An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  According to Lawrence Freedman, “Kennedy was maintaining his military options [against Cuba] for no better reason than his preference for never closing any options off, just in case circumstances changed.” JFK’s affinity for competing rapprochement proposals makes Freedman’s assertion convincing. In November, as the Cuban missile crisis ended, Castro’s anger at Khrushchev for giving in to U.S. pressure and agreeing to on-site inspections raised the possibility that Castro might actually welcome a rapprochement with the United States. In fact, Castro announced himself ready for an agreement with Washington, but his conditions for an accommodation—an end to Washington’s economic embargo, subversion, exile raids, U-2 overflights, and control of Guantanamo—were more than any American government could accept, especially if it hoped to avoid a firestorm of criticism from Cuban exiles and their American allies.

  Castro’s demands did not kill Kennedy’s interest in reducing Cuban-American tensions. In February, after an NSC staffer urged him to talk publicly about isolating Cuba from the Soviet bloc and not other hemisphere countries, Kennedy told newsmen that the communist threat in the hemisphere did not emanate “primarily” from Cuba. Instead, it fed on economic “hardships” suffered by Latin American peoples. If Cuban subversion disappeared, a communist threat would still exist. A few days later, when a Cuban MIG fighter fired at an American shrimp boat in the Caribbean, the administration’s measured protest and a “soft” Cuban reply avoided an escalation in Cuban-American tensions, and, as the New York Times reported, became instead an opportunity for the two sides to discuss their overall differences.

  Bobby remained the principal voice in the administration for anti-Castro action, and the failure of Mongoose and the CIA to propose practical means of ousting Castro moved him to look to Cuban exiles to rescue their country. In March 1963, when McCone told an NSC meeting that an internal military coup in Cuba was more likely than a civil uprising facilitated from the outside and predicted that congressional pressure over Cuba would ease, Bobby disputed his analysis. He also took exception to Rusk’s advice against giving the Cuban exiles false hopes. The next day, he sent his brother a memo urging “periodic meetings of half a dozen or so top officials of the Government to consider Cuba and Latin America.” He felt that the NSC meeting showed an insufficient commitment to new anti-Castro actions. They needed to “come up with a plan for a future Cuba.” “I would not like it said a year from now,” he explained, “that we could have had this internal breakup in Cuba but we just did not set the stage for it.”

  When the President ignored Bobby’s recommendations, Bobby wrote his brother: “Do you think there was any merit to my last memo? . . . In any case, is there anything else on this matter?” Another Bobby suggestion in early April that the administration support a five-hundred-man raiding party also received no reply.

  Kennedy was in no mood to exacerbate tensions with Cuba. In March, after Cuban exiles attacked Soviets ships and installations in Cuba, Kennedy expressed concern at the potential damage to Soviet-American relations and the need to prevent further assaults. He told an NSC meeting that “these in-and-out raids were probably exciting and rather pleasant for those who engage in them. They were in danger for less than an hour. This exciting activity was more fun than living in the hills of Escambray, pursued by Castro’s military forces.” McCone warned against openly cutting off the commandos; it would produce “intense public and press criticism” as well as congressional complaints. And while he acknowledged that the raids would probably increase difficulties with Castro and the Soviets, he also saw potential benefits, including a Soviet reappraisal of their Cuban commitment, which might cause them “to open a discussion of their presence [in Cuba] with the United States.” Kennedy was not convinced. Although he was willing to consider encouraging the raiders to strike only at Cuban targets, this was as much to give himself political cover as to promote Castro’s demise. Negotiations with Castro for the release of twenty-two American citizens held in Cuban prisons as CIA agents were one reason for discouraging exile attacks. James B. Donovan, a New York lawyer who had negotiated the release of the nearly twelve hundred exile Cubans captured at the Bay of Pigs in exchange for $53 million worth of medicines, had Kennedy’s approval for these additional talks. In April, Kennedy privately made clear to the exiles that for the time being he wanted no more attacks. By May, the CIA described the exile groups as “puzzled with regard to the American policy toward Cuba and the exile community.” Exile leaders, the CIA also reported, saw “[no] real reason for unity because obviously there is no moral or financial support forthcoming from the U.S. government and without this support there is no point to unity.”

  Though Donovan was careful to emphasize his status as a private citizen during his April visit, Castro and Kennedy saw him as an intermediary who might help initiate better Cuban-American relations. During his five days in Cuba, Donovan spent more than twenty-four hours in conversations with Castro. A first meeting on Sunday, April 7, lasted from 1:00 A.M. to 6:30 A.M. Castro asked Donovan for suggestions on “how relationships could be established with the United States.” When Donovan replied that American public sentiment toward Castro might be changing, as White House limits on the exiles and majority opinion against a war with Cuba demonstrated, Castro declared that a future “ideal” Cuban government “was not to be Soviet oriented. . . . There was absolutely no chance that Cuba would become a Soviet satellite.” He also stated that “Cuba was not exporting subversion to other Latin American countries.” He pressed Donovan to say how Havana and Washington could achieve better political relations and raised the possibility that Donovan be given some official status that would allow him to continue these discussions in Havana. Castro saw official relations with the United States as a “necessity,” but explained that “certain Cuban Government officials, communists,” currently limited what he could do. A report from Donovan greatly interested Kennedy, especially the part about Castro’s eagerness for better relations and his description of communist constraints.

  In May, when Castro visited Moscow for a month, the CIA, White House, and State Department tried to decipher the consequences for Cuban-American relations. Was Castro’s visit meant to remind the United States that no attack on Cuba would be tolerated? Was it an effort to reduce Soviet-Cuban tensions and head off a U.S.-Cuban accommodation? Or was it a demonstration of Khrushchev’s conviction that a Cuban “rapprochement with the U.S. [was] a necessity” and that Castro needed “indoctrination to this end”? Although the State Department acknowledged that the visit might signal the start of a campaign to improve Cuban-American relations, it argued against a rapprochement: An agreement with Castro would be destructive to the development of democracy in Latin America and would touch off a firestorm of domestic political opposition. Yet Kennedy did not want to close off the possibility of reaching an accommodation with Castro. As the NSC conceded at the end of May, all of the existing courses of action proposed for toppling Castro “were singularly unpromising.” Bundy was even more emphatic: The anti-Castro measures being considered “will not result in his overthrow.”

  Pessimism about U.S. capacity to alter conditions in Cuba, however, did not deter the administration from agreeing to renewed raids and sabotage. The political consequences of open efforts at rapprochement were more than Kennedy felt he could risk a year before his reelection campaign. Though raids and sabotage would not unseat Castro, they would meet continuing domestic pressures for action and encourage the belief that he was vulnerable to defeat. In September and October, respectively, when Dobrynin and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko told Kennedy of Khrushchev’s unhappiness with these raids, Kennedy conceded that they were serving “no useful purpose.”

  Consequently, albeit secretly, Kennedy agreed to further explore the possibility of improved relations. The principal advocate of change was William Attwood, a former Look magazine editor, who had interviewed Castro and had served from March 1961 to May 1963 as ambassador to Guinea, where he
had helped bring a government friendly to Moscow into the Western camp. Appointed an adviser to the United States Mission to the U.N. in the summer of 1963, Attwood listened attentively to “neutral diplomats,” who suggested “a course of action which, if successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Stripping the Republicans of the Cuban matter by “neutralizing Cuba on our terms” had considerable appeal to Kennedy. It would also eliminate international embarrassment over the image of a superpower America bullying a weak island country. If rapprochement included the removal of all Soviet forces from Cuba, an end to Cuba’s hemisphere subversion, and Havana’s commitment to nonalignment in the Cold War, Kennedy believed he could sell it to the American public.

  With Adlai Stevenson’s support and the president’s approval, Attwood secretly discussed the possibility of a Cuban-American dialogue with Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s U.N. ambassador. Lechuga urged that someone travel to Havana for an initial talk with Castro. Attwood was not hopeful. Lechuga and Castro might be interested, but they were “too well boxed in by such hardliners as Guevara to be able to maneuver much.” But Attwood, who believed that he could handle the assignment in secret, was eager to try. After a meeting with Bobby about possible negotiations, Attwood suggested to Lechuga that they hold secret talks at the U.N. “The ball is in Cuban hands and the door is ajar,” Attwood told Bundy in October.

  Kennedy’s receptivity to a possible accommodation with Castro registered forcefully on Jean Daniel, a French journalist on his way to Havana at the end of October. Agreeing to a meeting with Daniel at Ben Bradlee’s urging, Kennedy did not want to talk about Vietnam or say much about de Gaulle. “I’d like to talk to you about Cuba,” Kennedy said. He began by acknowledging U.S. responsibility for Cuban miseries perpetrated by Batista. “I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it,” he declared. Batista was “the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States.” All this, which Kennedy assumed would be repeated to Castro, was meant to suggest that he had genuine concern for Cuba’s well-being. Castro’s willingness to act as an agent of Soviet communism in Cuba and the hemisphere, Kennedy added, had put them at odds; indeed, Castro had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war. Kennedy did not know whether Castro understood this or even cared. Kennedy stood up at this point to signal an end to the conversation, but Daniel asked him about the economic blockade of Cuba. The end of subversive activities in the hemisphere could bring an end to the blockade, Kennedy replied. Kennedy asked Daniel to see him again after returning from Cuba. “Castro’s reactions interest me,” he said.

  Castro surprised the Americans by sending word that he “would very much like to talk,” but that it would have to be in Cuba, not at the U.N. He “appreciated the importance of discretion” and offered to send a plane to Mexico or Key West to fly an American official to Cuba, where they could meet in a secret airfield near Havana. Castro did not wish to be seen as in any way soliciting U.S. friendship. As a Greek intermediary told Attwood, “Castro would welcome a normalization of relations with the United States if he could do so without losing too much face.” Similarly, Bobby told Attwood that the administration could not risk accusations that it was “trying to make a deal with Castro.”

  On November 12, Bundy advised Attwood that the president saw the visit of any U.S. official to Cuba now as impractical. Instead, he, as Bobby had before him, suggested that Castro send his personal envoy to see Attwood in New York. Kennedy wanted Castro to say first whether there was any prospect of Cuban independence from Moscow and an end to hemisphere subversion. “Without an indication of readiness to move in these directions, it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Bundy advised Attwood to make clear to the Cubans “that we were not supplicants in this matter and the initiative for exploratory conversations was coming from the Cubans.” On the eighteenth, Castro sent word to Attwood that the invitation to come to Cuba remained open and that the security of the visit was guaranteed. When Attwood said that a preliminary meeting “was essential to make sure there was something useful to talk about,” Castro’s emissary promised to send an “agenda” for discussion between Attwood and Lechuga as a prelude to a future meeting with Castro.

  On the same day, Kennedy spoke in Miami before the Inter-American Press Association. His speech included veiled references to an altered relationship with Cuba. Latin America’s problems would “not be solved simply by complaining about Castro, by blaming all problems on communism, or generals or nationalism,” he said. He declared it “important to restate what now divides Cuba from my country and from the other countries of this hemisphere. It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba . . . a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American Republics. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes and the sympathy of many people throughout the hemisphere.”

  The Cuban community in Florida did not miss the president’s implied receptivity to a fresh start in relations with Cuba. In general, the exiles saw the speech as “expressions of willingness to accept ‘Fidelismo sin Fidel.’” This did not please the substantial number of conservatives in the community. If they had known about the Attwood initiative and the Daniel conversation, they would have been up in arms.

  There was still intense pressure for covert action. On October 1, Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA’s director of planning and new head of secret operations, described a 5 to 7 percent decline in Cuban production, with a 20 percent drop in the sugar harvest, which had caused a deterioration in living conditions and undermined Castro’s popularity. The fact that the economic downturn had not yet affected the Cuban military made it difficult to foresee a coup. But when the decline continued into November, “causing increasing hardships to the civilian population,” U.S. analysts thought that Castro’s “grip [was] weakening.” Since U.S.-sponsored sabotage seemed likely to further weaken the economy and Castro’s popularity, McCone urged a continuation of such harassment.

  Kennedy, however, had heard too much optimistic talk about bringing down Castro to trust current assessments and predictions. At a November 12 meeting on Cuba, he asked whether the sabotage program “was worthwhile and whether it would accomplish our purpose.” Nevertheless, his unresolved problems with Cuba and continuing worries about threats to the hemisphere and his own reelection made him reluctantly receptive to continuing subversion. Indeed, no one listening to his Inter-American Press Association speech on the eighteenth could have doubted that overturning Castro’s government remained an active option.

  Kennedy’s dual-track Cuban policy in 1963 did not, however, include assassinating Castro. A CIA scheme (or, more precisely, a Desmond Fitzgerald scheme) set in motion on November 22, to have Rolando Cubela Secades, an anti-Castro member of the Cuban government, kill Castro with an injection from a hypodermic needle hidden in a ballpoint pen, was directly at odds with Kennedy’s policies. It was one thing to hope that hit-and-run raids and economic sanctions could provoke an internal uprising, but assassinating Castro seemed certain to make things worse. The devoted communists, who were allegedly holding Castro back from a rapprochement, seemed likely to react to a martyred Castro by ending any chance of accommodation.

  No one knows what the future of Cuban-American relations would have been after November 22 or during a second Kennedy term, when he would not have had to answer to American voters again. The great likelihood that Castro was going to outlast U.S. plotting against him made it almost certain that Kennedy would have had to deal with him during that second term. And given the growing inter
est in moving beyond the stale conflict of the previous five years, who can doubt that a Cuban-American accommodation might have been an achievement of Kennedy’s second four years? Whatever the uncertainties in November 1963 about future Castro-Kennedy dealings, it is clear that they signaled a mutual interest in finding a way through their antagonisms, which were doing neither of them any good.

  UNCERTAINTIES OVER CUBA were matched by those on Vietnam. Back in February 1962, after the administration announced the creation of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), and an anonymous official told the press that the United States was determined “to win” the war, a reporter had pressed the president to answer a Republican charge that he had been less than candid with the public about U.S. involvement. Kennedy had reviewed the “long history” of U.S. commitment, urged a continuation of the “very strong bipartisan consensus,” and described U.S. assistance as logistics and “training missions,” not combat. In March and April, reporters had only three brief questions about Vietnam: How was the war going? Would he ask Congress for approval before sending combat troops? And what did he intend to do about American soldiers being killed? Kennedy’s assurances that the South Vietnamese were holding their own, that he did not plan to send combat troops, and that the handful of losses were regrettable accidents of war had satisfied the press, which asked nothing more about the war in the President’s twice monthly news conferences during the rest of the year.

  The lull in discussion about Vietnam, however, ended in November and December 1962 when conflicting reports about progress in the strategic hamlet program reached Washington and then leaked to the press. Indications that Diem saw the program more as a way to control rural areas than to ensure their security, coupled with a paucity of hard information from the hamlets themselves, provoked questions in the executive branch about the program’s effectiveness. In early November, Mike Forrestal, the State Department’s official most responsible for Vietnam, told Bobby that “Averell and I feel that the war is not going as well out there as one might be led to believe. . . . The political problem is growing relatively worse. . . . The major fault lies with the GVN.” To get a clearer picture of developments, Kennedy asked Mike Mansfield, who enjoyed a reputation as an Asian expert, to visit Vietnam.