Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (89 page)

Fidel Castro holds forth in a Harlem restaurant during his 1959 visit to New York. JFK was convinced that he could compete with the Cuban leader’s revolutionary charisma, winning over the people of Latin America with U.S. aid and promises of democratic reform. In the final months of the Kennedy administration, JFK opened up a diplomatic back channel with Castro to explore peace with his rival, who said that Kennedy could become “the greatest president of the United States.”
Courtesy Getty

ABC news correspondent Lisa Howard rubs elbows with Che Guevara. Howard, who carried peace feelers between Havana and Washington, became one of Castro’s lovers in the process. CIA officials regarded Howard’s efforts with cold disdain. Her partner in the peace effort, UN diplomat William Attwood, later concluded that when word of the Kennedy-Castro back channel spread throughout the febrile world of spies, gangsters, and militant Cuban exiles, the results were explosive.
Courtesy Getty

At a Cabinet Room meeting in April 1961, one week before the Bay of Pigs invasion, the operation’s CIA masterminds, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, were full of confidence. Sitting from left to right are Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, Dulles and Bissell. Intelligence officials did not inform President Kennedy that, by the agency’s own estimates, the invasion was doomed to fail unless the U.S. threw its military might against Castro’s forces. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” JFK raged after the ensuing fiasco.
Courtesy Woodfin-Camp NYC, photo by Jacques Lowe

The president and first lady welcome the recently freed leaders of the Bay of Pigs brigade at a December 1962 Orange Bowl ceremony in Miami. Though Kennedy had no intention of launching a U.S. invasion of Cuba, he raised the Cuban exiles’ hopes during his speech by declaring that the rebel flag they had presented him “will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”
Courtesy Getty

Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gather in the White House for a meeting with President Kennedy. From left to right are Admiral Arleigh Burke; General Andy Goodpaster, a military aide to former President Eisenhower; Marine General David Shoup; Army General George Decker; and Joint Chiefs chairman Lemnitzer. Kennedy had a deeply strained relationship with his military commanders. He became so concerned with the mutinous atmosphere in some military quarters that he persuaded friends in Hollywood to alert the public by making a film version of
Seven Days in May,
the bestselling novel about an attempted coup in Washington.
Courtesy Woodfin-Camp NYC, photo by Jacques Lowe

Defense Secretary McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, who took over from Lemnitzer as Joint Chiefs chairman, confer with JFK in the White House. Kennedy tried to impose control over the restive armed forces with the help of McNamara and Taylor, two men deeply distrusted by the military establishment. Kennedy saw McNamara as a key ally in his drive for a more peaceful and stable world. But after Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, McNamara would earn a more bellicose place in history.
Courtesy JFK Library, © Robert L. Knudsen, White House

Richard Helms, who maneuvered his way to the top of the CIA in the 1960s, kept the agency’s secrets from presidents and congressional overseers. He approved the CIA’s recruitment of Mafia assassins to kill Castro, without informing the Kennedys. And he later made sure that the Warren Commission remained ignorant of dark agency secrets like this.
Courtesy Getty

The strange and spectral James Angleton also played a key role in misleading the Warren Commission and spreading disinformation about JFK’s assassination. After his ouster from the CIA, grisly morgue photos of Robert Kennedy were found in his office vault.
Courtesy Corbis

Cord Meyer and Mary Meyer, shown here after their 1945 marriage, shared a youthful vision for global peace after the slaughterhouse of World War II, which took the life of Cord’s twin brother and left him partially blinded. But after he joined the CIA, where he fell under the spell of Angleton, Meyer grew increasingly gloomy in his world views. After Mary left him, to pursue the life of an early ’60s bohemian, she became romantically involved with President Kennedy. CIA officials like Angleton, who kept a creepy watch over Mary, suspected that she was leading Kennedy down the path of peace, love, and drugs.
Courtesy Corbis

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s propaganda chief for the Bay of Pigs operation, was among those who were deeply embittered by President Kennedy’s refusal to rescue the doomed invaders. Investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations later zeroed in on Phillips’ possible ties to JFK’s murder, but their inquiries were aborted. “I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald,” Phillips wrote in a proposal for a strangely confessional novel before his death in 1988.