The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  There were men who opposed the invasion or at the very least were uneasy with it, and to a degree, they were the same men who would later oppose the Vietnam commitment. One was General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. When talk about invading Cuba was becoming fashionable, General Shoup did a remarkable display with maps. First he took an overlay of Cuba and placed it over the map of the United States. To everybody’s surprise, Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best. It was about 800 miles long and seemed to stretch from New York to Chicago. Then he took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba. “What’s that?” someone asked him. “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take it.” He eventually became Kennedy’s favorite general.

  Significantly, two of the men who might have been Secretary of State knew of the plan and were opposed (a third, Stevenson, did not know of it, but presumably would have opposed it), and both were Democratic party professionals who also knew something of foreign affairs. Senator J. William Fulbright and Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, public men with a sense of public responsibility, were objecting to a clandestine operation organized by private men who seemed to be responsible to no one but their own organizations, with even that responsibility so secret that it was difficult to define whether it existed. (In secret organizations, a subordinate’s failure reflects badly upon his superior as well, so there is a very strong instinct on the part of both to cover it up; it is only when knowledge about such failure is out in the open that a superior himself becomes responsible.) Bowles heard of the plan at the last minute, agonized over it, and wrote Rusk suggesting he fight it, noting:

  . . . Those most familiar with the Cuban operation seem to agree that, as the venture is now planned, the chances of success are not greater than one out of three. This makes it a highly risky operation. If it fails, Castro’s prestige and strength will be greatly enhanced. . . . I realize that this operation has been put together over a period of months. A great deal of time and money has been spent and many individuals have become emotionally involved in its success. We should not, however, proceed with the adventure simply because we are wound up and cannot stop.

  If you agree that this operation would be a mistake, I suggest that you personally and privately communicate your views to the President. It is my guess that your voice will be decisive.

  The man who had been chosen as Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, a Democrat but a private man, was against the invasion but did not really oppose it; he expressed doubts but not really strong opposition.

  In the aftermath, the crux of the matter was not whether the United States should have provided the counterinsurgents with air power or not (the air cover would only have prolonged and deepened the tragedy without changing its outcome); the crux was how the U.S. government could have so misread the Cuban people. Had there been even the beginning of serious anti-Castro feeling in the country, nothing would have rallied the average Cuban more quickly to the cause of Fidel than to have an invasion sponsored by the United States. The least of the mistakes were the ones most frequently commented on, the tactical ones, the question of the air power (attaching the United States in the eyes of the world to a slow death of a terrible political mistake instead of, happily, a quick one). But these were the mistakes which were fastened on. General Maxwell D. Taylor was called in to conduct a special review which centered on the tactical faults (too few men in the Brigade assembled in Guatemala, too few pilots in the air arm, too few men prepared and ready to relieve commanders, too few reserves, too little knowledge about uncharted reefs).

  There was far too little questioning of the moral right to launch the attack: after all, the Communists did things like this all the time, that was the way it was, the way power was used. A vast number of people felt it had failed because too little force had been used (this indeed appeared to be the problem for the President; the right was noisier in those days). The President himself probably, in some of the far reaches of his mind, began to learn important lessons about institutional wisdom, but among his advisers there seemed to be little learned. Nothing very important, nothing very serious. “A brick through the window,” McGeorge Bundy would tell friends. Part of the fault, the Administration believed, was that the advice had come from relics of the Eisenhower years, Allen Dulles at CIA and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the departure of both would be precipitated, the idea being that people more loyal to the President should head those institutions and thus make them more Kennedy-like. Bundy seemed preoccupied with the tactical aspects of the failure; when he met with his staff the day after the debacle, he seemed very much in control. The Bay of Pigs, he told his staff, showed that Che had learned more from Guatemala than the United States had (apparently a reference to the importance of air power). As for the members of the Brigade (many of them still strung out on the beaches), he said that these counterrevolutionaries were very much like assistant professors at Harvard, who were always being reminded about the possibility of not getting tenure but who never really believed your warnings until tenure failed to arrive.

  Rusk’s weak stand left the Kennedy people in retrospect more frustrated by his performance than anything else, and left both Kennedy and Rusk wishing that he had spoken up more clearly. But as soon became apparent, it was consistent with both his character and his view of the job; Rusk had, after all, not been chosen because Kennedy wanted a strong man, but because he would be a low-profile Secretary of State. Thus a voice which might predictably have been strongly opposed to this kind of military adventure was muted. On the other hand, the overt opposition of Bowles and Fulbright did not do them much good. Although in Fulbright’s case it strengthened his reputation in Washington as the chief Hill intellectual, it did not bring him any closer to the Kennedy circle, in part because of his own growing doubts about the men now in the executive branch.

  For Bowles it would be a good deal worse. Somehow the word got out that he had been against the invasion. Soon there was a story going around Washington that Bobby Kennedy had come out of a meeting, jammed his fingers into Bowles’s stomach and told him that he, Bowles, was for the invasion, remember that, he was for it, they were all for it (the story did not originate with the Bowles people, either). The Bay of Pigs debacle seemed to symbolize the futility of Bowles and to seal his end; he was talky, a do-gooder, had probably been against the venture for the wrong reasons. He was too ideological, while they, of course, were all pragmatists. In the early days of the Administration that particular word had been used so frequently that David Brinkley, writing the introduction of an early book of portraits of the Kennedy people, would dwell on that single word, and note that at an early Washington cocktail party a woman had gone around the room asking each of the hundred people there if he was a pragmatist.

  In May, a month after the Bay of Pigs, when a variety of lessons might have been sinking in, Bowles, who was considered so good at spotting long-range problems and so bad at handling immediate ones, wrote one of the most prophetic analyses of the new Administration in his private diary:

  The question which concerns me most about this new Administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong. I realize in posing the question I am raising an extremely serious point. Nevertheless I feel it must be faced.

  Anyone in public life who has strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of public morality, both domestic and international, has a very great advantage in times of strain, since his instincts on what to do are clear and immediate. Lacking such a framework of moral conviction or sense of what is right and what is wrong, he is forced to lean almost entirely upon his mental processes; he adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion. Under normal conditions, when he is not tired or frustrated, this pragmatic appro
ach should successfully bring him out on the right side of the question.

  What worries me are the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry, frustrated, or emotionally affected. The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.

  The problem for Bowles would soon become somewhat personal. He had entered the Administration with powerful enemies, some on the Hill, some in the entrenched wing of the foreign service, and some in the Democratic party­Acheson hard-line group. His enemies had not decreased in the early months of the Kennedy Administration. He had added Bobby Kennedy to them, a most formidable person indeed in those days, the ramrod of the Administration. At the end of May an incident occurred which certainly contributed to Bowles’s downfall. While both the President and Rusk were in Europe with De Gaulle, there was a crisis in the Dominican Republic following General Rafael Trujillo’s assassination. A group headed by Bobby Kennedy, but including McNamara and a few others (with Rusk, Kennedy and Bundy out of town, they represented the highest officials in the government), wanted to effect an immediate, though somewhat limited American intervention. They had some CIA contacts who promised that the right kind of Dominicans would rally and thus save the republic. Bowles, acting as Secretary, held the line against intervention because he doubted the legality of what they wanted to do. The others argued that speed was of the essence. Bowles suggested they find out a little more about which way events were moving. At that point Bobby Kennedy, still in his hard-nosed incarnation, the tough guy of the Administration, unleashed a cascade of insults about Bowles’s being a gutless bastard, which made some of the others in the room wince. Later in the day Bowles went on the phone to the President in Paris, explaining what the activists wanted to do and why he objected. Kennedy concurred in the objections.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Bowles, “and in that case, would you clarify who’s in charge here?”

  “You are,” the President said.

  “Good,” said Bowles. “Would you mind explaining it to your brother?”

  In addition to everything else, the functioning of the State Department just wasn’t working out well. At a dinner party in the spring of 1961 after the Bay of Pigs, Bundy would tell friends, “Something has to be changed at State and you can’t fire the Secretary of State. Particularly,” he added, “if you hired him after only one meeting,” a reference to the fact that if you have made a snap judgment you dare not admit that it is wrong. By early July 1961 a somewhat embarrassed Rusk was offering Bowles a job as roving ambassador, preferably to rove out of town, and admitting that it was Kennedy’s idea. A few days later Charles Bartlett, a close friend of Kennedy’s, wrote in his syndicated column that Bowles was on his way out. Bowles called up Kennedy and asked for a meeting. A curious conversation ensued. Kennedy began by saying that perhaps it had been a mistake not to make Bowles Secretary of State and that if so, things might have been different. But Rusk was Secretary of State, and the Department had not come up with new policies, and changes had to be made. Would Bowles like Chile? No, Bowles would not like Chile. As far as new ideas were concerned, he told Kennedy he had spent a great deal of time coming up with them, but they did not seem to go beyond Rusk’s desk. They decided to meet together in a few days, on July 17.

  In the meantime Washington seethed with rumors that Bowles was on his way out. He had become the perfect target for the conservatives, while the liberals, uneasy about the direction of the Kennedy Administration, began to rally round Bowles. For the first time the split personality of the Kennedy Administration seemed to show itself. Stevenson, Walter Reuther, Soapy Williams all rallied and told Bowles not to leave without a fight. He had become, in spite of himself, a litmus paper of the Administration. At the July 17 meeting he showed up armed with his memos on Cuba, China and related issues, memos which incorporated far more new ideas than the Kennedy Administration was prepared to handle. He told Kennedy he did not intend to take Chile. Later that day Press Secretary Pierre Salinger held a briefing and said no, Bowles’s resignation was not currently expected, but he added that off the record, for background, he was not expected to be around very long.

  There were others in the Kennedy circle uneasy with the direction of the Administration and particularly with the decision-making processes used in the Bay of Pigs. Shortly afterward Arthur Goldberg, the new Secretary of Labor (a labor negotiator who had been a particular favorite of the Kennedy people, having worked for them when much of labor’s hierarchy was anti-Kennedy because of the rackets committee investigation), asked the President why he hadn’t consulted more widely, why he had taken such a narrow spectrum of advice, much of it so predictable. Kennedy said that he meant no offense, but although Goldberg was a good man, a friend, he was in labor, not in foreign policy.

  “You’re wrong,” Goldberg replied, “you’re making the mistake of compartmentalizing your Cabinet. There are two people in the Cabinet you should have consulted on this one, men who know some things, and who are loyal to you and your interests.”

  “Who?” Kennedy asked.

  “Orville Freeman and me.”

  “Why Orville?”

  “Because he’s been a Marine, because he’s made amphibious landings and because he knows how tough they can be even under the very best circumstances. He could have helped you.”

  “And why you?”

  “Because I was in OSS during the war and I ran guerrilla operations and I know something about guerrillas. That they’re terrific at certain things. Sabotage and intelligence, nothing like them at that. But they’re no good at all in confronting regular units. Whenever we used them like that, we’d always lose all our people. They can do small things very well, but it’s a very delicate, limited thing. But you didn’t think of that—and you put me in the category of just a Secretary of Labor.”

  “A brick through the window.” Windows are easy to replace, and the Bay of Pigs did not change the basic direction of the Kennedy Administration in foreign affairs. It was still activist, anxious to show its muscles, perhaps more anxious than before. At Defense, McNamara was an activist, pledged to end a missile gap which did not exist, and whose own immediate instincts, once he was in government, were if anything to add to the arms race; he was, at first, very much the hardware man. In early 1961 some of the White House people like Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner and Carl Kaysen of the National Security Council were trying to slow down the arms race, or at least were in favor of a good deal more talking with the Soviets before speeding ahead. At that point the United States had 450 missiles; McNamara was asking for 950, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asking for 3,000. The White House people had quietly checked around and found that in effectiveness, in sheer military terms, the 450 were the same as McNamara’s 950. Thus a rare moment existed, a chance to make a new start, if not turn around the arms race, at least to give it a temporary freeze.

  “What about it, Bob?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, they’re right,” McNamara answered.

  “Well, then, why the nine hundred and fifty, Bob?” Kennedy asked.

  “Because that’s the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered,” he answered.

  Perhaps, thought one of the White House aides, by holding back we might have slowed the cycle rather than accelerated it. But in 1961 the advocates of disarmament encountered an Administration which considered the issue a little peripheral, not something that could be taken up immediately, something that would have to wait. Of the high officials, the President himself seemed the most receptive to the idea, though he was in no rush to lead the parade. McNamara appeared to be surprisingly educable, and if not an ally, at least open-minded, a man who could be brought around. Bundy was of little help; in the early days this was something he simply stayed out of. And Rusk, whose job at State it really was to create a disarmament lobby, seemed the least interested in the subject.

&nbs
p; If anything, the Bay of Pigs had made the Kennedy Administration acutely aware of its vulnerability and determined to show that it was worthy, that this was not a weak young President unable to cope with the Soviets, but that he was just as tough as they were, just as fast on the draw. In the Administration, those who were the tough-minded realists were strengthened; those less inclined to use force were weakened. Kennedy would soon have a chance to show whether he was worthy of his mandate, at the upcoming conference with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in early June, a meeting scheduled so soon after the Bay of Pigs that the very holding of it was dubious. But he went through with it, and the outcome, rather than lowering tensions, increased them. The President left Khrushchev in Vienna feeling that he had been bullied, more determined than ever to show Khrushchev that despite his youth, despite the Bay of Pigs, he was someone to conjure with. He would call up the reserves, and flex American muscle in many ways.