The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (90 page)

Mann was not the only disapproving voice that Kennedy heard. When the president flew down on Air Force One to Palm Beach for Easter, he invited Senator J. William Fulbright to join him. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the most articulate student of foreign policy in Congress, and a persistent critic of America intervention. On the flight
down Fulbright handed the president a lengthy memo opposing the operation, arguing in part that “to give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union.” Kennedy said nothing, but he surely weighed not simply the words but the political weight of their author, an acerbic intellectual who was perfectly capable of standing up in the Senate to condemn him.

For Kennedy, Palm Beach had always been a respite from the work and woes of politics, but the obligations of the presidency never left him even there. He had feared that he might be shut out from a wide range of counsel, but he was hearing at times a cacophony of voices. He had lengthy conversations over the weekend with Smathers, who was in favor of any action that would unseat Castro. Former ambassador to Cuba Earl Smith was at the Kennedy house as well. He was an equally strong supporter of military action against Cuba. Joe talked to his son as well.

On the flight back to Washington on April 4, Kennedy was still so unsettled regarding his course of action that he invited Fulbright to go with him to what would prove to be the decisive meeting of his foreign policy advisers at the State Department. They were all there in the drab meeting room, including three members of his cabinet: Rusk, McNamara, and Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the Treasury; Dulles, Bissell, and Colonel Jack Hawkins, chief of the CIA’s paramilitary staff; and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Most major presidential decisions are funnel-shaped. If broad philosophical issues are debated, they are debated first. Then the discussion is limited to general policy matters. In the end, the participants focus on the narrow details of the agreed-upon plan. In this instance Fulbright was bringing up grand moral and political questions that had never been placed openly on the table before, while the military brass and CIA officers sat restlessly wanting to go over the specific derails of an operation that they had believed was already largely decided. To many of the policymakers, it appeared self-indulgent and sloppy that Fulbright should not only be present but endlessly pontificating.

Kennedy went around the table asking each official to vote yea or nay, treating each person as equal in status and equal in vote. If this was a family, it was like the Kennedys, in which some considered themselves the crucial members. Rusk was particularly upset that as secretary of State he did not receive the deference he believed he deserved. Despite all the nervous rumblings and worries, Rusk was the only administration member to voice a dissent, and he did so in the disappointed tones of a spurned lover.

Kennedy said that he preferred to have the brigade infiltrate Cuba in units of 200 to 250 men, though close to 1,500 men were about to embark.
Hawkins told the president that such a truncated plan would not work: Castro’s forces would pick off the men. Kennedy replied that “he still wished to make the operation appear as an internal uprising and wished to consider the matter further the next morning.”

Kennedy had opened a spigot, and he was discovering, to his increasing discomfort, that it was next to impossible to close it down to a meaningless trickle. He was the commander in chief, but this policy was now riding him as much as he was riding it. He was trying to signal that he had not yet decided whether he was willing to unleash these forces that he had allowed to build up. He was discovering, however, that indecision is sometimes the greatest decision of all. He left the two-hour meeting still saying that he had not made up his mind, but it would take an immense, wrenching force to shut down the invasion now.

I
hear you don’t think much of this business,” Bobby told Schlesinger on April 11 at Ethel’s birthday party. “You may be right or you may be wrong, but the president has made his mind up. Don’t push it any further. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can.”

Despite what Bobby said, the president was still full of doubts. Kennedy was, if anything, looking for those who would confirm his doubts, but he had no one left in the White House who dared to speak to those misgivings. Schlesinger had been the most articulate and persuasive skeptic among Kennedy’s aides. In the White House he was a surrogate for tough-minded, anti-Communist American liberals everywhere. But even before his talk with the attorney general, Schlesinger had proudly taken his first flight as a hawk.

The day before, Schlesinger had written a nine-page, single-spaced memo for the president. The former Harvard professor saw himself as representing a humane counterbalance to the CIA and the Defense Department, but if he had ever been that, the historian had quickly learned a different language. Despite what Schlesinger believed, there was no epic struggle going on in the White House, with the humane academic idealist standing on one side and against him the evil twins: the State Department, with what Schlesinger called its “entrenched Cold War ways,” and next to it the all-powerful, duplicitous “military-intelligence complex.” There was a struggle, but it was for power among aides like Schlesinger who were stumbling over each other in their rush to get close to Kennedy and, in the end, narrowing the spectrum of voices that reached the president’s ear.

In his important memo, Schlesinger wrote of what he called the “cover operation.” Schlesinger and other American liberals idealized Adlai Stevenson,
the noble prince of their faith. Yet Schlesinger called for his beloved Stevenson to get up in the United Nations and say that though “we sympathize with these patriotic Cubans … there will be no American participation in any military aggression against Castro’s Cuba.” The historian said that if forced, Stevenson would “presumably … be obliged to deny any such CIA activity.”

Schlesinger realized that the Cubans would have strong arguments to make: “If Castro flies a group of captured Cubans to New York to testify that they were organized and trained by CIA, we will have to be prepared to show that the alleged CIA personnel were errant idealists or soldiers of fortune working on their own.” These captured soldiers would presumably have been only a sample of others still in Cuba clinging to their American patrons to save them from execution or years in prison. And Schlesinger was willing to tear away their fingers.

“When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials,” Schlesinger wrote.
“At no point should the President be asked to lend himself to the cover operation. “
Schlesinger was in agreement with the secretary of State who apparently had first proposed that some other official should “make the final decision and do so in his [Kennedy’s] absence—someone whose head can later be placed in the block if things go terribly wrong.”

Schlesinger thought it imperative that the president stand back and allow others to lie for him. Nevertheless, there remained the melancholy reality of a free press that had the distressing inability to stay on message. Schlesinger prepared a group of possible questions and answers so that in his press conference Kennedy could dissemble with willful ease.

Truth is democracy’s greatest weapon. It is a painful, difficult weapon that often seems to turn on those who use it, and it is terribly tempting to jettison it in dangerous times. But it was the one unique value that America held in the struggle against communism. In his memo to the president, Schlesinger called in the end for a progressive, liberal, post-Castro Cuba, but the road map he handed the president did not lead there.

As Kennedy contemplated whether to go ahead with the invasion plans, he had two different political constituencies that he had to placate. One was the right wing, which would condemn him if he did nothing; the other was the left-liberal coalition, which might rise up against him if he proceeded with the invasion. The president thought of Schlesinger as Stevenson’s great advocate in the administration, and a bearer of American liberalism. The president considered Stevenson, the UN ambassador, as a man whose weakness and moral vanity made him dangerous. He was the perfect exemplar of everything about liberalism that the president deplored. Kennedy saw that in going
ahead with the invasion he would not have to worry about Schlesinger, and perhaps not about Stevenson and other liberals either. Schlesinger, moreover, was telling the president that he could use Stevenson as his agent of deception.

A
s the plans moved inexorably forward, the most fervent doubters were not liberals like Schlesinger, or the diplomats at the State Department, but the two officers in charge of the operation. Jake Esterline and Colonel Jack Hawkins felt that Kennedy had fatally compromised their plans. Even though Esterline was now a civilian CIA officer, he was, like Hawkins, essentially a military man. They were both part of that sacred unspoken covenant between politicians and the professional military that is one of the glories of American democracy. American leaders do not have to worry that they will be overthrown by a restless military. In exchange, the military expects that the president will call them into combat only when their nation is truly at risk and they have the means to do the job they are asked to do.

Esterline and Hawkins were risking Cuban, not American lives, but they saw no difference between the two, and they felt that what they were being asked to do was wrong. They believed that as the plan now stood they would be leading these men into disaster and death. Over the weekend, they went to Bissell’s home and threatened to resign. Bissell placated his subordinates by promising that he would convince Kennedy to add more air power to protect the brigade.

“Bissell said he felt sure he could persuade the president to increase the air force participation which we said was absolutely essential,” Hawkins recalled. “Instead of doing that, without letting it be known to Esterline and me, he agreed with Kennedy in his private conversations to cut the whole thing even further.”

T
here was an added urgency to these efforts since the plans to assassinate Castro did not appear to be working out. The Americans had so demonized Castro that they believed that once he was dead, the docile Cubans would line up behind the anti-Communist brigade and its powerful American champion. The CIA gave poison pills to Rosselli, who gave them to Trafficante, who gave them to Juan Cordova Orta, who worked in Castro’s office. Instead of putting the pills in Castro’s drink, the Cuban returned them to his CIA contact. The agency then gave poison pills and probably between $20,000 and $50,000 to Manuel Antonio “Tony” de Varona, one of the five members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council that the American government
had deputized to form a post-Castro government. Varona, as the CIA knew, was associated with American racketeers ready “to finance anti-Castro activities in hopes of securing the gambling, prostitution, and dope monopolies in Cuba in the event Castro was overthrown.” Varona had no more luck than his predecessors, and as the day of the invasion approached, it appeared that Castro would still be alive.

I
know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,” Kennedy told Sorensen, referring to those weak sisters like Stevenson and Rusk who presumably quaked at the thought of combat. Kennedy used profanity like many former prep school boys, as if it stiffened his mettle and reinforced his manhood. He had decided to go ahead, and he gave Sorensen a political reason for doing so: he “felt it was impossible now to release the army which had been built up and have them spreading word of his action or inaction through the country.” Even as he decided to go ahead, the president was attempting to burn any bridges that might still carry American soldiers to the bloody sands of Cuba. At his press conference he pointedly said, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces. The government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.”

In private, Kennedy would not consider supplying American soldiers in a supporting role even after a successful initial invasion. “The minute I land one marine, we’re in this thing up to our necks,” he exclaimed at a high-level meeting on April 12, though if he had looked down he would have seen the muddy currents already lapping around his waist. “I can’t get the United States into a war, and then lose it, no matter what it takes. I’m not going to risk an American Hungary. And that’s what it could be, a fucking slaughter. Is that understood, gentlemen?”

Even as the chartered freighters prepared to embark with their holds full of the young men of the brigade, Kennedy still appeared uncertain; unwilling to give the final go-ahead, he was waiting until the last possible hour to give his assent. Finally, on April 14, Kennedy agreed that the planned air strikes flown by the Cuban Expeditionary Force against Castro’s air force should set off from a CIA base in Nicaragua two days before D-Day.

These planes were part of an elaborate ruse. They were B-26s with Cuban air force markings, piloted supposedly by defectors from Castro’s air force flying one final mission against the Communist regime before heading toward freedom.

“Well, I don’t want it on that scale,” Kennedy told Bissell when he
learned that sixteen planes would be taking off from Nicaragua. “I want it minimal.” As he had done in so many other ways, the president once again sought to diminish the risk that American involvement would become apparent. He was tinkering with the number of planes, applying an aesthetic sensibility to the gray art of propaganda, accomplishing nothing but keeping alive for a few more hours his illusion that he could keep the American role quiet.

Although Kennedy was thinking about the propaganda battle, he was making a crucial military decision: cutting in half the surprise attack on the Cuban planes on the ground. Bissell knew that the president might be putting lives in unnecessary jeopardy, breaking the tacit pledge the CIA had given the men of the brigade. He knew too that he had promised Esterline and Hawkins to insist on more air power, not to cave in to more compromises.