The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (45 page)

On Monday, November 18, the last week of the trial to deport Carlos Marcello for good began. Bobby was monitoring it closely. Marcello had spent that weekend at Churchill Farms closeted with Lee Harvey Oswald’s associate and Cuban exile activist David Ferrie.
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Ostensibly, the two were discussing defense strategy for Marcello’s final week in federal court. Strangely, Marcello’s attorneys were not present. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby continued to make calls all over the United States — to Mafia and Teamsters Union henchmen such as Barney Baker (recently released from federal prison), Lenny Patrick, Irwin S. Weiner (of the Chicago Outfit), Alex Gruber, and others who had “worked closely” with Johnny Rosselli.
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During the weekend of November 17—18, Rosselli flew to Phoenix. He booked the flight in his own name, something unusual for him. He normally bought his ticket in cash and boarded the plane at the last minute, which kept his name off flight manifests. He also booked reservations in his name at the Phoenix resort known as Mountain Shadows for himself and his rich friend Maury Friedman. They were accompanied by two women, Dina Stephens and Arlene Miller, whom the FBI described as call girls (another uncharacteristic practice for Rosselli, who habitually traveled solo). The FBI also learned that Rosselli was on his way to Washington to see a congressman.
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All these shreds of fleece left on FBI hedges suggest that Rosselli was developing an alibi. The two couples arrived in Phoenix on November 16 and were immediately tailed by four FBI agents. They described in detail the sartorial getup of Rosselli — now famous in FBI circles as the Mafia’s glass of fashion and mold of form: “blue pants, light blue shirt, black sweater, black shoes, dark glasses.”

Although the hotel operator at Mountain Shadows had been instructed by the FBI to take note of all incoming or outgoing calls, she only took down one: a call to Los Angeles November 17 at 3:05 A.M. On November 18, Rosselli, apparently canceling his plans to go to Washington, left instead for Las Vegas, where he could make calls and conduct meetings free from FBI surveillance. He checked into a hotel he had helped develop, the New Frontier.

Back in Washington the president moved through his appointments. On Tuesday, November 19, William Mahoney, United States ambassador to Ghana and former Kennedy campaign leader in Arizona, dropped by to see the president. Mahoney had been appointed to handle the vagaries — if this were possible — of Ghana’s nonaligned leader, Kwame Nkrumah, a task of particular interest to Kennedy since he had authorized over $150 million in loans and loan guarantees to build Ghana’s Volta Dam. The conversation soon turned to the president’s dramatic statement on civil rights, which had drawn singular acclaim in black Africa. Kennedy expressed worry over what effect his position on civil rights would have on his reelection prospects. He got up from his rocking chair to show Mahoney poll results from swing precincts in Iowa, where white voters had now turned against him. He asked Mahoney to come home for the 1964 campaign against the probable Republican nominee, Arizona senator Barry M. Goldwater. The president then mentioned another initiative he was contemplating — the recognition of Red China. He told the ambassador that Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman was raising a trial balloon of sorts in a speech about China to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. As they parted, Kennedy mentioned his upcoming trip to Texas. Jackie was accompanying him, he told Mahoney. “And she’s going all the way with me in ’64,” he added with a smile.

To 1960 campaign veterans like Mahoney, news that Jackie Kennedy was rallying to her husband’s political side was welcome. It suggested that a reconciliation between the two had occurred. Jack’s idea to send Jackie on a cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in October to take her mind off the loss of their child had worked. She had returned, according to Ben Bradlee, “with stars in her eyes — Greek stars.” Jack asked her to join him on a political swing through Texas. “Sure I will, Jack,” she had said. “I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want.” Flipping open her appointment book, she wrote “Texas” across November 21, 22, and 23.
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That same Tuesday, November 19, the attorney general called Kenny O’Donnell to see if he could squeeze CIA deputy director Richard Helms into the president’s schedule. The CIA was claiming that it had hard evidence of Castro’s attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela. A half hour later, Helms and Bobby Kennedy walked into the Oval Office carrying a submachine gun. On the stock of the gun, which had been recovered from an arms cache in Venezuela, was the official seal of Cuba. Helms apologized for bringing such a “mean-looking weapon” into the president’s office. “Yes, it gives me a feeling of confidence,” was Jack’s’s sarcastic reply.
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At the time, the president was considering the prospect of a modus vivendi with Castro, and a key condition from the American standpoint was the cessation of all subversive Cuban activities in Latin America. Helms’s visit was meant to torpedo any notion of entente. Moreover, within days of a discussion designed to start a negotiated solution between Ambassador William Attwood and the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, the CIA’s operational wing (DDP) launched a new operation to murder Castro.

Rolando Cubela Secades, a hero of the Castro revolution and an official in the Castro regime, told CIA officers in Brazil in September 1963 that he could perform “an inside job” on Castro’s life. His conditions were that the Americans supply the weapons and that he meet personally with Robert Kennedy. Cubela’s wide-open approach and his apparent freedom to travel raised suspicions that he was operating under orders from Castro. Furthermore, Cubela was an alcoholic, usually drunk by nine and verbally incontinent thereafter. Nevertheless, Helms authorized a meeting between his deputy Desmond Fitzgerald, masquerading as Robert Kennedy’s “personal representative,” and Cubela to take place in Paris at the end of October. Helms later conceded in testimony before the Church Committee that he had never sought or received the attorney general’s approval, much less that of his own director.
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It was an extraordinary stretch for a career spymaster. Cubela (code-named AMLASH) and Fitzgerald met — with CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez doing the translating — on October 29. They discussed Cubela’s plan to kill Castro. Fitzgerald promised to supply the arms. They arranged for a second meeting on November 22.
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In an interview conducted in Havana in May 1997, National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon allowed that Cubela may have been a Castro plant.
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At the very time the Kennedy administration was considering normalizing relations with the Castro regime, certain CIA officials were assiduously undermining that possibility. In their incompetence, they had allowed themselves to be set up by Castro, a man whom they regarded as a Latin hysteric.

President Kennedy was meanwhile using a back channel to communicate with Castro. Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
had encouraged Kennedy to have a conversation with the French journalist Jean Daniel before Daniel’s trip to Havana. The two sat down in late afternoon of October 24. It was evident from the start that the president wanted to use Daniel as a conduit to Castro. Kennedy told Daniel that he “understood the Cubans. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra. . . . I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.” The problem, Kennedy said, was that Castro had betrayed his promises and agreed to become “a Soviet agent in Latin America.” This the United States would not accept, nor his intrusion into the affairs of other countries. Kennedy encouraged Daniel to give him a report on his return from Cuba. “Castro’s reactions interest me.”
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Three weeks later Daniel met with Castro, talking until four in the morning in Daniel’s Havana hotel room. Daniel later described Castro as listening with “devouring and passionate interest,” stroking his beard, “making me the target of a thousand malicious sparks cast by his deep-sunk lively eyes.” He made Daniel repeat three times Kennedy’s indictment of Batista and then labeled Kennedy “a realist” and “an intimate enemy.” “Personally, I consider him to be responsible for everything,” Castro continued, “but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months.”

The day before the president was to leave for Texas, two police officers in downtown Dallas drove though Dealey Plaza on patrol. They noticed several men standing behind a wooden fence on a grassy knoll on one side of the plaza, engaged in what looked to be “target practice” with rifles. When the officers approached the men, they hastened away. The Dallas police gave the officers’ report to the FBI, which, in turn, issued its own report of the incident on November 26, 1963. The FBI report was never part of the Warren Commission’s investigation. It resurfaced as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request in 1978.
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On Wednesday evening, November 20, there was the annual judiciary reception in the East Room, and afterward a birthday party for Bobby, his thirty-eighth, at Hickory Hill. Earlier that day, staff members at Justice had thrown a party for their boss and had given him a joke gift — a Monopoly board game with spaces altered to read with things like “Land on White House.” Kennedy was clearly anxious to move on and had even begun to refer to his tenure as attorney general in the past tense.
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The surprise party was “miserable,” in the words of his deputy John Douglas. Bobby was in a bad mood. He stood up on his desk and delivered a sarcastic toast to himself for having assured the president’s reelection with all of his “popular actions” — civil rights, wiretapping, Hoffa.

After the reception, Bobby went upstairs to talk to Jackie. Jack joined them. They chatted briefly about the trip to Texas before Ethel came up to remind him of his own party that evening at Hickory Hill. Perhaps because Jackie was there, Bobby did not convey his concern to Jack about the letter Byron Skelton had sent urging him to convince the president to avoid Dallas. The fact that Bobby immediately raised this subject with Kenny O’Donnell at the birthday party at Hickory Hill later that evening reveals that it was very much on his mind. O’Donnell replied that showing the letter to the president would have been “a waste of time.”
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Kennedy would never go to Texas and skip Dallas.

On Thursday morning, November 21, the president woke up alone in his bed. After showering, he strapped on his back brace with valet George Thomas’s help, dressed himself, and had Thomas tie his shoes, the left one with a quarter-inch lift to ease the anatomic seesaw in his lower back. Despite the cortisone he took orally each day and the intermittent injections of uppers, he was in the best shape of his beleaguered life. The daily regimen of swimming and stretching had had salutary effect. After breakfast, he walked over to the Oval Office to do some last-minute paperwork. The president summoned Sorensen for some tweaking of the Texas speeches.

Kennedy was not going to let up in his attack on the right and its equation of peacemaking with treason. The speech at the Dallas Trade Mart was going to take on the right wing for “expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility . . . [finding] vituperation as good as victory and peace as a sign of weakness.” The president read it over as Sorensen waited. At points, the text seemed especially sharp: “We cannot hope that everyone, to use a phrase from a decade ago, will ”talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.” Finished reading it, Kennedy said, “Good,” then asked Sorensen to come up with a joke or two. Reading an advance copy of the speech the following morning, Robert MacNeil of NBC News “felt a warm surge of the intellectual power and rational force that he represented. I felt warmed by it and was looking forward to the moment when he would release his barrage on the citizenry of Dallas.”
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Saying good-bye to those on his staff who were staying behind, Jack walked out to the helicopter pad with his son. Together they boarded a brown, double-rotored army helicopter, one of the three that would airlift the White House party to Andrews Air Force Base. It drizzled as they waited for Jackie to board. At Andrews, the Kennedys boarded Air Force One, leaving John-John, crying, in the hands of a Secret Service agent. As William Manchester and others later reported, Kennedy’s mood was upbeat. Jackie was along and, as she busied herself in one of the forward cabins, O’Donnell conferred with the president alone about some details concerning the trip. O’Donnell would later recount that he was “a little surprised” when Kennedy suddenly brought up the subject of assassination. “If anybody really wanted to shoot the president,” Kennedy remarked to O’Donnell, “it was not a very difficult job — all one had to do was get on a high building someday with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt.”
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November 22, 1963

Washington, D. C.; Dallas; and Havana

T
he schedule on November 22 called for a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce in Fort Worth, and then it was on to Dallas. It was raining. The president got up before Jackie, shaved, and scanned the
Dallas Morning News
. On the front page were stories about the rift between Connally and Yarborough as well as the prediction of former vice president Nixon that LBJ would be dropped from the ticket in 1964. Inside the first section was a black-bordered, full-page ad taken out by “The American Fact-Finding Committee” that accused the Kennedy administration of selling out to the communists. Jack told Dave Powers to make sure the paper wasn’t around when Jackie got up. After breakfast, however, he must have had second thoughts, for he showed her the paper. As she read the ad, he observed, “We’re entering nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
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He walked over to where she was sitting, “Last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” he continued. “I mean it — the rain and the night and we were all getting jostled.”
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