An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (62 page)

Ill-timed health problems further rattled Kennedy. Immediately prior to and during the invasion on April 17 and 18, he struggled with “constant,” “acute diarrhea” and a urinary tract infection. His doctors treated him with increased amounts of antispasmodics, a puree diet, and penicillin, and scheduled him for a sigmoidoscopy.

For days after the defeat, Kennedy’s anguish and dejection were evident to people around him. At a cabinet meeting on April 20, Chester Bowles saw him as “quite shattered.” He would talk to himself and interrupt conversations with the non sequitur “How could I have been so stupid?” He felt responsible for the deaths of the valiant Cubans on the beaches. The episode even seemed to revive memories of his brother’s death in World War II. When he met at the White House to console the six-member Cuban Revolutionary Council, three of whom had lost sons in the invasion, Kennedy produced a photograph of Joe and explained, “I lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the war.” Kennedy described the meeting and the Bay of Pigs episode as “the worst experience of my life.” Weeks after the invasion, he told an aide one morning that he had not slept all night. “I was thinking about those poor guys in prison down in Cuba.”

Kennedy was not only angry at himself for having signed on to what in retrospect seemed like such an unworkable plan but also at the CIA and the Chiefs for having misled him. When newspapers began publishing stories blaming different officials except the Joint Chiefs for the debacle, Kennedy took note of the omission and told his aides that none of the decision makers was free of blame. He named Fulbright as the only one in the clear but thought that he also would have backed the operation if he had been subjected to the same barrage of misleading information about “discontent in Cuba, morale of the free Cubans, rainy season, Russian MIGs and destroyers, impregnable beachhead, easy escape into the Escambray, [and] what else to do with these people.”

To Kennedy’s credit, he had no intention of publicly blaming anyone but himself. He authorized a White House statement saying, “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility. . . . The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” He understood the impulse of some to shun their role in a failed operation. He quoted “an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” This was his defeat: “I’m the responsible officer of the Government,” he told the press.

Later that year, when
Time
began trying to use the Cuban disaster against the administration to help Republicans in 1962, Kennedy wrote publisher Henry Luce that “the testimony of the participants in an ill-fated failure should be taken with a good deal of caution.” If
Time
aimed “to clear the Defense Department and the CIA from all responsibility,” Kennedy declared an article it had published “a success.” The same was true if
Time
intended to demonstrate “the incompetence of the men who played a part in this venture.” But if the article hoped “to set the record straight,” Kennedy sardonically described its success as “more limited.” For the time being, he believed it not a good idea to rehash the Bay of Pigs failure. “I have felt from the beginning,” he told Luce, “that it would not be in the public interest for the United States to take formal responsibility for the Cuban matter other than the personal responsibility which I have earlier assumed.”

He was more interested in understanding why he had allowed so unsuccessful an operation to go forward than in assessing blame. True, he had some impulse to think, “They made me do it”: The false hopes pressed on him by the CIA and the Chiefs had led him astray. But “How could I have been so stupid?” was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed, he later told Schlesinger, that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The experience taught him “never to rely on the experts.” He told Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

More immediate concerns than understanding what had gone wrong were repairing the damage to Kennedy’s prestige and deciding what to do next about Cuba. Initially, the Bay of Pigs seemed like a terrible blow to Kennedy’s reputation. When journalist Henry Brandon told Kennedy that Peter Lisagor had suggested he make fun of Castro, JFK replied, “Well, for the time being, they’re making fun of me.” The hope and excitement of the first ninety days had turned to cynical complaint, especially in western Europe, about an administration whose progressive, inspiring rhetoric seemed nothing more than a cover for old-fashioned imperialism. Worse yet, the fiasco raised Moscow’s standing in the Third World, strengthened Castro in Cuba, and increased his appeal across Latin America. There was also the concern that political opponents would use the failure to score points against the administration. “Not much time remains for the education of John F. Kennedy,” one hostile southern newspaper declared. “In his first great crisis, he bungled horribly.” Nixon and Republican congressional leaders privately agreed to hold their fire only until the crisis had passed, but the Republican Congressional Committee’s newsletter said, “It is doubtful if any President had gotten the United States in so much trouble in so short a time.”

The setback infuriated Jack and Bobby. Losing or even second best was not in their vocabulary, and except for the sinking of PT-109 and the vice presidential contest in 1956, Kennedy had (publicly) nothing but a string of high-profile victories. Even the loss of his boat had been less a defeat than an opportunity to become a hero who had rescued his crew.

Now, in response to the Bay of Pigs, no one was allowed to seem wiser than Kennedy or to overshadow him. When Mac Bundy toldKennedy that, like Fulbright, Schlesinger had been prescient, Kennedy not only played down Fulbright’s wisdom, he also dismissed Schlesinger’s advice as calculated to make him “look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” Bowles, whose warnings against the operation were leaked to the press, also earned the Kennedys’ wrath. “When he disagreed with the President,” Bobby said later, “he talked to the press. He was rather a weeper. He came up in a rather whiny voice and said that he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that he was against the Bay of Pigs.” Such self-righteousness was “resented.” When Bowles, substituting for Rusk, presented some State Department reflections at White House and National Security Council meetings on the impossibility of doing anything about Castro without another ill-advised U.S. invasion, Bobby, who had written his brother a memo urging decisive action on Cuba, “savagely” and “brutally” tore into Bowles. “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby shouted. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the President. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.” Richard Goodwin, who watched JFK calmly tapping his teeth with a pencil, suddenly realized that “Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the president’s own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation. I knew, even then, there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger, beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.”

But worries about Kennedy’s loss of political clout in the United States evaporated quickly, in part because he personally appealed to Nixon’s vanity and Eisenhower’s patriotism. He called Nixon, whose daughter told him, “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.” Although Kennedy rejected Nixon’s suggestion of direct intervention in Cuba, he flattered him by speaking candidly about politics and their shared interest in international relations. “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn’t it?” Kennedy asked, knowing that Nixon agreed. “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?” Nixon promised to support him to the hilt if Kennedy attacked Cuba.

With Eisenhower, whom he invited to lunch at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, Kennedy played the student being lectured by the master teacher gently reprimanding him on a poor performance. “There is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,” Eisenhower told him. “It must be a success.” Kennedy replied, “Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.” Eisenhower said that he was “glad to hear that.” Before the press, Eisenhower declared, “I am all in favor of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs.”

With Nixon, Eisenhower, and most other public officials backing Kennedy, a Gallup poll at the end of April showed him with an 83 percent approval rating. As reassuring, 61 percent of the public supported Kennedy’s “handling [of] the situation in Cuba,” and 65 percent specifically opposed sending “our armed forces into Cuba to help overthrow Castro.” But Kennedy could not put the failure aside. He dismissed the polls, saying, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.”

Because he believed that Castro now more than ever represented a threat to U.S. interests in the hemisphere, and because defeat at the Bay of Pigs gave an added incentive to topple Castro’s regime, Kennedy gave a high priority to finding an effective policy for dealing with the Cuban problem. On April 21, he set up a task force to study “military and paramilitary, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activities which fall short of outright war.” The task force chairman was General Maxwell Taylor, a World War II hero whose 1959 book,
The Uncertain Trumpet,
had “reoriented our whole strategic thinking,” Bobby said. Taylor’s book affirmed JFK’s opposition to massive retaliation with nuclear weapons and support for counterinsurgency forces designed to fight guerrilla wars. Bobby, Burke, and Dulles (who did not leave office until later in the year) served with Taylor and agreed to “give special attention to the lessons that can be learned from recent events in Cuba.”

Though ostensibly a study group to work against a replay of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the committee quickly became a vehicle for suggesting ways to overturn Castro. At a National Security Council meeting on May 4, Kennedy and his advisers “agreed that U.S. policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro,” but that neither a blockade nor direct military action should be the means for doing it, though U.S. intervention should remain a possibility. The study group’s report of June 13 concluded, “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” He constituted “a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of weak Latin American republics.” But action against him needed to rest on a wide range of international and domestic considerations. With only 44 percent of the American public favoring aid to anti-Castro forces and 41 percent opposed, a program of clandestine subversion seemed the best of the planners’ options. Decisions on exactly how to proceed were left for the future.

Despite his high approval ratings, Kennedy was disappointed with the results of his first hundred days. To be sure, he had established himself as an attractive and even inspirational leader, but rising tensions with Castro and ongoing communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Africa joined with a sluggish economy and civil rights divisions at home to shake Kennedy’s confidence in mastering the challenges of his presidency. The May 5 edition of
Time
declared, “Last week, as John Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his administration, the U.S. suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic.” Asked how he liked being president, Kennedy replied that he liked it better before the Bay of Pigs. He also described himself as “always on the edge of irritability.” “Sons of bitches,” Kennedy said after reading
Time
’s critical assessment of his first hundred days. “If they want this job they can have it tomorrow.”

Yet however frustrated he was by events and his own stumbles, Kennedy was determined to use the problems of his first months as object lessons in how to be more effective. His resolve stood him in good stead: He managed coming crises with greater skill and a growing conviction that he might be an above average and maybe even a memorable president after all.

CHAPTER 11

A World of Troubles

We face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe.

— John F. Kennedy, April 20, 1961

IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS
since the onset of the Cold War, Americans had struggled with their fears. The long tradition of “free security,” weak neighbors, and vast oceans, which had insulated the country from foreign dangers, had done little to prepare it for a drawn-out contest with a hostile superpower convinced that its ideology and that of the United States could not coexist. The tensions over the East-West divide and America’s apparently unprecedented vulnerability to attack tested the country’s self-confidence.

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy mirrored this national anxiety. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, he spoke apocalyptically about the Cold War. “If the self-discipline of the free cannot match the iron discipline of the mailed fist—in economic, political, [and] scientific . . . struggles as well as the military—then the peril to freedom will continue to rise,” he predicted. Cuba was a case in point. “The evidence is clear—and the hour is late,” he said. “We and our Latin friends will have to face the fact that we cannot postpone any longer the real issue of survival of freedom in this hemisphere itself.” It was “clearer than ever that we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear weapons. . . . We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle . . . [which] is taking place every day, without fanfare, in thousands of villages and markets—day and night—and in classrooms all over the globe.” The message underlying this clash was that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can survive.” It sounded like Theodore Roosevelt and what Kennedy himself had said in the forties in response to earlier foreign threats.