The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (92 page)

After the meeting, the attorney general called the admiral. “The president is going to rely upon you to advise him on this situation,” Burke recalled Bobby saying, standing now in the White House for the first time as his brother’s right arm and enforcer.

“It is late!” Burke exclaimed. “He needs advice.”

“The rest of the people in the room weren’t helpful,” Bobby said, dismissing all the other counsels of war, as Burke remembered.

I
n trying to learn what was going on, the White House was hampering operations in the Caribbean. In times of combat the command aircraft carrier, the
Essex,
had to take down the vertical antennae that were needed to get distant radio communications. If they were left up, planes could not be safely launched, since the electromagnetic radiation from the antennae might set off their rockets. So much high-level radio communication was coming in, not only the high command prompted by the White House but the White House itself, and possibly Bobby in particular, that the air boss was having
trouble finding time to launch planes. “There’s no doubt in my mind but that communication was coming from the White House,” asserted retired Captain William C. Chapman, the
Essex
air boss. “I don’t know firsthand, but everything I heard was that Bobby was calling too.”

While the fighting continued, the White House was concerned in part with tidying up the bureaucratic debris and pushing the evidence into history’s closets. Burke cabled Commander in Chief (Atlantic) Admiral Robert Dennison, asking whether the brigade could disappear into the bush: “Authorities [the president] would like to be sure CEF [the brigade] could become guerrillas whenever they desire so that point could be emphasized in our publicity, i.e., that revolutionaries crossed the beach and are now operating as guerrillas.”

The brigade would have to bring out their wounded, but these broken, bloodied men hardly represented the photographic image of victory. Burke cabled: “Wounded should be kept in Essex until suitable hospital arrangements could be made on beach in some place inaccessible to news hawks.”

About six hours later, Dennison replied: “Evacuation of wounded is completely out of the question without overt involvement of U.S. forces. Furthermore, I know of no haven in some place ‘inaccessible to news hawks.’”

T
he president attended the annual congressional reception that evening resplendent in white tie and tails. He waltzed with his wife and danced the social minuet. Just before midnight, he left and arrived to meet with the same tired men he had seen so many times these past two days.

The situation was desperate. Bissell and Burke implored the president to take some action. He could send two jets from the
Essex
to down Castro’s planes, or at least have them fly over the beachhead as a sign of support, or if not that, bring in a destroyer to shell the tanks that were killing the men of the brigade.

“Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” Kennedy said, his voice charged with anger.

The president went to his office and sat there downcast, as close to crying as O’Donnell had ever seen him. As for Bobby, he was on a manic rant, pacing back and forth, consumed with emotion. “We’ve got to do something,” he told his brother late at night. “They can’t
do
this to you!”

There precisely in those words lay the difference between the two men. For Bobby, politics always had a human face, and he saw Castro as attacking not the brigade but his brother, as surely as if he were stomping on Kennedy. Kennedy, as desperate and hopeless as he may have felt, was never a man to
indulge in open self-pity and perceived the potentially devastating impact on his whole presidency.

This was precisely the moment Kennedy had feared most when he had signed on to the CIA plans. He did not see himself as a cowardly, cynical politician who would let men die in the sands, but he had preoccupations beyond those of the men here this evening. The president was playing with a chessboard as big as the world, not just with one or two pieces. He knew that the Soviets could make their countermove anywhere. “We are sincerely interested in a relaxation of international tension, but if others proceed toward sharpening, we will answer them in full measure,” Khrushchev had just written Kennedy.

At around four in the morning the president got up from his desk and walked out into the darkness of the south grounds and paced by himself there for forty-five minutes or more. Kennedy believed that democracy’s most crucial creations were its leaders. A great man made history and was not merely its temporary steward.

Kennedy could have heeded the call of the right wing and backed the brigade to the hilt, with shiploads of marines standing by and the might of America ready to crush Castro, running the risk of a world war and brushfire conflicts elsewhere. He could have listened to those on the left who would have sent an olive branch to Castro instead of fifteen hundred fighting men and ended the covert operations in Cuba. Instead, on national security issues he was a moderate conservative worried about communism in Cuba but worried about nuclear conflagration too. He had treated the invasion plan as if it were a piece of legislation, placating the CIA here, moving toward the State Department there, seeking an accommodation that would please everyone. He had attempted to pare the operation down, and even as it was, if much of the brigade had been able to escape into the Cuban wilderness, he would not have had his whole administration held hostage to this issue.

No matter how one turned the issue over, looking for light, all one found was darkness. He felt he had to do something or he would suffer the Republicans’ accusations of dishonor and worse. That was perhaps a tinsel treasure to weigh against the lives of these men, but Kennedy was convinced that it was better “to put the guerrillas on the beach in Cuba and let them fight for Cuba than bring them back to the United States and have them state that the United States would not support their activities. The end result might have been much worse had we done this than it actually was.” If these patriots died in Cuba fighting for their country, he would have considered them worthy martyrs as long as they did not die too loudly or shout too long, in their death throes, for American help.

Kennedy could have held to the CIA’s original plan and let the brigade
stake its flag on Trinidad, or he could have decided to at least go ahead with all the planes. Then the CIA and the Joint Chiefs would have admonished him to send in American soldiers and aid, and he might well have found himself leading his country into a war he did not want. He knew that was the game plan from the day he walked into the Oval Office. He seemed now like a craven compromiser, but he was dancing along this line with fire on either side, trying to finesse a matter that in the end could not be finessed.

If the plan had worked out as it was supposed to, Castro would have been assassinated and the Communists overturned. Kennedy would have considered that the best of all outcomes, but it is doubtful that Cuba would have blossomed into a Caribbean democracy. More likely, the island would have been a sullen, subdued land, overseen by bickering politicians, all clients of the United States. And the triumphant CIA would have felt that it had proved the broad efficacy of covert activity and assassination, not only in Cuba but also across the world.

B
rigade 2506 had no air cover, no ammunition resupply, and no promise of aid to its beleaguered forces. By the third day, it was not a question of whether they would win, but how long they could possibly hold out. That morning Pepe San Roman, the brigade commander, told the Americans that many of his men were standing in the water on the beach “being massacred” by Cuban fire and by three enemy Sea Furies strafing the brigade positions. He looked up and saw high in the sky four American navy jets, and he called the
Essex
and asked that those planes descend and fight. He was told that the navy command was doing everything possible to get permission. “God damn it,” he swore. “God damn you. God damn you. Do not wait for permission.”

In the annals of American military history—and the brigade’s story surely belongs there—there are few more pathetic messages than this: “Am destroying all equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to woods. I can not wait for you.”

As those soldiers who had not yet surrendered were being tracked down in the endless swamps, Kennedy ordered air cover to try to save at least a few of them. In the Cabinet Room, Bobby was merciless with those officials sitting in dismay and shock around the massive table. He acted as if he and his brothers had been mere bystanders to this debacle. He was not ready to assume any burden of blame for the president, but sought to parcel out the chunks of responsibility among all the other major players. He seemed incapable of understanding where most of the responsibility lay. He called on them “to act or be judged paper tigers in Moscow” and not simply to “sit and take it.”

It was not Khrushchev who had sent these men in without air cover and it was not Khrushchev who had fought them on the beach, but from the fury
of Bobby’s rhetoric it might have been. It was almost as if he wanted these middle-aged officials to jump out of their seats, take up arms, and run into the street in a heroic counterattack.

T
he president had no such fire in his voice. As Kennedy sat in a rocking chair in the Oval Office, he looked at the
Washington News
trumpeting the disaster and let the paper fall to the floor beside him. As the Cuban exile leaders entered the room, he did not display his despair. Kennedy kept doodling on a pad of paper, writing the phrase “Soviet Cuban” over and over again, and enclosing the two words in boxes.

These exile leaders were proud men who had been kept under de facto house arrest in Miami so that they would not betray the secrets of the invasion. The Cubans sat on two long couches beside the president in his rocking chair. The group included Varona, who had failed in his attempt to kill Castro. Kennedy told the men that he too had been in war. He had lost a brother, and he knew what they felt. It was not easy saying what Kennedy had to say, but he said it, and by all accounts the Cuban leaders listened and believed.

When these exile leaders had come together, they pretended that they were in the Cuban Revolutionary Council on their own and were not Washington’s creatures. And now, as they attempted to justify their ersatz coalition, they exited Washington with another lie. The CRC released a statement that the events at the Bay of Pigs did not amount to an invasion but “a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months … [which] allowed the major portion of our landing party to reach the Escambray mountains.”

That same day, Kennedy received a memo from his brother. Love is expressed in many tongues, and few who read Bobby’s terse words would imagine that they were reading not only a serious political document but also an act of devotion. Kennedy was despairing, and Bobby was speaking to him in the one idiom that mattered to him now, justifying what he had done and not done. “The present situation in Cuba was precipitated by the deterioration of events inside that state,” Bobby began. His brother the president must not blame himself, but understand that everything that happened had been because of Castro. “Therefore, equally important to working out a plan to extricate ourselves gracefully from the situation in Cuba is developing a policy in light of what we expect we will be facing a year or two years from now!” Bobby went on, underlining this sentence in his own hand.

Bobby wrote his brother that what had “been going on in Cuba in the last few days must also be a tremendous strain on Castro,” as if the Cuban
leader were suffering too. Even as the recriminations crescendoed, Bobby sought to direct the president toward the future, and a battle with Castro that he was sure would come again. For Kennedy, Cuba was an unseemly nuisance, but to Bobby it was the most important and most dangerous country in the world. “Our long-range foreign policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in Laos or the Congo or any other place in the world,” he wrote his brother.

Bobby was investing in the island enormous amounts of psychic energy, fierce anger, and intensity. He seemed willing to do anything to bring Castro down, even staging false provocations. Bobby wrote: “If it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MIGs attacked Guantánamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war and that we might very well have to take armed action ourselves, would it be possible to get the countries of Central and South America through OAS to take some action to prohibit the shipment of arms or ammunition from any outside force into Cuba?” He was not for waiting either. “The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse,” he wrote. “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”

Everything Bobby had seen told him that communism was an evil malignancy that had to be attacked without qualms and without waiting. Not only did he believe this, but now he shouted it with a force and confidence not shared by any of the other bruised players in the White House. He was the attorney general, and if he had not been the president’s brother, the other cabinet officers would have been tempted to hush him up, dismissing his remarks as the mindless impressions of a man who knew less about foreign affairs than anyone in the room. But in this malaise of uncertainty, he stood boldly and made this Cuban issue his own.

At the NSC meeting the next day, April 20, the cabinet members and other officials got their first rich taste of the Robert F. Kennedy who had terrorized faltering subordinates during the campaign. The attorney general saved the worst of his rebukes not for those who had been most wrong, but for those who had shown a modicum of prescience. Bobby savaged the State Department, directing his greatest wrath at Chester Bowles, who had been opposed to the invasion from beginning to end and had articulately and passionately said so. The man had had the audacious bad judgment the previous day to come up to Bobby and say: “I hope everybody knows that I was always against the Bay of Pigs.” That rankled the attorney general beyond measure and probably doomed Bowles’s tenure in Washington.