Newly released government documents and more than 150 interviews with administration officials, friends and family members provide the nucleus for David Talbot's reinterpretation of the Kennedy presidency, writes Anna Mundow
Even a nation afflicted with amnesia cannot forget the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and this summer two new books testify to the crime's enduring fascination in the US. The first, Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, is hardly beach reading. More than 1,600 pages long and filled with enough autopsy photographs to satisfy the grisliest connoisseur, Bugliosi's detail-ridden doorstop concludes that Oswald did it, a verdict that has generally pleased American commentators. David Talbot's Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years has, by contrast, drawn fire from critics on all sides. "What's getting people riled up is not so much my view on the assassination as my reinterpretation of the Kennedy presidency," Talbot says. "Both the left and the right - for very different reasons - want to see Kennedy as a Cold War hawk." Talbot offers a more subversive judgment: that John F Kennedy talked tough to get elected president, but while in office he wanted to halt the US policy of massive nuclear retaliation, to establish a detente with leaders of the Soviet Union, even with Cuba and - had he been re-elected in 1964 - to withdraw American forces from Vietnam.
"At the end of his motorcade that day in Dallas, he was going to tell the people of Texas that peace is not weakness," Talbot recalls. "So who benefited from his death? In general terms, the forces that General Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex." Specifically, Talbot identifies a mainly CIA plot executed by Mafia/anti-Castro Cuban operatives.
Nothing new there, you might say. Nothing that Oliver Stone in his movie JFK, Don DeLillo in his novel Libra and numerous historians and conspiracy theorists have not already posited. Talbot, however, draws on newly released government documents and more than 150 interviews with Kennedy administration officials, friends and family members. He also constructs his narrative around a central yet often overlooked character in the operatic tragedy: Robert Kennedy, Jack's attorney general and fierce defender. "Bobby publicly accepted the Warren Commission's report [ which endorsed the lone-gunman theory]. But privately he was a man on fire to get to the bottom of the crime. A week after the funeral he told his family that it was a high-level plot involving elements of the government. But he said we can't do anything until we get back to the White House." Robert Kennedy was arguably on his way to the White House, as president, when he was assassinated in California in 1968.
Talbot was 16 years old and a volunteer in Robert Kennedy's campaign in California when the candidate was killed. Speaking today from his home in San Francisco, he admits that as a youth he was "completely taken by the Kennedy dream" but that later, as a leftist, he was equally influenced by "the anti-Kennedy backlash". Talbot became a journalist, worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine, as features editor for the San Francisco Examiner and wrote for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and other publications before founding and editing Salon.com. He is easy-going, charming and self-deprecating but not naive. "I didn't set out to redeem the Kennedys," he says. "I was really more interested in the assassination and in what Bobby Kennedy thought. But my research exposed an inescapable fact. I was 11 years old at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm only here today because Kennedy had the guts and the intelligence to stand up to these people. And tapes show that he was often the only person in the room doing it. His entire national-security staff was pushing him to nuclear war, and he held the line."
Brothers opens on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, as Robert Kennedy, at home in Virginia, hears of the president's assassination from J Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, who hated both brothers and seemed to relish delivering the news. Kennedy first called federal marshals to secure his home, then immediately began to demand information, calling his Cuban anti-Castro contacts and even CIA headquarters. "Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?" he roared at a CIA officer who has never been identified. "It's very tribal," Talbot comments of the circle that Kennedy drew around him that day. "He didn't get the Secret Service or the FBI to surround his home - remember, some of his aides think they're coming for him next. He got one of his Irish comrades, Jim McShane, and his federal marshals." Kennedy subsequently took possession of medical evidence (brain and tissue samples) from the autopsy; secretly visited Mexico where Oswald had travelled before the assassination (during the trip Kennedy himself was under surveillance by the CIA); and met with his arch-enemy, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose associates had Jack Ruby on their payroll.
Kennedy was, Talbot insists, collecting evidence for an investigation that would have to wait. "He knew he didn't have the power once Jack was gone. Hoover hated him. Johnson hated him. Hoover was in charge of the investigation into Dallas. So Bobby followed his own leads." Those leads, according to Talbot, reached back to the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, when President Kennedy enraged his military and intelligence commanders by refusing to commit US forces to a full-fledged invasion of Cuba. (US attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, however, continued.) "At that point I believe the government cracked," Talbot reflects. "The president's military and security forces perceived him as weak, not to be trusted, while Kennedy vowed to shatter the CIA. The Kennedys were at war with their own national-security apparatus; there is no way to avoid that conclusion when you do any first-hand research."
Talbot interviewed some of Kennedy's most trusted advisers, among them Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger jnr and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence who, under President Johnson, carried out the destruction of Vietnam. "As soon as the Kennedys were removed, the generals got their war. Johnson gave them Vietnam. And that wouldn't have happened under JFK. I don't care how historians quibble. It is absolutely clear that he was going to withdraw from Vietnam - after the 1964 election, of course. He was discussing the withdrawal with McNamara and others."
In the early 1970s Sorensen told the Church Committee investigating the Dallas assassination that "Jack Kennedy was not in charge of his national-security apparatus". Last year Schlesinger told Talbot: "We were not in charge of the joint chiefs of staff either." Talbot describes Schlesinger's revelation as "the most chilling thing I've ever heard", particularly when he contemplates someone such as General Curtis LeMay (the model for General Jack D Ripper in the movie Dr Strangelove), who wanted to launch a nuclear war against the Soviet Union "sooner rather than later".
The Kennedys did not rise to power by underestimating their enemies, and Talbot notes that in 1962, when the US army appeared likely to mutiny rather than enforce racial integration at the University of Mississippi, Jack Kennedy persuaded his friend John Frankenheimer, the Hollywood director, to make Seven Days in May as a warning to the American public and possibly as a "shot across the bows" of his own security forces. (In the film, US military leaders plot to overthrow the president because he supports a nuclear-disarmament treaty.)
Later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy, representing his brother in back channel communications with Soviet representatives, reportedly declared that "the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army is out of control". The source for that quote is Nikita Khrushchev's memoir, but for dramatic effect Talbot relies chiefly on the words of those he interviewed and those who testified before the Church Committee and the house select committee on assassinations during the 1970s. "The last time the government shed light on Dallas was during the post-Watergate period with those committees," Talbot observes, "and they were looking at the intelligence and security forces." Those forces remain vigilant. This summer the CIA will go to court to prevent the Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley from gaining access to documents thought to be relevant to both Kennedy assassinations.
"From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq," Talbot writes, "the truth has consistently been avoided . . . When the nation has mustered the courage to impanel commissions, those investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22nd, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible." u
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot, is published by Simon & Schuster, £20 in UK