So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (34 page)
Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
“And Kennedy and Latin America?” I then asked.
“He drew up the Alliance for Progress,” Castro had responded. “It is true that this policy was inspired by the idea of stopping the Cuban revolution, by avoiding the factors that sharpen social situations and facilitate the possibilities of Cuban-style revolutions in Latin America. But he did have an idea, he did have a strategy, and he tried to push it forward. Some people in the United States now say Cuba is the only country in Latin America that has realized the objectives of the Alliance for Progress, because it had been intended that the Alliance for Progress would include some tax reforms, agrarian reforms, a better distribution of wealth, concern about housing, about health conditions, education, public health, and all these things.”
* * *
I carried messages back and forth between Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations—when Kissinger was at the peak of his influence and power, serving as Secretary of State
and
national security adviser to the presidents. Our Cuban exchange involved some mild cloak-and-dagger, with code names and look-over-your-shoulder meetings at airport bars—all done at Kissinger’s request to keep our Cuban exchanges out of the news; Gerald Ford and the Republican Party would have paid a high political price for any leaks.
In 1974, more or less on the eve of my first departure for Mexico and Cuba—a circuitous route necessary because direct travel to Cuba was forbidden—I thought to ask Secretary of State Kissinger if he had, by any chance, any back-channel message for Fidel Castro I might deliver, because I was to interview
El Comandante
once I got to Havana. To my surprise, Kissinger quickly said yes and wrote, by hand, a message to Castro seeking informal “meetings” to discuss U.S.-Cuba relations. He urged on me extreme secrecy about this mission, lest President Nixon get wind of it. “Bebe Rebozo would kill me,” Kissinger warned, referring to Nixon’s Cuba-born playboy friend and frequent companion. Kissinger instructed me, should Castro be willing to communicate, to ask the Cuban leader to designate an intermediary in the United States—at the Cuban mission to the United Nations (in New York City)—to deal directly with his special assistant, Lawrence Eagleburger, to arrange the details whenever a meeting would be fruitful. That began a relationship between Larry Eagleburger and me that lasted until his death, many decades later.
Castro brooded and sought my advice about the message from Kissinger, not its content or significance, but simply how and to whom he should reply. Kissinger, after all, was only the secretary of state, and, Fidel pointed out, he was chief of state. But after a day’s thought, he decided to write to Kissinger directly (because President Nixon, after all, was on shaky ground; indeed, he resigned within weeks) and accept the offer. The arrangement was that either Castro’s designated hitter, Teofilo Acosta of the UN mission, or Eagleburger would request, through me, a meeting, and I would notify the other participant. When Ford soon took over for Nixon, an actual physical meeting took place twice, at the shabby bar of the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle terminal at LaGuardia Airport. Eagleburger took the code name Henderson, and Acosta was simply Teo. Once a meeting was arranged, Eagleburger and I would fly the Eastern shuttle to New York, and I would stand a sort of wary guard at the entrance to the bar, while the two diplomats met inside.
Some progress was made, chiefly an extension of the distance Cuban diplomats could travel from the UN mission in New York—from 10 to 250 miles, so they could travel to Washington—an increase in the number of “exempt” diplomats, and some relaxation as to family visits. From my conversations with Eagleburger during those visits, I had the distinct impression real progress was possible and that Kissinger, particularly after Nixon and Rebozo were gone, genuinely wanted to pursue rapprochement and expected relations even to warm slightly. But it was not to be. Jimmy Carter’s election over Gerald Ford, which one might have thought would even result in a change in our Cuba policy, placed responsibility in the hands of the new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. But Vance, whom I met at Carter’s transition headquarters, seemed uninterested in Cuba and asked me to “talk it over with Zbig.”
Zbig was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s then super-hawkish national security adviser, and he seemed quite willing to continue the Nixon “anti-Communist” policy in Latin America, even where, as in the case of Cuba, it seemed absurd. Or perhaps Carter had seen some polls showing Florida would be lost to the Democratic Party if sense were restored to U.S.-Cuba relations. In any event, the opportunity slipped away, Eagleburger went off to be ambassador to Yugoslavia, Teo Acosta became Cuba’s ambassador to Zimbabwe, and even my monthly hand-delivered box of Cohibas ceased to arrive. And when some Cuban troops were discovered fighting to defend Angola’s government against the U.S.-furnished, supplied, and paid “rebels” in that country, the die seemed recast.
* * *
During visits to Cuba, I formed the opinion the people are not only pro-American but, of all those below the border, the most like us. Of course, they almost universally dislike the American boycott, which for fifty years has kept their country virtually in poverty, but they regard it as a government policy, not the will of the American people. Cuba’s values generally most approach ours. They place a high value on hard work, education, literacy, and public health. In addition, I found in Cuba a sense of patriotism, almost absent elsewhere in Latin America. If we had embraced Castro’s revolution in 1959 or 1960, I’m convinced we’d have had a valued ally in the battle against drugs and organized crime in the Western Hemisphere, to say nothing of a steady supply of major-league infielders.
Unlike other countries without democracy, Cuba never had detention camps. Castro saw very early that if his opponents—“enemies”—wanted to leave Cuba, the best thing for the regime was to send them on their way. It’s the only country I know of to encourage emigration by the disaffected, and as many as one million Cubans have taken advantage of it. They were, by and large, the “ruling class,” followers of or participants in the Batista government, big landowners, mafiosi, agents of the U.S.-dominated economy (Coca-Cola, Western Union, Esso, and so on), and what there was of a professional class.
It’s hard to appreciate the extent and reach of organized crime, which owned the hotels, the casinos, the whorehouses—all the things that made a weekend in Havana so attractive to so many Americans. I once asked Fidel what his life would have been like if not for his revolution, and he told me he’d almost certainly be running numbers for the Mafia “and making a good living.”
It is true Cuba has no real elections, and no First Amendment, the justice system is rudimentary, and the press, such as it is, is a voice of the government. But it is also true that Cubans have vastly improved living conditions, their children go to school—free, at all levels, kindergarten through college—and they don’t pay for transportation or first-rate medical care or, for that matter, movies or baseball games. And the medical care
is
excellent—thousands of Cuban doctors are sent to other Latin American countries, and the country’s infant mortality rate is the lowest of any nation’s in the hemisphere, including ours. Perhaps the most significant difference with other “dictatorships” is that every Cuban household has been issued a rifle—presumably to defend against a second U.S. invasion.
* * *
Am I going against the direction of history? Holding views about Castro contrary to such a broad portion of accepted wisdom in the United States? I’m just advocating justice and fairness. Castro stood up to American corporations; I’m not excusing his abuses, but I do respect his confronting American corporate power.
The first time I went to Cuba, the novel
Jaws
had recently come out, and when I asked Castro what American books he had read and enjoyed recently, he cited
Jaws
because of what he called its “splendid Marxist message.” I had not thought
Jaws
particularly Marxist, but in the book the local police chief wants to close beaches because a shark is out there, eating people, but town officials do not want to ruin their July 4 holiday business. The book thus makes the point, Castro said, that capitalism will risk even human life in order to keep the markets open. Karl couldn’t have said it better.
These days, most college-age people who ask me questions seem to have read Hunter S. Thompson’s
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,
his account of the McGovern-Nixon campaign of 1972.
It is a remarkable book; Thompson was almost the only reporter who covered McGovern from the beginning—every day, every appearance, every press encounter, from the early days as a 100 percent outsider through the days when McGovern’s choice for a vice presidential nominee, Senator Thomas Eagleton, led to the events that doomed his candidacy. His reporting—for
Rolling Stone
magazine—was brilliant and filled with lurid, if fictional, accounts. I have said many times his book was “the most accurate and the least factual” account of the 1972 campaign. I’ll stick to that, meaning he had the music if not the words, the spirit if not the hard facts, the aspect and the sense of the campaign if not accurate names and numbers.
No hard facts? Well into the book, after reporting on numerous conversations and shared experiences with me, Thompson informs his readers I am a “scurvy, rumpled, treacherous little bastard” and he would not be sad to hear that “nine thugs” had caught me in an alley near the U.S. Capitol and cut off my big toes making it “permanently impossible” for me to keep my balance “for more than five or six feet in any direction.” He also says I snore and look “like an out-of-work ‘pre-Owned Car’ salesman.” Elsewhere, I’m praised as an expert on organization.
In another typical passage, Thompson described one candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries as having been on a mysterious Brazilian drug, exhibiting characteristics of speech and demeanor he then ascribed to this wonder drug. It was totally made up but captured well much of the surreal feeling of listening to the candidate describe his views on the war in Vietnam. Thompson and I had, once in New Hampshire during the primary campaign there, a serious argument about some of the techniques being used by the door-to-door canvassers of the McGovern campaign. This argument went down in
Fear and Loathing
as an attack on Hunter by me, with a tire iron, no less. But his description of the points made in the dispute was accurate.
Senator McGovern developed a real fondness for Thompson, even as he and I laughed at and deplored—for the record at least—his journalistic tactics. Curiously, much of Thompson’s work, which included countless reviews, accounts, and musings in
Rolling Stone
and other organs of the Left, seems to be forgotten, but his account of the 1972 campaign remains fresh and continues to sell well. He calls the former vice president and 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current.” So much for objectivity. And a few pages after that, he wonders if the governor’s mansion in American Samoa is on a cliff above the beach and has a big screened-in porch because he wants me to get him appointed governor after McGovern wins, and then I come across “very tense, very strong into the gila monster trip.” And of course other scenes have me displaying a “cold lizard’s smile.” All of this is in good fun and is part of what makes Hunter S. Thompson Hunter S. Thompson. The sheer audacity of the lies that fueled the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam, the clear willingness of Democratic Party leaders in state after state to break the election law in order to stop McGovern, the rising outsider mentality that has left-wing George McGovern as the second choice of many right-wing George Wallace voters, the huge, undocumented dumps of cash spent on TV in the California primary in a last-minute effort to smear McGovern—all this and more could be captured only in what Hunter described as a “gonzo” style, borrowing, in Thompson’s words, from William Faulkner’s notion that “the best fiction is more true than journalism.”
* * *
One evening, around six o’clock, I was at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. I bumped into Fred Friendly, the legendary former president of CBS News, who had presided over some of the best of the best journalists in U.S. history, including Edward R. Murrow. We were both waiting for planes that had been delayed. It was terrible weather and clearly it was going to be quite a while before we’d be able to fly, so we had one drink and then another. We spent about three hours waiting for those planes. And in the course of it we developed what we agreed he would call the Friendly-Mankiewicz rule and I would call the Mankiewicz-Friendly rule of journalism. The rule is that if you read something—we were still talking print—or hear about it on the radio or see it on television and you know about it firsthand, whether it be negotiations at a national political convention or events at an automobile accident in your neighborhood, then you’ll know that something about the news coverage is
wrong—
some fact, some detail in the news coverage is just plain
wrong
. The car driven by the drunk did not enter from the west; it entered from the north. The state chairman was not looking for a judgeship for his nephew; he was looking for a paving contract for himself. Some fact is always wrong. Every story. All media. Every time. Facts are wrong. The story didn’t happen that way. And therefore, because, after all, history for the most part is written by scholars looking at old newspapers, history is probably also wrong. As soon as Fred and I came up with the rule, which happened, admittedly, with a lot of fun and laughter, all of my work for Robert Kennedy suddenly made more sense. I sort of had it in the back of my mind all the time. Something, usually something significant and important, is always wrong in every story. Every time.