Word: castros
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...long-rumored first marriage, the Mob contacts that helped him steal the 1960 election, and his history of health problems, including years of venereal disease. Then there was his real role in the murder of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and in CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro--there's the Mob again--as well as his inflated victory over Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis. Mob leader Giancana was Bobby's first suspect in his brother's assassination, says Hersh. He knew the Mafia felt betrayed because Bobby's Justice Department had targeted them even after they...
When Hersh takes on Kennedy's foreign policy, he runs into the same kind of problems. Kennedy loyalists argue that J.F.K. was no more than an interested bystander in the CIA campaign to murder Castro. But during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Hersh writes, Kennedy was in fact expecting that Castro would be quickly assassinated by Giancana's men. His fateful decision to abandon the whole thing was the abrupt consequence of his getting the news that the Cuban leader was still alive...
...long been known that some of the invasion planners were plotting to have Castro killed. "Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan," as the late CIA official Richard Bissell coolly put it in a 1984 article in the quarterly Diplomatic History. Was Kennedy one of the planners who were in on the murder plot? Perhaps, but to be sure of that, it helps to be persuaded by Hersh's attempts earlier in the book to prove that Kennedy "must have" been in communication with Giancana--or at least that he was briefed before the 1960 election by Bissell...
Hersh argues that the Kennedy brothers were the U.S. government's "strongest advocates" of CIA plans to kill Castro, not merely dispassionate judges of tough-guy talk from the spy shop. After the Bay of Pigs, Hersh writes, "the necessity of Castro's death became a presidential obsession." Former CIA Director Richard Helms told much the same story in 1975 to the Church committee, the Senate body investigating CIA shenanigans. Samuel Halpern, onetime executive officer of the CIA's Task Force W, an enterprise charged with the single mission of killing Castro, says the Kennedy brothers wanted Castro dead...
...book also claims that Kennedy paid up to $2 million in bribes to win the key West Virginia primary in 1960, that he was heavily involved in plots to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro, that he had numerous love affairs in his last years in the White House ? and that he suffered for 30 years with venereal diseases...