Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (59 page)

Walter Sheridan died of lung cancer in January 1995 at the age of sixty-nine. His obituaries cited his long, successful career as a crusading investigator for the American public, including his battles against Teamster corruption, abuses in the pharmaceutical industry, dangerous working conditions in the mines, and the exploitation of farm workers. His eulogies highlighted his family devotion and his strong convictions. “He had a heart as large as his ability, and his courage and dedication to justice and the public interest were unmatched by anyone,” said Teddy Kennedy. “In a sense, Bobby lived on through Walter. In the nearly twenty years that he worked with me in the Senate, I never met with Walter or talked with Walter or laughed with Walter that I didn’t think of Bobby.”

Despite his many accomplishments, Sheridan became deeply despondent before his death over his failure to close the Kennedy case. Jack Newfield, who stayed in touch with Sheridan, used the word “suicidal” to describe his state of mind near the end of his life. When I asked Nancy Sheridan if it was true that Walt had become seriously depressed, I expected her, ever protective of her husband’s memory, to deny it. But she said, “Yes, that’s true. He was so close to Bob. He felt very strongly about him. And I believe that the two of them did crack the case. But Walt was never in a position to do anything about it after Bob died.”

Why didn’t Sheridan pursue the investigation after Bobby’s death? “He did not have the mandate or power to do anything,” said Nancy. “And he had promised Bob not to do anything without him. So he was honoring that agreement even after Bob was gone.” Even in death, Kennedy was the man they followed.

O
ne evening in late spring 1966, Kennedy aide John Nolan—who was in Johannesburg helping to organize the senator’s forthcoming historic trip to South Africa—dropped by the home of South African tennis player Abe Siegel. While he was visiting Siegel, the Kennedy aide’s car was broken into and a bag containing his passport stolen.

“This scared the bejesus out of Siegel and his wife,” recalled Nolan. “They thought it was the South African secret police.” Kennedy’s trip, which was scheduled for June, was a source of growing tension within the apartheid regime, which feared the U.S. senator’s arrival would set off a wave of unrest against its racist policies. But it was not only the South African government that was keeping a watchful eye on Kennedy’s travel plans. His own government was also tracking him. Despite the regime’s barbaric treatment of its nonwhite population, Pretoria was viewed as an important Cold War ally in Washington. Once again, Kennedy’s political opponents thought his freewheeling diplomacy was damaging United States’ security interests.

Despite his host’s anxieties, Nolan was not too unnerved by the theft of his belongings until he returned home to Washington. “I had a little trouble getting a new passport and so on, but we managed to do that and I flew back on schedule,” Nolan said. When he reported back to Kennedy’s office, the senator asked him about the car break-in, wondering if any sensitive notes on the trip also might have been stolen. Nolan, who had not told Kennedy about the burglary, was stunned.

“How did you know about that?” he asked him.

“Dick Helms called me,” Kennedy replied. “He followed you day by day, every step of the way across South Africa.”

To Nolan, Helms’s close monitoring of his trip was another example of how the spymaster tried to ingratiate himself with Washington VIPs, by showing that he was always “on the ball.” But Helms, who would soon be promoted to the top of the CIA by President Johnson, was also conveying another message to Kennedy: The agency is watching you.

In the last years of his life, Bobby Kennedy became increasingly estranged from Washington’s political elite. His growing commitment to a new, multiracial America—which allied him with the crusade of Martin Luther King Jr.—was viewed with alarm by J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded both men as dangerous. And his critique of American foreign policy, which became more passionate as the war in Southeast Asia dragged on, drew the baleful eye of the White House and CIA, which began spying on Kennedy as if he were a hostile foreign agent.

When Kennedy and his small party—Ethel, Angie Novello, and Adam Walinsky—finally arrived in Johannesburg on June 4, 1966, the regime—which had held up the trip for five months—greeted him with frosty contempt, declaring it would not allow the senator’s trip to be “transformed into a publicity stunt…as a buildup for a future presidential election.” But as Kennedy disembarked from his plane just before midnight and exited the airport, he was welcomed by a boisterous crowd of young people, who screamed his name and tore his cufflinks from his sleeves.

During his South Africa odyssey, Kennedy directly challenged the moral basis of apartheid. Unintimidated by the coldly watchful regime, he denounced its brutal subjugation of its black citizens and urged his largely white university audiences to muster the courage to overthrow the cruel system of racial separation. In a soaringly inspirational speech at the University of Capetown on June 6—a speech Schlesinger called the greatest of Kennedy’s life—the senator reminded his audience that history is moved forward by countless small acts of heroism. “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.” The speech, which was written for Kennedy by Walinsky and Goodwin, would later be chiseled on his Arlington resting place.

At a dinner party with a group of politicians, business leaders, and newspaper editors in Pretoria, Kennedy drew fire. How could he attack South Africa when it was such a loyal ally in the world struggle against communism? But fighting one form of tyranny doesn’t excuse another, Kennedy responded. “What does it mean to be against communism if one’s own system denies the value of the individual and gives all the power to the government—just as the Communists do?” The Cold War had long provided a cover for despotic U.S. allies to abuse their own populations. But Kennedy was declaring those days must end.

Everywhere the senator went, he challenged his white hosts to question their deepest assumptions. At the University of Natal in Durban, one audience member observed that the church to which most of the white population belonged taught that black inferiority is divinely ordained. “But suppose God is black,” replied Kennedy. His remark was greeted by stunned silence. Afterward, returning to his hotel, Kennedy came upon a group of black South Africans and he joined them in singing the stirring U.S. civil rights hymn, “We Shall Overcome.”

As the Kennedy cavalcade rolled across South Africa, he created his own, ever-expanding ripples of hope. At first, “his only crowds were the students,” Walinksy observed. “But then somewhere as the thing started to get across…there were just thousands of ordinary citizens…pulling at him and tugging at him and cheering him and it was really fantastic.” In Soweto, the sprawling black ghetto Kennedy called “a dreary concentration camp,” he waded through cheering and chanting throngs, climbing up the steps of a church and onto the roof of a car to address them. He visited banned opposition leaders in their homes, including the aging Chief Albert Luthuli, for whom he played a recording of JFK’s landmark 1963 civil rights address.

The Pretoria regime was greatly relieved when it finally came time for Kennedy to go. He too sensed the revolutionary fervor his trip had unleashed. As his plane lifted off the runway, Kennedy remarked with a wry smile, “If we stayed another two days, we could have taken over the country.”

During his years in the Senate, Robert Kennedy undertook a remarkable mission—the forging of an independent foreign policy. He was intent on showing the world that there was another America—one aligned with his brother’s ideals instead of the Johnson administration’s policies. As the United States’ image turned darker overseas, where the country was seen as increasingly militaristic and business-driven, Kennedy strived to make a separate peace with the world. Trying to avoid a traumatic rupture with Johnson, RFK was compelled to convey this message with diplomatic finesse. But his message to the world, particularly those countries where antiAmerican sentiments were on the rise, was clear: Take heart. The United States once stood for negotiation, not war; social reform, not oppression. And it will once again. The message carried weight, since Kennedy was no ordinary senator. He was his martyred brother’s heir; an aura of righteous ascension hung over him.

The first clear sign of Kennedy’s diverging foreign policy came in April 1965 when Johnson responded to a leftist uprising in the Dominican Republic by storming the impoverished island with 22,000 Marines. LBJ’s heavy-handed action had been prompted by the CIA, which relayed false and inflammatory messages about decapitations in the streets and other unverified reports of Communist mayhem. Kennedy thought the U.S. invasion was an “outrage,” and he took to the Senate floor to denounce it. Johnson undoubtedly found Kennedy’s impassioned protest bitterly ironic, coming it as it did from the man who once led the covert war on Castro. But by then Kennedy had mellowed so far on Cuba that he was not even agitated by its ongoing efforts to arm other Latin revolutionaries. Cuban guns were no longer the problem in Kennedy’s mind, said Walinsky—it was the medieval condition of Latin societies. “I mean, hell, anybody can get guns—the question is what people want to do with them. I think he felt that if people really want to overthrow the government, then they’re going to do that whether they get guns or not.”

Looking back today at Kennedy’s political evolution, Walinsky insists that RFK’s growing sympathy for Che Guevara and his revolutionary mission has been wildly exaggerated by left-leaning writers. “There has been all this romanticism—people treat him as if he were sort of Che without the beard. It’s such utter drivel. I can’t begin to express my horror at that kind of view.” But Kennedy himself called Guevara “a revolutionary hero.” And when, in October 1967, a sick and exhausted Che was tracked down and killed in the jungles of Bolivia by a CIA-led team of hunters, who sawed off his hands and buried him in an unmarked ditch so his grave could not become a shrine, Ethel was moved to mourn his passing at a Washington party.

As with Che and other icons of the sixties, a struggle has raged over the decades to define Robert Kennedy’s political identity. Walinsky—who later in life became associated with conservative issues such as welfare reform and police training—is among those who have emphasized Kennedy’s more traditional values, including his devotion to family, country, and religion. He points out that Kennedy too became increasingly critical of the welfare state, decrying how the bureaucratization of modern life robbed the individual and the family of their power. But, as Walinsky acknowledges, this is not just a conservative critique—it was a radical one, and it was also espoused by the 1960s New Left, which sought to empower communities, not the federal government. (Though some liberals squawked about it, even RFK’s law and order fervor as a Senate investigator and attorney general had a progressive focus, targeting the corrupt politicians, union bosses, and gangsters who preyed on working Americans.) One thing is clear, looking back at Kennedy’s storied political odyssey in the sixties. The message of self-determination and human dignity that he brought to his fellow citizens—as well as to those in the countries he visited—was undeniably radical. In the highly polarized atmosphere of the day, Kennedy had an electrifying—and dangerous—impact.

This was demonstrated during the tumultuous, three-week tour of South America that RFK made in November 1965. Kennedy said his trip to Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile was motivated by his concern that the Alliance for Progress—which he saw as an important part of his brother’s legacy—was being gutted by the new administration. Soon after JFK’s assassination, Johnson promoted Thomas Mann—the hard-line ambassador to Mexico who had tried to connect Oswald to a Communist conspiracy—to the State Department post in charge of Latin American affairs. Mann quickly turned his attention to the Alliance, the centerpiece of Kennedy’s Latin reform policy, and began turning it into a tool of American corporations. Tom Mann was the type of “colonialist” who believes that the “natives…need to be shown who is boss” and “who feels the principal job of the United States in Latin America is to make the world safe for W.R. Grace and Company,” moaned Dick Goodwin when he heard about his appointment. Mann himself summed up his philosophy years later like this: “I never believed we should compete with the revolutionaries.” But this is precisely what the Kennedys had in mind when they launched the Alliance. They would try to steal the Communists’ thunder by offering the downtrodden of Latin America not only aid but the stirring vision of democracy.

The political passion displayed by Kennedy in South America—and later in South Africa—resonated around the world. These two memorable journeys would set the stage for Robert Kennedy’s most heroic expedition of all, the 1968 presidential campaign.

Kennedy’s party—including Ethel, Walinsky, Goodwin, and John Seigenthaler—began their Latin America trip by swooping into Lima on November 10, 1965. U.S. embassy officials immediately wanted to hustle the senator off to a white-tie reception for the King of Belgium. “Robert F. Kennedy doesn’t even own a white tie,” an aide informed the officials.

Instead Kennedy met with students at a local university, where he quickly struck the insurgent theme of his trip. “The responsibility of our time,” he told them, “is nothing less than a revolution.” This cataclysm, said Kennedy, would “be peaceful if we are wise enough; humane if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough. But a revolution will come whether we will it or not.” Then, as if to underscore why this sweeping change was inevitable, Kennedy threw himself into Lima’s deepest holes of misery, the teeming barriadas built on the city’s red-clay hillsides, where he stepped over acrid streams of sewage to play with the listless, half-naked children who clustered outside their mud huts. He was appalled to find out that the slums had no running water because U.S. aid to Peru had been suspended after the Peruvian government got into a conflict with the local subsidiary of Standard Oil. “What has aid got to do with company profits!” Kennedy angrily demanded of a hapless embassy official. “You mean to say we can’t get a water tank for these people because of an oil dispute?”

He followed this volatile pattern in each country he visited—delivering provocative speeches to campus audiences, touring the shanty towns and plantations where the continent’s semifeudal conditions were on shocking display, and angrily confronting local patricians and U.S. officials at the lavish receptions in his honor. “Don’t you know you’re making way for your own destruction!” he snapped at a sugar cane company representative in Brazil after hearing about the cane cutters’ slavelike working conditions.

The grotesque disparities in Latin societies began to wear on the nerves of Kennedy and his group. One evening—after coming down from the Andes, where the once-proud citadels of Inca civilization were now overrun with children whose bellies were swollen from hunger—the senator was invited by a friend of President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to his lavish estate. Belaúnde was known by Latin American standards as a Kennedy-style reformer. But his friend was one of the country’s wealthiest landowners, and as Bobby’s group entered the aristocrat’s mansion, walking past machine guntoting guards into the great hall, they were stunned by the baronial opulence on display. “It’s a sight I’ll never forget,” Walinksy remembered. “The room was about a hundred feet long and about three stories high. It was their living room. And it had a fireplace that was big enough for eight men to stand in…. Above the fireplace was the head of an elephant, and on either side of the fireplace there were two rhinoceros heads and two hippopotamus heads. And then stretching all along the walls…were [more] animal heads. There were conservatively a thousand heads of animals. There was a great long table with maybe twenty-five chairs, and the chairs were all covered in zebra hide. The ash trays were made out of leopard claws. I mean there just wasn’t anything in the room that wasn’t a dead animal. And a case of maybe thirty or forty guns. And we were all, I mean we were all just struck dumb. And I almost went insane because literally every head up there in front of my eyes turned into the head of one of these Indians, because it was the same thing of course.”