Your reliable correspondent,
Harry
9
March 27, 1962
Dear Lout,
Oh, that mighty circus—JM/WAVE! What is happening to you? Your character, so quick to distinguish nuance, so firm in its integrity, seems to be disappearing. I feel that you want to present yourself as gung-ho, but given the way you write about Dix Butler you seem to be undergoing a high school crush.
Let me remind you of our purpose. With all our abominations and excesses, we are a superior society to the Soviets because there is an ultimate restriction upon our behavior—we believe, most of us Americans, in God’s judgment upon us (even if it is the last thing one can ever talk about). I cannot emphasize how crucial such a last inner fear, such a modesty of the soul, is to the well-being of society. Without it, the only thing infinite about human beings becomes their vanity, which is to say, their contempt for nature and society. They generate an inner belief that they know a better way to run the world than God. All the horrors of Communism come out of the vanity that they know that God is only a tool employed by the capitalists. Joseph Stalin’s paranoia was the diseased end of such certainty. Ditto Lenin’s vanity. Hear me, Harry. I judge myself by the same standard I judge the Communists. Without my belief in God and in judgment, I would be a monster of vanity, and Hugh would be diabolical. Vanity is the abominable conceit that one could run the world if only one weren’t so weak.
Your coyotes—lower-grade psychopaths. You may admire them, but they root around in petty crime like the giddy goats they are, ramrodding it around in the sludge. You must remember. If we are to fight evil with evil (in the belief that under the circumstances it is necessary), we must avoid random wickedness like the plague. I fear for this nation I love so much. I fear for all of us.
Take what I say in the spirit intended. Don’t sulk.
Love,
Kittredge
Sulk was not the word. I was pissed off. It occurred to me that Kittredge knew nothing about men. I gave up the thought of explaining to her that the natural condition of men’s lives was fear of tests, physical even more than mental tests. Highly developed skills of evasion went into keeping ourselves removed from the center of our cowardice. We took on a profession, and in time, marriage and a family, some of us entered a bureaucracy, and we developed programs for our leisure activities, insulated ourselves in habit. So I could not help it—I admired men who were willing to live day by day with bare-wire fear even if it left them as naked as drunks, incompetent wild men, accident-prone. I understood the choice. It was not one I could ever take on for myself, but I honored them, and if I had a high school crush on Dix, then damn her to hell, and, yes, to hell with her. I did not answer Kittredge.
That gave me time to recollect. On the day I met her, she had just come back from her first go at ice climbing; she was happy. She must have overcome a good bit of bad stuff in herself that morning. I was debating whether to look to send a reply on that basis when a letter arrived at my post office box in Miami. (Since I still visited it every other day, even if it involved rising a quarter of an hour earlier, it is obvious that I was hoping to hear something better from her.)
April 23, 1962
Dear Harry,
You did sulk, didn’t you, and perhaps there was cause. There is such cruelty lurking in me. I wonder if you remember that Easter Sunday afternoon years ago when my father read from Titus Andronicus? He would never admit it, but no matter how poor that play, it is one of his secret favorites. I remember he once said: “Shakespeare has the best comprehension of vengeance. He knows. It must not only be dark, but precise. What can be more precise than to cut off a hand at the wrist?”
Daddy’s Alpha never got into anything more bloody than an academic skirmish or two, but Daddy’s Omega was dark and precise. I think he passed that on to me. I do not know why I take such relish in scourging your manhood. I suspect it has to do with Hugh. I resent how he has preempted this question of being a man until it is now a code unto himself. It gives him whole sanction never to take a backward look. I, who am always peering in all directions, resent Hugh profoundly, and, yes, I know, I take it out on you.
Nonetheless, you have much to learn about the dimensions of manhood. It is the ability to live with responsibility and danger that makes a man, and, do you know, I’ve decided that I admire the Kennedy brothers, Bobby almost as much as Jack, for just that reason. You discover that they are so much more responsible than they ought to be.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate their virtues. They are as silly as most men in many a way, and if one ever had any doubt of it, you need only be given an invitation for a Saturday afternoon at Hickory Hill, as Hugh and I were, to see where misplaced enthusiasm can lead you. Those same Green Berets who so captivated your pen were among the invited, and about twenty of us well-dressed guests were treated to a dozen of those fatuous if strapping young studs jet-popping ten feet above the croquet sward, while others—Tarzanians, I call them—were swinging on ropes from tree to tree. Bobby loved it—I think he suffers from the same set of misplaced affections as you—but then he also loves Hugh. Why? Because Hugh distinguished himself in a touch-football game. How would he not? They don’t know that Hugh coached soccer and is still a sinewy concentration of will and gymnastic reflex. I was proud of my bald beau—in fact, he caught the winning touchdown pass. Thank God it was for Bobby’s side. So we were in the thick of things at dinner. Afterward came the point of the evening. We were treated to a prestigious lecture.
Since the Kennedys are always trying to break records in all pursuits, Bobby has now decided that Cabinet officials, Presidential Advisers, and other key White House people ought to establish themselves on the intellectual slope and once a month, therefore, a night is given over to hearing some distinguished economist or scientist who is (leave it to the Kennedys) very much in the public eye at the moment. Sometimes, I think the K’s take their cues from Time magazine.
Time recently featured the logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer, and so here was Ayer tonight, superb Oxford accent, et al., lecturing the Kennedy clan and cohorts on the necessity for verification.
Now, Freddie Ayer is a nice enough man personally, or would be if all of him were merely his Alpha; he is courteous, witty, decent, all of it. But then there’s that arid, sterile, rather ugly Omega that British philosophers do keep downstairs. The English truly detest philosophy. Logic is their game. Their minds are happiest when most resembling their gardens. Culture, to them, seems to consist of lovely quotes in bloom. Listen to Freddie Ayer talk for an hour on the limits of philosophy—learn that nothing much is worth retaining in metaphysics inasmuch as you can’t verify most metaphysical propositions. You come to realize that the logical positivists are trying to cut out all the Alps and lush forests of the speculative worlds. Perhaps it is to get us ready for a universe of computers. I may like Freddie Ayer for his personable qualities, his good manners, especially his pipe, but I do detest logical positivism. Viscerally. It would consign my speculative work to the trash bin.
Well, Ayer had his audience. A notable crew full of Rusks and Galbraiths and Maxwell Taylors and McNamaras. Esteemed ilk. And of course they were more in agreement with him than not. Logical positivism, given its ability to euchre the more intangible questions of ethics out of the game, has to appeal to bureaucrats. So Ayer was creating his own kind of impressive spell (even if logical positivism would speak of spells as not worth talking about) when a voice cried out right into the middle, “Doctor Ayer? Professor Ayer?”
“Yes?”
It was Ethel Kennedy. Now, she is not one of my favorite folk. She’s a study in energy—hordes of children and still active in all sorts of ways, but she’s got an awfully heavy set of mind. It’s that earthy Catholicism which knows all the answers and doesn’t think too much of the questions. “Doctor Ayer,” she said, unable to hold herself in for another moment, “what about God?”
“What do you mean?” he ask
ed.
“Well,” she said, “in all you’ve talked about, there’s not one mention of Him.”
Ayer was most courteous. That was true, he agreed. In effect, God was outside the purview of logical positivism. This was a philosophy, after all, which concerned itself only with those rational problems whose propositions could be verified.
“Yes,” said Ethel, “but where in all of this is God? What do you think about God?”
Now, she must have been drinking. She had certainly had a long day as hostess and was now off on a hectoring tone—low stubbornness is the unkind way to put it. “I don’t hear anything about God in all that has been said.”
“Ethel,” came Bobby’s voice from the back of the room, “drop it.”
Professor Ayer went on to the preordained conclusion.
That story has a lot to tell about Bobby. I’m sure his real agreement was with Ethel, but the Kennedy logic is that everybody on the team better get behind a project. The project tonight was to listen to A. J. Ayer.
This is a small example of the emphasis placed in Kennedy quarters on loyalty. Jack is blessed. He has a brother devoted full-time to his aims. There is no treachery permitted toward one another in the workings of that family. Which is why, I suspect, they are so successful. I contrast it to the peculiar depth of treachery that existed in my own family, never overt, but I do not think my father or mother ever shared a thought. Alpha marched ostensibly with Alpha and never a voice was raised, but I doubt if there was an hour when the Omega of one was not scheming against the other. In the sacrament of marriage, that is treachery. Some day I will tell you of how they made love. No, I will tell you now. I discovered them one night in Cambridge when I was ten, for their door was open by an inch, and I, often on the edge of sleepwalking in those years, was wandering the halls, so I peered in. Their lovemaking proved another form of treachery. I was not going to, but I will tell you now. Maisie was asleep, or most certainly pretending to be, and my father was working his way upon the corpse. I was a junior at Radcliffe before I divined that there might be other ways to make love.
Seen as sweet, attentive, and a dear daughter, I grew up seething at the expanses of frozen waste they had laid into me. Now I specify treachery as the nostrum for the narcissist and the psychopath; yes, I suppose that is true. I certainly am intrigued by treachery. A Shakespearean childhood.
The Kennedys, Bobby most of all, are immune. Bobby has absolute loyalty to Jack. There is no question in my mind that he would die for him. Yet they are unalike. Jack, for example, is near to himself. His Alpha and Omega, while at odds about such matters as duty and pleasure, are, I suspect, very much at ease with each other, much like old roommates who know what to expect, and do get along. Bobby has an A and O that inhabit the same room, but neither seems to have the faintest interest in what the other is up to. His Alpha and Omega choose separate associates fully as much as a lover would look for a different kind of companion than would a taskmaster. To see Bobby walking around Hickory Hill with any of his numerous brood is to recognize how much he loves children. He holds their hands with an instinctive delight in the joys of sheltering a child’s feelings, and that is a quality few men possess. When he feels compassion for strangers, as I will soon delineate for you, it is comparable to the tenderness he offers to his children. He is very much a lover in that sense, although the love comes forth not as desire but concern. Whereas Jack, under all that calm, is, by contrast, as full of acquisitive desire as a reporter teeming with curiosity about a story he wants to get. Women serve as sources of knowledge for Jack—an express route for coming into contact with the Unknown.
Bobby is a Kennedy and so he, too, is acquisitive. But for results, not people. He takes on new programs as if they were personal conquests. That makes him an overbearing whipmaster to some. I think he lives in the terror that if he does not take on all the important jobs for Jack, everything will bog down. So, at work, from all I hear, he is always in an enormous hurry. His style of cross-examination when trying to find out why something went wrong is nonstop. I probably know better than you of the kind of pressure he puts upon Lansdale and Harvey concerning Mongoose. I can tell you from what Hugh chooses to divulge that being questioned by Bobby Kennedy when he is in a hectoring mood (yes, like Ethel!) is analogous to having adhesive tape removed from every square inch of your body. Unrelenting.
Part of the trouble is that while Bobby wants a great deal from everyone, he cannot always know what to tell others. After all, some of the knowledge he needs cannot be acquired by questioning. In February, he took a trip around the world for Jack, had a stop-off in Saigon, and announced that American troops are committed to remain in Vietnam until the Vietcong is beaten. That leaves him personally committed to Vietnam, the Green Berets, and all the attendant follow-up. Yet much of April has been taken up with fighting U.S. Steel and Bethlehem on their price rises, and the civil rights problems are with him all the time. Then there is organized crime. He is still trying to get Jimmy Hoffa. He also keeps up a running feud with Lyndon Johnson, whom he despises. J. Edgar Hoover even more. It seems Hoover lets him cool his heels whenever Bobby goes down the hall of the Department of Justice to pay a visit. In return, Bobby has given strict orders to have his Airedale, Binky, exercised in the corridor just outside Buddha’s suite of offices. Yes, it’s urination and counterurination; Bobby, you see, gives as much to small-sized wars as to large ones, and all the while, Fidel Castro remains paramount in Bobby’s emotions, yet does not receive enough real time and attention. On those Thursdays when Bobby sits over for Special Group, Augmented, he is—as Hugh obtains it—just heating up the air to conceal his paucity of knowledge. Bobby’s instinct, which can be excellent, is to light the fire beneath any undertaking that is not showing enough progress, then dig into the attendant bureaucracy, convey to those slow-grinding wheels that his own sense of urgency will soon become the most uncomfortable source of heat for them. He can spend a morning saturating some subdepartment of State or Defense or Justice with a set of calls to officials at every level of the hierarchy. Activates the ant’s nest from top to bottom. He is awfully good at that. He hates sloth and circular habit. Like many another spark plug, however, he has no patience. He cannot comprehend that because there is a problem, there is not necessarily a solution.
That is why he cannot comprehend Castro, and will not put in the concentration on Mongoose that it needs. Yet he is screaming for results. I would say I understand why Jack and Bobby are so intense on the question. On our second visit to Hickory Hill, I did get into a conversation with Bobby, and he cut me off on Castro. “The man’s got to be stopped,” he said. “What if he ends up with long-range Russian missiles? Have you thought about that, huh? Have you thought of that? This country could be under the thumb of an irresponsible fellow.”
Perhaps the clue is there. They do not begin to understand Castro—that is, they do not know (1) how serious he is, and (2) how flexible. They fear him in the way rich boys are uneasy with poor boys, yes, just like you and your coyotes. Under it all, they obviously admire Castro. Admiration is an intolerable ferment when it resides beneath the skin. So, of course, they have to hate him. If the Kennedys are going to form an admiration society, it will not be for a man who rose to power by fighting through a jungle in which they might have perished, no, when it comes to a fan club, they’ll give their plaudits to Robert Frost and Camelot.
Never forget, however, the power of Bobby’s compassion. It redeems him. I don’t know that he has had a good night’s sleep since the Bay of Pigs. He broods over those thousand and more men of the Brigade who sit in Cuban prisons now. For that matter, both Kennedy brothers have shown a superior sense of responsibility. They took on the blame for Pigs when it was not really their fault. I don’t know if the greater culpability belongs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or CIA, but, in fact, when one has to choose between fools, what is there ever to choose? The Joint Chiefs never got around to studying the reality of the problem. Do they sit i
n a pomade of complacency? I know they never doubted that Castro’s air force could not survive a major attack by the exiles’ B-26s, nor did they question whether the Brigade would have any real shot of crossing eighty miles of swamp to reach the Escambray Mountains. In turn, Quarters Eye did their best to nudge the Joint Chiefs over to a favorable evaluation of the possibilities; then Quarters Eye used the formal optimism of the Chiefs to convince Jack Kennedy. Of course, the Joint Chiefs never did their homework and all of you managed to lie to yourselves while telling other lies to the Brigade about the military, air, and naval support coming from us. So Jack Kennedy, three months in office, got taken. He was a decent man in response. He accepted the blame. Even Hugh, who is wholly Republican (whenever he can hold his nose long enough to vote), began to respect Jack at that point. And since Pigs, Jack has never stopped feeling responsible. Back in May, when Castro offered to exchange the Brigade prisoners for five hundred bulldozers, Jack induced Milton Eisenhower to form a committee of prestigious Americans who would raise the money. Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther—immaculate backing. But Goldwater and his Senatorial cohorts killed it. Did you pay attention to that? It was terrible. Goldwater seized the headlines. If we sent tractors to Castro, he said, our prestige “would have to sink even lower.” I couldn’t believe he would use such a situation to make political capital. God knows what those men are enduring in prison. And Homer Capehart: “If we accept, we will become the laughingstock of the entire world.” That pompous ass! And Styles Bridges: “How much more humiliation must be taken from this Communist dictator?” I realized for the first time that no matter what dubious deeds we commit for the Agency from time to time, we are honorable people next to that opportunistic slime. And Nixon! As if honor wouldn’t melt in his mouth, he says, “Human lives are not something to be bartered.”