An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Two days after he became president, the CIA had begun urging Kennedy to move against Cuba. At a January 22 meeting of Rusk, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, Lemnitzer, Dulles, and other national security and foreign policy experts, Dulles emphasized that the U.S. had only two months “before something would have to be done about” the Cubans being trained in Guatemala. The urgency rested partly on the belief that Castro had plans to promote communism in Latin America, and that he “already had power among the people in the Caribbean countries and elsewhere, particularly in Venezuela and Colombia.” Because the CIA planners were now considering direct U.S. intervention, Rusk “commented on the enormous implications of putting U.S. forces ashore in Cuba and said we should consider everything short of this, including rough stuff.” He feared “we might be confronted by serious uprisings all over Latin America if U.S. forces were to go in.” He also worried that such a move might trigger “Soviet and Chi[nese] Com[munist] moves in other parts of the world.” The meeting ended with admonitions to consider “the so-called ‘shelf-life’ of the Cuban unit in Guatemala . . . [and] the question of how overtly the United States was prepared to show its hand.”

  During the last week in January, Kennedy held two White House meetings on Cuba in which Lemnitzer and CIA planners emphasized that time was working against the United States. Castro was tightening his hold on the island and seemed likely to make Cuba a permanent member of the communist bloc, “with disastrous consequences to the security of the Western Hemisphere.” They proposed overthrowing Castro’s government by secretly supporting an invasion and establishing a provisional government, which the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS) could support. In response, Kennedy authorized continuing covert CIA operations, a revised CIA invasion plan, a prompt diplomatic initiative to isolate Castro, and a strenuous effort to keep these discussions secret. He also tried to ensure that no decision would be taken without his authority. “Have we determined what we are going to do about Cuba?” he asked McGeorge Bundy on February 6. “If there is a difference of opinion between the agencies I think they should be brought to my attention.”

  Differences among his advisers about the results of an invasion did not give Kennedy much assurance. Bundy told him on February 8 that Defense and the CIA were much more optimistic than State about the outcome of an invasion. The military foresaw an invasion touching off “a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly.” And should there be no immediate uprising, the invaders could take refuge in the surrounding mountains and work toward the day when a critical mass of Cubans joined their cause. By contrast, State anticipated “very grave” political consequences in the United Nations and Latin America. Troubled by State’s predictions, Kennedy pressed advisers later that day “for alternatives to a full-fledged ‘invasion,’ supported by U.S. planes, ships and supplies.”

  Kennedy now faced two unhappy choices. If he decided against an invasion, he would have to disarm the Cubans in Guatemala and risk public attacks from them for failing to implement Eisenhower’s plans to combat communism in the hemisphere. The CIA offered Kennedy no alternative: They “doubted that other really satisfactory uses of the troops in Guatemala could be found.” As O’Donnell later put it, a decision to scrap the invasion would then make Kennedy look like an “appeaser of Castro. Eisenhower made a decision to overthrow Castro and you dropped it.” Kennedy would have been faced with “a major political blowup.”

  But an invasion might also produce an international disaster. “However well disguised any action might be,” Schlesinger told Kennedy, “it will be ascribed to the United States. The result would be a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States). Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative. At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.”

  Kennedy shared Schlesinger’s concern. He remembered his own rhetoric about liberty, justice, and self-determination, and understood that a visible U.S. role in an invasion would justifiably be seen as a betrayal of the progressive principles to which he was supposedly committed. But he was also attracted to the idea of toppling a Castro government that seemed to have little regard for the democratic freedoms promised by the Cuban revolution or for the autonomy of other Latin countries, which Castro hoped to destabilize and bring into the communist orbit. During the February 8 meeting, Kennedy asked CIA planners if the Cuban brigade could “be landed gradually and quietly and make its first major military efforts from the mountains—then taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.”

  The CIA and the military gave him assurances that the Cuban exiles could succeed without the participation of U.S. forces. On March 10, the Joint Chiefs told McNamara that “the small invasion force” of some twelve to fifteen hundred men “could be expected to achieve initial success. Ultimate success will depend on the extent to which the initial assault serves as a catalyst for further action on the part of anti-Castro elements throughout Cuba.” The Chiefs also predicted that the invading brigade “will have a good chance of sustaining itself indefinitely.”

  In turn, the CIA endorsed and went beyond the Chiefs’ recommendations. At a meeting with JFK on the eleventh, Dulles and Richard Bissell, the agency’s deputy director of plans, predicted that Castro would not fall without outside intervention and that within a matter of months his military power would reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. “The Cuban paramilitary force if effectively used [in the next month] has a good chance of overthrowing Castro, or of causing a damaging civil war, without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action against Cuba.” Kennedy declared himself “willing to take the chance of going ahead; [but] . . . he could not endorse a plan that put us in so openly, in view of the world situation. He directed the development of a plan where US assistance would be less obvious.”

  The CIA now assured the president that an invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in the Zapata region some hundred miles west of Trinidad, the original site for the attack, would look less like a “small-scale World War II amphibious assault” and more like “an infiltration of guerrillas in support of an internal revolution.” Although Dulles and Bissell warned that communist accusations of U.S. involvement were inevitable, they thought it preferable to the “certain risks” of demobilizing the Cuban exiles and returning them to the United States, where they seemed bound to launch ugly political attacks on the administration for losing its nerve.

  Schlesinger urged Kennedy not to let the threat of political attacks push him into a questionable military operation. He saw “a slight danger of our being rushed into something because CIA has on its hands a band of people it doesn’t quite know what to do with.” Allen Dulles worried that if the CIA scotched the invasion and transferred the exiles from Guatemala to the United States, they would wander “‘around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.’ Obviously,” Schlesinger concluded, “this is a genuine problem, but it can’t be permitted to govern US policy.”

  CIA revisions of the invasion plan muted Schlesinger’s warning. The CIA, Bundy told the president on March 15, “[has] done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials. . . . I have been a skeptic about Bissell’s operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer.”

  Kennedy was still not so sure. At a meeting that day, he seemed to accept the essentials of the new plan but objected to a dawn landing, suggesting instead that “in order to make this appear as an inside guerrilla-type operation, the ships should be clear of the area by dawn.” Though the CIA returned the next day with the requested changes, which Kennedy approved, he “reserv
ed the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing.”

  Although planning went forward for an early-April invasion, Kennedy remained hesitant, and even a little distraught about what to do. Admiral Burke deepened Kennedy’s concerns on March 17, when he told him that “the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising.” On March 28, Schlesinger asked JFK, “What do you think about this damned invasion?” Kennedy replied, “I think about it as little as possible,” implying that it was too painful a subject with too many uncertainties for him to dwell on it. But of course it was at the center of his concerns. At yet other meetings about Cuba on March 28 and 29, Kennedy instructed the CIA to inform Cuban Brigade leaders that “U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to participate in or support the invasion in any way.” Kennedy also wanted to know whether the Cubans thought the invasion could succeed without U.S. military intervention and whether they wished to proceed under the limitations he had described. Brigade leaders responded that despite Kennedy’s restrictions, they wished to go ahead.

  The willingness of the Cubans, the CIA, and the U.S. military to proceed partly rested on their assumption that once the invasion began, Kennedy would have to use American forces if the attack seemed about to fail. One of the invaders remembers being told, “If you fail we will go in.” The pressure for U.S. intervention was evident to Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, who opposed the plan. On March 31, he told Rusk, “If the operation appears to be a failure in its early stages, the pressure on us to scrap our self-imposed restriction on direct American involvement will be difficult to resist.” The danger, Bowles added, is that a failure would “greatly enhance Castro’s prestige and strength.” And Bowles saw the odds of a failure as two to one. He believed it better to scrap the invasion and live with Castro’s regime. The United States could then blockade any Soviet attempt to provide Cuba with large amounts of arms and use force, with likely OAS backing, against any overt Castro aggression in Latin America.

  “No one,” Schlesinger said later, “expected the invasion to galvanize the unarmed and the unorganized into rising against Castro at the moment of disembarkation. But the invasion plan, as understood by the President and the Joint Chiefs, did assume that the successful occupation of an enlarged beachhead area would rather soon incite organized uprisings by armed members of the Cuban resistance.” Dulles and Bissell, Schlesinger also pointed out, “reinforced this impression” by claiming “that over 2,500 persons presently belonged to resistance organizations, that 20,000 more were sympathizers, and the Brigade, once established on the island, could expect the active support of, at the very least, a quarter of the Cuban people.” A CIA paper of April 12 on “The Cuban Operation” estimated that “there are 7,000 insurgents responsive to some degree of control through agents with whom communications are currently active.” The paper conceded that the individual groups were “small and very inadequately armed,” but after the invasion the Agency hoped to supply them with air drops and make “every effort . . . to coordinate their operations with those of the landing parties.”

  In the days leading up to the attack on April 17, Kennedy continued to hear dissenting voices. At the end of March, he asked Dean Acheson what he thought of the proposal to invade Cuba. Acheson did not know there was one, and when Kennedy described it to him, Acheson voiced his skepticism in the form of a question: “Are you serious?” Kennedy replied, “I don’t know if I’m serious or just . . . I’m giving it serious thought.” When Acheson asked how many men Castro could put on the beach to meet the nearly 1,500 invaders and Kennedy answered 25,000, Acheson declared, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.” Schlesinger peppered JFK with memos and private words about the injury to U.S. prestige and his presidency; Rusk lodged muted protests; and Fulbright, who as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had been briefed about the plan, spoke forcefully against U.S. hypocrisy in denouncing Soviet indifference to self-determination and planning an invasion of a country that was more a thorn in the flesh than a dagger in the heart.

  These warnings reinforced Kennedy’s own considerable doubts about so uncertain an operation. Allen Dulles countered them by saying, “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this. But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, ‘I believe it will work.’ And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala.” Dulles emphasized that there was small risk of failure and no risk of U.S. involvement that would sacrifice American credibility when it came to professing regard for self-determination. Dulles clearly could not foresee later critical assessments by historians complaining that CIA operations overturning a popular government in Guatemala City solidified America’s reputation as an imperial power hypocritically ignoring commitments to democracy for all peoples. Or, if he did foresee this, he found it easy enough to ignore when pressing the president about Cuba.

  Other subtle psychological impulses were at work in persuading Kennedy to approve the invasion plan. One element was Kennedy’s conception of military action. The possibility of a nuclear war was abhorrent to him, but the idea of patriotic men prepared to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their country was an entirely different matter. He saw no higher recommendation for someone than patriotic courage. Schlesinger remembered how much the commitment of the Cuban Brigade moved Kennedy. The invasion also had a romantic appeal for him, the quality of an adventure like that which had drawn Kennedy to command a PT boat. He and Bobby shared an affinity for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and their urbane hero. Bissell, who did so much to sell Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, seemed to be something of a real-life Bond himself—an Ivy League graduate, socially sophisticated, tall and handsome, “civilized, responsible,” “a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts.” His description of himself as “a man-eating shark” delighted the Kennedys.

  Despite Dulles’s assurances, the operation had the code name “Bumpy Road.” Moreover, because Kennedy did not entirely trust Dulles’s predictions, he kept emphasizing in the two weeks before the invasion that it needed to “appear as an internal uprising” and that “the United States would not become overtly engaged with Castro’s armed forces.” At a meeting on April 6, he insisted on “everything possible to make it appear to be a Cuban operation partly from within Cuba, but supported from without Cuba, the objective being to make it more plausible for US denial of association with the operation, although recognizing that we would be accused.”

  Newspaper stories about anti-Castro forces being trained by Americans made it all the harder to deny U.S. involvement. Castro “doesn’t need agents over here,” Kennedy said privately. “All he has to do is read our papers.” At a news conference on April 12, with press stories predicting an imminent invasion, Kennedy was asked how far the United States would go “in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba.” He replied, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This Government will do everything it can . . . to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.” Two days later, Kennedy ordered Bissell to “play down the magnitude of the invasion” and to reduce an initial air strike by Cuban pilots flying from outside Cuba from sixteen to eight planes.

  On Saturday, April 15, eight B-26s flying from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields. It was the beginning of what historian Theodore Draper later called “one of those rare events in history—a perfect failure.” The bombers destroyed only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes and left the invaders, traveling by boats from Nicaragua, vulnerable to air attacks before and after landing on the beaches. To give credence to a CIA cover story, the Agency arranged to have a ninth bomber with Cuban air force markings and bullet holes fly from Nicaragua to Mia
mi, where it made an “emergency” landing and the CIA-trained pilot declared himself a defector who had flown from Cuba.

  Adlai Stevenson, who was not among those the White House believed needed to know the truth, sincerely denied U.S. involvement before a U.N. General Assembly committee considering charges of United States “imperialist aggression” against Cuba. When the implausibility of the CIA cover plot quickly became evident, an outraged Stevenson complained to Rusk and Dulles on April 16, “I do not understand how we could let such an attack take place two days before debate on the Cuban issue in GA.” Nor could he understand “why I could not have been warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us.” He saw the “gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action.”

  A second planned air strike in support of the invasion on the morning of April 17 became a casualty of the CIA’s unraveling ruse. Until the brigade could establish a beachhead and make a plausible case for the fiction that their B-26s were taking off from and landing on the beach, Kennedy, who was keeping a low profile at his retreat in Glen Ora, Virginia, grounded the exiles’ sixteen planes. After giving the order by phone to Rusk, Kennedy paced “the room in evident concern,” worried now that the whole operation might prove to be a fiasco. “Those with him at Glen Ora,” Schlesinger recorded, “had rarely seen him so low.” When Bundy passed Kennedy’s order along to Dulles’s two principal deputies, they warned that “failure to make air strikes in the immediate beachhead area the first thing in the morning (D-Day) would clearly be disastrous.” When informed of the president’s decision, other CIA planners concluded that “it would probably mean the failure of the mission.”