Free The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby by Richard D. Mahoney Page B

self-concept, its continuing pretense of politics as redemption. The Kennedys had 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 their 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 question 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 Kennedy had made their way History as the Kennedys lived it was neither orderly nor 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