23

November 28, 1962

Dearest Harry,

Yes, I’ve been remiss in offering you any good running account of Jack and Bobby’s negotiations with Khrushchev and Dobrynin, and now it’s too late. You were right. I feel tedium descend on me at the thought of reconstructing all the fine moves. What does remain alive for me is Jack’s unflappability as the Russian freighters approached the line of quarantine. There are moments when great political leaders not only receive the emoluments of the gods, but their terrors. Is this too grandiose? I don’t care. I love Jack Kennedy for finding his balance between two horrors, submission or extermination, and maintaining that balance through all the stunts that Khrushchev pulled after the Russian freighters turned around. I will tell you, Harry, that I did not really believe in Jack Kennedy’s pristine worth as a President before this happened. I liked him enormously because he had not gone dead inside like most major politicians—but for just that reason, perhaps, I secretly assumed he would not be equal to those monster Soviets who come to power with buckets of blood in the hall. Ditto Bobby. How could two Americans, well brought up, innocent as the well-to-do always are, manage not to panic? What bravery they showed at the core—to stay so long at the edge of the precipice! Even Hugh, who thinks that Khrushchev got out of a losing game with a little more than he should, does respect Jack a bit more. I, in contrast with Hugh, am deeply moved. Two brothers who love each other are worth more in the balance of history than one wily, filthy brute.

I expect you will be disappointed, but I am going to offer no more than a quick tour of the negotiations. Our side, naturally, wanted the missiles out, plus the removal of fifty Ilyushin bombers Khrushchev “sold” to Cuba. We also called for UN teams to be empowered to do ground inspection on the missiles. In return, we would offer our pledge not to invade Cuba, given the understanding that Castro would not try to subvert Latin America. Clear enough on paper, but it did depend on the timing of each proposal. Jack, you see, had to keep steering between his own hawks who wanted to make no deal at all unless we obtained everything on our terms, and doves like Adlai Stevenson who felt that it had been enough for Khrushchev to pull back his freighters. Moreover, Castro was not amenable to anything. He wouldn’t give up his Ilyushin bombers; he wouldn’t allow inspection of the missile sites; he wouldn’t even agree to relinquish the missiles.

Harry, I won’t give you any more of it. The key to these matters, I have discovered, is to separate out what is essential. Removal of the Cuban missiles was essential. So, Jack, by not insisting immediately on the recall of the fifty bombers (which are only a small weight in the whole balance), and by accepting Castro’s refusal to permit UN teams (since our U-2 overflights dispense with the need for on-the-ground inspection), has been able to maneuver Khrushchev into getting these nuclear projectiles out of Cuba despite all of Castro’s tantrums.

Enough. If I had not restricted myself to this quick tour of the problem, I would have had to send a ten-page letter every day for a week. Which is not what is on my mind. I would rather talk to you about Bobby Kennedy. He does occupy my thoughts these days. Since the summer, Bobby has been inviting us out fairly steadily to Hickory Hill. This, even though we are patently not Ethel’s favorites. She is a good sort, I’m sure, a hearty soul full of compassion for the wounds she can see in people around her, if a bit brash and judgmental in relation to wounds she is oblivious of, but of course, she is so Catholic, and there are all those children. If I were in her place, I would end up as a heavy drinker.

Hugh is invited, I believe, for his tennis game, which is precise, elegant, ruthless. Everyone wants him for a doubles partner (until he deigns to give them a tongue-lashing). I, who used to be a fiend at field hockey during Radcliffe days, have a mean, determined, damn-you-I’ll get-it-back sort of game which cheers no one, but I don’t lose that often to the women, and make few friends in the course of winning. Christopher, terribly shy at six, has a hell of a time with all the Kennedy children who overwhelm his reluctance to join anything. I’m not happy at how he suffers on our occasional Sundays over there but: “It’s his first rite of passage since leaving your prenatal auspices,” Hugh remarks. Dependably, he adds: “You’ve spoiled him rotten.”

On balance, Hickory Hill is less fun for your Kittredge than it should be, but since I adore Bobby and he delights in talking to me, we do have some fun. It is all very chaste. Secretly, I think Bobby is dying for an affair, but, my God, where would he go with it? Time made him Father of the Year. So he indulges cerebral communion with ladies like me. We even discuss issues on the telephone. He lets you in on that crackerjack mind of his, at once innocent and forthrightly logical. He is absolutely impressive in his energy. No one, with the possible exception of Hugh, has the beans to oversee as many separate activities. Apart from civil rights and the brouhaha at the University of Mississippi, the missile crisis, and the never-ending hunt for Hoffa and the Mafia, plus routine stuff at Justice, plus the Green Berets, plus your Mongoose (which has to be the least successful venture he ever took up), there is the occasional whopper that overwhelms everything. This last month it was the care and concern he gave to ransoming the Brigade. It proved to be a remarkable performance. Do you remember when I wrote to you about Harry Ruiz-Williams, that wonderful Cuban with smashed feet who has been working all these months to try to get Americans and Cuban-Americans to put up the millions of dollars needed for ransom? I don’t know whether you paid close attention, but at that time a lot of Republicans attacked the Kennedys for daring to consider exchanging tractors with Cuba for the prisoners. Ugly. All those Cubans rotting away in jail, while our politicians were making political capital of the cheapest sort of knee-jerk anti-Communism. Well, now that same Brigade has been in jail more than a year and a half. Bobby tells me that a wealthy Miami exile who used to have a ranch in Cuba went over as a ransom emissary and was shocked by the condition of the men. He told Bobby that cattle who are going to die get an unhealthy look on the back of their necks, and the prisoners now give off exactly that appearance. “I can’t put it out of my mind,” said Bobby to me. “The back of the neck!” The ex-rancher also said: “If you are going to rescue these men, Mr. Attorney General, this is the time. If you wait, you will be liberating corpses.” “You are right,” said Bobby, “we put them there, and we are going to get them out by Christmas.”

I think only Bobby could have pulled off the operation that followed. Castro wanted $62 million in ransom for something like 1,150 men. Great damage had been done by the attack, was his claim, and thousands of Cuban militia were dead as a result of the battle. Now, a year and a half later, $50,000 a man was not an excessive indemnification. If he could not get 62 million in dollars, then he would take it in goods. If not tractors, then in drugs, medical supplies, and baby food.

Originally, this ransom was to be obtained by the Cuban Families Committee, composed of a group of mothers in Miami and Havana who had sons among the prisoners. At Bobby’s recommendation, they selected for their negotiator James Donovan, a canny lawyer who was able to get on with Castro. Donovan, apparently, has a rough, in-close New York style, the finger-to-the-ribs sort of needling. According to Bobby, Donovan, on his first visit to Havana, told Castro that there was no alternative to ransoming the prisoners. “If you want to get rid of them, you have to sell them. That means you have to sell them to me. There’s no world market for prisoners.”

Castro, apparently, takes to this kind of talk. “Yes,” he answered, “but how is the Cuban Families Committee going to raise money? They have been trying for over a year and they still don’t see the first million. What they have discovered is what I could have told them in the first place. Wealthy Cubans are the worst rich people in the world. That is why I am here and the wealthy Cubans are in Miami.”

“We may not get the money,” said Donovan, “but we will get the medical supplies.”

Now it was Bobby’s turn. He had to convince the drug industry to donate their product. No mean feat. Before he even started, he said to me over the telephone, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, Kittredge, but we will.” He had the following problem: The drug industry is under investigation for antitrust violations by Congress, by Justice, and by the Federal Trade Commission. Some of these drug moguls may actually have been breaking the law. Naturally, like all semidishonest corporate types, they are stuffed with self-righteousness, self-pity, and no sense of what they have done wrong. They hate the Kennedy administration; in their mind, it is against big business. By patriotic reflex, they hate Castro even more, but the Brigade prisoners they look upon as failures.

Nonetheless, Bobby brought the industry leaders together in Washington and delivered a most moving address. (Which I did hear about from several sources.) He said the Brigade was composed of brave men who, in all the pain of their defeat, had never turned upon America. Was it not our responsibility to rescue these good men, the first to fight Communism in our hemisphere, before they perished in the desperate conditions of Castro’s jails?

Well, these big businessmen were moved enough to open negotiations with Bobby. When I asked him if his speech made the difference, he laughed. “With these guys, you feed the belly as well as the heart.” So Internal Revenue found a way to allow large tax rebates on the drug donations. Some of the drug companies even ended up with profit from their charitable acts, and, of course, they stamped little American flags on each package in their shipment, notwithstanding that a few of them also tried to empty their warehouses of stale and/or obsolescent drugs. One way and another, given his sharp nose, Bobby brought it off. As of this writing, it is still not certain the Brigade will reach Miami before Christmas, but there is no doubt in my mind. There may be last-minute hitches all over the firmament, but Bobby will get those prisoners back. You can look forward to a hectic but happy week down South.

Yours, dear cousin,

Kittredge

On the day before Christmas, the Brigade was flown in from Havana to Miami, and on December 29, President Kennedy addressed them at the Orange Bowl. I managed to be one of the forty thousand people in the audience.

I felt disoriented. Sitting high up on the twenty-yard line, the podium was far away, and Jack Kennedy seemed but a small figure in a cavernous valley, a man speaking to a bank of microphones that looked no larger than the legs of a hermit crab poking out from a snail shell. If I choose so surrealistic an image, it is because the situation was bizarre. I was looking at Modene’s ex-lover. He was the one who finally had not wanted her all that much. Since she, somewhat earlier, had not wanted me, I had to wonder if I was the only man in all of the Orange Bowl who had such an unhappy if intimate purchase on the presidency.

I was no better prepared for the crowd. Working these last two months in the subdued offices of Zenith, I was unready for the impact of a stadium full of Cubans in a state of high elation. Ecstasies of ovation for the return of the lost and the damned flowed around the arena. Currents of sorrow commemorated the loss of a land they could never have loved as much when they were there.

I recall the pandemonium. From the onset of the ceremony, when all 1,150 men of the Brigade marched onto the field and took up positions at parade rest in precisely ordered files, the uproar of the fathers, mothers, wives and sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, and cousins of the first, second, third, and fourth step removed, gave every promise of contributing to the largest sound one had ever heard in a stadium, and that was doubled by the entrance of the President and Jacqueline Kennedy in an open white Cadillac. A myriad of Cuban and American flags began to wave as the President and his lady dismounted to stand at attention next to Pepe San Román, Manuel Artime, and Tony Oliva and the Cuban national anthem was played, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then, the emotion of these gathered families able to sustain any ceremony no matter how protracted, the President moved through the ranks of the Brigade, shaking hands personally with every soldier who caught his eye, and applause lifted, as if we were all at the largest graduation ceremony ever conducted; each of President Kennedy’s handshakes was equal to the realization of a family saga.

Pepe San Román spoke first: “We offer ourselves to God and to the free world as warriors in the battle against Communism.” Then, he turned to Jack Kennedy and said, “Mr. President, the men of Brigade 2506 deposit their banner with you for your safekeeping.”

The local newspapers had spoken of how the Brigade flag had been carried away from the Bay of Pigs in one of the few boats available, and Kennedy unfurled it now to one more operatic ovation, turned to the soldiers, asked them to seat themselves on the grass, and replied, “I want to express my great appreciation to the Brigade. This flag will be returned to you in a free Havana.”

I thought a new war had begun. “Guerra, guerra, guerra,” they shouted in the exaltation of being confirmed in the high holy sanction of one thought for all. Back to war! For war!

And I, a working agent in the cause of Intelligence, had an insight. They were free for this instant of the ongoing fatigues of my divided soul, which, but a day ago, had been their divided soul. Guerra! War was the hour when Alpha and Omega could come together. For some, at any rate.

I had to admire Jack Kennedy in the next moment. It was possible that he would have tasteful instincts in the midst of an avalanche. He asked: “Would Señor Facundo Miranda, who preserved this flag through the last twenty months, come forward so we can meet him?” Señor Miranda and he shook hands, and then Jack Kennedy said, “I wanted to meet you so I would know who to give this flag back to.”

The ovation was near to never-ending. In the embrace of those emotions, he gave his speech. “Although Castro and his fellow dictators may rule nations, they do not rule people; they may imprison bodies but they do not imprison spirits; they may destroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the determination to be free.”

This patriotic experience was interrupted for me by the sight of Toto Barbaro. He was working his way closer and closer to the podium. He would be there at the end to shake hands.

“I can assure you,” said Kennedy, “that it is the strongest wish of the people of this country, as well as the people of this hemisphere, that Cuba shall one day be free again; and this Brigade will march at the head of the free column.”

What was happening, I wondered, to the negotiation—so impressive to Kittredge—that Kennedy was working up with Khrushchev? Had the hot blood of the politician overwhelmed the cool arteries of the President? Or was I attending a new declaration of war against Cuba?

In the morning, my father called me from Washington. “I hope,” he said, “that we get a transfusion out of all this.”