The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [295]
One of the reasons Jack was so leery of academics and liberals in politics was that when they attempted to engage in what they thought was realpolitik, they were playing with weapons that often blew up in their own faces, and those of their friends, rather than hurting their enemies. When Goodwin called Jack at the Carlyle Hotel and learned that he was already asleep, the aide went ahead and issued the press release.
The headline in the New York Times (“Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and Fighters for Freedom”) unsettled American liberals still uncertain about Jack’s bona fides. James Reston, the New York Times columnist, a man of studiously judicious opinions, wrote: “Senator Kennedy made what is probably his worst blunder of the campaign.”
In the fourth debate Jack marked Nixon as an impotent bystander looking on hopelessly as Castro took over Cuba. Nixon said later that for the first time he felt personal animosity toward Jack. He knew that Jack’s remarks and his press release were even more unfair than they seemed to Republican loyalists. Since March, the government had been planning a large-scale covert action against Cuba run by Cuban exiles, an operation that he assumed Jack had learned about in his CIA briefings. Nixon was not only a fervent supporter but a prime mover of the action—an understandable position considering that, if the agency had kept to its original schedule, the action would have taken place a few weeks before the presidential election.
The Eisenhower-Nixon administration that Jack was condemning for its weakness in fighting communism was the first peacetime American administration to mandate assassination as official government policy. Eisenhower had done so, or so it appears, at a National Security Council meeting on August 19, 1960, dealing with the left-wing Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Robert H. Johnson, the official note-taker, recalled that the president turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles “in the full hearing of all those in attendance and [said] something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated … there was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Within a few days, Dulles authorized $100,000 to kill the new president of the Congo. Dulles preferred hiding the sting in euphemism. He told Station Chief Lawrence Devlin that “we wish to give you every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position.”
At the same time this action was going on, a CIA agent was meeting with Johnny Rosselli at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills, asking the mobster’s help in assassinating Fidel Castro. In Miami, Rosselli brought in a group of his associates that included Giancana, the Chicago syndicate leader, and Santos Trafficante, a Florida mob boss, who agreed to use their contacts in Havana to attempt to kill the Cuban leader.
As Jack stood next to Nixon in these historic debates, he appreciated one of the conundrums of democratic government in the modern world. Time and again he had pondered how self-interested democratic man could possibly win against the regimented legions of totalitarian regimes. He knew that in World War II the magnificent qualities of his fellow Americans had come through, but would it happen again in the silent, twilight war against communism?
The Eisenhower who had apparently chosen to authorize murder was a different leader from the greatest general of American’s greatest war, who led 150,000 men into