The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [345]
When a man like this proffered an olive branch, either his arm was trembling in weakness or he held a pistol behind his back. The Soviets, however, prided themselves on not personalizing politics, and they saw Bobby as a representative of his class and time who was selling the latest American line. They instructed Bolshakov to meet with Bobby again, and rather than respond to the specific initiatives to offer him only the bland proclamations that were the tedious essence of their propaganda. He was to tell Bobby that on the crucial issue of Berlin, there would be no compromise: the Western powers would have to accept the fact that the Soviet Union was going to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, meaning in effect that West Berlin would be locked up within a sovereign state.
Bobby’s worst mistake was to say that Cuba was a “dead issue.” It was a dead issue to his brother around the White House; his aides had learned that the Bay of Pigs was “almost a taboo subject.” That was the Kennedy pattern, to move on and away from anything unpleasant or negative. But if the Soviets might risk placing nuclear missiles on the island, as Bobby had written his brother after the Bay of Pigs, then Cuba was one of the most crucial issues of all to be discussed at the summit. It was irresponsible and dangerous to exclude the Cuban issue primarily because it was painful, immediate, and raw. Bolshakov’s bosses told him that they did not “understand what Robert Kennedy had in mind when he said that Cuba was a dead issue.” He was told to tell Bobby “if by that he meant that the United States will henceforth desist from aggressive actions and from interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba, then, without question, the Soviet Union welcomes this decision.”
Khrushchev had studied under the toughest of masters in his apprenticeship to power. As a Ukrainian miner, he had fought in the Russian Revolution when the armed might of the Soviets won the day. In World War II, it was neither diplomacy nor grand strategy that defeated Hitler, but a generation of Russian manhood throwing itself forward against Hitler’s lines. Khrushchev was righteously proud of the Soviet sacrifices, and his ideological suspicions of men like the Kennedys were only enhanced by a Russian mistrust of outsiders. Bobby’s meetings with Bolshakov may have reinforced Khrushchev’s conviction that this new young president was a man of weakness, not strength, a man who could be pushed and bullied and played.
It was one of those malevolent New England nights when the wind rattled the most secure shutters and the rain slashed down hard enough to keep all but the intrepid and foolish indoors. Inside the big house at Hyannis Port, Joe’s mood was as foul as the weather. He had become terribly conscious of his age, and worried that he was being shunted aside.
“Goddamn it!” the old man cursed in the half-light to Frank Saunders, the new chauffeur. “He’s the president of the United States! You’d think he could at least order somebody to make a telephone call and tell his family what goddamn time he’ll be home—wouldn’t you, Frank—goddamn it!”
Kennedy was coming home to Hyannis Port for the first time since he had taken office, to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and relax a bit before flying to Europe and the summit. Joe had never waited for anybody and was damned if he was going to begin now at the age of seventy-two for a son who did not value his counsel the way he had before he entered the White House. He had gone to the considerable trouble of placing nude and seminude pinups on the wall of Kennedy’s room, the bathroom, his pillow, and dresser, and his son wasn’t even here yet to see his efforts.
“The weather be damned!” Joe fumed in a manic rage inexplicable to the chauffeur. “He’s the president. I came all the way back here from France just to see him.”
The only reply was the rain beating in staccato rhythms against the old house.