WASHINGTON
Monday was one of the busiest days of Kennedy’s presidency, packed with so many meetings and ceremonies that he ate lunch at three and missed his swim and nap. He began with a morning conference with Taylor and McNamara, who were preparing to depart for Vietnam, and ended with an evening meeting with Blaik and Royall, who were leaving for Birmingham. In between, he chaired the first cabinet meeting since July, conferred with the Italian foreign minister and the Laotian prime minister, met with his new Marine Corps commandant and with officers of the National Rural Electronic Cooperative Association, and held an hour-long conference with a delegation of white civic leaders from Birmingham.
He had sent McNamara and Taylor a memorandum stating that recent events in Vietnam had “raised serious questions about the present prospects for success against the Viet Cong.” When they met, he stressed that they should not threaten Diem with cuts in aid, but let whatever cutbacks occurred “speak for themselves.” Taylor, who now understood what he wanted, proposed that they “work out a time schedule within which we expect to get this job done and to say plainly to Diem that we were not going to be able to stay beyond such and such a time with such and such forces, and that the war must be won in this time period.” Kennedy suggested that they impress upon Diem “the need for reform and change as a pragmatic necessity and not as a moral judgment.” (A week later, Harriman would tell Arthur Schlesinger over dinner, “The only thing that really counts for us in the world is our moral position. Every time we compromise our moral position, we take a loss.”*)
A month after Kennedy had worried about his government “coming apart,” the split between the Pentagon and the State Department remained bitter and intractable. At the Pentagon, Krulak and Taylor, and to a lesser extent McNamara, believed Diem had the best chance of defeating the Communists. The State Department faction of Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Lodge viewed the Taylor-McNamara mission as a threat, evidence that Kennedy was siding with the Pentagon. Harriman told Forrestal that he and Hilsman believed the mission would be “a disaster,” because it entailed “sending two men opposed to our [the State Department’s] policy.” Hilsman wrote a “Top Secret; Personal and Private” letter to Lodge that he asked Forrestal, who was accompanying Taylor and McNamara, to hand deliver. Hilsman made what he called “four rather personal points.” These included “More and more of the town is coming around to our point of view and that if you in Saigon and we in the Department stick to our guns the rest will also come around”; “No pressures—even a cut-off in aid—will cause Diem and Nhu to make the changes we desire and that what we must work for is a change in government”; and “You have handled an incredibly difficult task superbly. My very heartiest and most sincere congratulations.”
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KENNEDY MET WITH BOBBY and Burke Marshall before seeing the delegation of Birmingham’s white leaders. Marshall reported that the leaders had not delivered on their promises to hire black department store clerks and form a biracial committee, leading Kennedy to ask why there were no Negro policemen in the city.
“They say it would be bad for morale,” Marshall replied.
“Of the white policemen?” he asked incredulously.
He wanted to know what he should say if the whites blamed outside agitators like Dr. King for stirring up trouble. Marshall said that King had not been in Birmingham since May, and had only returned after the bombing in an effort to calm the situation.
“What do I want people to do?” he demanded.
Form a biracial committee, Marshall said. Hire Negro policemen.
William Hamilton, an aide to Mayor Albert Boutwell, opened the meeting by pleading for “a little bit of calm” and “a little bit of time.” Kennedy despised this kind of stalling tactic. “I’m just interested in . . . what you can do in Birmingham to ease the situation there,” he said.
Hamilton said Birmingham’s white leadership had already done “a great many things.” Another man blamed “constant agitation” from people “outside the community” for preventing them from making reforms.
“Now tell me why it is you can’t get a Negro policeman around there,” Kennedy snapped. “Seems to me, if you’ve got forty percent of the community that’s Negro . . . I would think you’d be much better with Negro policemen.”
They blamed civil service regulations, an absence of qualified Negro applicants, and the possibility that a third of the Birmingham police force would resign if they hired a Negro. Frank Newton, a telephone company executive who chaired the moribund biracial committee, blamed outside agitators for his city’s troubles. Five days after a Birmingham policeman had shot a Negro youth in the back, and four months after the photograph of a white policeman turning a German shepherd loose on a Negro teenager had sickened Kennedy, Newton insisted that charges of police brutality were unwarranted, because “in reality, we have a well-trained police force, and they have acted with admirable restraint.”
“Why isn’t it possible to do something?” Kennedy asked. “It seems to me that there are two or three things that aren’t very difficult to do.” He pointed out that the Washington police force was integrated. Why could Birmingham not do the same? His voice hardening, he added, “It isn’t any use . . . to say to me to get the agitators out . . . because I didn’t put them in—”
Newton interrupted to say, “If I may give you a straightforward answer, but a respectful answer. There’s people, though, that think you have given these people encouragement—”
“Let me make it clear that I regard getting on the police force as legitimate, and I regard people working as clerks as legitimate.”
Newton argued that the public accommodation section of his civil rights bill was certainly not a limited measure.
Kennedy had had enough. The conference had already run too long. The black delegation from Birmingham had withdrawn its demand for troops and praised him at a press conference. The whites were not only refusing to hire a single black policeman, they were scolding him for encouraging the demonstrations. He seldom spoke at length at meetings like this but now delivered a testy ten-minute monologue about integration. “Oh, public accommodation is nothing. When I think what Harry Truman did in integrating the armed forces—to give you an honest answer and a respectful one—that was really tough,” he said, throwing Newton’s “respectful answer” comment back in his face. “Imagine . . . taking kids out of Mississippi and all the rest, putting them together in a barracks, putting them under a Negro sergeant? They did that fifteen years ago.” Compared with that, permitting Negroes to rent a hotel room was easy, and so was integrating the workplace and universities. The “tough one” was integrating elementary and secondary schools. “I understand Mississippi, where it’s forty-five to fifty percent Negro, where half of them, three quarters, haven’t gone beyond the sixth grade, what it means to try to integrate those schools,” he said, and he could understand “the gut feeling about that,” but not the gut feeling about the police force, clerks, and public accommodation or about whether a student goes to a state university. “Now that’s my feeling about it,” he concluded in a firm voice.
For another thirty minutes, he pleaded with them to do something that could “give everybody outside of Birmingham and all of us up here and other places, a chance to say, well, now they’re trying.” He begged them to hire a Negro policeman—to do something, even if it was “window dressing.” They refused to budge. At a press conference following the meeting, Hamilton declared that most of Birmingham’s residents, including its Negroes, were “firmly, deeply dedicated to the principle of segregation.”
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ONCE KENNEDY HAD APPROVED Attwood’s request to meet with Lechuga, Attwood moved fast. He asked the ABC correspondent Lisa Howard to throw a cocktail party on Monday evening and invite the Cuban diplomat. As Kennedy was briefing Blaik and Royall before their departure for Birmingham, Attwood was huddled with Lechuga at Howard’s Park Avenue apartment, discussing a possible meeting with Castro.
Howard was a former soap opera actress who had become a correspondent for the Mutual Radio Network and had scored an interview with Nikita Khrushchev during his 1960 visit to the United States. In April 1963, she had held the first television interview with Fidel Castro in four years. Upon her return, she informed the CIA that during their eight hours of private talks Castro had stressed that he wanted negotiations with the United States and was ready to discuss the Soviet military presence in Cuba, compensation for expropriated American investments, and the question of Communist subversion in the hemisphere. She urged that a U.S. official be sent on a quiet mission to Havana to hear him out. Deputy Director Richard Helms wrote in a memorandum based on their conversation, “It appears that Fidel Castro is looking for a way to reach a rapprochement with the United States government, probably because he is aware that Cuba is in a state of economic chaos.” He added that Howard believed that “Castro’s inner circle was split on the idea of a rapprochement with the U.S. with hardliners like Che Guevara and Raoul Castro opposing it.” Helms thought it was encouraging that Castro had asked Howard for an appraisal of Khrushchev. She had told Castro he was a shrewd politician who would dispose of him when he was no longer needed. Upon hearing this, Castro had nodded his head “as if in skeptical agreement.”
The New York attorney James Donovan had also developed a relationship with Castro while negotiating to secure the release of Cuban exiles captured at the Bay of Pigs. In January 1963, he returned to Cuba to arrange the release of several imprisoned U.S. citizens. During what he called a “most cordial and intimate conversation” with Castro and his trusted aide and interpreter, the Boston-trained physician Dr. Rene Vallejo, Castro had invited him to return to Cuba with his wife for another visit, and had given Donovan the impression that he wanted to discuss “the future of Cuba and international relations in general.” While accompanying Donovan to the airport, Vallejo raised the subject of reestablishing diplomatic relations.
When Kennedy heard about Donovan’s experiences, he told Gordon Chase, the National Security Council aide responsible for Latin America, that they should “start thinking along more flexible lines,” and not insist that Castro make a clean break with Moscow as a precondition for talks. He recommended that Donovan postpone what he called “his week-long walk along the beach with Castro” until they could debrief him. After that, he said, he might want to give Donovan “some flies to dangle in front of Castro.” Chase concluded his memorandum of their conversation: “The above must be kept close to the vest. The President, himself, is very interested in this one.”
Donovan returned in April and had two long conversations with Castro. Vallejo claimed that although Castro wanted to develop a relationship with the United States, other officials in his government were opposed and Castro feared they might rebel. But Castro still believed he and Donovan could negotiate a “reasonable relationship” between their nations. After being briefed about these conversations, Kennedy expressed more interest in pursuing a demarche with Cuba, discussing it with the CIA director, John McCone, five days later. McCone suggested two courses of action: engaging Castro in negotiations “with the objective of disenchanting him with his Soviet relations, causing him to break relations with Khrushchev,” or continuing their current policy of supporting hit-and-run sabotage raids by Cuban exiles—of exerting “constant pressure of every possible nature on Khrushchev to force his withdrawal from Cuba, and then to bring about the downfall of Castro by means which could be developed after the removal of the Soviet troops.” Kennedy decided to keep the Donovan channel open and pursue both strategies at once.
This remained his policy when Attwood met with Lechuga at Lisa Howard’s cocktail party on September 23. After Attwood described his 1959 conversations with Castro, Lechuga suggested that Castro might be ready to talk again, particularly with someone he knew and trusted, and said there was a good chance that Castro would invite him to Havana. Attwood explained that since he was a diplomat instead of a journalist he would need official authorization, and promised to contact him when he had an answer. The next day, Bobby told Attwood he was concerned that he might be identified if he visited Cuba. He proposed holding the meeting in Mexico or at the United Nations instead and encouraged him to continue the conversation. Three days later, Attwood ran into Lechuga at the UN, relayed Bobby’s comments, and said that if Castro or his personal emissary had something to tell the president, they could meet somewhere outside Cuba.