The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  When they turned back to Nicaragua, they left seven burning tanks, trucks, and buses and a column of smoke rising for seven miles. Lynch says that informants told the CIA that they counted nearly 1,800 grave markers, more dead in that one attack by far than died everywhere else on both sides in the entire three-day battle. Hawkins recalls that it was only American pilots flying that day and the intercepts from the Cubans referred to 1,800 casualties. This would have included not only the dead but also the burned and the maimed. That latter figure was listed in the official Taylor Report. A Cuban writer asserts that Battalion 123 “lost nearly 100 men—dead, wounded and those hurt in the napalm attack.” Castro had reason to minimize the losses his forces suffered. Even if that low figure is correct, the White House believed that American CIA pilots burned to death or wounded 1,800 Cubans. The pilots were flying, moreover, on a punitive mission in planes carrying the markings of Castro’s air force. This was not the way Americans thought they fought their wars, and the episode merited a serious investigation. But Bobby and his colleagues flew as quickly away from this matter, as did the planes leaving the scene of carnage.

  The next morning other American pilots flew back after being promised that the navy would be flying cover for them. But the navy pilots were still in the ready room when the planes arrived over the Bay of Pigs. Castro’s planes shot down one of the planes and later in the day shot down another plane piloted by Americans.

  The White House had given approval for the use of napalm, but an inquiry might have asked whether these Americans should have flown and died in what was to have been a Cuban struggle. There were all kinds of questions that could have been asked, but Bobby did not ask them, and neither did anyone else. It would be years before Americans learned that four of their fellow citizens had died in what they had been told was a Cuban battle.

  Grayston Lynch was the first witness who had been at the Bay of Pigs. Lynch was not a politician. He was a soldier trained to fight his country’s clandestine wars. He went ashore at the Bay of Pigs in large part because he would not think of leaving his men alone. His was a pure soldier’s voice that asked only that he and his comrades be unleashed, not harnessed to the will and whim of politicians. His was a voice without which battles are not won, and a voice that when it drowns out all others leads to the loss of wars. He believed that, if only Kennedy had not called off the planes, he and his men would have won not only the day but also the country. He was as fearless in what he told Bobby and the others as he had been fearless at the Bay of Pigs.

  “I told ‘em to kiss my ass practically. ‘You people are the ones who failed, and this is why you failed,’” Lynch recalled. “Why, they tried to interrupt me and I wouldn’t even stop talking. I laid it all out, and finally Maxwell Taylor turned and said, ‘Well, it all goes back to the planes.’ He did that a second time, and when he did Bobby stared across the table at him like, ‘Buddy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ “

  Lynch had the dog soldier’s version of things, but there were matters to consider that went far beyond what happened on the beach. The reports the CIA had given Kennedy before the invasion suggested that Castro was barely tolerated by most Cubans. In these secret hearings, Hawkins said that as late as the previous September, the agency “thought he still had 75 percent of the population behind him, although his popularity was then declining.” That was a startling admission, and if true suggested a willful duplicity on the part of the CIA leaders to maneuver the president into an exercise in which he would have no choice but to involve American troops.

  “I don’t specifically remember that statement,” Colonel Hawkins said. “I had been given the understanding that everybody was ready to revolt. That must have come up after the operation was over. All I know is that I came away from the Bay of Pigs feeling that I had been cheated as well. Afterwards, what they were all trying to do, including Taylor, was covering Kennedy’s rear end.”

  At minimum, Hawkins’s statement should have signaled a serious investigation. Bobby and the others, however, were not about to look under that dark carpet. These men treated the Cuban revolution as little more than a conspiracy. They did not grasp, as did others in the administration, that Castro’s revolution had been born out of a compost heap of poverty, inequality, and foreign exploitation, and that the sooner social justice reigned across Latin America, the sooner the appeal of Castro and Castroism would fade away.

  One hundred and fourteen members of the brigade had died. Castro had imprisoned 1,189 of those who survived. A few escaped, including Roberto San Roman, whose imprisoned brother, Pepe, had been the brigade’s military leader. San Roman had been sick and weak when a cargo ship picked him up in an open boat that had been drifting for nineteen days. By then, 10 of the 22 men on the boat had died, and Roberto was still in a daze when the CIA flew him up from Miami Naval Hospital to Washington to meet the president and testify before the Cuban Study Group. And when he testified before Bobby and those other men of power and majesty, he started to cry, and through his sobs, he looked up at them and said: “How could you send us and leave us there?” And Bobby came down from the platform and held his hand, saying he would be there for him whenever he needed somebody, and San Roman thought that was true.

  On June 1, 1961, after the last of the twenty sessions of the Cuban Study group, Bobby wrote a memorandum: “He [Kennedy] was taking them at face value and when they told him that this was guerrilla country, that chances of success were good, that there would be uprisings, that the people would support this project, he accepted it … Their study of the Cuba matter was disgraceful.” This was all true, but he didn’t ask why these judgments had been false, why the CIA’s intelligence officers had been silenced, and why his brother was led into the Cuban swamps.

  The president’s back was troubling him when Bobby and the other members presented their final report to him in mid-June. Kennedy listened carefully and accepted the thick portfolio of documents. The report, one of the most important documents of the young administration, not only supposedly detailed why the Bay of Pigs had gone so wrong but set out a blueprint of how the government should act in the future toward Cuba and much of the rest of the world.

  All his adult life, the president had wrestled with the puzzle of how a democracy could win in the struggle against totalitarian regimes. In England, he had seen how the “pacifists” had worked against rearming Britain. He thought as little of them as he did of those American leftists who now saw nothing but benign goodwill coming from the Soviet Union. On the right, he had seen those who he believed were equally wrong, men like Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was calling for the air force to go in and bomb Castro away. Kennedy tended to stand somewhere in the middle because he believed that was where the best answers lay.

  Bobby and his study group colleagues, however, were for getting on with it within the context of an overall cold war strategy, taking what they called “a positive course of action against Castro without delay” and destroying the malignancy that lurked so close to American shores. The group made a few perfunctory criticisms of the decision-making structure in the administration. They suggested no reorganization of the CIA; the only change in that organization immediately contemplated in the White House was to change the agency’s name to a less recognizable one. They said nothing about the underlying social realities that nurtured Castro. They said not one word about Castro’s surprisingly strong support but wrote only that “Castro’s repressive measures following the landing made coordinating uprisings of the populace impossible.”

  In the report that sat on Kennedy’s desk, Bobby and his three colleagues presented ideas that, if they had been accepted, would possibly have changed the entire nature of American democracy. They wrote that this struggle against Castro and the seven million Cubans was “a life and death struggle” that would require America to fight with wartime intensity and means. They called for the consideration of “such measures as the announcement of a limited national em
ergency” and “a re-examination of emergency powers of the president.” They gave no details, but such an announcement would probably have led to the partial militarization of America and at least some limitations on civil liberties. They called for “the review of any treaties or international agreements which restrain the full use of our resources in the Cold War.” They presumably meant questioning the OAS treaty and America’s involvement in the United Nations.

  If the president had relied only on this report, he most likely would have called for an invasion and challenged those Americans who were asking what they could do for their country to help in its militarization. Kennedy read the report, but he had other crucial sources of information from the State Department and the CIA that presented the reality of Castro’s popularity, the difficulty of any attempt to overthrow him, and the fact that the Cuban revolution was much less a threat to Latin America than it had once appeared. In the end Kennedy backed away from most of the recommendations that Bobby and his associates proposed.

  Although Dulles and Bissell retired, Kennedy was left with much the same CIA and military leaders he had before. He still read their memos, but he no longer fully trusted their judgment. The president was like a pilot flying a plane with a feathered engine: always looking nervously out the window, afraid that the plane would burst into flame. What he had now that he had not had before was his brother sitting beside him as co-pilot.

  23

  A Gold Winter

  In the middle of May 1961, Kennedy flew up to Canada for his first state visit. Travel was a tonic to a president who had been living too long in the compressed world of Washington. The crowds along the boulevards were sidewalk-wide, shouting his name out as if it were a magical talisman. As much as the Canadians saluted his visit, they were even more enthusiastic about Jackie, who had only reluctantly made the trip. She had become a problem for the president: only fitfully willing to apply herself to all the banal rituals of her life as first lady, Jackie much preferred her fancy friends in New York, Charlottesville, and Palm Beach. On this visit, however, Kennedy’s elegant wife was celebrated as an American icon, giving panache to his every public moment while deflecting attention away from the Bay of Pigs.

  When it came time for the ritual planting of a tree on the grounds of Government House, it would not do for the vibrant young president to join his wife in turning over a few grains of dirt with a silver trowel. Instead, he hefted up shovel-load after shovel-load. And when he was finished, he felt the ominous twinges of back pain. It got so bad that he had a difficult time walking, and in the following weeks he spent much of his time in private on crutches.

  All his political life Kennedy had managed to keep the question of his health problems to no more than an uncivil murmur. So it was quite unacceptable now, of all moments, to be seen hobbling along. He was about to set off for a summit conference with the rotund, aging Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev; it would be a war of symbols, and neither Kennedy nor his nation walked on crutches.

  Even though the young president looked like the very definition of good health, he often walked on what amounted to invisible crutches. He had no problem allowing photographers to picture him sitting in a rocking chair because it seemed so incongruous. When the photographers left, he often stayed in the rocking chair with his feet propped on his desk, seeking some relief that way. For most presidents, throwing out the ritual first baseball of the major league season was one of the pleasant rites of spring. For Kennedy, it was a potentially troubling moment, and each year, as the day approached, he had his right shoulder checked out to make sure he could throw the ball.

  Even before his trip to Ottawa, Kennedy’s back had been bothering him. The problem created an unwelcome surprise for Judith Exner, his occasional mistress, when early in May she checked into the Mayflower Hotel and visited the president. Exner recalled: “This was the first time that he remained completely on his back. He was having trouble with his back, but there is something about that position, if not arrived at naturally, that makes the woman feel that she is there just to satisfy the man.”

  The president strained his back anew falling out of his old spring-back Senate chair. On another occasion early in his term his chair mysteriously splintered, hurting him again. On yet another occasion he had been playing with Caroline and John Jr. when he cracked his head against the corner of a table. The three-quarter-inch wound required the services of a plastic surgeon, who covered the stitches with a thick bandage.

  The president’s friends occasionally caught a glimpse of the inner world of Kennedy’s health. He never took off his stoic mask, but they knew that he was in pain. “You could see it sometimes,” recalled his friend Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and later the executive editor of the Washington Post. “He would have to lie down, watching the movies lying on the bed.”

  In one of the most famous photos of his presidency, Kennedy stands leaning over a table lost in thought. The reality was that Kennedy was resting his painful back. His back had become so troublesome that he had not only a special mattress of nonallergenic hair set over a heavy bed board in the White House but another bed board on Air Force One. Because he often woke up with a puffy face, the legs of the head of the White House bed were set on three-inch-high blocks so that he could sleep with his head elevated. He was so allergic to horsehair that the one time he attended the Washington horse show he had to leave in the middle of the event and return to the White House. To help immunize him from his allergies, he took weekly or biweekly injections of a vaccine made of dust gathered around the White House family quarters.

  That did not help with his allergy to milk. That allergy was particularly irritating to Kennedy, for like many of his generation he considered milk a natural wonder drug that he would have loved to drink by the quart, not to mention the pints of ice cream he would love to have eaten. The calcium supplement that he took to make up for the lack of milk was only one of the many pills he was supposed to take each day.

  George Thomas, his valet, set a box of pills before him at breakfast and lunch. There were six pills in all—Cytomel, Meticorten, hydrocortisone, Florinef, calcium, and vitamin C—that he took all at once, swallowed down with a quick swig of orange juice or water. He also took 500 milligrams of ascorbic acid once or twice a day.

  Cytomel is the trade name for a T3 thyroid replacement drug that Kennedy took in 25-microgram pills twice a day for thyroid insufficiency. He also took 25-milligram cortisone pills for Addison’s disease each day, and for a number of years injections of 150-milligram desoxycorticosterone acetate pellets every three months.

  The Kennedy administration was one of the most crisis-filled periods of American history, and the president was weighed down by an overwhelming burden of decision. He dealt with issue after issue that resolved itself as history usually does, not in monumental triumph or brutal defeat but in ambiguity and uncertainty. He was under such stress that healthy adrenal glands would have been pumping adrenaline into his system to give him the force and stamina to prevail. Instead, in difficult times he upped his hydrocortisone to improve his general functioning. Without the daily medicine, he would have died. The cortisone was that essential to his life.

  Other doctors who had not even examined Kennedy sensed that he was not the healthy man he pretended to be. When the president stood so boldly against the elements giving his inaugural address, he was watched on television by Major General Howard M. Snyder, Eisenhower’s White House physician. “He’s all hopped up,” Dr. Snyder commented, seeing beads of sweat on Kennedy’s forehead. He hypothesized that the new president had taken a double shot of cortisone that morning. “I hate to think,” the doctor reflected, “of what might happen to the country if Kennedy is required, at 3 A.M., to make a decision affecting the national security.”

  Dr. Snyder was suggesting that the new president was a cortisone junkie, shooting himself up with the drug. Kennedy had taken the drug orally for several years, and he needed more of h
is daily dosage of cortisone in times of stress. Just as a person who begins to exercise needs more calories, so in times of increased tension Kennedy needed more cortisone. He was seeking not a euphoric high but merely the feeling of being a healthy human being. If he did not take enough, he risked feeling an overwhelming sense of lassitude and exhaustion. If he took too much, he risked feeling a rush of manic invincibility that in some instances spilled over into despair and depression.

  One of Kennedy’s physicians, Dr. Eugene Cohen, was worried that even if the president survived a plane crash, he would go into shock without his cortisone. Thus, the endocrinologist devised an ingenious mechanism through which Kennedy could keep a safe supply of cortisone. Dr. Cohen put a syringe full of the drug in a cigar holder. He surrounded the holder with cigars and placed it in a sealed humidor to be carried on Air Force One.

  Dr. Cohen had been largely responsible for the president choosing Dr. Janet Travell as the primary White House physician, but Kennedy also received medical advice from several others, including Dr. Cohen himself. In her first few months in Washington, Dr. Travell made herself into one of the most celebrated figures in the administration and was featured in a New York Times profile and celebrated in U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post. Kennedy did not like his aides to get publicity. He found it an indulgence that served neither him nor them. Moreover, there was a high irony in the fact that the May issue of Reader’s Digest celebrated the matronly, silver-haired, fifty-nine-year-old doctor’s successful treatment of “thousands of persons with disabling back conditions, including the president,” while Kennedy hobbled around the White House, unable to get relief from his pain.

  Dr. Travell was a doctor who knew only one chamber in the temple of medicine. She attempted to wall the president off from other medical advice as she continued to inject him with painkillers and stick needles in his lower back, a treatment that had always given him respite from his pain. It was not working now, however, precisely when Kennedy desperately needed relief before his European trip.