As it turned out, the murder of Fidel Castro was also on the anti-Cuba agenda. At least for the CIA. The actual assassination attempts were made public by the Church Committee investigation of the CIA in 1975. Senator Frank Church and his staff had access to the Inspector General report on this subject prepared at the request of President Johnson in 1967. Some of the methods proposed were of the Keystone Kops variety. They included attempts to use poison cigars and ice cream sodas, chemicals to make Castro’s beard fall out, and even the use of a poisoned seashell at his favorite skin diving beach. But there is little doubt that the CIA wanted someone to get close to Castro and assassinate him. In attempting this, they reached out to the Mafia. As mentioned earlier, the mob had been earning large profits in the hotel and resort business in Cuba. But months after gaining power, Castro decided to shut these down also. But in 1959, Castro actually imprisoned Santo Trafficante at the Tresconia detention camp on the outskirts of Havana. This was an easygoing prison, which allowed visitors. One of these visitors to Trafficante was reported to be Jack Ruby.70 Which makes perfect sense since one of Ruby’s close friends, Lewis McWillie, had reportedly worked for Trafficante in one of his Havana casinos.
Realizing that the mob was probably interested in getting their lucrative hotel/casino business back, the CIA made contact with private investigator Robert Maheu.71 In the fall of 1960, Maheu got in contact with mobster John Roselli. Roselli then arranged a meeting for Maheu with Chicago don Sam Giancana and Florida godfather Trafficante. The letter said he had a contact on the island who could probably get the job done.72 But the contact got cold feet about feeding poison pills to Castro. Trafficante then suggested Tony Varona who still had contacts in Cuba. This scheme entailed a man who worked in a favorite restaurant of Castro feeding him poison pills. But Castro stopped going to this particular establishment.73 This failure ended the first phase of these assassination attempts—all of them prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion— thus leaving Castro in place to lead the opposition to that perfect failure.
As 1959 bled over into 1960, the USA and its allies tried to organize a banking boycott of Cuba. The State Department actively tried to block loans from Europe to Cuba. And they explicitly stopped in place a large Dutch, French, and West German loan transaction to Castro. Therefore, with nowhere else to turn, in the first half of 1960, Cuba now signed trade and credit agreements with communist countries like China, Poland, and East Germany.74 By backing Castro into the communist orbit, the planned isolation of Cuba was now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Predictably, Eisenhower now said that Castro was beginning to look like a madman, and something had to be done about him. He even mused about blockading the island.75
In March of 1960 there was another important meeting at the White House about Castro. Dulles and his special assistant on Cuba, Richard Bissell, met with the president to discuss a Guatemala-type incursion against Cuba.76 There were four main parts to the plan: creating a credible government-in-exile; launching a full propaganda offensive aimed at both Cubans in exile and those on the island; creating an on-island guerrilla unit sympathetic to the government-in-exile; and creating a paramilitary force outside Cuba to precipitate action.
Eisenhower approved the plan but insisted that all four parts be in place, especially the first, before he would initiate hostilities. Dulles thought this would take about six to eight months. Eisenhower wished to get rid of Castro before he left office. But if he did not, he felt that Richard Nixon, who both enthusiastically supported the plan and, as White House Cuba Project action officer, knew its details, would succeed him as President and carry it out well.77
Unfortunately for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Dulles, Jack Kennedy’s election in 1960 was a big surprise.
CHAPTER TWO
The Education of John F. Kennedy
“In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”
—President Kennedy to Fidel Castro, November of 1963
It is difficult to imagine two major politicians as seemingly different as Dwight David Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Their superficial differences are easy to list. Eisenhower was a traditionally conservative Republican. Kennedy was a liberal Democrat. At the time, Eisenhower was the oldest President to hold office, while Kennedy was the youngest ever elected. That age difference was visually dramatic: the former general was partly bald, white-haired, wrinkled, and stooped; Kennedy was youthful, with a full head of wavy, brown hair; he was effervescent, vibrant, with fashion-model good looks.
In the 1960 election, the Kennedy brain trust was well aware of these differences and worked assiduously to take advantage of them. Indeed, the idea of the “New Frontier” theme was created at the nominating convention in Los Angeles, when, with more than 50,000 in attendance, then Senator Kennedy accepted the nomination with these words: “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the ’60s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfilled hopes and threats.”1
Kennedy was challenging an image of eight Republican years of apparent security and quietude or, as one commentator has termed it, “years of excitement cushioned in complacency.”2 For Kennedy seemed like a new kind of liberal—well-informed, dynamic, moderate, fiscally prudent, yet one who could reach across lines of class and politics to create a consensus. Unlike Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy could not easily be pigeonholed by the Republicans.
But if there was one area where Kennedy and Eisenhower seemed to intersect, it was in their response to the communist threat. For all his freshness and energy, Kennedy was a prudent politician. He knew that to be branded soft on communism would be to invite political oblivion. Throughout his career, he had carefully cultivated anticommunist credentials, even on domestic issues. For instance, when he first began investigating labor issues in the House of Representatives, he targeted communist membership in American unions.3 During the Senate voting to censure McCarthy for witch-hunting against the army, young Kennedy carefully dodged the roll call, failing to phone in his vote from his hospital bed. It was Kennedy’s fence-sitting on the McCarthy issue that cost him the support of the liberal paragon, Eleanor Roosevelt, in his drive for the vice-presidential nomination in 1956.4
In the 1960 campaign, Kennedy was strong on national defense, claiming a huge missile gap existed between the U.S. and USSR. (In fact, the “gap” was decidedly in our favor; the U.S. had a ten-to-one advantage in missiles, and the Soviet Union had cut its military budget by one-half between 1955 and 1960.5) He was strong on defending the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of China against the Chinese Communists—a crisis that had been all but extinguished by that time.6 Most of all, he was tough on Cuba. In the famous election debate against Nixon, Kennedy used the Cuban issue like a billy club. When Nixon attacked the Democrats for “losing China,” Kennedy shot back that Nixon was in no position to accuse anyone of not standing up to the communists, since his administration had allowed a communist takeover ninety miles off the Florida coast.7
Kennedy was even more specific in his prescriptions for dealing with Castro: “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces …. Thus far these freedom fighters have had virtually no support from our government.”8 This was not accurate. As we have seen, Eisenhower had sanctioned formal backing of the recruitment and formation of anti-Castro forces and the attempted creation of a government in exile. During the winter of 1959–60 there were actually paramilitary operations of Agency-supervised bombing and incendiary air raids piloted by Cuban exiles.9 It is hotly debated just how much Kennedy knew about the Bay of Pigs preparations during the campaign. Allen Dulles briefed JFK on the operation twice, once in July and again in September. Dulles has stated that at the first meeting only generalities were discussed and the only clandestine operations he revealed were radio broadcasts. Dulles did not reveal the substance of the second meeting, but after it, Kennedy went on recor
d in two speeches in support of the freedom-fighting forces in exile.
Then, on November 18, president-elect Kennedy received a fuller briefing from Dulles on the proposed invasion. Again, it seems that specific details were not discussed. But Kennedy appears to have developed other channels both inside and outside the government to gather information on the planned operation.10 In any event, Kennedy then showed some affinity with Nixon and Eisenhower about the need for alternatives to Castro. In 1960, whether because of or in spite of these similarities to the Nixon-Eisenhower positions, JFK won the closest election victory in American history. Out of nearly 70 million votes cast, Kennedy won by a bit over 100,000. The electoral vote was a more solid 303–219.
But below the level of campaign rhetoric, John Kennedy was not simply a more youthful version of Eisenhower. This was especially marked in his attitude toward the communist threat in respect to what was becoming known as the “third world,” those developing former European colonies just achieving their independence.
In the 1950s, there was massive conformity in American politics about counteracting alleged communist infiltration or expansion into so-called free or neutral areas: it must be prevented, no matter what the price or circumstances. Since 1946, this attitude was increasingly vehement, explaining in large part the intensity of reaction to Castro’s leftward turn in Cuba. Despite its internal differences, the communist world was portrayed as a hulking monolith, poised to enslave a precarious free world. Soviet actions right after World War II, the Alger Hiss case, the Rosenbergs’ alleged theft of atom bomb secrets, the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities—of which Nixon was a member—the wild accusations of Senator Joe McCarthy, all these and more seemed to paralyze rational analysis and, ironically, give the lie to the self-proclaimed serenity of the golf-playing Eisenhower and the era taking his name. But what ensured a rigid, overwrought, knee-jerk reaction was the juggernaut of the domino theory.11
Like most political boilerplate, the theory had some relation to fact. After World War II, every Eastern European government had gone communist. All but Yugoslavia were closely allied with Stalin. Extrapolating from this, jingoists postulated that this chain reaction would be repeated if another country in any other area were to fall to communism. The peculiar relationship of the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, Stalin’s legitimate fear of Germany,12 the fact that China went communist under totally different circumstances and by itself in 1949,13 the indigenous nature of most Third World liberation struggles—all this was ignored or distorted in this oversimplified, self-serving theory. Once the dominoes started falling, there was no telling where they would stop: the Philippines, Australia, Hawaii, maybe even San Diego.
Eisenhower was an avid believer in the domino theory. During his administration, one domino after another seemed to be constantly falling. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, a treaty organization had to be formed or “the whole anti-Communistic defense of that area [would] crumble and disappear.”14 The democratically elected Arbenz government of Guatemala had to be subverted, or it would endanger Central America all the way up to the Rio Grande: “My God,” Ike told his Cabinet, “just imagine what it would mean to us if Mexico went communist!”15 The U.S. could not even “lose” tiny islands like Quemoy and Matsu “unless all of us are to get completely out of that corner of the globe.”16 He even postulated that the threat must be met in Vietnam or the dominoes would fall across the Pacific to Australia.17
This was a frightening scenario for politicians to ponder. Who would want to be responsible for the loss of whole areas of the globe?18 And who better to broadcast the alarm than the aged eagle who had saved us from the barbarous Nazis?
As we have seen in the intervening years, the Communist Bloc was not a monolith, nor did the domino theory describe the real world; although the fear of it and of “losing Vietnam” led Lyndon Johnson into both national and personal tragedy in Southeast Asia. At the time there were some scholars and politicians (and many ordinary people) who were bold and imaginative enough to think of the world as more than just bipolar, free versus enslaved, and who wished to penetrate the surface of this new constellation of ideas and how they worked—especially in the third world.19 One such person was John Kennedy.
Kennedy had always held a strong interest in and curiosity about foreign affairs. His first published book, Why England Slept, was an analysis of the reasons for that country’s reluctance to face up to Nazi aggression prior to 1939. In 1951, Congressman Kennedy toured the Far East. According to his biographer, Herbert Parmet, it changed him a great deal: “He returned highly critical of … British and French colonialism … It enabled him to understand the potency of nationalism as a force more significant than communism and as something utilized by them to gain their own ends.”20
But Parmet actually underplays the impact that this tour had on Congressman Kennedy. He also fails to detail what Kennedy actually did, where he visited, and who he met on this trip. In the author’s view, this is a key part of the story, because it explains why Kennedy did what he did in his first year in office. Its an element that is too often ignored or slighted, both in books about John F. Kennedy—for example Chris Matthews’s recent biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero—and, even worse, in volumes dealing with his assassination. This part of his biography helps delineate what made Kennedy’s foreign policy unique in comparison to what came before (the Dulles brothers) and what followed afterwards (LBJ). It should be dealt with in some detail.
1951: Kennedy, Colonialism, and The Cold War
By early 1951 Kennedy had decided that he would not remain in the House of Representatives for another term. He had set his sights on the Senate seat held by Massachusetts incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. But in order not to be characterized as a local or provincial politician, he knew he had to broaden his scope of interests. This meant that he had to set a higher profile in international affairs. So Kennedy’s camp decided he should take two well-publicized foreign excursions. The first was, quite naturally, to Europe. The second one was a bit unusual in that his itinerary consisted of places like the Middle East, India, and French Indochina, including Vietnam. While in Saigon, he ditched his French escorts and decided to seek out the best and most honest reporters and diplomats. He wanted to find out for himself just what the violent conflict between the French colonizers and the Vietnamese was really all about. And further, if the colonized populace had any chance of winning the struggle.21
While in Saigon, Kennedy met an American diplomat named Edmund Gullion. Gullion advised Kennedy that France’s Indochina war to hang onto Vietnam was not really about democracy versus communism. For the Vietnamese it was really about a choice between colonialism and independence. He impressed upon Kennedy that the Viet Minh rebellion in the south, supervised by northern nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, could not be extinguished by France since too many Vietnamese were willing to die rather than stay a colony of the Europeans. France could not win such a long and brutal war of attrition.22
There is no doubt that his talks with Gullion and others had a strong impact on Kennedy’s thinking about both the Cold War and the Third World struggle for independence. Robert Kennedy, who accompanied his brother on this journey, later said that the seven weeks they spent in the Far East had a major effect on Kennedy’s foreign policy views.23 And, in fact, its effect was shown in speeches Kennedy made upon his return to America. Speaking of French Indochina, he said, “This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long.” He later added that, “the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been kindled and are now ablaze …. Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men.”24
It is worth noting here that Kennedy also took time to criticize his own State Department for what he thought was its lackadaisical approach to the true issues in the area. He pointed out that too many of our diplo
mats spent too much time socializing with and then serving the short-term goals of our European allies instead of “trying to understand the real hopes and desires of the people to which they are accredited.”25 What makes this last remark unusual is that young Kennedy was criticizing both a Secretary of State and a sitting president from his own party—Dean Acheson and Harry Truman. He then went even further and questioned the wisdom of the USA in allying itself with “the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire.”26 And, in fact, this was true. As historians of the Vietnam conflict know, the American commitment to that war began in 1950. This is when Truman and Acheson chose to recognize the newly propped up French proxy government in Vietnam led by their stand-in Bao Dai. In other words, Kennedy was not playing political favorites. Since Gullion, at the time Kennedy met him, was working for Acheson, Kennedy understood that the views of both parties about the Cold War in the colonial world suffered from a lame orthodoxy. Kennedy was so impressed by Gullion that he brought him into his administration when he was elected president.27
The first Indochina War, between France and Vietnam, lasted from 1946 to 1954. Already depleted by the impact of being overrun and then occupied by the Nazis, France could not economically sustain this long and difficult colonial war. In fact, it became so unpopular that native born French soldiers were not even asked to serve there. Other parts of the declining French Foreign Legion, from as far away as Madagascar and Tunisia, were made to supply troops. And by 1952, the USA was footing the bill for a large part of the war effort. So much of it in fact, that America reserved veto power over whether the French could enter into peace negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. And, in 1952, America exercised that option. Dean Acheson exerted pressure upon France not to attend a scheduled meeting with Viet Minh negotiators in Burma.28
Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case Page 4
