The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (87 page)

McNamara had one other quality that Kennedy found essential in his associates. He spoke the fast-paced, urgent shorthand that was the natural language of Kennedy and his siblings. It was a cinematic way of talking, following the basic rule in scriptwriting: always enter the scene as late as you can. Everyone knew the back story, and if you didn’t, if you asked for it to be repeated, then get out, get away, be quiet. “People, even if they were brilliant and even if they had things he was very interested in, if before they came to the point they had to explain the whole build-up and background to what they had to say, these people in the end bored him,” reflected his old friend David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador in Washington. And if they bored him, if they courted him with their meandering soliloquies, they were often soon gone, exiled to some region where he would not have to endure their endless pedantries. Most of these men may have been numbing bores, but at times men are ponderous because there is much to ponder, and slow making decisions because the decisions are hard and close.

O
n his first day in office, Kennedy walked into the Oval Office early in the morning. Only a fool or a megalomaniac—and the new president was neither—would have entered what was now his citadel of power without a
momentary sense of inadequacy, uncertainty, or self-doubt. Despite his accomplishments as a politician, he had never administered anything grander than the PT-109. The new president sat in an office stripped of photos, paintings, and memorabilia behind a desk suitable for a middling insurance executive. He stared at a floor that looked as if it had been savaged by a regiment of termites who had begun gnawing their way from behind the president’s desk, continuing their meal out to the door. The holes, as Kennedy soon realized, were left by the golf shoes that Eisenhower wore when he used the putting green outside his window. By the evidence, he had practiced regularly, a fact that brought the figure of the former president down to a mortal level.

“We ought to have a list of all the promises we made during the campaign,” Kennedy said as he sat there for his first hours of work. His inaugural address had been singularly devoid of specific proposals, but now was the time to begin. “Didn’t we promise West Virginia that we would do something about poverty? We ought to do something about it now.”

“We thought about increasing the food allotment to those getting surplus food,” Feldman said.

“How do we do that?” Kennedy asked, still unsure about the mechanisms of governance.

“You write an executive order,” Feldman replied.

“Well, do it,” Kennedy said, and turned to other matters. Feldman left the room to write Executive Order No. 10914 dated January 21, 1961, and then gave it to Salinger to issue as a press release. The release was hardly on the wires when government bureaucrats alerted the new administration that that was not how it was done. The president had to publish his orders in the
Federal Register for
thirty days, get comments, and then perhaps hold hearings.

Later that day, Kennedy met with John Kenneth Galbraith to discuss balance-of-payments problems. The Harvard professor seemed scarcely aware that a “briefing” is called that for a reason. On and on he went, in his professorial monotone. Kennedy had one of the greatest gifts with which a human spirit can be blessed, an Odysseus-like enchantment with the world around him. Even now, in the midst of Galbraith’s lecture, he could not abide sitting any longer when there was a world to explore. He suggested that the professor continue his monologue as the two men took a tour of the White House.

Kennedy’s interest in music reached no higher than the Broadway musical. His knowledge of art was limited to the greatest hits of Western culture that his mother had drilled into her sons. His curiosity about antiques stopped at the price. For the most part, his cultural taste developed by osmosis, from living with Jackie. Yet he did not envision himself living in a White
House that was decorated with all the panache of a businessman’s hotel. He roamed through the rooms, criticizing the lackluster furniture, the sad reproductions, the dreary decor. Despite his bad back, he got down on his hands and knees and looked underneath some of the tables. He moved from room to room, even entering storerooms where presidents rarely or never ventured. On another one of his early explorations, he discovered what appeared to be two large covered portholes upstairs in the wall of the Oval Room. The mysterious coverings opened up to disclose matching his and her television sets that the Eisenhowers enjoyed in their cozy evenings at home.

Kennedy was no more willing to live in what he considered a pedestrian decor than he was to surround himself with pedestrian human beings whose ideas were as much reproductions as the furniture. “I won’t have this,” he said. “We must replace these with the correct pieces.”

He took the derivative, mediocre furniture as a perfect metaphor for what he considered the derivative, mediocre presidency of his predecessor. “I’d like to make this White House the living museum of the decorative arts in America,” he said, a task that Jackie would brilliantly fulfill.

As Kennedy settled into office, the White House was inundated by phone calls, few of which reached Lincoln’s secretarial desk. One of the few calls that did reach the president’s office on his sixth day in office was from Marguerite Oswald, whose son, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union. Mrs. Oswald had come to Washington seeking help, and though apparently the president did not talk to her, Lincoln noted the call in the official list of calls.

K
ennedy had been in office for less than a month before those officials who could not speak the president’s idiom were pushed to the antechambers. “Jack feels that Stewart Udall [Secretary of Interior], though very bright, talks too much and that Arthur Goldberg [Secretary of Labor], also very bright, goes on and on,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote on February 22 after a small private dinner at the White House.

Schlesinger, a liberal Harvard history professor, had been brought into the administration in part to write its official history and to provide a liaison with his close friend and ideological colleague, Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador. “He [O’Donnell] has caught Adlai Stevenson in two lies regarding agreements that he’s made with Jack [Kennedy] as to personnel at the United Nations,” Schlesinger wrote after the dinner. “As Kenny [O’Donnell] said, the people that he has got around him now at the United Nations are mostly queers and I don’t think that is far from the truth.” Whether true or not, “queer” was the ultimate epithet in the Kennedy White House, for
queers were weak sissies, the complete antithesis to the bold men of the New Frontier.

As the first director of the Peace Corps, Sarge Shriver was forming an advisory council to include the novelist Gore Vidal, who was not only a Democratic activist but also Jackie’s stepbrother. “I can’t remember whether it was the president or his brother,” Wofford recalled, “but one of them got the full story that he was gay … and they canceled him from being on the advisory council.”

S
hortly before the inauguration, Allen Dulles, the legendary director of the CIA, had dinner with a small group of Kennedy aides, among them Sorensen and Feldman. Dulles told the men that during the Eisenhower years the president had not known everything the agency was doing. Dulles’s seemingly casual remarks were often the vehicle for his most crucial, calculated utterances. Although Kennedy’s men were unsettled by Dulles’s comments, the CIA director was suggesting to the new administration that his agency should be left alone to work its will on a dark, troubled world.

A week after the inauguration the president and his top foreign policy advisers met with Dulles for a briefing on Cuba. Kennedy felt an emotional affinity with Dulles and other top CIA officials. The CIA leaders belonged to the old upper-class Protestant world to which the Kennedys had long aspired. These men were doubly elite: members of the American establishment, they were also from a private world that worked its will without following any of the prissy necessities of law and politics that governed other men. Their successes, be it overthrowing governments in Iran or Guatemala or manipulating elections in France or Italy, were all secretly accomplished and privately celebrated. They were men who walked as easily into a secret rendezvous in Tehran or Lima as they did into the Somerset or Metropolitan Club.

These CIA leaders were for the most part sophisticated men who were not terrified by words like “socialist” and “social democrat,” so-called progressives who seemed to want the same world that the president wanted. One of the president’s favorites, and his putative choice to become the next director when sixty-seven-year-old Dulles retired, was Richard Bissell, the CIA director of covert operations. An economist, Bissell was an accomplished man who had come into government during the New Deal as a protégé of the liberal Chester Bowles in the Office of Price Administration. Fifty-year-old Bissell had developed the U-2 program, which, until the Russians shot down Francis Gary Powers in 1960, had been indispensable in getting accurate information about Soviet defenses and missile sites.

Dulles described a Cuba that had become “for practical purposes a Communist-controlled
state” in which there was “a rapid and continuing buildup of Castro’s military power, and a great increase also in popular opposition to his regime.” For months the United States had underwritten a series of covert actions, including sabotage, infiltration, and propaganda, while training an insurgent guerrilla force in Guatemala. Most of this Kennedy already knew before the election, and he had learned the rest immediately afterward when Dulles briefed him.

The tweedy, pipe-smoking CIA head explained that there was a renewed urgency to these efforts. The Soviet Union was shipping tons of munitions to the island. Cuban pilots had gone off to Czechoslovakia to train. Castro was steadily garroting his people’s liberties until soon the populace might hardly have the strength to rise up, and his agents were provoking revolution throughout Latin America. As the agency realized the magnitude of the challenge, the program of covert actions kept expanding: from the original $4.4 million the year before Kennedy took office, the budget for fiscal year 1960/61 grew to more than $45 million.

Kennedy had met with Eisenhower on the day before the inauguration, when the Republican president had bequeathed his covert Cuba program and admonished his successor to push on with the plans. These were no longer guerrilla infiltrations that Dulles was proposing to the new president, however, but a major amphibious invasion seeking to establish an impregnable enclave that would set off an uprising across Cuba, or at least be a symbol of resistance that would grow until finally the whole island was rid of Castro and his Marxist regime. The Republican president had never authorized an invasion that might involve American troops. Kennedy was being asked to authorize a far more dangerous venture than the one that Eisenhower had signed on to, and far beyond anything the Republican president had authorized the CIA to attempt during his two terms in the White House. The CIA was hoping that its paramilitary force and its agents on the island would foment a “continuing civil war,” setting brother against brother in the streets and fields of Cuba, a struggle in which the United States or its Latin surrogates could then intervene and play savior.

On January 4, 1961, before Kennedy was inaugurated, Colonel Jack Hawkins, the head of the CIA’s paramilitary staff, prepared a crucial memo outlining what the United States would have to do for the operation to be successful. Hawkins was a poster-handsome marine officer who had fought on Iwo Jima and at the Yalu River in the Korean War and was on the fast track to become a general. Hawkins knew little about Cuba or intelligence and was depending on what the agency told him about Cuban realities. “My belief from the intelligence provided by the CIA was that the
place was ripe for revolt,” said Colonel Hawkins. “As it turned out, the CIA intelligence was hugely wrong, based largely on Cuban émigrés in Miami saying things that would promote their cause.”

Hawkins’s CIA plan called for the brigade to liberate a small area, then to dig in, waiting for “a general uprising against the Castro regime or overt military intervention by United States forces.” If the Cubans did not rise up against Castro, a provisional government would be established on the small territory and “the way [would] then be paved for United States military intervention aimed at pacification of Cuba.”

At the first Special Group meeting on Cuba, held Sunday morning, January 22, two days after the inauguration, Dulles told a number of Kennedy men, including the attorney general, that he thought “our presently planned Cuban force could probably hold a beachhead long enough for us to recognize a provisional government and
aid that government openly.”
A few days later, at another meeting on Cuba, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he felt that the envisioned force of six hundred to eight hundred was inadequate, and he anticipated that “final planning will have to include agreed plans for providing additional support for the Cuban force—presumably such support to be the U.S.”

As
Kennedy listened to the arguments and perused the memos that passed across his desk, trying to decide what to do, he was so new in the Oval Office that he told Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador, “You don’t even know which of your team you can really trust from the point of view of their judgment.” He knew this was an important decision, but neither he nor anyone else had any idea that his actions here would be one of the defining moments of his administration. His decisions would lead him up the pathway to nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. His judgments would dramatically affect administration polices from Bolivia to Vietnam and help create fiercely held attitudes that would determine American policy toward Cuba until the end of the century and beyond. His decisions in early 1961 may even have inspired an assassin who would be waiting to meet the president on the saddest of November days.