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

at the Sovietskaya stunned the Russian. He said that Bobby and Jackie believed that the president had been killed by a large political conspiracy. “Perhaps there was only one assassin, but he did not act alone,” Walton said, continuing the message from the Kennedys. There were others behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun. J. Edgar Hoover had told both Bobby and Jackie that Oswald was a Communist agent. But despite the alleged assassin’s well-publicized defection to the Soviet Union and his attention-grabbing stunts on behalf of Fidel Castro, the Kennedys made it clear that they did not believe he was acting on foreign orders. They were convinced that JFK was the victim of U.S. opponents. And, Walton told Bolshakov, “Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime.”
    Despite this provocative remark, the Kennedy courier apparently did not mean to implicate President Johnson in the crime. But he shared with Bolshakov the Kennedys’ true scornful feelings about JFK’s successor. Johnson was “a clever timeserver” who would be “incapable of realizing Kennedy’s unfinished plans.” More pro-business than JFK, Johnson was certain to stock his administration with a legion of corporate representatives. The one hope for peaceful relations between the two countries was Robert McNamara. Walton described the defense secretary as “completely sharing the views of President Kennedy on matters of war and peace.”
    Walton then discussed Bobby’s political future. He said he planned to stay on as attorney general through 1964, and then he planned to run for governor of Massachusetts, an idea Kennedy had already floated in the press. He would use this office as a political base for an eventual race for the presidency. If he succeeded in returning to the White House, he would resume his brother’s quest for détente with the Soviet Union. Some Russians he spoke with, added Walton, regarded Bobby as more of a hard-liner toward Moscow than President Kennedy. “This is untrue,” Walton assured Bolshakov. The younger brother might have a tougher shell than JFK had, Walton acknowledged. But “Robert agreed completely with his brother and, more important, actively sought to bring John F. Kennedy’s ideas to fruition.”
    The remarkable meeting between Walton and Bolshakov was first recounted in One Hell of a Gamble , a widely praised 1997 book about the Cuban Missile Crisis by Timothy Naftali, a Yale scholar at the time and now director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and Aleksandr Fursenko, chairman of the history department at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Though the book itself—which was based on secret documents from a variety of Soviet agencies and government bodies, including the KGB and Politburo—attracted wide coverage in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Nation , none of these reviews saw fit to highlight Walton’s extraordinary mission on behalf of the Kennedys, certainly one of the book’s more eye-popping disclosures.
    Newsweek ’s Evan Thomas, a dean of Washington journalism, did zero in on the book’s account of the Moscow mission in his 2000 biography of Robert Kennedy, wagging his finger at Kennedy for this “irresponsible and potentially mischievous act of backdoor diplomacy.” But Thomas completely ignored the most provocative part of Kennedy’s communication—his views on the assassination—and focused solely on Bobby’s anti-Johnson sentiments and political ambitions. Bobby’s astonishing secret message to Moscow, one of the most revealing glimpses we have from those days of his thinking about the assassination, would disappear down the media hole as soon as it was made public.
    Bolshakov immediately delivered a report on what Walton told him to his superiors at the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. It undoubtedly added to the gloom at the Kremlin, where the Kennedy assassination was already