Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (20 page)

Not only was it smart politics, but it also came from Kennedy’s conviction that McNamara and Bundy had been as gullible as he was in accepting assurances of so-called experts that this was a well thought out, entirely doable operation. Kennedy shared McNamara’s feeling that they were too little schooled in the ways of the Pentagon and covert operations and had been too deferential to the CIA and the military chiefs. McNamara said that he let himself “become a passive bystander.” Kennedy later told Schlesinger that he made the mistake of thinking that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” His lesson: “never rely on the experts,” or at least take a skeptical view of their advice and consult with outside observers who had a more detached view of the policy under consideration.

Kennedy was also genuinely appreciative of the selflessness that McNamara and Bundy showed in offering to resign. So, instead of firing them, Kennedy increased their opportunities to consult with him. He moved Bundy from an office in the Executive Office Building to one in the basement of the White House West Wing, where he would have easy access to a Situation Room, a new center of national security operations. McNamara was also invited to have a regular presence there.

Kennedy’s public response to the failure and his closest advisers was only one side of his reaction. Privately, he was furious at the CIA’s and the military’s poor judgment. “Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” Kennedy said of the Chiefs. He told Schlesinger, “Can you imagine being President and leaving behind all those people there?” He echoed the point to Jackie Kennedy, telling her repeatedly, “Oh, my God, the bunch of advisers that we inherited! . . . Can you imagine leaving someone like Lyman Lemnitzer?” When she repeated this to Schlesinger, she added, “Just a hopeless bunch of men.”

At the same time, a handful of Kennedy’s own appointees greatly irritated him, especially Chet Bowles, who had not only proved wiser in opposing the invasion but also leaked his dissent to the press and made clear that the CIA and military had been the principal advocates of the operation. Kennedy said of the CIA that he wanted to “splinter” it “into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind.” Dulles and Bissell were told that they had to go. “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving,” Kennedy told Dulles. “But under our system it is you who must go.” Kennedy was especially incensed at Bissell, who Bobby Kennedy learned had held back a recommendation from a U.S. Army intelligence officer that the Bay of Pigs operation be canceled if air strikes against Castro’s forces were not permitted.

The removal of Dulles and Bissell was done slowly, in order not to make direct connections to the Bay of Pigs or to ignore earlier achievements of devoted public servants. As Kennedy told some of his advisers at a breakfast meeting on April 21, he was “concerned that the entire blame for this not be placed on the CIA,” and by keeping Dulles in place for the time being, it also “helped keep the Republicans off his back. As long as he was there, they couldn’t criticize.” As with the decision to allow the operation to go forward, domestic politics shaped Kennedy’s handling of the aftermath. Dulles retired gracefully in September 1961, and Bissell left the following year in February, becoming the head of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon think tank evaluating weapons systems.

While Kennedy sat on his anger toward Dulles and Bissell and shelved any impulse he may have had to dismantle or reform the agency as too controversial, he had few qualms about striking out at vulnerable liberal critics in the administration. Although Schlesinger had been a team player and gave Kennedy no cause to fire him, his cautionary memos had shown him to be wiser than the president. Kennedy didn’t like being one-upped by anyone: When Bundy reminded him that Schlesinger had “opposed the expedition,” Kennedy said: “Oh, sure, Arthur wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.”

The principal fall guy in the administration was Chet Bowles. At a morning news conference on April 21, a reporter asked if it was true that Kennedy had reached his decision to approve the Cuban invasion against the advice of Rusk and Bowles. It angered Kennedy that the State Department had covered itself by leaking information about opposition from its top officials. Although it would consign Rusk to the fringes of Kennedy’s principal advisers, domestic politics again dictated that he not be dismissed or treated so harshly that it became a topic of press discussion. It would deepen doubts about Kennedy’s judgment if he had to oust his principal cabinet officer or overtly consigned him to a subordinate role in the administration less than a hundred days into his term.

But Bowles was another matter. He was a less visible representative of the party’s liberals, and he closely identified with Stevenson, whom Kennedy had purposely ignored in the run-up to the invasion. To JFK and Bobby, who had been left out of the overt deliberations on the operation but was quietly consulted every step of the way, the liberals were too flabby or irresolute to have risked the hard choice of going forward with the attack. Moreover, they were not to be trusted. Bringing them into the discussion threatened press leaks that could have undermined the operation at the start.

Conflicting memos from Stevenson and Bobby in response to the Bay of Pigs failure deepened Kennedy’s antagonism to the liberals. A cable from Stevenson to the president and Rusk on April 19 was a thinly disguised attack on Kennedy’s misjudgment on Cuba. The Bay of Pigs disaster was “extremely dangerous to U.S. position throughout the world,” he wrote. The Soviets and Castro now had the “moral” high ground. “This is at least partly due to lack of advance planning on how to defend our selves politically,” which was code for Stevenson’s complaint about not being consulted. “Everyone, of course,” Stevenson pointedly told Kennedy, “friend or foe, believes we have engineered this revolution and no amount of denials will change their minds.” How could you have been so stupid to believe that it would be otherwise, Stevenson all but told him. “Now we are in for a period of serious political trouble,” Stevenson added. He warned against a “prolonged military stalemate in Cuba which we are committed to support.” It would produce “grave difficulties in [the] UN” and “would be politically disastrous.”

By contrast, Bobby urged his brother to recall that their intervention in Cuba aimed to prevent Castro’s efforts to help “Communist agitators in other South American and Central American countries . . . overthrow their governments. . . . Our long-range foreign policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in . . . any other place in the world,” Bobby declared with no reference to Berlin or what many saw as the growing dangers in Africa and Southeast Asia. “Because of [Cuba’s] proximity . . . our objective must be at the very least to prevent that island from becoming Mr. Khrushchev’s arsenal.” Bobby considered it essential to enlist the support of other Latin American countries in combating Castro’s subversion by whatever it might take. “If it was reported that . . . Castro’s MIGs attacked Guantánamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war . . . would it be possible to get the countries of Central and South America through OAS [Organization of American States] to take some action to prohibit the shipment of arms or ammunition from any outside force into Cuba? . . . Something forceful and determined must be done. Furthermore, serious attention must be given to this problem immediately and not wait for the situation in Cuba to revert back to a time of relative peace and calm with the U.S. having been beaten off with her tail between her legs.”

Bobby Kennedy exaggerated the long-term threat posed by Castro. Or at least his analysis had not reflected Fulbright’s more judicious understanding that Castro’s Cuba was less of a peril to U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere than the White House and most members of the national security establishment believed. The widespread fear that the United States was falling behind Moscow in a competition for worldwide dominance spurred unwise reactions, principally a growing military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had cautioned against in his farewell address and a fear of Castro that continues to bedevil Americans.

Kennedy shared Bobby’s concerns and wanted to punish those who had misled him about the chances for success at the Bay of Pigs as well as anyone who was undermining his authority by revealing that they had correctly anticipated what the invasion would bring. After his April 21 press conference, Kennedy was angry at reporters for pressing him to talk about the Cuban fiasco. “What the hell do they want me to do—give them the roll-call vote?” he told Salinger. “If I’m going to knock some heads together, now isn’t the time to do it with everybody looking down the barrel at us.” Later that morning “he was still burning.” He couldn’t understand what the newsmen expected him to say: “That we took the beating of our lives? That the CIA and Pentagon are stupid?”

He intended to straighten all this out, and soon. But for the moment the recriminations would have to remain hidden. And because it was too risky politically and to the national security to give direct expression to his hostility to the principal perpetrators of the failure, he attacked the most vulnerable of his perceived tormentors—the liberals, and Bowles in particular.

Harris Wofford got a glimpse of what was coming when “Salinger accosted me in a White House corridor. . . . ‘That yellow-bellied friend of yours, Chester Bowles, is leaking all over town that he was against it,’ Salinger almost shouted. ‘We’re going to get him!’” Wofford urged him to “get those who got us into this mess. . . . Allen Dulles and Company.” But “this made no dent on the President’s Press Secretary, who roared down the hall cursing.”

The Bowles onslaught came openly from Bobby Kennedy, with the unstated but transparent approval of the president. At a cabinet meeting on April 20, followed by an Oval Office discussion including the president, Johnson, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, and Bowles, and followed by a National Security Council meeting on April 22, Bobby ripped into Bowles with “angry . . . tough, savage comments.” Speaking for the State Department and himself, Bowles urged caution in the administration’s future actions toward Castro. Bobby led the “fire eaters,” Bowles called them, in “brutally and abruptly” brushing aside his comments.

Dick Goodwin, who was at the NSC meeting, captured the language and feel of the exchange and the president’s anger toward a subordinate who had offended him. Bowles’s

tedious, bureaucratic verbiage . . . essentially concluded that . . . nothing could now be done; that Castro’s power was secure from anything except an American invasion. (An accurate estimate.) When Bowles finished, Bobby exploded: “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else. . . .” As the embarrassing tirade continued, the President sat calmly, outwardly relaxed, only the faint click from metallic pencil cap he was tapping against his almost incandescently white, evenly spaced teeth disrupting his silence—a characteristic revelation that some inner tension was being suppressed. I became suddenly aware—am now certain—that Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the President’s own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation. . . . After Bobby had finished, the group sat silently, stunned by the ferocity of his assault, until the President—without comment on his brother’s accusations—named a “task force” to develop a new Cuban policy from which the State Department was pointedly omitted. Shortly thereafter Bowles was fired.

Bobby Kennedy thought his attack on Bowles was entirely justified. Before Cuba, Bobby recalled that Bowles had already “irritated” them no end. He was all “long sentences and big words” that went nowhere and contributed nothing to immediate problems—just pie in the sky. As for Cuba, he talked “to the press too much. . . . He was rather a weeper.” After the failure, “He came up in a whiny voice and said that he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that he was against the Bay of Pigs. . . . Everybody rather resented it.” And then his recommendations for dealing with Castro were “God awful.” Bobby told Bowles that his suggestions were “a disgrace,” describing them later as “foolish . . . filled with generalities . . . [and] didn’t make sense.”

Bowles’s open dissent over Cuba persuaded Kennedy to remove him as undersecretary of state and send him overseas. But ousting him provoked a conflict with liberals, who saw it as a loss of influence over foreign policy. In July, when Kennedy tried to send him abroad as a roving ambassador, Bowles resisted the demotion and relied on pressure from liberal allies in and out of the government to force Kennedy to back down. The resistance angered Kennedy, and he privately described his determination to force Bowles to leave. At a press conference on July 19, when reporters asked Kennedy if rumors of Bowles’s departure were true, Kennedy’s endorsement of him was so equivocal that few doubted his days were numbered. His ouster took until the end of November, when the discussion of Cuba had quieted and Kennedy appeased him and liberals by making Bowles a “special representative and adviser for Asian, African, and Latin American affairs,” and naming George Ball, another liberal, as his replacement and Averell Harriman, a prominent FDR diplomat, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs.

Kennedy blunted liberal anger with the appearance of continuing influence for Bowles and the elevation of Harriman to a high State Department post. But he could not counter the inevitable doubts planted in the minds of other advisers that open opposition to a presidential policy would diminish their standing at the White House or even lead to their removal from office. Most everyone was convinced, regardless of what Kennedy or Bobby might say, that open or even quiet criticism of a presidential directive would jeopardize an adviser’s access to White House deliberations and his own influence. However much Kennedy may have valued genuine debate among Oval Office counselors, Bowles’s departure was bound to discourage criticism. In short, subsequent crises did not benefit from Kennedy’s overreaction to Bowles’s open criticism of the Bay of Pigs failure: Being wiser than the president and Bobby about any high-visibility issue was best left unsaid, certainly in public, but Bowles’s ouster made even private dissent less likely from ambitious men excited by the chance to continue in high office.