An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (61 page)

“No one,” Schlesinger said later, “expected the invasion to galvanize the unarmed and the unorganized into rising against Castro at the moment of disembarkation. But the invasion plan, as understood by the President and the Joint Chiefs, did assume that the successful occupation of an enlarged beachhead area would rather soon incite organized uprisings by armed members of the Cuban resistance.” Dulles and Bissell, Schlesinger also pointed out, “reinforced this impression” by claiming “that over 2,500 persons presently belonged to resistance organizations, that 20,000 more were sympathizers, and the Brigade, once established on the island, could expect the active support of, at the very least, a quarter of the Cuban people.” A CIA paper of April 12 on “The Cuban Operation” estimated that “there are 7,000 insurgents responsive to some degree of control through agents with whom communications are currently active.” The paper conceded that the individual groups were “small and very inadequately armed,” but after the invasion the Agency hoped to supply them with air drops and make “every effort . . . to coordinate their operations with those of the landing parties.”

In the days leading up to the attack on April 17, Kennedy continued to hear dissenting voices. At the end of March, he asked Dean Acheson what he thought of the proposal to invade Cuba. Acheson did not know there was one, and when Kennedy described it to him, Acheson voiced his skepticism in the form of a question: “Are you serious?” Kennedy replied, “I don’t know if I’m serious or just . . . I’m giving it serious thought.” When Acheson asked how many men Castro could put on the beach to meet the nearly 1,500 invaders and Kennedy answered 25,000, Acheson declared, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.” Schlesinger peppered JFK with memos and private words about the injury to U.S. prestige and his presidency; Rusk lodged muted protests; and Fulbright, who as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had been briefed about the plan, spoke forcefully against U.S. hypocrisy in denouncing Soviet indifference to self-determination and planning an invasion of a country that was more a thorn in the flesh than a dagger in the heart.

These warnings reinforced Kennedy’s own considerable doubts about so uncertain an operation. Allen Dulles countered them by saying, “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this. But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, ‘I believe it will work.’ And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala.” Dulles emphasized that there was small risk of failure and no risk of U.S. involvement that would sacrifice American credibility when it came to professing regard for self-determination. Dulles clearly could not foresee later critical assessments by historians complaining that CIA operations overturning a popular government in Guatemala City solidified America’s reputation as an imperial power hypocritically ignoring commitments to democracy for all peoples. Or, if he did foresee this, he found it easy enough to ignore when pressing the president about Cuba.

Other subtle psychological impulses were at work in persuading Kennedy to approve the invasion plan. One element was Kennedy’s conception of military action. The possibility of a nuclear war was abhorrent to him, but the idea of patriotic men prepared to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their country was an entirely different matter. He saw no higher recommendation for someone than patriotic courage. Schlesinger remembered how much the commitment of the Cuban Brigade moved Kennedy. The invasion also had a romantic appeal for him, the quality of an adventure like that which had drawn Kennedy to command a PT boat. He and Bobby shared an affinity for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and their urbane hero. Bissell, who did so much to sell Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, seemed to be something of a real-life Bond himself—an Ivy League graduate, socially sophisticated, tall and handsome, “civilized, responsible,” “a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts.” His description of himself as “a man-eating shark” delighted the Kennedys.

Despite Dulles’s assurances, the operation had the code name “Bumpy Road.” Moreover, because Kennedy did not entirely trust Dulles’s predictions, he kept emphasizing in the two weeks before the invasion that it needed to “appear as an internal uprising” and that “the United States would not become overtly engaged with Castro’s armed forces.” At a meeting on April 6, he insisted on “everything possible to make it appear to be a Cuban operation partly from within Cuba, but supported from without Cuba, the objective being to make it more plausible for US denial of association with the operation, although recognizing that we would be accused.”

Newspaper stories about anti-Castro forces being trained by Americans made it all the harder to deny U.S. involvement. Castro “doesn’t need agents over here,” Kennedy said privately. “All he has to do is read our papers.” At a news conference on April 12, with press stories predicting an imminent invasion, Kennedy was asked how far the United States would go “in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba.” He replied, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This Government will do everything it can . . . to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.” Two days later, Kennedy ordered Bissell to “play down the magnitude of the invasion” and to reduce an initial air strike by Cuban pilots flying from outside Cuba from sixteen to eight planes.

On Saturday, April 15, eight B-26s flying from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields. It was the beginning of what historian Theodore Draper later called “one of those rare events in history—a perfect failure.” The bombers destroyed only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes and left the invaders, traveling by boats from Nicaragua, vulnerable to air attacks before and after landing on the beaches. To give credence to a CIA cover story, the Agency arranged to have a ninth bomber with Cuban air force markings and bullet holes fly from Nicaragua to Miami, where it made an “emergency” landing and the CIA-trained pilot declared himself a defector who had flown from Cuba.

Adlai Stevenson, who was not among those the White House believed needed to know the truth, sincerely denied U.S. involvement before a U.N. General Assembly committee considering charges of United States “imperialist aggression” against Cuba. When the implausibility of the CIA cover plot quickly became evident, an outraged Stevenson complained to Rusk and Dulles on April 16, “I do not understand how we could let such an attack take place two days before debate on the Cuban issue in GA.” Nor could he understand “why I could not have been warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us.” He saw the “gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action.”

A second planned air strike in support of the invasion on the morning of April 17 became a casualty of the CIA’s unraveling ruse. Until the brigade could establish a beachhead and make a plausible case for the fiction that their B-26s were taking off from and landing on the beach, Kennedy, who was keeping a low profile at his retreat in Glen Ora, Virginia, grounded the exiles’ sixteen planes. After giving the order by phone to Rusk, Kennedy paced “the room in evident concern,” worried now that the whole operation might prove to be a fiasco. “Those with him at Glen Ora,” Schlesinger recorded, “had rarely seen him so low.” When Bundy passed Kennedy’s order along to Dulles’s two principal deputies, they warned that “failure to make air strikes in the immediate beachhead area the first thing in the morning (D-Day) would clearly be disastrous.” When informed of the president’s decision, other CIA planners concluded that “it would probably mean the failure of the mission.”

The failure, which became evident by Tuesday afternoon, April 18, resulted less from any decision about air attacks than from the flawed conception of the plan—illusions about an internal uprising and 1,400-plus invaders defeating Castro’s much larger force. By noon of April 18, Mac Bundy told Kennedy that “the situation in Cuba is not a bit good. The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others. . . . The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” Kennedy had no intention of sending in a U.S. rescue mission, however bad the situation might be.

Kennedy’s poise in the face of the Bay of Pigs defeat began to crumble during the afternoon and evening of April 18. Admiral Burke recalled that at an hour-and-a-half White House meeting with the president and his principal advisers, “nobody knew what to do. . . . They are in a real bad hole,” Burke recorded, “because they had the hell cut out of them. . . . I kept quiet because I didn’t know the general score.” Because Burke had been less demonstrative than Lemnitzer in his support of the invasion, Bobby Kennedy called him after the meeting to say that the president needed his advice and intended to bypass “the usual channels of responsibility in the management of the crisis.” Burke had no answers, and Kennedy reconvened his advisers around midnight in the Cabinet Room. Coming from a White House reception for Congress dressed in white tie and tails, Kennedy reviewed the deteriorating situation for four hours without success. Bissell and Burke pressed for the use of carrier planes to shoot down Castro’s aircraft and for a destroyer to shell Castro’s tanks. But Kennedy stuck to his resolve not to intervene directly with U.S. forces. He later told Dave Powers that the Chiefs and the CIA “were sure I’d give in to them. . . . They couldn’t believe that a new President like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

On Tuesday morning, Castro’s air force had sunk the brigade’s principal supply ship with ten days’ ammunition and most of its communication equipment. By late that afternoon, Castro had pinned down the invaders with a force of twenty thousand men and Soviet tanks, while his arrest of twenty thousand potential opponents had guarded against the CIA-predicted internal uprising. As for plans of escape to the Escambray Mountains, an eighty-mile stretch of swampland between the beach and the mountains made this impossible. The outgunned and outmanned invaders faced dying on the beaches in a hopeless fight or surrender. Almost 1,200 of the 1,400-plus attackers gave up.

Kennedy at first tried to put the best possible face on the failed invasion, which was obviously a U.S.-sponsored operation. During lunch on Tuesday with Schlesinger and James Reston, he described the defeat as “an incident, not a disaster.” When asked about the blow to American prestige, he responded philosophically: “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power. No doubt we will be kicked in the can for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.” He felt he had made a mistake in keeping Dulles at the CIA. He did not know him and had been unable to assess his advice wisely. He saw the necessity for someone in the Agency “with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I know I will be getting the exact pitch.” He believed he would be better off with brother Bobby as director. “It is a hell of a way to learn things,” he said, “but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with CIA.”

A six-month secret review by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s inspector general, blamed the Bay of Pigs failure largely on the CIA and confirmed Kennedy’s conviction that both Dulles and Bissell would have to resign. “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving office,” Kennedy told Dulles. “But under our system it is you who must go.” Although Dulles and Bissell blamed the canceled air strikes for the defeat, Kirkpatrick concluded that this was not “the chief cause of failure”; a better-conceived plan would never have confronted Kennedy with such a decision. Kirkpatrick saw the root cause in the CIA’s poor “planning, organization, staffing and management.” More specifically, he blamed the false assumption that “the invasion would, like a
deus ex machina,
produce a shock . . . and trigger an uprising,” and the “multiple security leaks” that alerted Castro to the attack and allowed him to respond effectively. CIA officials “should have gone to the President and said frankly: ‘Here are the facts. The operation should be halted.’ . . . The Agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically.”

Although the invasion had become a fiasco that cost more than a hundred lives and deeply embarrassed Kennedy and the United States, the president was determined not to compound his problems by publicly denying a U.S. role. But while he responded philosophically to the defeat in public, he was anything but composed in private. On April 19, Jackie told Rose that Jack “was so upset all day & had practically been in tears. . . . She had never seen him so depressed except once at the time of his operation.” Dave Powers recalled that “within the privacy of his office, he made no effort to hide the distress and guilt he felt.” At the end of the late-night meeting on April 18, he went into the Oval Office with Salinger and O’Donnell, where in the middle of a sentence he broke off the conversation and walked out into the Rose Garden. He stayed there for almost an hour, walking on the wet grass and keeping his grief to himself. The next morning, Salinger found him crying in his bedroom. At a meeting shortly after with Albert Gore, Kennedy, with messed hair and tie askew, seemed “extremely bitter” about the defeat.

Wire service journalist Henry Raymont, who had been in Cuba during the invasion, had similar recollections of Kennedy’s distress. When Raymont returned to the United States after several days in a Cuban jail on charges of being a CIA agent before being expelled from the country, Kennedy invited him to the White House. Raymont was eager for the chance to chide the president for being so foolish as to think that an uprising would greet the invasion. Any high school student in Cuba or any diplomat in Havana could have told you otherwise, Raymont planned to tell Kennedy. But when he got into the Oval Office, he found the president so full of self-recrimination and so dejected at his short-sightedness that Raymont only gently reinforced what Kennedy already understood about the reasons for the failure.