An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (60 page)

Diem’s satisfaction with Johnson’s visit partly rested on his understanding that he had won a convert to his cause. “I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, and other efforts,” LBJ told Kennedy on his return. “The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination,” Johnson advised, “. . . or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores.” Though Johnson did not urge the dispatch of combat troops, only military advisers, his rhetoric was apocalyptic: “The basic decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept.”

Kennedy had other advice that challenged Johnson’s evangelism and encouraged skepticism about larger commitments to a repressive Saigon government and a region of questionable importance to U.S. national security. From India, Galbraith, echoing his comments about Laos, warned JFK that spending “our billions in these distant jungles” would be of no value to the United States and of no harm to the Soviets. He wondered “what is so important about this real estate in the space age” and urged any kind of political settlement as preferable to military involvement. He conceded that this was a choice between “the disastrous and the unpalatable.” But he wondered “if those who talk in terms of a ten-year war really know what they are saying in terms of American attitudes.”

IN THE FIRST MONTHS
of his term, Kennedy’s focus on Laos, Vietnam, and the Congo paled alongside that on Cuba.
Look
journalist Laura Berquist Knebel observed that, whenever she saw Kennedy, he “nearly always” wanted to discuss Cuba, “his ‘albatross,’ as he used to call it.” During the 1960 campaign, he had already learned how frustrating Cuba could be as an issue. In 1958-59, he had been sympathetic to Castro’s revolution against the corrupt and repressive Batista regime. By 1960, however, he shared the growing perception in the United States that Castro, who may have begun as a “utopian socialist,” had abandoned his romantic idealism for an alliance with Cuban communists who were likely to help solidify his hold on power. The new regime in Havana seemed hell-bent on making the U.S. into a whipping boy and using widespread anti-American sentiment in Cuba to tie itself to Moscow and Peking. After facing attacks by liberals and Nixon during the presidential campaign for favoring an invasion by Cuban exiles, Kennedy had accepted Acheson’s advice and conspicuously avoided further comments on Cuba.

In early January 1961, Kennedy tried to stay above the battle, refusing to comment “either way” on Eisenhower’s decision to break relations with Cuba. He did not want to rule out the possibility of “a rapprochement” with Castro. He asked John Sharon, a Stevenson adviser on foreign policy, what he thought of the idea. He also questioned him about the Eisenhower economic sanctions: Were they working? Would the United States gain any advantage by ending them? A week before he took office, Kennedy had received a report Adlai Stevenson passed along from Chicago union leader Sidney Lens, who had just returned from Cuba. It confirmed the loss of freedoms under Castro but emphasized that the country largely supported him and that reporting by American journalists there was unreliable: They were “culling the negative and not reporting the positive.” In addition, Lens said that the U.S. embargo was not effective because other countries were filling the vacuum. Lens also warned that Castro spies had infiltrated the anti-Castro groups in America and were informing Castro about “their plans and conspiracies.” At the same time, Allen Dulles briefed the president-elect on a CIA plan to use Cuban exiles being trained in Guatemala to infiltrate Cuba and topple Castro. Without endorsing anything, Kennedy instructed Dulles to go ahead with the planning.

Two days after he became president, the CIA had begun urging Kennedy to move against Cuba. At a January 22 meeting of Rusk, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, Lemnitzer, Dulles, and other national security and foreign policy experts, Dulles emphasized that the U.S. had only two months “before something would have to be done about” the Cubans being trained in Guatemala. The urgency rested partly on the belief that Castro had plans to promote communism in Latin America, and that he “already had power among the people in the Caribbean countries and elsewhere, particularly in Venezuela and Colombia.” Because the CIA planners were now considering direct U.S. intervention, Rusk “commented on the enormous implications of putting U.S. forces ashore in Cuba and said we should consider everything short of this, including rough stuff.” He feared “we might be confronted by serious uprisings all over Latin America if U.S. forces were to go in.” He also worried that such a move might trigger “Soviet and Chi[nese] Com[munist] moves in other parts of the world.” The meeting ended with admonitions to consider “the so-called ‘shelf-life’ of the Cuban unit in Guatemala . . . [and] the question of how overtly the United States was prepared to show its hand.”

During the last week in January, Kennedy held two White House meetings on Cuba in which Lemnitzer and CIA planners emphasized that time was working against the United States. Castro was tightening his hold on the island and seemed likely to make Cuba a permanent member of the communist bloc, “with disastrous consequences to the security of the Western Hemisphere.” They proposed overthrowing Castro’s government by secretly supporting an invasion and establishing a provisional government, which the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS) could support. In response, Kennedy authorized continuing covert CIA operations, a revised CIA invasion plan, a prompt diplomatic initiative to isolate Castro, and a strenuous effort to keep these discussions secret. He also tried to ensure that no decision would be taken without his authority. “Have we determined what we are going to do about Cuba?” he asked McGeorge Bundy on February 6. “If there is a difference of opinion between the agencies I think they should be brought to my attention.”

Differences among his advisers about the results of an invasion did not give Kennedy much assurance. Bundy told him on February 8 that Defense and the CIA were much more optimistic than State about the outcome of an invasion. The military foresaw an invasion touching off “a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly.” And should there be no immediate uprising, the invaders could take refuge in the surrounding mountains and work toward the day when a critical mass of Cubans joined their cause. By contrast, State anticipated “very grave” political consequences in the United Nations and Latin America. Troubled by State’s predictions, Kennedy pressed advisers later that day “for alternatives to a full-fledged ‘invasion,’ supported by U.S. planes, ships and supplies.”

Kennedy now faced two unhappy choices. If he decided against an invasion, he would have to disarm the Cubans in Guatemala and risk public attacks from them for failing to implement Eisenhower’s plans to combat communism in the hemisphere. The CIA offered Kennedy no alternative: They “doubted that other really satisfactory uses of the troops in Guatemala could be found.” As O’Donnell later put it, a decision to scrap the invasion would then make Kennedy look like an “appeaser of Castro. Eisenhower made a decision to overthrow Castro and you dropped it.” Kennedy would have been faced with “a major political blowup.”

But an invasion might also produce an international disaster. “However well disguised any action might be,” Schlesinger told Kennedy, “it will be ascribed to the United States. The result would be a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States). Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative. At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.”

Kennedy shared Schlesinger’s concern. He remembered his own rhetoric about liberty, justice, and self-determination, and understood that a visible U.S. role in an invasion would justifiably be seen as a betrayal of the progressive principles to which he was supposedly committed. But he was also attracted to the idea of toppling a Castro government that seemed to have little regard for the democratic freedoms promised by the Cuban revolution or for the autonomy of other Latin countries, which Castro hoped to destabilize and bring into the communist orbit. During the February 8 meeting, Kennedy asked CIA planners if the Cuban brigade could “be landed gradually and quietly and make its first major military efforts from the mountains—then taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.”

The CIA and the military gave him assurances that the Cuban exiles could succeed without the participation of U.S. forces. On March 10, the Joint Chiefs told McNamara that “the small invasion force” of some twelve to fifteen hundred men “could be expected to achieve initial success. Ultimate success will depend on the extent to which the initial assault serves as a catalyst for further action on the part of anti-Castro elements throughout Cuba.” The Chiefs also predicted that the invading brigade “will have a good chance of sustaining itself indefinitely.”

In turn, the CIA endorsed and went beyond the Chiefs’ recommendations. At a meeting with JFK on the eleventh, Dulles and Richard Bissell, the agency’s deputy director of plans, predicted that Castro would not fall without outside intervention and that within a matter of months his military power would reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. “The Cuban paramilitary force if effectively used [in the next month] has a good chance of overthrowing Castro, or of causing a damaging civil war, without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action against Cuba.” Kennedy declared himself “willing to take the chance of going ahead; [but] . . . he could not endorse a plan that put us in so openly, in view of the world situation. He directed the development of a plan where US assistance would be less obvious.”

The CIA now assured the president that an invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in the Zapata region some hundred miles west of Trinidad, the original site for the attack, would look less like a “small-scale World War II amphibious assault” and more like “an infiltration of guerrillas in support of an internal revolution.” Although Dulles and Bissell warned that communist accusations of U.S. involvement were inevitable, they thought it preferable to the “certain risks” of demobilizing the Cuban exiles and returning them to the United States, where they seemed bound to launch ugly political attacks on the administration for losing its nerve.

Schlesinger urged Kennedy not to let the threat of political attacks push him into a questionable military operation. He saw “a slight danger of our being rushed into something because CIA has on its hands a band of people it doesn’t quite know what to do with.” Allen Dulles worried that if the CIA scotched the invasion and transferred the exiles from Guatemala to the United States, they would wander “‘around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.’ Obviously,” Schlesinger concluded, “this is a genuine problem, but it can’t be permitted to govern US policy.”

CIA revisions of the invasion plan muted Schlesinger’s warning. The CIA, Bundy told the president on March 15, “[has] done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials. . . . I have been a skeptic about Bissell’s operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer.”

Kennedy was still not so sure. At a meeting that day, he seemed to accept the essentials of the new plan but objected to a dawn landing, suggesting instead that “in order to make this appear as an inside guerrilla-type operation, the ships should be clear of the area by dawn.” Though the CIA returned the next day with the requested changes, which Kennedy approved, he “reserved the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing.”

Although planning went forward for an early-April invasion, Kennedy remained hesitant, and even a little distraught about what to do. Admiral Burke deepened Kennedy’s concerns on March 17, when he told him that “the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising.” On March 28, Schlesinger asked JFK, “What do you think about this damned invasion?” Kennedy replied, “I think about it as little as possible,” implying that it was too painful a subject with too many uncertainties for him to dwell on it. But of course it was at the center of his concerns. At yet other meetings about Cuba on March 28 and 29, Kennedy instructed the CIA to inform Cuban Brigade leaders that “U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to participate in or support the invasion in any way.” Kennedy also wanted to know whether the Cubans thought the invasion could succeed without U.S. military intervention and whether they wished to proceed under the limitations he had described. Brigade leaders responded that despite Kennedy’s restrictions, they wished to go ahead.

The willingness of the Cubans, the CIA, and the U.S. military to proceed partly rested on their assumption that once the invasion began, Kennedy would have to use American forces if the attack seemed about to fail. One of the invaders remembers being told, “If you fail we will go in.” The pressure for U.S. intervention was evident to Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, who opposed the plan. On March 31, he told Rusk, “If the operation appears to be a failure in its early stages, the pressure on us to scrap our self-imposed restriction on direct American involvement will be difficult to resist.” The danger, Bowles added, is that a failure would “greatly enhance Castro’s prestige and strength.” And Bowles saw the odds of a failure as two to one. He believed it better to scrap the invasion and live with Castro’s regime. The United States could then blockade any Soviet attempt to provide Cuba with large amounts of arms and use force, with likely OAS backing, against any overt Castro aggression in Latin America.