Kennedy: The Classic Biography (54 page)

CHAPTER XI
THE EARLY CRISES—THE BAY OF PIGS

J
OHN KENNEDY ONCE RECALLED
with humor the day at Cape Cod when he sat handicapped by his bad back in the eye of a New England hurricane. The only two other people in the house had been a servant who was drunk and a chauffeur enraged at the servant. While they chased each other threatening murder, the then Senator sat alone with his crutches in the deadly still air, watching nature’s fury swirl about him and wondering whether he would survive.

In 1961 he found himself once again in the eye of a hurricane. Sitting alone in the unnatural quiet that becalms the summit of power, beset by economic and military handicaps and quarrels within the free world, he saw the international horizon explode about him in one storm after another. “Every President,” wrote John Fischer in
Harper’s Magazine
, “needs about twelve months to get his executive team organized, to feel his way into the vast and dangerous machinery of the bureaucracy…. While [Kennedy] was still trying to move in the furniture, in effect, he found the roof falling in and the doors blowing off.”

Kennedy had been forewarned. The CIA briefings he received from Allen Dulles and his deputy in Palm Beach were far more revealing than those he had received as a candidate, and the still fuller familiarity with world trends that came with his assumption of power “staggered” him, as he willingly confessed. But he had never entertained any illusions about avoiding or postponing these crises. “That’s stupid,” he had said to me in Palm Beach upon hearing that sources within his administration were supposedly reporting that he had asked Soviet Chairman Khrushchev for a six-month moratorium on world tensions to give the new administration time to look for new answers. The national interests of the Soviet Union, he said, like those of the United States, could not be waived or suspended for any person or period, and where those two sets of interests conflicted, there was trouble ahead.

During his first week in office we worked intermittently on his first State of the Union address. As each successive draft was reviewed, he sought to make more somber his warning to the country of the perils that lay ahead. His original foreign affairs passage struck me as already rather ominous, preoccupied as I was with his legislative program:

Our problems are critical. The tide is unfavorable. The news will be worse before it is better. And while hoping and working for the best, we should prepare ourselves now for the worst.

But on Saturday, January 28, two days before the message was to be delivered, he decided, in reviewing a near-final draft completed in an all-night session, that these words of warning were still insufficient. He inserted another paragraph:

Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger…. I feel I must inform the Congress that…in each of the principal areas of crisis, the tide of events has been running out and time has not been our friend.

And then on Sunday, going over the finished draft in the Mansion after church, he added one final prediction:
“There will be further setbacks before the tide is turned.”

On Monday the message was delivered, and immediately much of the press called these passages unnecessarily grim and gloomy. No one could have foreseen that the rate of world crises in the following eight months would so rapidly outpace that message that a unique second State of the Union address would be required in the spring and that even grimmer dangers would appear in the summer.

Two weeks after his speech, on February 13, the Soviets threatened new intervention in the Congo following the assassination of former Premier Lumumba.

On March 9 Communist-led forces were so close to taking over all of Laos that detailed plans for the introduction of American forces were presented to the President.

On March 18 NATO ally Portugal was required to rush troops to Angola to repress a nationalist uprising supported by America’s African friends.

On March 21 the Soviet delegation at the Geneva test-ban talks announced its new demand for a Troika veto over all inspection, making doubtful any nuclear disarmament.

On April 12 the Soviets dramatically demonstrated their superior rocket boosters by orbiting the first man in space.

On April 19 Fidel Castro completely crushed an invasion at the Bay of Pigs by a band of U.S.-supported Cuban exiles hoping to free their homeland.

On May 1 the Communist-sponsored National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Communist Party newspaper in North Vietnam announced that the rate of progress in the guerrilla war would enable them to take over the country by the end of the year.

On May 15 an internal military coup overthrew the government of U.S.-defended South Korea.

On May 30 the assassination of dictator Trujillo introduced an atmosphere of revolt and unrest into the Dominican Republic that is still continuing as of this writing.

On June 4 Khrushchev at Vienna warned Kennedy that a peace treaty with East Germany, ending Western access rights in West Berlin, would be signed before the end of the year.

On July 19 fighting broke out between two nations friendly to the U.S., France and Tunisia, over a French base on Tunisian soil at Bizerte.

On August 13 the Communists closed off East Berlin through barricades, barbed wire and a stone wall.

On August 25 Brazil, our largest Latin-American neighbor, was thrown into a constitutional crisis by the resignation of President Quadros.

On August 30 the Soviet Union announced that it was breaking the three-year moratorium on nuclear testing with a series of high-megaton explosions.

On September 18, touring the Congo where fighting had broken out once again, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash, subjecting the UN to insistent Soviet demands for a Troika.

There were other foreign crises during these first eight months. There were others in the months that followed, one of them—in October, 1962—the most critical in our nation’s history. But these eight months were the darkest period for the President personally and for freedom—eight months in which he labored to fit our strength to our commitments and to reshape our ends and our means. Often his plans were altered by fast-moving events even before they were executed. “It is easier,” he commented somewhat sourly, “to sit with a map and talk about what ought to be done than to see it done.”

During these eight months he could at times be privately bitter about the mistakes he had made, the advice he had accepted and the “mess” he had inherited. But, while learning his lessons, he never lost his sense of confidence. Red Fay has said that PT boat skipper Kennedy was cheerful in the South Pacific before the tide was turned against the Japanese simply because he was happy to be in the midst of it and certain of success in due time. In the crisis councils of various names and sizes that met daily or oftener in his office or in the Cabinet Room during this difficult eight-month period, President Kennedy generally displayed the same qualities. “Last year, in its way, was a pretty tough year too,” he said to me one noon en route from his office to the Mansion—referring to West Virginia, Truman’s attack, the Houston ministers and the TV debates. “I think we can handle whatever hits us.”

Nor did he lose his sense of humor. He opened one troubled NSC meeting with the remark: “Did we inherit these problems, or are these our own?” To a reporter he quipped, “The only thing that surprised us when we got into office was that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were.” When McGeorge Bundy or another aide would bring an urgent message to his desk, the President would ask, in a voice resigned to bad news and not wholly able to make light of it, “What’s happened now?” He liked quoting General MacArthur’s reminder to him in late April: “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.” And to another NSC meeting he remarked, “Oh, well, just think of what we’ll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me.”

THE BAY OF PIGS

The worst disaster of that disaster-filled period, the incident that showed John Kennedy that his luck and his judgment had human limitations, and the experience that taught him invaluable lessons for the future, occurred on April 17 to the Zapata Swamp at the Cuban Bay of Pigs. A landing force of some fourteen hundred anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized, trained, armed, transported and directed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was crushed in less than three days by the vastly more numerous forces of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. America’s powerful military might was useless, but America’s involvement was impossible to deny. Both publicly and privately the President asserted sole responsibility. Many wondered, nevertheless, how he could have approved such a plan. Indeed, the hardest question in his own mind after it was all over, he told one reporter, was “How could everybody involved have thought such a plan would succeed?” When I relayed to the President late in 1962 the request of a distinguished author that he be given access to the files on the Bay of Pigs, the President replied in the negative. “This isn’t the time,” he said. “Besides—we want to tell that story ourselves.”

This is the time to tell that story—at least those parts about which I can speak with confidence. I am limited by the fact that I knew nothing of the operation until after it was over. When I asked the President a few days earlier about the bare hint I had received from another meeting, he replied with an earthy expression that too many advisers seemed frightened by the prospects of a fight, and stressed somewhat uncomfortably that he had no alternative. But in the days that followed the fiasco the President talked to me about it at length—in the Mansion, in his office and as we walked on the White House lawn. He was aghast at his own stupidity, angry at having been badly advised by some and let down by others, and anxious, he said, that I start giving some time to foreign affairs. “That’s what’s really important these days,” he added.

What was really important in the Bay of Pigs affair was the very “gap between decision and execution, between planning and reality” which he had deplored in his first State of the Union. John Kennedy was capable of choosing a wrong course but never a stupid one; and to understand how he came to make this decision requires a review not merely of the facts but of
the facts and assumptions that were presented to him.

The Eisenhower administration authorized early in 1960 the training and arming of a Cuban exile army of liberation under the direction of the CIA. Shortly before the Presidential election of 1960, it was decided (although Eisenhower was apparently not informed of the decision) that this should be a conventional war force, not a guerrilla band, and its numbers were sharply increased.

On January 20, 1961, John Kennedy inherited the plan, the planners and, most troubling of all, the Cuban exile brigade—an armed force, flying another flag, highly trained in secret Guatemalan bases, eager for one mission only. Unlike an inherited policy statement or Executive Order, this inheritance could not be simply disposed of by Presidential rescission or withdrawal. When briefed on the operation by the CIA as President-elect in Palm Beach, he had been astonished at its magnitude and daring. He told me later that he had grave doubts from that moment on.

But the CIA authors of the landing plan not only presented it to the new President but, as was perhaps natural, advocated it. He was in effect asked whether he was as willing as the Republicans to permit and assist these exiles to free their own island from dictatorship, or whether he was willing to liquidate well-laid preparations, leave Cuba free to subvert the hemisphere, disband an impatient army in training for nearly a year under miserable conditions, and have them spread the word that Kennedy had betrayed their attempt to depose Castro. Are you going to tell this “group of fine young men,” as Allen Dulles posed the question later in public, “who asked nothing other than the opportunity to try to restore a free government in their country…ready to risk their lives…that they would get no sympathy, no support, no aid from the United States?” Would he let them choose for themselves between a safe haven in this country and a fighting return to their own, or would he force them to disband against their wishes, never to be rallied again?

Moreover, the President had been told, this plan was now or never, for three reasons: first, because the brigade was fully trained, restive to fight and difficult to hold off; second, because Guatemala was under pressure to close the increasingly publicized and politically controversial training camps, and his only choice was to send them back to Cuba, where they wished to go, or bring them back to this country, where they would broadcast their resentment; and third, because Russian arms would soon build up Castro’s army, Cuban airmen trained behind the Iron Curtain as MIG pilots would soon return to Cuba, large numbers of crated MIGs had already arrived on the island, and the spring of 1961—before Castro had a large jet air force and before the exile army scattered in discontent—was the last time Cubans alone could liberate Cuba. (With an excess of candor during the week prior to the landing, the President revealed the importance of this factor in his thinking when he stated in a TV interview, “If we don’t move now, Mr. Castro may become a much greater danger than he is to us today.”)

Finally, the President was told, the use of the exile brigade would make possible the toppling of Castro without actual aggression by the United States, without seeming to outsiders to violate our principles of nonintervention, with no risk of involvement and with little risk of failure. “I stood right here at Ike’s desk,” Dulles said to Kennedy (as Kennedy told me later), “and told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed,
¹
and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one.”