MONDAY
E-mail a friendDavid Talbot
airdate May 23, 2007
Hailed as a pioneer of online journalism by The New York Times, David Talbot is the founder, former editor-in-chief and current board chair of the Internet magazine, Salon. He previously worked as a freelance writer for several print publications, including Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and as an editor for The San Francisco Examiner. Talbot is the author of several books, and in his latest, Brothers, turns his focus on members of America's version of a royal family, John and Robert Kennedy.
David Talbot
Tavis: David Talbot is one of the pioneers of Internet journalism, having served as the founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Salon.Prior to that, he serves as features editor at the "San Francisco Examiner."His new book is an in-depth look at the relationship between John and Robert Kennedy called "Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years."Keep that picture up, Jonathan.
I love, David, the photo on the cover.Of course JFK on the left, Robert Kennedy on the right, you can see by their profiles.Tell me about that photo.
David Talbot: Well it says, I think, so much about the relationship between the brothers.They really completed each other.Often, according to people I interviewed in my book, they would complete each other's sentences, literally.They complimented each other so much.This photo was taken in Los Angeles during the Democratic Convention in 1960, and you see them, of course, huddled in a hotel room plotting strategy, no doubt, and successfully.Bobby was his brother's right-hand man, and he made sure that things got done.
Tavis: When I got this book and decided to have a conversation with you on the program, the first thought I had when I saw the cover, aside from that gorgeous photo, this subtitle:"The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years."That was a newsflash to me.I did not know that there was any hidden history (laughter) of the Kennedy years, David.
Talbot: Well, yeah, there's been a lot of history revealed; that's certainly true.But what compelled me to write this book was the question, I think, that's haunted a lot of people.What did Bobby Kennedy think really happened to JFK in Dallas?What was the real story there?And Bobby Kennedy, again, was his brother's attorney general, his right-hand man, his brother's devoted protector.I thought if anyone could provide a light for us into this darkest of American labyrinths, the mystery of Dallas, it would be Bobby Kennedy.
Tavis: You know what's fascinating about that statement, David, is that publicly, for the record, Bobby Kennedy towed the line.Whatever the commission had to say about it, he pretty much publicly went along with that.When asked what he thought about it he said, "The commission is doing their work; we'll see what the commission has to say."But we learn a different story in the text about what he was really doing behind the scenes privately while towing that line publicly.
Talbot: Absolutely.That's right.That's the great drama of this story.Publicly, as you say, he endorsed the Warren Report.He said, "One man did it:Lee Harvey Oswald."But he does this for, I think, a politically strategic reason.He realizes that the moment his brother is dead on that afternoon - a terrible afternoon, November 22nd, 1963 - that his own power is evaporating immediately.
The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, famously hates him.LBJ and he have a poisonous relationship; the new president. He knows that his power to investigate is fading by the minute.So what he tells friends and close intimates is we have to wait till I get back to the White House and then I'm going to reopen the investigation.
Now if he had said publicly before then, "I reject the Warren Report," he knew that it would have been a media circus.And he wasn't prepared yet to go there publicly.But privately, he was doing what Bobby Kennedy always did:keeping his own counsel and very quietly and diligently looking into this.
Tavis: Not even just keeping his own counsel, but as you report in the book, at least, collecting data along the way.
Talbot: That's right.
Tavis: Famously from the hospital.
Talbot: That's right.When his brother undergoes the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bobby Kennedy later takes possession of his brother's brain and the tissue samples.He and the White House physician, Dr. George Berkeley.I think he does that not for any morbid reasons but because he's planning to reopen the investigation.
He wants as much evidence as possible.He tried to take possession of the limousine, the Lincoln that was, of course, in Dallas where the president was killed, where he was shot.That ended up in a museum in Michigan, but Bobby Kennedy at one point discusses how can he take possession of this.Again, I think to collect as much evidence as he can.
Tavis: Tell me how he interpreted, how he viewed the tenor of the phone call that he received from Mr. Hoover, the CIA director, to inform him that his brother, one, had been shot, and 20 minutes later or so that he'd been killed?
Talbot: Well, no love lost, as I say, between the two men.They each represented to each other what was wrong about America.To Bobby, J. Edgar Hoover was a reactionary individual trying to stem the tide of progress in America.Thought of the Kennedys as is political enemies, as they were.Compiling secret information on the Kennedys, as he did on so many others.
So this was the man, ironically, of all men, who makes this phone call and initially says in a very chilly tone, "The president's been shot."Twenty minutes later, he calls back and says, with almost a sense of pleasure, according to Bobby, "The president has died, he's been killed."He always would remember that, Bobby Kennedy said, the way he heard that news that night.
Tavis: Take me, again, back inside Bobby's brain and tell me what you discover in the writing of the text, the researching of the text, what you discovered about the way he processed this entire ordeal.That is to say, the notion of a conspiracy to take his brother out.
Talbot: Well, Bobby immediately, we know from his conversations that afternoon at his home in Virginia, is making phone calls and calling people to his home.He's a man on fire to find the truth.And based on those conversations, we know he's looking immediately at the CIA's secret war on Castro, the shadowy underground that brought together spies and gangsters and militant Cuban exiles as the source of the plot.
Now ironically, that was Bobby's portfolio.He was in charge of Cuba, which could have become the Iraq of its day, where so many geopolitical forces were swirling around.He thought that he should have seen this coming, and I think this was a deep wound for Bobby, as well, because he felt guilty about it. Not that he was responsible, but that he should have seen it coming out of this underground.
Tavis: To your best guesstimate or estimate, and I guess that depends on the answer you're about to give me, what's your sense of ultimately what he thought happened to his brother, those phone calls on the day of notwithstanding?
Talbot: Well number one, he associates Lee Harvey Oswald, as I say, with this intelligence world, with this anti-Castro operation.He thinks it's more than one shooter.He hears this from people in Dallas - from Kenny O'Donnell, the loyal Kennedy aide who was riding in the car immediately behind the president's limousine.
He hears from Kenny O'Donnell and others shots were fired from the front as well as behind, which immediately tells him there was a conspiracy.There's Secret Service agents who tell him the same thing.And of course Jackie Kennedy herself famously said, "I don't want to take off my blood-spattered Chanel suit," her famous pink Chanel suit she was wearing, "because I want them to see what they've done to my husband."
That was the immediate reaction of people in that motorcade.They were riding into a crossfire, into a trap - an ambush.And that's what they reported back to Bobby Kennedy that day.
Tavis: How would you respond to one who would read what Bobby did, or put another way what he didn't do, with regard to publicly challenging the commission's report if in his heart he felt something more had happened?How would you respond to someone who said that that's the problem with what we hear over the years about the Kennedy mystique - that politics above all else, winning above all else, opportunity above all else.
I'm trying to process myself if my brother had been gunned down and I thought that what this commission said was, in fact, not the truth, I'm not sure I'd put the politics or being afraid of a media circus - the truth is the truth, let's get to it and let the chips fall where they may.How do you process the fact that he decided not to do that?
Talbot: It's a very good question, and of course Jim Garrison, the New Orleans prosecutor who reopened the case and was a very controversial figure - I have this quote in my book - later told Mort Saul, the political comedian who helped out on the Garrison case, "If it were my brother, I wouldn't be going to the Kennedy Center with them to watch ballet; I'd be in the alley with a steak knife."
That was Bobby's feeling.Bobby was a tough person.He was a tough customer, famously so - one of the most aggressive investigators in the country.So this must have torn him apart.It did tear him apart.Whenever he was asked in public about the Warren Report he gave a tepid kind of pro-forma reply, saying, "I accept it."
But it got more and more tenuous as time went on, and in fact here in Los Angeles when he was on the campaign trail himself for president in 1968, there was a campus rally out in the Valley and students began to heckle him and say, "We want to know the truth about your brother's assassination.When will you reopen the case?"
And he hedges - it's interesting.He again accepts the Warren Report, but then he also says, "I will reopen the archives at the right time," which they cheer.So you can see how he's trying to balance this.I think he was a shrewd man politically.Yes, emotionally, why didn't Bobby immediately point the finger?We, as human beings, all have to ask that.But he also, I think, knew how power worked in America, and he was biding his time.
Tavis: A couple different ways to read that, but he was a shrewd politician, to be certain.Let me ask, finally, what, if anything, you learned - back to the cover of this book where we started this conversation, this wonderful photo - what, if anything, did you learn about the relationship between these two brothers?Because the book is called, again, "Brothers," and it really does, at the heart of it, get into, in some significant degree, their relationship?
Talbot: Well, I think both were men ahead of their time.They were trying to lead the country to peace.Bobby was the more hotheaded one originally, the guy who would do the tough assignments for his brother.Jack was more restrained, a visionary person who delivered the famous peace speech, as it was called, at American University, saying, "We all live on the same planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's' future, and we're all mortal."
Words that I think our leaders today could live by.So Jack was a little ahead of his time, but I think Bobby caught up with him towards the end of his life, where he becomes a visionary figure, a man ahead of his time.When he delivers speeches, the because speeches on the campaign trail about the suffering that we were going through with Vietnam, saying, "These men who are dying for us in the rice paddies of Vietnam - which of these men could have written a symphony? Could have played in the World Series?Could have taught a small child to read?It's our responsibility as Americans to let these men live." That was Bobby Kennedy at the end of his life.
Tavis: It is a relationship that I suspect people will be writing about for years to come.The book is called "Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," written, of course, by David Talbot.David, nice to have you on the program.
Talbot: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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