The Atlantic and Its Enemies (32 page)

Either Castro gave way, or he went on. He went on. A single Marxist-Leninist Party was set up, in 1961, with the usual paraphernalia, including revolutionary fancy dress and a theoretical journal,
Cuba Socialista
, edited by an old Comintern hand. Castro made a show of associating himself with the ‘non-aligned’ leaders, including the Algerian Ahmed Ben Bella (who came on a visit in September 1962), Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia and the inevitable Tito. The USSR took a serious hand, and agreed to buy (at half the price) the sugar that the Americans were not taking, lent $900m (by 1964) and educated 4,000 Cubans. It was now that Castro, abroad, generally appeared in his guerrilla rig-out, no doubt an example for Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization later on, and that the CIA, with Richard Bissell and under Allen Dulles, began to plot Castro’s overthrow.

Relations were broken off, and a plot to use Cuban counter-revolutionaries went ahead. By now there was a new President, John F. Kennedy, and he allowed the plan to proceed. Preparations went ahead for a landing at the Bay of Pigs; but in Guatemala, where a hundred different Cuban exile groups were represented, there was an atmosphere of black farce: a brothel was built for them, while the American trainers, arrogant and speaking no Spanish, lived apart and better, and their commander, a colonel, simply said, ‘I just don’t trust any goddam Cuban.’ The counter-revolution turned into a huge version of the U2 fiasco. Of course, it needed some preparation from the air, but that was kept very limited, as Kennedy did not want to expose his involvement too far and anyway feared criticism from Castro’s friends in New York. Two planes attacked each of the airfields - warning of something coming, but not enough to affect the issue and, despite precautions of a clumsy sort, very obviously not the work of exiled Cubans. The landing at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April was music hall floundering. It occurred on a reef coast, which damaged the ships, and the deep water swamped the invaders’ mobile radios (‘walkie-talkies’). The coast was not, as expected, deserted: on the contrary there were charcoal burners at work, and they spread news of the landings. Almost at once the exile force - 1,500 men - was pinned own. Kennedy would not use air power to help; 1,200 men were taken prisoner (they were bought out, late in 1962). Here was another opening for Khrushchev: he would now pose as the protector of the People’s Cuba.

Cuba made for legend: Che Guevara agonizing on student T-shirts and posters the Western world over. But those T-shirts could as well have had a thermonuclear cloud instead, because the collision of the USA and the USSR over this and other ‘Third World’ matters did for a time threaten the ultimate disaster. Cuba now provoked this. Castro was full of himself, and so was Khrushchev: they had stood up to the Americans and their proxies, and in the United States Castro had many sympathizers who even blamed America for his turn to Communism: he had been, they said, just a sort of Jacksonian democrat, and it was only the vicious and interest-bound hatred in Washington that threw him into alliance with the Soviet Union. The truth was of course more complicated. The Soviet machine was used to dealing with such matters as national liberation fronts, had managed their precursors in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, and had handled European resistance movements. Raúl Castro and Guevara himself had been members of the Party and in April 1959, weeks after the capture of Havana, they sought Soviet military help: it came, through Czechoslovakian weaponry, and with mediation by the KGB, the resident of which in Havana subsequently became Soviet ambassador (in general, the affair was handled not by the Soviet foreign ministry but by the KGB and the Central Committee’s International Department). By March 1960 Castro himself was approaching Moscow, suspecting that the Americans would intervene. Khrushchev spoke out against American intervention early in July, described the Cuban revolution as ‘national-democratic’ (i.e. a step towards socialism, according to his own understanding of Lenin) and in January 1961 made a famous speech in which he offered Soviet protection for movements of national liberation, such as Castro’s. The speech came before Kennedy’s own Inaugural, which offered help to any nation saving itself from Communist takeover (an echo of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ of 1947). Then came the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, which threw Cuba and the USSR together, and Castro, with KGB help, ruthlessly suppressed opposition.

Khrushchev was in forward mode: he had just exploded an ICBM, but needed to make up, he thought, for the Americans’ superiority there (and the moratorium on tests, of 1958, had been broken, first by himself, then by the Americans). Placing intermediate rocketry on Cuba would allow him to reach two thirds of American territory directly. In any case, the rockets were something of a counterpart to the American Jupiter missiles that had just been placed in Turkey. Khrushchev used this as an argument with the Politburo in May 1962 for the placement of Soviet missiles on Cuba (which the experienced and cautious Mikoyan thought risky). In July Raúl Castro came to Moscow and the despatch was agreed - Khrushchev insisting on secrecy, which meant disguising ships and sailors; not a realistic notion, given the U2 flights, which recorded everything serious. The Soviet Union sent far more than was until recently thought - 50,000 men and eighty-five ships, not 10,000 - and there were eighty nuclear weapons of differing range. In other words the operation went far beyond a simple defence of Cuba.

On 14 October an American spy plane did record the missile bases that were being constructed. Khrushchev wanted the secret kept so that Kennedy would not be forced into a public confrontation - the Soviet missiles could in private just be passed off as equivalent to the Turkish ones - and he intended, when he went to the UN in New York in November, to make a grand public announcement. This was completely to misunderstand Kennedy. There was an election in the offing, and the Republicans made a great fuss about the arrival of Soviet troops - at which Khrushchev ordered more missiles, including tactical ones, to be sent to Cuba (7 September). The Americans called up 150,000 troops, in part for Berlin purposes, and prepared for an invasion of the island. Kennedy told the visiting Algerian president, Ben Bella, that he could accept a Caribbean Yugoslavia, but not more, and stepped up his response, setting up a group named ‘Excom’ under his main lieutenants, including General Maxwell Taylor. There were ideas of simple invasion, to dispose of Castro, but the technicians warned that not all missiles would be wiped out by an initial strike and on 18 October it became clear that the position was worse than had been suspected - even the American ICBM sites were under threat. That evening Gromyko called; and he greatly angered the Americans by lying outright that there were no offensive weapons on Cuba. They did not say anything, and he sent a reassuring telegram back, such that Khrushchev did not take fright, as he might have done.

October the 20th was the decisive day, when Excom agreed that there should be a blockade around Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering any more missiles, and on 21 October Kennedy saw the British ambassador and revealed his thinking - air strikes would have alarmed the allies; a blockade, technically called ‘quarantine’ because the legality of a blockade was dubious, was to be imposed. Next day Kennedy revealed to the public, on television, that missiles were on Cuba and announced his response: ‘quarantine’. His behaviour, now, was sound enough because the difficulties were formidable, given that substantial parts of Western opinion were against him: what was so wrong about Cuba, given Turkey, and why risk all-out war over this? The Politburo was at first relieved on the 23rd that there would at least be no invasion of the island, and agreed to stop some of the ships; but a few others, to complete the missile preparations, would proceed on course. That day, Soviet forces were put on alert. Khrushchev sent a message that he would not respect the blockade. At the same time, American forces were also put on alert (24 October) with many nuclear-armed bombers permanently in the air. Would the USSR try to force the blockade? October the 25th and 26th marked the height of the crisis. Khrushchev realized that Kennedy was entirely serious, that he would invade Cuba, and was not bluffing. A letter was then composed - the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn, in return for an American pledge not to invade. A further letter was sent on the 27th, and seemed in part to revoke the concessions, this time read out over the radio - a condition was added, that American missiles should be withdrawn from Turkey. Khrushchev had claimed that if these missiles were indeed withdrawn, then it would be a Soviet victory. That evening, Robert Kennedy indicated that they might indeed be withdrawn, but not at once and not in public, since other allies might feel let down. On the 28th, a deal was done and revealed at 9 a.m. on the radio - no American invasion, and withdrawal in due course of Jupiters from Turkey; Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. The United Nations would inspect. Castro himself was enraged (he broke a mirror), especially at the last proposal, and refused; the American commitment was therefore never made formal, but at least a new code of conduct grew up around these potentially disastrous confrontations. Mikoyan was sent to calm down Castro and discussions as to nuclear disarmament - or control - went ahead. But the episode had vastly alarmed Khrushchev’s associates: so much for his ‘peaceful coexistence’. Plotting began, to be rid of him. In 1964 he was duly overthrown. He was replaced by safe pairs of hands: no more adventures. Kennedy, by contrast, was assassinated on 22 November 1963, the end of the post-war period, but the start of a very troubled period in the history of the United States.

12

America in Vietnam

In strange symmetry with his enemy Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy became an icon, film attached. He had been - at least given the infuriating late-fifties cult of Youth - the best-looking President ever, and, like Che, he had had a tragic, mysterious fate. When he was assassinated in 1963, the date - 22 November - became one of the very few that have sunk into the mass memory. The funeral was a very solemn and tragic affair, as the widow, herself a strikingly good-looking woman, veiled in black, held her three-year-old boy’s hand, as with his slightly older sister she walked towards the funeral service in the cathedral. The little boy touched the world as he saluted his father’s coffin. It is, again, an image that has never quite left the world’s retina.

It was a most extraordinary murder, in its way a descant upon the American dream, in the sense that a ‘loner’, Lee Harvey Oswald, product of a (very) broken home, failed volunteer for the military and the CIA and the KGB, acquired a gun, thanks to America’s lawlessness in that regard (he got it by mail order), and, his brain full of confusion, thought of murder. Kennedy rode in an open car through Dallas, Texas. Oswald fired, and killed. He was then himself caught, and was shot by a man with Mafia connections who himself was dying of cancer. There was easily stuff here for an Oliver Stone film, and for contorted conspiracy theories: even the considerable British historian Hugh Trevor Roper set himself up as an expert in ballistics to endorse one of these, as, towards the end of his life, he endorsed a preposterous forgery, ‘The Hitler Diaries’ (he had an addiction to betting on horses, generally unsuccessfully, perpetually needed money, and, in an otherwise distinguished career, made absurd blunders). Few people in the commentating classes could see, as did I. F. Stone, that Kennedy had been ‘an optical illusion’, and the outpouring of histrionic grief that followed upon his death was not equalled until the death of Princess Diana, grasping and manipulative, a third of a century later. But the neon enlightenment cast shadows. The strangest concerned his own family. The corrupt old father, Joseph, had a stroke in 1961 which confined him, fully conscious, to a wheelchair, and he lived for another twenty years. One daughter with depression had a lobotomy that went wrong and made her a vegetable (she too lived on and on). His oldest son had been killed in the war, two others were murdered, and another daughter, Marchioness of Hartington, was killed in a plane crash with her lover, Earl Fitzwilliam. The last son, Edward Kennedy, was lucky to avoid a charge of manslaughter; and the generation further on has also suffered. John F. Kennedy’s own son, the poor little boy of 1963, was killed while semi-trainedly flying an aircraft, carrying his wife (whose family then sued the Kennedys). It was the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge who as ever spoke for common sense with an inspired essay in the
New York Review of Books
, when he mocked the obituary literature as ‘plaster pyramids’ and showed Kennedy to have been a creation of the new media. Later biographies - Victor Lasky, Nigel Hamilton - left nothing standing of the legend. Besides, Kennedy’s legacy led to disaster.

Johnson was a politician from Texas who, like the fabled Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, understood how to play Democratic Party games: between them, they had concocted Kennedy’s sliver of a majority in 1960. But Johnson was Texas-machine, on a vast scale, and he had been Roosevelt’s manager; he wanted to go into history as a new version of the great man. Kennedy had already referred to the ‘New Frontier’. What this would mean in practice was a sixties version of the Roosevelt New Deal in the thirties. The federal government would override the separate states and use the Supreme Court to bypass Congress in pursuit of general emancipation; it would spend money, even if that meant bending the constitutional rules, as Roosevelt had done. As things turned out, the deficits that then came up put a huge strain on the world’s financial system, which collapsed in August 1971. This led first to a fourfold and then an eightfold rise in oil prices, with baleful consequences all round. Kennedy began this.

The background was a great shift in American politics. The parties began - in part - to reverse their natures without changing their names. The Republicans were generally speaking Protestant in origin, their leadership East Coast and well off; now, some Republican parts of America, the north-east and its counterparts - migrant territory, such as Illinois - in the Midwest were gradually turning Democrat. The Democratic Party, historically, was a very odd alliance of Northern Catholics and Southern Baptists, whose chief concern was the rights of their generally backward states. Now, the Democrats of the South tended, more and more, to ally with Republicans on many vital matters such as states’ rights - meaning, in this case, racial segregation, and a general fear of the overriding power of the Supreme Court to change states’ ways. The Democrats, though still formally holding southern fiefdoms for some time to come, thus tended towards left-liberalism, and they adopted the Kennedy image, whereas the Republicans, though also divided, acquired what would later be called a conservative wing. In 1964 its candidate was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, who was made to seem almost ridiculously right-wing though he was no stupid bigot, and was personally a kinder and more upright man than Johnson (in Phoenix, Arizona, he had been good at stamping out corruption and had had a brave career in the air force, over the Himalayas, for instance). Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater manoeuvred himself into what appeared to be grotesquely reactionary positions - the abolition of graduated income tax, the bombing of North Vietnam, a denunciation of Eisenhower’s administration as a ‘dime store New Deal’. His electoral ship sank with all hands, though Ronald Reagan found a lifebelt.