The Kennedy Half-Century (18 page)

Even worse, Fidel Castro was informed about, and prepared for, the attack. By November 1960, Cuban and Russian intelligence realized the CIA was training anti-Castro exiles in Guatemala; and by early 1961, Soviet leaders knew that April 17 was the date selected for the invasion. A week before the assault, the
New York Times
reported that the Cuban government had reinforced military installations and deployed artillery and troops along the coast.
³⁶

Despite all the warning signs, Kennedy went ahead with the operation.
³⁷
On April 15, eight aging B-26 bombers painted with Cuban Air Force insignia dropped bombs on three of Castro’s air bases. Some Cuban T-33 jets survived, and they later helped repel the U.S.-backed paramilitary force. United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson, oblivious to what was actually happening, denied U.S. involvement before the U.N. General Assembly. When he learned the truth on April 16, he chided the CIA’s Dulles and Secretary of State Dean Rusk for keeping him in the dark. Worried that the American role was about to be revealed to the world, Kennedy canceled a second airstrike scheduled for April 17 even though the CIA insisted it was essential if the invasion were to succeed. JFK also ordered the USS
Essex
—on patrol in the West Indies—to steer clear of the fighting. Without American military support, the invading brigade didn’t stand a chance. Castro’s T-33s destroyed six of the B-26s and two ships. One hundred fourteen exiles were cut down on the beach; 1,189 others were thrown in jail to await possible execution.
³⁸

A few days later, Kennedy called Eisenhower and asked the former president to meet him at Camp David to discuss the crisis. “I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing,” Ike replied matter-of-factly, “It must be a success.” He asked Kennedy why he hadn’t provided air cover for the rebels. JFK answered that he had been worried about the Soviet response in Berlin. Eisenhower assured the president that the Communists only attacked when they detected weakness. “The failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would not otherwise do,” he warned.
³⁹
“Well,” said Kennedy, “my advice was that we must try to keep our hands from showing in the affair.” Eisenhower was stunned. “Mr. President, how could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to
do with it? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons?”
⁴⁰

The sad truth was that the inexperienced Kennedy had not paid enough attention to the details of the plan, deferred to some military and civilian aides too much, and failed to think through the consequences of his actions.
⁴¹
For example, advisers had assured him that the paramilitaries could retreat to the safety of Cuba’s Escambray Mountains if the worst happened. However, the Escambray lay eighty miles from the invasion point over a treacherous stretch of swampland. No one had studied the map with sufficient care. The operation was poorly planned and sloppily executed.
⁴²

Kennedy loyalists tried to pin the blame for the defeat on everyone but the president. Eisenhower served as a convenient scapegoat for a brief time.
⁴³
To his credit, JFK accepted full responsibility for the fiasco in short order. “There’s an old saying,” he told the press, “that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan … I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious.” The American people appreciated the president’s candor, and they rallied behind their leader at a time of crisis. By the end of April, Kennedy’s approval ratings had soared above 80 percent.
⁴⁴
Nevertheless, the incident caused considerable damage to America’s reputation abroad and strengthened ties between Havana and Moscow.
⁴⁵
Almost immediately, Castro issued an official declaration that Cuba was a Marxist-Leninist country.
⁴⁶
The following year, Castro allowed the USSR to put nuclear missiles in Cuba, a decision that triggered the most serious crisis of the Cold War. The Bay of Pigs incident had occurred in Kennedy’s first hundred days in office and badly tarnished his administration’s reputation both in Washington and many foreign capitals. “How could I have been so stupid?” Kennedy was said to have muttered on more than one occasion.

There had been outside pressures on Kennedy to act precipitously. The president of Guatemala told Kennedy that he wanted the Cuban paramilitaries out of his country by the end of April.
⁴⁷
Cuban expats wanted Castro’s head on a platter without delay. No doubt President Kennedy was also motivated by a political need to project a tough-on-Communism image. He remembered the attacks on President Truman as insufficiently resolute against the Reds, and he wasn’t going to yield that ground again to the Republicans.
⁴⁸
Kennedy himself had criticized the Eisenhower administration during the campaign for showing weakness toward Cuba. For these reasons and more he had felt compelled to act.
⁴⁹
But even this major blunder did not lessen the Kennedy administration’s resolve to eliminate Castro. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the president approved Operation Mongoose, a program of secret military missions, sabotage, and assassination plots designed to topple the Castro regime. “The lesson Kennedy drew from the Bay of Pigs was not
that he should talk to Castro, but that he should intensify his efforts to overthrow him.”
⁵⁰
JFK’s unrelenting hostility toward Castro made it exceedingly difficult for any of his successors to reverse course—and none of them has done so in a fundamental way during the fifty-four years Fidel or his brother Raul have governed Cuba.

Cuba was only a part of Kennedy’s global efforts to contain the spread of Communism. In Asia, a carrot-and-stick approach was employed. Foreign aid to the region was combined with the dispatch of Green Berets to Vietnam and military supplies to Laos. Laos had been on the president’s plate from the very beginning. Today, most Americans associate the Vietnam War with the Kennedy presidency, but in 1961, the conflict in Laos seemed like the larger challenge. The day before the inauguration, Eisenhower had told Kennedy that he might need to send troops to the country to prevent a Communist takeover and chain reaction in Asia. Arthur Schlesinger suggested that JFK may have “spent more time on Laos than on anything else” during the first sixty days of his administration. Laos was an artificial construct, a product of the 1954 Geneva Accords that had divided French Indochina into three separate countries, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Prince Souvanna Phouma—Laos’s first prime minister—enjoyed the support of the Laotian people but alienated Washington by trying to form a coalition government with the Pathet Lao, the local Communist group led by his half brother.

Haunted by the prospect of a future “domino effect” in Asia, Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to begin looking for ways to replace Souvanna. In 1958 a staunch anticommunist, Phoui Sananikone, seized power and blacklisted the Pathet Lao, which immediately triggered a civil war. When it became clear that Phoui’s army was no match for the Pathet Lao, the CIA supported a coup that brought a pro-American general, Phoumi Nosavan, to power. Phoumi’s ham-fisted policies divided the country even further. This opened the door to Soviet intervention, and Laos was soon flooded with Russian-made weapons. Kennedy’s advisers urged the dispatch of troops to Laos, but the president resisted; the Bay of Pigs debacle had made him skeptical of Pentagon recommendations.
⁵¹
That skepticism deepened when Joint Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer said that he could “guarantee victory” in Laos if he were “given the right to use nuclear weapons.” Instead, JFK decided to bluff Moscow by mobilizing his warships and troops in Asia. He also sent Secretary Rusk and Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman to Geneva to negotiate an agreement.
⁵²

In the midst of all this foreign intrigue, President Kennedy arrived in Canada for his first international trip in mid-May. After addressing the Canadian
Parliament, Kennedy joined Prime Minister John Diefenbaker for a tree planting ceremony at Government House. As soon as his spade hit the soil, the president felt a sharp twinge in his back. His physician described the pain that followed as “something like a steady toothache.” The muscles between Kennedy’s lumbar vertebrae and sacrum went into spasms and he began receiving injections of novocaine. When he got back to Washington, he was taken off Air Force One with a forklift and hobbled across the tarmac on a pair of crutches. “Remarkably, all during this period and until the
New York Times
published a fairly explicit account on June 9, the President’s condition was known only to his doctors. With a round of delicate European visits coming up … not a hint of his indisposition went beyond the Oval Office.”
⁵³

His ailment notwithstanding, Kennedy began an emphasis on the space program as a way to keep pace with the Soviets. On May 25, shortly before leaving for Europe, he outlined a bold new vision for America’s space program. In the wake of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s triumphant orbit around the earth, the president told Congress that the nation should “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” “No single space project in this period,” he added, “will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Kennedy’s larger goal was to show the world that the United States was still the global leader in science, since developing nations might want to be aligned with the side demonstrating technological superiority. Or, as Vice President Johnson put it: “In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.” Furthermore, the goal of landing a man on the moon meshed nicely with Kennedy’s futuristic, adventuresome vision for the New Frontier, one that held special appeal for young people.
⁵⁴

No one knew until many years later that Kennedy had first suggested sending U.S. astronauts to Mars instead of the moon, or that Robert Seamans, Jr., NASA’s associate administrator, was the person who talked him out of it. “Bob told me the story of working three days and nights [putting] together … the case for [going] to the moon,” says Chuck Vest, one of Seamans’s former colleagues. “Suppose the president had gotten up in this inspirational speech and set a goal that was not only audacious, but couldn’t be accomplished? The goal had to be right and Bob played a … major role in doing that.”
^55
h

Kennedy’s daring moon goal probably would have fallen flat if the Soviets hadn’t taken the lead in space. Dan Fenn, who worked as a Kennedy aide before becoming the initial director of the JFK Library, believes that Cold War considerations came first in the president’s mind. “Kennedy said, ‘Look—I don’t care that much about space,’ ” Fenn says. “ ‘If we’re going to spend a billion dollars, I’d rather spend it looking for a cure for cancer. But given the competition with the Soviets, that’s what I care about and that’s why I want to do this.’ ” Even so, Kennedy had second thoughts as his term progressed. “Why should we spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?” he asked a surprised NASA administrator James Webb in September 1963. Kennedy was looking for ways to save money and even approached Khrushchev about a Soviet-American partnership to reach the moon. When Khrushchev responded favorably, JFK ordered Webb to make it happen. But the president died before the head of NASA could carry out his orders.
⁵⁶
If JFK had lived and Russian cosmonauts had walked on the moon alongside U.S. astronauts, Kennedy’s legacy would be quite different than it is.
⁵⁷

In any case, the moon speech gave Kennedy added confidence as he departed for Europe—and so did the powerful drugs he was taking. Without telling anyone, the president had arranged a separate flight for a physician named Max Jacobson (aka Dr. Feelgood), who had been giving him “amphetamines and back injections of painkillers” for months. Jacobson, a borderline quack who had made a name for himself prescribing “speed” to celebrities, was also giving Jackie narcotics for postpartum depression.
⁵⁸
Kennedy had started seeing the New York doctor the previous year when he had needed relief from campaign-related aches and pains. After the election, the president kept Jacobson on the payroll; the doctor’s services helped preserve his image as a healthy, robust leader. Kennedy was also receiving medicines from his personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell, who injected her boss’s back with two or three procaine shots each day. It is anyone’s guess how much these drugs affected Kennedy’s mood and judgment, but it is impossible to argue they had no effect whatsoever.
⁵⁹

On May 31, 1961, Air Force One touched down at Orly Airport in Paris. President Kennedy needed to reassure President Charles de Gaulle of his commitment to France’s security. After a series of preliminary meetings, JFK rode with de Gaulle in a “big open car … up the Champs Elysées” to the Arc de Triomphe, where, in a touching state ceremony, he rekindled the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Mrs. Kennedy absorbed the
somber images and quiet dignity of the occasion; it was a poignant way to pay tribute to fallen heroes.