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Authors: David Talbot
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viewed as a backlash by hard-line elements in the U.S. national security establishment against JFK’s bid for rapprochement with the Soviets. When Khrushchev heard about Kennedy’s death, he had broken down and wept. “He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze,” a Soviet official told Pierre Salinger.
Robert Kennedy’s post-Dallas, back-channel message to Moscow is a stunning historical footnote. The man who bared his soul to the Soviets that week is, after all, the same man who had served as counsel for the notorious red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. The man who led the administration’s relentless drive to overthrow Fidel Castro and stop the spread of Communism in Latin America. The man so enthralled by the adventures of James Bond, the supremely elegant and implacable foil of Soviet skullduggery, that he wrote fan letters to Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.
Robert Kennedy’s views of the Soviet threat had, like his brother’s, become more complex with time and experience. But the Soviet Union was still his country’s most feared enemy, with whom his brother had parried and thrusted all over the world, from Berlin to Cuba to Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the ground beneath his feet had given way for Bobby Kennedy on November 22. The world was, in an instant, deeply different. The enemy lines no longer seemed so certain that week. Suddenly the attorney general of the United States regarded the government of our leading enemy as less alien than our own. He was eager to share his darkest suspicions with Moscow, taking pains to hide this extraordinary communication from the U.S. embassy there. What is even more remarkable than the fact that Kennedy engaged in an “irresponsible act of backdoor diplomacy” is the fact that such an intensely patriotic man, someone who was viscerally anticommunist, felt driven to do so.
There is no other conclusion to reach. In the days following his brother’s bloody ouster, Robert Kennedy placed more trust in the Soviet government than the one he served.
Why did Kennedy feel so estranged from his own government that he was willing to take such an extreme step? To understand his conspiratorial frame of mind in the days after Dallas, we must understand the inner workings and tensions of the Kennedy administration in the years leading to the assassination. John F. Kennedy’s body was not long in the ground when his administration began to be enshrouded in the gauzy myths of Camelot. Years later these myths would be shredded by the counterlegend of a decadent monarch, a sexually frenzied and heavily medicated leader whose reckless personal behavior put his nation at risk. Neither of these versions conveys the essential truth of the Kennedy administration. Missing from the vast body of literature on the Kennedy years—including the sentimental memoirs, revisionist exposés, and standard texts—is a sense of the deep tumult at the heart of the administration. The Kennedy government was at war with itself.
2
1961
J ohn Kennedy was haunted by the specter of cataclysmic war. An avid reader of history from boyhood on, he was acutely aware of how the Great War had been stumbled into by the great powers, decimating the flower of Europe’s youth and leaving behind scarring images of muddy, blood-soaked trenches and the dead stillness of poisoned air. “All war is stupid,” he had written home from the Pacific in 1943, while fighting the next war, the one that World War I—the war to end all wars—had led to. The death of his older brother, Joe, in a fiery aerial explosion over the English Channel during a suicidal mission, brought home the raw misery of it all. “He was very close to my brother Joe, and it was a devastating loss to him personally, and he saw the enormous impact that it had on my father,” Ted Kennedy told me. “He was a very different person when he came back from the war. I think this burned inside of him.”
But it
Robert Kennedy’s post-Dallas, back-channel message to Moscow is a stunning historical footnote. The man who bared his soul to the Soviets that week is, after all, the same man who had served as counsel for the notorious red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. The man who led the administration’s relentless drive to overthrow Fidel Castro and stop the spread of Communism in Latin America. The man so enthralled by the adventures of James Bond, the supremely elegant and implacable foil of Soviet skullduggery, that he wrote fan letters to Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.
Robert Kennedy’s views of the Soviet threat had, like his brother’s, become more complex with time and experience. But the Soviet Union was still his country’s most feared enemy, with whom his brother had parried and thrusted all over the world, from Berlin to Cuba to Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the ground beneath his feet had given way for Bobby Kennedy on November 22. The world was, in an instant, deeply different. The enemy lines no longer seemed so certain that week. Suddenly the attorney general of the United States regarded the government of our leading enemy as less alien than our own. He was eager to share his darkest suspicions with Moscow, taking pains to hide this extraordinary communication from the U.S. embassy there. What is even more remarkable than the fact that Kennedy engaged in an “irresponsible act of backdoor diplomacy” is the fact that such an intensely patriotic man, someone who was viscerally anticommunist, felt driven to do so.
There is no other conclusion to reach. In the days following his brother’s bloody ouster, Robert Kennedy placed more trust in the Soviet government than the one he served.
Why did Kennedy feel so estranged from his own government that he was willing to take such an extreme step? To understand his conspiratorial frame of mind in the days after Dallas, we must understand the inner workings and tensions of the Kennedy administration in the years leading to the assassination. John F. Kennedy’s body was not long in the ground when his administration began to be enshrouded in the gauzy myths of Camelot. Years later these myths would be shredded by the counterlegend of a decadent monarch, a sexually frenzied and heavily medicated leader whose reckless personal behavior put his nation at risk. Neither of these versions conveys the essential truth of the Kennedy administration. Missing from the vast body of literature on the Kennedy years—including the sentimental memoirs, revisionist exposés, and standard texts—is a sense of the deep tumult at the heart of the administration. The Kennedy government was at war with itself.
2
1961
J ohn Kennedy was haunted by the specter of cataclysmic war. An avid reader of history from boyhood on, he was acutely aware of how the Great War had been stumbled into by the great powers, decimating the flower of Europe’s youth and leaving behind scarring images of muddy, blood-soaked trenches and the dead stillness of poisoned air. “All war is stupid,” he had written home from the Pacific in 1943, while fighting the next war, the one that World War I—the war to end all wars—had led to. The death of his older brother, Joe, in a fiery aerial explosion over the English Channel during a suicidal mission, brought home the raw misery of it all. “He was very close to my brother Joe, and it was a devastating loss to him personally, and he saw the enormous impact that it had on my father,” Ted Kennedy told me. “He was a very different person when he came back from the war. I think this burned inside of him.”
But it
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