The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  By the end of the summer, it was clear that Castro would last through the American election. In August, Bissell sought authorization from Eisenhower for spending thirteen million dollars to train more guerrillas. There was still no talk of an invasion; and Peter Wyden argues, in the best history of the operation, that Eisenhower “thought the operation was in its infancy.” The CIA had been disturbed all along that “Eisenhower was wary” when he was not bored: “He never gave Cuba high priority.” But if Castro could not be overthrown by CIA tricks, Bissell felt sure that the next President would have the enthusiasm to give him whatever he needed. Vice-President Nixon had been the strongest supporter of the scheme within the White House, and Senator Kennedy issued a campaign statement promising support for freedom fighters in Cuba.

  When John Kennedy won in November, Bissell pushed forward with his plans, certain of the support that Kennedy did, in fact, give him during the interregnum. But Bissell “sold” the plan to Kennedy by stressing its clandestine and “surgical” aspects. He was given a free hand on the assurance that a guerrilla operation would lead to a rapid coup—neither a long-run resistance, nor a full-scale invasion. The CIA had been saved from the “wariness” of Eisenhower, only to fall victim to Kennedy’s romanticism about technological guerrillas. Eisenhower, the organizer of D-day, who as President approved the massive amphibious landing in Lebanon, would have put the military in charge of invasion troops—something Bissell resisted, making the whole operation depend on CIA funds and planning. But Kennedy, precisely because he wanted the plan restricted to CIA scale, cut the program back at the very time when even Bissell saw that more was needed, not less. Kennedy, unaware of the difficulties of an amphibious landing, insisted that the “raid” take place at night and in an obscure place, not at Trinidad, the obvious site for a countercapital to be set up. Kennedy was still thinking of guerrilla troops that would bring Castro down invisibly. The logic of invasion called for seizing a communications center; the logic of resistance called for secret drops that would “fade into the hills.” The invasion of a remote area—the Bahia de Cochinos—fit neither scheme; it had remained remote, after all, because coral reefs and dangerous swamps made it hard to reach (or break out of) by sea or land.

  Bissell was put in the position of having to expand his plan and cut it back at the same time—expand it to cope with new obstacles facing him every day, and cut it back to keep the President’s support. Air cover was restricted, naval support held back from the shore. Meanwhile, striving to keep control, Bissell withheld information at the top—from the CIA’s own Board of Estimates and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff—while news of the invasion was leaking out around its periphery. Kennedy, aware only of the secrecy at the center, was taking steps to guard a secret that no longer existed. Castro knew the landing would occur; only Adlai Stevenson was kept in the dark. If the site of the invasion surprised Castro, that was only because it made no military sense.

  Having denied himself the advantages of military precaution, while taking on all the dangers of a military invasion, Bissell ended up with ships crashing onto unexpected coral reefs off a lonely spot that Castro knew intimately as his favorite fishing retreat. Since control of the operation was held in Washington, reaction time to all these problems was slow—five or six hours to report the need of air support to the CIA and sue for presidential approval. Bissell’s attempt at total control led to total breakdown. Not only were the military branches insufficiently informed and involved; they were not supportive, since they had been excluded from the planning. Bissell had exercised such personal control over all aspects of the U-2’s construction that the resulting fleet of planes was known as the Bissell Air Force. But he could not personally check the manifests of every landing boat at the Bay of Pigs, to discover that the communications equipment was—against normal military procedure—stuffed into a single boat, which sank. Ordinary military procedure was what the CIA daredevils had transcended. That is why two hired captains of “freelance” ammunition ships fled from the shelling and had to be chased back by American planes—too late.

  For many, the puzzle of the Bay of Pigs is how a brilliant planner like Bissell could have convinced himself and so many others that it would succeed. But the first thing we must remember is that “it” was never a single thing. It changed character constantly, often without Bissell himself noticing what had happened. The propaganda-cum-assassination-coup gave way, first, to a large-scale raid meant to set up a rival center of government at Trinidad. Then this was cut back to a covert raid again, but now on the scale of a small invasion. By the time this confused sequence came to the point where it must be launched or called off, Bissell seems to have taken a “cap over the wall” approach to the matter—Castro had to be attacked now, with whatever was at hand, or never. If the exile army was disbanded, to roam free telling its tale, America would lose without even trying. It would get blamed for assembling the force in the first place, and blamed even more heatedly for not using it. The Cuban political leaders would air their grievances against the CIA. Castro would have a propaganda victory fixing him more securely in the affection of his people. Russia would feel freer to move in on Latin America.

  Eisenhower would have called off an amphibious invasion unless it became clear a real invasion was needed. But Kennedy would approve a raid on the scale of an invasion—and, having done that, Bissell thought he would have to follow up with whatever military assistance was needed to defeat Castro. The CIA would cause a crisis that America could not walk away from. In that sense, the one-man operation would succeed. A country that could not be invaded by following normal channels of military preparation would be invaded in order to rescue a desperate band of American-led patriots trapped on the beaches of “Pig Bay.” Bissell would throw our cap over the wall, and Kennedy would have to follow. What else could a President do who had begun his reign with the promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”?

  By the time of the invasion, a certitude of Kennedy’s support—whatever was called for—pervaded the CIA team. Many shared Howard Hunt’s feeling: “Everything seemed ready. So ready, with success so inevitable, that when President Kennedy on April 12 declared the United States would never invade Cuba my project colleagues and I did not take him seriously. The statement was, we thought, a superb effort in misdirection.” The propaganda experts not only believed their own propaganda by this point, but thought the President was taking his cue from them. Clayton Lynch, the guerrilla trainer who went ashore with his Cuban pupils, could not believe it when the President canceled a second air strike—it was, he said, “like learning that Superman is a fairy.” The ballsy President had betrayed the James Bonds whom he admired, and who admired him. The agents who took it as implicit that the President would back them up conveyed this certitude to the Cubans as an explicit promise—when Peter Wyden interviewed veterans of the invasion, they still felt betrayed, sold out after pledges of support.

  Even Bissell had some reason to feel betrayed. If he was trying to “force the hand” of the military, draw them into a situation they would not have relished had they been given the choice, wasn’t that what Kennedy’s ideal of guerrilla government called for? The inventive and unorthodox agents of the President should cut across channels, defy normal procedure, get the bureaucracy moving despite itself; should welcome crises, not avoid them; should precipitate trouble, and then improvise; throw the cap over the wall, and then follow. That is what Kennedy had encouraged—and then, having loosed his unorthodox warriors, he failed to back them up. The President might claim he was misled into thinking this was less an invasion than a raid. But sophisticated men talked in signals, out on the Kennedy basketball court, not by way of long reports in triplicate. Bissell had only to wink among his peers, and he had taken Kennedy as a peer. How did he think a guerrilla raid in the hills could overthrow Castro in a matter of days? Kennedy had first tr
usted Bissell to know what he was doing; and then, at the crunch, he would not follow Bissell’s recommendation to widen the war.

  Kennedy apologists would later say the New Frontier was itself betrayed in this episode, misled and lied to by the government in place—overborne by the military, who took too narrow a view of the problem; awed by experts dealing with a team of novices in the fledgling administration; told that ongoing procedures could not be broken off; reminded that Eisenhower’s authority stood behind the plan.

  But the Taylor Report concluded, after investigating the invasion, that the military mindset was excluded from planning; that the Joint Chiefs of Staff rather acquiesced in the project than approved of it—precisely because it was kept outside their bailiwick. What was needed was more procedure and bureaucratic checking: “Top level direction was given through ad hoc meetings of senior officials without consideration of operational plans in writing and with no arrangement for recording conclusions and decisions reached.” Taylor concluded that Kennedy, by instantly dismantling Eisenhower’s National Security Council apparatus, removed the machinery that could and would have spotted the plan’s inadequacies.

  Far from being awed by military types, Kennedy trusted Bissell because he so openly expressed contempt for them. And Eisenhower’s approval of the project—so far as any existed—was no recommendation to Kennedy, who tried to contrast his administration in every way possible with his predecessor’s. He did not revere a man of whom he could say, when his own popularity increased after the invasion’s failure: “It’s just like Eisenhower, the worse I do, the more they like me.” No, the Cuban invasion was taken to heart because it was so clearly marked with the new traits of Kennedy’s own government. It had for its target the man who obsessed Kennedy. It had for its leader the ideal of Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” It was a chess game backed by daring—played mind to mind, macho to macho, charisma to charisma. It was a James Bond exploit blessed by Yale, a PT raid run by Ph.D.s. It was the very definition of the New Frontier.

  19

  The Midas Touch

  Oh, I am fortune’s fool!—Romeo and Juliet

  A favorite word in the Kennedy administration was “options.” Eisenhower, it was contended, never heard the whole range of possible choices. By the time he was asked to decide, committees had sifted the possibilities, winnowing out the unusual or daring. Kennedy, by engaging in the decision process at every level from the outset, would consider even risky or bold new courses.

  Yet it was precisely by seeking options, with regard to Cuba, that Kennedy hemmed himself in, making Schlesinger call him “a prisoner of events.” Schlesinger means that there was a concatenation of pressures forcing the President toward the Bay of Pigs. Sorensen and others make Kennedy the prisoner of Eisenhower, whose plan he inherited. But Eisenhower told Maxwell Taylor, during the investigation of the Bay of Pigs disaster, that he had never even heard of an amphibious invasion of Cuba until it was in the news. What he authorized was the training of a few guerrillas, an action on the scale of Guatemala, small enough to remain covert, the kind of thing the CIA had been doing. Bissell wanted to do something much grander; and though he probably had some of the final plan shaping in his head while Eisenhower was in office, the “takeoff” in terms of scale occurred when Kennedy was elected and gave Bissell the go-ahead at a November briefing. The invading troops were almost doubled in the two months that followed, and that larger number was redoubled by the time of the landing.

  It is true that Eisenhower recommended a continuation of the CIA operation against Castro; but he meant the small-scale one he had authorized. As Peter Wyden concludes: “To him, nothing called a ‘program’ was fully hatched. When he insisted in a September 10, 1965 interview that ‘there was no tactical or operational plan even discussed’ with him while he was in the White House, he was technically correct.” For Eisenhower, military terms had technical meanings.

  If Kennedy, inheriting an Eisenhower plan, was forced to go ahead with it despite misgivings, why did he not question Eisenhower about the operation after he took office? Make the master answer his doubts? Explore the possibilities of failure with the man who supposedly stood behind the plan? Kennedy did nothing of the sort. And even when he called Eisenhower in for a face-saving “conference” after the invasion’s failure, Eisenhower noted in his diary that “the President did not ask me for any specific advice”—though Kennedy later claimed, before reporters, that he had sought Eisenhower’s counsel.

  When William Pawley, the conservative diplomat who had advocated an assault on Castro, gave Eisenhower some details of the operation (including the loading of the heavy signal equipment in one ship, and that ship carrying ammunition), Eisenhower wrote in his diary: “If this whole story is substantially correct, it is a very dreary account of mismanagement, indecision, and timidity at the wrong time.” The right time for timidity would have been when Bissell gave the CIA the task of making an amphibious assault in force. Eisenhower was notoriously cautious when considering romantic options of that sort. Murray Kempton summed up the General’s rules of action this way: “When a situation is hopeless, never listen to counsels of hope. Fold the enterprise. Do nothing unless you know exactly what you will do if it turns out to have been the wrong thing.”

  Before the Guatemalan coup was launched, Eisenhower asked his advisers if they were all absolutely sure it would succeed. They were. Then, when trouble developed and Allen Dulles asked for more airplanes, Eisenhower asked what were the chances of this making the difference. “About twenty percent,” Dulles told him. The President later said that if Dulles had given him an inflated estimate, he would not have got the planes. For Eisenhower, only a realism verging on pessimism inspired confidence in the discussion of military matters.

  By contrast, Kennedy asked his principal advisers, not if they were sure of success, but if they thought the mission worth trying. When the Joint Chiefs were asked to estimate the chances of a successful landing at Trinidad (the site chosen by the CIA before Kennedy overruled it), General David Gray wrote a report describing the chances as “fair,” a term suggested by General Earl Wheeler. Wyden reports their conversation: “When they discussed what ‘fair’ meant, Gray said he thought the chances were thirty to seventy. ‘Thirty in favor and seventy against?’ asked Wheeler. ‘Yes.’” Gray used no figures in his report for the White House, and President Kennedy never asked what “fair” meant. Gray thought it obvious that a “fair” rating would not imply chances were “very good” or even “good”—much less “certain.” And this, remember, was the estimate for a landing site that had advantages lacking to the Bay of Pigs.

  The truth is that Kennedy went ahead with the Cuban action, not to complete what he inherited from Eisenhower, but to mark his difference from Eisenhower. He would not process things through the military panels, let them penetrate Bissell’s secrecy. He would be bold where he accused Eisenhower of timidity. He would not send in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but only Bissell’s raiders. In all this he was the prisoner of his own rhetoric. As Sorensen admits, “his disapproval of the plan would be a show of weakness inconsistent with his general stance.”

  Kennedy’s campaign had promised strong action against Castro, a man, says Sorensen, who made Kennedy lose his normal “cool”: “He should never have permitted his own deep feeling against Castro (unusual for him) and considerations of public opinion—specifically, his concern that he would be assailed for calling off a plan to get rid of Castro—to overcome his innate suspicions.” Kennedy had “run scared” from accusations of softness on Castro in the campaign itself. When Harris Wofford was called in to produce a campaign book of Kennedy speeches (The Strategy of Peace), he wrote that Castro’s revolution stood in the tradition of Simón Bolivar’s fight against colonialism. That passage soon came under fire, and Kennedy told Sorensen to draft a strong statement against the Cuban government. Richard Goodwin wrote the release, which said: “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democra
tic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.” On the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy reminded Goodwin of that statement: “Well, Dick, we’re about to put your Cuban policy into action.”

  Schlesinger says that Kennedy had some misgivings about taking a hard line on Cuba and blaming its loss on Eisenhower. But campaign advantage won the day:

  Cuba, of course, was a highly tempting issue; and as the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy’s innate sense of responsibility. Once, discussing Cuba with his staff, he asked them, “All right, but how would we have saved Cuba if we had the power?” Then he paused, looked out the window and said, “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.” In that spirit, he began to succumb to temptation.

  Began to? Adopting the method of McCarthyites in their assault on Truman is not merely flirting with temptation. But the important thing in this place is not the moral justification of Kennedy’s campaign tactic, but the fact that his lunge toward immediate advantage inhibited his freedom later on. He would have to live with Goodwin’s language if he disbanded the freedom fighters he had called for, had criticized Eisenhower for not raising up and “loosing” on their homeland. He narrowed his range of future options by stigmatizing ahead of time the one that might prove the most sensible. A man who has to be tough in each response is not free; his very professions of control put the matter beyond his choice: