The young American president was attempting a deft diplomatic maneuver, hoping to confront a very real threat by not allowing U.S. military personnel actually to take part. His remarks stretched the truth, but the subtext couldn’t have been clearer: the invasion had become personal. It was no longer about the United States versus Cuba, but about John F. Kennedy versus Fidel Castro, two extremely competitive men battling for ideological control over the Western Hemisphere. In the days to come, each would take the actions of the other as a personal affront. And each man would remain determined to win at all costs.
In Moscow, another brutal dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, who murdered his way up the ladder of Soviet Union politics, was confused: “Why should an elephant be afraid of a mouse?” he wondered. Castro’s ongoing defiance of the United States was keeping his popularity in Cuba very high. Khrushchev understood that even if the Cuban invasion succeeded, the Cuban people would be hard-pressed to accept an American puppet as their new leader. An ensuing guerrilla war against the United States by Castro’s supporters might benefit the Soviet Union by allowing it to establish a military presence in the Western Hemisphere to aid the Cuban dictator.
The bottom line for Khrushchev, of course, had little to do with Castro or Cuba. His goal was world domination. Anything that distracted or in any way diminished the United States was good for the Soviet Union.
* * *
In the days leading up to the scheduled invasion, President Kennedy soured on the CIA’s plan. The Trinidad beach was too much like the Normandy landing zones. The president wanted the invasion to seem as if it had been generated solely by Cuban exiles, thereby masking American involvement. Kennedy wanted an out-of-the-way location where men and supplies could come ashore quietly, then slip into the countryside unnoticed.
The CIA response was to offer a new location, known as Bahia de Cochinos—loosely translated as the “Bay of Pigs.” The landing would take place at night. Unlike the broad beachheads of Trinidad or even Normandy, miles of impenetrable swamp bordered the Bay of Pigs, and few roads led in or out.
Yet, while the United States has a history of successful large-scale amphibious invasions, very few of them have taken place in darkness. There are only two ways the mission can succeed. First, the invasion force will have to get off the beach immediately and take control of the access roads. Second, rebel planes need to take control of the skies, wipe out Castro’s air force, and then gun down Castro’s troops and tanks as they race toward the Bay of Pigs. Without overwhelming airpower, the mission will fail.
Kennedy is a man fond of spy novels—James Bond is a personal favorite—and enchanted by the cloak-and-dagger world of undercover agents. CIA director Alan Dulles, an urbane and wealthy gentleman in his late sixties, epitomizes that aura of secrecy and covert intrigue. He assured Kennedy that the plan would succeed.
The president initially believed him. On April 14, just two days after giving a press conference in which he promised there would be no intervention by U.S. forces in Cuba, Kennedy gave Operation Zapata, as the Bay of Pigs invasion was known, the official go-ahead.
April 14 was a Friday. After launching the invasion, there was nothing for the president to do but wait. So he flew to Glen Ora to be with Jackie and the kids, where he endured a gut-wrenching weekend waiting for news from Cuba. When word finally came, almost none of it was good.
It started on Saturday morning, when eight B-26 bombers piloted by Cuban freedom fighters attacked three Cuban air bases. The original plan called for sixteen planes, but Kennedy had gotten cold feet and ordered the number cut in half.
As a result, the bombings were ineffectual, barely damaging the Cuban air force at all. But Fidel Castro was furious. He immediately turned up the heat on the Kennedy administration by launching public accusations of U.S. involvement in the attack.
Things only got worse after that. A diversionary landing on Saturday was supposed to put roughly 160 anti-Castro Cuban freedom fighters ashore near Guantanamo Bay, but was canceled due to the breakdown of a crucial boat. In a separate incident, Cuban forces arrested a small band of freedom fighters who were already on the island with a large cache of arms.
By Saturday afternoon, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations was addressing the General Assembly, denouncing the United States for its attack—in response to which Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, repeated JFK’s promise that no American forces would ever wage war in Cuba.
As all this was taking place, John Kennedy hid in the country. Each event so far had been a prelude to the real invasion. But the pressure has already gotten to Kennedy. He canceled a second wave of bombings, even though he knew full well the move might doom the invasion.
In the dead of night, just after Sunday turned to Monday, the landing force of 1,400 Cuban exiles from Brigade 2506 powered toward the Bay of Pigs aboard a small fleet of freighters and landing vessels. Their hopes were high—their dream was to regain control of their homeland.
Very few of the invaders were actually soldiers. They were men from all across the social strata who had been trained by American World War II and Korea veterans—and those hardened U.S. vets were impressed by what they saw.
But when they landed, the brave freedom fighters had no idea that the president had called off a second wave of air strikes. Now the men of Brigade 2506 would have to secure the beachheads on their own—an almost impossible task.
On Monday morning, even as those Cuban freedom fighters encountered the first wave of Castro’s defenders, the president boarded Marine One and flew back to Washington, hoping that the freedom fighters might find a way to do the impossible.
* * *
Other than John Kennedy, only two men are allowed to enter the Oval Office through the Rose Garden door: Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. That privilege, along with their mutual disdain, is all the two men have in common.
The six-foot, four-inch Texan is a self-made man and career politician, a former high school teacher whose towering physique belies a fragile and sometimes insecure persona. The fifty-one-year-old LBJ, as he is known, was perhaps the most successful and powerful Senate majority leader in U.S. history, adept at building partnerships and fortifying his party faithful to pass important legislation.
Bobby, at a shade over five foot nine, speaks with the same clipped Boston accent as his brother. He is a physical fitness buff who was born into privilege and has never held elective office. LBJ knows this and revels in the fact that as leader of the Senate, he is a cut above the relatively inexperienced Kennedy political machine.
Their feud dates to the autumn of 1959, when Bobby Kennedy went to visit Johnson at his expansive Texas ranch. His brother had sent him to Texas to gauge whether Johnson would run against Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in 1960.
President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had a contentious relationship with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. (Abbie Rowe, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
It was LBJ’s habit to take important guests deer hunting on his vast property, and Bobby’s visit was no different. At first, Bobby and LBJ got along extremely well—that is, until Bobby shot at a deer. The rifle’s recoil knocked him flat and opened a cut above one eye. Johnson, reaching down to help Bobby to his feet, couldn’t resist taking a swipe: “Son,” he told Bobby, “you’ve got to learn to shoot a gun like a man.”
No one speaks to Bobby Kennedy that way. Of such small moments are great feuds made.
As the election of 1960 drew nearer, it was Bobby who fought hardest against Lyndon Johnson as the choice for vice president. And it was also Bobby who personally visited Johnson’s hotel suite during the Democratic convention in Los Angeles to offer him the job—though not before trying to talk him out of accepting.
Now the Bay of Pigs will mark the moment when their careers officially veer in two radically different directions. Bobby’s stature will quic
kly rise, with his brother soon referring to him as the “second most powerful man in the world.”
Johnson, who privately refers to Bobby as “that snot-nosed little son of a bitch,” is already regretting leaving the Senate. LBJ is a man in decline. President Kennedy doesn’t trust him and barely tolerates him. The president is so dismissive of Johnson that he even wonders to Jackie, “Can you imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?”
Being vice president, noted John Nance Garner, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first VP, is like being “a pitcher of warm spit.” John Adams once described being in the position as “I am nothing.” Lyndon Johnson knows precisely what his predecessors meant. He no longer has a constituency, no longer has political leverage, and no longer has a whit of authority.
For instance, the vice president does not have a plane of his own. When his duties require him to travel, Johnson must ask one of Kennedy’s aides for permission to use a presidential plane. Though he is technically second in command of the nation, Johnson’s request carries no more weight than that of a cabinet member. Sometimes his request is denied. When that happens, the vice president of the United States might even be forced to fly commercial.
The greatest insult, however, isn’t that Johnson has lost his political pull in Washington, it’s that he has lost almost all his clout in his home state of Texas. Despite Johnson’s crucial role in delivering Texas to Kennedy on Election Day, Senator Ralph Yarborough is now moving in to take control of Texas politics, and Secretary of the Navy John Connally is making plans to run for governor. One, or both, of them will soon control political power in the Lone Star State. Johnson is becoming expendable. If Kennedy chooses another running mate when he seeks a second term in office, LBJ will be out of politics entirely.
For now, however, Johnson possesses that rare privilege of entering the Oval Office through the Rose Garden door. But when Kennedy picks up the phone to call for help on the morning of April 17, he does not call Lyndon Johnson.
It is Bobby Kennedy who answers the phone. He is in Virginia, giving a speech. “I don’t think it’s going as well as it could,” the president tells his younger brother. “Come back here.”
John Kennedy has purposely focused his brother on domestic policy issues, preferring to let others advise him on international matters. Despite their frequent phone conversations, the president sees his younger brother as a guy who’s benefited from nepotism, for it was Joseph Kennedy who insisted that JFK hire Bobby as attorney general. But now, in a moment of great insecurity, John Kennedy understands his father’s wisdom. Even though Bobby hasn’t had a CIA briefing on the Cuban operation in three months, he is the one man the president believes he can count on.
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson drifts farther and farther from the center of political power.
* * *
John Kennedy stands in the Oval Office, helpless to stop what he has started. The president could have called off the invasion right up to the moment on Sunday night when the highly trained men and teenage boys of Brigade 2506 clambered down from their transport ships and transferred to the boats that would carry them to shore.
But reversing course would have taken extraordinary courage. Kennedy would have lost face with Allen Dulles, the CIA, his close advisers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Yet that is the sort of unpopular decision he had been elected to make. And now Kennedy’s unwillingness to make those tough choices is threatening to devastate his administration.
He has come a long way since his days as the young commander of PT-109. But he is still learning, as Abraham Lincoln also learned, that the decision to use force should not be determined by men whose careers depend upon its use.
But it was not the CIA or the Joint Chiefs who ordered the invasion; it was John Kennedy.
Bobby has sped back from Virginia and now steps into the Oval Office to find his older brother in a pensive mood. “I’d rather be called an aggressor than a bum,” JFK laments. The news from the landing beaches is not good: the freedom fighters have failed to secure key roads and other strategic points. There is no way off the beach for the men of Brigade 2506. Cuban forces have pinned them down. The invasion is stalled.
A distraught JFK openly shares his fears with Bobby. The president knows when speaking with his brother that he is safe from security leaks or attempts to undermine his authority. But even now, with Bobby at his side, John Kennedy feels the crushing loneliness of being the president of the United States. He has made this mess in Cuba, and he alone must find a way to turn a potential fiasco into a rousing victory.
* * *
But it’s not to be.
By Tuesday, April 18, Castro himself is on the beach in a T-34 tank, fighting off the invaders. Tens of thousands of Cuban militia have taken up positions to contain the rebel advance. The Cubans now control the three main roads leading in and out of Bahia de Cochinos. Most important of all, thanks to Kennedy’s cancellation of air cover, the Cuban air force and its T-33 jets easily control the skies.
At noon on April 18, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy meekly reports to the president that the “Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others.”
That evening, at a White House meeting shortly after midnight, Kennedy is dressed in white tie as he listens to yet another report on the failure of the invasion. Earlier that night he was called away from a White House reception for Congress—formal duties call even in the midst of the crisis.
The Cabinet Room is decorated with a map of the Caribbean, on which tiny magnetic ships have been placed to show the location of the various vessels on station to support the invasion. Among them are the aircraft carrier Essex and her protective escort vessels.
“I don’t want the United States involved in this,” snaps an incredulous JFK as he surveys the map.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, head of the U.S. Navy, takes a deep breath and speaks the truth: “Hell, Mr. President, we are involved.”
In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the invasion, the president reluctantly authorizes one hour of air cover from 0630 to 0730 by six unmarked jets from the Essex. The jets are to rendezvous with B-26 bombers piloted by Cuban freedom fighters and keep the Cuban aircraft at bay. However, the U.S. Navy pilots are not to attack ground targets or actively seek out air-to-air combat—yet another sign that JFK has lost his nerve.
After the midnight meeting, the president steps through that Oval Office door into the Rose Garden, the weight of the free world and the fate of more than a thousand men on his shoulders. He is alone for an hour pacing in the wet grass.
On the morning of April 19, more bad news: incredibly, the CIA and the Pentagon didn’t account for the time zone difference between Cuba and the freedom fighters’ air base in Nicaragua. Jets from carrier Essex and the B-26 bombers from Central America arrive at the rendezvous one hour apart. The two groups of aircraft never meet up. As a result, several B-26s and their pilots are shot down by the Cuban air force. Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, discovers Kennedy alone in the White House residence weeping after hearing the news.
Jackie has never seen her husband so upset. She has seen JFK cry only twice before and is startled when he puts his head in his hands and sobs. Bobby asks the First Lady to stay close, because the president needs comfort. On this day, Kennedy doesn’t even worry about his usually meticulous personal appearance, greeting one senator for a meeting in the Oval Office with his hair a mess and his tie twisted at an odd angle.
Bobby Kennedy rushes to his brother’s defense when Lyndon Johnson complains that he’s been kept out of the loop. Bobby paces the floor of the Cabinet Room, glaring now and again at the Caribbean map and those magnetic ships. “We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something,” he says again and again. When the CIA and military leaders don’t reply, he wheels around and s
harply says, “All you bright fellows have gotten the president into this, and if you don’t do something now, my brother will be regarded as a paper tiger by the Russians.”
Meanwhile, the president passes the rest of the day wallowing in grief, making no attempt to hide his depression from the White House staff. “How could I have been so stupid?” he mutters to himself, often interrupting a completely different conversation to repeat those words. “How could I have been so stupid?”
* * *
By 5:30 P.M. on the night of April 19, Cuban forces have taken complete control of the Bay of Pigs. The invasion is over.
In addition to the dead and captured on the ground, Castro’s forces have sunk almost a dozen invasion vessels, including those carrying food and ammunition, and shot down nine B-26 bombers.
The defeat is a major humiliation for the United States. Kennedy is forced to give a press conference and take full blame. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. What matters,” he says, is that “I am the responsible officer of the government.”
One day JFK will look back and speculate that the Bay of Pigs blunder could have given the U.S. military reason to interfere with the civilian American government on the grounds that the president was unsuited for office.
Six months later, however, it is CIA director Allen Dulles who is fired. The CIA chief is extremely bitter. The slight is one that the old spymaster and his agency will not soon forget.
* * *
A week after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy calls his advisers, including Bobby, into the Cabinet Room. Bobby’s attendance at a foreign policy meeting is unusual, and at first the president’s brother holds his tongue.
The president leans back in his chair and softly taps a pencil against his teeth as Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles reads a lengthy statement that absolves the State Department from any blame concerning the Bay of Pigs.
Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy Page 34
