My good friend Michael and I became interested today in finding an article we had read years ago about John F. Kennedy and his interest in a rapprochment with Fidel Castro.
Michael thought the conservative first generation of Cuban-Americans in Miami might have been behind Kennedy's assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. Other conspiracy theorists, as I recall, lay the responsibility upon Chicago crime syndicates whose privileges in pre-revolutionary Cuba were considerable, and at least in some measure, upon the Dallas police force, who managed to allow Jack Ruby with a loaded pistol into the locale of their transporting Oswald to another location. Despite a host of inquiries going back to the Warren Commission, no such theory has acquired evidence to sustain its plausibility. The consensus appears to be, however unsatisfactory, that Oswald acted alone, convinced that Kennedy was anti-Castro. A terrible irony in the context of my current investigation.
I hadn't thought of Kennedy or his assassination for many years. In searching for that article, in the improbable magazine Cigar Aficionado, and in the reading and thought that followed, I recalled today what a huge and awful experience of loss I felt with so many of the American people. We all remember just where we were that day when we heard the news of Kennedy’s death, and we all spent the next days in a kind of trance, glued to our television screens, still somehow unwilling to believe. I was in a taxi on Amsterdam Avenue in New York.
I imagine it was very like the experience so many felt in learning of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I learned that news on the bedside radio in my room in Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was ill with a staphylococcus infection, and just six years old, so could not absorb the impact. I do remember a nurse running in to turn off my radio, not knowing I had already heard. My mother came later to help me understand that my grandfather — PaPa — had died.
The day Kennedy was elected in November 1960 I was fresh out of college, starting graduate studies for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. I was filled with hope and pride in our capacity to elect him as our president. I went to Washington in the summer of 1963, only months before his assassination, to serve briefly as a desk officer in the State Department.
I realize in retrospect that in losing both Kennedys — John and his brother Robert in their candidacy for president, JFK's tragically short service in the presidency, Robert Kennedy's assassination while trying to overtake Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination in 1968 — and in the terrible death by a third assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., we lost the three finest public leaders of this nation since Franklin Roosevelt.
It was the last time — a half-century ago — I felt unalloyed pride and optimism about American civic leadership. Yes, I’ve been saddened by a few things I’ve since come to know about both Kennedys and even about Martin Luther King. But they still stand in my mind as I knew them then. No one since them has evoked the same admiration. Youthful it may have been — youthful it was — but it remains a passion I remember with pleasure and sorrow. The might-have-beens of history are tantalizing and ephemeral.
I’m happy that I cast my first presidential ballot for John Kennedy. I have voted for every Democratic candidate since then, with a clear realization that the alternative would have been worse. I admire Barack Obama and much of what he has done during his first term. I also believe it is critically important that he be re-elected. I am not confident of that outcome. David Javerbaum wrote an amusing column in last Sunday’s New York Times, saying that we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician. “Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the ‘principle uncertainty principle.’” I would be more sanguine if I did not harbor the fear that we also have a quantum electorate.
I wrote earlier today and offer here in a letter to my friend Michael, the fruits of a day of research, reading and reflection for which I've been thankful.
Dear Michael,
I found the Peter Kornbluth article, which appeared in the Cigar Aficionado issue of September/October 1999. You may click on it below. It makes fascinating reading today. Kennedy indeed was actively contemplating a rapprochement with Castro, and efforts, while interrupted by the assassination of Kennedy, were continued under Johnson, then ended, only to be reinstituted under Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton finally set them aside. There was always much sensitivity about the US being identified as soft on communism, little reference to the Cuban-American community before the 1990s. Lisa Howard, an ABC journalist living in New York, facilitated much of the dialogue, so was probably the "beautiful woman spy" you remembered. Gordon Chase was McGeorge Bundy's assistant.
The only thing specifically about the Kennedy assassination Kornbluth writes, however, was his understanding that Oswald was reputed to have killed Kennedy because he suspected Kennedy of being anti-Castro. Oswald himself was strongly pro-Castro. And indeed there was enough evidence from the public record — Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, Cuban Missile Crisis, all could easily suggest that Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was anti-Castro; regarded as a synonym for anti-communist. Kornbluth makes no suggestion of a conspiracy or involvement of Cuban-Americans.
Here is Kornbluth's wistful conclusion in the fall of 1999:
"To be sure, the 'what ifs' of history are speculative. But the lesson of the aborted Kennedy-Castro initiative toward a rapprochement is clear: at the apex of the Cold War, and the height of tensions between Washington and Havana, diplomacy and dialogue were still possible. Amidst the charged international conflicts of the early 1960s, a U.S. president appeared willing, as one National Security Council memo put it, to 'live with Castro personally and to assist Cuba'--albeit only 'under certain circumstances.' Those circumstances--an end to Cuba's ties to the Soviet Union and support for Third World revolution--now exist due to the extraordinary changes in the international environment over the past decade. And recent events have created considerable opportunity for reevaluating a policy stuck in the time warp of the Cold War."
Alas, the U.S. still has that thoroughly irrational policy, still stuck thirteen years after Kornbluth wrote. It will surely remain so at least through this election cycle and perhaps beyond. After all, it costs Americans very little; it costs Cubans a lot. Since the Kennedys so briefly led us — indeed even then — we have been a warrior nation built upon the profits of war.
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/7300
There is an earlier and even more fascinating - and of course heartbreaking - companion essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the November/December 1998 issue of Cigar Aficionado, "JFK Revisited." He has no comment on the assassination, except to demonstrate the terrible loss of a fine man and a fine president. In his article, Schlesinger writes, "There are those who claim that the Kennedys had an "obsession" with Castro and Cuba. They cite the assassination plots, though they were inherited from the Eisenhower administration, and they cite the Kennedy administration's own Operation Mongoose. But there is no direct evidence that either Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of the assassination plots....
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/6018/p/7
"What is far more likely is that the CIA, like intelligence agencies in other countries, believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents, and invoked the excuse of "plausible deniability" to act as it deemed best without telling those to whom the agency was nominally accountable. As John Le Carre, who should know, has said, "Scrutiny of intelligence services is largely an illusory concept. If they're good, they fool the outsiders--and if they're bad they fool themselves."
"As for Operation Mongoose, which Robert Kennedy kept trying to spur on—not his finest hour—this was not an assassination project but a foolish, futile and costly intelligence-gathering and sabotage effort. As Richard Helms of the CIA testified before the Senate committee investigating assassination plots in 1975, "Mongoose was not intended to apply to assassination activity." [Personally I'm not sure why we should trust the testimony of Richard Helms.]
"Those who are themselves obsessed with the theory of the Kennedys' alleged anti-Castro obsession must deal with the stubborn fact that, given by the Soviet missiles the best possible excuse for invading Cuba and smashing Castro forever, an excuse that would have been accepted around the world, it was Robert Kennedy who led the fight against military action and John Kennedy who made the decision against it. A year after the missile crisis, Kennedy was exploring through Ambassador William Attwood (United States) and Ambassador Carlos Lechuga (Cuba) and through the French journalist Jean Daniel the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba. Some anti-Castro obsession!
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"JFK touched and remolded lives and gave young people the faith that individuals can make a difference to history. Inspired by his words, they dedicated themselves thereafter to public service, whether in government, in civil rights and human rights movements, in nonprofit sectors, in community organization, in their own hearts and souls. His irreverence toward conventional ideas and institutions provoked a discharge of critical energy throughout American society. He gave the country back to its own best self and taught the world that the process of rediscovering America was not over.
"One is bound to speculate how America and the world would have been different if Kennedy had lived. For individuals do indeed make a difference to history. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City was struck by an automobile and nearly killed. In February 1933, an American politician sitting in an open car in Miami was fired upon by an assassin; the mayor of Chicago, sitting beside him, was killed. Would the history of the twentieth century have been the same if the New York automobile had killed Winston Churchill and the Miami assassin had killed Franklin Roosevelt?
"Had John F. Kennedy lived, his New Frontier program would have been enacted, he would have pressed the attack on poverty and racism in America, would have pursued détente in Europe, would most probably have withdrawn from Vietnam,and would have urged on the global crusade against nuclear proliferation. The republic would have been spared much of the trauma, disorder and violence that disfigured the raging 1960s.
"And there remain memories of the private man. He was not, as some claim, a bearer of grudges--the "don't get mad, get even" idea. He made Lyndon Johnson his vice president after Johnson had said unforgivable things about his father. He took most of the Stevenson-for-President crowd--George Ball, Willard Wirtz, Thomas K. Finletter, William Blair, Newton Minow, J. Edward Day, William Attwood, Clayton Fritchey--into his administration though the Stevenson campaign had seemed for a moment to imperil his nomination.
"Nor was he, as claimed, a spoiled rich man who used and discarded people and treated his associates as if they were indentured servants. He was one of the most unfailingly courteous and considerate men I have ever known. I did my share of creating trouble for his administration; and a couple of times, after one scrape or another made headlines, I told him that maybe the time had come for me to resign. He would laugh and dismiss the idea: "Better that you're the target than me."
"He was easy, accessible, witty, candid, enjoying the clash of ideas and the ripples of gossip, never more relaxed than when sitting in his rocking chair and puffing away on a fine Havana cigar. He was, in his self-description, an "idealist without illusions." He was the best of my generation. It is good for the country that he remains so vivid a presence in our minds and hearts."