Fifties (119 page)

In 1958
The New York Times
sent Russell Baker, then a young reporter, to cover him with a tape recorder. At the first stop, when Baker had pushed the recorder up so that it could catch Nixon at a press conference, Nixon had seen the machine, had understood the game immediately, and had answered Baker’s first question with a diatribe against his paper. It was clearly going to be harder than ever to be a hydra-headed candidate in American politics. Which Nixon would he choose to be as he entered his presidential run—the combative anti-Communist Nixon of the earlier, harsher campaigns, or the new Nixon, more centrist, less partisan, acceptable to the entire country? During the 1960 campaign Ken Galbraith asked Kennedy if he was tired from the brutal daily campaign routine. No, he was not tired, Kennedy answered, but he felt sure that Nixon was and he felt sorry for him. Why? Galbraith asked. “Because I know who I am and I don’t have to worry about adapting and changing. All I have to do at each stop is be myself. But Nixon doesn’t know who he is, and so each time he makes a speech he has to decide which Nixon he is, and that will be exhausting.”

Escaping the past and moving from one constituency to another was not easy, even for someone as politically nimble as Richard Nixon. In an off-record interview with David Astor, the British publisher, Nixon addressed the ugliness of the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas: “I’m sorry about that episode. I was a very young man.” When a version of the interview came out in
The New Republic,
Nixon angrily denied the statement and claimed that he had nothing to apologize for.

He was still wary of being accused of being soft on Communism. The one thing, he wrote in a memo to his speechwriters in July 1959, that they should never put in his speeches was an endorsement of the idea of peaceful coexistence. “This is the Acheson line in the State Department and I will not put it out!!!!!! Cushman [his Marine aide and NSC liaison, Major Bob Cushman], tell all of them—it is never to be used again ... or whoever does it will be shipped [out] on the next plane.”

In the summer of 1959, he had scored a coup in his so-called “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev. Nixon had gone to Moscow as the head of a large delegation to open a trade fair. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson warned Nixon on arrival that the Russians were primed for a fight because of their anger over the Captive Day resolution, which Washington annually issued and to which no one, of course, paid virtually any attention except the Soviets. When Nixon went to the Kremlin for his first meeting with the Soviet leader, Khrushchev observed that Senator McCarthy might be dead but apparently his spirit lived on. Nixon tried to change the subject, but Khrushchev pushed on, earthy as ever: “People should not go to the toilet where they eat. This resolution stinks. It stinks like fresh horse shit, and nothing smells worse than that!” Nixon, remembering that the Russian leader had been a pig farmer, said there was one thing that smelled worse “and that is pig shit.” With that Khrushchev smiled and agreed to change the subject.

But the tone had been set. From then on it seemed a mutual boasting competition. Whatever America did, the Russians did better. As the two men toured a model American house, which was a part of the exhibition, Nixon claimed that though the Soviet Union might be ahead in rocket power, America was ahead in middle-class housing. But the house was not good enough for the Soviet first secretary: The Russians would build better housing than the West, he boasted, housing that would last for several generations.

When Nixon tried to talk about the new consumer devices that made life easier in these houses, Khrushchev scorned them. Some of
them, he said, were probably out of order. Others were worthless. “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?” he asked sardonically. “You do all the talking and you do not let anyone else talk,” Nixon finally complained. “I want to make one point. We don’t think this fair will astound the Russian people, but it will interest them.... To us, diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have a thousand different builders, that’s the spice of life. We don’t want to have a decision made at the top by one government official saying that we will have one kind of house. That’s the difference.”

But Khrushchev was not Nixon’s problem as 1959 became 1960 and the campaign for the presidency began. The problem was Castro. If Nixon and the Republican party were vulnerable on any one issue, it was Cuba. Vietnam had been a close call, but the President had shrewdly managed to put the blame on our allies. But Cuba was a wild card. Castro had come to power, our influence with him was minimal, and yet the President did not seem very interested in Cuba; his mind was elsewhere. He, unlike Richard Nixon, did not have to run for the presidency in 1960. Whatever else Dwight Eisenhower thought about Cuba, it had nothing to do with his political future.

A new ambassador, Phillip Bonsal, a highly professional career officer, had replaced Earl Smith, and Bonsal had made it clear that he wanted to create some kind of dialogue with Castro. But it was increasingly apparent by the fall of 1959 that Castro was on a course to the left: Both his words and actions were increasingly upsetting to American authorities. In October 1959 Huber Matos, one of the top men in the revolution, criticized the rising influence of the Communists in Castro’s inner circle; Matos was immediately arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison. By November 1959, almost all of Castro’s moderate ministers were gone, replaced by men either from the Communist party or sympathetic to it. In November a Soviet trade delegation arrived and was given the red-carpet treatment, and in February 1960, Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, to an unusually warm welcome. More and more, Castro seemed to be on a deliberate collision course with Washington.

Castro continued his brutal executions of former Batista sympathizers, and his rhetoric was increasingly hostile to the United States. Perhaps both sides carried too much baggage from the past to be friends now. When a French ship that was unloading munitions exploded, Castro angrily blamed the United States, though there was no evidence of American involvement, nor did any show up later. Wayne Smith, a man not averse to criticizing American policy, felt
that the explosion was probably caused by carelessness. But the incident seemed to mark the point of no return. Castro started buying petroleum products from the Soviet Union, and when Soviet tankers arrived, the three local refineries—two of them American, one British—refused to refine the crude. With that, Castro nationalized the refineries. By the end of the summer he had nationalized a large amount of American property. The Americans, in retaliation, ended the Castro sugar quota, refusing to buy the remaining 700,000 tons of it.

On his second visit to the United States, Castro was not so amiable a guest. He arrived for the United Nations General Assembly in September 1960 and stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem—in itself a major political statement. He dined with Khrushchev at the Soviet mission in New York. With such moves Castro was thinking not of his place in Cuba but of his place in the world. Even the sympathetic Herbert Matthews, Wayne Smith noted, had written about Fidel’s “Messiah complex.” “Fidel,” Matthews had written, “has all along felt himself to be a crusader if not a saviour.” For a man like this, Cuba was too small a stage. He wanted to be a major figure on the international stage, and to do that he had to be free of the United States.

To Tad Szulc, the distinguished
New York Times
reporter who covered Castro for years and later wrote a major biography of him, that explanation made the most sense. Castro, Szulc believed, was a man of instinct and circumstances as much as he was of ideology. He was shrewd, emotional, extremely talented, and overwhelmingly ambitious. Given Castro’s view of himself, given his desire to be a worldwide revolutionary figure, it was inevitable, Szulc thought, that he would go the way he did. It was not by chance that he kept the fatigues and the beard long after he had left the Sierra Maestra. His decision was, thought Szulc, not at all very ideological, but rather very pragmatic—indeed instinctive. Therefore the question for American policymakers was not whether or not the Eisenhower administration had played him incorrectly in those important early months, for there was simply no right way to play him. He was going in a very different direction because it was the way he wanted to go. He could not be a major revolutionary figure of world-wide status and yet be an ally of the leading capitalist power.

Nevertheless, America was largely without a policy toward Cuba. As the unthinkable happened—a radical, left-wing, quite possibly Marxist, government had taken power—the American response was almost automatic. On January 18, 1960, the CIA division responsible
for the Western Hemisphere held its first meeting on Castro and Cuba. As the regulars assembled, everyone’s spirits were high. Many of them were veterans of the successful coup against Arbenz six years earlier and looked forward to a repeat success. When Jake Engler (a professional pseudonym), one of the men in charge, called David Atlee Phillips, who had run the radio station during the Arbenz coup, he gave Phillips three guesses what they were going to deal with. The answer was easy: “Cuba. Cuba. And Cuba,” Phillips said. When Phillips was reunited with Howard Hunt, who had been one of the high-level operatives in the Guatemalan coup, Hunt was excited. “Welcome aboard, Chico,” he said. They were all so confident; it was, they thought, like a reunion; Guatemala had been a piece of cake, and Cuba now would be a bigger one. The operating group proceeded enthusiastically, ignoring all intelligence estimates from the embassy and from the CIA, which portrayed Castro as remarkably invulnerable to guerrilla insurrection. Rather, they showed a far more sophisticated and developed country than Guatemala, and also that Castro was a truly formidable figure, in no way a target comparable to Arbenz. If he was losing some popularity through his increasingly brutal tactics of suppressing all domestic political opposition, then he compensated by developing his own secret police.

Wayne Smith vacationed in Miami in the summer of 1960 and found the city rife with surprisingly detailed accounts of a new clandestine operation which was obviously intended to topple Castro. “We’re going to take care of Castro just like we took care of Arbenz,” one man, obviously a CIA agent, told Smith. “It was easy then and it’ll be easy now.” The smugness of the CIA men stunned Smith and others. There was one CIA agent who liked to move around the Miami exile community telling Cuban exiles that he carried the revolution with him in his checkbook.

The planning for the anti-Castro operation was all done in a rush. The driving force was Richard Bissell, who had been so successful in the development of the U-2. Though Bissell was inexperienced in running an operation like this, he was a fierce taskmaster and pushed things through ruthlessly. Time was of the essence. Cuban pilots were said to be learning to fly MiGs in the Soviet Union, and any operation needing air cover would lose its advantage when they returned. Pressure was also being applied by Richard Nixon, who much more so than Eisenhower supported the operation. Eisenhower remained ambivalent about Cuba. He did not like Castro and he was irritated by what Castro was doing, but his second tour was
almost done. His warnings to the CIA people were not unlike those he had made in the past; if it was to be done, he wanted it to succeed. It was all or nothing for him. But he clearly had his doubts. At one meeting in March 1960, Eisenhower said Cuba might be “another black hole of Calcutta.”

Nixon, though, did not want Castro’s Cuba to be an issue in the 1960 campaign. “How are the boys doing at the Institute?” Nixon would ask his liaison with the NSC, Robert Cushman referring to the CIA’s operation in Cuba. It was clear, Cushman thought, that Nixon wanted the operation to take place before the election. Predictably, things did not develop smoothly. The ablest top-level CIA officer, Dick Helms, who was involved in something of a power struggle with Bissell at the time, wanted no part of it. Throughout the Agency, the word was out that Helms was staying away from the Cuba thing—a signal to many other of the Agency’s more senior people to stay away as well. Helms, as Peter Wyden noted in his book on the Bay of Pigs, was known to have “a nose for incipient failures.”

There were four parts to the operation: the creation of what was called a responsible government in exile, a powerful propaganda effort, a covert intelligence operation inside Cuba, and, most important, the training of a paramilitary Cuban force in exile. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower gave his official approval to go ahead on the paramilitary unit. The plan called for training twenty-five Cuban exiles, who would in turn train other exiles to overthrow Castro. From then on, what happened was a striking case of an ill-conceived, ill-advised policy being carried forward by its own institutional momentum. Many people thought the plan was foolish and ill-conceived, but no one wanted to take responsibility for stopping it; finally, it became impossible to stop.

In mid-August, 1960, Ike approved a budget of $13 million for the covert operation. But still things lagged behind schedule. The presidential election was heating up. Bissell was confident that Nixon would approve the final plan. Of Kennedy he was not so sure. Nixon, thought his aide Robert Cushman, was getting very restless. There was constant pressure from him to find out how things were going. The truth was, Cushman thought, they were not going that well. Early operations in which agents were dropped into Cuba backfired, and the agents were easily picked up. It was decided that the operation needed to be bigger, with a fifty-kilowatt radio station, a rebel air force based in Nicaragua, and a full-scale landing in Cuba of more than one thousand men. It was now not so much a covert operation as an invasion. Eisenhower was still ambivalent. “Where’s
our government in exile?” he kept asking Allen Dulles. In the late fall, he showed his skepticism yet again at a meeting with Dulles and Bissell. “I’m going along with you boys, but I want to be sure the damned thing works.”