Read Online Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot - Free Book Online

tried to reassure the well-connected Izvestia editor that America had not been taken over by a “reactionary clique.” He asserted that President Johnson “has indicated a real desire” to continue JFK’s policies. Walton must have “bit his tongue” as he passed along these assurances about LBJ, as one report of the meeting later observed, for he “detested” the new president, and the feeling was mutual. Like Bobby, he shuddered to think of the Texan occupying JFK’s office.
    Despite what he told Adzhubei over tea and cognac, Bill Walton had a much more disturbing secret message for the Soviet government, which he delivered as soon as he arrived in Moscow. Bobby had asked Walton to meet with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet agent formerly stationed in Washington, through whom the Kennedys had communicated confidential messages to Khrushchev at critical points in their administration, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. The squat, pug-nosed, jovial Bolshakov was a frequent visitor to Bobby’s Virginia home and to his spacious Justice Department suite, where he would sweep unannounced into the attorney general’s office, with Kennedy’s diligent secretary Angie Novello running frantically after him. So closely associated was he with Kennedy circles that Newsweek dubbed him the “Russian New Frontiersman.” Official Washington frowned on the back channel between the Kennedys and Bolshakov. But that did not deter Bobby from pursuing the relationship.
    “One time Bob wanted to invite Georgi to a party of government officials on board the presidential yacht, the Sequoia ,” recalled James Symington, the attorney general’s administrative assistant, in a recent interview. “But McCone from the CIA said, ‘If he gets on the boat, I get off.’ McCone was appalled at the idea of swanning around with some Soviet agent. But Bob was looser than that. Bob had no illusions about Bolshakov—he had no illusions about anyone. He knew perfectly well what Bolshakov was. But he knew how to read him. And he knew he could be useful. It was impossible for JFK and Khrushchev to speak directly, so it was important for the Kennedys to have a back channel to communicate with the Kremlin.”
    Now Bobby was using Bolshakov one more time to relay a top-secret message to the Soviet leader. The attorney general instructed Walton to go directly to Bolshakov in Moscow, without first checking in to his quarters at the U.S. Embassy. Bobby did not want the new U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler, whom he regarded as anti-Kennedy, to know about the Bolshakov meeting. Kohler was a hardliner who thought Khrushchev was more dangerous than Stalin. “He gave me the creeps,” Bobby later recalled of Kohler, adding that he didn’t regard him as someone “who could really get anything done with the Russians.” Kohler was equally cool to Kennedy. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, when Kohler was the State Department official in charge of the Soviet Union, he remembered, “Bobby would sit there across the table with those cold blue eyes as if to say, ‘You son of a bitch, if you ever let my brother down, I’m going to knife you.’”
    Walton delivered his remarkable message to Bolshakov at Moscow’s ornate Sovietskaya restaurant. What he heard must have reminded the Russian of an unsettling encounter he had had with Bobby the year before in Washington. As Bolshakov came out of an August 1962 meeting with JFK at the White House, where he was asked to relay a conciliatory message to Khrushchev, Bobby heatedly confronted his Russian friend: “Goddamn it, Georgi, doesn’t Premier Khrushchev realize the president’s position? Every step he takes to meet Premier Khrushchev halfway costs my brother a lot of effort…. In a gust of blind hate, his enemies may go to any length, including killing him.”
    Now, in Moscow, Bobby Kennedy’s representative was reporting that the attorney general’s worst fears had come true. What Walton told Bolshakov over their meal