Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (71 page)

But, as the saying goes, “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” Despite some Republican protests of voting fraud in Illinois, Nixon went back to California, where he lost the race for governor to Pat Brown in 1962. After that, as if he were finally leaving the national stage, he would famously tell reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

America got its youngest president, his beautiful young wife, its youngest attorney general in Jack’s brother Robert F. Kennedy (1925–68), and a new royal family whose regal intrigues were masked by sun-flooded pictures of family games of touch football.

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From
JOHN F. KENNEDY’S
inaugural address (January 20, 1961):

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. . . .

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

. . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

What happened at the Bay of Pigs?

In March 1961, during his first hundred days in office, Kennedy announced a program that perfectly symbolized his inaugural appeal to “ask what you can do for your country.” The Peace Corps would dispatch the energy of American youth and know-how to assist developing nations. Directed by another family courtier, Sargent Shriver, husband of John’s sister Eunice, the Peace Corps was the new generation’s answer to Communism, promoting democracy with education, technology, and idealism instead of the fifties rhetoric of containment. Linked with the Alliance for Progress, a sort of Marshall Plan aimed at Latin America, the Peace Corps was the visible symbol of the vigor that Kennedy wanted to breathe into a stale American system.

What the Peace Corps idealism masked was a continuing policy of obsessive anti-Communism that would lead to one of the great disasters in American foreign policy. This failure would bring America to its most dangerous moment since the war in Korea and, in the view of many historians, help create the mind-set that sucked America into the Vietnamese quicksand. It took its unlikely but historically fitting name from an obscure spot on the Cuban coast, Bahía de Cochinos. The Bay of Pigs.

If the operation had not been so costly and its failed results so dangerously important to future American policy, the Bay of Pigs fiasco might seem comical, a fictional creation of some satirist trying to create an implausible CIA invasion scenario.

The plan behind the Bay of Pigs sounded simple when put to the new president by Allen Dulles (1893–1961), the legendary CIA director and a holdover from the Eisenhower era, when his brother, John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), had been the influential secretary of state. It was Allen Dulles’s CIA operatives who dreamed up the Cuban operation involving a force of highly trained and well-equipped anti-Castro Cuban exiles called La Brigada during the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, part of a larger CIA venture called the Cuba Project aimed at overthrowing and if necessary assassinating Fidel Castro. As James Srodes writes in
Dulles,
his admiring biography of the CIA director, “Some of the schemes the CIA discussed with President Eisenhower (and later with President Kennedy) bordered on the lunatic. There were suggestions that Castro could be sprayed with hallucinogens, or his cigars laced with botulism, or his shoes dusted with thallium powder in the hope that his beard would fall out.”

Supported by CIA-planted insurgents in Cuba who would blow up bridges and knock out radio stations, the brigade would land on the beaches of Cuba and set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro, eliminating the man who had become the greatest thorn in the paw of the American lion. The most secret aspect of the plan, as a Senate investigation revealed much later, was the CIA plot to assassinate Castro using Mafia hit men Sam Giancana and John Roselli, who were also sleeping with Judith Campbell, the president’s steady partner. The Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to rid Cuba of Castro. (Giancana and Roselli were both murdered mob style in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Giancana was assassinated before he could testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee; Roselli testified, but his decomposing body was later found floating in an oil drum off Florida.)

For most of the century, since Teddy Roosevelt and company had turned Cuba into an American fiefdom in the Caribbean after the Spanish-American War, the island’s economy was in nearly total American control. Almost all the sugar, mining, cattle, and oil wealth of Cuba was in American hands. The Spanish-American War had also given the United States a huge naval base at Guantanamo. But American gangsters had a rich share, too. While American businessmen controlled the Cuban economy, the casinos and hotels of Havana, a hot spot in the Caribbean, were controlled by the Mafia from New Orleans and Las Vegas.

All that had come to an end in 1958, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara marched out of the hills with a tiny army and sent dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile. At first, Castro got good press notices in the United States and made a goodwill visit to Washington, professing that he was no Communist. But that didn’t last long.

Cuban Communism became a campaign issue in 1960 as Nixon and Kennedy tried to outdo each other on the Castro issue. As they campaigned, the plans for La Brigada’s invasion were being hatched by the CIA, a plan that had the enthusiastic encouragement of Vice President Richard Nixon and the nominal approval of Eisenhower. When Kennedy arrived in office, the plans only awaited the presidential okay. Briefed by Dulles himself before his inauguration, Kennedy agreed that preparations should continue. After his inauguration, momentum took over.

The CIA planners cockily pointed to their successful 1954 Guatemala coup that had installed a pro-American regime there as proof of their abilities. Before that, in 1953, the CIA had overseen a coup in Iran that installed the shah of Iran, an immediate success with much longer-term disastrous effects. But Cuba, as they were sadly going to learn, was not Guatemala. From the Cuban plan’s outset, the agency men in charge of the invasion (including a fanatical CIA operative named E. Howard Hunt, who also wrote third-rate spy novels and would later be involved in the Watergate debacle) bungled and blustered. Almost every step of the plan was misguided. The CIA overestimated themselves, underestimated Castro and the popular support he enjoyed, relied on sketchy or nonexistent information, made erroneous assumptions, and misrepresented the plot to the White House.

The secret invasion proved to be one of the worst-kept secrets in America. A number of journalists had uncovered most of the plan, and several editors, including those at the
New York Times,
were persuaded by the White House to withhold the information. When the curtain finally came down, it was on a tragedy.

On April 17, 1961, some 1,400 Cubans, poorly trained, under-
equipped, and uninformed of their destination, were set down on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. Aerial photos of the beaches were misinterpreted by CIA experts, and Cuban claims that there were dangerous coral reefs that would prevent boats from landing were ignored by invasion planners, who put American technology above the Cubans’ firsthand knowledge. CIA information showing the target beaches to be unpopulated was years out of date. The bay happened to be Fidel’s favorite fishing spot, and Castro had begun building a resort there, including a seaside cabin for himself.

The invasion actually began two days earlier with an air strike against Cuban airfields, meant to destroy Castro’s airpower. It failed to do that, and instead put Castro on the alert. It also prompted a crackdown on many suspected anti-Castro Cubans who might have been part of the anticipated popular uprising on which the agency was counting. Assuming the success of the air strike without bothering to confirm it, the agency didn’t know Castro had a number of planes still operable, including two jet trainers capable of destroying the lumbering old bombers the CIA had provided to the invaders. But these planes wouldn’t have counted for much if the air “umbrella” that the CIA had promised to La Brigada had materialized. President Kennedy’s decision to keep all American personnel out of the invasion squashed that, and Castro’s fliers had a field day strafing and bombing the invasion “fleet.” The CIA-leased “navy” that was to deliver the invasion force and its supplies turned out to be five leaky, listing ships, two of which were quickly sunk by Castro’s small air force, with most of the invasion’s supplies aboard.

Cuban air superiority was responsible for only part of the devastation. Castro was able to pour thousands of troops into the area. Even though many of them were untried cadets or untrained militia, they were highly motivated, well-equipped troops supported by tanks and heavy artillery. While the invasion force fought bravely, exacting heavy casualties on Castro’s troops, they lacked ammunition and, most important, the air support promised by the CIA. Eventually they were pinned down on the beaches, while American Navy fliers, the numbers on their planes obscured, could only sit and wonder why they had to watch their Cuban allies being cut to pieces. U.S. ships, their identifying numbers also pointlessly obscured, lay near the invasion beach, also handcuffed. Frustrated naval commanders bitterly resented their orders not to fire. In Washington, Kennedy feared that any direct U.S. combat involvement might send the Russians into West Berlin, precipitating World War III.

The sad toll was 114 Cuban invaders and many more defenders killed in the fighting; 1,189 others from La Brigada were captured and held prisoner until they were ransomed from Cuba by Robert Kennedy for food and medical supplies. Four American fliers, members of the Alabama Air National Guard in CIA employ, also died in the invasion, but the American government never acknowledged their existence or their connection to the operation.

What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Those were the immediate losses. The long-term damage was more costly. American prestige and the goodwill Kennedy had fostered around the world dissipated overnight. Adlai Stevenson, the former presidential contender serving as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, was shamed by having to lie to the General Assembly about the operation because he was misled by the White House. In Moscow, Kennedy was perceived as a weakling. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) immediately saw the Bay of Pigs defeat as the opening to start arming Cuba more heavily, precipitating the missile crisis of October 1962.

When American spy flights produced evidence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, America and the Soviet Union were brought to the brink of war. For thirteen tense days (recently dramatized in a film of that title that conveys much of the drama of the situation, if not all the facts), the United States and the Soviet Union stood toe to toe as Kennedy, forced to prove himself after the Bay of Pigs, demanded that the missile sites be dismantled and removed from Cuba. To back up his ultimatum, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to “quarantine” Cuba, and readied a full-scale American invasion of the island. With Soviet ships steaming toward the island, Soviet premier Khrushchev warned that his country would not accept the quarantine. People around the world nervously awaited a confrontation. Through back channels a secret deal was struck that the Soviets would dismantle the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba. On Sunday, October 28, Radio Moscow announced that the arms would be crated and returned to Moscow. Nuclear disaster was averted, temporarily.

The damage done to U.S. credibility by the Bay of Pigs fiasco had seemingly been undone. But the lesson of the foolishness of committing American military support to anti-Communism hadn’t really sunk in. Kennedy was still willing to make an anti-Communist stand in the world. The next scene would be as distant from America as Cuba was close, a small corner of Asia called Vietnam.

(Recently released documents also reveal that during the Missile Crisis and his entire presidency, JFK suffered from more ailments, was in much greater pain, and was taking many more medications than the press, public, or family members and close aides knew. Although his back problem was well known, Kennedy also suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening lack of adrenal function, along with digestive problems and other ailments. Taking as many as eight medications a day, Kennedy used painkillers such as codeine, Demerol, and methadone; anti-anxiety agents such as librium; Ritalin and other stimulants; sleeping pills; and hormones to keep him alive. For all his intense suffering, there is no suggestion that these ailments or the medications ever incapacitated President Kennedy. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that any presidential candidate who revealed this array of medical problems could be elected.)

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RACHEL CARSON
(1907–64), from
Silent Spring
(1962):

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.