Berlin 1961 (27 page)

With Adenauer safely back in Bonn, President Kennedy took a break from his unfolding Cuba crisis to put on a white tie and tails and sip champagne with members of Congress and their spouses at the White House. They all basked in the elegance and charm that the Kennedys had brought to Washington.

Most of Kennedy’s guests didn’t know that the previous morning 1,400 Cuban exiles, armed and trained by the CIA in Guatemala, had begun their landing at the Bay of Pigs, nor that the operation was already heading for disaster.

Two days earlier, eight B-26 bombers with Cuban markings, launched from a secret CIA air base in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had failed in their preparatory strikes for the assault. They had destroyed only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes, leaving the landing party’s boats vulnerable even before they had run aground on unanticipated coral reefs.

Castro’s fighters sank two freighters loaded with ammunition, food, and communication gear. Many of the U.S.-backed Cuban brigade’s men had landed in the wrong locations, and all had insufficient supplies. On the morning of the white-tie gala, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had delivered to Kennedy the bad news: “The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had anticipated.”

Nevertheless, the Marine Band played on that evening, striking up “Mr. Wonderful.” A singer belted out the lyrics from the Broadway hit as the perfect couple with their perfect smiles, the president and the First Lady, descended red-carpeted stairs to enormous applause.

Jackie danced with senators. The president schmoozed, elevated by popularity ratings that still exceeded 70 percent.

At 11:45 p.m., the president pulled away from his guests for a meeting that would be the last chance to save the failing Cuba mission. It was a scene out of Hollywood: the president and his Cabinet members in white tie talking battle plans with a military leadership in their most formal dress uniforms, medals dripping from their chests. Meanwhile, in Cuba, men they had sent into battle were being cut apart. Although Kennedy had tried to preserve deniability by refusing to use American soldiers or planes in the operation, his fingerprints were all over the unfolding calamity.

Most of the military brass in the room had been in their jobs under Eisenhower when in January 1960 he had approved the plan to overthrow Castro. Allen Dulles, the sixty-eight-year-old CIA director whom Kennedy had kept on from the Eisenhower administration, was overseeing the operation. He had produced the first plan for the assault, modeled on a successful 1954 coup in Guatemala that had toppled a leftist government using 150 exiles and U.S. pilots flying a handful of World War II fighter planes. The CIA men involved in Guatemala had also served as Dulles’s point men for the new Cuba plan.

Most important at the meeting was Richard Bissell, who was the sort of high-intellect, high-class, high-secrecy figure that appealed to the Kennedy brothers’ spy world fascination. The tall, stooped former Yale economics professor was CIA director of plans and had direct charge of the Cuban operation. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, he had amused Kennedy by describing himself as a “man-eating shark” when the two men had first met over a dinner put on for the new president by CIA officers at the all-male Alibi Club.

Now working for Kennedy, Dulles and Bissell had put the final touches on a plan for a high-profile amphibious landing of some 1,400 exile soldiers. The notion was that the assault force’s success would somehow trigger an anti-Castro uprising among what U.S. intelligence estimated to be 25 percent of the population, spurred by 2,500 members of resistance organizations and 20,000 sympathizers.

Kennedy had never questioned their numbers, yet had ordered changes in the plan that had weakened its chances of success. He had altered the landing site from Trinidad, a Cuban town on the south-central coast, to the Bay of Pigs on the argument that the new site would allow a less spectacular nocturnal landing with less chance of opposition. Kennedy had insisted there be no air or other support traceable to the U.S. and had reduced the initial air strike from sixteen to eight planes—again, to “play down the magnitude of the invasion.” Berlin had factored in the president’s considerations: he wanted to avoid providing Khrushchev with any pretext for Soviet military action in the divided city through a too-direct U.S. involvement in the Cuban invasion.

Kennedy’s last-minute changes to the operation had required such quick fixes that the result was a number of oversights. No one had anticipated the Bay of Pigs’ treacherous coral reefs. Nor had anyone thought to replace the earlier site’s escape route for insurgents into the mountains, should matters go amiss. Also, leaks had been widespread. Already, on January 10, the
New York Times
had splashed a three-column headline across its front page:
U.S. HELPS TRAIN AN ANTI-CASTRO FORCE AT SECRET GUATEMALAN AIR-GROUND BASE.
Then, just hours ahead of the invasion, Kennedy had to intervene through aide Arthur Schlesinger to get the
New Republic
magazine to withhold a story that richly and accurately detailed the Cuban invasion plans.

“Castro doesn’t need agents over here,” Kennedy had complained. “All he has to do is read our papers.”

The April 17 invasion had produced a sharp exchange of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The Soviet leader, not yet knowing how badly the operation was going, fired a warning shot on April 18 at 2:00 p.m. Moscow time in the most threatening language he had yet employed with Kennedy. Making the Cuba–Berlin link, he said, “Military armament and the world political situation are such at this time that any so-called ‘little war’ can touch off a chain reaction in all parts of the globe.”

Khrushchev wasn’t buying Kennedy’s disclaimers, saying it was a secret to no one that the U.S. had trained the invasion force and supplied the planes and bombs. Warning Kennedy about the chances of a “military catastrophe,” Khrushchev vowed, “There should be no mistake about our position: We will render the Cuban people and their government all necessary help to repel armed attack on Cuba.”

Kennedy had responded to Khrushchev at about 6:00 p.m. Washington time on the same day. “You are under a serious misapprehension,” he protested to the Soviet leader. He recited all the reasons Cubans found the loss of their democratic liberties “intolerable,” and how that had bred growing resistance to Castro among more than 100,000 refugees. That said, he stood by the fiction of American noninvolvement and warned Khrushchev to also keep his hands off. “The United States intends no military intervention in Cuba,” he said, and if the Soviets intervened in response, then the United States would honor its obligations “to protect this hemisphere against external aggression.”

With that exchange fresh in his mind, Kennedy resisted all calls for greater American involvement. He rejected Bissell’s argument that he should urgently provide the exiles with limited U.S. air cover, with which Bissell argued victory could still be had. Bissell said all he required were two jets from the aircraft carrier USS
Essex
to shoot down enemy aircraft and support the stranded force.

“No,” said the president.

Just six days earlier, Kennedy had been irritated when aides expressed doubts about the mission. “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,” he had said. Now he was just as annoyed when told by the people who had gotten him into this mess that he couldn’t succeed without escalating military action in a manner that would more clearly show the U.S. hand.

“The minute I land one Marine, we’re in this up to our necks,” he told Bissell. “I can’t get the United States into a war and then lose it, no matter what it takes.” Moreover, Kennedy didn’t want another “American Hungary,” a situation in which the U.S. was perceived to have encouraged an uprising that in the end it did nothing to defend. “And that’s what it could be, a fucking slaughter. Is that understood, gentlemen?”

If the president didn’t want to use warplanes, argued Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, a hero of World War II and the Korean War, he could use a U.S. destroyer’s guns to help the Cuban brigade. Known as “31-knot Burke” for his tendency as admiral to drive his destroyers at boiler-breaking speed, Burke now wanted Kennedy to push up the throttle. He said Kennedy could change the whole course of battle if just one destroyer “knocked the hell out of Castro’s tanks,” which he insisted would be a relatively easy task.

“Burke,” the president fumed, “I don’t want the United States involved in this.”

“Hell, Mr. President, we
are
involved,” retorted Burke, speaking with the tone of a four-star to a young PT boat captain. He had seen often enough how political indecision could cost lives and shift battle outcomes.

Kennedy ended the three-hour meeting at 2:45 a.m. with a weak compromise. He approved a plan that would send six unmarked jets to protect the exile force’s B-26s as they dropped supplies and ammunition. But the bombers arrived an hour ahead of the U.S. escorts, and the Cubans shot down two of the planes.

When it was all over, Castro had killed 114 of the CIA’s trainees and had taken 1,189 prisoners. He had gained his enemies’ surrender after three days of fighting.

A
cheson immediately grasped the negative impact Kennedy’s Cuba failure would have on Khrushchev’s thinking and on Allied confidence. He considered it “such a completely un-thought-out, irresponsible thing to do.”

Speaking before diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute, he said, “The European view was that we were watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang, when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out.” He told his audience the Europeans were “amazed that so inexperienced a person should play with so lethal a weapon.”

With a tone of dismay, Acheson wrote to his former boss Truman after returning from his Europe trip, referring to his Rose Garden meeting with Kennedy but without mentioning the president’s name. “Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure,” he said, “I cannot imagine. Before I left it was mentioned to me and I told my informants how you and I had turned down similar suggestions for Iran and Guatemala and why. I thought that this Cuban idea had been put aside, as it should have been.”

He told Truman that the impact of Cuba on European thinking about Kennedy would be profound. “The direction of this government seems surprisingly weak,” he said of Kennedy. “So far as I can make out the mere inertia of the Eisenhower plan carried it to execution. All that the present administration did was to take out of it those elements of strength essential to its success. Brains are no substitute for judgment. Kennedy has, abroad at least, lost a very large part of the almost fanatical admiration which his youth and good looks have inspired.” Acheson told Truman that Washington was “a depressed town,” where “the morale in the State Department has about struck bottom.”

Reports of Acheson’s comments to diplomats-in-training made their way back to Kennedy, who asked to see a full transcript of the meeting. From that point forward, Acheson noticed “an unfortunate effect” on Kennedy’s trust in him and a sharp reduction in his level of personal access.

Acheson’s colorful criticism had cut too close to the bone.

MOSCOW

THURSDAY, APRIL
20, 1961

Khrushchev could hardly believe his good fortune.

He had known in advance that Kennedy would act in Cuba, and he had told columnist Lippmann as much at Pitsunda. Yet never in his fondest dreams had he anticipated such incompetence. In his first major foreign test, the new U.S. president had lived down to Khrushchev’s lowest expectations. Kennedy had demonstrated weakness under fire. He had lacked the backbone to cancel Eisenhower’s plans or the character to make them work as his own. He had lacked the resolve to bring to a successful conclusion an action of so much importance to American prestige.

Though Kennedy had avoided giving Khrushchev a pretext for a tit-for-tat response in Berlin, at the same time, through his failure, he had provided the Soviet leader valuable intelligence on the sort of man who was leading the U.S. “I don’t understand Kennedy,” Khrushchev said to his son Sergei. “Can he really be that indecisive?” He compared the Bay of Pigs unfavorably to his own bloody but bold intervention of Soviet troops in Hungary to ensure the country remained firmly in the communist sphere of influence.

That said, Khrushchev was concerned by the possibility that CIA chief Dulles, whom he had blamed for the U-2 incident the year before, might have executed the invasion to undermine preparations for a U.S.–Soviet summit. Khrushchev was also sufficiently self-centered to believe Kennedy may have launched his Cuban landing to humiliate the Soviet leader on his April 17 birthday. Instead of ruining his celebration, however, Kennedy’s failure would provide Khrushchev with an unanticipated gift.

The KGB reports on Kennedy that followed struck Khrushchev as simultaneously encouraging and troubling. On the positive side, the KGB was reporting from London—apparently from sources at the American embassy—that Kennedy had been telling colleagues in the wake of Cuba that he regretted having kept on Republicans like Dulles as CIA chief and C. Douglas Dillon at Treasury. At the same time, however, Khrushchev wondered what the Cuban operation said about the nature of the Kennedy presidency. Was the president really in control, or was he being manipulated by anticommunist hawks like Dulles? Was Kennedy himself a hawk? Or, more likely, did the botched plan suggest that Kennedy was perhaps something even more dangerous—an incalculable and unpredictable adversary?

Whatever the truth, what was indisputable was that Khrushchev’s fortunes had shifted dramatically for the better in the space of a single week. Very little could have provided a more dramatic shift in momentum than the combination of the Gagarin space triumph and the Bay of Pigs setback. It had been just six weeks since Khrushchev had met Ambassador Thompson in Siberia and relayed his reluctance to accept Kennedy’s invitation for a summit meeting.