Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (18 page)

By contrast, Rusk and subordinates in the State Department advised Kennedy that an invasion could produce very grave political consequences in the U.N. and Latin America. In response, Kennedy asked whether the exiles could “be landed gradually and quietly . . . taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.” In short, was it possible to deceive the world about the sources of an anti-Castro attack? Even if they “landed gradually and quietly,” who would believe that they arrived in Cuba without U.S. support?

Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of operations and the heir apparent to Dulles, convinced Kennedy, or at least sold him on the fantasy, that it could be done by landing Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, an isolated inlet on Cuba’s south coast about a two-hour drive from Havana. But how could an armed force have found the wherewithal—the ships to transport them and the arms and munitions—to fight a pitched battle without the backing of the United States?

A Groton graduate and Yale Ph.D. in economics with a reputation for brilliance as an inventor of the U-2 spy plane, Bissell, with Dulles’s full backing, exuded confidence in his plans to oust Castro, which overcame Kennedy’s skepticism. Not only did Kennedy, Bobby, Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk mute concerns about the obvious criticism certain to come from complaints about U.S. complicity in making an invasion possible, but they also had to embrace the assumption that a force of fourteen hundred or so exiles could defeat a much larger army of defenders. When former secretary of state Dean Acheson asked Kennedy how many Cubans he could put on the beaches and how many Castro could bring up to oppose them, Acheson responded to Kennedy’s response by saying, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.”

Bissell advised Kennedy that if a battle on the beaches did not produce an immediate outburst of opposition to Castro across the island, the invaders would be able to escape into the nearby Escambray Mountains, where they could become a rallying force for a civil war that would eventually topple Castro. But Bissell neglected to tell Kennedy that to reach the mountains the invaders would have to cross some eighty miles of impassable swampland. Bissell didn’t think it would ever come to that; he assumed that Kennedy would feel compelled to use U.S. forces to ensure against such a setback. In fact, the CIA planners did not believe the operation could succeed without direct U.S. military intervention, which they didn’t tell Kennedy. Concerned, however, that Kennedy might just stand by his refusal to use American forces, Bissell arranged with American Mafia members, whose profitable gambling and prostitution operations in Cuba had been ended by the new regime, to try to assassinate Castro, transferring funds from the invasion budget to “pay the Mafia types.” It was a measure of the shadowy world in which the CIA and Bissell in particular operated that they could consort with shady characters to kill a foreign head of government and use secret budgetary resources to pay for such criminality.

In brief, having been tasked, in the bureaucratic jargon of the day, to take down Castro, Bissell, joined by others in the CIA and U.S. military, would not declare themselves incapable of finding a way; they had extraordinary power at their command and every confidence that they could overturn Castro’s government.

The emerging assumption of Kennedy and his White House advisers that they could successfully screen themselves off from domestic and foreign recriminations over a failed attack was more unrealistic than the conviction of U.S. officials that a stumbling attack would compel a White House response. Walt Rostow concluded that military planners as well as Bissell and others at the CIA believed administration passivity in the face of defeat was “inconceivable.” As Kennedy later told Dave Powers, the CIA and the military “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.” But not entirely: It was difficult for the CIA-military planners to imagine that a president ready to authorize an operation would not take the next logical step to ensure its success. Their motto could have been, You don’t get into a fight unless you intend to go all out to win.

Schlesinger, who had become a part of the conversation as an advocate of the president’s domestic and international standing, echoed Rusk’s concern that any invasion ascribed to the United States would produce “a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. . . . Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative,” he told Kennedy three weeks into his term. “At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world.” Schlesinger suggested a possible “black operation” that could lure Castro into “offensive action” that in turn would give Kennedy political cover for striking at his regime. Schlesinger was as intent on protecting Kennedy’s standing as on toppling Castro. It was an unconvincing response to Kennedy’s hope of finding some way to fool people about an invasion; but in the midst of the Cold War, when almost anything seemed acceptable as an answer to communist expansion, especially in defense of an admired new president whose administration could be put in early jeopardy, even the smartest of advisers succumbed to the lure of international skulduggery. Such an unworkable proposal, however, eroded Schlesinger’s credibility with Kennedy and diminished his prospects of remaining a part of the president’s inner circle.

Part of Schlesinger’s problem was that American military planners unsuccessfully cooked up a similar plan. During the Bay of Pigs attack in April, a U.S. ship with 164 troops aboard dressed in Castro army uniforms were ready to stage an assault on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo as a pretext for an American military intervention to assure the success of the exiles. The plan had to be scrapped, however, when a small advance element of the force ran into a Cuban patrol. While Kennedy had limited knowledge of the operation—assuring him of plausible deniability—he concluded that the military’s eagerness to end Castro’s government outran common sense.

During February and March, Kennedy’s advisers struggled to come up with a better plan for bringing down Castro. But on March 11, prodded by renewed warnings from the CIA and military chiefs that delay would increase the difficulty of toppling Castro’s government, Kennedy declared himself “willing to take the chance going ahead.” It was also clear to him that if he dropped the invasion plan, it would mean having the exiles wandering around the United States complaining that Kennedy had lacked the nerve to risk a Cuban attack. It would open him to conservative complaints that he had failed to defend the national security. He feared accusations reminiscent of ones made against him during the campaign—that he was too inexperienced or, worse, that he was naïve about the Soviets and too ambivalent or wishy-washy to deal with the communist challenge.

As Bobby Kennedy said about his brother, “if he hadn’t gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed no courage. Eisenhower trained these people [the exiles]; it was Eisenhower’s plan; Eisenhower’s people all said it would succeed—and we turned it down.” Memories of McCarthy’s attacks on communist “fellow travelers” or liberal do-gooders too blind to communism’s peril and too weak to confront the Sino-Soviet threat influenced Kennedy’s decision to strike at Castro. The danger to Kennedy’s presidency was more internal than external—Castro, as Senator J. William Fulbright asserted, was “a thorn in the flesh” but “not a dagger in the heart.”

And so the safest political ground for Kennedy was to support a coup against Castro, but by means that masked America’s role. When the CIA reframed “the landing plan . . . to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials,” and Mac Bundy advised that they were close to a workable plan, Kennedy agreed to an invasion in mid-April. He tweaked the proposal by directing that it not be a “dawn landing . . . in order to make this appear as an inside-guerrilla-type operation.”

It was an act of self-deception for Kennedy and his advisers to believe that they could effectively disguise the U.S. part in an attack. How they could think that people everywhere would accept the fiction of U.S. passivity is a demonstration that even the smartest men can talk themselves into foolish actions they consider essential for their larger effectiveness. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

All manner of rationalization, however, could not quiet every doubt: Admiral Arleigh Burke cautioned that “the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising.” It was the Joint Chiefs’ way of implicitly pressuring Kennedy to understand that he might have to rely on direct U.S. military intervention to ensure a successful invasion. But Kennedy was determined not to use U.S. forces, which would confirm suspicions that the assault was nothing more than old-fashioned U.S. interventionism and would cripple the Alliance for Progress before it even started. At a meeting with national security advisers on March 29, Kennedy issued instructions telling exile leaders that “U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to participate in or support the invasion in any way . . . and whether they wished on that basis to proceed.” When the Cubans said yes, Kennedy gave the final order for the attack.

Undersecretary Chet Bowles was one of the few unpersuaded by the auto-intoxication gripping the White House—the illusion that somehow commentators everywhere would not see a direct U.S. part in the attack and that even if they did, the toppling of a communist dictator like Castro would mute complaints. In a memo to Rusk, which Bowles asked be shown to the president, Bowles cautioned that the risks to U.S. prestige were more than anyone in the administration was willing to acknowledge. He saw the chances of a successful invasion as no more than one in three and the pressure on the president to intervene if the operation faltered as difficult to resist. He told Rusk that it would “jeopardize the favorable position we have steadily developed in most of the non-Communist world . . . by embarking on a major covert adventure with such heavy built-in risks.”

Rusk assured Bowles that the operation was being “whittled down into a guerrilla infiltration” and filed away his memorandum. Rusk apparently believed that the attack could be kept so low-key that Kennedy didn’t need to hear Bowles’s concerns. Or more likely, Rusk was unwilling to press the case against a badly flawed plan Kennedy had decided to follow. It was a demonstration of his reluctance to be little more than a cipher in an administration intent on running foreign policy from the White House. It would do more to diminish Rusk in Kennedy’s eyes than to increase Kennedy’s regard for him as a smart adviser.

While Kennedy liked Rusk as a person, he came to see him as terribly ineffective in managing the State Department and, more important, as failing to provide helpful advice on Cuba and much else. Jackie Kennedy recalled that he saw Rusk as someone who “could never dare to make a decision. . . . Jack used to come home some nights and say, ‘Goddamn it, Bundy and I get more done in one day in the White House than they do in six months in the State Department.’ . . . And he used to say that sending an order to Rusk at the State Department was ‘like dropping it in the dead letter box.’”

Richard Goodwin also questioned the viability of the invasion, warning that it couldn’t succeed without direct U.S. military intervention, which would result in a bloodbath for the Cubans who would fight to save Castro. To “get rid of this irritating young man,” as Goodwin recalled it, Bundy, confident that he knew better than the so-called Latin American expert, urged him to go see Rusk. Rusk was as unprepared to give Goodwin a serious hearing as Bundy: Rusk “listened patiently to my monologue, then—I’ll never forget it—leaned back in his chair, pressed his fingertips together, hovered for a moment in this pose of thoughtful concentration, and then, slowly, pausing between each phrase: ‘You know, Dick, maybe we’ve been oversold on the fact that we can’t say no to this thing.’ . . . I was beginning to understand the secret of Rusk’s extraordinary staying power—say little, and, above all, go with the flow.”

At an April 4 meeting in the State Department between Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Fulbright echoed Bowles’s and Goodwin’s objections, arguing that taking down Castro would be like swatting a fly with a hammer: A U.S.-sponsored invasion was wildly out of proportion to the threat and would badly compromise America’s international standing, he said.

Schlesinger also cautioned that, “no matter how ‘Cuban’ the equipment and personnel, the US will be held accountable for the operation.” On balance, he favored continued quiet anti-Castro actions but opposed an invasion. Against his better judgment, however, he fell into line with Kennedy’s command. It is an example of a brilliant critic who sacrificed his independent judgment to the attractions of continuing access to power. Specifically, on April 7, the week before the attack,
New Republic
editor Gilbert Harrison gave Schlesinger an advance look at an article, “Our Men in Miami,” describing CIA involvement with Cuba’s exiles. Schlesinger believed that publication “would cause great trouble.” He struggled over what to do—discourage Harrison from printing it or asking him to put patriotism above the public’s right to hear the details of a questionable foreign policy action. He resolved the question by asking Kennedy’s judgment.

The president predictably asked that Schlesinger do all he could to stop publication. Schlesinger successfully persuaded Harrison not to go ahead, but it “made me feel rather unhappy,” he recalled. Kennedy had no regrets then or later about repressing a story that told the truth about America’s role in a reckless operation. When he spoke to the American Newspaper Publishers Association ten days after the Bay of Pigs operation had failed, Kennedy did not commend some in the press for anticipating the administration’s miscalculations, but cautioned them to think of the need for “a change in outlook . . . tactics . . . and missions,” warning that Moscow was receiving through “our newspapers information they would otherwise have to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage.” Although he assured the publishers that he would be scrupulous about press freedom, his Cold War warnings stirred fears of administration censorship.