That same day, Kennedy received a memo from his brother. Love is expressed in many tongues, and few who read Bobby’s terse words would imagine that they were reading not only a serious political document but also an act of devotion. Kennedy was despairing, and Bobby was speaking to him in the one idiom that mattered to him now, justifying what he had done and not done. “The present situation in Cuba was precipitated by the deterioration of events inside that state,” Bobby began. His brother the president must not blame himself, but understand that everything that happened had been because of Castro. “Therefore, equally important to working out a plan to extricate ourselves gracefully from the situation in Cuba is developing a policy in light of what we expect we will be facing a year or two years from now!” Bobby went on, underlining this sentence in his own hand.
Bobby wrote his brother that what had “been going on in Cuba in the last few days must also be a tremendous strain on Castro,” as if the Cuban leader were suffering too. Even as the recriminations crescendoed, Bobby sought to direct the president toward the future, and a battle with Castro that he was sure would come again. For Kennedy, Cuba was an unseemly nuisance, but to Bobby it was the most important and most dangerous country in the world. “Our long-range foreign policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in Laos or the Congo or any other place in the world,” he wrote his brother.
Bobby was investing in the island enormous amounts of psychic energy, fierce anger, and intensity. He seemed willing to do anything to bring Castro down, even staging false provocations. Bobby wrote: “If it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MIGs attacked Guantánamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war and that we might very well have to take armed action ourselves, would it be possible to get the countries of Central and South America through OAS to take some action to prohibit the shipment of arms or ammunition from any outside force into Cuba?” He was not for waiting either. “The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse,” he wrote. “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”
Everything Bobby had seen told him that communism was an evil malignancy that had to be attacked without qualms and without waiting. Not only did he believe this, but now he shouted it with a force and confidence not shared by any of the other bruised players in the White House. He was the attorney general, and if he had not been the president’s brother, the other cabinet officers would have been tempted to hush him up, dismissing his remarks as the mindless impressions of a man who knew less about foreign affairs than anyone in the room. But in this malaise of uncertainty, he stood boldly and made this Cuban issue his own.
At the NSC meeting the next day, April 20, the cabinet members and other officials got their first rich taste of the Robert F. Kennedy who had terrorized faltering subordinates during the campaign. The attorney general saved the worst of his rebukes not for those who had been most wrong, but for those who had shown a modicum of prescience. Bobby savaged the State Department, directing his greatest wrath at Chester Bowles, who had been opposed to the invasion from beginning to end and had articulately and passionately said so. The man had had the audacious bad judgment the previous day to come up to Bobby and say: “I hope everybody knows that I was always against the Bay of Pigs.” That rankled the attorney general beyond measure and probably doomed Bowles’s tenure in Washington.
“I understand that you advised against this operation,” Bobby replied at one point, drumming his finger on Bowles’s chest. “Well, let me tell you as of right now you did not. You were for it.”
“When I took exception to some of the more extreme things he said by suggesting that the way to get out of our present jam was not to simply double up on everything we had done, he turned on me savagely,” Bowles recalled.
The undersecretary’s fear was not groundless. On that very day, the president asked the Joint Chiefs to come up with a new plan to overthrow Castro, this time not with Cuban surrogates but with the full application of American military. They replied with a plan to invade Cuba in the west with an amphibious force in an operation slated to take place in sixty to ninety days, beginning before the hurricane season but no later than July 9, 1961.
Two days later, at the next full-scale NSC meeting on Cuba, Bobby once again dominated the thirty-five policymakers. As for the president, his questions led only one place—back to the bloody shores of Cuba. Of all the men who sat there, only Bowles dared boldly to speak otherwise. The undersecretary was a pedantic gentleman whose sonorous moralizing was hardly the best way to convince the president. That said, he spoke important cautionary words, warning that as bad as things were now, percipitent action “would almost surely be ineffective and … would tend to create additional sympathy for Castro in his David and Goliath struggle against the United States.”
“That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby raged at Bowles. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”
Kennedy sat listening, tapping his pencil against his pearly white teeth.
The president was running out of stamina. The evening of the surrender, he went to a dinner at the Greek embassy, accompanied by Jackie and his mother. Kennedy smiled at the ladies and made small talk. Rose had taught her son never to show public weakness, and even in the limousine back to the White House he did not drop his stoic poise for a minute. Only after Kennedy left did Jackie tell her mother-in-law about her son’s sad spirits. “Jackie walked upstairs with me and said he’d been so upset all day,” Rose wrote in her diary afterward. “Had practically been in tears, felt he had been misinformed by CIA and others. I felt so sorry for him. Jackie so sympathetic and said she had stayed with him until he had lain down that afternoon for a short nap. Said she had never seen him so depressed except at time of his operation.”
While the president morosely contemplated his losses, pilots from the Essex flew mission after mission looking for survivors. As the pilots skimmed fifty feet above the endless swamps, they were fired upon by the Cuban military, at times returning to the carrier with bullet holes in their planes. The pilots, who had orders not to fire back, flew back again and again to the shores of Cuba. When the brigade soldiers saw the American planes above, they knew they were saved, and they hurried to the beach, where American teams took them to an unmarked destroyer just offshore.
On one of the last days when the bedraggled, desperate men came out of their hiding places and stumbled toward the beach, Castro’s forces chased after them. The American commander of the planes that had set the brigade survivors scurrying toward the beach, Commander Stanley Montunnas, asked permission to fire warning bursts above the heads of the Cubans, just enough to keep them back. “Hold!” he was told. The Essex had to seek permission from “Black Walnut,” the code name of the White House command post. “Negative,” the reply came back a few minutes later. “One of the intelligence men on the Essex told me they had contacted the White House,” Montunnas recalled, “and they said they didn’t want to open up a bag of worms.”
Montunnas flew above, watching Castro’s forces capture men he had brought out of hiding. He felt no better than a Judas sheep. There were many sailors, from admirals to swabs, who felt the same way: that they had led the Cuban brigade to slaughter. “We were all pretty well disgusted,” Montunnas reflected forty years later. “We could have stopped that Cuban operation cold if they’d just turned us loose. I had the feeling that the Kennedy administration was gutless. They got the brigade in that predicament, and they let them hang out to dry.”
These Americans had been trained to fight their nation’s wars, and they felt they had been prevented from doing so by Kennedy. They said nothing, and they wore their uniforms with
ramrod pride, but they carried within them feelings that would grow in the next few years, feelings of devastating consequence to America in the next decade. Craven politicians were holding America’s brave men back, preventing them from fighting against communism the way they believed they must fight. And America’s soldiers were bearing the onus of defeat, not the men in Washington who were its architects.
By the end of the week Kennedy was, in Bobby’s words, “more upset this time than he was any other.” In public he stood and accepted blame, but privately he mused about those who had let him down, blaming everyone but himself. The president blamed Bowles and what he considered the other limp-wristed, effete diplomats at the State Department, though Rusk’s worst sin was not in being wrong but in speaking his doubts only in quiet tones. Kennedy blamed the “fucking brass hats,” though the Joint Chiefs had given realistic appraisals of the military prospects based on what the CIA had told them. Kennedy seemed to place less blame on the CIA, which had masterminded the operation, though more likely he had decided not to alienate the agency. When Dulles arrived, his shoulders slumped despondently, Kennedy buttressed the CIA chieftain by putting his arm around him, a gesture he did not make to Rusk or the Joint Chiefs.
The two Kennedy brothers walked back from the East Room together after the president had taken public responsibility for the debacle. “Let’s go in and call Dad,” Bobby said. “Let’s see if he can find something good about this.”
That was the role Joe had always had. No matter how grievous the problem, how deep the tragedy, how intractable the dilemma, they could turn to their father and he would find some way to bolster them. “This is the best thing you’ve done,” he told the president. “A person that takes responsibility, the American people love you. A person that’s going to be responsible and accountable, you’re going to find out you did real well.”
The public opinion polls showed that the president was more popular than ever, the irony of which Kennedy was perfectly aware. He had said during the invasion that he was going ahead because “he’d rather be called an aggressor than a bum,” and now he was being called both. The papers were merciless in their vivisection of the debacle, roundly condemning Kennedy for duplicity while endlessly repeating the details of the military humiliation.
On Friday evening, April 21, Kennedy might have found more fruitful uses of his time than watching the CBS Evening News, but he had to understand how the story was playing. He and Bobby stood in the family room a few feet in front of the television set. They watched a gesticulating, triumphant Castro standing beside twisted, smoking, unrecognizable wreckage. It was too soon for CBS to have film of Castro standing over a B-26 or other armament at the Bay of Pigs, but the public wouldn’t know that, and it scarcely mattered. Then Walter Cronkite said that Castro had called Kennedy a “coward.”
“Fuck!” Bobby exclaimed. He turned away from the set as if he had been struck in the face and hurried from the room. A blow against his brother was a blow against him. The epithet resonated deeply within him. Bobby’s life was in part an all-consuming, never-ending struggle to prove that he was not a coward. He could play football on a broken leg, confront Communists in their very lair in Central Asia, and destroy this bearded interloper who called his brother such an unspeakable epithet and dared to dance on wreckage strewn where men better than he had died. Bobby hated Castro as the personification of evil. He believed, wrongly, that Castro had personally flown across the swamps of Zapata to “pick out these fellows who were in the swamps—and just shoot them.” From now on, Bobby was like an ancient knight who had taken a vow to slay his brother’s enemy.
The president named a commission of inquiry headed by General Maxwell Taylor and including Dulles and Burke. Bobby, his brother’s representative, was the fourth member of the Cuban Study Group, and the only one who had the motive and strength to move the inquiry beyond the narrow parameters of military policy. The president had thought about naming his brother the new director of the CIA, but he decided that he had even better uses for him.
Bobby slouched in his chair like a disgruntled teenager, his hair messy, his tie askew, but he showed subtle deference to these men. He valued physical courage above all virtues, and these men all wore badges of bravery that he did not wear. He admired Taylor, one of America’s most decorated war heroes, so much that he would name his sixth son Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
The accused rarely are their own best judges, and by naming Dulles and Burke to the study group, Kennedy was making it clear that he did not want to look too deep or too hard into the debacle. Bobby had the same mandate as the others. He was protecting his brother, and no one dared suggest that Kennedy had made all the crucial decisions, from changing the invasion site to limiting the aircraft that were to have cleared the skies of Castro’s planes.
Failure is often a great teacher, but those who rush through its pages, turning away from unpleasantness, do not easily understand its lessons. It was Cuba that the study group would be focusing on, but the lessons here, whatever they were, would be used elsewhere. This was one of the most crucial moments in the Kennedy presidency. If the administration could not figure out what had happened so close to its shores, how would it deal with these quiet, purposeful men who were moving through the jungles of Laos and Vietnam carrying guns and revolution?
Bobby put in a full day at these sessions before heading over to the Justice Department to do another day’s work. The witnesses came on one after another, justifying their actions as best they could, rarely being pressed, at times making modest mea culpas. Privately, Bobby felt that both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had in some measure betrayed the president. Bissell, as the attorney general saw it, had been so inept as to base his judgment that the Bay of Pigs was guerrilla country on a survey done in 1895. He did not dare contemplate the possibility that the CIA had willfully led the president into approving its plans knowing that swamps surrounded the Bay of Pigs. As for the military chiefs, he believed that the generals had deliberated for no more than twenty minutes before signing on to the plan. These men were not quite so cavalier in their actions, but their judgment deserved the closest scrutiny. Nevertheless, Bobby asked only a few pointed questions but showed none of the prosecutorial zeal that had made witnesses fear him so on the Rackets Committee.
During one session, Dulles sat down on the other side of the table to tell his tale. He told his fellow commission members that he thought there had been a better than 50 percent “probability of being able to effect a beachhead and to hold it for a considerable period of time,” but that he “never gave a great deal of weight to the idea of a large popular uprising.” Neither Bobby nor anyone else asked Dulles what was to happen then, or why there had been up to thirty thousand extra weapons in the holds of the ships for Cubans who were supposed to join their brigade comrades in the fight against Castro.
The CIA director said that he believed that the operation could not be a disaster because “quite a number … would go through the swamp and take up guerrilla activities.” Most of the brigade members who had fled into the swamps had had their clothes ripped from their bodies by the prickly, cactuslike vegetation and their flesh lacerated. They had stumbled ahead, half starving, running away from the Cubans that pursued them and on occasion shot at them like hunters.
For the most part, the attorney general, the other study group members, and the witnesses had only the most demeaning and patronizing comments to make about Castro’s Cuba. Castro’s tiny air force had rendered savage damage. The “aircraft were probably flown by 50 Cuban pilots that had been trained in Czechoslovakia and returned to Cuba a few days before the invasion.” It could not be, as it was, that only nine pilots flew all these missions, and that none of them had any training outside of Cuba. Castro’s forces had arrived a day earlier than they were supposed to and fought more fiercely than any one had imagined they could. The Cubans had fought so well that the Americans believed that the action had been “spearheaded by Czechoslov
akians … indicated by the report that one of the tanks knocked out had three persons aboard that were not Cuban. Further, another report said that some of the command chatter was in a foreign tongue.”
There had been a foreign tongue on the beaches, but it was English, not Czech. Grayston Lynch, one of two American CIA operatives who had gone ashore, led frogmen onto the beach and fired the first bullets. Lynch had blown away a jeep with a burst of fire when its militia driver turned on its lights, thinking he had seen a lost fishing boat. And on the second day, when most of the brigade pilots in Nicaragua had their stomachs full of Cuba and were refusing to fly and the battle was lost, Bissell had ordered two American CIA pilots into the air with planes full of bombs and napalm. They flew north from the CIA base along with those brigade pilots willing to fly back once again.
As the planes reached the Zapata Peninsula, they saw that the road leading to Girón Beach was full of traffic backed up for miles. Among the vehicles on the road were twenty Leyland buses filled with the militia of Battalion 123 from the town of Jaguey Grande consisting of “men of all ages and professions—except the military: masons, carpenters, schoolteachers, sales clerks, shopkeepers, dock workers, bank and office employees, telephone company workers, musicians, artists, writers, witch doctors, surveyors, doctors, architects, house painters and others.” They bombed the front of the column, and then they bombed the back of the column until the Cubans could go nowhere except into the swamps. And then the planes swept back and forth, machine-gunning and napalming, and when they came to one end of the great column, they swept back again, and they did not stop until they had no more bullets and no more napalm.
The Kennedy Men Page 72
