Let's Blame Bobby: Part Two

In the hours of panic that followed the assassination of John Kennedy, conspiracy theories were as rife as in the decades to come. Kennedy aides, thinking first of the reactionary politics endemic to Texas, suspected a right-wing cabal. Officials with national security credentials saw a more ominous specter -- the Soviet Union or, perhaps, China or Cuba. But "hindsight began early," as the writer William Manchester observed.... There had been no second strike or suspicious activity, and the assassination of American presidents was not the modus operandi of the USSR.

Still, the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald and the discovery of pro-Communist propaganda among his meager possessions prompted a new wave of dread. FBI, CIA, and State Department records detailed Oswald's shadowy past: defection to the USSR, contacts with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico, and pro-Castro activity in New Orleans. Had this erratic young man been duped by Castro or the KGB into killing the president? Was this "silly little Communist," as Jackie Kennedy dubbed him, an agent of vengeance?

The Soviet card was quickly forsaken. The USSR, obviously discomfited by its ties to the assassin, offered its intelligence on Oswald's activities in Russia. But for those Americans who had plotted to overthrow Fidel Castro, the possibility of Cuban involvement could not be easily dismissed. Only two months earlier, on Sept 7, Castro had given a marathon impromptu interview to an AP reporter. In an outpouring of vitriol against the United States, Castro warned against assassination plots targeting his regime. "We are prepared to...answer in kind," he said....

Clearly, three years of subversion had begun to rattle Castro and his followers. American activities were hardly covert, after all; they were widely reported in the sort of left-wing periodicals read by sympathizers like Oswald, and Castro well understood what the United States was up to. By Castro's own tally, eight of the twelve plots on his life were linked to the CIA. The campaign of harassment and sabotage that began after the Bay of Pigs waxed and waned during the Kennedy years, but it never ceased.

Though Washington took note of Castro's dramatic posturing, there was no reconsideration of American policy. Five days after Castro's AP interview, administration officials met to weigh the threat of retaliation. All agreed Castro was likely -- almost certain -- to strike back at the United States. Still, the possibility of an attack against Americans on American soil was quickly dismissed; this was too foolhardy for even the impetuous Castro....

As early as November 24, American analysts rejected the notion of Castro as conspirator. A French journalist had spent the day of November 22 with the Cuban leader and recorded every nuance of his reactions. Upon hearing of the assassination, Castro panicked; he was terrified LBJ would blame Cuba and send in the Marines. If there was a mastermind behind the assassination, it did not appear to be Fidel Castro.

Yet the question remained: had American belligerence toward Cuba driven Oswald to kill Kennedy? Castro need not have pulled the strings; American policy toward Cuba appeared to have embittered Oswald deeply. The stranglehold of the U.S. trade embargo and the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962, both common knowledge, must have jarred the man who marched the streets of New Orleans demanding "Hands off" and "Fair Play for Cuba," the same man who tracked Radio Havana and devoured leftist screeds like the Militant, which chronicled the activities of Operation Mongoose. However murky Oswald's politics, Cuba was his singular passion.


Likewise for Robert Kennedy. Bobby's strong grip left an imprint on the administration's Cuba policy as surely as Oswald's fingerprints appeared on the murder weapon. If Oswald's Cuba connections gave anyone cause for painful self-reflection, it was Bobby. He had been entangled in the unsavory web of Cuban affairs since the first months of his brother's presidency. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, RFK and General Maxwell Taylor advised the president bluntly that "there can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor....His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of Communism and anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of weak Latin American republics." The two men recommended a new covert program of "political, military, economic and propaganda action against Castro."

When talk turned in the fall of 1961 to contingency plans for a post-Castro Cuba -- not the means to remove him, but what to do if Castro was "in some way or other removed from the Cuban scene," as a presidential adviser put it optimistically -- the CIA argued that the regime would outlive the man. The notion of "removal," in any case, troubled John Kennedy. "We can't get into that kind of thing," he told his assistant Dick Goodwin in October 1961. "Or we would all be targets."

Still, Castro's presence rankled. "Welcome to the Site of the First Defeat of Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere," proclaimed an official sign on the shore of the Bay of Pigs. In November 1961, the president installed RFK at the head of a pyramid of plotting. In Bobby's purview was the Special Group (Augmented), as well as the CIA's Directorate of Plans, its covert policy shop.

Bobby was watchdog, strategist, and catalyst, and Cuba quickly became his obsession. "Bobby is a wild man on this," Richard Bissell of the CIA concluded privately. White House aide Harris Wofford later identified Bobby as "the driving force behind the clandestine effort to overthrow Castro. From inside accounts of the pressure he was putting on the CIA to 'get Castro,' he seemed like a wild man who was out-CIAing the CIA." At a January 19, 1962, meeting at the Justice Department, the attorney general declared the Cuban problem to be America's greatest. "No time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared," he said, renewing his call for action and impressing the others with his vehemence. He visited Mongoose facilities in Florida. He clamored for the specifics of sabotage raids -- "in nauseating, excruciating detail," said a CIA operative. The weather, the boats, the munitions, the terrain -- every tidbit of information fascinated him. Richard Helms, director of covert activity for the CIA, was a bit exasperated by the attorney general's enthusiasm. Almost daily, Bobby was on the phone to Helms, Helms's executive assistant, or his assistant's staff, pressing for tangible results.


Helms needed no prodding. "The CIA," as Arthur Schlesinger recalled, "was a rogue elephant from way back." Since the 1950s the Agency had been plotting, in concert with Cuban exiles and the American Mafia, to assassinate Castro. Neither President Eisenhower nor President Kennedy was informed. The doctrine of "plausible deniability" -- protecting a president from the most unsavory activities of his own operatives -- provided convenient cover for dark, secret agendas. (Even the CIA's director, Allen Dulles, was told of its Mafia contacts only after the fact.) The plots continued during the Kennedy years, and the CIA felt little obligation to inform its elected superiors. They were "transient." They did not need to know.

On May 7, 1962, however, Robert Kennedy found out. CIA representatives briefed him on the assassination attempts against Castro -- not to seek authorization but to stop the administration's prosecution of a CIA associate in a wiretapping case -- and Kennedy was visibly unsettled by the news. "If you have seen Mr. Kennedy's eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise," a CIA representative later testified, "you get a definite feeling of unhappiness." Bobby was particularly incensed by the use of mafiosi like Sam Giancana in such schemes. "I want you to let me know about these things," he said curtly as the briefing concluded.

The CIA men assured Bobby the plots had been terminated. And on May 9 the attorney general ordered that the CIA "never again in the future take such steps without first checking with the Department of Justice."

The CIA felt no such obligation. Years later, as its schemes came to light, the question whether the Kennedys knew of or even endorsed the plots inflamed the passions of participants: in 1977, Arthur Schlesinger and Bill Moyers waged a public dispute and "interrupted" a long friendship over the matter (Schlesinger argued that the Kennedys did not know; Moyers believed that they did). Richard Helms testified before Senator Frank Church's investigative committee in 1975 that he had received no direct order to kill Castro; nor, Helms admitted, had he sought one.

In Helms's view, none was needed. Bobby Kennedy's "intense" pressure generated the "kind of atmosphere" in which assassination was authorized implicitly. "It was made abundantly clear to everyone involved in the operation that the desire was to get rid of the Castro regime and to get rid of Castro," Helms told the Church Committee. "No limitations were put on this injunction." Bobby, according to Helms, "would not have been unhappy if [Castro] had disappeared off the scene by whatever means." Assassination appeared to be well within the bounds of the administration's efforts to overthrow Castro.

The point is arguable. Kennedy administration officials, at those same Senate hearings, insisted that assassination was beyond the pale, that a direct order was required for such action and none was given. Still, there was something to Helms's logic, however self-serving his testimony. The Kennedy's Cuba policy was marked by a moral and operational ambiguity in which the line between acceptable and unacceptable means was never clearly drawn. Neither JFK or RFK ever explicitly endorsed the plotting. It was an immoral policy, the sort Bobby opposed during the Cuban missile crisis, and it was unwise, too, by the administration's own analysis -- Cuba experts were quite certain the Communist regime would outlive its dictator. Yet Bobby never ruled out assassination; he only required his stamp of approval.

Thus, a central, crippling irony: by his eager antagonism toward the Castro regime, his relentless, "white heat" pressure on the CIA and other agencies, and his tacit endorsement of any means necessary, Bobby Kennedy helped create what the Church Committee called a "conspiratorial atmosphere of violence." And if the baiting of Castro incited Oswald to retaliate, did Bobby Kennedy not share the blame?

126 conspiracy theories were as rife: [Max] Holland, "The Key to the Warren Report," American Heritage, Nov. 1995: 52, 54.

126 "hindsight began early": Manchester.

126 the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald: Holland, "Key," 54.

126 "We are prepared to...answer in kind": Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy [and His Times], 589.

127 A French journalist: Jean Daniel, "When Castro Heard the News," New Republic, Dec. 7, 1963. Daniel, a French reporter, was interviewing Castro when the first reports reached Cuba.

127 Embittered Oswald deeply: Holland, "After Thirty Years," 197 [in Reviews in American History, June 1994: 191-209, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination"].

127 "there can be no long-term living": Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereafter, "Assassination Report"), 94 Cong., 1 Sess., Nov. 20, 1975: 135-6.

127 "in some way or other removed": Ibid., 136, 139.

127 Still, Castro's presence: Holland, "After Thirty Years," 195-6; Reeves, 264 [President Kennedy: Profile of Power, 1993].

128 "the driving force": Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980): 386; Assassination Report, 144, 150-51; Holland, "After Thirty Years," 196.

128 "a rogue elephant": Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "An Open Letter to Bill Moyers," Wall Street Journal, July 5, 1997.

128 Robert Kennedy found out: Ibid.

128 "If you have seen Mr. Kennedy's eyes": Assassination Report, 134-5.

129 Schlesinger and Bill Moyers: Schlesinger, "Open Letter"; Schlesinger interview; letter, Schlesinger to author, Feb. 4, 1997.

129 Richard Helms testified: Assassination Report, 134-5.

129 assassination was authorized implicitly: It appeared authorized, at least, to those who wished it to be. Helms's executive assistant, the man who briefed RFK on the CIA/Mafia plots, disputed the notion that talks with Robert Kennedy carried any such subtext. Ibid., 134-5.

129 "It was made abundantly clear": Ibid., 141, 148-51.

129 administration officials, at those same Senate hearings: Ibid., 134-5.

In 1975, when Richard Helms testified before another investigatory body, the CIA officer was asked pointedly: Had it occurred to him in 1963 that Oswald might have shot the president on Castro's behalf, if not by his direct orders? "No, I don't recall the thought ever occurring to me at the time," Helms told the panel guilelessly. "The very first time I heard such a theory as that enunciated was in a very peculiar way by President Johnson."

Johnson was in fact full of such theories. The day after John Kennedy's funeral, LBJ stood in the hallway of his house and pointed at a portrait of Diem. "We had a hand in killing him," Johnson said to Hubert Humphrey. "Now it's happening here." Was Johnson merely pointing out a cruel irony, or suggesting some darker connection? Days later, LBJ told Pierre Salinger a story. Like so many other Johnson stories, it was almost certainly apocryphal, but made its point bluntly. This one told of a childhood friend who had misbehaved -- and then crashed his sled into a tree and gone cross-eyed. It was divine retribution, Johnson told Salinger, gravely. And perhaps John Kennedy's assassination was, too.

On November 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson displayed less interest in divine ordinance than in Oswald's possible ties to Cuba. On the phone that afternoon with [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover, the president wanted to know "whether [Oswald] was connected with the Cuban operation [Mongoose] with money."

"That's what we're trying to nail down now," Hoover told him, but judged the connection unlikely. Oswald, it was already clear, "was strongly pro-Castro, he was strongly anti-American, and he had been in correspondence -- which we have -- with the Soviet embassy here in Washington...and with this committee we call Fair Play to Cuba [sic]." If Oswald was entangled in Cuban affairs, Hoover implied, it was not on our side....

The theory found a ready subscriber in Lyndon Johnson, and he clung to it. Even years later, LBJ's "inner political instinct," Jack Valenti recalled, was that Castro was behind the killing. Yes, Johnson conceded, the FBI had no evidence to prove it or even to suggest it; neither did the CIA or the State Department or anybody else. But the equation had a concise, appealing logic: "President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first," Johnson told his aide Joseph Califano. Johnson said "President Kennedy" but he knew it was Bobby who tried to "get" Castro. Ever since the Bay of Pigs, LBJ had blamed Bobby for the excesses of American policy in Cuba.

Several years later, in January 1967, the hornet's nest of allegations was stirred again, to Johnson's great interest. Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson met with Chief Justice Earl Warren to pass along a curious rumor: a client of Edwin Morgan, a prominent Washington lawyer, was insisting that the United States tried to kill Castro during the Kennedy years and that Castro killed Kennedy in retaliation. Warren considered the charge serious enough to pass along to the Secret Service, which then forwarded it to the FBI. The FBI called it old news and buried it. Uncharacteristically, Hoover did not even inform the president. "Consideration was given to furnishing this information to the White House," read an internal FBI memo, "but since this matter does not concern, nor is it pertinent to, the present administration, no letter was...sent."

But the rumor was in the air, in Washington and elsewhere. In New Orleans, District Attorney Jim Garrison pressed ahead with a sensational case, charging several CIA- and Cuba-connected men with a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. And Pearson, having been rebuffed by the FBI, now took his story to the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson was tantalized. On February 18, 1967, speaking on the phone with Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark, his excitement was evident....

As Johnson told it, Pearson had spoken of "a man that was involved [in the JFK assassination], that was brought into the CIA with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the attorney general" -- Bobby Kennedy -- "to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs."

"I've heard that much," Clark said, "I just haven't heard names and places."

"I think it would look bad on us if we'd had it reported to us a number of times and we just didn't [investigate]," the president told him. He instructed Clark to develop "a file that protects you, [so] that you don't just look like they report these things to us and we just throw 'em overboard and say, well, we don't like 'em, and they're not what we want to hear, so we're not gonna do anything about it.

"But anyway," Johnson continued, the American-sponsored assassins "had these [cyanide] pills and they were supposed to take 'em when [Castro] caught 'em. And they didn't get to take their pills, so he tortured 'em, and they told him all about [the plot] -- who was present and why they did it. So he said, Okay, we'll just take care of that. So then he called Oswald and a group in...and [Castro said] go set it up and get the job done."

The president was certain he'd heard the story two or three times before, from sources other than Pearson, but their names escaped him. "They were reputable people," he insisted, "or they wouldn't have gotten in here." Still, Johnson cautioned, "I credit it 99.99 percent untrue, but...y'all oughta do what you think oughta be done to protect yourselves."

Why Ramsey Clark and the Justice Department needed to protect themselves was not entirely clear; if any official body would be held accountable for not pursuing the story, it was not Justice but the FBI. Johnson seemed less interested in providing cover for Clark than in passing along a salacious rumor. He was particularly titillated by Robert Kennedy's role in the alleged caper-gone-awry. On the evening of March 2, LBJ took a call from his old lieutenant, Texas Governor John Connally, and the two men traded confidences on the subject.

Connally passed along a secret report from a man claiming to have seen Garrison's files in New Orleans -- files "proving" Castro had sent four separate teams of assassins to kill JFK. One or two teams had been picked up in New York and grilled by the FBI and Secret Service; but another, consisting of Oswald and three accomplices, had skirted the trap and made it to Dallas.

In this scenario, a slight variation on the one Johnson told Clark, Robert Kennedy's role was especially damning. Connally's source claimed that after the missile crisis JFK and Khrushchev cut a deal to leave Castro in power. About six months later "the CIA was instructed to assassinate Castro, and sent people into Cuba. Some of them were captured and tortured," Connally reported. "And Castro and his people...heard the whole story...that President Kennedy did not give the order to the CIA, but that some other person extremely close to President Kennedy did.

"They did not name names, but the inference was very clear," Connally said. "The inference was that it was his brother."

LBJ's interest was piqued.... "We have had that story, on about three occasions. The people here say that there's no basis for it....I've given a lot of thought to it....I talked to another one of our good lawyers [who] evaluated it pretty carefully and said that it was ridiculous." Hoover, too, deemed the Garrison story "a phony."

What LBJ found hard to swallow was not Bobby Kennedy's culpability -- that seemed likely enough; it was that anyone really knew what Castro was thinking.

"But," Johnson added, "we can't ever be sure."

In fact, Johnson was so reluctant to concede that "there's no basis" to the story that he continued to badger the FBI for a full investigation. On March 17, presidential assistant Marvin Watson told Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, the FBI's White House liaison, that "the president had instructed that the FBI interview Morgan [the lawyer] concerning any knowledge he might have concerning the assassination of President Kennedy." DeLoach demurred, arguing that Morgan did not want to be interviewed, and the FBI certainly did not want to do business with the "publicity seeker" Garrison. But the president's wishes were clear. "Under the circumstances," DeLoach reported glumly to his seniors at the Bureau, "it appears that we have no alternative but to interview Morgan and then furnish the results to Watson in blind memorandum form."

The interviews yielded no great insight into JFK's murder. But the renewed allegations of the attorney general's plots against Castro only further convinced LBJ of Bobby's complicity. Bobby "had been operating a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean," Johnson told Leo Janos of Time. The plots remained classified information -- they were never mentioned to the Warren Commission -- but the president began dropping hints to friendly reporters. And however strongly Johnson professed not to believe them, he was fascinated by and took delight in repeating rumors of Bobby's role in this circle of conspirators. If these stories made it to Hickory Hill, Bobby would have to wonder how much Johnson knew.

By 1967, Lyndon Johnson was not alone in questioning the Warren Commission's account of events. But the president's attachment to this particular conspiracy theory was rooted less in its merits than its trail of blame -- back through layers of CIA agents and Cuban exiles, through obscure schemes and counterschemes, to the desk of Robert F. Kennedy.

131 when Richard Helms testified: Final Report, 71 [i.e., page 71 of The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Book V, Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94 Cong., 2 Sess., April 23, 1976].

131 "We had a hand in killing him": Hammer, 309 [in Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1987].

131 LBJ told Pierre Salinger: RFK O[ral]H[istory].

131 "whether [Oswald] was connected": Recording of telephone conversation between LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover, Nov. 29, 1963, 1:40 P.M., Tape K6311.04, PNO 15, LBJL...Recordings of Telephone Conversations, White House Series, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings, LBJL.

132 "inner political instinct": Valenti interviewed on Nightline, ABC, Dec. 1, 1993, Transcript #3268.

132 "President Kennedy tried to get Castro": Shortly after assuming the presidency, LBJ ordered a halt to all covert activity aimed at Castro's ouster or assassination. Califano, 295 [in Joseph A. Califano, Jr., The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1991].

132 "Consideration was given": Rosen to Cartha DeLoach, Feb. 15, 1967, in Final Report, 82.

132 "You know this story": Recording of telephone conversation between LBJ and Ramsey Clark, Feb. 18, 1967, 10:39 A.M., Tape K67.02, LBJL.

133 LBJ took a call from...Connally: Recording of telephone conversation between LBJ and John Connally, March 2, 1967, 9:22 P.M., Tape K67.02, LBJL.

133 "the president had instructed that the FBI": DeLoach to Clyde Tolson, March 17, 1967, in Final Report, 82-3.

134 "damned Murder Incorporated": Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1981): 103.