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(from Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy)
My father was a friend of Robert F. Kennedy and an ambassadorial appointee of John F. Kennedy. He, and consequently the rest of our
large Irish-American family, admired the Kennedys uncritically, a sentiment that was reinforced by the nature of their deaths.
One of the last things Robert Kennedy did on June 5, 1968, in his suite in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before going
downstairs to accept victory in the California primary was to make a list of friends he wanted to call when he got back to his
room later that night. Among them was my father.
In March 1974, when I first went to the Federal Records Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, which then housed the Kennedy papers,
I did so more in the manner of a pilgrim than a scholar. I was a member of the faithful, looking for evidence, even relics,
of the blessed era. I would sit for hours in the poorly-heated research room reading JFK's office files and the oral histories of RFK's
brief run for the presidency sis years earlier. I became friends with the late Dave Powers, then curator of the Kennedy Library,
who had been Jack Kennedy's best friend. I would often drop by his office in the late afternoon and listen to his stories about
the Kennedy brothers, Jack in particular. The figures Powers evoked fit my family's conception of them - men full of wit,
charm and purpose who, in those Watergate years, seemed nothing less than heroic.
Yet scholarship was beginning to offer a second, far harsher evaluation of the Kennedys. President Kennedy, some scholars charged,
was responsible for bringing America into the nightmare of Vietnam. Other scholars claimed that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had,
for reasons of political expedience, done the minimum on civil rights. I decided that I would take a look for myself at an area of
the Kennedy record that had not yet been analyzed - the Kennedy administration's policy in Africa, where I had spent part of my youth.
Over the years, I became a familiar figure to the staff of the Kennedy Library. Much of my first book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, published
by Oxford University Press in 1983, was based on what I found in the National Security Files, which the library staff had effectively
declassified. Between 1974 and 1980, I also did 223 oral history interviews. These encounters opened doors that led to unexpected places.
I remember a winter day in 1976 in Princeton, New Jersey. At the conclusion of an interview with the late George Ball, undersecretary
of state during the Kennedy years, he invited me to have a look at his transcribed telephone conversations, about ten thousand in number.
For three weeks, I read through those telephone conversations in Ball's home, often leaving at daybreak and then returning a few
hours later.
I was stunned by what they revealed. The picture they painted of the Kennedys was very different from the treasured anecdotes,
those memorable and canonized speeches, or the top-secret memos covering "policy options." What emerged first were traits common
to powerful men - expediency, calculation, and manipulation. But the transcriptions also revealed other qualities that were,
I came to believe, unique to the Kennedys - an icy wit,
an awareness that they were players on a larger stage, and a capacity for growth nurtured by their constant collaboration. Depending
on the conversations, they could be idealistic or Machiavellian, utterly conventional or suddenly imaginative, hot or cold.
The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the "court histories" that sprang up after the president's
assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later book's, such as Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot,
argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.
I began to question the standard portrait of the male Kennedys as a perfectly functioning juggernaut. That Jack, Bobby and their
father, Joseph P. Kennedy, worked as seamlessly and relentlessly as a combat unit on their path to power seemed true. That Bobby,
as executor of his father's fearsome will and facilitator of Jack's ambition, was the key actor in the triumvirate seemed obvious.
But I heard accounts of tensions among them. Former Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, another friend of my father, told me that Bobby,
in his crusade to destroy the American Mafia in the McClellan Committee investigation in the late 1950s (a committee on which Goldwater
served) had stumbled over evidence of his father's dealings with the underworld. "It just killed him," Goldwater recalled. I wondered
what other kinds of combustion Bobby's moral ambitions had touched off, both within and without the family.
In 1987 I was appointed the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the University of Massachusetts and the Kennedy Library. I spent a year lecturing,
writing, and organizing symposia at the Kennedy Library. Revisionary analysis of the Kennedy years had shifted once again, this time to
"character issues." Private sins were said to be revealing of the Kennedys' deficient public character. I gave a lecture in which I
suggested that the Kennedy story might simply be a projection of America's own unresolved concept, its continuing pretense of politics
as redemption. The Kennedys has become, I argued, "caricatures of our unsettled national psyche." They were "warped mirror images of
our own hopes, doubts, and indulgences." Thus they could only be saints or scoundrels, disinterred on occasion to reflect some current
need to moralize to the body politic. I believed then and believe today that at the base of this tendency is America's inability to see
its history as tragedy: to recognize, even embrace, the incompleteness of its ideals and its own struggle against doubt and violence.
Perhaps by facing this we could come to a cathartic and settled view of ourselves and the Kennedys. "Tragedy," Bobby Kennedy said during
his run for the presidency in 1968, "is a tool for the living." But we have found no such tool, and our literalness has rendered the Kennedys unrecognizable, even ahistoric. Something in the story was missing.
JFK's assassination was not a subject I ever thought I would research. Practically every frame of the Zapruder film has occasioned its own book. There seemed to be enough of them. But in my twenty-year journey as a Kennedy scholar, first on Africa, then on Vietnam, I had gotten glimpses of spectral linkages between that event and the administration itself. Ralph Dungan, a White House aide during the Johnson administration, once related to me how LBJ had told him, only days after the assassination, that JFK had died because of "divine retribution." And then there was Bobby's strange phone call only hours after Jack's assassination to a Cuban safe house in Washington. "One of your guys did it," he said, apparently referring to the anti-Castro Cubans living there. He asked director of the CIA John McCone whether the agency was involved in the murder. This was, to say the least, an extraordinary question. Another spectral link was Joe Kennedy's lunch with senior members of the Chicago Mafia in February 1960, when he tried to talk them into giving money to his son's presidential campaign. These were the same people his other son had vowed to bring to justice.
In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations dug deeply into the motives and the roles of everyone from the anti-Castro Cubans to renegade CIA operatives and the Mafia. In so doing, it built a formidable record. But one critical questions remained unanswered: what was the relationship between the Kennedy administration and the Kennedy assassination?
In 1995, having completed a term as Arizona's secretary of state, I decided to try to answer that question. I reread transcripts of the interviews I'd done in the light of new scholarship published while I was in public office. I began traveling to Florida to interview Cuban exiles, to Chicago to look at the fading traces of the Kennedy-Mafia connection, and to Havana to search through Cuban records and gather recollections of the murderous contest between the Kennedy administration and the Castro regime. I also waded through FBI and CIA files, and spoke again to some of the principals I had once interviewed about other matters.
The story that emerged from the swirl of events and characters permitted no detached discourse; it was, rather, a narrative journey into the trackless wood through which Joe, Jack and Bobby had made their way. History as the Kennedys lived it was neither orderly or obvious in its unfolding; it was a struggle in which the characters of the three men, and their interaction with one another, led to their fate - a struggle in which pride and avarice, fear and strength, and, above all, ignorance of what lay ahead provided them with an ill-fitting armature of engagement.
Armed with their ambition and their money, agnostic to their enemies, they moved onto the public stage as no family had before in American history, trying to understand and somehow master the terrain of their time. "Always the next hill, always the next hill," was the way one Kennedy lieutenant described Bobby's relentless drive. They moved beyond the normal boundaries of political power, crossing into a murderous frontier where their enemies, whose faces they knew, were waiting for them.
At the moment he received the news from Dallas on November 22, 1963, Bobby Kennedy sensed a terrible thing - that he himself had somehow contributed to his brother's murder. That is what this story is about.
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