The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [366]
When the Freedom Riders had finished their journeys, the attorney general took the action that if taken earlier might have made the rides unnecessary. He directed the Justice Department to collect photographs and other evidence of the pervasive racial discrimination in the South. Then he prevailed upon the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue an order prohibiting all such discrimination. Within a year the Department of Justice reported that segregation in interstate public transportation had ended. It had been ended by a group of courageous young people deliberately confronting segregation and by the skill and determination of the attorney general acting under the president’s orders. What had started as dangerous tension between the administration and the civil rights movement had resulted in a successful meeting of popular protest and public power.
As for the South, the region was far more complex in its peoples, and far more diverse in its reactions, than many northerners understood. “But when all has been said, we Montgomerians and Alabamians are left in loneliness and with a grievous problem,” the Montgomery Advertiser editorialized. “The agitators will be tried for defiance of Alabama law. But what of the mobsters who have defied Alabama law? They were not duly quelled and that failure is ours alone. In fact, the mobsters were encouraged.”
Bobby had a heavy schedule dealing with civil rights, organized crime, and other legal matters that traditionally concern the attorney general. He was so obsessed with the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, however, that he became the crucial policymaker in the attempts to end Castro’s regime.
Bobby was there at the crucial meeting on November 3, 1961, setting up “Operation Mongoose,” the multi-agency plan to harass Cuba and destroy the revolutionary government. When the attorney general took notes at the meeting, he named all the other participants, then wrote: “Lansdale (the Ugly American).”
Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, the chief of operations of Operation Mongoose, had served in the early 1950s in the Philippines, where he was involved in anti-insurgency efforts against Communist Huk guerrillas. That experience became the subject of an adulatory fictional portrait in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 best-seller, The Ugly American. In those pages Lansdale became the idealistic Edward Hillandale, an air force colonel who is genuinely concerned about the lives of the people in a Filipino province threatened by Communist guerrillas.
Lansdale had also been immortalized as Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s classic novel The Quiet American. The book is a primer on the dark side of the American character—the deadly innocent who sets out to do good, oblivious to the murderous devices he employs. Lansdale had served in the CIA in Vietnam in the midfifties, when Greene’s novel takes place. In Greene’s novel the protagonist is a CIA agent in Vietnam, a crew-cut, friendly fellow who, with all the best of intentions, “comes blundering in, and people have to die for his mistakes.”
After the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers called on the celebrated counterinsurgency expert to lead where the CIA had faltered, taking over as chief of operations of the renewed efforts against Cuba. The Kennedys had no real trust in the CIA, and Lansdale ran the operation out of the Defense Department, using CIA and other resources. Although Bobby oversaw Operation Mongoose, he did nothing important without the clear direction and knowledge of the president.
Bobby was enamored with the mythic Lansdale, though he was no more The Ugly American than he was The Quiet American. He was, however, a brilliant propagandist, among other things, and he promoted nothing better than himself. In that crucial meeting he was