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'Kennedy
& Castro' spins preposterous and inaccurate
yarn
Glenn Garvin. Posted on
Tue, Nov. 25, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
Kennedy & Castro: The Secret History.
8 to 9 tonight. Discovery Times Channel.
Worried about your job security in a troubled
economy? Get a job as a JFK historical touch-up
artist, softening Kennedy's hard Cold Warrior
edges. As the shoddy Kennedy & Castro:
The Secret History shows, that remains a
growth industry no matter how perilous the
rest of the economy. This exercise in Kennedy
spinmastering, airing on the new joint-venture
cable network owned in part by The New York
Times, ought to be a serious embarrassment,
if the post-Jayson Blair Times is still
capable of that.
Kennedy & Castro is neither secret
nor very good history. Using an odd historical
footnote that's been known for decades --
a fleeting back-channel contact between
the two men, managed by a troubled network
newswoman -- it argues preposterously that
these two hateful adversaries were on the
verge of kissing and making up when Kennedy
was assassinated in Dallas.
FANTASY LAND
It's a nice Thanksgiving fantasy, as long
as you overlook the parts where Kennedy
invades Cuba, blockades it, and sends the
CIA and the Mafia to murder Castro; or where
Castro aims nuclear missiles at Washington
and threatens to kill the president and
his brother. The truth is that nothing in
the whole history of the Cold War was more
viciously personal than the feud between
Kennedy and Castro.
But Kennedy & Castro ignores the broad
outlines in favor of the peculiar tale of
the shuttle diplomacy of Lisa Howard, a
pretty blond soap opera star-turned-news
anchor who hosted ABC's afternoon News with
the Woman's Touch in the early 1960s.
Howard, a Castro groupie (My dearest Fidel,
she wrote in one letter, men like you lift
us up out of our apathy, our despair, our
resignation), in early 1963 launched a one-woman
crusade for rapprochement between the two
men, carrying conciliatory messages back
and forth as she pursued assignments in
Havana and Washington.
Though Kennedy & Castro makes much
of Howard's efforts, the most she ever accomplished
was to arrange a face-to-face meeting between
members of the U.S. and Cuban delegations
to the United Nations. Though it's true
that Kennedy administration officials encouraged
Howard's amateur diplomacy, they also continued
trying to kill Castro with exploding seashells,
tuberculosis-contaminated diving suits and
poisoned milkshakes. At the very moment
Kennedy was being shot in Dallas, a CIA
official was delivering the agency's latest
lethal gizmo -- a poison syringe disguised
as a fountain pen -- to a would-be Castro
assassin.
That goes unmentioned in Kennedy &
Castro, as does Castro's brutal public threat
to the president just two months earlier.
''Kennedy is a cretin,'' he told an American
reporter. ''If U.S. leaders are aiding terrorist
plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves
will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother
Robert take care of themselves since they,
too, can be the victims of an attempt which
will cause their death.'' Go ahead, spin
that.
HOWARD'S STORY
Kennedy & Castro would have been a
much better program if it had skipped the
Kennedy revisionism and stuck to the story
of Howard, a fascinating woman who wrote
policy analysis pieces for leftist academic
journals as she starred on As The World
Turns, then somehow broke into the cloistered
men's club of network news.
Believe it or not, the Castro-Kennedy shuttle
may not even have been the oddest chapter
in her life. LSD guru Timothy Leary, years
later, would write that Howard and the wife
of a top CIA official spearheaded a small
group of Washington wives who were trying
to alter American politics by dosing their
husbands with LSD.
Whatever the truth of that allegation,
which has never been corroborated, by the
time of the assassination, Howard's life
was clearly spinning out of control. I've
often wondered if she somehow discovered
that the Kennedys were plotting Castro's
murder while jollying her along with empty
talk of peace and reconciliation.
She turned vehemently against the Kennedy
family -- she called Bobby ''ruthless, reactionary
and dangerously authoritarian'' -- and lost
her job at ABC when she formed a group to
oppose his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In 1965, she killed herself with an overdose
of sleeping pills, one more unknown soldier
of Camelot.
Related:
The
saga of Rolando Cubela / keysnews.com
After President Lyndon B. Johnson reviewed
the report, he told a reporter, in confidence
at the time: "Kennedy was trying to
kill Castro. Castro got him first."
JFK
backed secret meeting with Castro 17 days
before his assassination / Yahoo!
US President John
F. Kennedy backed an American intermediary
holding a secret meeting with Cuban President
Fidel Castro (news - web sites) just 17
days before his assassination in Dallas
40 years ago, according to a recently declassified
audio tape.
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