The Untold Story of How One Journalist's Intimate Diplomacy With
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‘My TK Dearest Fidel’ The untold story of how one journalist’s intimate diplomacy with the Cuban revolutionary changed the course of the Cold War. By PETER KORNBLUH | Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro ISA HOWARD HAD BEEN WAITING FOR MORE THAN TWO she answered. “I do.” hours in a suite of the Hotel Riviera, enough time In the early morning hours, Howard asked Vallejo to leave. Finally alone, Castro slipped to bathe, dress and apply makeup, then take it his arms around the American journalist and all off to get ready for bed. But at 11:30 p.m. on the two lay on the bed, where, as Howard recalled in her diary, Castro “kissed and ca- that February night in Havana in 1964, Howard, ressed me … expertly with restrained passion.” an American correspondent with ABC News, “He talked on about wanting to have me,” finally heard a knock at the door. She opened it Howard wrote, but “would not undress or go all the way.” “We like each other very much,” and saw the man she had been waiting for: Fidel Castro told her, admitting he was having Castro, the 37-year-old leader of the Cuban revolution and one of trouble finding the words to express his reluc- tance. “You have done much for us, you have ¶ LAmerica’s leading Cold War antagonists. “You may be the prime written a lot, spoken a lot about us. But if we minister, but I’m a very important journalist. How dare you keep me go to bed then it will be complicated and our waiting,” Howard declared with mock anger. She then invited Castro, relationship will be destroyed.” He told her he would see her again—“and accompanied by his top aide, Rene Vallejo, into her room. ¶ Over the that it would come naturally.” Just before the sun rose over Havana, Castro tucked Howard next few hours, they talked at length about everything from Marxist ERWITT/MAGNUM ELLIOTT PHOTO: PAGE PREVIOUS in, turned out the lights and left. theory to the treatment of Cuba’s political prisoners. Howard and Howard’s trip to Havana in the winter of Castro reminisced about President John F. Kennedy, who had been 1964 was pivotal in advancing one of the most unusual and consequential partnerships assassinated just a few months before. Castro told her about his trip in the history of U.S.-Cuban relations. She be- to Russia the previous spring, and the “personal attention” he had came Castro’s leading American confidant, as received from “brilliant” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Howard well as his covert interlocuter with the White House —the key link in a top-secret back admonished Castro for the repressive regime he was creating in channel she singlehandedly established be- Cuba. “To make an honorable revolution … you must give up the tween Washington and Havana to explore the possibility of rapprochement in the aftermath notion of wanting to be prime minister for as long as you live.” of the Cuban missile crisis. From mid-1963 to “Lisa,” Castro asked, “you really think I run a police state?” “Yes,” the end of 1964, Howard secretly relayed mes- 86 | POLITICO MAGAZINE Polaroid photos taken with Fidel Castro’s camera at his first meeting with Lisa Howard in Havana on April 21, 1963. sages from Cuba’s revolutionary regime to the fied official documents and, most important, diences on the lecture circuit. “I wanted to talk White House and back again; she also used Howard’s own unpublished diaries and let- to people who were making news. I wanted to her reporting skills and high-profile perch at ters, can the story finally be told of how one be there on the spot when history was being ABC to publicly challenge the Cold War mind- tenacious journalist earned the trust of the written.” So, in 1960, while living in New York set that Castro was an implacable foe of U.S. legendary leader of the Cuban revolution, and City with her husband, Walter Lowendahl, interests. Her role as peacemaker was built on cajoled two U.S presidents into considering and two daughters, Howard abandoned her a complex, little-understood personal rapport peaceful coexistence with him. acting career, grabbed a tape recorder and be- she managed to forge with Castro himself—a gan scoring exclusive radio interviews as an relationship that was political and personal, *** unpaid volunteer for the Mutual Radio Net- intellectual and intimate. work. She earned access to major political Today, almost no one remembers Lisa ISA HOWARD WAS BORN DOROTHY Jean figures, including then-Senator John F. Ken- Howard. But in the early 1960s, she was one Guggenheim to a middle-class nedy, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and of the most famous female TV journalists Jewish family in Ohio, but she even President Dwight Eisenhower. But it was in the United States—a glamorous former was first known to the world as Howard’s lengthy interview with Khrushchev soap opera star who reinvented herself as a TV’s “first lady of sin”—a designa- in September 1960—the first the Soviet lead- reporter and then climbed to the top of the Ltion Hollywood bestowed on her for playing er had granted to a reporter from the West— male-monopolized world of television news. temptresses, murderesses and thieves in for- that caught the attention of executives at ABC She became ABC’s first female correspon- gettable TV programs and second-rate movies News. In May 1961, ABC hired Howard, then dent and the first woman to anchor her own in the early 1950s. In 1957, she scored the re- 35, as its first-ever female correspondent; two network news show. Her influential role in curring role of Louise Grimsley in the popu- years later, the network gave her her own the media empowered her efforts on Cuba, lar CBS series “The Edge of Night.” But even show—a daily midafternoon broadcast geared even as it worried White House officials who as she gained attention in Hollywood, How- toward housewives called “Lisa Howard and were the targets of her ceaseless pressure to ard signaled far greater ambitions. “Though News with the Woman’s Touch.” change U.S. policy. a looker (5’3; 109 lbs; 35-23-35 from bust to At a time when women in television news In top-secret reports from the era, they hips),” read a cringeworthy 1953 cover story were typically relegated to reporting on fash- speculated about “a physical relationship be- in People Today, “Miss Sin prefers to think of ion, lifestyle and the weather, Howard’s was tween” Howard and Castro and worried she herself as the ‘sensitive-intellectual type’ who the first female face beamed into the living would use her position at ABC News to break is ‘going places.’” rooms of America offering authoritative cov- the story of Washington’s secret talks with the And she was. “I became more and more in- erage of national and international events on Cuban comandante. But both she and Castro terested in politics and world affairs … and less a daily basis. “Six changes of Puccis and six took the secret of their intimate diplomacy and less interested about the fate of Louise politicians in one day are par for the course for NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE LISA HOWARD COLLECTION HOWARD LISA ARCHIVE SECURITY NATIONAL to their graves. Only now, thanks to declassi- Grimsley,” Howard would later recount to au- Lisa Howard,” read a 1963 McCall’s Magazine MAY/JUNE 2018 | 87 From Starlet to Star Reporter ma. But U.S. officials soured on his anti-Amer- In just a few years, Lisa Howard transformed from a sultry soap opera star to ican rhetoric and his economic outreach to a leading TV journalist. “I wanted to be there on the spot where history was the communist Soviet Union. In the spring being written,” she later said of her metamorphosis. of 1960, Eisenhower authorized planning for a secret CIA paramilitary intervention to roll back the Cuban revolution and install a more compliant government in Havana, cutting diplomatic relations in January 1961. Kennedy inherited the covert operation, gave it the green light to proceed in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, and watched it explode into a major debacle when Castro’s militia de- feated the exile brigade in less than 72 hours. In frustration, he ordered a new program of covert operations against Cuba, known as Operation Mongoose, and a full economic blockade in early 1962—aggressive moves that persuaded Castro, who had recently de- clared Cuba a socialist state, to accept Soviet nuclear missiles as a deterrent to another U.S. invasion, leading to the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October, the world stood on the brink of nuclear Armageddon until Kenne- dy offered Khrushchev a secret deal: pulling U.S. missiles out of Turkey in exchange for removal of the missiles in Cuba. With Castro furious at Khrushchev for removing the weap- ons without consulting him, some Kennedy officials saw the opportunity to entice Castro back into the Western orbit; the CIA, howev- er, was determined to continue efforts to over- throw him. Meanwhile, the Kennedy admin- istration was forced to negotiate with Castro for the release of more than 1,000 members of the CIA-led invasion force taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba was obviously a major news story. But with tensions running high, the embargo in place and no direct travel between the two countries, few establishment reporters could gain access to the country, let alone an inter- view with its fiery leader.