Authors: Lamar Waldron
House and twenty at the Pentagon . . . President Kennedy’s plans
for removing Castro from power were ended. . . . 58
When Bobby met with Harry Williams to tell him about LBJ’s final
word, Harry took the news better than the Attorney General did. For
Bobby, LBJ’s refusal widened the already deep rift between them. Also,
Bobby wasn’t quite ready to give up the fight—though in light of LBJ’s
decision, he really had no options left. As Bobby struggled with his dis-
appointment, he indicated to Harry that perhaps private funding could
be found to keep Harry’s effort alive, in case LBJ changed his mind or
the situation in Cuba changed.
Harry had spent the last four years of his life in the fight against Fidel,
often putting his family and business aside while risking his life. Even
after suffering for a year in Castro’s brutal prisons, Harry had been
willing to put his life on the line yet again while he had the full support
of President Kennedy and his brother, whom he’d come to consider
a trusted friend. Now, that time had passed. Harry realized that LBJ
would never give the same degree of support to Castro’s overthrow as
the Kennedys had. He and Bobby had done their best, and given it their
all. Harry had sacrificed a lot, and Bobby even more, when JFK made
the ultimate sacrifice.
In light of all that, Harry told Bobby that it was time to move on, to
leave the task of bringing democracy to Cuba to others. Harry must have
felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Bobby
had burdens enough without Cuba, and soon he came to see it Harry’s
way. From that time on, Bobby abandoned plans to stage coups, topple
governments, and eliminate foreign leaders. He was beginning a new
journey, one that would see him start to view the world, and his place
in it, with a new perspective. It would also lead to his tragic murder just
over three years later.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-one
Bobby Kennedy devoted the rest of his life to the pursuit of two goals,
one very public and the other so private that it has become known only
in recent years. Bobby’s evolution into a champion of civil rights and
the poor, which eventually included his stance opposing the war in
Vietnam, has been widely chronicled. But another part of Bobby’s life
was conducted in secret and has not been fully documented until now.
This quest, known only to a few of his closest associates, was his vigi-
lant effort to discover who was behind JFK’s assassination and bring
them to some type of justice—without exposing Commander Almeida.
Revealing the JFK-Almeida coup plan would not only cost the lives of
the Commander and his allies in Cuba, but would also ruin the image
of the slain president and his brother, Bobby—ending Bobby’s chances
of ever attaining the presidency, the only position that could allow him
to conduct a truly thorough but secret investigation of JFK’s murder.
Bobby Kennedy’s deepening involvement in the civil rights movement
is inexorably intertwined with his sometimes tumultuous relationship
with Dr. Martin Luther King. Their relationship, which ended with
Dr. King’s death in 1968, lasted only eight years. It began during the
1960 presidential campaign, when Bobby and JFK may have saved Dr.
King’s life, while King helped propel JFK into office.
Newsweek
editor
Evan Thomas wrote that “just two phone calls—one by JFK and one by
RFK—decided the outcome of the election and determined the course
of racial politics for decades to come.”1
Two weeks before the 1960 presidential election, Dr. King had been
convicted for staging a lunch-counter sit-in in Atlanta, and given a harsh
prison sentence of four months at hard labor. According to Thomas, Dr.
King was “hustled off in chains to a state prison deep in the Georgia
backwoods.” King’s wife, Coretta, called a Kennedy aide and pleaded,
“They are going to kill him . . . I know they are going to kill him.”2
Mrs. King’s concerns were real, since she knew that violence against
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blacks and their leaders was all too common. In January 1956, a bomb
had been thrown at their home after King began leading a bus boycott
in Alabama. Eleven months later, following the boycott’s successful
conclusion, a shotgun blast was fired into their home. A year after that,
another bomb was thrown at their house.3 The legal system offered little
help, since Jim Crow laws limited the recourse of blacks; in addition,
much of the South was still segregated, and some in law enforcement
shared the racism of King’s attackers.
Mrs. King’s desperate plea reached JFK, who personally called to
reassure her that he would try to help. JFK’s call to Mrs. King during
the tight 1960 presidential campaign was politically perilous: While the
South was solidly Democratic, most Southern leaders were conserva-
tive and opposed civil rights. Yet as an issue of fairness and justice, JFK
and Bobby felt something had to be done to help Dr. King. Just a few
months earlier, Bobby had pushed for a pro–civil rights platform at the
Democratic National Convention, and now he had the chance to turn
those words into action.
Hurried, behind-the-scenes calls were made to Georgia’s governor
by JFK, and to King’s judge by Bobby. However, the next day’s news-
papers reported only that King had been released after Bobby’s call to
the judge. Sparked by the Kennedys’ actions, the shift of black voters
away from the Republican Party of Lincoln, which had begun under
Franklin Roosevelt, took a giant leap forward. Thomas writes that Dr.
King’s father, “an extremely influential Baptist preacher, openly shifted
his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy,” and that on election day Ken-
nedy carried “a half-dozen states in the East and Midwest . . . by very
narrow margins [and] black turnout made the difference.”4
After this promising beginning, the ensuing relationship between
Bobby and Dr. King was often rocky. Dr. King pushed for rapid change,
while the Attorney General and JFK moved cautiously, trying to lay the
groundwork for JFK’s reelection. Even slow progress was sometimes
met with violence. On the night of JFK’s June 12, 1963, televised speech
to the nation as he prepared to introduce his civil rights bill, Mississippi
civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot and killed.
The Kennedys had to prod J. Edgar Hoover into action on that case
and others. The FBI Director’s racism has been well documented: As
late as 1961, instructors at the FBI Academy used the “N-word” to refer
to blacks and called the NAACP a communist-front organization. It
was only pressure from Bobby that finally resulted in Hoover allow-
ing the first blacks to enter the FBI Academy, in 1962.5 FBI agents in the
South often stood by and watched when peaceful demonstrators were
attacked, sometimes by the police themselves. Hoover’s attitude set
the tone for the FBI, and a former Atlanta agent later testified to Con-
gress about the degree of racism he observed in the FBI’s Atlanta office,
particularly toward Dr. King.6 A far different former FBI agent, Arthur
Hanes (Sr.), was mayor of Birmingham in May 1963, when city authori-
ties unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators—
and Mayor Hanes blamed King for the violence.7
Hoover hated Dr. King and constantly tried to portray him and his
cause as communist. One of Dr. King’s advisors had previously dealt
with the American Communist Party, but even though Hoover knew
that affiliation had ended by 1962, the FBI Director still pushed Bobby
to approve phone taps on Dr. King. After Bobby tried unsuccessfully to
persuade Dr. King to end his relationship with the advisor, the Attorney
General finally gave in to Hoover’s demands and approved limited
phone surveillance on Dr. King in October 1963.
On November 22, 1963, Dr. King was at his modest Atlanta home
when he saw the first televised reports that JFK had been shot. Joined
by his wife Coretta, both watched in horror as the news filtered in. Dr.
King said, “This is just terrible . . . I hope he will live.” As JFK’s death
was announced, Dr. King could say only, “This is what’s going to hap-
pen to me.”8
After JFK’s death, Hoover started bugging some of Dr. King’s hotel
rooms, setting in motion a campaign to discredit King that would last
until the civil rights leader’s death. President Lyndon Johnson reached
out to King, meeting with him twice during LBJ’s first months in office.
However, while LBJ didn’t explicitly authorize the hotel bugging, he
also apparently didn’t shut it down when he became aware of it. As for
the Attorney General, whose authorization should have been required
for the extra surveillance, Hoover hadn’t bothered to ask Bobby.
In the early months of 1964, Bobby continued to be overwhelmed by
his brother’s tragic murder. Evan Thomas writes that Bobby’s lingering
grief left him appearing “wasted and gaunt.” He cites JFK aide John
Seigenthaler as saying that Bobby seemed “to be in physical pain, like a
man . . . on the rack . . . he walked for hours, brooding and alone.”9 Bobby
was consumed by keeping secrets he couldn’t fully share with anyone,
but decades later—after the Congressional disclosures of the 1970s—
a few of Bobby’s friends began to realize some of what he had gone
through. Harris Wofford, a Kennedy aide before becoming a senator,
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said that for Bobby, “keeping from the public facts about the CIA, the
FBI, and the Mafia crucial to the investigations of his brother’s [murder]
must have caused him special suffering.”10
Bobby undoubtedly heard about Chief Justice Earl Warren’s answer
to a question about whether all of the material from his Commission
would be made public. As the
New York Time
s reported on February 5,
1964, Warren said, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in
your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may
be some things that would involve [national] security. This would be
preserved but not made public.”11
Perhaps such a public statement was Warren’s attempt to encourage
officials to share sensitive information with the Commission, with the
assurance that it wouldn’t be released in the foreseeable future. If so, that
approach didn’t work with Bobby, who revealed nothing to the Commis-
sion about Almeida, the coup plan, or his suspicions about CIA-backed
exiles who might have sold out the plan to the Mafia. Bobby would make
one indirect effort to focus suspicion on Jimmy Hoffa, but he would be
stopped because of matters related to Cuba and Almeida.
Stymied in his pursuit of Marcello, Bobby had his prosecutors con-
tinue their trial of Hoffa in Chattanooga, with another Hoffa trial soon
slated for Chicago. For Bobby, the associates Hoffa shared with Jack
Ruby were too obvious to ignore. It’s not clear whether Bobby ever real-
ized that Ruby was probably the “Jack La Rue” he had searched in vain
for only four years earlier. However, it must have been obvious to Bobby
that Ruby had been involved in a murder that Bobby had mentioned
in his book
The Enemy Within
. Union gangster Paul Dorfman had been
implicated in that murder, and Paul’s stepson, Allen Dorfman, was on
trial with Hoffa in Chattanooga. Allen Dorfman’s name had also been
part of the Ruby-Chicago payoff rumor reported to Walter Sheridan just
hours after Ruby shot Oswald.
Hoffa was shocked and furious when Sheridan had Teamster official
Ed Partin take the stand against him in Chattanooga, because Hoffa
knew the secrets he had confided to Partin, including talk of assassinat-
ing Bobby Kennedy in the summer of 1962. However, Walter Sheridan
had warned Partin not to mention that during his testimony. Sheridan’s
fear was that in the wake of JFK’s assassination, any mention of an
attempt to kill Bobby (especially in a car) would be so prejudicial that
Hoffa might be able to get a mistrial. Hoffa’s lawyers realized the same
thing, and though they pressed, they were unable to get more than a few
words about it on the record, and nothing about the target’s being Bobby
Kennedy. Still, in an obvious attempt to intimidate Partin, someone fired
shots into his close associate’s Louisiana home.12
Hoffa also had secrets he could expose, especially since one of his
attorneys in Chattanooga was Trafficante’s confidant, Frank Ragano. At
one point when Partin was on the stand, he was asked about running
guns to Cuba and dealing with high-ranking Cuban military officials.
Bobby’s men quickly shut down that line of questioning. Hoffa, Partin,
and Ruby had all run guns to Cuba during the Revolution, but Bobby
wanted to avoid the entire subject, since one of the Cuban military offi-
cials receiving such arms was Commander Almeida, who was still vul-
nerable in Cuba.