President Trump’s first months in office have spawned comparisons with the Nixon White House, especially by Democrats who see a parallel pattern of obstructing justice and fantasize a comparable fate of impeachment or resignation.
For now, though, the real template is the administration of President John F. Kennedy, who would have turned 100 today.
First there is Trump’s penchant for naming close relatives to high-level posts, the only statutory limit on which is the antinepotism law Congress passed after JFK named his brother Bobby as attorney general. Then there are Trump’s obsessions with ISIS and North Korea as the sole enemies that count, which conjure up the Kennedy brothers’ consuming and secretive war against Cuba and Fidel Castro that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. Now comes the latest in the rain of falling shoes: Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner seeking precisely the kind of back-channel communications with Russia that RFK did in the early days of the Kennedy administration.
There is no guarantee that any of these controversial moves will work out as well for the Trumps as they did for Kennedys. Quite the reverse, so far. But the current president would do well to study the lessons of his predecessor of half a century ago if he hopes to craft an administration that will thrive or even survive.
President Kennedy knew tapping his brother to run the Justice Department was unprecedented and perhaps preposterous. There was nothing new in a president keeping around his campaign manager to help with the challenge of running the country, but the tradition was to make him postmaster general, not attorney general. Eisenhower broke the pattern in 1953 by naming Herbert Brownell Jr., a key political operative, as attorney general, but that president kept his brother Milton in the low-key role of special ambassador. Woodrow Wilson thought about making his only brother a postmaster in Nashville in 1913 but decided “it would be a very serious mistake both for you and for me.’’ The whole government eventually came around to that thinking, and in 1967 Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed a ban on nepotism that became known informally as the Bobby Kennedy law.
Neither Eisenhower nor Wilson was as brazen as JFK. Wit helped, too. Asked by Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee how he would announce his brother’s appointment, a straight-faced Kennedy said, “I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2 a.m., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’ ’’ A week after he made it official, the newly inaugurated president joked, “I don’t see anything wrong with getting [Bobby] a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.’’
While Robert Kennedy may have begun his tenure as one of the least-prepared attorneys general, he ended it as arguably the best ever. He stage-managed America’s most aggressive war against organized crime. He stood up for civil rights in a way none of his predecessors and few successors did. And he so inspired his staff and the nation that he offers a model to current Attorney General Jeff Sessions and convinced George W. Bush and his arch-conservative attorney general John Ashcroft to rename Justice Department headquarters the Robert F. Kennedy Building.
The Kennedys’ behavior in the Cuban Missile Crisis suggests a different lesson for Trump. While the public didn’t know it at the time, the superpower standoff wasn’t the devious Russians acting out of the blue and guileless Americans responding with what Robert Kennedy called “shocked incredulity.’’ It was a predictable response to US aggression in arming, training, and bankrolling the émigrés who tried to reclaim Cuba by staging an invasion at an inlet on its southern coast known as the Bay of Pigs.
When that failed, Bobby Kennedy personally steered a year-long campaign of sabotaging Cuban agriculture, inciting political upheaval, and charting cloak-and-dagger schemes for invading the island and deposing its leaders. The attorney general was too myopic to consider how what he called Operation Mongoose would be perceived in Havana and Moscow. It was logical for Castro to conclude that the United States was hell-bent on eliminating his regime and understandable for his primary protector, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to come to his aid. “We had to think up some way of confronting America with more than words . . . The logical answer was missiles,’’ Khrushchev wrote in his memoir. “The installation of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government.’’
It was the sort of gambit the United States should have understood, since we had similar mutual defense pacts with our allies in Europe. Grave as we thought the dangers of the Missile Crisis were in 1962, they were substantially worse. The Russians had more missiles than we believed, with the capability to take out targets as far away as Manhattan. There were 43,000 Soviet soldiers on hand, not the 10,000 we thought, and Castro encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike if America invaded Cuba. What saved the day was not our staring down Khrushchev and Castro, the way the Kennedys had us believe, but rather that both sides blinked.
Are you listening, commander in chief Trump?
It was with aim of avoiding just such confrontations that, at the start of his brother’s administration, Bobby Kennedy had begun meeting with Georgi Bolshakov, a faintly disguised Soviet spy posted to its embassy in Washington as bureau chief for the Tass news agency. Theirs was one of the most beguiling relationships of the Cold War and brings to mind what Kushner may have had in mind last year when he reportedly proposed a comparably secretive back channel with Moscow to discuss Syria and other issues.
The buttoned-down Attorney General Kennedy and the hail-fellow secret agent Bolshakov got together an average of three times a month for a year-and-a-half, starting in the spring of 1961. They conferred sitting on the lawn near the US Capitol, in the back office at the Justice Department, and at RFK’s compound at Hickory Hill, where the Russian dazzled the Kennedy children by dancing on his haunches. Conversations ranged from crises in Berlin and Laos to the upcoming superpower summit in Vienna.
Why, agents at the FBI and elsewhere wanted to know, was the president’s brother risking these unprecedented cloak-and-dagger encounters? To the Kennedys, however, they were just the thing. What better conduit for messages to be passed between JFK and Khrushchev without the misinterpretation, second-guessing, and risk of leaks of regular diplomatic channels? Who better to do it than Robert Kennedy, who wasn’t bound by rules of spycraft or diplomacy yet could be trusted with anything? No need to share this unshareable information with FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover or to write anything down. It worked brilliantly until the Missile Crisis in 1962, when Bolshakov either didn’t know or lied about Khrushchev’s true plans for Cuba.
In either case Robert Kennedy was heard to say, “That son of a bitch has got to go.’’ Khrushchev got the message and recalled him, which was just fine with the new Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who felt he should be Bobby’s channel to Moscow.
Larry Tye is a former Globe reporter. His most recent book, “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon,’’ was just released in paperback by Random House.
