Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (9 page)

It was minutes before midnight when the extraordinary meeting convened. Kennedy, McNamara, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had all just come from the annual Congressional Reception in the East Room and were still wearing their white ties and black tails. They were joined by General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Admiral Burke, the Navy chief, both of whom were in full dress uniform. Bissell presented his case for U.S. intervention to the assembled group in urgent tones, “acutely aware of the desperation of those whose lives were on the line,” he later recalled. The invasion was “on the brink of failure,” he told them, but there was “still hope.” Burke was “very much on my side,” recalled Bissell. The two men implored Kennedy to unleash the military.

“Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” pleaded Burke.

Kennedy refused. He reminded Bissell and Burke that he had warned them “over and over again” that he would not commit U.S. combat forces to save the operation.

The president was beginning to realize that his top military and intelligence chiefs did not take his instructions that seriously. Kennedy would later learn that the Bay of Pigs operation had been riddled with insubordinate behavior. Up until the moment he finally approved the invasion, Kennedy repeatedly emphasized to Bissell that he reserved the right to abort the operation. But Bissell had sent a very different message to the military leaders of the Bay of Pigs brigade in their Guatemala training camp. They were informed that “there are forces in the administration trying to block the invasion” and if these “forces” succeeded, the brigade leaders were to mutiny against their U.S. advisors and proceed with the invasion. This stunning act of CIA defiance would provoke a public furor when it was later revealed by Haynes Johnson in his 1964 book about the Bay of Pigs. Burke, it was subsequently disclosed, had also flirted with insubordination on the first day of the invasion, “leaning on his orders” in the polite description of a sympathetic chronicler and sending the U.S. aircraft carrier
Essex
and helicopter landing ship
Boxer
close to Cuban shore, in violation of Kennedy’s order to keep U.S. ships fifty miles away.

The blunt-spoken admiral grew increasingly angry during the midnight White House meeting as Kennedy repeatedly brushed aside his and Bissell’s pleas. Finally, Burke asked for just one destroyer, so he could “knock the hell out of Castro’s tanks.”

“What if Castro’s forces return the fire and hit the destroyer?” Kennedy appropriately asked.

“Then we’ll the knock the hell out of them!” roared the admiral. The man who had commanded a destroyer squadron in the South Pacific during World War II, winning fame as “31-Knot” Burke for his speed and daring during the battles of Empress Augusta Bay and Cape St. George, was grappling with someone who had been a junior ensign on a PT boat in the same seas—and the blustery Navy commander was appalled to find himself in such an ignominious position.

But the junior ensign was now president, and he was not easily intimidated. “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” Kennedy snapped, beginning to lose his own temper.

“Hell, Mr. President,” the Navy chief shot back loudly, “but we
are
involved!” Burke wanted to be “as forceful as I could be in talking to the president,” he later recalled. But Kennedy was unmoved.

As the meeting finally came to an end shortly before 3:00 a.m., the president stood by his decision to keep U.S. forces out of the Bay of Pigs and the mission met its doom later that day, with more than 200 brigadistas killed and nearly 1,200 captured and marched off to Castro’s prisons. The country’s military and intelligence chiefs had clearly believed they could sandbag the young, untested commander-in-chief into joining the battle. But he had stunned them by refusing to escalate the fighting.

“They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the
Essex
,” Kennedy said to Dave Powers. “They 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.”

What JFK suspected about the CIA—that the agency knew all along that its plan was doomed to fail unless Kennedy could be panicked into sending in U.S. forces at the eleventh hour—was confirmed years later. In 2005, a secret internal CIA history of the Bay of Pigs was finally released to the public. The 300-page document contained proof that Bissell concealed the operation’s bleak prospects from Kennedy when he briefed him about it for the first time shortly after JFK’s election. The internal history quoted a CIA memo dated November 15, 1960, that was prepared for Bissell before the Kennedy briefing. In it, the agency conceded that “our concept…to secure a beach with airstrip is now seen to be unachievable, except as joint Agency/ DOD [CIA/Pentagon] action.” In other words, “The CIA knew that it couldn’t accomplish this type of overt paramilitary mission without direct Pentagon participation—and committed that to paper and then went ahead and tried it anyway,” explained Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, the George Washington University–based research group that made public the CIA document. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Bissell informed Kennedy of the CIA’s bleak assessment.

It is also now known that the CIA still pushed ahead with the ill-fated mission, even after it discovered that the cover for the clandestine invasion had been blown. One of the operation’s key CIA planners, Jacob Esterline, later admitted to a government panel that the agency discovered in advance that the plan had been leaked to Soviet intelligence. “There was some indication that the Soviets somewhere around the 9th [of April] had gotten the date of the 17th,” Esterline said, in secret testimony that was later revealed through the indefatigable National Security Archive.

Charles Bartlett, the Washington correspondent for the
Chattanooga Times
and old Kennedy friend who had introduced JFK to his future wife at a 1951 dinner party, also got advance word about the invasion—not from his friend in the White House, but from Castro’s former Washington lobbyist, Ernesto Betancourt. “He came to see me after Kennedy had just been in office a few weeks,” Bartlett recently recalled. “And he said, ‘The CIA is about to make a huge mistake. Terrible things are about to happen and Castro knows all about it.’ I was walking around the Oval Office later and it would have been easy to tell Jack. But I figured he had all these pressing appointments, let’s not hit him with another one. So I took the information to Allen Dulles. It was the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever done. He was sitting there in his office at the CIA smoking his pipe. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about this. I’ll look into it and give you a call.’ So I get a call about five days later, but by then the boats were already going ashore. Dulles was really the wrong guy to tell.”

Dulles clearly did not care whether Castro and his Soviet patrons knew the invasion was coming, because his agency regarded the band of Cuban exiles who were about to hit the beaches as mere cannon fodder, a device to trigger the real invasion by the U.S. military—one that would be so overwhelming it would quickly sweep aside any resistance. When this cynical calculation failed, short-circuited by the surprisingly resolute Kennedy, Dulles and the CIA high command were stunned. For years they had gotten their way in Washington, with the Dulles brothers running the government as a family franchise, and the secretive agency deceiving and manipulating President Eisenhower under the convenient Cold War cover that dangerous times called for drastic measures. But now a new president was signaling that those days were over.

Dulles believed that “great actions require great determination” and “at the decisive moment of the Bay of Pigs operation,” Kennedy showed himself lacking in this quality of leadership. He thought that Kennedy was “surrounded by doubting Thomases and admirers of Castro.” On the evening the invasion collapsed, sitting down for dinner with Richard Nixon—the man who had spearheaded the plan as vice president—a visibly distraught Dulles asked for a drink, exclaiming to Nixon, “This is the worst day of my life!” Nixon agreed that Kennedy lost his nerve when he failed to send in U.S. war planes to cover the invasion. This lament about the lack of air cover would become the central fixation of Kennedy critics for decades to come. They were convinced that air strikes could have saved the day for the would-be liberators of Cuba.

As for Bissell, the chief architect of the Bay of Pigs would remain silent about the disaster until shortly before his death in 1994. In his final interview, the former CIA golden boy whose glittering intelligence career would come to an end in the Zapata swamp, made a strange, unnerving remark about his onetime White House patron: “I was probably taken in by Kennedy’s charisma. He was such a complicated mix of accomplishments and mistakes that when he died, my children didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

The Bay of Pigs catastrophe sent shock waves through the agency, particularly among the agents who had worked closely with the Cuban émigrés on the operation. CIA men muttered darkly among themselves that Kennedy was guilty of “criminal negligence” or even worse. Years later, Robert Maheu, the shadowy private intelligence operator whom the CIA had asked to serve as a go-between with the Mafia in their plots to kill Castro, would testify bitterly to the Church Committee that the bloodiest crimes in the whole Cuba saga were not those committed by mobsters or CIA agents but by President Kennedy. “I think I rattled some cages. I said something like: ‘Senator, I find it difficult to understand all the time and money that is being spent to determine if our country plotted to murder a foreign leader—a murder that never took place—when there is no [effort] to turn the spotlight on the murders that in fact did take place,’” recalled Maheu in his memoir. “I tell you everybody jumped out of their seats.”

“Are you saying that murders
actually
took place?” Church asked.

“I said, ‘yes,’ but my explanation wasn’t what he was expecting. The murders I meant were the boys killed during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion.”

Anti-Kennedy spleen seeped into the Cuban exiles from their CIA handlers, like Howard Hunt. The night Kennedy was elected, “the Cuban barrio in Miami went wild with joy,” noted Hunt in his 1973 memoir, since JFK’s campaign rhetoric had raised exuberant expectations about the overthrow of Castro. But after the Bay of Pigs, the hatred of Kennedy became just as florid in Little Havana. The United States now owed the Cuban people a blood debt “so tremendous that it can never be paid,” Hunt declared. Captain Eduardo Ferrer, who led the exile air force, bluntly explained the shift in opinion about Kennedy: “The [Bay of Pigs] failure was Kennedy’s fault. Kennedy was a little bit immature, a little bit chicken. Today, 90 percent of the Cubans are Republicans because of Kennedy, that motherfucker.”

The Bay of Pigs disaster was also viewed with great distress in the Pentagon, where Kennedy’s hesitation was seen as sending a dangerous signal of U.S. weakness to Moscow. “Pulling out the rug,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Lemnitzer, was “unbelievable…absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, told a friend that the failed invasion was the worst American defeat “since the war of 1812.”

“Their big mistake was that they didn’t realize the tremendous importance of the operation or the effect it would have on the world,” said Admiral Burke in an oral history for the Naval Institute over a decade later, still furious at Kennedy and his civilian team. “They didn’t realize the power of the United States or how to use the power of the United States. It was a game to them…. They were inexperienced people.”

“Mr. Kennedy,” Burke added, “was a very bad president…. He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation.”

The heavens ripped open for the Kennedy administration following the Cuba crisis and they never came back together. Cuba was the Iraq of its day, no more than a swath of sugar cane afloat in the Caribbean, but to the national security elite who determine such things, it was where the forces of good and evil were arrayed against one another, the epicenter of a struggle that would come close to a literally earth-shattering climax. And in his first test in this supreme confrontation, Kennedy was judged by military and intelligence officials to be a dangerously weak link at the top of the chain of command. He would never again enjoy their complete trust or loyalty.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY, FOR HIS
part, was equally estranged from his national security team after the Bay of Pigs. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” he raged. He also lashed out at the Joint Chiefs, with their rows of colorful ribbons that boasted of all their military experience: “Those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work.” While the president famously took responsibility for the debacle in public, CIA and Pentagon officials knew that he privately spread the word that they were to blame. Never again, he told liberal advisors like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., would he be “overawed by professional military advice.”

Weeks after the fiasco, playing checkers at his Cape Cod family compound with his World War II pal Red Fay, whom he had installed as assistant secretary of the Navy, Kennedy was still fuming. “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interest of the country,” he said, referring to the intense pressures that had been put on him to escalate the Bay of Pigs fighting. “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.”