The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [397]
This memo did not mention the word “assassination,” but it was as explicit an admission of the plots as any official was likely to make. Anyone would have asked just what Giancana and his colleagues were doing. If the matter had been unknown to the attorney general, he most likely would have thunderously cried out against the CIA for employing the very figures that the Justice Department was trying determinedly to indict and put in prison. Instead, Bobby wrote in a margin his instruction to the FBI liaison, Courtney Evans: “Courtney, I hope this will be followed up vigorously.”
Bobby was usually assumed to be speaking with the authority and the voice of the president. It remains unknown to what extent Kennedy approved many of his brother’s specific actions. What was indisputable, however, was that there was hardly a crucial issue in the administration in which Bobby’s hand did not appear. “It must be understood that the president wanted his brother involved in almost every important action,” Feldman asserted. “Those who say that Bobby was spread thin have to realize that he was merely doing what his brother wanted him to do.”
Bobby’s scribbled note may have been an attempt to cover himself. He was the crucial player in the actions against Cuba, and he could scarcely have been unaware that Castro’s possible death was an integral part of these plans. What was happening in the Kennedy administration was that more and more of the important actions of government were being kept purposely obscure, the connection between the word and the deed so smudged that no one could ever tell definitively who had given what order, and who had been deputized to carry it out.
In March 1962, Lansdale, Bobby, and a few others met with the president at the White House to discuss Operation Mongoose. General Lemnitzer mentioned “contingency plans” for the invasion of Cuba. The military would create “plausible pretexts … either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.” For months Bobby had been talking of creating an orchestrated event to justify an American assault on Communist Cuba. This was just what the Nazis had done before their invasion of Poland, and such an action was the antithesis of what democratic leadership was supposed to represent. Yet apparently nobody in that room condemned the idea on moral grounds. The president, for his part, bluntly told his top general that those forces might be needed in Berlin and he should not be contemplating sending them into Cuba.
Bobby spoke later. There are times when covert information is little more than wishful gossip, and Bobby told the group about reports that Castro was so upset at the way things were going in Cuba that he had begun to drink heavily. Bobby talked of Mary Hemingway, whose novelist husband had killed himself eight months before, “and the opportunities offered by the ‘shrine’ to Hemingway.” Ernest Hemingway’s beloved house in Havana was being turned into a museum, and supposedly Castro went there on occasion. Lansdale already knew about this possibility:
I commented that this was a conversation Ed Murrow had had with Mary Hemingway, that we had similar reports from other sources, and that this was worth assessing firmly and pursuing vigorously. If there are grounds for action, CIA had some invaluable assets which might well be committed for such an effort. McCone asked if his operational people were aware of this. I told him that we had discussed this, that they agreed the subject was worth vigorous development, and that we were in agreement that the matter was so delicate and sensitive that it shouldn’t be surfaced to the Special Group