I have to say first that I always greatly admired John Kennedy. He was “my” president.
Just as my generation was coming to young adulthood in 1960, the handsome hero ascended to the American presidency and the world seemed to be made anew. Just as we were seeking a new world of American politics that would combine our idealism with a realism, JFK strode onto the scene with (we thought) just the right mix of characteristics.
More, I was working in–and enamored of–Latin America, while Kennedy’s passion for its future through his Alliance for Progress was proving that even too-long impoverished backwoods of the world could finally develop.
But now what is one to think? Another detailed book is all over the place these days, making well-documented claims that Kennedy was a sexual libertine as well as a man who without surcease tried to assassinate Fidel Castro because the Cuban president had humiliated the Kennedy family by defeating the hapless American invasion in the 1961 Bay of Pigs. Is it possible that we were all somehow wrong about the man?
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Let’s take the libertine image first, and ask whether investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s sensational new book, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” is changing our minds about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Neither a prude nor a pagan, I do not expect our leaders to live perfectly sober or virginal lives or to lust safely only in the dull security of their hearts (frankly, I have a deep-seated fear and distrust of such men in high political office). But I do expect leaders to exercise a disciplined judgment and, at the very least, protect the nation from any casually reckless behavior.
It is now clear, from Hersh’s book but also from innumerable other sources, that Kennedy did not care about protecting us at all. Exercising his near-insatiable appetite for sex at any cost, he had it with staffers in the White House swimming pool at “lunch,” and had it with a woman shared by Mafia boss Sam Giancana and with hookers promiscuously scooped off the streets across the country by his “don’t ask, don’t tell” hangers-on, thus driving the Secret Service to rage.
Then let’s look at Hersh’s (and, again, many others’) claims that Kennedy and particularly his avidly confrontational brother Robert were also insatiable co-conspirators out to “get” Fidel Castro.
Hersh summons impressive evidence that they were, but that is not surprising to me, for there has never been the slightest doubt in the minds of virtually all Castro-watchers that the Kennedy brothers were squarely behind the American government’s attempts in the early ’60s (“Operation Mongoose”) to kill Castro. They had to be.
Indeed, in the 1980s one of my sources was the respected late CIA director William Colby. He unhesitatingly told me that it was particularly Bobby Kennedy and his “push-push-push” to kill Castro that led to the bizarre and surely “original” attempts to kill him through such measures as a poisoned wet suit and an exploding cigar.
The attempts, most unfortunately, bespoke the hubris of the Kennedys, whose entourage even today closes around them, and particularly Jack, like a “see no evil” Byzantine court around its kings–with their secreted private lives and hatreds.
The question that Hersh’s broad investigations brings up, however, is did the Mafia–whose boss Giancana, Hersh says, was enraged at the Kennedys for trying to get him after he helped them throw the 1960 election in Chicago to Jack–then conspired with Castro to get rid of Jack Kennedy?
Personally, I will always believe that this is indeed what happened, because there are simply too many coincidences. Of course, no one can ever prove it, but we might recall that President Lyndon Johnson told at least four people after the assassination (these words to broadcaster Howard K. Smith) that “Kennedy tried to get Fidel Castro, but Fidel Castro got Kennedy first.”
The failure at the Bay of Pigs led to the Kennedy-Castro vendetta, which in turn spawned Kennedy’s need to “look tough” in Vietnam. All of this in turn made him look weak to Nikita Khrushchev, who then put missiles in Cuba. A combination of all that (I will always believe) led finally to Kennedy’s death and to the Castro/Mafia hand in it.