The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (91 page)

The CIA officer said nothing in part probably because he was not about to give Kennedy an opportunity to end the whole operation. Beyond that, the president had made it clear he was a leader who disliked men who “grabbed their nuts,” who whimpered and complained. So far, Kennedy’s decision making had all the vices of the informal—sloppy, improvised, ad hoc—and none of the virtues, such as a trusting congeniality in which the participants felt welcome to say whatever had to be said.

At dawn on April 15, 1961, eight planes flown by Cuban expatriates took off from the CIA base in Nicaragua and flew toward Cuba. With their Cuban air force markings, they flew unopposed to their targets. They destroyed five planes and damaged others, but left the other ten planes of Castro’s tiny air force intact. Seven Cubans died on the ground and fifty-six were wounded. Castro used the funerals as a public occasion to commemorate the martyred and condemn what he considered a perfidious attack. The raid gave Castro ample reason to continue his roundup of anyone he thought might threaten him. He would put tens of thousands Cubans in jail, while preparing the Cuban people for the invasion that he knew was coming.

After the attack, a bullet-ridden B-26 landed at Miami International Airport. The excited pilot said that he and three of his colleagues had defected from Castro’s air force and staged an attack. Suspicious reporters could not know that the CIA had shot up the fuselage and that the plane had not been one of the planes making the attack. They did, however, observe that the machine guns had not been fired and that the B-26’s nose was metal, not plastic, as in Castro’s planes.

The grand deception had begun to unravel even before all its elements had been set in place, and it now became a matter of placing lies on top of lies on top of lies. Even before the brigade landed, the Cuban ambassador to the
United Nations was denouncing an American invasion, and Stevenson was sullying his reputation by unwittingly lying in his country’s defense. Stevenson had the quaint idea that without honor a public man was nothing, and he was outraged that Kennedy had let him stand up before the world and say that America was not involved.

Kennedy went out to Glen Ora, the home that he had rented in the hunt country of Virginia, to try to make Jackie happy. Steve Smith, a weekend guest, thought that the president appeared moody. When Kennedy talked to his brother-in-law, he confided that even though he had given the go-ahead, he was still worrying about whether he should proceed with the invasion. The president seemed to be still in control, but he had lost that control the moment the ships carrying the brigade left Nicaragua. What Kennedy did not know was that many of the men of the brigade had vowed that if the president called off the mission, they would take over the boats and stage their own invasion in name and fact.

Rusk called to discuss plans that called for the B-26s to fly another air strike at dawn against Cuba just as the brigade finished landing on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The story would be put out that the planes had flown from the airstrips that had just been liberated by the brigade forces.

Rusk had begun receiving urgent reports from Stevenson. The UN ambassador was full of justifiable rage that he had not been told about his own government’s involvement in the air strike. “If Cuba now proves any of [the] planes and pilots came from outside we will face [an] increasingly hostile atmosphere,” the UN ambassador cabled the secretary of State. “No one will believe that bombing attacks on Cuba from outside could have been organized without our complicity.”

Stevenson told Rusk about the severe damage already done to American prestige, warning him that if the administration went ahead with this new air strike, he would no longer be able to sustain his nation’s position in the UN. Rusk decided that it was time, whatever the military price, to limit the political costs.

The president listened as Rusk told of Stevenson’s unbridled anger and explained that if the planes were launched, the cover story would hardly last until the craft had returned to their Nicaraguan base. Kennedy had kept the UN ambassador uninformed about the invasion. Stevenson personified the liberal political animal that both Kennedys abhorred. Even Joe Alsop, hardly a liberal but a man of good manners, was appalled at the way the president “regularly harassed and even teased the virtuous Adlai Stevenson. The president disliked Stevenson nearly to the point of contempt…. It did not seem to me good style or, above all, useful to take delight in making him miserable.” The president’s disdain for Stevenson was full of sexual invective. “He
used to drive him out of his mind,” Bobby reflected in 1964. “Just because he was a girl, complained like a girl, cried like a girl, moaned, groaned, whined like a girl. Every time he’d talk on the phone, he’d whine to us. He used to drive the president out of his mind.”

Bobby agreed with his brother. He observed that Stevenson’s admirers considered the Illinois politician the “Second Coming,” but Bobby considered him a second coming “who never quite arrives there; he never quite accomplishes anything.”

In many respects, Kennedy had no problem with liberalism itself but with liberals, and it made him irrational when he was considering the progressive ideas that came from their mouths. It was Stevenson, the personification of 1950s liberalism, who irked the president beyond all men in his administration. Both men had gone to Choate, where Kennedy had been a devilish goad to all the rights and rituals of the place and Stevenson had been a little gentleman. He had never run the gauntlet that Kennedy’s father believed a boy had to run or else end up nothing more than a eunuch in pants. Kennedy believed that his UN ambassador was surrounded in New York by chattering, adoring ladies who pandered to his limitless vanity. He could not see beyond his belief that Stevenson was weak to appreciate the value of many of the ambassador’s ideas and the strength it took to profess them among men who ran off to defame him.

Stevenson was very aware of these slights, and now the president had handed him a reason to attack the administration. Stevenson called Senator Wayne Morse and said that he was flying down to Washington and to meet him at the ambassador’s Georgetown hideaway. “I’m going down to resign,” Stevenson told the Oregon politician. “I’ve been destroyed. No one will ever believe me again in the United Nations. They all think I’ve lied. I did not lie.” Morse talked Stevenson out of going over to the White House to submit his resignation, but the outrage boiled within him.

“I’m not signed on to this,” Kennedy replied to Rusk on the telephone, as if the decision lay elsewhere. This was hardly the response of a resolute leader, confident of his decisions. He was indeed the only one “signed on to this,” the only one capable of measuring the complex matrix of political and military decisions and deciding what should be done.

Kennedy told the secretary of State that the strikes should be canceled unless there were “overriding considerations.” The president later suggested to brigade members and others that he had pulled back because of international considerations, fearing that the Soviets might threaten him somewhere else. That was a rarefied reason, but from what Kennedy told Feldman and others later, he felt Stevenson had bludgeoned him into the wrong decision with his nagging self-righteousness. Kennedy realized the immense danger
his young administration would be in if Stevenson resigned dramatically and condemned him. Kennedy never publicized that reason, for it hardly would have made sense to the Cuban patriots waiting to go ashore at the Bay of Pigs to face danger of another magnitude.

When Rusk told Bissell and Charles P. Cabell, Dulles’s deputy, about the president’s decision, they instantly tallied up what they considered the devastating military cost. The two CIA leaders were so vociferous in their protests that Rusk agreed that the planes could fly later that day at the beachhead, but not attack Cuban airfields.

At 4:00
A.M.
, Rusk called the president yet again and put Cabell on the phone. For hours, the CIA deputy chief had listened to the enraged, beseeching screeds of CIA officers who believed that the president’s actions were dooming brave men to death soon after dawn, when Castro’s planes would fly unchallenged across the Bay of Pigs. Cabell told Kennedy that at this hour only American planes could arrive in time to protect the brigade. Kennedy responded by ordering the American carrier
Essex
moved even farther away from what in a few hours would be the battle scene.

F
rom the moment the brigade landed on the beaches on Monday, April 17, 1961, the news that Kennedy heard in Washington was not good. Just as the president had been forewarned, the skies were largely clear to Castro’s planes. Castro ordered two Sea Furies and a B-26 into the air at dawn and admonished the pilots to attack either enemy planes or the motley armada still at anchor offshore. During that first day, Castro’s planes sank two ships, one smaller craft, and damaged three other vessels. They also downed three B-26s and damaged two other planes, while a third crashed in the Nicaraguan mountains. Castro’s air force lost two planes, a B-26 and a Sea Fury.

Kennedy had been told that Castro’s troops would not be able to reach the seacoast for twenty-four hours or more, but the day was not yet over when soldiers of Cuba’s First and Third Battalions launched their first attack. The brigade fought with courage and tenacity, as did Castro’s forces, and the insurgents largely held the line. The brigade had only limited ammunition, however, and the munitions ship lay far out to sea, beyond range of Castro’s planes.

All during the day, the Kennedy men sat around trying to monitor the events, reaching desperately for bulletins and scraps of information. Kennedy knew all about the dark uncertainties of war; in the Blackett Strait a man could not tell foe from friend, island from vessel. But even here in the White House, the fog of war had seeped under the door of the Oval Office. Men
who thought themselves powerful were becoming little more than impotent bystanders. The Cabinet Room had been turned into a command post, with large highlighted maps and magnetic ships on a representation of the Bay of Pigs, scores of reports, data, radio messages, and intercepts. Men scurried in and out, yet there was little they knew and little they could do.

For Kennedy, the call of blood was the deepest call of all. That was his father’s ultimate lesson. Beyond the boundaries of the family lay deception, ill will, and danger. In this moment when the president had reason to be full of a sense of massive mistrust, betrayal even, he called for the one man to whom he could tell everything and know that the bounds of secrecy would never be broken.

“I don’t think it’s going as well as it should,” the president told Bobby on the phone. Kennedy’s brother was down in Williamsburg, Virginia, giving a speech, and he flew back to Washington immediately.

Bobby had an endless fascination with the covert. Even before the inauguration, he had been involved with clandestine aspects of the Cuban situation, meeting with an attorney who told him that Raul Castro might be turning against his brother’s revolution. He had gone to the first Special Group meeting on Cuba and heard Allen Dulles make his presentation, but for the most part he had stayed away from conferences dealing with the invasion. He may have been a hawk but he flew so high above that none saw his talons.

Bobby was there beside his brother at just before noon the day after the invasion when the president met with his top advisers. The tense, impatient men gathered there were making the most crucial decisions of this young administration. As Kennedy walked into the meeting, he had just received a memo from Bundy outlining the insurgents’ plight, saying that if the brigade was to have any chance at all, Castro’s air force had to be destroyed, if necessary by unmarked American planes. Kennedy’s top national security adviser concluded, “The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” There were no mountains, only endless swamps, and it was symptomatic of the whole operation that Bundy did not even know that simple but crucial fact.

Men were dying on the sands of Cuba, continuing to thrust themselves into the bullets’ path believing that they might still win. Here in these councils of power, however, the scent of recrimination was already in the air, and men tried to sit as far away as they could from blame. Bobby cautioned all those in the room that they were to say nothing to suggest that they were not completely behind the president, nothing that indicated they questioned his judgment.

“Can anti-Castro forces go into the bush as guerrillas?” the president asked the Joint Chiefs. Kennedy and the officers had known the answer weeks before, but Admiral Burke agreed to seek an answer.

At this meeting Burke felt that “nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening and we the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] … have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths. They are in a real bad hole because they had the hell cut out of them. They were reporting, devising, and talking and I kept quiet because I didn’t know the score.”

Burke recalled that he had left his contributions primarily to the judicious sprinkling of such words as “balls” to show his manly displeasure. But he was the crucial service officer and had to speak. Harlan Cleveland, undersecretary of State for International Organizations, remembered the admiral “pressing for every yard of ground he could get in the direction of more American participation by American forces in at least limiting the damage.”

As Kennedy turned back all Burke’s entreaties, he picked up one of the little destroyers and moved it across the map. Cleveland thought that he observed Burke’s face stiffen as the president touched what was by all rites and rituals only the admiral’s to touch. By his passivity, the president had allowed Bissell to push the Joint Chiefs of Staff away from hands-on input into what was a military operation about which they knew infinitely more than the CIA. There were navy ships on the map, but it was not the military’s plan that was falling apart on the sands of the Bay of Pigs.