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  • Tom Hanks and 1968

    Tom Hanks and 1968

    As many of this site’s readers know, for the recently released book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, this author did a lot of work on the career of actor Tom Hanks. In 1993, on the set of the film Philadelphia, Hanks met music producer Gary Goetzman. A few years after that meeting, Goetzman and Hanks decided to expand their careers into producing movies: both feature films and documentaries. They set up a company called Playtone and began to churn out products that—if one understands who Hanks is—were reflective of both the actor’s personal psyche and his view of the American zeitgeist. That view was accentuated when, in 1998, Hanks first worked with Steven Spielberg on the film Saving Private Ryan. It was while working on this film that the two met and befriended the late historian Stephen Ambrose, who was a consultant on that picture.

    As I wrote in my book, Ambrose turned out to have a real weakness for a historian: He manufactured interviews. Ambrose made his name, and became an establishment darling, due to his several books about Dwight Eisenhower. This included a two volume formal biography published in 1983-84. All of these books, except the first, were published after Eisenhower’s death in 1969. It was proven, by both an Eisenhower archivist and his appointments secretary, that Ambrose made up numerous interviews with the late president, interviews which he could not have conducted. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 46) Late in his career, Ambrose was also proven to be a serial plagiarist by two different studies. (See David Kirkpatrick’s article in the NY Times, January 11, 2002; also “How the Ambrose Story Developed”, History News Network, June 2002)

    But the worst and most revealing issue about Ambrose’s career was his switching sides in the attacks on James Bacque’s important book, Other Losses. Bacque had done some real digging into the military archives of World War II. He had discovered that the Americans had been involved in serious war crimes against German prisoners of war, and had later tried to cover it up. Bacque sent his manuscript to Ambrose in advance of publication. Ambrose had nothing but praise for it. (DiEugenio, p. 47) In 1989, before the book was to be published abroad, Bacque visited Ambrose at his home and the two went over the book in detail. When Other Losses was published in America, Ambrose at first stood by the book, which, quite naturally, was generating controversy. But after doing a teaching engagement at the US Army War College, Ambrose reversed field. First, he organized a seminar attacking the book. Then, as he would later do with Oliver Stone’s JFK, he wrote an attack article for the New York Times. (DiEugenio, p. 47)

    As Bacque noted, the book Ambrose attacked was the same one the historian had praised in private letters to the author. It was the same book Ambrose read and offered suggestions to in the confines of his home. The difference was that the information was now public, and creating controversy. Bacque’s book was accusing the American military of grievous war crimes, including thousands of deaths, and since Eisenhower was involved in these acts, the pressure was on. Ambrose was the alleged authority on both Eisenhower and his governance of the American war effort in Europe. Could America have really done what the Canadian author was saying it did? To put it simply, Ambrose buckled. Under pressure from the military and the MSM, he did triple duty. Not only did he organize the panel and write the attack editorial, he then pushed through a book based on the panel. (See Bacque’s reply to this book)

    Reflecting on this professional and personal betrayal, Bacque later wrote that he could not really blame Ambrose for it all, because the American establishment does not really value accuracy in the historical record. What it really wants is a “pleasing chronicle which justifies and supports our society.” He then added that, in light of that fact, “We should not wonder when a very popular writer like Ambrose is revealed to be a liar and plagiarizer, because he has in fact given us what we demand from him above all, a pleasing myth.” (DiEugenio, p. 48)

    II

    I have prefaced this review of Playtone’s latest documentary 1968: The Year that Changed America, because it is important to keep all of this information in mind during any discussion of Hanks and his producing career. Even though he did not graduate from college, he fancies himself a historian. Thus many of his films deal with historical subjects: both his feature films and his documentaries. Yet Hanks—and also Spielberg—have set Ambrose as their role model in the field. In my view, it is this kind of intellectual sloth and lack of genuine curiosity that has helped give us films like Charlie Wilson’s War, Parkland, and The Post. These films all tried to make heroes out of people who were no such thing: U.S. representative Charlie Wilson, the Dallas Police, and in the last instance, Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham. And by doing so, these pictures have mislead the American public about important events; respectively, the origins and results of the war in Afghanistan, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the position of the Washington Post on the Vietnam War. (For details on all of these misrepresentations, elisions, and distortions see Part 3 of The JFK Assassination.)

    Since he wrote so often about Eisenhower, one of Ambrose’s preoccupations was World War II. He wrote at least a dozen books on that subject. As previously mentioned, Hanks and Spielberg took a brief vignette Ambrose had uncovered for his book Band of Brothers and greatly expanded and heavily revised it into the film Saving Private Ryan. (DiEugenio, pp. 45-46) From there, Hanks and Spielberg produced the hugely budgeted mini-series Band of Brothers. This was a chronicle of a company of American soldiers fighting in the European theater until the surrender of Japan. In addition to these two dramatic presentations, Hanks has produced three documentaries on the subject of American soldiers fighting in Europe. As anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan knows, that film is largely based on the allied landing at Normandy in 1944. Ambrose wrote extensively on that event. In fact, one of his books was titled D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. And in the films of Hanks and Spielberg, the import of that title is also conveyed: that America defeated the Third Reich.

    The problem with this is quite simple: it’s not true. Any real expert on World War II will inform you that it was not America that was responsible for the defeat of Hitler. It was the Soviets. And D-Day was not the climactic battle of that war. That took place in 1942 at Stalingrad, and to a lesser extent in 1943 with the tank battle at Kursk. Both of those titanic battles took place prior to the Normandy invasion, and Hitler gambled everything on them. His invasion of Russia in 1941 consumed 80% of the Wehrmacht, over three million men. To this day, it is the largest land invasion in history. (DiEugenio, p. 454) When this giant infantry offensive was defeated at Stalingrad, Hitler tried to counter that defeat with the largest tank battle in history at Kursk. This battle ended up being more or less a draw; but it was really a loss for Hitler since he had to win. The Germans lost so many men, aircraft and tanks on the Russian front that the rest of the war was a slow retreat back to Berlin.

    Due to the Cold War, the historical establishment in America largely ignored these facts. Like Ambrose, they chose to glorify and aggrandize what commanders like Eisenhower had done in Europe and, to a lesser extent, what Douglas MacArthur achieved in the Pacific. In both films and TV, Hollywood followed this paradigm. Pictures like The Longest Day, Anzio, and Battle of the Bulge were echoed by small screen productions like Combat, The Gallant Men, and Twelve O’clock High. Parents bought their children toy weapons and they played games modeled on these presentations of America crushing the Nazis.

    The social and historical problem with all this one-sidedness in books, films and network television was simple. It contributed to a cultural mythology of American supremacy, both in its military might and moral cause. That pretense—of both might and right—was slowly and excruciatingly ground to pieces in the jungles of Indochina. This is an important cultural issue that Ambrose, Hanks and Spielberg were not able to deal with in any real sense. I really don’t think that they ever actually confronted it. If one can make a film so weirdly lopsided as The Post, then I think one can say that, for whatever reason, it’s just not in them. After all, Hanks is 61, and Spielberg is 71. If you don’t get it after a combined 132 years, then it is probably too late. (This reviewer did some research into both men’s lives to try and ponder the mystery of this obtuseness. For my conclusions, see DiEugenio, pp. 42-44, 405-12)

    III

    This brings us to the latest Hanks/Goetzman historical documentary for CNN. It is called 1968: The Year that Changed America. HBO is the main outlet for the Playtone historical mini-series productions, e.g., John Adams, Band of Brothers, The Pacific. Cable News Network is the main market for their historical documentaries. This includes Playtone’s profiles of four decades—The Sixties, The Seventies, The Eighties, and The Nineties, and their awful documentary The Assassination of President Kennedy. This last was broadcast during the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in 2013. The two main talking heads on this program were Dan Rather and Vincent Bugliosi. One would have thought that Rather had so discredited himself on the subject that he would not appear on any such programs ever again. Playtone did not think so. Either that or Hanks was unaware of the discoveries of the late Roger Feinman. Feinman worked for CBS and exposed their unethical broadcast practices in both their 1967 and 1975 specials, in addition to their subsequent lies about them. (See Why CBS Covered Up the JFK Assassination) I would like to think Hanks unaware of all this. But after sustained exposure to his output, I am not sure it would have made any difference.

    This lack of scholarly rigor is reflected in some of the talking heads employed in 1968: The Year that Changed America. There is a crossover with that recent documentary bomb, American Dynasties: The Kennedys. (See my review) So again we get writers like Pat Buchanan, Tim Naftali and Evan Thomas. But in addition, we get Rather, plus the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, former Nixon appointee Dwight Chapin and Hanks himself. There have been many books written about that key year of 1968, but this documentary does not utilize most of the recent releases by authors like Richard Vinen, or even Laurence O’Donnell. Instead, it relies on authors who wrote their books long ago; for example, Mark Kurlanksy, whose book was published in 2003, and Charles Kaiser, who first published his volume in 1988. Readers can draw their own conclusions about these choices.

    The four-hour series is divided up by seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. It begins with Rather discussing the fading presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He delivers the usual platitudes about LBJ’s passage of some good domestic legislation like Medicare, but how this was outweighed by the war in Vietnam. In addition to this standby cliché, the program misses a grand opportunity to elucidate a key point about that war. In 1966, author Michael Arlen termed it “the living room war”. This is because reporters on the scene were allowed almost unfettered access to military operations. This approach brought the war’s brutality into the home front. The Pentagon understood this was a liability, so in later wars, this was greatly curtailed. What took its place was the so-called press junket or pool: certain journalists were given restricted access accompanied by escorts. They reported back to their colleagues and that is how the news was distributed. To put it plainly, because of Vietnam, war reporting has now become controlled. This technique was used extensively during Operation Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq (e.g., the siege of Fallujah).

    The film’s second lost opportunity concerns the fact that, by 1968, Johnson had escalated the Vietnam War to almost unfathomable heights since he had taken office in 1963. What made that worse is that he had run on a peace platform in 1964. In that campaign he had characterized his opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, as the hawk on Vietnam. As Frederick Logevall noted in his book, Choosing War, if anyone had promised anything during that campaign, Johnson had promised the American people there would be no wider war. But not only did LBJ hide his true intentions in 1964, he also hid the fact that, unlike President Kennedy, he was determined not to lose in Indochina. (Logevall, p. 94) The fact that he had deceived the American public in 1964, then escalated the war to the point of inserting 500,000 combat troops in theater, while instituting Rolling Thunder, the largest aerial bombardment campaign in military history—all of this was too much of a reversal. Especially when it was accompanied by a draft, and resistance to that draft. In this reviewer’s opinion, this film downplays or ignores all of these key points. Yet they are all crucial in explaining why Johnson had become so unpopular in 1967 and 1968. To have Dan Rather, not Logevall, address this issue reveals early how honest this program is going to be.

    We then cut to the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive. Philip Caputo talks about the former, Hanks discusses the latter. Surprisingly, the program makes no attempt to link the two attacks. Many analysts of the war, like John Prados, have posed the questions: Was Khe Sanh a diversion for Tet? Or was Tet a diversion for Khe Sanh? Today, the consensus seems to be the former. Khe Sanh was in an extreme, almost isolated northern part of South Vietnam and was under siege by the regulars in the North Vietnamese army. Most of the Tet uprisings were in the south and were conducted by a combination of the Viet Cong supported by about 60 to 70,000 North Vietnamese regulars. The commander of the northern army, Genral Giap, later said that Khe Sanh itself was not important, but only served as a diversion to draw American forces away from population centers in the south, including Saigon. (See the essay “The Battle of Khe Sanh”, by Peter Brush.) Not only is this important issue not addressed, but the program again utilizes another cliché: namely, that Tet was a military defeat but such a shock that it succeeded psychologically.

    The reviewer begs to disagree. Militarily, what Tet revealed was two crucial points. The first was that the three-year escalation by Johnson, as supervised by General William Westmoreland, had been a failure. No major city in South Vietnam was secure from attack, not even the American embassy in Saigon. The enemy was everywhere and was armed and ready to kill. The Westmoreland/Johnson strategy of wearing down the opponent through a war of attrition had been misguided and pretty much useless. Secondly, it showed that the fabricated country of South Vietnam was a hollow shell. Without American troops, Tet would have probably collapsed the Saigon government. Johnson and Westmoreland had built no effective independent fighting force there. It was the exposure of these two failures that cashiered both Johnson and Westmoreland. On top of that, it stopped any further troop escalation of the war.

    A third result of Tet—also ignored by the program—was that it showed the almost astonishing lack of intelligence America had on the enemy. As CIA professionals like Ralph McGehee have written, the surprise of the Tet offensive was probably one of the greatest intelligence failures in American military history. Yet it did not seem to hurt the career of the CIA station chief in Saigon, Ted Shackley.

    The complement to this North Vietnamese success was that the American military was disintegrating. In fact, the My Lai Massacre took place in March, 1968. If the reader can believe it, I could detect no mention of this atrocity in this four-part documentary. I also could find no mention of what My Lai was probably a part of, namely Operation Phoenix. This was the CIA’s systematic and brutal program to torture and kill civilians who were suspected of being Viet Cong. Reporters like Seymour Hersh had denied My Lai was part of the Phoenix Program. But later authors like Doug Valentine have discovered new evidence which indicates it was. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 367)

    In addition to these shortcomings, there is almost no analysis of why President Johnson decided not to run in 1968. The program offers up the fact that Senator Eugene McCarthy had done well against LBJ in the New Hampshire primary—something that we all know and is about as sophisticated and penetrating as a high school history textbook. The program does not mention the now famous meeting of the so-called Wise Men that Johnson called after the Tet offensive. This meeting was attended by some outside luminaries like former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General Omar Bradley. Johnson brought in a military briefer. The briefer tried to explain how Tet was a military loss for the communists. At this point, former Secretary of State Acheson got up and walked out. After, a Johnson aide called and asked why he left. Acheson replied that he would not sit through more canned Pentagon briefings. He wanted to see the raw reports and talk to people on the ground. After this call, LBJ sent Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford over to the Pentagon to look at those reports and interview the commanders. After about two weeks of review, Clifford—who had been a hawk—now decided the war was hopeless. He advised Johnson to seek a negotiated settlement. What makes this key episode surprising by its absence is that Evan Thomas is the co-author of the book the information first appeared in. Today, Thomas has become a hack. But in 1986, he and Walter Isaacson wrote an interesting book. (The Wise Men, pp. 683-89; see also Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 303-04)

    The other reason that Johnson decided to step down was first conveyed through journalist Jules Witcover’s book 85 Days, a chronicle of Robert Kennedy’s last campaign. After Senator Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary and Robert Kennedy’s announcement to enter the race, Johnson’s men on the ground in Wisconsin predicted he had no chance of winning the state primary. (Gitlin, p. 304; Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets, p. 419) That is how unpopular LBJ had become. Indeed, realizing he had no chance of winning, authors like Robert Dallek and Joseph Palermo have shown that Johnson now schemed of ways to deprive Bobby Kennedy of both the nomination and a victory in November. Again, Dallek is one of the interviewees, but apparently this was too hardboiled for the Playtone scenario.

    IV

    After Vietnam, the second major subject the film portrays is the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis that Martin Luther King was part of in March and April of 1968. It was this participation that led to King’s assassination on April 4th. Since this is Hanks and Goetzman, there is no discussion of any of the suspicious circumstances that took place that made his murder possible. Rather, the program uses the late Rev. Billy Kyles as a witness, a man who some believe may have been part of the set up to kill King. (See The 13th Juror, pp. 521-28) There is only a brief mention that, in 1967-68, King was trying to expand his movement beyond civil rights, of how this strained his relations with his more conservative political allies and how it was not enough for the more radical elements.

    The program then breaks from straight political history into a segment on African-American singers James Brown and Diana Ross. It thereafter cuts to the 1968 Academy Awards, where the Best Picture Oscar was won by the film In the Heat of the Night, a tricky race-relations police mystery. If the reader can fathom it, the program then follows with a few moments on the science-fiction film Planet of the Apes. Author Rick Perlstein says something like, well the riots in the cities were reflected in the destruction of the Statue of Liberty at the end of that film. I will not comment on the silliness of that cultural comparison. Except to say that this is Playtone.

    Instead of the sci-fi interlude, I wish the program would have given more time to the establishment and aftermath of the Kerner Commission. As a result of the terrible race riots in Watts, Chicago, Newark and Detroit, President Johnson appointed Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois to chair an 11-member panel to study the causes and possible cures for these riots, which had taken the lives of scores of citizens. That 1968 report ended up being a national bestseller and was one of the most acute and candid analyses of the race problem written in that era. It revealed that police brutality instigated many of the riots and that the underlying issues were failed housing and education programs. It also assailed the media for having almost no insight into the causes of the conflagrations. The report’s most memorable quote was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” The most notable aspect of this remarkable document is that, after appointing the commission, Johnson ignored the report. This was the beginning of the policy that White House advisor Patrick Moynihan and President Richard Nixon would later formalize as “benign neglect” toward the race problem. (Viorst, p. 508) Needless to say, one month after the report was published, over a hundred riots broke out in the wake of King’s assassination.

    The third large event that the film describes is the entry into the Democratic race for the presidency by Robert Kennedy. Tim Naftali says that Kennedy did not enter until Johnson had been already wounded by McCarthy in New Hampshire. As several authors have noted, Bobby Kennedy had been having discussions on whether to announce his candidacy for over a month prior to the New Hampshire primary. As journalist Jules Witcover wrote, he had decided to enter the primary race prior to New Hampshire. (Chapter 2 in the e-book version of Witcover’s 85 Days, specifically p. 70) But he did not announce until after because he did not want that announcement to have any effect on that state primary. The film then depicts Kennedy in Indianapolis announcing the news of King’s murder to an awaiting crowd, and his prominent role in helping Coretta King arrange the funeral in Atlanta.

    The student riots at Columbia are mentioned and depicted visually, but their anti-war origins are bypassed. One of the students involved, Bob Feldman, had discovered the university was supporting the war effort through its association with the Institute for Defense Analysis. The film also does not deal with the unusual bifurcation of that demonstration. The SDS students were dealt with separately from the university’s African-American demonstrators. The former were motivated by Columbia’s association with the war; the latter by the encroachment by the university into the nearby lower class area of Morningside Heights and the construction of a gym they felt would be segregated. The Columbia demonstration ended with the NYPD assaulting the students: over 100 were injured and nearly 600 were arrested. As author Todd Gitlin noted, the MSM—particularly the New York Times and Newsweek—turned against the students and did not denounce the brutality the police used in expelling them from the campus. (Gitlin, pp. 307-08)

    The film now begins to posit the two figures of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in opposition to these student and race disturbances. The series never makes explicit what was clearly the political objective of both presidential candidates: To capitalize on these inner city bonfires—over one hundred cities erupted in riots after King’s murder—in order to exploit the issue of “law and order” for political purposes. The idea was to ignore their underlying causes and exalt the effort of the police to stamp them out, which was made easier by LBJ ignoring the Kerner Commission. For example, Nixon began to cultivate a Southern Strategy around the race riots issue. Kevin Phillips, a Nixon strategist at the time, was open about this later. He had noted that in 1964, although Senator Barry Goldwater had lost in a landslide, the conservative Republican presidential candidate took five states in the south. The strategist chalked this up to the fact that Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Phillips concluded that his party should enforce the Voting Rights Act because, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” He then added that without that aspect, “the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” (NY Times, May 17, 1970, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy”) For whatever reason, Phillips is not on the program to explain this strategy.

    A good way to have crystallized this moral and political quandary would have been to contrast the Nixon/Phillips strategy with what Bobby Kennedy was faced with in late 1963. The first scene of John Bohrer’s book about RFK depicts the Attorney General contemplating a letter of resignation to his brother in November of 1963. Kennedy felt that he had been too strong on the issue of civil rights and would now lose the entire south for JFK in the upcoming election. (The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, p. 1) In other words, since the 18 previous presidents had ignored the issue and allowed segregation and discrimination to fester in the south, when Bobby Kennedy faced the issue directly, white backlash had been unleashed. This painful moral and political issue is not addressed in this Hanks/Goetzman production.

    V

    The race for the Republican nomination is also outlined. Richard Nixon had a well-planned, well-organized campaign and he got in early. His two rivals were Michigan governor George Romney and the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. In 1967, Romney made a bad mistake for a Republican: He told the truth about Vietnam. In explaining his early support for the war, he said he had been brainwashed by the army about it. (Gitlin, p. 297) This eventually forced him to leave the field in February. Rockefeller vacillated and did not enter the race until the end of April. Considering that tardiness he did fairly well, coming in second in the delegate count at the Miami convention. California Governor Ronald Reagan challenged Nixon in some of the primaries but only won in his home state. Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland was nominated for Vice President, reportedly on the strength of a scolding delivered to civil rights demonstrators. (Gitlin, p. 132)

    As many commentators have stated, this race constituted a milestone for the Republican Party. Nixon’s victory and the failure of Romney and Rockefeller to effectively challenge him from the center marked the beginning of the end of both the moderate and liberal wings of the GOP represented, respectively, by politicians like Senator John Sherman Cooper and Senator Jacob Javits. The next Republican to win the White House would be the man who challenged Nixon from the far right, Ronald Reagan. This historical landmark is only passingly noted in the film.

    In dealing with Bobby Kennedy’s June victory in California, the program has Tim Naftali say words to the effect that when Kennedy exited the Embassy Room and walked through the pantry, Sirhan Sirhan was waiting for him. It’s comments like this that keep Naftali on these programs. As anyone who has studied the RFK case knows, Sirhan was escorted into the pantry by the infamous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress after he shared coffee with her. Or as Sirhan himself said, “Then she moved and I followed her. She led me into a dark place.” (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby, p. 115) The program then shows some film of the aftermath of the shooting. In relation to Sirhan, who was being pummeled, one person cries out, “We don’t want another Oswald!” That exclamation bridges a five-year national psychic chasm extending from Dallas to Los Angeles.

    Kennedy’s death is followed by the subsequent mass at St Patrick’s in New York, featuring Ted Kennedy’s memorable eulogy. We then see the famous railroad car journey from New York to Washington where reportedly two million spectators lined the tracks to say good-bye and pay their respects to the senator. This touching moment is then dissipated by Hanks coming on and saying words to the effect: And that was the end of 1968. No Tom, that was the end of the second phase of the sixties, and for all intents and purposes it closed the promise of the decade down. The first phase of the sixties are sometimes termed the Camelot years, from 1960-63. It was brought to an end in Dallas in 1963. The second phase of the decade was the angry sixties, finished off by Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination in Los Angeles. The murders of both King and RFK were the last spasms of the once promising and hopeful decade. After this, American youth escaped into drugs and psychedelic rock epitomized by Woodstock in 1969. That sensational decade was therefore literally shot to death.

    During Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington, many inhabitants of Resurrection City, the site of the Poor People’s March, journeyed over to pay their last respects. This was fitting in more than one respect, because it was Kennedy, through Marian Wright, who had given King the idea for that Poor People’s March. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 911-12) The film does not note that irony. Nor does it note that Tom Hayden, who was about to lead the demonstrations in Chicago, was weeping in a pew during the requiem mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Schlesinger, p. 956)

    And that would have been a good lead-in to the film’s presentation of the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had entered the race, but had bypassed competing in any primaries. In 1968, it was still possible to amass a large amount of delegates without going the primary route. Because he was closely associated with President Johnson, Humphrey—unlike Kennedy and McCarthy—had not denounced the war in public. On the contrary, as John Bohrer wrote, he had attacked Kennedy for offering diplomatic solutions to end the conflict. (The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 271-74) As the film notes, after the death of RFK, McCarthy essentially slid off the grid. There really was no genuine anti-war alternative to Humphrey in Chicago. And this was the cause of the demonstrations and rioting that took place there. Unlike what the film conveys, while the riots were ongoing, the networks did not really cover them very much. For instance, out of 19 hours of coverage, NBC only showed 14 minutes of the demonstrations and police beatings. (“Lessons from the Election of 1968”, The New Yorker, January 8, 2018)

    Resurrection City and the Poor People’s March had failed without King. And, as many have observed, without RFK there, the Democratic Party split apart in Chicago. Mayor Richard Daley was determined to show that, amid the chaos, he was in charge. The police even raided McCarthy’s headquarters at the Hilton Hotel. (Gitlin, p. 334) Humphrey won the nomination, but he was a severely wounded candidate. He did not announce his support for a bombing halt and negotiations until the last month of the campaign. McCarthy would not endorse him until the last week. He was gaining rapidly at the end, but he fell just short. The film tries to say that Illinois, which went for Nixon, made the difference. But doing the arithmetic in the Electoral College, that is not correct. Nixon still would have won. The difference was probably the Wallace campaign.

    To the film’s credit, it does mention the October Surprise of 1968: that is, Nixon’s actions through Republican lobbyist Anna Chennault to sabotage Johnson’s attempt to get negotiations going in Paris between Saigon and Hanoi. The subterfuge turned out to be effective and it might have cost Humphrey the election. But the film does not ask the next logical question. Since Johnson found out about Nixon’s subversion while it was in progress, why did he not make it public? Johnson also had evidence that the Greek junta had funneled Nixon $500,000 during his campaign. (NY Times, April 12, 1998, “Lone Star Setting”) This was clearly a bribe. Did Johnson not want Humphrey to win? In fact, as Sean Wilentz reported in the aforementioned article, Johnson actually preferred Nelson Rockefeller as his successor.

    The film ends with what one would expect of Hanks. Not with Nixon and the premature end of the sizzling Sixties, but with 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 missions, the latter of which orbited the moon. Hanks has always idealized those space missions. And he has always ignored their prohibitive costs and the fact that they ended up in the Challenger catastrophe. Which pretty much ended the wild ideas about manned space flights. This contravenes the film’s idea that somehow Apollo 8 redeemed the horrible disappointments and reversals of 1968, which helped bring about the coming of Richard Nixon. And neither does a film culture that went from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Wonder Woman and Black Panther. Those last two films treat the issues of women’s rights and black identity only a couple of notches below the depth with which In the Heat of the Night did. On the issue of race, I much preferred the quiet simplicity of Nothing But a Man.

    In sum, this is a thoroughly mediocre rendering of a tumultuous year. Mediocre in every way, including aesthetically. It is almost as if Adam Curtis and the daring things he did with documentary form in The Power of Nightmares never happened. What Playtone does here is simply slap together archival footage with people talking. Which would not be bad if the talking heads delivered original or insightful commentary. But they don’t. Not even close. And that is a real shame since what happened in 1968 casts a very long shadow. A shadow that cuts well into the new millennium.

  • Richard N. Goodwin, ‘supreme generalist’ who was top aide to JFK and LBJ, dies at 86

     

  • Does Paul Street get paid for this junk?

    Does Paul Street get paid for this junk?

    I really hope the answer to the question posed by this article’s title is no. Why? Because Street’s latest exercise in fruitiness is nothing but a recycling of two previous columns he wrote. His current article, which was supposed to be a salute to the memory of Martin Luther King, is really no such thing. It is actually a cheapening of King’s memory, because Street chose to elevate King at the same time that he denigrates President Kennedy. But beyond that, the article is ironically titled, “Against False Conflation: JFK, MLK and the Triple Evils”, since Street himself is guilty of conflating one column he did in January on King with another he did in February on Kennedy. The latter was posted at Truthdig; the former at Counterpunch. What he does in his current effort at the latter site is largely a cut-and-paste job of the two articles. Which is what I mean about hoping he does not get paid for this stuff.

    I demolished his February piece on Kennedy at length already. (See Paul Street Meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington for the ugly details) But what he does now is make believe that demolition did not happen, and he simply modifies it slightly to serve as the first part of his worthless essay. So if he is getting paid, it’s easy money.

    When I heard of what he had done, I emailed Counterpunch and asked if I could reply on site. After four days I received no reply. Therefore, I will reply here again. And to place Street on warning: whenever I hear about more of his nonsensical writing on the subject, I will reply in the future. Especially since his scholarship is so bad that this is like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, Kennedys and King may end up with a special section called “Street is a Dead End”.

    As I stated, Street slightly modified the first part of his hatchet job on President Kennedy. He opens his article by aseerting that he does not pretend to know the full stories behind who killed Kennedy or King. But he cannot help but list the lone gunman option first. Anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject would howl with laughter at anyone who would proffer that option today. That Street leaves it open tells us a lot about the argument he wishes to make. For if he did admit that JFK was killed by a high-level plot, it would tend to undermine his nonsensical thesis.

    This is especially true in light of the fact that so many of President Kennedy’s policies were altered and then reversed after his death. For example, there were no American combat troops in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed. By the end of 1965, not only were there 175,000 combat troops in theater, but also Rolling Thunder—the greatest air bombardment campaign in history—was operating over North Vietnam.   We can make other comparisons to the same effect from the scholarly literature that Street refuses to consult. For example, by reading Richard Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa, one can see that a very similar trend followed in Congo. By reading Lisa Pease’s essay about the giant conglomerate Freeport Sulphur, one can see the same trend line in Indonesia. (See JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur) By reading just a few pages from Donald Gibson’s masterful volume, Battling Wall Street, one can see that it occurred in the Dominican Republic as well. (See pages, 76-79) By reading Robert Rakove’s fine overview of Kennedy’s revolutionary foreign policy, one can see that the same thing happened in the Middle East, where Kennedy favored Gamel Abdel Nasser. After his death, Johnson and Nixon moved back to favoring Iran and Saudi Arabia, with disastrous results. (See Kennedy, Johnson and the Non Aligned World.) The story of Africa outside the Congo also followed a similar plot line. And the reader can see that by reading Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans.

    What is remarkable about Street’s articles is that there is no evidence at all in any of them that he read any of this material. Consequently, in addition to the ignorance he shows on the subject, there is also a tinge of arrogance involved. Does he think that since he knows better, somehow he is above reading the latest scholarship on the subject? Well, that is one way that he can keep his screeds coming, isn’t it?

    The other point that he implies with his opening is that the assassinations of the Sixties are not really linked in any way. Again, this is quite a difficult thesis to swallow. Lisa Pease and I wrote a 600-page book on that very subject called The Assassinations. There, with rather intricate and up-to-date evidence, we tried to show how the four major assassinations of the decade—President Kennedy, Malcolm X, King, Robert Kennedy—all shared similar characteristics in both their outlines and design, and in the cover-ups afterwards. We also offered a final essay in which we tried to show that it was the cumulative effect of those murders that brought us to the election of 1968: the coming of Richard Nixon and the rise of the hard right to power—a phenomenon that drastically altered the social and economic landscape of this country, and from which it may never recover. One only needs to look at what happened after Nixon left office: how Jerry Ford allowed Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to bring the Committee on the Present Danger into the White House and do battle with the CIA over their estimate of the Soviet Threat, an unprecedented event. The people they brought in—Paul Nitze, Paul Wolfowitz—thought as Rumsfeld and Cheney did: namely, that Henry Kissinger, Nixon, and Alexander Haig were too moderate. (See Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis.)  

    That remarkable, little noted occasion had two effects. First, it gave birth to the neoconservative movement, and its later cast of characters, e.g., Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle. Second, it was the final burial of Kennedy’s progressive, visionary foreign policy. And I do not just mean his attempt at détente with Cuba and the USSR. I also mean his attempt to mold a policy concerning the Third World which was not bound to Cold War ideology, but which was characterized instead by an effort to understand and ameliorate the problems of nations coming out of the debilitating state of European colonialism.

    Indonesia and Congo offer the two most notable examples. And if Street had done a little bit of reading on the subject he would have known better. For as Susan Williams wrote in her study of the murder of Dag Hammarskjold, Harry Truman made a curious comment when he heard about the UN Secretary General’s death. He said, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice, I said ‘When they killed him.’.” (Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold?, p. 232) Why on earth did Truman say this? We did not learn why until Australian scholar Greg Poulgrain published another book Street has never read.   It is called The Incubus of Intervention. In examining how Kennedy’s Indonesian policy was opposed by Allen Dulles, the author talked to George Ivan Smith, a close friend and colleague of Hammarskjold’s at the United Nations. Smith revealed that Hammarskjold and Kennedy were secretly cooperating not just on the Congo, but on the problem of Dutch occupation of West Irian, which Indonesian leader Achmed Sukarno felt should be a part of Indonesia. Smith added that Kennedy had let former Democratic president Truman in on that cooperation. That is why Truman made the comment he did. (Poulgrain, pp. 77-78. For a fuller discussion of the Hammarskjold/Kennedy nexus, see Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite)

    What is so remarkable—in fact, admirable—about this revelation is this: Kennedy kept his pledge to Hammarskjold even after the UN Secretary General was killed! As anyone who reads Mahoney’s book, or Lisa Pease’s essay, or Poulgrain’s book will see, Kennedy was diligent throughout his abbreviated term on both fronts. He personally visited the United Nations on two occasions to ensure that the UN would not forget what Hammarskjold was doing in Congo after he died. And Kennedy allowed American troops into battle to stop the secession of the Katanga province, a move sponsored by Belgium and, to a lesser extent, by England. (See Desperate Measures in the Congo)

    The same was true of Indonesia. Kennedy stuck by Sukarno until the end. He engineered the ceding of West Irian to Indonesia under the negotiated guidance of his brother Robert. President Kennedy had also arranged a state visit to Jakarta in 1964, in part to stave off the confrontation between Sukarno and the United Kingdom over the creation of the Malaysia federation. When Sukarno wanted to expel foreign corporations, Kennedy negotiated new agreements with them so that Indonesia would benefit from the profit split, which JFK requested be 60/40 in Indonesia’s favor. After Sukarno was overthrown, that split was 90/10 in favor of the companies. (Poulgrain, p. 242) Without Kennedy, Sukarno lasted less than two years. President Johnson now backed Malaysia in the dispute with Sukarno, and consequently, Sukarno withdrew from the United Nations. As Lisa Pease notes in her above-referenced article, President Johnson altered Kennedy’s policy towards Sukarno very quickly, and within 12 months the CIA started to plot his overthrow.

    These are just two examples. But they typify President Kennedy’s overall foreign policy. If Street can show me another president since him who did these kinds of things in two separate instances—that is, attempt to foster a revolutionary, nationalist government against European imperialists, and work with the United Nations to do so—I would very much like to hear about them.

    Ignoring the above two cases, Street brings up Vietnam in relation to the issue of Kennedy and the Third World. Here Street says that there has been since 1991 an ongoing debate on whether Kennedy was going to withdraw. He states that the debate was between Oliver Stone and Jamie Galbraith on one side, and Noam Chomsky and Rick Perlstein on the other. He then claims that, somehow, the latter two writers have won that debate. First off, Chomsky has not done any new work on Vietnam since before 1991. But secondly, other authors have done new and important work that is based on new material. Real historians like Howard Jones, David Welch and David Kaiser have uncovered new evidence to make the original argument, first offered by John Newman in 1992, even stronger. For Street to even bring up Perlstein shows just how threadbare he is. For Perlstein did nothing but reiterate Chomsky’s dated, musty and unconvincing polemics. To note just one difference in the quality of scholarship: Welch offered up declassified tapes of Lyndon Johnson actually admitting that he knew Kennedy was withdrawing from Indochina and thus had to cover up the fact he was breaking with that policy. (Welch, Virtual JFK, pp. 304-14) I ask the reader, how much more proof does one need? Well, how about Assistant Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric revealing that his boss Robert McNamara told him that Kennedy had given him orders to wind down the war? (Welch, p. 371) Is Street, who was not there, going to say he knows better than Johnson and Gilpatric, who were in the room?

    This relates to the overall comparison of King with the Kennedys. As anyone who studies American history understands, after the Civil War, the states of the former confederacy passed local and state laws which created the conditions of segregation throughout the southeast: from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. No one wanted to challenge these laws out of fear of violent retribution from white terrorist groups, but also because of the political price that was going to be exacted. The most that any president did was Harry Truman, who decided to integrate the armed forces. Which really did not cost him much politically, since it was invisible stateside.

    From the beginning, the Kennedys decided that they were going to take the issue on, no matter what the price. They decided they were going to use the Brown vs. Board decision as a legal basis to break down the structure of segregation. Kennedy announced this before he was elected. And he stated he was prepared to lose every southern state at the Democratic Convention because of that stand. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) Which, of course, completely contradicts Street’s dictum that the Kennedys were constricted on civil rights because of votes in the South.

    But prior to that, during the debate over the 1957 civil rights act, Kennedy stressed the prime role of Title 3 in the bill. That clause allowed the Attorney General to enter into a state to enforce school desegregation. When Kennedy, in no uncertain terms, came out for Title 3, he began to lose support in the South. It got worse when he made a speech in Jackson, Mississippi—let me repeat: Jackson, Mississippi—where he reiterated that he supported the Brown vs. Board decision as the law of the land. (Golden, p. 95) Again, this is before he entered the White House.

    It did not change once he was elected. Kennedy had his civil rights advisor Harris Wofford draft a long memorandum on how to strategically attack the segregation problem. Wofford advised that the president use a series of executive actions to forge a path and build momentum until it was possible to pass a bill over a filibuster in the Senate. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 47) To anyone who studies Kennedy’s presidency, it is common knowledge that this memorandum furnished the design of his plan to attack the bastions of southern racism.

    His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, understood this out of the gate. To the Kennedys, civil rights were simply a matter of doing the right thing. As RFK said, “it was the thing that should be done.” (Robert Kennedy in his Own Words, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffrey Schulman, p. 105) The Attorney General announced this in public at his famous Law Day speech at the University of Georgia in May of 1961. In other words, three months after the inauguration, RFK went into the Deep South and said he was going to support Brown vs. Board in the courts. Does Street think this helped him get votes for his brother in the South?

    Quite the contrary. But, as many have noted, what these pronouncements did was provide a catalyst for the civil rights movement. They finally had someone in the White House who was on their side. This sparked King and his allies to incite even larger displays of civil disobedience. As Bobby Kennedy noted later, the emerging images and films of Bull Connor’s actions to stamp out the Birmingham demonstration were the impetus that made his civil rights bill possible. JFK used to joke about it by calling it ‘Bull Connor’s Bill’. (Guthman and Schulman, p. 171) It was that, plus Kennedy’s showdown with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama, that provoked Bobby Kennedy to suggest his brother go on national television and make his famous speech about civil rights. That powerful oration was then followed by the Kennedys helping King arrange the March on Washington in August of 1963. (Bernstein, pp. 103; 114-15) This provided the ballast to start Kennedy’s civil rights bill on its path through Congress.

    One of the most bizarre things Street says in his article is that, somehow, the Kennedys were responsible for things like the killing of civil rights workers in the South. In his mad crusade, is he trying to blame the Kennedys for the rise of the Klan? That began about ninety years before Kennedy entered the White House. Or is Bobby Kennedy to be blamed for J. Edgar Hoover’s lack of rigor in counteracting white racists? As Burke Marshall, who was in charge of the civil rights division at Justice, once noted, it was Bobby Kennedy who had to push Hoover and the FBI into investigating civil rights matters. (Guthman and Schulman, p. 139)

    In his zealous jihad, Street can do what he wants to rewrite history and rearrange the make-up of government bodies. He can blame the whole Reconstruction Era on President Kennedy. He can ignore what Hoover failed to do. He can discount all the previous Attorney Generals before RFK. He can erase the record of all the presidents from Lincoln to Kennedy who did next to nothing on civil rights issues. He can cast a blind eye to the virtual inaction of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon in the six years after Brown vs. Board. But there is one simple truth that no one can deny: the Kennedys did more for civil rights in three years than all the previous 18 presidents did in nearly a century. That is an ineradicable fact.

    And Street’s hero, Martin Luther King, knew it. This is why, in March of 1968, King told his advisors that he would be behind Bobby Kennedy in the election. At this time, both McCarthy and President Johnson were in the race, but RFK had not formally declared. King preferred Bobby Kennedy over McCarthy for the specific reason that Kennedy had a stronger record on civil rights than the Minnesota senator. And he knew Kennedy would withdraw from Vietnam. (Martin Luther King, Jr: The FBI File, edited by Michael Friedly and David Gallen, p. 572)

    But further, as Arthur Schlesinger revealed through Marian Wright, it was Bobby Kennedy who gave King the idea for the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. He suggested it to her, and then she relayed it to King. (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 911-12) So much for Street’s charge that the Kennedys never wanted to redistribute wealth. King very much liked what RFK offered as a candidate. As he told his inner circle, Bobby Kennedy could become an outstanding president and there was no question that King was going to formally endorse him. (Schlesinger, p. 912) But I am sure Street would say: Well, King was wrong about that one. Even though he was there.

    The judging of presidents is a comparative exercise. There is no absolute standard to propose. Mother Theresa, or an equivalent, would not have been a viable candidate. With the declassification process we have had—and which Street is apparently oblivious to—presidents like Johnson and Nixon have looked worse, Nixon much worse. But the more documents we get on JFK, the better his administration appears. Street does not read them, so he does not know. But whether he denies it or not, the bottom line is simple: King was right.

    It’s always nice to be able to hoist a pretentious gasbag on his own petard.

  • New York Historical Society Features Exhibit on MLK and RFK

    Rebel Spirits: Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., February 16, 2018 through May 20, 2018

  • Paul Street meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington

    Paul Street meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington

    About a decade ago I fell out of love with the liberal blogosphere. Prior to that time, I had read many of their sites assiduously, e.g., Think Progress, Daily Kos, Firedoglake and so on and so forth. Then, in December of 2008, I came across a rather mindless attack by Jane Hamsher at her Firedoglake site on Caroline Kennedy. That irresponsible and jejune jeremiad was picked up by Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos. It was about whether or not JFK’s daughter was fit to serve in the Senate seat that Hillary Clinton was going to leave to become Secretary of State under President Obama.

    I was taken aback by the lack of any historical perspective, by the fundamental errors, and—there is no way around it—the deliberate distortion of the record. I decided to reply, and my reply ended up evolving into a three part series. This was the beginning of the end of my romance with the so-called “liberal blogosphere”. Later on, someone who worked for one of those sites read my series and confirmed all of my fears about what it had become. When I mentioned in my series the hopes some had for a revival of the likes of Art Kunkin and LA Free Press and Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts, he said, “Art Kunkin? You are dreaming my friend.” He then added words to the effect that: These people fell into this field. They don’t understand at all what real journalism is, let alone investigative reporting and research. And, what is worse, they are not interested in learning about it.

    Evidently my series did not have much of an impact, because someone named Paul Street has now repeated the hit piece begun by Hamsher and Moulitsas. Street writes for journals like Z Magazine and Counterpunch, former homes to the likes of Noam Chomsky and the late Alex Cockburn. They are part of what I call the doctrinaire Left that has done so much to lead so many good-hearted people astray in both history and politics.

    What is the occasion of Street picking up the cudgel to attack both President Kennedy and, to a lesser extent, Senator Kennedy? Well, it is similar to the occasion that Hamsher embarrassed herself about. Street did not like the fact that the Democratic Party chose Bobby Kennedy’s grandson, Joseph Kennedy III, to counter President Trump’s State of the Union address. As far as I could tell, Street did not mention anything that Congressman Kennedy said in his speech. Nor did he point to his attacks on Trump’s tax plan, or the Affordable Care Act, both of which were vigorous and effective. So, right at the start, we know that Street is going to be playing the usual shell game in his screed. This consists of distorting the adduced record, leaving key points out, and relying on folklore and not scholarship to jimmy together another cheap smear job.

    This gaming begins with the title: “Joe Kennedy III, Just Another False Progressive Idol, like JFK”. So from the outset, Street has no equivocations about what he is about to say, even though almost none of his essay is footnoted. Like many before him, he begins with the whole mildewed cliché that JFK has a stellar image today because of his glamorous wife, his charisma, and his two cute kids. Yawn.

    If you can believe it, Street begins his assault by referring to a book that is over forty years old, Bruce Miroff’s musty and obsolete Pragmatic Illusions. From here, Street now begins to argue that Kennedy was part of the upper class—what we would call the 1 per centers today—who wanted to perpetuate inequalities and had no interest in altering the “established socioeconomic arrangements.”

    How anyone could write something this false and have it published by any kind of journal—whether electronic or print media—is almost beyond imagining today. And why would one use Miroff’s book on the subject and ignore Donald Gibson’s classic volume on Kennedy’s economic policies, Battling Wall Street? Gibson’s book was published almost twenty years after Miroff’s and constitutes the most definitive statement in the literature on Kennedy’s economic program. Thus, right off the bat, Street shows us that he is not being honest with the reader; he has an agenda about a kilometer wide. Gibson’s volume was an example of real scholarship. He used documents and reports that had never been discussed in any kind of depth before. And after presenting these materials, reviewing President Kennedy’s showdown with the steel companies, and analyzing the long-term design of his national and international economic plan, he concluded that Kennedy’s economic concept was the most progressive he had seen since Franklin Roosevelt’s.

    One of the many valuable things Gibson did was to demonstrate the split between David Rockefeller and President Kennedy (Gibson, pp. 73-74). To anyone who knows anything about the structure of the Power Elite at that time, such a split would not have existed if Kennedy were part of that “one percent” exclusive club, for, as Gibson points out, when Kennedy took office, David Rockefeller had emerged as its leader. (Gibson, p. 73) In an exchange of letters, Rockefeller requested that Kennedy place reins on spending; that he raise interest rates, and also tighten the money supply. As Gibson notes, Kennedy shunted aside each of these requests. Kennedy’s chief economic advisor was Walter Heller, a noted Keynesian. Heller had nothing but derisive scorn for the rising policies of the Austrian School of Economics, soon to be popularly represented by Milton Friedman, who would become the darling of the GOP Eastern Establishment. Further disproving Miroff, both Henry Luce’s Fortune and the Wall Street Journal strongly attacked Kennedy’s expansive and remedial domestic economic policies and programs. (Gibson, pp. 58-67) For instance, in 1962, Kennedy instituted the Manpower Development and Training Act and attempted to pass a Medicare bill. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 187, 256-57) Questions for Street: How would those programs uphold the status quo? And why doesn’t he mention them?

    Kennedy also opposed Rockefeller in his international economic policy, as exemplified by the Alliance for Progress, which extended loans to Latin America from the Treasury Department, thereby bypassing the IMF and Export-Import Bank. In fact, after Kennedy’s death, Rockefeller expressed his relief that Lyndon Johnson had done much to eviscerate this program. (Gibson, p. 84) But further, as Philip Muehlenbeck and Robert Rakove have also pointed out, Kennedy eschewed using military force in the Third World and instead wanted to use aid and loan programs to curry favor with nationalist leaders in these emerging nations, e.g., Sukarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. (See, respectively, Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 73-96, and Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, pp. 148-49)

    Continuing with his exercise in absurdist theater, Street now goes on to say that, somehow, President Kennedy and his brother Robert were also on the wrong side of the civil rights issue. He even writes that the Kennedy brothers were calculating their moves in this arena by counting how far they could go without losing white votes in the South. Before Mr. Street wrote that, he should have read the opening pages of John Bohrer’s new study of the Attorney General. The Revolution of Robert Kennedy begins with the AG pondering whether or not he should resign his position because he has lost the South for his brother due to his aggressive backing of Martin Luther King’s cause. That was on November 20, 1963. The reason for his quandary was that, from the beginning—when Robert Kennedy was being questioned by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi during his confirmation hearing—Eastland reminded him that his predecessor had never brought a legal action against discrimination or segregation in his state. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) That was true. But in one year it all changed. In that time span, RFK doubled the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, and in 12 months he had more than doubled the amount of cases that President Eisenhower had filed in eight years! By 1963, the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights Division had nearly quintupled. (Golden, p. 105) RFK then hired 18 legal interns to search microfilm records for evidence of discrimination in voting rights; and that led to him opening up 61 more cases.

    This was all a part of a preplanned strategy by President Kennedy. In October of 1960, Kennedy had told his civil rights advisory board that this was the legal strategy he planned on using in order to break the back of voting discrimination in the South. (Golden, p. 139) President Kennedy felt that with the Brown vs. Board decision, plus the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960, his brother would be able to win these court cases and defeat the voting rights problem in the Southern states.

    President Kennedy had chosen this path since he understood that he could not get an omnibus bill through Congress because it would be filibustered in the Senate. In fact, when President Kennedy submitted one in 1962, it went nowhere (Robert Kennedy in his Own Words, p. 149, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman.) Therefore, as he had been advised by civil rights advisor Harris Wofford, he kept on using administrative actions as far as he could, e.g., the New Orleans Schools case (Guthman, pp. 80-82), the integration of interstate busing through the ICC (Guthman, p. 100), the integration of higher education at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, the formation of the 1961 Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the Fair Housing Act of 1962, and the industry agreements to hire minorities involving all federal contracting (Golden pp. 60-61). There were many more, all of which Street is either ignorant of, or deliberately ignores in order to complete his hatchet job.

    In conjunction with the legal proceedings, what these unprecedented administrative actions did was to inspire African American groups and individuals to heights they had not scaled before. James Meredith applied to go to the University of Mississippi the day after Kennedy’s inauguration. (Bernstein, p. 76) As can be seen on the DVD of the film Crisis, Vivian Malone defied George Wallace in Tuscaloosa because she trusted the Kennedys to protect her, which is what RFK did by assembling over 3,000 federal troops against Wallace’s 845 state troops. All of this, and much more, gave the leaders of the civil rights movement more ballast and backing.

    It culminated in Birmingham. It was there where Governor Wallace and Police Commissioner Bull Connor overplayed their hand. The ugly images of fire hoses and barking dogs repelled Americans outside of the South, and even many in the South. Dick Gregory was on the scene. One night he left Alabama to fly home. When he got there, his wife told him that President Kennedy called and said he wanted him to phone the White House. Gregory said, “But it’s midnight.” She replied, “He said it didn’t matter what time it was.” Gregory called the White House. Kennedy picked up the phone. He told the comedian, “I need to know everything that went on, even the stuff not on TV.” Gregory spoke for about ten minutes. After he was done, Kennedy said, “Good. We’ve got those bastards now.” Gregory started to weep. (Author interview with Gregory on the Joe Madison Show in 2003)

    It was things like that, and the public face-off with Wallace, that allowed Kennedy the leverage to make his epochal civil rights speech to the nation in June of 1963. That speech is commonly referred to as the greatest presidential oration on civil rights since Lincoln. A month later he became the first white Washington politician to endorse King’s March on Washington, which occurred that August. (Bernstein, p. 114) This was the beginning of the passage of the two bills that guaranteed both civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans throughout America. It is why King, in 1968, told his advisors they would back RFK over Gene McCarthy. (Martin Luther King: The FBI File, edited by Michael Friedly and David Gallen, p. 572) I will take King’s judgment over Street’s any day of the week.

    But, Street actually outdoes himself when he begins to address President Kennedy’s foreign policy, ignoring the fact that the day before Kennedy made his civil rights speech, the president delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University. In the face of that address, Street can actually call Kennedy’s foreign policy record “militantly imperial and militarist.” He ignores not just Sukarno, who Kennedy backed to the end of his life, but also Patrice Lumumba, who the CIA helped to get rid of before JFK was inaugurated because they knew once he was in the Oval Office Kennedy would try to restore Lumumba to power. (James DIEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 29) Street also ignores the new work by Australian Greg Poulgrain, who has broken new ground with his discoveries about the informal alliance between Kennedy and UN Chairman Dag Hammarskjold over Congo and Indonesia, one that Kennedy continued by himself after Hammarskjold was murdered. (See Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention, pp. 71-83)

    Street writes that somehow Kennedy was involved in the planning of the coup to overthrow President Goulart in Brazil. As A. J. Langguth wrote, the group behind the coup was called the Business Group for Latin America. It was headed by David Rockefeller. As we have seen, and as Donald Gibson has demonstrated, Rockefeller was not on good terms with President Kennedy. In fact, he had been given the cold shoulder by JFK for three years. But once Kennedy was killed, this all changed. With President Johnson in the White House and his new assistant on Latin America Thomas Mann in charge, Rockefeller and his group were now warmly received. (Langguth, Hidden Terrors, p. 104) Within a few months, a CIA operation, which Warren Commissioner John McCloy was part of, was aimed at Brazil. It was codenamed Brother Sam and this overthrow, plus Johnson’s 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, essentially spelled the beginning of the end of the Alliance for Progress. (Kai Bird, The Chairman, pp. 551-53; Gibson, pp. 78,79)

    In keeping with his utter ignorance of the declassified record, Street now turns to Cuba and Vietnam. He repeats the mantra that somehow the Kennedy White House was behind the plots to kill Castro. This was discredited with the declassification of the CIA’s Inspector General report in the nineties. There, the Agency admitted that there was no plausible deniability for them on this issue. But as William Davy has further discovered, when the Church Committee interviewed the co-author of that IG report, he admitted the same thing. He then went further and said the CIA had deliberately deceived Robert Kennedy about the plots being terminated. (Church Committee interview with Scott Breckinridge, June 2, 1975, pp. 30-33, 49)

    On Indochina, Street now says that somehow there is still a debate going on over whether or not Kennedy was going to withdraw advisors from South Vietnam. Again, this completely discounts the declassified record, either out of pure ignorance or by purposeful design. The record of the SecDef meeting in May of 1963 was probably the single most important declassified document released by the Assassination Records Review Board. That document shows that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered all State Department, CIA officers, and Defense Department employees from Vietnam to show up in Hawaii with withdrawal plans in hand. When McNamara read the plans, he said the schedules were not fast enough and had to be hastened. (DiEugenio, pp. 336-37) This is all in black and white; it is not a Rick Perlstein/Noam Chomsky stunt over language. If Street has not read these records, then a conclusion is necessitated: He should not be writing about the issue, for the simple reasons that he is misinforming his readers and therefore resorting to propaganda. And it is this deliberate approach that allows him to ignore a very simple fact: When Kennedy was killed, there was not one combat troop in Vietnam. By the end of 1965, Lyndon Johnson had inserted 175,000 in theater. By the end of Johnson’s presidency there were over a half million there.

    If one can believe it, and by now one can, Street concludes his discussion of JFK’s foreign policy by saying that the kudos Kennedy gets over his leadership of the Missile Crisis is nauseating. Yet he somehow finds room to praise Nikita Khrushchev’s actions instead.

    Let us be clear about this: Khrushchev provoked the crisis by secretly moving a first strike force into Cuba. This included all three arms of the nuclear triad: bombers, submarines and ICBMs. All told, there were well over 100 delivery systems in this armada. Enough to knock out every major city in America except those in the Pacific Northwest. (DiEugenio, p. 60) The Russians lied to Kennedy when he wanted to discuss their presence there. They did this knowing he had repeatedly warned Moscow not to do what they had just done. Even after this Soviet subterfuge, and ignoring most of his advisors, Kennedy resorted to the least violent alternative: a blockade. He refused to bomb the missile silos since he felt too many civilians would be killed. And he refused to authorize an invasion even after the Cubans had knocked down an unarmed U2 plane, killing the American pilot. Which was the only fatality of the 13-day crisis. If one reads the transcripts of the tape-recorded discussions, any rational person—which Street is not—would admit that Kennedy was the person who saved Cuba from both a bombing campaign and an armed invasion. And it was his brother who helped defuse the crisis through his secret meetings with undercover KGB agent Georgi Bolshakov and Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. All one has to do to see the difference is to read what almost everyone else was saying toward the end, especially Lyndon Johnson. (The Kennedy Tapes, pp. 590-91, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow) Not just Kennedy’s advisors, but Senators Richard Russell and William Fulbright were also for a full invasion. (DiEugenio, p. 64) By the end, one can safely say that it was John Kennedy who rammed through a deal with Khrushchev: he would get his missiles out of Cuba, we would pledge not to invade the island and get our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey and Italy.

    Needless to say, Street makes not one mention of the détente that Kennedy was working on with both Castro and Khrushchev at the time of his assassination. Or the pain that both communist leaders felt about his death once they heard the news. Or that both men also believed that Kennedy had been the victim of a high-level government plot. This is the crazy cul de sac one arrives in following on the heels of Noam Chomsky.

    The truth is that Kennedy’s foreign policy—like his plan for civil rights—was largely arranged before he entered the White House. It was germinated on his first trip to Saigon in 1951 and his meeting with State Department official Edmund Gullion. It was later honed and refined until it was eloquently stated in his 1957 speech on the Senate floor attacking Eisenhower’s support for the French colonial war in Algeria. (The Strategy of Peace by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80) In that speech, Kennedy directly referred to Eisenhower, Nixon and the Dulles brothers as repeating the same mistake they had made three years prior in Vietnam by not negotiating a peaceful way out before the inevitable French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

    Did that tragic episode not teach us that, whether France likes it or not, admits it or not, or had our support or not, their overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence?

    Kennedy went on to say, “The problem is to save the French nation, as well as free Africa.” If Street can point out any other Washington politician who made these comments in public at this time I would like to read them. As Audrey and George Kahin wrote, in their book Subversion as Foreign Policy, at no time since World War II

    … has violence—especially on a militarized level—in the execution of covert American foreign policy been so widespread as during the Eisenhower administration. Especially was this so with respect to US relations with Third World countries … .” (p. 8)

    All one needs to do is recall Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, the attempted coup against Sukarno, and the murder plots against Lumumba. Kennedy formulated his foreign policy in opposition to this Dulles/Eisenhower/Nixon backdrop. And he specifically said on the eve of the 1960 Democratic convention that he had to win, because if the nominee was Johnson or Stu Symington, it would be a rerun of Foster Dulles or Dean Acheson. (Muehlenbeck, p. 37; I should note that Kennedy was correct about Johnson, as exhibited in Vietnam, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Greece.) As George Ball said, Kennedy’s policies stated that if we did not encourage nascent nationalism, then America would be perceived as part of the imperial status quo and we would lose out to the USSR. Therefore, to compete with the Russians we had to side with those promoting change. (Muehlenbeck, p. xiv)

    It was these ideas about the Third World which stopped Kennedy from bailing out the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, prohibited him from admitting combat troops into Vietnam, and prevented him from bombing the missile sites in Cuba during the October, 1962 crisis. This gestalt concept is easy to understand if one studies Kennedy’s career. And I have been at pains to elucidate these distinctions on more than one occasion. The last time I did so, I pointed out how Kennedy’s ideas were opposed to the stated objectives of the Council on Foreign Relations, proving once more that Mr. Street is flat wrong about Kennedy being part of the Eastern Establishment.

    As I wrote, the occasion for this leap into the abyss is Street’s outrage over Joseph Kennedy’s speech answering Trump. He is about as reliable and honest on the younger Kennedy as he is on JFK and RFK. For example, he writes that the congressman is against single payer health care. Not true. And he does not link to his speeches on Trump Care or Trump’s tax plan.

    As I noted at the start, I left the liberal blogosphere a decade ago. From reading Street, I made the right choice.

  • John R. Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy

    John R. Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy

    rfkrevolutionNext year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Consequently there have been three biographies published about RFK in the last 16 months. Last year we had the Henry Kissinger endorsed book by Larry Tye entitled Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. That work was so agenda driven, with so little new information, that it was quite difficult to read. (Click here for my review) A couple of weeks ago we had the publication of Chris Matthews’ book on RFK. Judging from Matthews’ book on John Kennedy, the volume does not hold much promise; but we will be fair in our upcoming review.

    This past June, John R. Bohrer published an unusual book about RFK. Entitled The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, it focuses on the period of time from after President Kennedy’s assassination to the end of 1966. In other words, it covers only three years, but they were crucial years. To anyone really interested in RFK, it seems to me a volume of the greatest interest. Not only is it unique in its focus, but, unlike Tye, Bohrer has done some valuable research on his subject, and unearthed some new and important information about the senator. His book shows that you can reveal a lot about a person if you study your subject from a small window but tell more about that frame than others do.

    In his introduction, Bohrer mentions something I was not aware of. Bobby Kennedy had offered to resign his position as Attorney General in advance of his brother’s 1964 reelection campaign. It had become clear to RFK that the opposition to his actions in the civil rights arena had done much to alienate both Democratic voters and politicians in the south. He saw this as being a serous liability to President Kennedy’s 1964 reelection. JFK refused to entertain the offer, but on November 20, 1963 Bobby Kennedy was despondent about the issue and still thought it was the right thing to do. After all, as the author notes, Bobby had run JFK’s 1952 senatorial campaign. In 1956, as a kind of dress rehearsal for 1960, he joined up with Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign. So he knew how brutal these things could become, and the impact his name and acts could have on the calculus for 1964.

    Bohrer portrays the assassination of President Kennedy as something that seriously affected Robert Kennedy and made him rethink his ideas about politics, in the sense that ideas and ideals mattered. It should not be all about practicality and vote counting. In fact, one of the recurring words in his speeches after his brother’s death was “revolution”. In visiting Peru, he told students who had assembled to meet him that the revolution was their responsibility. They must be wise and humane so that it will be peaceful and successful: “But a revolution will come whether we will it or not. We can affect its character, we cannot alter its inevitability.” (Bohrer, p. 8) That speech was made while RFK was a senator from New York. Ask yourself the last time you heard a US senator encourage revolution anywhere in the world.

    II

    When Attorney General Robert Kennedy got the word of his brother’s death, he talked with his press secretary Ed Guthman. The latter commented that this might bring people together. RFK replied prophetically that no, this was going to make things worse. (Bohrer, p. 12) He actually pondered whether he should resign. But President Johnson sent Clark Clifford to persuade him to stay in his position. Within days, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had pulled RFK’s private line out of his inner office. And with that, the Attorney General realized that his power in the Justice Department had been severely curtailed. As long as his brother was president, he had some leverage over Hoover. Without the White House behind him, Hoover was free to chart his own course. (p. 15) Again, he thought of resigning. But he decided to stay on until the Civil Rights bill that he and his brother had worked so hard for was passed. A main thesis of Bohrer’s book is that although his brother was gone, and JFK had been the main fulcrum of his life, Bobby now began to search for a new rudder. And that would turn out to be keeping the legacy of President Kennedy alive. Because, as the book outlines, in addition to Hoover, RFK saw certain moves that President Johnson made as being counter to what his brother had been about.

    One of these was the ascension of Thomas Mann on the Latin American desk of the State Department. Under President Kennedy, Mann had been Ambassador to Mexico. Within three weeks of his murder, Mann was promoted by Johnson to Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and also to govern the US Agency for International Development. As Arthur Schlesinger has noted, and as RFK agreed, this double appointment seemed aimed at neutralizing JFK’s rather moderate Alliance for Progress program in Latin America. (Bohrer, p. 19)

    In fact, a couple of months later, Mann held a conference for the State Department’s Latin American diplomatic corps. During his address, he did not mention the Alliance for Progress. He said the USA should not intervene against dictators if they were friendly to American business interests. But they should oppose communists whatever their policies would be. The speech was leaked to the press and characterized as advocating American commercial profits over Latin American political reform. The policy became known as the Mann Doctrine. (Walter LaFeber Inevitable Revolutions, p. 157)

    Mann’s speech was instrumental in the American backed coup that occurred several weeks later in Brazil. The following year, Mann and Johnson worked together in order to halt the movement to reinstall Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic. President Kennedy had ordered severe economic sanctions against the military plotters who had ousted the democratically elected President Bosch in September of 1963. In their opposition to Bosch, Mann and LBJ’s actions eventually led to a large military intervention by the Marines to halt his restoration. (See LaFeber, pp. 157-58; Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-80)

    What RFK and Schlesinger understood was that Johnson’s favoring of Mann’s hardline approach was a direct challenge to what Kennedy wished to achieve with his Alliance for Progress. (For a long, detailed analysis of this program under JFK, see Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 494-574) One of the aims of the 1961 Alliance program was to stimulate economic growth by making loans to Latin American countries directly from the American treasury; this afforded lower interest rates and less stringent policy strictures than going through the World Bank.

    To understand who Mann was and what he did in Latin America, one only has to comprehend that in reviewing the Alliance for Progress, historians like Schlesinger and LaFeber divide it in half: the Kennedy version versus the Johnson version. As Alliance administrator William D. Rogers stated about the Mann/LBJ takeover: “… a more dramatic shift in tone and style of US Alliance Leadership would have been difficult to imagine.” (Schlesinger, p. 721) As for President Kennedy’s oratorical hopes for the Alliance causing peaceful revolution, LBJ assistant Harry McPherson termed that: “A lot of crap.” As LaFeber notes, the Mann/LBJ revision of the Alliance consisted largely of dismantling it. But also in tilting it away from economic investment and toward military build ups. (LaFeber, p. 156) As Juan Bosch later noted of JFK’s intent to use the Alliance for Progress for democratization and structural change, those aims died with Kennedy in Dallas. (Schlesinger, p. 722) Bobby Kennedy predicted what the outcome of that abandonment would be: “The people of Latin America will not accept this kind of existence for the next generation. We would not, they will not. There will be changes.” Considering the violence that swept through Central America in the eighties, and the more peaceful revolutions that occurred in the new millennium, Kennedy was correct. (For the latter, see Oliver Stone’s documentary film, South of the Border.)

    A significant achievement of the book is its detailed explication of Robert Kennedy’s opposition to what LBJ did in another theater of Third World conflict, South Vietnam. The accepted version of RFK’s thoughts and actions on this subject has been that his tacit acceptance of what Johnson did in Indochina from 1964-66 suggested that he was in agreement with it. With what Bohrer has unearthed for his book, that view is simply untenable today.

    When young Adam Walinsky first joined Senator Kennedy’s staff, Kennedy told him that Johnson was more conservative than most people thought he was. (Bohrer, p. 141) Walinsky recommended that they not confront Johnson directly, but on the edges of policy, thus not inciting an open feud. So Kennedy took his time in making his disagreement over Indochina public. But as early as 1964, he told Johnson that he did not think the war should be escalated into a full-blown military conflict. (p. 70) Kennedy felt that raising the military component to a higher level would not work. There had to be some attempt at a political settlement. But also, our side had to offer more significant aid to the people of South Vietnam. Johnson feigned at agreeing with this approach. But, as we all know, that is not the path he took. (p. 152) In June of 1964, shortly after telling Johnson about his ideas, Attorney General Kennedy confided to Schlesinger that he believed “the situation in Vietnam may get worse and become a serious political liability to the administration.” (p. 72)

    It did get worse after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed two months later, and Johnson began air attacks against the north. When the Viet Cong retaliated by detonating bombs on new American air bases, the retaliatory air attacks increased. Kennedy was also disappointed that, while escalating, Johnson seemed to rely for advice and courage on former President Eisenhower. (p. 152)

    Journalist David Halberstam—who was a full-fledged Hawk at the time—got wind of this and criticized Bobby on the grounds of arrogance: How dare he think he was smarter than the likes of LBJ and Eisenhower? Unlike them, Bobby thought he could win the war without dropping tons of bombs and using overwhelming force. Needless to say, Halberstam’s half-baked ideas would lead to an epochal disaster. And only when it peaked out in 1968, with over 500,000 combat troops in Vietnam, and the war devolved into ”dropping tons of bombs and using overwhelming force,” did Halberstam begin to see that he and his colleague Neil Sheehan were utterly and completely wrong about a path to victory. But, to my knowledge, neither author ever admitted that the Kennedys were right.

    III

    Although some members of JFK’s staff wanted to resign after his assassination, the Attorney General advised them to stay on at least until the presidential election of 1964, if only in order to push Johnson into following through on President Kennedy’s goals on civil rights, unemployment insurance, and aid to education. In January of 1964, there was a boomlet to draft Bobby Kennedy as Johnson’s vice-president. Democratic leaders like Peter Crotty of New York, and Paul Corbin, who was working a write-in vote for Bobby in New Hampshire, were a major part of this effort. (Bohrer, pp. 31-39) Without visiting the state, Kennedy got over 25,000 write-in votes in New Hampshire. (p. 47) By April, a poll showed that 47% of the public wanted the Attorney General to serve as vice-president. An aide, Fred Dutton, advised him to make more speaking engagements to boost that figure. Up until that time, Kennedy had only made two speeches after his brother’s death. The first was little more than a courtesy appearance for the UAW, the second was a speech on civil rights. Kennedy now began to negotiate personally with GOP Senator Everett Dirksen over the civil rights bill in progress through Congress. (p. 55) To show how intent he was on seeing the bill pass, he visited Prince Edward County Virginia, a school district that had closed down its school system rather then integrate. The Kennedys had been instrumental in raising private funds to keep the system open. RFK visited the area again to present a large check to the Teachers’ Union to sustain issuing paychecks. Shortly after, in a visit to West Georgia College, he was asked about George Wallace’s popularity. He replied that people who vote for Wallace “…want the Negroes to be quiet, but the Negroes are not going to be quiet.” He then managed to continue his reply with what was now becoming his favorite word: “This is a revolution going on in connection with civil rights and the Negroes.” (pp. 58-59)

    In an oral history given as he began to find his own voice, Kennedy stated the differences between him and the new president. He said LBJ had made it clear that it was not really the Democratic Party anymore. It was now an All-American party and the businessmen like it. All the people who opposed JFK now like it. He concluded with, “I don’t like it much.” (p. 60)

    Those sentiments are remarkably consistent with what Senator William Fulbright would conclude in 1966 as he began to investigate the reasons for the escalation in Vietnam. Namely, conservatives opposed to President Kennedy were now supporting LBJ, while liberals who supported President Kennedy were now opposed to the new president. In the late spring of 1964, Bobby Kennedy began to formulate a countering political strategy: running for the Senate from New York. As he said, there he would be the “head of the Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party.” (p. 60)

    Bobby Kennedy was leaving the Senate seat in Massachusetts to his brother Teddy. His brother-in-law, Steve Smith, had been at work organizing President Kennedy’s presidential campaign. New York was to be a big part of that campaign. So Smith now switched to recommending RFK run for the Senate in New York against Republican Kenneth Keating. After all, the Attorney General had lived in New York for about ten years. (pp. 62-63) Bobby now put out the word that he would resign from Johnson’s cabinet after the civil rights bill was passed and signed. As the author notes, one of the things that bothered the AG was that he believed that Johnson saw Vietnam as a military problem. Kennedy did not see it that way. He thought a purely military effort would not be successful. He also did not like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was also a Hawk on Vietnam. (pp. 70-71) Because of this, Kennedy was not happy when Johnson chose General Maxwell Taylor as the new ambassador to Vietnam. RFK liked Taylor because of his advocacy of low intensity warfare through Special Forces, like the Green Berets. But Kennedy thought that LBJ chose the general to give him cover for a military escalation. Which turned out to be the case. (p. 74)

    The civil rights bill passed in the latter part of June, 1964. A few days later, Ben Bradlee of Newsweek asked Kennedy what he would like to do in life now. Kennedy replied that he would like to maintain all the energy and excitement his brother had generated and harness it. (p. 88) Bradlee printed this and Johnson was quite naturally perturbed. During the signing of the bill, LBJ let Bobby know how perturbed he was. Within earshot, he handed a signing pen to J. Edgar Hoover and told the FBI Director, “You deserve several of these.” If anything told the Attorney General he was persona non grata with the new power axis, that did. (p. 90) Further, Johnson now arranged the upcoming Democratic convention so that the salute to President Kennedy came on the last night, instead of the first. Johnson was worried because Bobby Kennedy was now outpolling Hubert Humphrey for vice president by a margin of 2-1. In July, Johnson called in the Attorney General and read off a list of potential vice presidential nominees he would not consider, with Bobby being on the list. (p. 100) The next month in Atlantic City at the Democratic convention, it was obvious that Johnson had made the right decision for himself politically. When Robert Kennedy appeared at the podium an oceanic ovation took place that lasted over ten minutes. In the public eye, Robert Kennedy was the heir apparent to his brother. It was time to begin his ascension to the throne.

    IV

    Robert Kennedy declared himself a candidate for the Senate on August 25, 1964 at his home in Glen Cove, Long Island. As he began to campaign, something unusual began to happen which no one recalled seeing before. In his public appearances, a reaction set in similar to Beatlemania: people began to tear his clothes off, rip his cuff links, and shake hands with him so hard that after doing this repeatedly, it caused the candidate’s hands to bleed. (p. 117) His managers, fearing for his health, demanded he not campaign each day and take off one day per week to recover.

    His advisors also found out that Kennedy did not speak well in rehearsed commercials for the camera. But he did do well in unrehearsed Q-and-A periods after delivering a speech, especially with young people. So this is what they broadcast. (p. 124) Kennedy ended up defeating Keating by ten points.

    Once in the Senate, RFK visited his brother’s grave at night. In fact, after a friend watched this happen once, he realized that the groundskeeper had an arrangement with Bobby to let him in when no one was there. (p. 147) In the Senate, Robert Kennedy decided to do what he could to maintain what he perceived to be his brother’s legacy. He fought against closing Veterans Hospitals for budgetary reasons. He got the administration’s requested allotment cut in half. He moved for adding testing provisions to a large education bill—and he got that through. He fought Governor Nelson Rockefeller on getting grants for New York state’s impacted poverty areas. He won that battle also. (pp. 148-50) By his eleventh week in office, the new senator was getting a thousand letters per day.

    One of his pet issues was something his brother was an early advocate for: gaining home rule for Washington D. C. He said about this objective that, because the District of Columbia was predominantly African-American, home rule was being held back for the reason that “there are many people who don’t want progress made here.” (p. 161) He further added that, in his view, the problem fundamentally was not about race, but about poverty. There was a reason he accentuated this point. RFK had kept his notebook from President Kennedy’s last cabinet meeting. In his notes he had written down the word “poverty” seven times. So this was another way of continuing the policies his older brother had left behind. (p. 159) To him, if America did not attack the problems of broken homes in the ghetto, and the effect that had on education, then there would be no real improvement.

    RFK and his brother Senator Ted Kennedy were very much involved in extending the Civil Rights Act with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They also wanted to add a clause that would eliminate the poll tax. That failed, and an amendment had to be passed to eradicate the tax. (pp. 165-66) The bill passed in large part because of the 1964 electoral landslide, which gave the Democrats 68 seats in the Senate. As Walinsky later said, it was, “A crazy time. I mean we were going to reshape American society, all of us. There was a new bill every day.” (p. 166)

    But there was a shadow hanging over it all. In early April of 1965, Johnson gave a hawkish speech about Vietnam. This was just after the first combat troops had landed at DaNang Air Base, and Rolling Thunder, Johnson’s air campaign against the north, was in its initial stages. Again, RFK advised Johnson against taking the militaristic path in Vietnam. Sounding like his fallen brother, he added that America should make it clear to the Saigon government that we will not be staying there to fight the war for them. He even asked Johnson to fire Dean Rusk and replace him with the more moderate Bill Moyers. (p. 168) But since he was a Democrat, and American troops had been committed into theater, he also felt obligated to vote for Johnson’s appropriations for escalation, even though he did not approve of the actions. He explained, “If I voted for it without saying anything, it would have appeared that I approved of it—which I didn’t.” (p. 175)

    In his public speeches he again returned to his favorite word, revolution. He praised students who marched on Washington as demonstrating the “essence of the American Revolution.” (p. 180) At a commencement address he stated, “We are the heirs of a revolution that lit the imagination of all those who seek a better life for themselves and their children.” He added that there was also a revolution aimed against America. After hundreds of years of domination by the West he said, America buys 8 million cars per year, while those in formerly colonized countries go without shoes. He told the graduates, that they “have an unparalleled opportunity—not to find a world, but to make one.” (p. 179)

    Kennedy had no qualms about taking on big lobbies or big business. He railed in public about the growing power of the NRA, a lobby which he characterized as spending huge amounts of cash distorting the facts, and which placed a minimal inconvenience above saving the lives of thousands of Americans each year. (p. 182) He called in the CEO’s of the Big Three auto companies and questioned them about how much money their companies were making while spending so little on research into safety matters. (pp. 200-01) He also moved against the tobacco companies. He was the first to propose a warning label on cigarette packages. (p. 203) Senator Kennedy even tried to get right-to-work statutes repealed. These were laws, mostly in the south, that weakened unions since they allowed employees in a shop to opt out of union membership while enjoying union benefits. (p. 203)

    Reading Bohrer’s book, it is very hard to defend the MSM meme that RFK was a reluctant warrior on civil rights and the plight of African Americans. For the simple reason that he never let go of the issue. At times he went beyond what most civil rights advocates were talking about. Frequently, his ideas echoed Martin Luther King’s. At a VISTA indoctrination in Harlem, Kennedy said, “It is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant: it is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there…” (p. 205) He was sometimes at pains to delineate the differences for black Americans in the south versus the north. For example, he stated, “Civil rights leaders cannot, with sit-ins, change the fact that adults are illiterate. Marches do not create jobs for their children.” (p. 205)

    In one of his most controversial statements about the issue, the former Attorney General talked about the differing ways in which the law is looked upon by middle class and wealthy Caucasians as opposed to downtrodden minorities. To the more privileged group, the law is looked upon as a friend who preserves and protects property and personal safety. But to the latter group, the law seems different: “The law does not fully protect their lives, their dignity, or encourage their hope and trust for the future.” (p. 206) Kennedy was attacked for this statement by several media outlets including the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and Time. They characterized his comments as a sitting senator encouraging youths to break the law. Kennedy stood by his statement. He said that the Watts riots of 1965 would be repeated “across the nation if we don’t act quickly.” (p. 206)

    As noted above, another point that Bohrer’s book effectively contravenes is the idea that Kennedy was late to oppose Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. As shown, Kennedy had done this in private with LBJ in 1964. That same year, in an address at Caltech, he did so publicly in an indirect way. He stated that guerilla warfare and terrorism arose from the conditions desperate people live under, and they cannot be put down by force alone. He then said, “Over the years, an understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers and supersonic bombers.” (p. 190)

    What surprised many commentators inside the beltway was that the first term senator’s attempt to forge his Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party was working. For example, one evening there were two competing Washington social events arranged. One was by the Kennedys; one by the wealthy Washington hostess and former ambassador to Luxembourg, Perle Mesta. Mesta had backed Johnson against JFK in 1960. The Kennedy gathering outdrew Mesta’s by a 10-1 ratio. (p. 183)

    In the midst of this entire rising furor came the invitation to speak in South Africa.

    V

    Ian Robertson was a member, and eventual president, of the longstanding National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). From its founding in 1924, this group had opposed the apartheid system in their country. In July of 1965, Robertson extended an invitation to Kennedy to speak at Cape Town University in the spring of 1966. After doing so, he challenged the authorities to deny Kennedy entry. Robertson was now placed under house arrest. Not only did Kennedy accept, he made the invitation public, thereby making it harder for the South African government to deny him entry. Reporter Murray Kempton wrote, “It is unlikely he will ever go. What is extraordinary is the fact of the invitation …. Senator Kennedy has a name at which lonely men grasp in their loneliness.” (p. 227)

    Kempton was wrong. Kennedy had every intention of speaking in South Africa. But at the time that journey was being arranged, RFK also decided to also take an expedition to Latin America. What Kennedy did south of the border, and the very fact that he was determined to go to South Africa—these factors defined who he was at this time, and also where he was in the makeup of our political system. As we shall see, he had by now clearly inherited his brother’s mantle, and in some ways, gone beyond it.

    Before going to Latin America, Kennedy was to be briefed on the political conditions in the countries he was visiting, and also what the State Department wanted him to say and not say while he was there. So he and two assistants showed up at the State Department and were briefed by Jack Vaughn. As Vaughn went through the countries Kennedy was to visit, and advised him on what to say if anyone asked him about the American invasion of the Dominican Republic, the senator began to fully understand how much Johnson had overturned President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program. By the time it was ending, RFK registered his disgust at what had happened:

    Well, Mr. Vaughn, as I see it, then, what the Alliance for Progress has come down to is that you can abolish political parties and close down the Congress and take away the basic freedoms of the people and deny your political opponents any rights at all and banish them from the country, and you’ll get a lot of our money. But if you mess around with an American oil company, we’ll cut you off without a penny. Is that it?

    Vaughn then replied, “That’s about the size of it.” Walking out of the meeting, Kennedy said to one of his assistants, “It sounds like we’re working for United Fruit again.” (p. 231)

    What Kennedy said and did while on this voyage south seemed designed to show that he, for one, was not working for United Fruit. In addressing crowds in Lima, Peru, he told them to emulate the men who liberated Latin America from the Spanish Empire: San Martín and O’Higgins. He urged them on by saying, “You can do as they can. You cannot do less.” He then went beyond that. He urged them to emulate the justice of their Indian ancestors, the Incas, who punished nobles more harshly than they did the peasants for breaking identical laws. (p. 233) In Lima, Santiago and Buenos Aires, he repeated what had become his motto: “The responsibility of our times is nothing less than revolution.” (p. 233)

    In speaking of the history of the United States, he told crowds that the revolution in the American political system that they should look at was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Because that example demonstrated “the power of affirmative free government.” To RFK it was a hallmark of the state combining the twin ideals of social justice and liberty. (p. 234)

    In Peru, Kennedy made part of his itinerary a visit to the high altitude city of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca civilization. There, young children followed him shouting “Viva Kennedy”, ripping his pants and tearing his cheek, drawing blood. On their way back down, he stopped to talk to some peasant farmers tilling the land. When they told him they paid high prices for powdered milk donated through the US Food for Peace program, he turned to the Peace Corps aide with them and told him to look into the matter. He then asked aloud, “What happened to all our AID money? Where is it going?” He then added that the ambassador to Peru, Wesley Jones, “might as well have been the ambassador from Standard Oil.” (p. 235)

    The high point of the Peru part of the visit was a meeting with intellectuals and artists in Lima, at a gathering that resembled a salon on the west side of Manhattan. Bobby was being assailed about all the problems that the Rockefeller owned oil companies had caused and mistakes America had made. RFK asked why they always looked to the USA first. The answer was that the USA would not let them do anything about Rockefeller’s International Petroleum Company. Kennedy replied that they could not have it both ways, cursing the USA and then blaming the State Department. The solution was simple: nationalize the oil company. Someone responded that David Rockefeller had been there and warned them if they did anything to his oil company all aid would be cut off.

    The senator’s response to this should serve as a model to any doctrinaire leftist who still thinks that the Kennedys were part of the Eastern Establishment. He tartly replied, “Oh, come on! David Rockefeller isn’t the government. We Kennedys eat Rockefellers for breakfast.” (p. 235)

    In Chile, he offered to debate with communist students on an equal time basis. But after he gave his speech and offered the time to the other side, no one took him up on it. (p. 240) Then, in the mining town of Concepcion, he went down into a coal mine. When he came back up he said, “If I worked in this mine, I’d be a communist too.”

    In Brazil, three youths were arrested on charges of plotting to kill the senator. Bobby asked that they be released. They were not, but the charges were then lessened. RFK then sent a messenger to the jail to ask them to write down any questions they had about him. (p. 244) He then visited a sugar cane field and talked to the workers. They told him that their landlord was paying them three days wages for six days work. The senator walked directly to the property owner’s house and started yelling at him for not paying his workers a decent wage. (p. 245) He then went to the presidential palace. After visiting with the newly installed government ushered in by the previous year’s CIA sponsored coup, he was being driven back to his hotel when he saw some of the crowd being struck by soldiers trying to keep them away from his car. He jumped out of the car and shouted, “Down with the government! On to the palace!”

    His visit to Latin America was so incendiary that much of it was not reported in American newspapers. (p. 245)

    VI

    At the time of his death in August of 1965, United Nations representative Adlai Stevenson was working on at least one—perhaps two—ways of negotiating out of Vietnam. One was through the UN Secretary General U Thant. A second rumored one was initiated by Ho Chi Minh, using Italy and India as go-betweens. (p. 250) Bobby Kennedy heard about these through his contacts in the White House. He was very disappointed they came to naught, and shared his chagrin with columnist Joe Kraft. Kraft then wrote a column in which he said that the senator opposed what Johnson was doing in Indochina, but could not confront the White House about it out of loyalty to the president and also to his party.

    In December of 1965, echoing Martin Luther King, Kennedy said that we should not forsake the domestic battle against poverty for a war abroad because it would divide the nation. (p. 252) Heeding Kennedy’s words to accept an offer for a bombing halt at Christmas 1965, Johnson did so, although he told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara it went against his “natural inclinations.” Both Senators Fulbright and Kennedy urged Johnson to use the interim halt as a negotiating tool for some kind of settlement. When LBJ resumed bombing at the end of January 1966, Kennedy said if bombing Indochina is our answer to the problem there, we were headed for a disaster. He added that, “The danger is that the decision to resume may become the first in a series of steps on a road from which there is no turning back—a road which leads to catastrophe for all mankind.” (p. 264)

    The next month RFK called a press conference. The reaction to this conference shows just how much Johnson and the unquestioning press—specifically David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan—had tilted the scales toward intervention. This press conference was called a few months after Halberstam had published his book, The Making of Quagmire. That book was an all out attack on American policy toward Saigon from the right. Kennedy suggested a power sharing coalition government in South Vietnam, which included the communists. (p. 269) In retrospect, this was a very sensible solution for everyone: Hanoi, Saigon, and the USA. Kennedy was viciously attacked by both the MSM and Washington politicians, even those from his own party. Vice-President Humphrey said this would be like placing an arsonist in the fire department. The Chicago Tribune called him Ho Chi Kennedy. Forgetting Vietnam was one country, The Washington Post said it would be rewarding aggression. (pp. 271-74).

    Incredibly, Kennedy visited both Ole Miss and the University of Alabama in 1966. At Ole Miss, he revealed to the crowd just how politically motivated Governor Ross Barnett was before the James Meredith riot broke out there in 1962. In negotiations with Barnett, the governor had asked Kennedy if he could have a federal marshal pull a gun on him so it would look like he was physically intimidated into going along with integrating the college. Kennedy was not responsive. So Barnett called him back and said, no, he wanted all the marshals to pull guns on him. The students roared with laughter at that one. (p. 285)

    At Christmas, 1965, Kennedy threw a series of celebrations of the holidays in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It was his way to begin to follow through on President Kennedy’s nascent attempt at a war on poverty. It was his way to generate interest in a developing program to attack the poverty cycle in the inner cities. He gave a series of three speeches on the subject. The aim was to break up the ghettoes and offer subsidies to those who wished to leave. For those who stayed, Kennedy wanted to give more aid to schools to improve education, offer tax breaks to companies to relocate there, and free legal advice for tenants to fight predatory landlords. The idea was to go beyond the New Deal. He envisioned this program to be a combination public-private community development corporation, the aim being to offer a diversified program to end inner city poverty and eradicate ghettoes. (pp. 255-61)

    There can be no better way to end this review than to describe Kennedy’s eventual journey to South Africa at the request of the courageous Ian Robertson. I should preface this by saying Kennedy really had nothing to gain from this visit. The South Africa cause was so vague and nebulous in 1966 it did not even register as a blip on the political screen. And, due to what he and his brother had done from 1961-63, there was no domestic political benefit for him because he already had the African–American vote tied up.

    The South African government denied any American reporters entry into the country. Four who tried to sneak in were rounded up and placed on a plane to Rhodesia. (p. 294) The visual record we have of this momentous event consists largely of grainy black and white home movies. No member of the government would meet with him. And the only press representatives on hand were those who supported apartheid. Unlike in the USA and Latin America, spectators did not rush to grab him, since it was considered an offense for a black man to shake hands with a white man. At his first speaking engagement Kennedy stood an empty chair next to him to signify the absence of Robertson. Robertson had been charged with the Suppression of Communism Act. Which evidently meant that, in South Africa, RFK was considered a communist.

    When he visited Robertson at his apartment, the government would allow no one else to be present, not even friendly journalists. The first thing he asked Robertson was if the place was bugged. He then told him to stomp his feet to throw the surveillance off temporarily. Kennedy then asked him questions about his country and how he felt about Vietnam. He told him how badly he felt about his house arrest. He closed the meeting by giving him a copy of President Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage. It was signed by Jackie Kennedy. (p. 295)

    He then went to make his memorable speech at the University of Cape Town—to, of course, an all white audience. That speech has one of the most brilliant openings in the history of modern American oratory. He began by saying he was glad to be in a country settled by the Dutch, taken over by the British, and now a republic. A nation in which the natives had been subdued and with whom relations remained problematic; a land which defined itself by a hostile frontier; a land which once imported slaves and now had to solve the residue of that problem. He then stopped, smiled, and said, “I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” (p. 295)

    He then talked about the responsibilities of a republic, which South Africa had become in 1961. And how that model of government was intended to guarantee individual rights for its citizens. He added that he meant all of the citizenry. He then talked about governments that denied freedom and would label as “‘communist’ every threat to their people.” He continued with how his family had felt the sting of prejudice because they were looked down upon as being Irish in New England. He mentioned the fact that Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Prize because of his struggle in the USA. He ended his speech in South Africa with the following:

    Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

    He then closed with, “Each of us have our own work to do.”

    This is a fine book. The best volume on Robert Kennedy I have read since Arthur Schlesinger’s two volume set in 1978. If you want to know about Bobby Kennedy’s life, the Schlesinger book is your choice. But if you want to know who RFK was in his last years, this is the book to read. No politician I know of ever did or said these kinds of things at home and abroad. I strongly recommend the book as a Christmas gift for your children and younger loved ones. Through it, they will be reminded that, not that long ago, the political spectrum was not defined by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And you did not have to hold your nose before entering the voting both. We all owe thanks to John Bohrer. He is to be congratulated for capturing the essence of a good man who became a great man. The vivid memory this book draws reminds all of us just what America could have been.

  • JFK at 100

    JFK at 100

    logo 750 wide 2

    On May 29, 2017, the nation commemorated the 100th birthday of President John F. Kennedy. As we all know, Kennedy was cut down before reaching the age of 50. Yet, his short term in office still casts a giant shadow over contemporary American history.  As author Larry Sabato has shown, the vast majority of Americans believe that something went wrong with America after he was assassinated. We take this opportunity to remind us all of what might have been and to commemorate what was.  And it’s important, too, to learn about the many things Kennedy achieved while in office, but which you won’t hear about from today’s mainstream media.

    The images below are linked to a four-part slideshow and afterword featuring highlights from the life and political career of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, which we hope you will find informative.

    ~Jim DiEugenio

    1917-1960: From Brookline to Washington 1961: The Kennedy Presidency
    1962: The Kennedy Presidency 1963: The Kennedy Presidency

     

  • Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Before opening Larry Tye’s biography of Robert Kennedy, I had some qualms about it. Why? Because when I turned to the back cover I saw that none other than Henry Kissinger had given the book his endorsement. The man many commentators think should be tried as a war criminal, who, for instance, supervised Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, was praising a book about Robert Kennedy. I then noted another blurb by journalist Marvin Kalb. In 1974, Kalb, along with his brother Bernard, wrote one of the first biographies of Kissinger. (Historian Theodore Draper called it a hagiography.) The Kalbs compared the validity of Kissinger’s diplomacy to George Washington’s likeness on a dollar bill. A judgment which, to say the least, does not hold up today. These endorsements, quite naturally, gave me pause.

    After reading the book, that pause was justified. Approximately the last 75 pages of Tye’s work are adequate and, in one or two places, actually moving. The problem with that observation is simple arithmetic: the book contains 447 pages of text. Therefore, those last 75 pages comprise about 1/6 of the volume. The rest of the book is not just below average; in many places it is worse than that, and in more ways than one.

    Tye tips us off to his agenda quite early. In his preface, he calls Robert F. Kennedy a commie baiter who was egged on by his father and Joe McCarthy. He adds that Kennedy practiced Machiavellian tactics to win his brother the presidency. He then says that he was also part of the plots to eliminate Fidel Castro. He tops this off by writing that “an assassin halted his campaign of conciliation.” (p. xi) I wrote in my notes: “Tye is off to a bad start.” I was correct.

    I

    Tye titles his first chapter “Cold Warrior”. In order to make this stick, he employs what military experts would call a pincers movement. He wants to envelop young Robert within the grasp of his father Joseph Kennedy, and his first legislative boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy. How anyone today could compare RFK with his father is really kind of inexplicable. But this is one of Tye’s unrepentant and recurrent proclamations. (Tye, p. 5) In this reviewer’s experience and knowledge there can be no better witness to this issue than Jackie Kennedy, since she was close to Joe Kennedy, and was even more familiar with his three surviving sons. She told Arthur Schlesinger that RFK was the son who was least like his father. (See Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 102) For instance, RFK did not have any interest in or aptitude for business. In fact, by 1957, he was a pro-labor advocate. Also, unlike his father, he was a devoted family man. Again, unlike his father, and more like President Kennedy, he was not an isolationist in his foreign policy outlook. Another point: RFK was quite aware of and sensitive to the plight of both the poor and minority groups. So where Tye gets this comparison is rather puzzling. After reading and taking notes on his book, in my view he does not come close to proving it. Jackie Kennedy appears correct on this point.

    It is interesting to note how Tye shoehorns RFK into this Cold Warrior box. One way he does so is by leaving out the name of Edmund Gullion. In 1951, in preparing for his run for the Senate a year later, congressman John Kennedy took a trip to the Far East. One of the places he visited was Saigon, South Vietnam. He was determined to find out the true status of the colonial war there between the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh on one side, and the colonial government of France on the other. After all, the USA was bankrolling a large part of the French war effort. One of the men that John Kennedy consulted with was a man he had formed a glancing relationship with in Washington a few years before. Gullion met with the 34-year-old John Kennedy at a rooftop restaurant. He told him that France would never win the war. Ho Chi Minh had fired up the young Viet Minh to such a degree that they would rather die than go back under French colonialism. France could not win a war of attrition. The home front would not support it.

    In 1983, when it was first reported at length in Richard Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, this meeting had a jarring effect on the reader, for the simple reason that about 99% of President Kennedy biographers had left it out. But since that time, several other authors—like this reviewer—have not just mentioned it, but detailed it. So it is hard to imagine that Tye is not aware of it. The reason that it should be important to him is simple: Robert Kennedy was there. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, p. 21) RFK later said that Gullion’s words had had a profound impact. As Arthur Schlesinger writes, when JFK opposed American intervention at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, RFK agreed. (ibid, p. 125) And on the issue of anti-communism and its relationship with anti-colonialism, RFK pretty much mirrored his brother: You could not consider anti-communism in the Third World without considering the impact of colonialism. (ibid, p. 133) RFK wrote in the pages of New York Times Magazine “… because we think that the uppermost thought in all people’s minds is Communism …. We are still too often doing too little too late to recognize and assist the irresistible movements for independence that are sweeping one dependent territory after another.” In his visit to Russia in 1955 with Justice William O. Douglas, which Tye mentions, RFK saw a different side of Russian life and became rather sympathetic with its citizens. He even wrote down some of the good things about the USSR. (Schlesinger, p. 134)

    But the main way Tye tries to turn Robert Kennedy into a Cold Warrior is through his service as assistant counsel under McCarthy on his Senate investigative committee. He partly does this by using some rather questionable and controversial sources, like M. Stanton Evans and Ralph de Toledano. The former was present at William F. Buckley’s estate when Buckley founded the Young Americans For Freedom. Evans actually wrote the charter for that right-wing group. He then went on to work for Buckley’s National Review for 13 years. Just a few years before Evans died in 2015, he wrote an apologia for Joe McCarthy. De Toledano was so anti-communist that OSS chief Bill Donovan would not include him in covert operations in Europe during World War II. He then became a close friend of Richard Nixon during the Alger Hiss trials, and later was a co-founder of National Review. He wrote a quite negative book about Robert Kennedy in 1967, in anticipation of his run for the presidency. (In this regard it is important to note that Tye also uses two other dubious sources in this section: conservative hit-man Victor Lasky’s Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man and Burton Hersh’s absolutely atrocious Bobby and J. Edgar.)

    Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s committee for about six months. According to most observers, he composed one of the very few reports that had any value to it. This was a documented study of how some American allies—like Greece and England—extensively traded with China during the Korean War, consequently being part of the effort against the USA in that conflict. Even McCarthy’s liberal critics described the report as being factually accurate and soberly written. (Schlesinger, p. 108) Unlike most of Chief Counsel Roy Cohn’s work, it did not accuse people of being traitors. And Robert did not take part in the hunting down of alleged subversives in the State Department. (ibid, p. 106)

    In fact, RFK and Cohn bumped heads at this time over the way the chief counsel was conducting the committee. Bobby also complained to McCarthy that although Cohn’s recklessness was attracting a lot of press, it would eventually collapse the committee. He likened what Cohn was doing to a toboggan ride down a slope ending with a crash into a tree. (ibid, p. 110) But McCarthy decided to stick with Cohn. So, in the summer of 1953, RFK resigned.

    About six months later, he returned. He wrote a letter to a friend at this time, saying, “I think I will enjoy my new job.” (ibid, p. 115) This time he was chief counsel to the Democratic minority. He spent about three times longer in this role as he did as assistant counsel to Cohn. Therefore, some dramatizations of this episode use his role as minority chief counsel and discount his prior work. (See the HBO film Citizen Cohn) He went head to head with Cohn, and more often than not, he came out in front. In fact, the two became such bitter rivals that, on one occasion, they almost came to blows. (ibid, pp. 117-18) Even a local newspaper, The Boston Post, went after RFK for his determined and public opposition to Cohn.

    As RFK predicted, McCarthy imploded. One cause was Cohn’s close friendship with David Schine, a draftee who Cohn tried to get special privileges for in the army. Bobby Kennedy wrote the questions for each Democratic senator on this issue. (ibid) The second cause was McCarthy’s fatal showdown with attorney Joseph Welch, who had been hired to specifically defend the army against the McCarthy/Cohn assault. Welch’s famous “Have you no decency sir” riposte punctured McCarthy in front of 20 million spectators.

    When the Army-McCarthy hearings ended in June of 1954, Bobby Kennedy wrote the minority report. It was highly critical of McCarthy’s leadership. Parts of it were so extreme that the committee would not sign off on the whole report. RFK wrote that there was no excuse for McCarthy’s failure to rein in Cohn. Or how irresponsible many of Cohn’s charges turned out to be. He then concluded with: “The Senate should take action to correct this situation.” (ibid, p. 118) For all intents and purposes, this was the beginning of the movement to censure McCarthy. That motion arose on the Senate floor a month later. It was passed on December 2, 1954.

    Under the new leadership of Sen. Karl Mundt, Robert Kennedy had even more power. He used it mainly to wrap up what was left of Cohn’s charges: the Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss cases and the accusation of communist infiltration of defense plants. No charges were ever filed.

    From the above synopsis it’s fairly easy to deduce that RFK was stuck in a bad situation and he tried to make the best of it. When he could not, he resigned. Given the opportunity to return under more propitious circumstances, he atoned for his earlier errors. Based upon that, it’s not justified to call Bobby a Cold Warrior, or to have the episode cast a shadow over his entire career.

    II

    The next major section of the book deals with RFK’s confrontation with Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa. In 1956, the Democrats took control of the Senate and with that, the leadership of the sub-committee on investigations passed to Senator John McClellan. Because he appeared to be eminently fair in wrapping up the McCarthy/Cohn fracas, a few journalists got in contact with Robert Kennedy, trying to interest him to use his chief counsel’s office to go after a real danger: organized crime influence on labor unions. Kennedy and McClellan went in that direction and this resulted in RFK’s four-year long pursuit of Hoffa. Tye seems to have no serious problems with this episode in young Kennedy’s career. The worst he can say about it is that it was used to boost Senator John Kennedy’s profile in his attempt to attain the White House.

    JFK & RFK on the McClellan committee

    Which is kind of ridiculous. The reason JFK ended up on the committee was because of complaints by Teamster leaders Dave Beck and Hoffa. They protested that McClellan’s committee was the wrong place for these hearings; they should be held before the Labor Committee. McClellan resisted this since he thought that committee was too friendly with labor and would not pursue the complaints vigorously. Because they did have a valid point, the solution was to form a special committee, half from McClellan’s committee and half from the Labor Committee. Since JFK was on the latter, that is how he got on the special committee. Is Tye saying that Beck and Hoffa brought up this objection at the request of RFK to get his brother on the committee?

    What is odd about this section is that the reviewer could find few, if any, questions or comments by Tye about some of the techniques used by RFK to finally imprison Hoffa. Some distinguished authors, e.g., Victor Navasky and especially Fred Cook, have raised some serious questions about the methods used by Kennedy’s office to enlist witnesses to testify against Hoffa. Many of these methods were employed by Kennedy’s investigator Walter Sheridan, who remains pretty much untouched by Tye. (For a look at these charges, see Cook’s multi-part series in The Nation which culminated in his article “The Hoffa Trial” on 4/27/64.)

    Another oddity about this section is that much of the political background of the issue goes unexplored. The Republicans on the special committee, for instance archconservative Barry Goldwater, wanted RFK to delve into the Teamsters so they could use that issue to tar labor unions in general. But once they saw how RFK was bringing in organized crime as an influence on Hoffa, they actually began to side with Hoffa, since this would detract from their real aim. (See review of James Neff’s Vendetta, by Alex Lichtenstein, Washington Post July 17, 2015.) When John Kennedy tried to pass legislation aimed at this particular influence in order to sanitize union elections, the Republicans hijacked his legislation and turned it into the union weakening Landrum-Griffin bill. That act was such a twisting of JFK’s original intent that he took his name off of it. (Schlesinger, pp. 188-92)

    Walter Reuther & RFK

    Another fascinating aspect of RFK’s service on this committee was the Kohler company investigation. And again, Tye pretty much discounts the episode. The Republicans on the committee, especially Goldwater, wanted RFK to inquire into this long running UAW strike against Kohler plumbing in order to investigate UAW leader Walter Reuther. Goldwater did not foresee the consequences. First, Reuther turned out to be a forceful witness for the rights of labor and abuses by corporations. Secondly, Bobby Kennedy actually visited the home of Kohler in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was appalled at some of the working conditions there, and at what the company called a “lunch break”, which lasted about five minutes. (ibid, pp. 183-87) This had two effects. First, it resulted in a strong personal and professional relationship between RFK and Reuther. For example, Kennedy later called on Reuther to bus in as much of his membership as possible to attend Martin Luther King’s 1963 March On Washington. Second, it ended in the largest fine ever awarded over a strike. Kohler was ordered to pay three million dollars in back wages to the strikers and to give their pension fund another 1.5 million.

    RFK’s focus on Hoffa’s ties with organized crime caused his interest to spread into a general inquiry into the workings of what had become known as the Cosa Nostra in America. As a result, in 1959, the McClellan Committee was nicknamed the Rackets Committee. For the first time the American public was exposed to organized crime figures like Anthony Provenzano and Sam Giancana. Many authors have concluded that it was this part of RFK’s congressional service, his exposure of Mob influence in labor unions and on the national scene, which really made him into a national figure.

    III

    From here, Tye segues into the 1960 presidential election and RFK’s role as his brother’s campaign manager. At the beginning of the chapter he writes that what Bobby did in this campaign would later embolden the likes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. (Tye, p. 87) That theme is repeated later on. (see pp. 106, 121) One has to wonder: What in God’s name is Tye up to with those comparisons? Does he really think that no one remembers what Richard Nixon and his political hatchet man Murray Chotiner did to, first Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 congressional race, and then Helen Douglas in the 1950 senatorial race? These have become famous today because of the new low they hit in creating red baiting campaign tactics. Tye also seems to trust the reader not being aware of revelations about how Allen Dulles helped finance Nixon’s run against Voorhis, a man who was opposed to both big banking and big oil, which Dulles represented at his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp.162-63) Or how Nixon was on the take from private companies in 1946 because he would not run for office at a financial sacrifice to himself. (ibid, p. 165) Chotiner portrayed the anti-communist Voorhis as a tool and fellow traveler of the Kremlin. This included voters getting anonymous phone calls during the last week saying that they should know Voorhis was a communist before they voted for him. (ibid, p. 166)

    What made it all the worse was that Nixon knew it was all a fabrication. When a Voorhis backer later confronted him with those last minute phone calls Nixon took the opportunity to give him an education in realpolitik. He coolly replied, “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a communist. I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naïve.” (ibid) I could continue on with Nixon’s run against Douglas which was, in some ways, even worse than the Voorhis campaign. But the point is obvious: What could someone as corrupt and feckless as Nixon learn from Robert Kennedy?

    The comparison with Johnson is just as bad. Maybe worse. One just has to conjure up the lawlessness of Texas politics in the thirties and forties, which is when LBJ got his start. Through the efforts of several Johnson biographers, we know about the associations of LBJ with such unsavory characters as Herman and George Brown of Brown and Root, the giant construction firm that eventually evolved into Halliburton. In return for steering contracts their way, the brothers financed Johnson’s congressional and senatorial campaigns. (Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains, pp. 7-9) When a government accountant tried to expose the illicit relations between LBJ and Brown and Root, he was framed for soliciting contributions from his staff. He was acquitted, but decided to leave government service. Johnson also used extortion tactics to gain newspaper endorsements. (ibid, p. 9) There is also circumstantial evidence that the Brown and Root connection helped finance Johnson’s purchase of KTBC radio in Austin, which was the beginning of Johnson’s personal fortune in media.

    But this is all prelude to Johnson’s infamous 1948 race for the senate against Coke Stevenson. The results of that race shifted back and forth for a solid week after the election was over. Johnson actually wiretapped Stevenson’s phone lines. Johnson had made a deal with south Texas political boss George Parr to rig the vote. This culminated in the notorious Box 13. This was a late arriving vote tally—five days after the polls closed—in which 203 ballots were “discovered”. Those results tilted the election to Johnson. Of the 203, a miraculous 202 were votes for Johnson. Which was even worse than the Parr controlled Duval county results, which were 94% for Johnson. Curiously, those 203 names were assembled in alphabetical order. When eleven of the 203 voters in Box 13 were interviewed, they said they had not even voted. Journalist Ronnie Dugger later found precinct official Luis Salas, who admitted he had performed the fraud for Parr and Johnson. Salas had a picture of the smiling officials who held the ballot box in their hands. The capper to all this is that when Dugger interviewed LBJ for his biography, Johnson had the very same picture. (Click here for Jason Matteson’s essay on this subject)

    Are we really to believe that Tye is not aware of this whole tawdry affair? It has been written about extensively since at least 1982, when Dugger’s book on Johnson, The Politician, was first published. Are we also to think that Tye is not aware of Johnson’s later associations with the likes of Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker and his bribery actions with Don Reynolds? (For the last, see Mellen, pp. 160-64)

    But in practical terms, in his book, does Tye excavate anything like the above to make his bombastic comparison stick? He mentions some dirty tricks in the primary campaign against Hubert Humphrey, but he admits he cannot trace these through to Bobby Kennedy. And his prime attempt at doing the same in the general election smacks of desperation. In 2011, over a half-century after the election, the Washington Post published an article by Mark Feldstein. (1/14/2011) This was yet another reworking of a story that was published in 1962. Since then it has been reported several times, for instance in the book Empire, a long biography of Howard Hughes by Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele. Somehow, Tye ignores all the previous reporting and accepts this one at face value (Tye, p. 123), even though in serious ways it contradicts the others.

    Back in 1956, Howard Hughes made a loan of $205,000 to Donald Nixon, Richard Nixon’s brother. Donald’s business enterprise, named Nixon burgers, was a kind of fast food place mixed in with a grocery store. It was about to go under unless it got a fast infusion of cash. Hughes was always attuned to these situations since he was all too intent on compromising politicians or their next of kin. After Nixon and Eisenhower won re-election in November, Hughes supplied the loan in December of 1956. Up until that time, the IRS was resisting granting Hughes a large tax exemption for Hughes Medical Center. They recognized it as a scam that was simply a way for Hughes to dodge taxes on profits from his other divisions. But, lo and behold, one month after Hughes notified the Vice-President that all was in place with the loan, the IRS reversed itself. Hughes got the phony exemption, which allowed him to save millions. The loan was supposed to be mortgaged by a plot of land in Whittier—except the land value was estimated at only 50,000 dollars. By most measures one would have to conclude that Hughes was buying influence, not making a business transaction. (Bartlett and Steele, p. 204)

    Through Drew Pearson, the story got out in a fragmentary way in the waning days of the 1960 election. Very few newspapers picked it up and Nixon dismissed it as a last-minute smear unworthy of comment. In 1962, Nixon lied about the loan in his book Six Crises, saying that the Whittier property more than covered the amount of the loan. That year, Nixon decided to return to politics by running for governor of California. This time, the Hughes loan would be a much larger story since now editors were ready for it. The Long Beach Press Telegram decided to run a long story on the loan since they had editorialized about it back in 1960. That story was published in that newspaper and in the magazine The Reporter in April of 1962. James Phelan, who many people in the JFK field have qualms about—including me— wrote it. But in this instance, Phelan did not seem to have a dog in the fight. And there were adequate records to back up what he wrote. And later reporting by, for example, Hughes manager Noah Dietrich, has also borne out the basic facts as he presented them.

    Hughes tried to cover up the loan by using two layers of disguise. The first was a lobbyist by the name of John Waters. But since Waters had done some work for Hughes, the trustee of the mortgage was changed to an accountant named Philip Reiner. Complicating the matter was that, after Donald Nixon eventually went bankrupt, a gas station was built over the Whittier lot. Reiner was sent the rent checks by the station, which amounted to $800 per month. When Reiner surrendered the check to Nadine Henley at Hughes headquarters in Hollywood, it was returned to him. Hughes wanted no paper trail linking him to the lot. So Reiner spent the money. But later, an accountant at Hughes Tool Company in Houston began raising a ruckus about what had happened to the loan for $205,000, well over a million dollars today. Reiner’s cut-out, a lawyer named Frank Arditto, now asked him what happened to the payments, knowing full well that he had given Reiner permission to cash the checks. Realizing he was being made the fall guy, Reiner hired an attorney. With an election coming up, the consul realized that his client would make a good asset for the Democrats, who would protect him. He got in contact with Robert Kennedy, who turned him over to an assistant named Jim McInerney. McInerney decided to subsidize Reiner for the money Arditto was demanding, sixteen thousand dollars. McInerney then put together a package of documents, affidavits, trust deeds, and receipts. He gave them to three outlets: St Louis Post Dispatch, Time magazine, and Drew Pearson. No one would run with it since it was so late in the campaign.

    But Nixon then made a mistake. Hearing about McInerney’s report, he launched a preemptive cover story to conceal the actual circumstances of the loan and the role of Hughes. These lies infuriated Pearson. He now decided to publish the story. (These details are in Phelan’s 1982 book, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels. Reiner later sued Hughes and won a $150,000 out of court settlement. See The Desert Sun, 2/22/72)

    When one compares this with the Post version, as adapted by Tye, it is unsettling. That version opens with Nixon complaining that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. It then says that the document package was picked up at McInerney’s office, not sent out. In a completely unprecedented twist—with no evidence advanced—it states that the Hughes cash was given to Dick Nixon to purchase a home in the Washington area. The wildest part then states that RFK acquired the story for money, and then a burglary was arranged at Reiner’s office to get the documents. In his text, Tye never mentions the earlier version of this story; therefore, he does not point out the differences between the two, which means he does not have to attempt to reconcile them. In his footnotes he does not even alert the reader to the other version. But the worst part of the improbable tale, and its innate spin, is that all culpability by Nixon is now gone. That poor Red-baiter Nixon is reduced to a helpless victim pondering what happened to him at the hands of Kennedy power. In this new version, there is not even a note of irony about how Voorhis and Douglas must have felt. Talk about (multi-leveled) historical revisionism.

    IV

    In this review, I will not divert much from the main topic in order to critique at any length or detail some of the comments that Tye makes about John F. Kennedy. If I did, the review would be about 50% longer. I will simply note that some of the things the author says about John Kennedy are rather obtuse, and not supported by the record. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter Four, dealing with JFK ‘s entry to the White House, the author writes that neither Eisenhower nor Wilson had been as brazen as Jack in running for President as an untested leader. I don’t understand what this means. The only elected political office Woodrow Wilson held prior to winning the presidency was a two-year stint as governor of New Jersey. Which is two years longer in office than Eisenhower. In comparison, John Kennedy had served in Congress and the Senate in Washington for 14 years prior to the 1960 election. About the 1960 race, Tye also writes that the politics of Nixon and Kennedy did not differ much. (p. 121) This is a Chris Mathews style blurring of the record. To use just two examples which occurred while JFK was in the Senate and Nixon was vice-president: 1) Kennedy opposed 1954’s Operation Vulture, the White House plan to use atomic weapons to aid the French at Dien Bien Phu; (op. cit Talbot, p. 361) 2) Kennedy’s monumental 1957 speech about why the USA should not support the doomed French colonial war in Algeria provoked barbed and snide remarks from Nixon in the White House. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 29)

    Tye’s depiction of Robert Kennedy running the Justice Department is, to be kind, equally myopic. The author is adequate in describing the new Attorney General’s war against organized crime. (Tye, pp. 142-45) He describes Kennedy’s attempts at fairness in going after Democratic politicians who had broken the law. (ibid, pp. 145-47) He also briefly describes RFK’s final neutering of the Smith Act by having the sentence of CPUSA member Junius Scales commuted. (p. 157) Again, when it comes to the complexities of the Hoffa case, he seems to have little problem accepting the prosecution’s dubious witness Ed Partin. In fact, he actually adds on to Partin’s sensational charges of Hoffa’s intent to kill RFK by adding the late arriving and dubious Frank Ragano story about Hoffa trying to choke Bobby to death at the Justice Department. (Tye, p. 152) To be fair, he does say that RFK’s pursuit of Hoffa was so unrelenting, so single-minded, that it created sympathy for the Teamster leader.

    JFK responds to U.S. Steel’s defiance
    (click image for YouTube video)

    Tye deals with the 1962 steel crisis in about one page (pp. 163-64). His account is so skeletal, so skimpy, that one would think all the commotion was about whether or not FBI agents should phone business executives late at night. To get my bearings back on this momentous event, I reviewed what is perhaps the best account: Donald Gibson’s chapter-long treatment in Battling Wall Street. Gibson begins his discussion by quoting the late, illustrious economist John Blair, who called the episode, “The most dramatic confrontation in history between a President and a corporate management.” (Gibson, p. 9) The only other instance that rivals it was Harry Truman’s intervention in a steel strike ten years before, but that was during a full-blown war in Korea. President Kennedy had worked on an industry-wide labor agreement for a year, mainly through Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. In late March, he thought he had one. But it was broken via a personal visit to the White House by US Steel chairman Roger Blough. He told JFK he would announce a price increase in 30 minutes, which is what the President and Goldberg had been promised would not occur. The President then uttered his famous quote, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.” (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 143) Within 24 hours JFK went on national television to condemn the steel companies. He said that Americans would find it hard to accept that “a tiny handful of steel executives … can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans.” (Gibson, p. 13)

    One day later, RFK announced formation of a grand jury and the delivery of subpoenas. Records, both personal and corporate, were seized. The aim was to establish if criminal conspiracy laws had been violated. The Attorney General also had the FBI march into executive offices for interviews. (Schlesinger, p. 421) Within 72 hours the crisis was over and the price increase rescinded. There can be little doubt that the Attorney General’s actions hurried the settlement. Especially in light of the fact that, in 1961, as a continuation of an investigation under the Eisenhower administration of price-fixing by electric companies, RFK had actually placed seven business executives in prison. Five were from General Electric and Westinghouse. (See The Great Price Conspiracy by John Herling.) And contrary to popular belief, and what Tye implies, based on information from the 1962 steel inquiry, RFK began new actions against US Steel in late 1963. (Gibson, p. 13)

    V

    This same pattern, shrinking a large achievement, is followed with respect to the Attorney General’s actions in the civil rights arena.  In this instance, however, Tye’s writing is even more problematic, since RFK’s achievements there are clearly epochal, no prior Attorney General coming even close to them.

    Harris Wofford & JFK

    Tye does something with the subject that I don’t recall seeing before. He begins his discussion of the Kennedy program in 1963, at a meeting RFK had with some militant black leaders like James Baldwin. Most accounts of the Kennedy civil rights program begin with a review of what had been done by the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and then segues into the memo written by Harris Wofford. After campaigning for Kennedy, Wofford was appointed JFK’s special assistant on civil rights. In late December of 1960, before the inauguration, Wofford wrote a memo that outlined a program for achieving equal rights for black Americans. He then recommended his friend and colleague, attorney Burke Marshall, to be the Justice Department lawyer in charge of the issue. (Bernstein pp. 42-43)

    Just the information above counters two observations Tye makes. First, that the Kennedy administration had no plan to attain civil rights, and second, that RFK took on issues willy-nilly. (Tye, p. 205) Wofford, a central figure by anyone’s estimation, is discounted by Tye. Surprisingly, he is only mentioned once in his chapter on the subject. Yet his memo was both acute and realistic, and it was more or less followed by the administration. He wrote that the only branch of government that had achieved anything so far was the judiciary. He then wrote that the administration would have to press the issue through executive actions in order to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation, something that, for political reasons, Congress would not be ready to do in the first year or two. Wofford also mapped out the country geographically and recommended what actions needed to be taken and where. For example, he recommended legal assaults on states that restricted voting rights, and strictures in contracting to open up corporations to black employment. (Bernstein, pp. 47-48) As historian Irving Bernstein notes in his book, once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he followed this program. (See Promises Kept, Chapter 2)

    When the Kennedy administration took office, it was evident that the Brown vs. Board decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were not having any kind of real impact. One reason for this was the Eisenhower administration’s lack of rigor in enforcing them. Senator John Kennedy, during the debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, said he championed Title 3 of that proposed act because it allowed the Attorney General to enter into individual states to attack cases of voting discrimination and school segregation. And this is what Robert Kennedy was doing once he became Attorney General. On May 6, 1961, at the University of Georgia’s Law Day, RFK announced that, unlike his predecessor, he would strongly enforce the Brown vs. Board decision. And RFK also began filing lawsuits in southern states based upon the low rates of voter turnout there. In his first year in office, RFK filed more than twice as many cases than Eisenhower had in his entire second administration. As writers like Harry Golden have pointed out, this plan was not just recommended by Wofford’s memo. Candidate Kennedy had approved it in no uncertain terms during the campaign in a meeting with his civil rights advisory board. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, pp. 105, 139)

    In the face of all this, how does the author actually begin his chronicle of the administration’s civil rights campaign? He ignores much of what I have noted above. He begins his actual chronicle with the Freedom Riders campaign, which started in May of 1961. He uses this for two reasons. He wants to show that 1) RFK was behind the curve, and 2) He uses the incident to call the AG a liar. He achieves the first in part by ignoring the comment that Senator James Eastland made to RFK after his confirmation. He told Kennedy that his predecessor had never filed a voting rights case against his home state of Mississippi. The next day President Kennedy wrote a note to his brother telling him to begin filing cases. (Golden, p. 100) This, of course, preceded the Freedom Riders campaign.

    The second objective is achieved by saying that RFK was alerted to the incident in advance. Yet the AG said he was not aware of the demonstration. To use one example, as an FBI informant later revealed, J. Edgar Hoover was well aware of the planned violence against the Freedom Riders. That information was not passed to Hoover’s boss, the Attorney General. (Schlesinger, p. 307) A letter that the demonstration organizer had sent to the Attorney General was routed to Burke Marshall instead. He either never got it or he did not inform Kennedy about it. (Bernstein, p. 63)

    But beyond that, is Tye implying what I think he is implying? That somehow, even if he had known about it, RFK would not have anticipated the violence the Freedom Riders would encounter? That is: vicious racists attacking the buses with baseball bats, lead pipes and bicycle chains. With people being pulled off the buses, thrown to the ground and then beaten and bloodied. All this while both the police and FBI did nothing. In this regard, I should note the following. At his meeting with President Kennedy about taking the job, both men understood there were going to be battles in the civil rights area right off the bat. (Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, p. 10) But also, I could find no mention by the author of the protest RFK made as a member of the Harvard football team when a southern opponent refused to let a black member of the team stay in the same hotel. That was in 1947. (Schlesinger, p. 71) Secondly, Tye seriously underplays the actions Kennedy took as leader of the Legal Forum at the University of Virginia in 1951. RFK invited black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak there. He knew it would raise a ruckus, since UV was the team that did not want to play Harvard back in 1947. What made it more problematic was that Bunche wrote Kennedy a letter saying that he did not wish to appear before an audience that featured segregated seating. Yet, state law required this. More or less on his own, Kennedy took the case through four levels of campus government saying that he would not give up, since he thought disallowing Bunche would be morally indefensible. (Schlesinger, p. 90) Bunche ended up speaking to an integrated audience that was about 1/3 black. But beyond those personal experiences, the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins had taken place in North Carolina during the presidential campaign of 1960. And further, RFK was already supervising the New Orleans school desegregation crisis against the likes of Leander Perez in early 1961. (Robert Kennedy in His own Words, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffery Schulman, p.81)

    What really happened with the revolution in civil rights that took place under Bobby Kennedy is fairly simple to understand. First, the failure of the Eisenhower administration to use any of the judicial and legislative achievements attained in the fifties built up large amounts of pent up frustration. For example, from 1955 to 1960, the courts had made a series of rulings that segregation in busing was not constitutional. If those rulings had been enforced, there would have been no need for the Freedom Riders. (Bernstein, pp. 62-63) But John F. Kennedy’s candidacy represented something different to black Americans. From his speeches on European colonialism in Africa back in 1957, to his speech in Jackson, Mississippi that year, telling southerners they must abide by Brown vs. Board, to his comments in New York during the 1960 primary that he would risk losing the south since this was a moral issue to him, and his later call during the general election to Coretta King while her husband was in jail, all these and more, caused that frustration to unleash itself once Kennedy won the election. Finally, someone was in the White House who was ready to do something about civil rights. For instance, it was John Kennedy’s election that inspired James Meredith to apply to the University of Mississippi. (Bernstein, p. 76)

    And they were correct. By the summer of 1963, in less than three years, that synergy had turned the tide. With John Kennedy’s landmark speech in June of 1963 on the issue, and Robert Kennedy’s stewardship of King’s March on Washington, the battle was essentially won. Kennedy’s civil rights act was going to pass. As Wofford predicted, it could not have passed earlier. But I must note, even with this—the reversal of a century of Jim Crow and segregation in less than three years—Tye is still not satisfied. About President Kennedy’s nationally televised speech he writes that Kennedy had wanted to redefine America’s place in the world, but he had not come close before. (Tye, p. 229) To say the least, many would disagree. For example, President Kennedy reversed the Eisenhower agenda in Third World nations like Congo, Indonesia, and Laos in 1961. Tye also states that Robert Kennedy’s confrontation with Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama was “scripted”. If one watches the classic documentary about this showdown at Tuscaloosa, Crisis, the viewer will see that all the way through, the AG did not know what Wallace was going to do. Wallace had deliberately decided not to talk to RFK to settle the matter in advance. So at the White House, the AG suggested that the students might have to be forced through one of the furthest doors Wallace was standing in front of. If the episode had been scripted, RFK would never have suggested such a dangerous alternative. After all, Wallace had 900 state troopers there, and Bobby Kennedy had brought in 3000 guardsmen.

    But in the long run Wallace and his henchman, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, had won. By creating these dramatic confrontations at Tuscaloosa and Oxford, they had made it appear that Bobby Kennedy was invading the state. Which conjured up images of President Lincoln and General Grant marching on Richmond in 1865. So even though Wallace lost on integration, he won the larger political stake: the South was lost to the Democrats after 1964. And this followed from the fact that, unlike Hoover, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower and Nixon, Bobby Kennedy viewed this as something that had to be done. Indeed, at times RFK sounded like Malcolm X on the issue: “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” And what made it even worse is that RFK was fully aware of what was happening in the political arena. He was writing off state after state for his brother’s re-election in 1964. (Guthman and Shulman, pp. 76, 82) This whole tragic dimension—the moral plane losing out to the political factors—is lost on Tye.

    But it wasn’t lost on Martin Luther King. In 1967, it was Bobby Kennedy who suggested King lead his Poor People’s March to Washington. (Schlesinger, p. 911) And for the 1968 primary election, King made it clear to his advisors that he was backing Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and there was no real question about it. (Martin Luther King: The FBI File, p. 572)

    VI

    I began to lose a lot of faith in the author when, about halfway through the book, he began to insert the work of the late David Heymann. (pp. 191-92) And while we are at it, Tye also sources writers like Kitty Kelley, Chuck Giancana, and Ron Kessler. To be clear, towards the end, he doesn’t actually endorse Heymann; he throws his work out there for discussion. The problem is that Heymann has been discredited about as far as an author can be discredited. And since that discreditation has been well publicized, it is hard to believe that Tye doesn’t know about it. He even gives play to Heymann’s book, saying that RFK and Jackie Kennedy had an affair after JFK was killed. That book, and Heymann’s reputation, was thoroughly savaged by Lisa Pease. And today, it has been shown beyond any doubt that Heymann was a professional confabulator, one who not only made up interviews he did not do, but even created interview subjects who did not exist. Beyond that, he even manufactured a fictional police department so he could refer to their reports. (See this Newsweek story) Tye uses a story about RFK making out with Candy Bergen that was vehemently denied by a furious Bergen in 2014 in an article for Newsweek. That Newsweek story was published two years before the author’s book. Can he really have missed it? Meanwhile, Tye does not quote what the late FBI officer in charge of domestic intelligence for Hoover said about Kennedy’s party life. In his book The Bureau, William Sullivan wrote that Hoover would send agents out to follow Kennedy around at night. They could never find him in any compromising situations. He would nurse one drink all night and then leave the party.

    This is all apropos of Tye’s chapter on RFK and Cuba, and also other foreign affairs. That chapter is surely one of the worst in the book. In order to discuss it, we must briefly mention President Kennedy’s policy, since Tye does so. Near the beginning of the chapter, Tye writes, in relation to Operation Zapata, the code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion, that “The new president was determined to act.” (Tye, p. 242) This is contrary to just about everything that has been written about Zapata. Even Allen Dulles, the progenitor of the operation, has stated that the project was a kind of orphan child that Kennedy had adopted, but he had no real love or affection for. (Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure, p. 103) When Arthur Schlesinger asked him what he thought about the concept, JFK replied he thought about it as little as possible. (ibid, p. 102) Contrary to what Tye states, the CIA had to entice the new president into going along with it. They did this in a variety of ways. This included presenting him with false estimates of the resistance to Castro on the island, having Dulles wildly overstate the possibilities of the project’s success, and actually predicting that once the invasion landed, much of the Cuban militia would defect. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 294-95) But beyond that, Tye persists in the idea that President Kennedy cancelled D-Day air strikes. (Tye, p. 242) Thanks to the declassification of Lyman Kirkpatrick’s Inspector General report, and the availability of General Maxwell Taylor’s White House report, this has been exposed as a myth propagated by the CIA.

    Now, what did Robert Kennedy have to do with Zapata? Just about nothing. He was briefed on the operation four days before the invasion force was launched from Central America. (ibid, p. 301) The importance of RFK in regards to Zapata is his role afterwards in serving as President Kennedy’s watchdog on the Taylor review board. This was a panel set up by President Kennedy to delve into the CIA’s creation and launching of the invasion. Tye seriously underplays RFK’s role on Maxwell Taylor’s board. For instance, he does not mention RFK’s cross-examination of Allen Dulles; or Joseph Kennedy’s aid in helping uncover the Bruce-Lovett report, which had previously been critical of Dulles; nor does he mention the termination of director Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, or operations supervisor Dick Bissell. (Tye, p. 245) JFK did this because he came to the conclusion he had been lied to about every aspect of the operation. Why? Because Dulles knew the plan would not succeed. The director had banked on Kennedy sending in American forces when he saw it failing. Kennedy did not. With the declassification process on Zapata, several respected authors, including Jim Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, have demonstrated this was the case. It is questionable whether the president could have understood all this without his brother’s role on the Taylor panel. As far as I can see, this is all left out by Tye.

    As Tye recognizes, it was largely RFK’s part on the Taylor board that convinced the president not to trust the CIA or the Pentagon. Thus Robert Kennedy assumed a larger presence in foreign policy matters. When Operation Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was formulated, RFK served as a kind of ombudsman over that project. As David Corn wrote in Blonde Ghost—his biography of the project’s administrator Ted Shackley—the CIA greatly resented this. For now they had to present detailed plans to RFK for every raid into Cuba.

    This gives Tye the opportunity to do what I thought he would. He tries to say that Mongoose included the elimination of Fidel Castro and since RFK knew all about the project, he had to have known about the plots to kill Fidel. (p. 253) This is wrong on two scores. First, it is clear from the declassified record on Mongoose that assassination plots were not a part of the program. The CIA had arranged plans to liquidate Castro, but these were apart from official plans. Secondly, the CIA Inspector General report on the plots specifically states that they were kept from the Kennedys. This includes the phase of the plots that CIA officer William Harvey was supervising with mobster John Roselli during Mongoose. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327) When RFK found out about them he called in Director John McCone and Director of Operations Richard Helms and he made it clear that this kind of thing was disgraceful and had to be stopped. (Goldfarb, p. 273) But the CIA deliberately deceived RFK and continued in them. In fact, when JFK was assassinated, they had a representative meeting with a Cuban national codenamed AM/LASH, delivering him murder weapons. Again, the CIA lied about this and said it had been authorized by Robert Kennedy. It was not. (David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 229-30)

    After all this rather flawed history—about Zapata, about Mongoose, about the CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro—Tye concludes with a remarkable reverie. (p. 254) I actually had to read it twice. He says that the clandestine operations against Cuba were the inspiration for things like Ronald Reagan’s war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Richard Nixon’s CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Somehow, Tye leaves out the fact that the CIA had been doing this kind of thing long before the Kennedys came to power. Can Tye really not be aware of the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? The Agency overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala the year after? Or their attempt to militarily overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958? Or the backing by Eisenhower and Allen Dulles of the murder plots against Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960? The idea that this kind of thing was all new in 1961 is a little ludicrous. And as more than one author—for example, Jim Douglass—has shown, the Kennedys were attempting to both halt and reverse these regressive actions in the Third World.

    But the main focus of this dubious chapter is the 1962 Missile Crisis. As is his consistent tendency, Tye’s goal seems twofold: 1) He wants to label Robert Kennedy a liar, and 2) He wants to blame RFK for the crisis in the first place. He does this by saying that the reason for the Russian placement of the atomic armada in Cuba was because of Mongoose, and the possibility of a second invasion. Therefore, he concludes that RFK was not forthcoming about the real cause of the crisis in his book on the subject, Thirteen Days. (Tye, p. 239)

    Again, to say this is flawed history is understating it. One way Tye achieves this is by not revealing the full expanse of the nuclear arsenal the USSR had secretly moved into Cuba. That arsenal included 40 missile launchers and 60 medium- and long-range nuclear tipped rockets. The former could fly 1,200 miles; the latter 2,400 miles. Consequently, the long-range missiles could reach almost any major city in the USA, excepting the Pacific Northwest. There were 140 surface to air missile defense launchers to protect the launching sites. Those batteries would be accompanied by a wing of the latest Soviet jet fighter, the MIG-21, plus a detachment of 45,000 Soviet combat troops. That troop detachment included four motorized rifle regiments and over 250 units of armor. To finish off the nuclear launch triad, the Russians had sent in 40 IL-28s, an armed nuclear bomber which had a speed of 560 MPH and a range of 4,500 miles. Finally, they had constructed a submarine pen with 11 subs, 7 of them with 1-megaton nuclear weapons. That explosive power is about 80 times the torque of the Hiroshima blast. (Probe Magazine, May-June 1998, p. 17)

    That array made it possible to hit every major city in America. One would use the bombers and subs for the southeast quadrant, targeting cities like Houston, New Orleans and Miami. The missiles could be used for targets in the northeast, Mideast, Midwest and southern California. With that revealed, here is my question: How was this designed to thwart a Cuban exile boat raid into say Varadero on the Cuban north coast? Do you incinerate 200,000 people in Atlanta in response to an eight-man raid that sabotaged an electricity plant? As many commentators have noted, it would be like killing a fly with a cannon—you would blow up your house in the process. To stop another invasion, all one would have needed to do was to give Castro tactical nuclear weapons, which the Russians did, and/or the SAM missiles and MIG jets. But such was not the case, not by a long shot.

    As scholars who have studied the crisis for decades have concluded, what Nikita Khrushchev was assembling in Cuba was a first strike capability. Something that the USSR did not have at the time, and would not attain for about four more years. In the nuclear planning policy of deterrence, this capability was considered necessary to stop your opponent from executing their first strike. In fact, in a meeting in July of 1961, Allen Dulles had asked President Kennedy to do just that: to launch a first strike against Russia. Kennedy not only refused, he walked out of the meeting. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 235)

    The most respected scholar in the field, Harvard’s Graham Allison, has concluded that with this first strike capability, Khrushchev was going to maneuver Kennedy into surrendering West Berlin. (Essence of Decision, p. 105) In their Vienna Summit in the summer of 1961, Khrushchev had made the question of Berlin a real bone of contention with Kennedy: since West Berlin was within East Germany, it should be a part of that Russian dominated country. Kennedy did not see it that way. He felt that if he surrendered Berlin, it could unravel the whole American/European alliance. Something he was not willing to do. In fact, during the meetings in the White House on this subject, Kennedy repeatedly referred to Berlin as the reason for the crisis. (op. cit. Probe, p. 18)

    Another point that Tye scores his subject on is that RFK pondered whether an air strike would be enough to get the missiles out, or if there needed to be an invasion. At this first meeting President Kennedy had just listed four options his advisors had mapped out for him. Robert Kennedy then chimes in:

    We have the fifth one really, which is the invasion [which was already raised by Maxwell Taylor]. I would say that you’re dropping bombs all over Cuba if you do the second, air and the airports, knocking out their planes, dropping it on all their missiles. You’re covering most of Cuba. You’re going to kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on this. And then—you know the heat. You’re going to announce the reason that you’re doing it is because they’re sending in these kinds of missiles.

    Well, I would think it’s almost incumbent upon the Russians then, to say, Well we’re going to send them in again. And if you do it again, we’re going to do the same thing in Turkey” or “we’re going to so the same thing to Iran.” (The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 66)

    Does this sound like RFK is pushing for an invasion? He is making an overall air strike, which is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had described, sound very unappealing. As Steven Schneider writes, Bobby Kennedy was against even the air strike option, comparing it to what the Japanese did to America at Pearl Harbor. So how could he have been for an invasion? (Robert F. Kennedy, pp. 56-57) In fact, after an unsettling meeting with congressional leaders who thought the agreed upon blockade of Cuba was too weak, the brothers were shaken by the sabre rattling. They both agreed that the blockade was the least JFK could do without being impeached. (op. cit. Probe, p. 16)

    The crisis was resolved by the blockade, meetings between newsman John Scali and KGB agent Alex Feklisov, Khrushchev’s annoyance with Castro’s recklessness, and a meeting between Robert Kennedy and Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The arrangement was that the Russians would remove the atomic arsenal from Cuba, in return for a no invasion pledge on Cuba from Kennedy, and the later removal of American missiles from Turkey. Kennedy wanted the last to be kept under wraps since he thought it would hurt American standing in Europe. But Robert Kennedy had assured Dobrynin that this would be part of the deal at his meeting with him. Needless to day, Tye scores both RFK and Ted Sorenson—who edited Thirteen Days after Kennedy’s death—for not making the deal more explicit in the final version of the book. This is really kind of penny ante even for this book. Bobby Kennedy’s diaries made the deal explicit. Sorenson edited them to make it less so, since that is the way his boss, John Kennedy—for reasons stated above—wished it to be. (See “Anatomy of a Controversy”, by Jim Hershberg at the online National Security Archive.)

    This is largely what Tye uses to call RFK a liar and accuse him of being a hawk during the Missile Crisis. But then he goes beyond that. He actually writes that the stance taken in Thirteen Days is what influenced Lyndon Johnson to do what he did in Vietnam! (p. 273) This is wild even for Tye. First, LBJ was at most of the meetings during the Missile Crisis. When you read those transcripts you will see that he was more hawkish than the Kennedys. (See especially the meeting of 10/27/62, Probe, op. cit. p. 23) Secondly, Johnson was against Kennedy’s policy of no American combat troops in Vietnam from 1961! Against Kennedy’s wishes, on his trip there in May of 1961, he suggested that Premier Diem of South Vietnam request combat troops from Washington. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) Later, after John Kennedy was killed, Johnson told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara how he had been against withdrawing from Vietnam, as Kennedy was planning to do; but he kept his mouth shut since he was only Vice-President. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, p. 310) Does it get any clearer than that? But in the end the claim is actually nonsensical, for what reasonable person could even compare the two situations? In one you had a superpower secretly moving a first strike nuclear capability 90 miles from Florida, thereby upsetting the balance of power; in the other, you had a years-long, anti-colonial, peasant rebellion 9,000 miles away—one that had no direct impact on America’s national security. Not even Johnson could possibly equate the two. If I didn’t know better, I would say that Tye is trying to blame Johnson’s epochal disaster in Indochina—which was expanded and completed by Nixon and Kissinger—on Bobby Kennedy’s book. Which, in view of the record, is absurd.

    As the reader can see, most of the book is like this. Is it worth reading? No, because of all the textual problems mentioned above. Is it worth buying? No, since I can see no real value for it as a reference work. Which leaves the final question: Why did the author write the book? Only Larry Tye can answer that question.

  • Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Before opening Larry Tye’s biography of Robert Kennedy, I had some qualms about it. Why? Because when I turned to the back cover I saw that none other than Henry Kissinger had given the book his endorsement. The man many commentators think should be tried as a war criminal, who, for instance, supervised Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, was praising a book about Robert Kennedy. I then noted another blurb by journalist Marvin Kalb. In 1974, Kalb, along with his brother Bernard, wrote one of the first biographies of Kissinger. (Historian Theodore Draper called it a hagiography.) The Kalbs compared the validity of Kissinger’s diplomacy to George Washington’s likeness on a dollar bill. A judgment which, to say the least, does not hold up today. These endorsements, quite naturally, gave me pause.

    After reading the book, that pause was justified. Approximately the last 75 pages of Tye’s work are adequate and, in one or two places, actually moving. The problem with that observation is simple arithmetic: the book contains 447 pages of text. Therefore, those last 75 pages comprise about 1/6 of the volume. The rest of the book is not just below average; in many places it is worse than that, and in more ways than one.

    Tye tips us off to his agenda quite early. In his preface, he calls Robert F. Kennedy a commie baiter who was egged on by his father and Joe McCarthy. He adds that Kennedy practiced Machiavellian tactics to win his brother the presidency. He then says that he was also part of the plots to eliminate Fidel Castro. He tops this off by writing that “an assassin halted his campaign of conciliation.” (p. xi) I wrote in my notes: “Tye is off to a bad start.” I was correct.

    I

    Tye titles his first chapter “Cold Warrior”. In order to make this stick, he employs what military experts would call a pincers movement. He wants to envelop young Robert within the grasp of his father Joseph Kennedy, and his first legislative boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy. How anyone today could compare RFK with his father is really kind of inexplicable. But this is one of Tye’s unrepentant and recurrent proclamations. (Tye, p. 5) In this reviewer’s experience and knowledge there can be no better witness to this issue than Jackie Kennedy, since she was close to Joe Kennedy, and was even more familiar with his three surviving sons. She told Arthur Schlesinger that RFK was the son who was least like his father. (See Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 102) For instance, RFK did not have any interest in or aptitude for business. In fact, by 1957, he was a pro-labor advocate. Also, unlike his father, he was a devoted family man. Again, unlike his father, and more like President Kennedy, he was not an isolationist in his foreign policy outlook. Another point: RFK was quite aware of and sensitive to the plight of both the poor and minority groups. So where Tye gets this comparison is rather puzzling. After reading and taking notes on his book, in my view he does not come close to proving it. Jackie Kennedy appears correct on this point.

    It is interesting to note how Tye shoehorns RFK into this Cold Warrior box. One way he does so is by leaving out the name of Edmund Gullion. In 1951, in preparing for his run for the Senate a year later, congressman John Kennedy took a trip to the Far East. One of the places he visited was Saigon, South Vietnam. He was determined to find out the true status of the colonial war there between the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh on one side, and the colonial government of France on the other. After all, the USA was bankrolling a large part of the French war effort. One of the men that John Kennedy consulted with was a man he had formed a glancing relationship with in Washington a few years before. Gullion met with the 34-year-old John Kennedy at a rooftop restaurant. He told him that France would never win the war. Ho Chi Minh had fired up the young Viet Minh to such a degree that they would rather die than go back under French colonialism. France could not win a war of attrition. The home front would not support it.

    In 1983, when it was first reported at length in Richard Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, this meeting had a jarring effect on the reader, for the simple reason that about 99% of President Kennedy biographers had left it out. But since that time, several other authors—like this reviewer—have not just mentioned it, but detailed it. So it is hard to imagine that Tye is not aware of it. The reason that it should be important to him is simple: Robert Kennedy was there. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, p. 21) RFK later said that Gullion’s words had had a profound impact. As Arthur Schlesinger writes, when JFK opposed American intervention at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, RFK agreed. (ibid, p. 125) And on the issue of anti-communism and its relationship with anti-colonialism, RFK pretty much mirrored his brother: You could not consider anti-communism in the Third World without considering the impact of colonialism. (ibid, p. 133) RFK wrote in the pages of New York Times Magazine “… because we think that the uppermost thought in all people’s minds is Communism …. We are still too often doing too little too late to recognize and assist the irresistible movements for independence that are sweeping one dependent territory after another.” In his visit to Russia in 1955 with Justice William O. Douglas, which Tye mentions, RFK saw a different side of Russian life and became rather sympathetic with its citizens. He even wrote down some of the good things about the USSR. (Schlesinger, p. 134)

    But the main way Tye tries to turn Robert Kennedy into a Cold Warrior is through his service as assistant counsel under McCarthy on his Senate investigative committee. He partly does this by using some rather questionable and controversial sources, like M. Stanton Evans and Ralph de Toledano. The former was present at William F. Buckley’s estate when Buckley founded the Young Americans For Freedom. Evans actually wrote the charter for that right-wing group. He then went on to work for Buckley’s National Review for 13 years. Just a few years before Evans died in 2015, he wrote an apologia for Joe McCarthy. De Toledano was so anti-communist that OSS chief Bill Donovan would not include him in covert operations in Europe during World War II. He then became a close friend of Richard Nixon during the Alger Hiss trials, and later was a co-founder of National Review. He wrote a quite negative book about Robert Kennedy in 1967, in anticipation of his run for the presidency. (In this regard it is important to note that Tye also uses two other dubious sources in this section: conservative hit-man Victor Lasky’s Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man and Burton Hersh’s absolutely atrocious Bobby and J. Edgar.)

    Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s committee for about six months. According to most observers, he composed one of the very few reports that had any value to it. This was a documented study of how some American allies—like Greece and England—extensively traded with China during the Korean War, consequently being part of the effort against the USA in that conflict. Even McCarthy’s liberal critics described the report as being factually accurate and soberly written. (Schlesinger, p. 108) Unlike most of Chief Counsel Roy Cohn’s work, it did not accuse people of being traitors. And Robert did not take part in the hunting down of alleged subversives in the State Department. (ibid, p. 106)

    In fact, RFK and Cohn bumped heads at this time over the way the chief counsel was conducting the committee. Bobby also complained to McCarthy that although Cohn’s recklessness was attracting a lot of press, it would eventually collapse the committee. He likened what Cohn was doing to a toboggan ride down a slope ending with a crash into a tree. (ibid, p. 110) But McCarthy decided to stick with Cohn. So, in the summer of 1953, RFK resigned.

    About six months later, he returned. He wrote a letter to a friend at this time, saying, “I think I will enjoy my new job.” (ibid, p. 115) This time he was chief counsel to the Democratic minority. He spent about three times longer in this role as he did as assistant counsel to Cohn. Therefore, some dramatizations of this episode use his role as minority chief counsel and discount his prior work. (See the HBO film Citizen Cohn) He went head to head with Cohn, and more often than not, he came out in front. In fact, the two became such bitter rivals that, on one occasion, they almost came to blows. (ibid, pp. 117-18) Even a local newspaper, The Boston Post, went after RFK for his determined and public opposition to Cohn.

    As RFK predicted, McCarthy imploded. One cause was Cohn’s close friendship with David Schine, a draftee who Cohn tried to get special privileges for in the army. Bobby Kennedy wrote the questions for each Democratic senator on this issue. (ibid) The second cause was McCarthy’s fatal showdown with attorney Joseph Welch, who had been hired to specifically defend the army against the McCarthy/Cohn assault. Welch’s famous “Have you no decency sir” riposte punctured McCarthy in front of 20 million spectators.

    When the Army-McCarthy hearings ended in June of 1954, Bobby Kennedy wrote the minority report. It was highly critical of McCarthy’s leadership. Parts of it were so extreme that the committee would not sign off on the whole report. RFK wrote that there was no excuse for McCarthy’s failure to rein in Cohn. Or how irresponsible many of Cohn’s charges turned out to be. He then concluded with: “The Senate should take action to correct this situation.” (ibid, p. 118) For all intents and purposes, this was the beginning of the movement to censure McCarthy. That motion arose on the Senate floor a month later. It was passed on December 2, 1954.

    Under the new leadership of Sen. Karl Mundt, Robert Kennedy had even more power. He used it mainly to wrap up what was left of Cohn’s charges: the Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss cases and the accusation of communist infiltration of defense plants. No charges were ever filed.

    From the above synopsis it’s fairly easy to deduce that RFK was stuck in a bad situation and he tried to make the best of it. When he could not, he resigned. Given the opportunity to return under more propitious circumstances, he atoned for his earlier errors. Based upon that, it’s not justified to call Bobby a Cold Warrior, or to have the episode cast a shadow over his entire career.

    II

    The next major section of the book deals with RFK’s confrontation with Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa. In 1956, the Democrats took control of the Senate and with that, the leadership of the sub-committee on investigations passed to Senator John McClellan. Because he appeared to be eminently fair in wrapping up the McCarthy/Cohn fracas, a few journalists got in contact with Robert Kennedy, trying to interest him to use his chief counsel’s office to go after a real danger: organized crime influence on labor unions. Kennedy and McClellan went in that direction and this resulted in RFK’s four-year long pursuit of Hoffa. Tye seems to have no serious problems with this episode in young Kennedy’s career. The worst he can say about it is that it was used to boost Senator John Kennedy’s profile in his attempt to attain the White House.

    JFK & RFK on the McClellan committee

    Which is kind of ridiculous. The reason JFK ended up on the committee was because of complaints by Teamster leaders Dave Beck and Hoffa. They protested that McClellan’s committee was the wrong place for these hearings; they should be held before the Labor Committee. McClellan resisted this since he thought that committee was too friendly with labor and would not pursue the complaints vigorously. Because they did have a valid point, the solution was to form a special committee, half from McClellan’s committee and half from the Labor Committee. Since JFK was on the latter, that is how he got on the special committee. Is Tye saying that Beck and Hoffa brought up this objection at the request of RFK to get his brother on the committee?

    What is odd about this section is that the reviewer could find few, if any, questions or comments by Tye about some of the techniques used by RFK to finally imprison Hoffa. Some distinguished authors, e.g., Victor Navasky and especially Fred Cook, have raised some serious questions about the methods used by Kennedy’s office to enlist witnesses to testify against Hoffa. Many of these methods were employed by Kennedy’s investigator Walter Sheridan, who remains pretty much untouched by Tye. (For a look at these charges, see Cook’s multi-part series in The Nation which culminated in his article “The Hoffa Trial” on 4/27/64.)

    Another oddity about this section is that much of the political background of the issue goes unexplored. The Republicans on the special committee, for instance archconservative Barry Goldwater, wanted RFK to delve into the Teamsters so they could use that issue to tar labor unions in general. But once they saw how RFK was bringing in organized crime as an influence on Hoffa, they actually began to side with Hoffa, since this would detract from their real aim. (See review of James Neff’s Vendetta, by Alex Lichtenstein, Washington Post July 17, 2015.) When John Kennedy tried to pass legislation aimed at this particular influence in order to sanitize union elections, the Republicans hijacked his legislation and turned it into the union weakening Landrum-Griffin bill. That act was such a twisting of JFK’s original intent that he took his name off of it. (Schlesinger, pp. 188-92)

    Walter Reuther & RFK

    Another fascinating aspect of RFK’s service on this committee was the Kohler company investigation. And again, Tye pretty much discounts the episode. The Republicans on the committee, especially Goldwater, wanted RFK to inquire into this long running UAW strike against Kohler plumbing in order to investigate UAW leader Walter Reuther. Goldwater did not foresee the consequences. First, Reuther turned out to be a forceful witness for the rights of labor and abuses by corporations. Secondly, Bobby Kennedy actually visited the home of Kohler in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was appalled at some of the working conditions there, and at what the company called a “lunch break”, which lasted about five minutes. (ibid, pp. 183-87) This had two effects. First, it resulted in a strong personal and professional relationship between RFK and Reuther. For example, Kennedy later called on Reuther to bus in as much of his membership as possible to attend Martin Luther King’s 1963 March On Washington. Second, it ended in the largest fine ever awarded over a strike. Kohler was ordered to pay three million dollars in back wages to the strikers and to give their pension fund another 1.5 million.

    RFK’s focus on Hoffa’s ties with organized crime caused his interest to spread into a general inquiry into the workings of what had become known as the Cosa Nostra in America. As a result, in 1959, the McClellan Committee was nicknamed the Rackets Committee. For the first time the American public was exposed to organized crime figures like Anthony Provenzano and Sam Giancana. Many authors have concluded that it was this part of RFK’s congressional service, his exposure of Mob influence in labor unions and on the national scene, which really made him into a national figure.

    III

    From here, Tye segues into the 1960 presidential election and RFK’s role as his brother’s campaign manager. At the beginning of the chapter he writes that what Bobby did in this campaign would later embolden the likes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. (Tye, p. 87) That theme is repeated later on. (see pp. 106, 121) One has to wonder: What in God’s name is Tye up to with those comparisons? Does he really think that no one remembers what Richard Nixon and his political hatchet man Murray Chotiner did to, first Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 congressional race, and then Helen Douglas in the 1950 senatorial race? These have become famous today because of the new low they hit in creating red baiting campaign tactics. Tye also seems to trust the reader not being aware of revelations about how Allen Dulles helped finance Nixon’s run against Voorhis, a man who was opposed to both big banking and big oil, which Dulles represented at his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp.162-63) Or how Nixon was on the take from private companies in 1946 because he would not run for office at a financial sacrifice to himself. (ibid, p. 165) Chotiner portrayed the anti-communist Voorhis as a tool and fellow traveler of the Kremlin. This included voters getting anonymous phone calls during the last week saying that they should know Voorhis was a communist before they voted for him. (ibid, p. 166)

    What made it all the worse was that Nixon knew it was all a fabrication. When a Voorhis backer later confronted him with those last minute phone calls Nixon took the opportunity to give him an education in realpolitik. He coolly replied, “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a communist. I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naïve.” (ibid) I could continue on with Nixon’s run against Douglas which was, in some ways, even worse than the Voorhis campaign. But the point is obvious: What could someone as corrupt and feckless as Nixon learn from Robert Kennedy?

    The comparison with Johnson is just as bad. Maybe worse. One just has to conjure up the lawlessness of Texas politics in the thirties and forties, which is when LBJ got his start. Through the efforts of several Johnson biographers, we know about the associations of LBJ with such unsavory characters as Herman and George Brown of Brown and Root, the giant construction firm that eventually evolved into Halliburton. In return for steering contracts their way, the brothers financed Johnson’s congressional and senatorial campaigns. (Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains, pp. 7-9) When a government accountant tried to expose the illicit relations between LBJ and Brown and Root, he was framed for soliciting contributions from his staff. He was acquitted, but decided to leave government service. Johnson also used extortion tactics to gain newspaper endorsements. (ibid, p. 9) There is also circumstantial evidence that the Brown and Root connection helped finance Johnson’s purchase of KTBC radio in Austin, which was the beginning of Johnson’s personal fortune in media.

    But this is all prelude to Johnson’s infamous 1948 race for the senate against Coke Stevenson. The results of that race shifted back and forth for a solid week after the election was over. Johnson actually wiretapped Stevenson’s phone lines. Johnson had made a deal with south Texas political boss George Parr to rig the vote. This culminated in the notorious Box 13. This was a late arriving vote tally—five days after the polls closed—in which 203 ballots were “discovered”. Those results tilted the election to Johnson. Of the 203, a miraculous 202 were votes for Johnson. Which was even worse than the Parr controlled Duval county results, which were 94% for Johnson. Curiously, those 203 names were assembled in alphabetical order. When eleven of the 203 voters in Box 13 were interviewed, they said they had not even voted. Journalist Ronnie Dugger later found precinct official Luis Salas, who admitted he had performed the fraud for Parr and Johnson. Salas had a picture of the smiling officials who held the ballot box in their hands. The capper to all this is that when Dugger interviewed LBJ for his biography, Johnson had the very same picture. (Click here for Jason Matteson’s essay on this subject)

    Are we really to believe that Tye is not aware of this whole tawdry affair? It has been written about extensively since at least 1982, when Dugger’s book on Johnson, The Politician, was first published. Are we also to think that Tye is not aware of Johnson’s later associations with the likes of Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker and his bribery actions with Don Reynolds? (For the last, see Mellen, pp. 160-64)

    But in practical terms, in his book, does Tye excavate anything like the above to make his bombastic comparison stick? He mentions some dirty tricks in the primary campaign against Hubert Humphrey, but he admits he cannot trace these through to Bobby Kennedy. And his prime attempt at doing the same in the general election smacks of desperation. In 2011, over a half-century after the election, the Washington Post published an article by Mark Feldstein. (1/14/2011) This was yet another reworking of a story that was published in 1962. Since then it has been reported several times, for instance in the book Empire, a long biography of Howard Hughes by Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele. Somehow, Tye ignores all the previous reporting and accepts this one at face value (Tye, p. 123), even though in serious ways it contradicts the others.

    Back in 1956, Howard Hughes made a loan of $205,000 to Donald Nixon, Richard Nixon’s brother. Donald’s business enterprise, named Nixon burgers, was a kind of fast food place mixed in with a grocery store. It was about to go under unless it got a fast infusion of cash. Hughes was always attuned to these situations since he was all too intent on compromising politicians or their next of kin. After Nixon and Eisenhower won re-election in November, Hughes supplied the loan in December of 1956. Up until that time, the IRS was resisting granting Hughes a large tax exemption for Hughes Medical Center. They recognized it as a scam that was simply a way for Hughes to dodge taxes on profits from his other divisions. But, lo and behold, one month after Hughes notified the Vice-President that all was in place with the loan, the IRS reversed itself. Hughes got the phony exemption, which allowed him to save millions. The loan was supposed to be mortgaged by a plot of land in Whittier—except the land value was estimated at only 50,000 dollars. By most measures one would have to conclude that Hughes was buying influence, not making a business transaction. (Bartlett and Steele, p. 204)

    Through Drew Pearson, the story got out in a fragmentary way in the waning days of the 1960 election. Very few newspapers picked it up and Nixon dismissed it as a last-minute smear unworthy of comment. In 1962, Nixon lied about the loan in his book Six Crises, saying that the Whittier property more than covered the amount of the loan. That year, Nixon decided to return to politics by running for governor of California. This time, the Hughes loan would be a much larger story since now editors were ready for it. The Long Beach Press Telegram decided to run a long story on the loan since they had editorialized about it back in 1960. That story was published in that newspaper and in the magazine The Reporter in April of 1962. James Phelan, who many people in the JFK field have qualms about—including me— wrote it. But in this instance, Phelan did not seem to have a dog in the fight. And there were adequate records to back up what he wrote. And later reporting by, for example, Hughes manager Noah Dietrich, has also borne out the basic facts as he presented them.

    Hughes tried to cover up the loan by using two layers of disguise. The first was a lobbyist by the name of John Waters. But since Waters had done some work for Hughes, the trustee of the mortgage was changed to an accountant named Philip Reiner. Complicating the matter was that, after Donald Nixon eventually went bankrupt, a gas station was built over the Whittier lot. Reiner was sent the rent checks by the station, which amounted to $800 per month. When Reiner surrendered the check to Nadine Henley at Hughes headquarters in Hollywood, it was returned to him. Hughes wanted no paper trail linking him to the lot. So Reiner spent the money. But later, an accountant at Hughes Tool Company in Houston began raising a ruckus about what had happened to the loan for $205,000, well over a million dollars today. Reiner’s cut-out, a lawyer named Frank Arditto, now asked him what happened to the payments, knowing full well that he had given Reiner permission to cash the checks. Realizing he was being made the fall guy, Reiner hired an attorney. With an election coming up, the consul realized that his client would make a good asset for the Democrats, who would protect him. He got in contact with Robert Kennedy, who turned him over to an assistant named Jim McInerney. McInerney decided to subsidize Reiner for the money Arditto was demanding, sixteen thousand dollars. McInerney then put together a package of documents, affidavits, trust deeds, and receipts. He gave them to three outlets: St Louis Post Dispatch, Time magazine, and Drew Pearson. No one would run with it since it was so late in the campaign.

    But Nixon then made a mistake. Hearing about McInerney’s report, he launched a preemptive cover story to conceal the actual circumstances of the loan and the role of Hughes. These lies infuriated Pearson. He now decided to publish the story. (These details are in Phelan’s 1982 book, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels. Reiner later sued Hughes and won a $150,000 out of court settlement. See The Desert Sun, 2/22/72)

    When one compares this with the Post version, as adapted by Tye, it is unsettling. That version opens with Nixon complaining that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. It then says that the document package was picked up at McInerney’s office, not sent out. In a completely unprecedented twist—with no evidence advanced—it states that the Hughes cash was given to Dick Nixon to purchase a home in the Washington area. The wildest part then states that RFK acquired the story for money, and then a burglary was arranged at Reiner’s office to get the documents. In his text, Tye never mentions the earlier version of this story; therefore, he does not point out the differences between the two, which means he does not have to attempt to reconcile them. In his footnotes he does not even alert the reader to the other version. But the worst part of the improbable tale, and its innate spin, is that all culpability by Nixon is now gone. That poor Red-baiter Nixon is reduced to a helpless victim pondering what happened to him at the hands of Kennedy power. In this new version, there is not even a note of irony about how Voorhis and Douglas must have felt. Talk about (multi-leveled) historical revisionism.

    IV

    In this review, I will not divert much from the main topic in order to critique at any length or detail some of the comments that Tye makes about John F. Kennedy. If I did, the review would be about 50% longer. I will simply note that some of the things the author says about John Kennedy are rather obtuse, and not supported by the record. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter Four, dealing with JFK ‘s entry to the White House, the author writes that neither Eisenhower nor Wilson had been as brazen as Jack in running for President as an untested leader. I don’t understand what this means. The only elected political office Woodrow Wilson held prior to winning the presidency was a two-year stint as governor of New Jersey. Which is two years longer in office than Eisenhower. In comparison, John Kennedy had served in Congress and the Senate in Washington for 14 years prior to the 1960 election. About the 1960 race, Tye also writes that the politics of Nixon and Kennedy did not differ much. (p. 121) This is a Chris Mathews style blurring of the record. To use just two examples which occurred while JFK was in the Senate and Nixon was vice-president: 1) Kennedy opposed 1954’s Operation Vulture, the White House plan to use atomic weapons to aid the French at Dien Bien Phu; (op. cit Talbot, p. 361) 2) Kennedy’s monumental 1957 speech about why the USA should not support the doomed French colonial war in Algeria provoked barbed and snide remarks from Nixon in the White House. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 29)

    Tye’s depiction of Robert Kennedy running the Justice Department is, to be kind, equally myopic. The author is adequate in describing the new Attorney General’s war against organized crime. (Tye, pp. 142-45) He describes Kennedy’s attempts at fairness in going after Democratic politicians who had broken the law. (ibid, pp. 145-47) He also briefly describes RFK’s final neutering of the Smith Act by having the sentence of CPUSA member Junius Scales commuted. (p. 157) Again, when it comes to the complexities of the Hoffa case, he seems to have little problem accepting the prosecution’s dubious witness Ed Partin. In fact, he actually adds on to Partin’s sensational charges of Hoffa’s intent to kill RFK by adding the late arriving and dubious Frank Ragano story about Hoffa trying to choke Bobby to death at the Justice Department. (Tye, p. 152) To be fair, he does say that RFK’s pursuit of Hoffa was so unrelenting, so single-minded, that it created sympathy for the Teamster leader.

    JFK responds to U.S. Steel’s defiance
    (click image for YouTube video)

    Tye deals with the 1962 steel crisis in about one page (pp. 163-64). His account is so skeletal, so skimpy, that one would think all the commotion was about whether or not FBI agents should phone business executives late at night. To get my bearings back on this momentous event, I reviewed what is perhaps the best account: Donald Gibson’s chapter-long treatment in Battling Wall Street. Gibson begins his discussion by quoting the late, illustrious economist John Blair, who called the episode, “The most dramatic confrontation in history between a President and a corporate management.” (Gibson, p. 9) The only other instance that rivals it was Harry Truman’s intervention in a steel strike ten years before, but that was during a full-blown war in Korea. President Kennedy had worked on an industry-wide labor agreement for a year, mainly through Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. In late March, he thought he had one. But it was broken via a personal visit to the White House by US Steel chairman Roger Blough. He told JFK he would announce a price increase in 30 minutes, which is what the President and Goldberg had been promised would not occur. The President then uttered his famous quote, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.” (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 143) Within 24 hours JFK went on national television to condemn the steel companies. He said that Americans would find it hard to accept that “a tiny handful of steel executives … can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans.” (Gibson, p. 13)

    One day later, RFK announced formation of a grand jury and the delivery of subpoenas. Records, both personal and corporate, were seized. The aim was to establish if criminal conspiracy laws had been violated. The Attorney General also had the FBI march into executive offices for interviews. (Schlesinger, p. 421) Within 72 hours the crisis was over and the price increase rescinded. There can be little doubt that the Attorney General’s actions hurried the settlement. Especially in light of the fact that, in 1961, as a continuation of an investigation under the Eisenhower administration of price-fixing by electric companies, RFK had actually placed seven business executives in prison. Five were from General Electric and Westinghouse. (See The Great Price Conspiracy by John Herling.) And contrary to popular belief, and what Tye implies, based on information from the 1962 steel inquiry, RFK began new actions against US Steel in late 1963. (Gibson, p. 13)

    V

    This same pattern, shrinking a large achievement, is followed with respect to the Attorney General’s actions in the civil rights arena.  In this instance, however, Tye’s writing is even more problematic, since RFK’s achievements there are clearly epochal, no prior Attorney General coming even close to them.

    Harris Wofford & JFK

    Tye does something with the subject that I don’t recall seeing before. He begins his discussion of the Kennedy program in 1963, at a meeting RFK had with some militant black leaders like James Baldwin. Most accounts of the Kennedy civil rights program begin with a review of what had been done by the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and then segues into the memo written by Harris Wofford. After campaigning for Kennedy, Wofford was appointed JFK’s special assistant on civil rights. In late December of 1960, before the inauguration, Wofford wrote a memo that outlined a program for achieving equal rights for black Americans. He then recommended his friend and colleague, attorney Burke Marshall, to be the Justice Department lawyer in charge of the issue. (Bernstein pp. 42-43)

    Just the information above counters two observations Tye makes. First, that the Kennedy administration had no plan to attain civil rights, and second, that RFK took on issues willy-nilly. (Tye, p. 205) Wofford, a central figure by anyone’s estimation, is discounted by Tye. Surprisingly, he is only mentioned once in his chapter on the subject. Yet his memo was both acute and realistic, and it was more or less followed by the administration. He wrote that the only branch of government that had achieved anything so far was the judiciary. He then wrote that the administration would have to press the issue through executive actions in order to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation, something that, for political reasons, Congress would not be ready to do in the first year or two. Wofford also mapped out the country geographically and recommended what actions needed to be taken and where. For example, he recommended legal assaults on states that restricted voting rights, and strictures in contracting to open up corporations to black employment. (Bernstein, pp. 47-48) As historian Irving Bernstein notes in his book, once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he followed this program. (See Promises Kept, Chapter 2)

    When the Kennedy administration took office, it was evident that the Brown vs. Board decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were not having any kind of real impact. One reason for this was the Eisenhower administration’s lack of rigor in enforcing them. Senator John Kennedy, during the debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, said he championed Title 3 of that proposed act because it allowed the Attorney General to enter into individual states to attack cases of voting discrimination and school segregation. And this is what Robert Kennedy was doing once he became Attorney General. On May 6, 1961, at the University of Georgia’s Law Day, RFK announced that, unlike his predecessor, he would strongly enforce the Brown vs. Board decision. And RFK also began filing lawsuits in southern states based upon the low rates of voter turnout there. In his first year in office, RFK filed more than twice as many cases than Eisenhower had in his entire second administration. As writers like Harry Golden have pointed out, this plan was not just recommended by Wofford’s memo. Candidate Kennedy had approved it in no uncertain terms during the campaign in a meeting with his civil rights advisory board. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, pp. 105, 139)

    In the face of all this, how does the author actually begin his chronicle of the administration’s civil rights campaign? He ignores much of what I have noted above. He begins his actual chronicle with the Freedom Riders campaign, which started in May of 1961. He uses this for two reasons. He wants to show that 1) RFK was behind the curve, and 2) He uses the incident to call the AG a liar. He achieves the first in part by ignoring the comment that Senator James Eastland made to RFK after his confirmation. He told Kennedy that his predecessor had never filed a voting rights case against his home state of Mississippi. The next day President Kennedy wrote a note to his brother telling him to begin filing cases. (Golden, p. 100) This, of course, preceded the Freedom Riders campaign.

    The second objective is achieved by saying that RFK was alerted to the incident in advance. Yet the AG said he was not aware of the demonstration. To use one example, as an FBI informant later revealed, J. Edgar Hoover was well aware of the planned violence against the Freedom Riders. That information was not passed to Hoover’s boss, the Attorney General. (Schlesinger, p. 307) A letter that the demonstration organizer had sent to the Attorney General was routed to Burke Marshall instead. He either never got it or he did not inform Kennedy about it. (Bernstein, p. 63)

    But beyond that, is Tye implying what I think he is implying? That somehow, even if he had known about it, RFK would not have anticipated the violence the Freedom Riders would encounter? That is: vicious racists attacking the buses with baseball bats, lead pipes and bicycle chains. With people being pulled off the buses, thrown to the ground and then beaten and bloodied. All this while both the police and FBI did nothing. In this regard, I should note the following. At his meeting with President Kennedy about taking the job, both men understood there were going to be battles in the civil rights area right off the bat. (Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, p. 10) But also, I could find no mention by the author of the protest RFK made as a member of the Harvard football team when a southern opponent refused to let a black member of the team stay in the same hotel. That was in 1947. (Schlesinger, p. 71) Secondly, Tye seriously underplays the actions Kennedy took as leader of the Legal Forum at the University of Virginia in 1951. RFK invited black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak there. He knew it would raise a ruckus, since UV was the team that did not want to play Harvard back in 1947. What made it more problematic was that Bunche wrote Kennedy a letter saying that he did not wish to appear before an audience that featured segregated seating. Yet, state law required this. More or less on his own, Kennedy took the case through four levels of campus government saying that he would not give up, since he thought disallowing Bunche would be morally indefensible. (Schlesinger, p. 90) Bunche ended up speaking to an integrated audience that was about 1/3 black. But beyond those personal experiences, the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins had taken place in North Carolina during the presidential campaign of 1960. And further, RFK was already supervising the New Orleans school desegregation crisis against the likes of Leander Perez in early 1961. (Robert Kennedy in His own Words, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffery Schulman, p.81)

    What really happened with the revolution in civil rights that took place under Bobby Kennedy is fairly simple to understand. First, the failure of the Eisenhower administration to use any of the judicial and legislative achievements attained in the fifties built up large amounts of pent up frustration. For example, from 1955 to 1960, the courts had made a series of rulings that segregation in busing was not constitutional. If those rulings had been enforced, there would have been no need for the Freedom Riders. (Bernstein, pp. 62-63) But John F. Kennedy’s candidacy represented something different to black Americans. From his speeches on European colonialism in Africa back in 1957, to his speech in Jackson, Mississippi that year, telling southerners they must abide by Brown vs. Board, to his comments in New York during the 1960 primary that he would risk losing the south since this was a moral issue to him, and his later call during the general election to Coretta King while her husband was in jail, all these and more, caused that frustration to unleash itself once Kennedy won the election. Finally, someone was in the White House who was ready to do something about civil rights. For instance, it was John Kennedy’s election that inspired James Meredith to apply to the University of Mississippi. (Bernstein, p. 76)

    And they were correct. By the summer of 1963, in less than three years, that synergy had turned the tide. With John Kennedy’s landmark speech in June of 1963 on the issue, and Robert Kennedy’s stewardship of King’s March on Washington, the battle was essentially won. Kennedy’s civil rights act was going to pass. As Wofford predicted, it could not have passed earlier. But I must note, even with this—the reversal of a century of Jim Crow and segregation in less than three years—Tye is still not satisfied. About President Kennedy’s nationally televised speech he writes that Kennedy had wanted to redefine America’s place in the world, but he had not come close before. (Tye, p. 229) To say the least, many would disagree. For example, President Kennedy reversed the Eisenhower agenda in Third World nations like Congo, Indonesia, and Laos in 1961. Tye also states that Robert Kennedy’s confrontation with Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama was “scripted”. If one watches the classic documentary about this showdown at Tuscaloosa, Crisis, the viewer will see that all the way through, the AG did not know what Wallace was going to do. Wallace had deliberately decided not to talk to RFK to settle the matter in advance. So at the White House, the AG suggested that the students might have to be forced through one of the furthest doors Wallace was standing in front of. If the episode had been scripted, RFK would never have suggested such a dangerous alternative. After all, Wallace had 900 state troopers there, and Bobby Kennedy had brought in 3000 guardsmen.

    But in the long run Wallace and his henchman, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, had won. By creating these dramatic confrontations at Tuscaloosa and Oxford, they had made it appear that Bobby Kennedy was invading the state. Which conjured up images of President Lincoln and General Grant marching on Richmond in 1865. So even though Wallace lost on integration, he won the larger political stake: the South was lost to the Democrats after 1964. And this followed from the fact that, unlike Hoover, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower and Nixon, Bobby Kennedy viewed this as something that had to be done. Indeed, at times RFK sounded like Malcolm X on the issue: “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” And what made it even worse is that RFK was fully aware of what was happening in the political arena. He was writing off state after state for his brother’s re-election in 1964. (Guthman and Shulman, pp. 76, 82) This whole tragic dimension—the moral plane losing out to the political factors—is lost on Tye.

    But it wasn’t lost on Martin Luther King. In 1967, it was Bobby Kennedy who suggested King lead his Poor People’s March to Washington. (Schlesinger, p. 911) And for the 1968 primary election, King made it clear to his advisors that he was backing Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and there was no real question about it. (Martin Luther King: The FBI File, p. 572)

    VI

    I began to lose a lot of faith in the author when, about halfway through the book, he began to insert the work of the late David Heymann. (pp. 191-92) And while we are at it, Tye also sources writers like Kitty Kelley, Chuck Giancana, and Ron Kessler. To be clear, towards the end, he doesn’t actually endorse Heymann; he throws his work out there for discussion. The problem is that Heymann has been discredited about as far as an author can be discredited. And since that discreditation has been well publicized, it is hard to believe that Tye doesn’t know about it. He even gives play to Heymann’s book, saying that RFK and Jackie Kennedy had an affair after JFK was killed. That book, and Heymann’s reputation, was thoroughly savaged by Lisa Pease. And today, it has been shown beyond any doubt that Heymann was a professional confabulator, one who not only made up interviews he did not do, but even created interview subjects who did not exist. Beyond that, he even manufactured a fictional police department so he could refer to their reports. (See this Newsweek story) Tye uses a story about RFK making out with Candy Bergen that was vehemently denied by a furious Bergen in 2014 in an article for Newsweek. That Newsweek story was published two years before the author’s book. Can he really have missed it? Meanwhile, Tye does not quote what the late FBI officer in charge of domestic intelligence for Hoover said about Kennedy’s party life. In his book The Bureau, William Sullivan wrote that Hoover would send agents out to follow Kennedy around at night. They could never find him in any compromising situations. He would nurse one drink all night and then leave the party.

    This is all apropos of Tye’s chapter on RFK and Cuba, and also other foreign affairs. That chapter is surely one of the worst in the book. In order to discuss it, we must briefly mention President Kennedy’s policy, since Tye does so. Near the beginning of the chapter, Tye writes, in relation to Operation Zapata, the code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion, that “The new president was determined to act.” (Tye, p. 242) This is contrary to just about everything that has been written about Zapata. Even Allen Dulles, the progenitor of the operation, has stated that the project was a kind of orphan child that Kennedy had adopted, but he had no real love or affection for. (Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure, p. 103) When Arthur Schlesinger asked him what he thought about the concept, JFK replied he thought about it as little as possible. (ibid, p. 102) Contrary to what Tye states, the CIA had to entice the new president into going along with it. They did this in a variety of ways. This included presenting him with false estimates of the resistance to Castro on the island, having Dulles wildly overstate the possibilities of the project’s success, and actually predicting that once the invasion landed, much of the Cuban militia would defect. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 294-95) But beyond that, Tye persists in the idea that President Kennedy cancelled D-Day air strikes. (Tye, p. 242) Thanks to the declassification of Lyman Kirkpatrick’s Inspector General report, and the availability of General Maxwell Taylor’s White House report, this has been exposed as a myth propagated by the CIA.

    Now, what did Robert Kennedy have to do with Zapata? Just about nothing. He was briefed on the operation four days before the invasion force was launched from Central America. (ibid, p. 301) The importance of RFK in regards to Zapata is his role afterwards in serving as President Kennedy’s watchdog on the Taylor review board. This was a panel set up by President Kennedy to delve into the CIA’s creation and launching of the invasion. Tye seriously underplays RFK’s role on Maxwell Taylor’s board. For instance, he does not mention RFK’s cross-examination of Allen Dulles; or Joseph Kennedy’s aid in helping uncover the Bruce-Lovett report, which had previously been critical of Dulles; nor does he mention the termination of director Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, or operations supervisor Dick Bissell. (Tye, p. 245) JFK did this because he came to the conclusion he had been lied to about every aspect of the operation. Why? Because Dulles knew the plan would not succeed. The director had banked on Kennedy sending in American forces when he saw it failing. Kennedy did not. With the declassification process on Zapata, several respected authors, including Jim Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, have demonstrated this was the case. It is questionable whether the president could have understood all this without his brother’s role on the Taylor panel. As far as I can see, this is all left out by Tye.

    As Tye recognizes, it was largely RFK’s part on the Taylor board that convinced the president not to trust the CIA or the Pentagon. Thus Robert Kennedy assumed a larger presence in foreign policy matters. When Operation Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was formulated, RFK served as a kind of ombudsman over that project. As David Corn wrote in Blonde Ghost—his biography of the project’s administrator Ted Shackley—the CIA greatly resented this. For now they had to present detailed plans to RFK for every raid into Cuba.

    This gives Tye the opportunity to do what I thought he would. He tries to say that Mongoose included the elimination of Fidel Castro and since RFK knew all about the project, he had to have known about the plots to kill Fidel. (p. 253) This is wrong on two scores. First, it is clear from the declassified record on Mongoose that assassination plots were not a part of the program. The CIA had arranged plans to liquidate Castro, but these were apart from official plans. Secondly, the CIA Inspector General report on the plots specifically states that they were kept from the Kennedys. This includes the phase of the plots that CIA officer William Harvey was supervising with mobster John Roselli during Mongoose. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327) When RFK found out about them he called in Director John McCone and Director of Operations Richard Helms and he made it clear that this kind of thing was disgraceful and had to be stopped. (Goldfarb, p. 273) But the CIA deliberately deceived RFK and continued in them. In fact, when JFK was assassinated, they had a representative meeting with a Cuban national codenamed AM/LASH, delivering him murder weapons. Again, the CIA lied about this and said it had been authorized by Robert Kennedy. It was not. (David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 229-30)

    After all this rather flawed history—about Zapata, about Mongoose, about the CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro—Tye concludes with a remarkable reverie. (p. 254) I actually had to read it twice. He says that the clandestine operations against Cuba were the inspiration for things like Ronald Reagan’s war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Richard Nixon’s CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Somehow, Tye leaves out the fact that the CIA had been doing this kind of thing long before the Kennedys came to power. Can Tye really not be aware of the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? The Agency overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala the year after? Or their attempt to militarily overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958? Or the backing by Eisenhower and Allen Dulles of the murder plots against Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960? The idea that this kind of thing was all new in 1961 is a little ludicrous. And as more than one author—for example, Jim Douglass—has shown, the Kennedys were attempting to both halt and reverse these regressive actions in the Third World.

    But the main focus of this dubious chapter is the 1962 Missile Crisis. As is his consistent tendency, Tye’s goal seems twofold: 1) He wants to label Robert Kennedy a liar, and 2) He wants to blame RFK for the crisis in the first place. He does this by saying that the reason for the Russian placement of the atomic armada in Cuba was because of Mongoose, and the possibility of a second invasion. Therefore, he concludes that RFK was not forthcoming about the real cause of the crisis in his book on the subject, Thirteen Days. (Tye, p. 239)

    Again, to say this is flawed history is understating it. One way Tye achieves this is by not revealing the full expanse of the nuclear arsenal the USSR had secretly moved into Cuba. That arsenal included 40 missile launchers and 60 medium- and long-range nuclear tipped rockets. The former could fly 1,200 miles; the latter 2,400 miles. Consequently, the long-range missiles could reach almost any major city in the USA, excepting the Pacific Northwest. There were 140 surface to air missile defense launchers to protect the launching sites. Those batteries would be accompanied by a wing of the latest Soviet jet fighter, the MIG-21, plus a detachment of 45,000 Soviet combat troops. That troop detachment included four motorized rifle regiments and over 250 units of armor. To finish off the nuclear launch triad, the Russians had sent in 40 IL-28s, an armed nuclear bomber which had a speed of 560 MPH and a range of 4,500 miles. Finally, they had constructed a submarine pen with 11 subs, 7 of them with 1-megaton nuclear weapons. That explosive power is about 80 times the torque of the Hiroshima blast. (Probe Magazine, May-June 1998, p. 17)

    That array made it possible to hit every major city in America. One would use the bombers and subs for the southeast quadrant, targeting cities like Houston, New Orleans and Miami. The missiles could be used for targets in the northeast, Mideast, Midwest and southern California. With that revealed, here is my question: How was this designed to thwart a Cuban exile boat raid into say Varadero on the Cuban north coast? Do you incinerate 200,000 people in Atlanta in response to an eight-man raid that sabotaged an electricity plant? As many commentators have noted, it would be like killing a fly with a cannon—you would blow up your house in the process. To stop another invasion, all one would have needed to do was to give Castro tactical nuclear weapons, which the Russians did, and/or the SAM missiles and MIG jets. But such was not the case, not by a long shot.

    As scholars who have studied the crisis for decades have concluded, what Nikita Khrushchev was assembling in Cuba was a first strike capability. Something that the USSR did not have at the time, and would not attain for about four more years. In the nuclear planning policy of deterrence, this capability was considered necessary to stop your opponent from executing their first strike. In fact, in a meeting in July of 1961, Allen Dulles had asked President Kennedy to do just that: to launch a first strike against Russia. Kennedy not only refused, he walked out of the meeting. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 235)

    The most respected scholar in the field, Harvard’s Graham Allison, has concluded that with this first strike capability, Khrushchev was going to maneuver Kennedy into surrendering West Berlin. (Essence of Decision, p. 105) In their Vienna Summit in the summer of 1961, Khrushchev had made the question of Berlin a real bone of contention with Kennedy: since West Berlin was within East Germany, it should be a part of that Russian dominated country. Kennedy did not see it that way. He felt that if he surrendered Berlin, it could unravel the whole American/European alliance. Something he was not willing to do. In fact, during the meetings in the White House on this subject, Kennedy repeatedly referred to Berlin as the reason for the crisis. (op. cit. Probe, p. 18)

    Another point that Tye scores his subject on is that RFK pondered whether an air strike would be enough to get the missiles out, or if there needed to be an invasion. At this first meeting President Kennedy had just listed four options his advisors had mapped out for him. Robert Kennedy then chimes in:

    We have the fifth one really, which is the invasion [which was already raised by Maxwell Taylor]. I would say that you’re dropping bombs all over Cuba if you do the second, air and the airports, knocking out their planes, dropping it on all their missiles. You’re covering most of Cuba. You’re going to kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on this. And then—you know the heat. You’re going to announce the reason that you’re doing it is because they’re sending in these kinds of missiles.

    Well, I would think it’s almost incumbent upon the Russians then, to say, Well we’re going to send them in again. And if you do it again, we’re going to do the same thing in Turkey” or “we’re going to so the same thing to Iran.” (The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 66)

    Does this sound like RFK is pushing for an invasion? He is making an overall air strike, which is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had described, sound very unappealing. As Steven Schneider writes, Bobby Kennedy was against even the air strike option, comparing it to what the Japanese did to America at Pearl Harbor. So how could he have been for an invasion? (Robert F. Kennedy, pp. 56-57) In fact, after an unsettling meeting with congressional leaders who thought the agreed upon blockade of Cuba was too weak, the brothers were shaken by the sabre rattling. They both agreed that the blockade was the least JFK could do without being impeached. (op. cit. Probe, p. 16)

    The crisis was resolved by the blockade, meetings between newsman John Scali and KGB agent Alex Feklisov, Khrushchev’s annoyance with Castro’s recklessness, and a meeting between Robert Kennedy and Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The arrangement was that the Russians would remove the atomic arsenal from Cuba, in return for a no invasion pledge on Cuba from Kennedy, and the later removal of American missiles from Turkey. Kennedy wanted the last to be kept under wraps since he thought it would hurt American standing in Europe. But Robert Kennedy had assured Dobrynin that this would be part of the deal at his meeting with him. Needless to day, Tye scores both RFK and Ted Sorenson—who edited Thirteen Days after Kennedy’s death—for not making the deal more explicit in the final version of the book. This is really kind of penny ante even for this book. Bobby Kennedy’s diaries made the deal explicit. Sorenson edited them to make it less so, since that is the way his boss, John Kennedy—for reasons stated above—wished it to be. (See “Anatomy of a Controversy”, by Jim Hershberg at the online National Security Archive.)

    This is largely what Tye uses to call RFK a liar and accuse him of being a hawk during the Missile Crisis. But then he goes beyond that. He actually writes that the stance taken in Thirteen Days is what influenced Lyndon Johnson to do what he did in Vietnam! (p. 273) This is wild even for Tye. First, LBJ was at most of the meetings during the Missile Crisis. When you read those transcripts you will see that he was more hawkish than the Kennedys. (See especially the meeting of 10/27/62, Probe, op. cit. p. 23) Secondly, Johnson was against Kennedy’s policy of no American combat troops in Vietnam from 1961! Against Kennedy’s wishes, on his trip there in May of 1961, he suggested that Premier Diem of South Vietnam request combat troops from Washington. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) Later, after John Kennedy was killed, Johnson told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara how he had been against withdrawing from Vietnam, as Kennedy was planning to do; but he kept his mouth shut since he was only Vice-President. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, p. 310) Does it get any clearer than that? But in the end the claim is actually nonsensical, for what reasonable person could even compare the two situations? In one you had a superpower secretly moving a first strike nuclear capability 90 miles from Florida, thereby upsetting the balance of power; in the other, you had a years-long, anti-colonial, peasant rebellion 9,000 miles away—one that had no direct impact on America’s national security. Not even Johnson could possibly equate the two. If I didn’t know better, I would say that Tye is trying to blame Johnson’s epochal disaster in Indochina—which was expanded and completed by Nixon and Kissinger—on Bobby Kennedy’s book. Which, in view of the record, is absurd.

    As the reader can see, most of the book is like this. Is it worth reading? No, because of all the textual problems mentioned above. Is it worth buying? No, since I can see no real value for it as a reference work. Which leaves the final question: Why did the author write the book? Only Larry Tye can answer that question.

  • The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 47 Years Later

    One of the lawyers in the Fred Hampton civil case reminds of just how bad the FBI Cointelpro program was under J. Edgar Hoover. It snuffed out the life of a young, charismatic Black Panther leader named Fred Hampton – one of the several assassinations of the sixties – and then went on to wipe out the Black Panther Party.

    ~Jim DiEugenio