Kennedy (53 page)

On July 19 fighting broke out between two nations friendly to the U.S., France and Tunisia, over a French base on Tunisian soil at Bizerte.

On August 13 the Communists closed off East Berlin through barricades, barbed wire and a stone wall.

On August 25 Brazil, our largest Latin-American neighbor, was thrown into a constitutional crisis by the resignation of President Quadros.

On August 30 the Soviet Union announced that it was breaking the three-year moratorium on nuclear testing with a series of high-megaton explosions.

On September 18, touring the Congo where fighting had broken out once again, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash, subjecting the UN to insistent Soviet demands for a Troika.

There were other foreign crises during these first eight months. There were others in the months that followed, one of them—in October, 1962—the most critical in our nation’s history. But these eight months were the darkest period for the President personally and for freedom—eight months in which he labored to fit our strength to our commitments and to reshape our ends and our means. Often his plans were altered by fast-moving events even before they were executed. “It is easier,” he commented somewhat sourly, “to sit with a map and talk about what ought to be done than to see it done.”

During these eight months he could at times be privately bitter about
the mistakes he had made, the advice he had accepted and the “mess” he had inherited. But, while learning his lessons, he never lost his sense of confidence. Red Fay has said that PT boat skipper Kennedy was cheerful in the South Pacific before the tide was turned against the Japanese simply because he was happy to be in the midst of it and certain of success in due time. In the crisis councils of various names and sizes that met daily or oftener in his office or in the Cabinet Room during this difficult eight-month period, President Kennedy generally displayed the same qualities. “Last year, in its way, was a pretty tough year too,” he said to me one noon en route from his office to the Mansion—referring to West Virginia, Truman’s attack, the Houston ministers and the TV debates. “I think we can handle whatever hits us.”

Nor did he lose his sense of humor. He opened one troubled NSC meeting with the remark: “Did we inherit these problems, or are these our own?” To a reporter he quipped, “The only thing that surprised us when we got into office was that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were.” When McGeorge Bundy or another aide would bring an urgent message to his desk, the President would ask, in a voice resigned to bad news and not wholly able to make light of it, “What’s happened now?” He liked quoting General MacArthur’s reminder to him in late April: “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.” And to another NSC meeting he remarked, “Oh, well, just think of what we’ll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me.”

The worst disaster of that disaster-filled period, the incident that showed John Kennedy that his luck and his judgment had human limitations, and the experience that taught him invaluable lessons for the future, occurred on April 17 to the Zapata Swamp at the Cuban Bay of Pigs. A landing force of some fourteen hundred anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized, trained, armed, transported and directed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was crushed in less than three days by the vastly more numerous forces of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. America’s powerful military might was useless, but America’s involvement was impossible to deny. Both publicly and privately the President asserted sole responsibility. Many wondered, nevertheless, how he could have approved such a plan. Indeed, the hardest question in his own mind after it was all over, he told one reporter, was “How could everybody involved have thought such a plan would succeed?” When I relayed to the President late in 1962 the request of a distinguished author that he be given access to the files on the Bay of Pigs, the President replied in the
negative. “This isn’t the time,” he said. “Besides—we want to tell that story ourselves.”

This is the time to tell that story—at least those parts about which I can speak with confidence. I am limited by the fact that I knew nothing of the operation until after it was over. When I asked the President a few days earlier about the bare hint I had received from another meeting, he replied with an earthy expression that too many advisers seemed frightened by the prospects of a fight, and stressed somewhat uncomfortably that he had no alternative. But in the days that followed the fiasco the President talked to me about it at length—in the Mansion, in his office and as we walked on the White House lawn. He was aghast at his own stupidity, angry at having been badly advised by some and let down by others, and anxious, he said, that I start giving some time to foreign affairs. “That’s what’s really important these days,” he added.

What was really important in the Bay of Pigs affair was the very “gap between decision and execution, between planning and reality” which he had deplored in his first State of the Union. John Kennedy was capable of choosing a wrong course but never a stupid one; and to understand how he came to make this decision requires a review not merely of the facts but of
the facts and assumptions that were presented to him.

The Eisenhower administration authorized early in 1960 the training and arming of a Cuban exile army of liberation under the direction of the CIA. Shortly before the Presidential election of 1960, it was decided (although Eisenhower was apparently not informed of the decision) that this should be a conventional war force, not a guerrilla band, and its numbers were sharply increased.

On January 20, 1961, John Kennedy inherited the plan, the planners and, most troubling of all, the Cuban exile brigade—an armed force, flying another flag, highly trained in secret Guatemalan bases, eager for one mission only. Unlike an inherited policy statement or Executive Order, this inheritance could not be simply disposed of by Presidential rescission or withdrawal. When briefed on the operation by the CIA as President-elect in Palm Beach, he had been astonished at its magnitude and daring. He told me later that he had grave doubts from that moment on.

But the CIA authors of the landing plan not only presented it to the new President but, as was perhaps natural, advocated it. He was in effect asked whether he was as willing as the Republicans to permit and assist these exiles to free their own island from dictatorship, or whether he was willing to liquidate well-laid preparations, leave Cuba free to subvert the hemisphere, disband an impatient army in training for nearly a year under miserable conditions, and have them spread the word that Kennedy had betrayed their attempt to depose Castro. Are you going
to tell this “group of fine young men,” as Allen Dulles posed the question later in public, “who asked nothing other than the opportunity to try to restore a free government in their country…ready to risk their lives…that they would get no sympathy, no support, no aid from the United States?” Would he let them choose for themselves between a safe haven in this country and a fighting return to their own, or would he force them to disband against their wishes, never to be rallied again?

Moreover, the President had been told, this plan was now or never, for three reasons: first, because the brigade was fully trained, restive to fight and difficult to hold off; second, because Guatemala was under pressure to close the increasingly publicized and politically controversial training camps, and his only choice was to send them back to Cuba, where they wished to go, or bring them back to this country, where they would broadcast their resentment; and third, because Russian arms would soon build up Castro’s army, Cuban airmen trained behind the Iron Curtain as MIG pilots would soon return to Cuba, large numbers of crated MIGs had already arrived on the island, and the spring of 1961—before Castro had a large jet air force and before the exile army scattered in discontent—was the last time Cubans alone could liberate Cuba. (With an excess of candor during the week prior to the landing, the President revealed the importance of this factor in his thinking when he stated in a TV interview, “If we don’t move now, Mr. Castro may become a much greater danger than he is to us today.”)

Finally, the President was told, the use of the exile brigade would make possible the toppling of Castro without actual aggression by the United States, without seeming to outsiders to violate our principles of nonintervention, with no risk of involvement and with little risk of failure. “I stood right here at Ike’s desk,” Dulles said to Kennedy (as Kennedy told me later), “and told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed,
¹
and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one.”

With heavy misgiving, little more than a week before the plan was to go into effect, President Kennedy, having obtained the written endorsement of General Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke representing the Joint Chiefs and the verbal assent of Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, gave the final go-ahead signal. He did not regard Castro as a direct threat to the United States, but neither did he see why he should “protect” Castro from Cubans embittered by the fact that their revolution had been sold out to the Communists. Cancellation of the plan at that stage, he feared,
would be interpreted as an admission that Castro ruled with popular support and would be around to harass Latin America for many years to come. His campaign pledges to aid anti-Castro rebels had not forced his hand, as some suspected, but he did feel that his disapproval of the plan would be a show of weakness inconsistent with his general stance. “I really thought they had a good chance,” he told me afterward, explaining it this way: If a group of Castro’s own countrymen, without overt U.S. participation, could have succeeded in establishing themselves on the island, proclaimed a new government, rallied the people to their cause and ousted Castro, all Latin America would feel safer, and if instead they were forced to flee to the mountains, there to carry on guerrilla warfare, there would still have been net gain.

The principal condition on which he insisted before approving the plan was to rule out any direct, overt participation of American armed forces in Cuba. Although it is not clear whether this represented any change in policy, this decision—while in one sense permitting the disaster which occurred—in another helped to prevent a far greater one. For had the U.S. Navy and Air Force been openly committed, no defeat would have been permitted, a full-scale U.S. attack would ultimately have been required, and—assuming a general war with the Soviets could have been avoided—-there was no point in beginning with a Cuban brigade in the first place. Once having openly intervened in the air and on the sea, John Kennedy would not have permitted the Cuban exiles to be defeated on the ground. “Obviously,” he said later, “if you are going to have United States air cover, you might as well have a complete United States commitment, which would have meant a full-fledged invasion by the United States.”

The results of such an overt unilateral intervention, “contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations,” as the President said, would have been far more costly to the cause of freedom throughout the hemisphere than even Castro’s continued presence. American conventional forces, moreover, were still below strength, and while an estimated half of our available Army combat divisions were tied down resisting guerrillas in the Cuban mountains, the Communists could have been on the move in Berlin or elsewhere in the world. Had such intervention appeared at all likely to be needed, Kennedy would never have approved the operation.

This decision not to commit U.S. forces emphasized the assumption underlying the pleas for the plan by its authors that it would succeed on its own. It also led to other restrictions designed to make the operation more covert and our involvement more concealed, restrictions which in fact impaired the plan’s military prospects.

Yet no one in the CIA, Pentagon or Cuban exile movement raised
any objection to the President’s basic condition. On the contrary, they were so intent on action that they were either blind to danger or willing to assume that the President could be pressured into reversing his decision once the necessity arose. Their planning, it turned out, proceeded almost as if open U.S. intervention were assumed, but their answers to the President’s specific questions did not. Could the exile brigade achieve its goals without our military participation? he asked. He was assured in writing that it could—a wild misjudgment, a statement of hope at best. Were the members of the exile brigade willing to risk this effort without our military participation, the President asked, and to go ahead with the realization that we would not intervene if they failed? He was assured that they were—a serious misstatement, due at least to bad communications on the part of the CIA liaison officers. But as the result of these assurances, the President publicly pledged at an April 12 press conference:

That pledge helped avoid any direct American attack the following week, thus limited our violation of international law and—despite pressures from the CIA and military—was never reversed or regretted by the President. But he was shortly to realize that he should have instead canceled the whole operation.

Early in the morning of Monday, April 17, 1961, the members of Cuban exile Brigade 2506—some fourteen to fifteen hundred Cubans of every race, occupation, class and party, well trained, well led and well armed—achieved tactical surprise in their place of landing, fought ably and bravely while their ammunition lasted, and inflicted heavy losses on a Castro force which soon numbered up to twenty thousand men. The proximate cause of their defeat, according to the full-scale investigation later conducted under the chairmanship of General Maxwell Taylor, was a shortage of ammunition, and the reasons for that shortage illustrate all the shortcomings of the operation.