Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (19 page)

Kennedy’s argument resonated with Schlesinger. Shortly before the Bay of Pigs attack, Bobby Kennedy drew Schlesinger aside at a party to say, “I hear you don’t think much of this business,” and told him that since the president had made up his mind, he didn’t think Schlesinger “should push it any further. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can.” Schlesinger did not quarrel with Bobby’s advice. Bobby was not only reflecting his brother’s wishes, which would become a constant of their close working relationship in the White House; he was also expressing his fierce determination to force Castro from power. No one in the administration was as loyal to the president as Bobby, nor was anyone more committed to combating the communist threat everywhere.

Adlai Stevenson was yet another skeptic about the plan. But he was kept on the fringes of the operation, receiving on April 8, nine days before the invasion, only an unduly vague briefing by Schlesinger and a CIA official. As the plan moved ahead, Stevenson complained to Schlesinger and an assistant secretary of state for international organization that “he had been given no opportunity to comment on it and believed that it would cause infinite trouble.” Anticipating Stevenson’s anger at being ignored, Kennedy told Schlesinger that nothing should “be done which might jeopardize . . . the integrity and credibility of Adlai Stevenson . . . one of our great national assets.” Kennedy assumed that Schlesinger would pass his comments to Stevenson, who would accept that the president was intent on shielding him from sharing in the humiliation if the operation failed.

But Kennedy had no interest in protecting Stevenson from some public embarrassment. In fact, by leaving him out of the discussion it led to his humiliation. When two planes bombed Castro’s forces, Stevenson unwittingly repeated a CIA cover story in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly. He described the raid as conducted by defectors from Castro’s air force who had taken off from a Cuban airfield. Cuban exiles trained by the CIA actually had flown the planes from Key West, Florida.

When Stevenson learned the truth, he told Rusk and Dulles that he was “greatly disturbed,” and asked why he was not “warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us.” He was mortified at having described the raid as a “clear case of attacks by defectors inside Cuba. There is gravest risk of another U-2 disaster,” he warned, referring to Eisenhower’s embarrassment at having to acknowledge that a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was not tracking the weather, as he had publicly declared after it was shot down fifteen hundred miles inside the Soviet Union, but was in fact a spy plane.

Stevenson understood that the failure to consult him was not an oversight at the White House, but a conscious effort to hold him at arm’s length. Kennedy assumed that Stevenson would instinctively oppose the invasion and wanted to isolate him from the decision. Kennedy’s assurance to Schlesinger that Stevenson was a great national asset was empty rhetoric: It was Kennedy’s way of blunting the annoyance Stevenson was bound to feel at being excluded from the invasion discussion, especially after being told by Kennedy that becoming ambassador would allow him to have an impact on policymaking.

In the final days before the attack, Kennedy pressed to assure plausible deniability, though he had no illusion that the United States could entirely escape accusations of complicity. Yet every effort was made to combat such assertions, especially to defend Kennedy from charges of facilitating the assault: “lies . . . should be told by subordinate officials,” and a final decision should be ascribed to “someone whose head can be placed on the block if things go terribly wrong,” Schlesinger advised in a memo that may have ingratiated him with the president but does no credit to his historical reputation.

Despite all precautions and efforts to keep the operation as far from the White House as possible, Kennedy feared that he was backing a disaster. The weekend before the invasion, Kennedy joined Jackie and his sister Jean and brother-in-law Steve Smith at Glen Ora, a rented estate in Middleburg, Virginia. Following a long, late afternoon phone conversation with Dean Rusk witnessed by Jackie, which she recalled as “a decisive phone call,” she heard him say, “Go ahead.” “He looked so depressed when it was over. . . . Jack just sat there on his bed and then he shook his head and just wandered around that room, really looking—in pain almost, and went downstairs, and you just knew he knew what had happened was wrong. . . . It was just an awful thing.” Jackie remembers him then as being “really low. So it was an awful weekend.”

The operation was a miserable failure. One hundred and twenty-four invaders, including ten airmen, were killed and another 1,202 captured. And despite his determination to bar the U.S. military from a direct role in the invasion, Kennedy could not resist a last-minute appeal to use airpower to support the exiles. Buried in a CIA history of the Bay of Pigs failure, which did not become public until Peter Kornbluh at the George Washington University National Security Archive used a Freedom of Information suit to force its release in 2011, are details about the deaths of four U.S. Navy pilots whom Kennedy allowed to engage in combat as the invasion was collapsing. The White House and CIA directed the pilots to describe themselves as mercenaries if they were shot down and captured, and their valor was recognized only fifteen years after they were killed when the Pentagon honored them in a medal ceremony their families had to keep secret. Even more disturbing in this history is a CIA brief Kennedy never saw predicting a failure without direct U.S. intervention.

Kennedy paid an emotional price for the disaster, suffering considerable anguish about the lost lives and the men confined in Castro’s prisons. His repeated refrain: “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” Jackie Kennedy remembered him breaking down and crying in the privacy of their bedroom after the defeat. He “put his head in his hands and sort of wept.” He cared about “those poor men who . . . were shot down like dogs or going to die in jail.”

Analysts were set to work figuring out what went wrong. Was it the failure to allow exile air strikes from U.S. territory, which Kennedy prohibited after it was clear that initial air attacks came from Florida? Certainly, the CIA and military viewed as the culprit this restraint as well as Kennedy’s refusal to allow U.S. forces to ensure a successful outcome after the invasion began. Kennedy saw merit in the argument that America’s direct intervention could have changed the outcome. But as he told Dave Powers later and as he tried to make crystal clear before the invasion, the United States would not be the final arbiter in the attack. The invaders were allowed to succeed or fail on the assumption that an anti-Castro uprising would greet their landing or, more likely, would touch off a civil war that eventually would bring down Castro.

But without decisive U.S. military support the invasion was doomed from the start. And even if Kennedy had thrown American might into the attack, Castro enjoyed a measure of popularity that would have made an assault on Cuba a bloody battle with no guarantee of quick success. As the American journalist Henry Raymont, who was a correspondent in Cuba during the invasion, said in an interview in 2000, any diplomat or high school student in Havana could have told Kennedy that there would be no revolt in response to the exiles’ attack. He also recalled a meeting with Kennedy in the Oval Office. After Raymont was released from a Havana prison, where Castro had confined him after the invasion, Kennedy asked to speak with him at the White House. He intended to chide the president for not having understood what was so obvious to everyone in Havana about Castro’s popularity. But on seeing how distressed Kennedy was at the botched operation, Raymont did not add to his grief by reprimanding him for something that was now transparent.

The failure at the Bay of Pigs lay in allowing the invasion to go forward. And the judgment of most of Kennedy’s advisers that it could succeed rested on illusory thinking. CIA and military chiefs assumed that a U.S.-sponsored invasion of so small an island led by a supposedly disliked leader strangling Cuba’s economy was pretty much a sure thing. And if it began to stumble, no president could allow it to fail, especially one new to the office whose standing at home and abroad would suffer terribly from so embarrassing a defeat.

But the invasion failed, not only because Castro was more popular than the exiles and their U.S. sponsors understood, but also because it was dictated more by the state of American politics than realistic perceptions of Cuban affairs. The unacknowledged force driving Kennedy and his closest advisers—Bobby Kennedy, a principal advocate of the operation, Bundy, McNamara, Schlesinger, and Rostow—was the concern that calling off an attack would expose Kennedy and his administration to charges of fecklessness in the face of a communist challenge in the Western Hemisphere.

Kennedy did not shy away from this reality: In a conversation Schlesinger had with him on April 7, it was “apparent that he has made his decision and is not likely to reverse it. . . . ‘If we have to get rid of these 800 men,’ Kennedy said, ‘it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States.’ I remarked that the political and diplomatic contingency planning was much less advanced than the operational planning. He agreed vigorously.”

Kennedy did not want the exiles on the loose in the United States complaining that he had stopped them from taking back their homeland. As Bobby Kennedy said, they feared the repercussions from bringing the Cubans back to the States from Guatemala after the CIA and military chiefs had said that their invasion would succeed. To abandon the plan would have subjected the president to charges of weakness or a lack of courage.

In addition, Kennedy was acknowledging to Schlesinger that too little attention had been paid to the political consequences of a possibly unsuccessful invasion. They should have thought about how they would counter the political outcry should the attack fall short. And so after the invasion failed, they struggled with questions of how to blunt the negative responses at home and abroad. Conservatives Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor and TV spokesman for General Electric, Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, and
National Review
editor William F. Buckley, Jr. denounced Kennedy’s “do-nothing policy” on Cuba for failing to use American forces to oust Castro. As bad or worse, Moscow took satisfaction from what it saw as the weakness of an inexperienced, young president who failed in his first attempt to defeat a communist regime. By comparison with Soviet actions in Eastern Europe to ensure that their satellite regimes in East Germany and Hungary did not collapse, Kennedy looked like an easy mark for aggressive Soviet moves to drive the Americans out of Berlin.

In a later conversation with Jackie Kennedy, Schlesinger recalled that “[w]e in the White House felt very badly, quite apart from the general horror of the thing, but we felt that we’d served the President badly. . . . All of us felt that we hadn’t done the job that the White House staff ought to be doing . . . —we’d been too intimidated by all these great figures and hadn’t subjected the project to the kind of critical examination it was our job to do.” What Schlesinger neglected to say was that fear of domestic political attacks were every bit as important as bad advice from national security officials.

McNamara and Bundy, Kennedy’s most visible national security advisers, tried to give him cover for the failure by suggesting that they resign. McNamara told him, “I was in a room where, with one exception [Fulbright], all of your advisers—including me—recommended you proceed. I am fully prepared to go on TV and say so.” Bundy also offered to sacrifice himself: “You know that I wish I had served you better in the Cuban episode, and I hope you know that I admire your own gallantry under fire in that case. If my departure can assist you in any way, I hope you will send me off—and if you choose differently, you will still have this letter for use when you may need it.”

Kennedy knew that to accept their offers would make him look too self-serving—throwing loyal aides to the wolves instead of taking responsibility for his flawed decision as commander in chief. Critics would compare him unfavorably to Harry Truman, who said of a president’s place in the chain of command, “The buck stops here!” Kennedy was too smart a politician to miss this. Throwing out McNamara and Bundy would have compounded his failure, made it harder to recover his political standing at home and abroad, and created difficulties in finding replacements for the two very talented men he had in place.

Besides, Kennedy understood that McNamara and Bundy were only following his lead. They were relatively passive observers who assumed that Kennedy knew what he was doing. Moreover, as inexperienced national security advisers, they saw themselves in no position to challenge the likes of Dulles, Bissell, and the supposed experts on an invasion, the military chiefs. Nor should one discount the reluctance of ambitious men like Bundy and McNamara to risk their tenure as powerful officials—jobs they took with the understanding that they had become historical figures. They did not relish thoughts of abandoning their positions before they had a chance to make a positive mark. They had offered their resignations more as a gesture than a realistic possibility. After all, those who deserved to go—and did—were Dulles and Bissell and possibly some of the Joint Chiefs.

Instead of firing anyone, Kennedy did the right and smart thing: He made clear to the press and public that he was the responsible officer of the government, adding, “there’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” When questions persisted, he issued a statement: “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility. . . . He has stated it on all occasions and he restates it now. . . . The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” Privately, he told McNamara, “I am the president. I did not have to do what all of you recommended. I did it. I am responsible, and I will not try to put part of the blame on you, or Eisenhower, or anyone else.”