JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (26 page)

With Kennedy and Castro expressing mutual hostility and backing away from any dialogue during the summer, it was not until late September that the two porcupines began to resume their prickly courtship. Their renewed interest in a dialogue came about through the mediation of Lisa Howard, the ABC newswoman who had interviewed Castro in April, and William Attwood, a U.S. diplomat attached to its United Nations mission.

After her return from Cuba, Lisa Howard had written an article in the journal
War/Peace Report
on “Castro’s Overture,” based on her interview with the Cuban premier. She wrote that in their private conversations Castro had been “even more emphatic about his desire for negotiations with the United States . . . In our conversations he made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere.”
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It was Howard who envisioned the next step. Her article urged the Kennedy administration to “send an American government official on a quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro has to say.”
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This was the risk-filled secret mission that William Attwood actually began to undertake on behalf of President John Kennedy in September 1963.

More than a decade after JFK’s assassination, on January 10, 1975, William Attwood testified at a top-secret executive session of Senator Frank Church’s Committee on Intelligence Activities. There the question was posed to Attwood: “Were you asked by President Kennedy to explore the possibility of a rapprochement with Fidel Castro and Cuba?”

Attwood answered: “Yes . . . yes, approaches were made and contact was established and this was done with the knowledge, approval, and encouragement of the White House.”
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William Attwood was well qualified for such a role. As a distinguished journalist, Attwood had interviewed Fidel Castro in 1959 soon after the Cuban revolution for two articles in
Look
magazine. In a September 18, 1963, memorandum to the White House, Attwood wrote of his journalistic relationship with Castro: “Although Castro did not like my final article in 1959, we got along well and I believe he remembers me as someone he could talk to frankly.”
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Attwood had also been a speechwriter for both Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy. President Kennedy appointed him ambassador to Guinea. Attwood had known Kennedy since their school days. In the fall of 1963, William Attwood was between diplomatic assignments by JFK, serving then for a few months at the United Nations as an African affairs adviser to UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Attwood was in a perfect position to be JFK’s point man in a secret dialogue with Castro. As he put it in his September 18 memorandum briefing Stevenson and Kennedy, “I have enough rank to satisfy Castro that this would be a serious conversation. At the same time I am not so well-known that my departure, arrival or return [to and from Cuba] would be noticed.”
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On September 20 President Kennedy went to New York to address the UN General Assembly. He met with Ambassador Stevenson and gave his approval for William Attwood “to make discreet contact” with Dr. Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s UN ambassador, in order to explore a possible dialogue with Castro.
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At this point Adlai Stevenson said prophetically why he thought such a Kennedy–Castro dialogue would never be allowed to happen. “Unfortunately,” he told Attwood, “the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.”
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Nevertheless, President Kennedy, while knowing the danger of his once again heading upstream against the CIA, had decided the time was right to begin talking with Castro.

In collaboration with Attwood, Lisa Howard organized a party at her New York apartment on September 23 to serve as the pretext and social cover for a first conversation between Attwood and Lechuga. When she invited Carlos Lechuga to the party, she made sure he would come by saying, in Lechuga’s recollection years later, “that Ambassador William Attwood of the U.S. delegation wanted to talk with me and that it was urgent, as he was going to Washington the next day.”
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Both Lechuga and Attwood later wrote memoirs that included complementary descriptions of their seminal conversation at Lisa Howard’s party, Lechuga’s
In the Eye of the Storm
and Attwood’s
The Twilight Struggle.
According to Lechuga’s more detailed account, Attwood was introduced to him “in the midst of cocktails, sandwiches, diplomats, and journalists,” and “lost no time in saying why he had wanted to meet me. He said that Stevenson had authorized him to do so and that he would be flying to Washington in a few hours to request authorization from the president to go to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and ask about the feasibility of a rapprochement between Havana and Washington.” Lechuga was astounded by Attwood’s overture. He sensed rightly that not only Stevenson but also the president had already approved their initial contact. He told Attwood that, in view of the conflicts between their countries, “what he was telling me came as a surprise and that I would listen to him with great interest.”
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Attwood asked if Lechuga felt the chances of the Cuban government allowing him to go to Havana for such a purpose were fifty-fifty. Lechuga said, “That may be a good guess.”
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The two men agreed that current U.S. policies, with Kennedy’s American University address and test ban treaty presenting one aspect, and the CIA’s saboteurs in Cuba and spy flights overhead presenting another, had created “an absurd situation.” Attwood told Lechuga “that Kennedy had often confessed in private conversations that he didn’t know how he was going to change U.S. policy on Cuba, and that neither the United States nor Cuba could change it overnight because of the prestige involved. However, Kennedy said something had to be done about it and a start had to be made.”
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William Attwood’s account of the same conversation adds a few details. Lechuga “said Castro had hoped to establish some sort of contact with Kennedy after he became president in 1961, but the Bay of Pigs ended any chance of that, at least for the time being. But Castro had read Kennedy’s American University speech in June and had liked its tone. I mentioned my Havana visit in 1959 and Fidel’s ‘Let us be friends’ remark in our conversation. Lechuga said another such conversation in Havana could be useful and might be arranged. He expressed irritation at the continuing exile raids and our freezing $33 million in Cuban assets in U.S. banks in July. We agreed the present situation was abnormal [Lechuga thought they had agreed the situation was “absurd”] and we should keep in touch.”
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On September 24 Attwood met Robert Kennedy in Washington and reported on his meeting with Lechuga the night before. RFK thought Attwood’s going to Cuba was too risky—“it was bound to leak,” provoking accusations of appeasement.
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He wondered if Castro would agree to meet somewhere outside Cuba, perhaps at the United Nations. He said Attwood should continue pursuing the matter with Lechuga.
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Three days later Attwood met Lechuga at the UN Delegates Lounge, “always a good place for discreet encounters,” Attwood noted, “because of its noise and confusion.”
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He told Lechuga it would be difficult for him as a government official to go to Cuba. However, “if Castro or a personal emissary had something to tell us, we were prepared to meet him and listen wherever else would be convenient.”
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Lechuga said he would pass on the information to Havana.

Lechuga then warned his secret dialogue partner that he’d be “making a tough anti-American speech on October 7, but not to take it too seriously.”
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When Adlai Stevenson replied to Lechuga on October 7 with his own anti-Cuban speech, it had been written by Attwood—and was in turn taken with a grain of salt by Lechuga, in view of his knowledge of John Kennedy’s turn toward a dialogue with Fidel Castro.
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U.S.–Cuban polemics at the UN now served as a cover for a beginning Kennedy–Castro dialogue.

After three weeks without a reply from Havana, with Attwood’s approval Lisa Howard began phoning Rene Vallejo, Castro’s aide and confidant, who favored a U.S.–Cuban dialogue. Howard doubted the message from Lechuga had ever gotten past the Cuban Foreign Office. She wanted to make sure through Vallejo that Castro himself knew there was a U.S. official ready to talk with him. For another week she and Vallejo left phone messages for each other.
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On October 28, Attwood was finally told by Lechuga in the UN Delegates’ Lounge that Havana did not think “sending someone to the United Nations for talks” would be “useful at this time.”
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Like Howard, Attwood felt that Lechuga’s message had never even reached Castro through an unsympathetic Foreign Office.
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In the meantime, an impatient John Kennedy had decided to create his own back channel to communicate with Fidel Castro, just as he had done with Nikita Khrushchev through Norman Cousins and other intermediaries. On Thursday, October 24, the president was interviewed at the White House by French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newsweekly
L’Observateur
. Daniel was an old friend of William Attwood, who knew he was on his way to Cuba to interview Castro. Attwood had urged Daniel to see Kennedy first. Kennedy granted the interview as a perfect way for him to communicate informally with Castro, through pointed remarks that Daniel would inevitably share with his next interview subject. Daniel realized that Kennedy, who asked to see him again right after he saw Castro, wanted to know Castro’s response. The president was making Daniel his unofficial envoy to the Cuban prime minister.

In the
New Republic
article he wrote on his historic interviews with Kennedy and Castro, Daniel stressed the emphasis with which Kennedy spoke about the Cuban revolution: “John Kennedy then mustered all his persuasive force. He punctuated each sentence with that brief, mechanical gesture which had become famous.”
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“From the beginning,” Kennedy said, “I personally followed the development of these events [in Cuba] with mounting concern. There are few subjects to which I have devoted more painstaking attention . . . Here is what I believe.” Then came the words that could have become the seeds for a just peace between the United States and Cuba. Just as Kennedy’s American University paragraphs on Russian suffering had profoundly impressed his Russian enemy Nikita Khrushchev, so would the president’s next words to Jean Daniel on Cuban suffering, repeated to Fidel Castro, break through the ideological resistance of his Cuban enemy:

“I believe that there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime . . . I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”
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Kennedy looked at Daniel in silence. He noticed his surprise and heightened interest. Then the president went on to define in Cold War terms what he saw as the essence of his conflict with Castro:

“But it is also clear that the problem has ceased to be a Cuban one, and has become international—that is, it has become a Soviet problem . . . I know that through [Castro’s] fault—either his ‘will to independence’ [Kennedy had just spoken with Daniel on General Charles de Gaulle’s ‘will to independence’ for France, a psycho-political strategy requiring a constant tension with the United States], his madness or Communism—the world was on the verge of nuclear war in October, 1962. The Russians understood this very well, at least after our reaction; but so far as Fidel Castro is concerned, I must say I don’t know whether he realizes this, or even if he cares about it.”

Kennedy smiled, then added: “You can tell me whether he does when you come back.”
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After his ringing endorsement of the Cuban revolution, Kennedy’s argument with Castro rested on Cold War assumptions that Kennedy himself was beginning to doubt but had not yet discarded. Even after his American University address, he was still unable to see that it had been the ongoing threat of a U.S. invasion of Cuba (provoking the Soviet-Cuban decision to deter that invasion by nuclear missiles) that had caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Castro’s “‘will to independence,’ madness, or Communism.” Yet at the same time Daniel could see Kennedy was distinctly uncomfortable with the dead end where his assumptions led for the revolution he had just endorsed. His last comment to Daniel was: “The continuation of the blockade [against Cuba] depends on the continuation of subversive activities.”
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He meant Castro’s subversive activities, not his own, but as Daniel said to his readers, “I could see plainly that John Kennedy had doubts, and was seeking a way out.”
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However, he had less than a month left to find that way out.