was not long in the ground when his administration began to be enshrouded in the gauzy myths of Camelot. Years later these myths would be shredded by the counterlegend of a decadent monarch, a sexually frenzied and heavily medicated leader whose reckless personal behavior put his nation at risk. Neither of these versions conveys the essential truth of the Kennedy administration. Missing from the vast body of literature on the Kennedy years—including the sentimental memoirs, revisionist exposés, and standard texts—is a sense of the deep tumult at the heart of the administration. The Kennedy government was at war with itself.

  2

  1961

  John Kennedy was haunted by the specter of cataclysmic war. An avid reader of history from boyhood on, he was acutely aware of how the Great War had been stumbled into by the great powers, decimating the flower of Europe’s youth and leaving behind scarring images of muddy, blood-soaked trenches and the dead stillness of poisoned air. “All war is stupid,” he had written home from the Pacific in 1943, while fighting the next war, the one that World War I—the war to end all wars—had led to. The death of his older brother, Joe, in a fiery aerial explosion over the English Channel during a suicidal mission, brought home the raw misery of it all. “He was very close to my brother Joe, and it was a devastating loss to him personally, and he saw the enormous impact that it had on my father,” Ted Kennedy told me. “He was a very different person when he came back from the war. I think this burned inside of him.”

  But it was the Cold War, with its constant threat of instant annihilation, that confirmed the ultimate absurdity of war. Kennedy came to recognize that war in the nuclear age was unthinkable. “I think that the principal reason Kennedy ran for the presidency was he thought the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of massive retaliation and all of that was heading the country toward nuclear war,” said Theodore Sorensen, contemplating his days with JFK years later in the offices of his Manhattan law firm. “He felt the policy of massive retaliation—in which we supposedly kept the peace by saying if you step one foot over the line in West Berlin or somewhere else, we will respond by annihilating you with nuclear weapons—he felt that was mad. He also felt it was a policy that had no credibility and would not prevent Soviet pressures or incursions in one place or another.”

  But John Kennedy did not run for the White House in 1960 against the scowling anticommunist Richard Nixon as a peace candidate. He was too politically shrewd for that. Kennedy had seen the owlish, high-minded Adlai Stevenson, darling of the Democratic Party’s liberal establishment, soundly defeated twice by Republican war hero Dwight Eisenhower. From the McCarthy era on, flag-waving Republican candidates had beaten their Democratic opponents by portraying them as soft and effete defeatists, no match for our brutal and implacable enemies. (It was a winning political formula that Republicans would use throughout the Cold War and then successfully retool, at least for a time, with the “war on terror.”) John Kennedy, however, was no Adlai Stevenson. The party’s liberal wing—regally presided over by the sainted widow of the Democrats’ gloried past, Eleanor Roosevelt—hated him for it, scorning Kennedy as slick and vague—“a gutless wonder,” in Harry Truman’s bitter formulation. Mrs. Roosevelt wondered, with reason, how the author of Profiles in Courage, a book extolling political leaders who put principle ahead of expediency, could have avoided taking a stand against McCarthyism, the greatest threat to American democracy of the day. If only the glamorous young senator “had a little less profile and a little more courage,” she tartly remarked.

  But the Kennedy family had no interest in being beautiful losers like Stevenson, whose inevitable defeats were embraced by liberals as confirmation of their own natural superiority. Winning was always the goal with the Kennedys, and they knew how to do it. The Kennedy brothers might have been raised in Brahmin comfort and been educated at the most elite New England schools, but when it came to the brawling world of politics, they were not that far removed from the Irish saloons of their forefathers.

  In his 1960 presidential race, John Kennedy faced the most cunning and dirty politician on postwar America’s national stage, Richard Nixon. JFK beat him by playing every bit as dirty—and more important, by grabbing the war club that Republicans like Nixon used to beat Democratic contenders, and using it against “Tricky Dick” instead. Kennedy stunned Nixon by thumping his chest louder than his opponent on the nuclear arms race and on Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government was dramatically breaking away from U.S. dominion. Prodded by his Georgetown friend Joseph Alsop, a syndicated newspaper columnist with close ties to the CIA, JFK sold voters on the alarming idea that we were falling dangerously behind the Soviets in the nuclear arms race. The “missile gap” turned out to be a myth, the creation of Air Force intelligence analysts and credulous newsmen, as Kennedy would be informed by a Pentagon arms expert soon after moving into the White House. But during the campaign, the missile gap hue and cry succeeded in putting Nixon on the defensive, as did Kennedy’s clarion call to support Cuban “freedom fighters” in their crusade to take back the island from Castro.

  Nixon felt especially flummoxed by Kennedy’s call for liberating Cuba, since the vice president was plotting to do just that, along with the CIA and a band of Cuban émigrés. Because he was obligated not to reveal the top-secret plan, Nixon was tongue-tied during the fourth and final presidential debate when Kennedy called for Cuba’s liberation. “I had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand and attack Kennedy’s advocacy of open intervention in Cuba,” Nixon wrote in his 1978 memoirs. “I shocked and disappointed many of my own supp
orters…. In that debate, Kennedy conveyed the image—to 60 million people—that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.” Nixon, a master of the black arts of electoral politics, had finally met his match.

  Kennedy edged out Nixon by a whisper of a margin on Election Day, but liberal JFK supporters like John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist who had been Kennedy’s tutor at Harvard and esteemed advisor in the campaign, worried about the costs of victory, especially JFK’s promise to help free Cuba. Journalists and historians have made much of the Kennedy family’s alleged deal with Chicago mobsters to deliver votes in their key city. But no pact would prove more decisive, or more costly to Kennedy, than the one he made with Vulcan, god of fire and metal. By invoking the gods of weapons and war, Kennedy succeeded in banishing the Democrats’ image of Stevensonian weakness and replacing it with a vigorous new muscularity. But the champions of aggressive foreign policy who thrilled to Kennedy’s militaristic rhetoric now expected the new president to deliver. As Kennedy prepared to take office, they eagerly awaited a massive U.S. arms buildup and a bold effort to roll back communism in Cuba.

  If the new president was committed to expanding America’s nuclear arsenal, he was even more determined never to use it. This seemingly contradictory position was vividly displayed in Kennedy’s ringing inaugural address. The speech revealed a man with “one foot in the Cold War, and one foot in a new world he saw coming,” as Kennedy advisor Harris Wofford described the new president. With its double-edged message of bellicose vigilance and pacific idealism, the speech appealed to a broad political spectrum. While Kennedy vowed the nation would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” he also dispensed with the usual Soviet-bashing rhetoric and invited our enemy to join us in a new “quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.” Likewise, he offered a post-colonial vision to the Third World, and Latin America in particular, where the United States would help “in casting off the chains of poverty” in an “alliance for progress”—but immediately followed this with a veiled warning to those revolutionary groups in the region who sought to follow Castro’s path, vowing to “oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.”

  The inaugural was an inspired work of oratory, whose soaring rhetoric succeeded in making its aggressive interventionism as well as its ambitious humanitarianism seem of a whole. Calling on powers both dark and light in our nature, it was cheered by everyone from Norman Thomas on the left to Barry Goldwater on the right. Only a speech this deftly written could have thrilled both the pacifist poet Robert Lowell, who had served prison time during World War II as a conscientious objector, and one of that war’s most ferocious lions, Admiral Arleigh Burke. After Kennedy’s speech, Lowell was moved to declare his joy “that at long last the Goths have left the White House.” Old “31-Knot” Burke—President Eisenhower’s crusty, saber-rattling chief of naval operations and certainly a man Lowell would have considered one of those “Goths”—was no less enthused. “I was there [at the inauguration] along with the other [Joint] Chiefs [of Staff], and I have never heard a better speech,” Burke later recalled. “I thought, ‘This is a magnificent speech. It’s the best statement of the policies in which I believe that I have ever heard.’…I was extremely proud on that day.”

  As Kennedy neared his trumpet blast of a conclusion that inaugural day—hatless and coatless in the biting, bright winter air, warmed only by the passion of his soon to be famous words (“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you…”)—he took a sweeping part of the nation “with him through a membrane in time, entering the next decade, and a new era,” in author Thurston Clarke’s words. Electrified by the bold poetry of JFK’s vision that day, many more Americans were willing to follow him through that membrane into the future than had voted for him in November.

  Looking back, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s essential collaborator, saw nothing contradictory about the inaugural address. It embodied, he said, Kennedy’s fundamental philosophy of peace through strength. “The line in the inaugural address that is the most important is not ‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ It’s ‘For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.’ That was the Kennedy policy in a nutshell. He wasn’t for unilateral disarmament—on the contrary, he wanted to build an overwhelming nuclear advantage, so we’d never have to use them, the Soviets would never dare challenge us.”

  IT’S ONE THING TO write a speech that artfully weaves together opposing views and unites opposing constituencies in a burst of applause. It’s another to govern consistently based on such a delicately balanced philosophy. The world of power has a way of reducing subtleties and complexities to their lowest common denominator. Ted Sorensen’s experience in the first year of the Kennedy White House is revealing in this regard.

  Sorensen was more than just John Kennedy’s speechwriter—he was one of the better angels of his nature. He helped Kennedy stay in touch with the liberal conscience that underlay the president’s carefully manufactured political enterprise. He knew how to tap into the soaring vision in JFK and how to give it wing in Kennedy’s speeches. Hired at the age of twenty-five to be a writer and advisor for Kennedy as the rising politician entered the Senate in 1953, Sorensen quickly learned how to crawl inside his employer and channel his thoughts. “Ted Sorensen is getting to be a mirror image of me, reflecting even what I am thinking,” Kennedy told his old Navy crony Paul “Red” Fay. During the decade they spent together, Sorensen would later say, John F. Kennedy “was the only human being who mattered to me.” Sorensen’s first marriage would become a victim of his devotion to Kennedy. He separated from his wife Camellia during the 1960 presidential campaign and divorced her in July 1963 after fourteen years of marriage.

  Still bitter from his loss, Nixon lashed into the two men’s eloquent political partnership in an interview with Redbook magazine in June 1962, charging Kennedy was a “puppet who echoed his speechmaker” during the 1960 campaign. “It’s easier for Kennedy to get up and read Sorensen’s speeches, but I don’t think it’s responsible unless he believes it deeply himself.”

  Jackie Kennedy—forced to yield much of her husband to Sorensen, especially during the 1960 race—had a better grasp of the dynamic between JFK and the man nearly a decade his junior. Far from a puppet master, the devoted Sorensen was “a little boy in so many ways” who “almost puffs himself up when he talks to Jack,” Jackie told a reporter during the campaign with ill-concealed spite. Nixon himself was more generous in his appraisal of Sorensen, telling Redbook that Sorensen “has the rare gift of being an intellectual who can completely sublimate his style to another intellectual”—a kind of “passionate self-effacement,” in the apt description of Thurston Clarke, who carefully analyzed the working relationship between the two men in his 2004 study of the JFK inaugural, Ask Not.

  Right-wing opponents of President Kennedy, searching for vulnerabilities in his administration during its first year, sensed something weak and exposed in Kennedy’s unique relationship with Sorensen. The speechwriter was not like the rough-and-tumble Irish mafia political operators surrounding Kennedy. The studious young aide, with his slicked down hair and horn-rim glasses, represented JFK’s more intellectual and idealistic side. More important, while Kennedy had created a winning political persona as the World War II hero of PT-109 fame, Sorensen embodied the antiwar sentiments that JFK’s enemies suspected were really in command of the new presidency despite its tough rhetoric. To these conservative critics, there was something weak and feminine about the team of boyishly handsome, tousled-haired young men who had taken over the government from the reliable old general who had commanded it before them. And in the fall of 1961, these critics zeroed in on Sorensen, the elegant voice of the administration, as the symbol of its wea
kness.

  Unlike Kennedy and many of his other top men, Ted Sorensen had never gone to war and never even served in the military. He had registered in 1948 as a conscientious objector and later escaped service in the Korean War as a father. “I was not against service, I was against killing,” Sorensen, told me years later. “I’m not sure that pure pacifists would describe me as a pacifist. I was willing to risk my life [in a noncombatant role]. I believed and still do that there is such a thing as just wars. I think ridding the world of Hitler was justified.”

  Born into a Unitarian household in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sorensen was raised to view war with a deeply skeptical eye. His father, a crusading attorney and progressive politician named C.A. Sorensen, had sailed on Henry Ford’s Peace Ship to Stockholm in 1916, as part of the automobile pioneer’s desperate attempt to head off World War I by convening a European peace conference. The attorney, who was also counsel to the women’s suffrage movement, met his Russian Jewish wife, Annis Chaikin, when he represented the ardent young feminist against charges of radicalism and pacifism during World War I. Their son Ted would meet his first wife, Camellia, a Quaker who shared the Sorensen family’s antiwar philosophy, when she came to attend services at their Unitarian church, since there was no Friends Meeting House in Lincoln.

  Knowing Ted Sorensen’s background as a Unitarian and conscientious objector, President Kennedy was careful to keep him out of high-tension meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, like one that took place in the White House during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I’m sure that would have provoked them further,” said Sorensen, chuckling today at the polarities JFK had to manage within his administration. “I don’t think they ever regarded me as one of their strongest advocates,” the former CO drily added.