The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [439]
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and his men had looked at the larger picture and contemplated the moral dimensions of their decisions. They were practical men of power, and they had discussed ends and means because they knew that they belonged at the center of their discussion. Now, however, such discussions had been stilled. No one in these meetings asked what would be left of international law and the president’s pledge not to invade if the United States attacked Cuba. No one asked about the cost to American democracy of running a secret war about which the citizens knew nothing. Nor did they ask, if Kennedy was not going to authorize an invasion, then what was the point of this endless, dangerous harassment of a neighboring state? If you reached out with a right hand proffered in peace and in your left hand cradled a knife, your neighbor was unlikely to come close enough to grasp your hand.
As Bobby looked out on the haunted faces of the freed prisoners, his belief in their cause grew even deeper. Many of these brigade veterans became his friends. He listened to their tales, and each sad recollection only reinforced his feelings. “He felt a very acute responsibility for the guys in the brigade,” recalled John Nolan, then a young lawyer helping with the negotiations to free the brigade. “He was their best friend in a way that continued for all of his life. He would do anything reasonable for any of the leaders particularly, not all of which turned out well.”
Bobby carried their cause to the highest counsels of government. No one in the administration was more militant, more relentlessly aggressive, than the attorney general. On April 3, 1963, Bobby called not for small covert actions but for the dispersal of a five-hundred-man raiding party into Cuba. In mid-April, at a meeting of the NSC’s Cuba Standing Group, Bobby proposed three studies. He wanted to look into “contingencies such as the death of Castro or the shooting down of a U-2.” He sought to look at a possible “program with the objective of overthrowing Castro in eighteen months” and a “program to cause as much trouble as we can for Communist Cuba during the next eighteen months.” Bobby did not propose studying the possibility of trying to woo Castro away from Moscow or exploring the potential benefits of decreasing covert operations. In this meeting he did not talk openly about assassination, but he and his colleagues often talked about Castro’s death as part of their contingency planning.
As Bobby pushed for fierce action against Castro’s Cuba, he knew a great deal about the possibilities of exploring some kind of meaningful dialogue with Castro. Almost every week in the early months of 1963, under Bobby’s direction, James Donovan, a former top OSS official and seasoned negotiator, along with a second negotiator, the attorney John Nolan, flew to Cuba to meet with Castro. Ostensibly, their reason for being there was to achieve the release of twenty or so other prisoners, and they had been warned not to push any diplomatic initiatives. But Donovan was almost as garrulous as the Cuban dictator, and there were few limits on their endless discussions. Castro took his guests to the Cuban World Series and to the Bay of Pigs, reliving his victory and talking endless hours with the two Americans. Donovan and Nolan were not naive, impressionable men, but they realized immediately that they were not in the presence of the narrow ideologue of American stereotype, but a subtle, complicated man conversant with the world.
Donovan and Nolan had struck up a lively rapport with Castro, and they returned each week full of anecdotes and insight. Bobby, however, had no interest in learning details about the man whom