Once he’d heard those declarations, Jack Kennedy’s sense of purpose—mission, really—was focused on their possible consequences. Did Khrushchev actually intend to sign a treaty with East Germany that would throw the USA, Britain, and France out of West Berlin, where they’d governed as allies since 1945? According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy couldn’t stop reading and re-reading those words. Did they mean war? And would the United States be forced to escalate to nuclear war if the Soviets made good on their threat? Could an American president let the Communists grab West Berlin, the very symbol of Cold War defiance?
This is the specter Jack Kennedy was forced to contemplate in those early days of his presidency: the real chance that he alone would have to choose between nuclear war over Berlin or a historic capitulation to a European aggressor, a second “Munich.” Somehow he was able to greatly enjoy these early weeks after the inauguration. Living, as he did, in compartments, he didn’t let the worry show. He found comfort where he had since youth, in the close company of old friends.
During those early weeks after they’d moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Bartletts came to visit and the First Couple took them on a stroll down the streets surrounding the White House. Escaping through the guard gates was a way of testing his freedom. That night both Jack and Jackie spoke of their commitment to saving the buildings surrounding Lafayette Park, just across Pennsylvania Avenue. The Eisenhower administration had considered leveling the historic townhouses to put up government office buildings. They also mentioned their desire to restore the White House itself. When they found their way up to the ornate Indian Treaty Room in the Old Executive Building, Kennedy practiced using the microphone used by Ike during press conferences. Charlie sat in the back, listening to how the new president sounded from there. The brand-new president was having fun in his discovered world and sharing it with a beloved pal. He wasn’t letting his hidden dread affect the occasion. As Chuck Spalding once told me, even amid crisis, “Jack’s attitude made you feel like you were at a fair or something.”
Lem Billings arrived on Friday and stayed a week. He was the Kennedys’ first houseguest and their most frequent. Soon he’d have his own room, and would show up unannounced and stay as long as he liked. He was never issued a White House pass, but the Secret Service agents all knew him. He joined the couple, too, on weekends at Glen Ora, their retreat in the Virginia horse country. Often, Jackie was the one inviting him. She wanted Jack to have someone to hang out with when she was out riding. The presence of Jack’s old Choate roommate ensured there’d always be company to lighten the mood.
Lem never took for granted Jack’s friendship, cherished it, and was always there for him. “Jack was the closest person to me in the world for thirty years,” he said, and no one doubted it. Still, even he found it difficult to explain Jack’s enduring loyalty. “I’ve often wondered why, you know, all through the years, we continued to be such close friends, because I never kept up on politics and all the things that interested him. What he really wanted to do, on weekends, was to get away from anything that had to do with the White House.”
In fact, escaping the White House even on weeknights appealed greatly to its new occupant. One time he had Red Fay buy tickets ahead of time for Spartacus, allowing them to slip into the nearby movie theater unnoticed once the lights were down. Fay never forgot an incident that occurred a few nights later, walking across Lafayette Park. A fellow standing in the shadows caught the attention of the Secret Service agents, who checked him out by shining their flashlights at him. “What would you do now if that man over there pulled a gun?” Kennedy suddenly asked his buddy from the PT boat days. “What would you do to help your old pal?”
As they walked on, they began talking about assassination, the word itself rather antiquated, given that there’d been none since McKinley. “You know, this really isn’t my job, to worry about my life,” Kennedy said. “That’s the job of the Secret Service. If I worry about that, I’m not going to be able to do my own job. So I have just really removed that from my mind. That’s theirs to take care of. That’s one of the unpleasant parts about the job, but that’s part of the job.”
Fay had moved from California to work at the Navy Department. Once he was on the federal payroll, Jack teased him. “Listen, Redhead, he’d say, I didn’t put you over there to be the brightest man that ever held the job of Undersecretary.” He said that he wanted him there for his honest judgment about what he saw. But, clearly, the president wanted Fay’s company as well. Jack had arranged for another PT buddy, Jim Reed, to be made assistant secretary of the treasury, and for Rip Horton to go to the Army Department. “The presidency is not a good place to make new friends,” Jack said. “I’m going to keep my old friends.”
The Peace Corps—once an idea that seemed, spontaneously, to create itself—was now in the process of becoming a reality. Not sure exactly how the logistics of the visionary but also highly practical project might work, Kennedy put it in the hands of Sargent Shriver. As the founding director, Shriver got it off the ground, with the first volunteers overseas by the end of the year in countries such as Ghana and Tanganyika, Colombia and Ecuador. “The president is counting on you,” he told one early group on the eve of their departure. “It’s up to you to prove that the concepts and ideals of the American Revolution are still alive. Foreigners think we’re fat, dumb, and happy over here. They don’t think we’ve got the stuff to make personal sacrifices for our way of life. You must show them.”
But then, Washington bureaucratic jealousy threatened the enterprise. Shriver sought help from Vice President Johnson, named by JFK to chair the advisory council. “You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service,” he told Shriver, “and they’ll put striped pants on your people when all you’ll want them to have is a knapsack and a tool kit and a lot of imagination. And they’ll give you a hundred and one reasons why it won’t work every time you want to do something different. If you want the Peace Corps to work, friends, you’ll keep it away from the folks downtown who want it to be just another box in an organizational chart.”
Like a high priest in cowboy boots, Johnson knew the secrets of life and death in the capital. Thanks to him, the Peace Corps remained independent.
Having first talked about it when she entered the White House, Jackie Kennedy now wanted to start making good on her desire to redecorate the Executive Mansion. To help her, she asked her friend Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, married to the Pittsburgh banking heir and philanthropist Paul Mellon, whose high-patrician style she admired. According to Bunny, “When he became president, Jackie changed—she became just as royal as could be. She said, ‘Will you come now? Jack’s president. Will you come now and help me fix up this house? It’s terrible. And don’t call me “First Lady” ever, because I just work here. This is a job. I’ve got to do it for Jack.’ ”
But in addition to her work with Jackie on the public and private rooms, Bunny Mellon made another singular and lasting contribution to the Kennedy-era White House. In this case, it was Jack himself who asked for her expert knowledge. Knowing her to be a celebrated garden designer and horticulturalist, he requested that she renovate the Rose Garden, which he could see from his Oval Office window and called “a mess.”
Established in 1913 by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, it continues to this day to be the scene of ceremonial events. The layout Bunny Mellon created for JFK, often following his specific instructions, comprises the admired Rose Garden layout still seen today.
• • •
On April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth. It was the first time in human history that man had gone beyond our planet’s atmosphere. Having beaten the United States into space with their first unmanned craft, the satellite Sputnik 1, back in 1957, the Russians once again had surpassed us. That first victory had come on President Eisenhower’s watch, but this one was on Kennedy’s.
But April, the “cruelest month,” held further setbacks, ones that would leave even mor
e serious political scars. On April 17, more than 1,400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles—trained, equipped, transported, and given limited air cover by the CIA—landed on a Cuban beach bordering an inlet now known as the Bay of Pigs on the island’s south side. The disembarking Cubans had been assured by Agency officials they’d have full U.S. military support were they to encounter trouble on landing, but this turned out to be a false promise.
As Kennedy famously quoted at the time, “Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan.” The best way to look back with full understanding at the debacle known as the “Bay of Pigs” is to get an idea of how it appeared going forward.
There were several factors contributing to the pressure put on the new president to approve this ostensibly secret plan. Kennedy had himself called for such an action during the campaign, having gotten a tip-off from, if not others, Governor John Patterson of Alabama, who knew his National Guard units were helping the CIA invasion effort. He felt another spur to action. Once he’d taken the oath of office, and had it confirmed that the operation was already well into its planning stages, he understood that to back off and shut down the preparations would paint him as a soft-liner.
Driving him the hardest were his new colleagues. Somehow, the people directing “Operation Zapata,” the invasion’s CIA code name, fully believed their plan could succeed. They were encouraged by the success Allen Dulles, the brother of the late John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had had in pulling off what was regarded as a similar scheme back in 1954, when a coup d’état had been stage-managed in Guatemala.
Richard Bissell, Dulles’s chief of operations, had slyly arranged, while Kennedy was still a candidate, to meet him at a Georgetown party, and the two Ivy Leaguers had hit it off. Not only was Bissell a persuasive and convincing supporter of Operation Zapata, but so were key Kennedy people, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
But what really clinched it for those men sitting safely in faraway Washington was the escape hatch many were led to believe was built into the plan: if the exiles found themselves unable to hold a beachhead once they landed, they could then retreat to the Escambray Mountains only eighty miles away, where they’d be able to join up with counterrevolutionary forces hiding out. Unfortunately, it was a very long eighty miles, across nearly impassable swamp—and getting even to that point meant eluding a Castro force vastly larger than the exile group. Obviously—had he known, and he should have known this—instead of signing off on it, Kennedy should have shut Zapata down while it was still possible.
Instead, there on the sands of that Cuban bay, every member of the invading Brigade 2506—mostly middle-class professionals recruited in Miami with little idea how to defend themselves against Fidel’s soldiers—was captured or killed. Quickly, in the aftermath, Kennedy asked for the resignations of both Dulles and Bissell. “In a parliamentary government, I’d have to resign,” JFK told Bissell. “But in this government, I can’t, so you and Allen have to go.”
In the end, even from this distant vantage point, nothing is perfectly clear about that ill-conceived CIA operation except for the fact that, once it was launched, it was bound to fail.
It’s hard to say just why Kennedy went along with his advisors, most of whom seem to have either had their heads in the sand or were otherwise enacting agendas of their own. Yet what does a president have such military and intelligence experts for if not to listen to them? JFK had been in office only three months, and however quick a study he was, he was still learning on the job. He was also used to being entirely his own boss, his own skipper, his own engine of accomplishment—from the Muckers to PT 109 to his extraordinary campaigns. The scope and scale, the sheer bulkiness of the apparatus around him made a difference to his sense of maneuverability. Now he’d signed on, not just to an operation, but to a government. He was surrounded by a government establishment he himself had no hand in forging.
But the contradictions buried in the Bay of Pigs scheme echoed Kennedy’s own. It was the old “two Jacks” problem. He was an idealist pursuing a new foreign policy he hoped would transcend the Cold War. He was also a Cold Warrior who had promised in the recent campaign to back “fighters for freedom” against Fidel Castro. Here he was caught going down the one road while signaling the other.
Just a month earlier, at a White House reception for Latin American diplomats, Kennedy had delivered his “Alliance for Progress” speech. In it he’d vowed to abandon the gunboat diplomacy engaged in by the “Goliath of the North” for generations, as the United States intervened at will in countries such as Cuba. This declaration of Pan-American mutual respect would be tarnished by U.S. efforts to overthrow Castro. Only too aware of the hypocrisy it revealed, Kennedy insisted that the Cuban invasion be carried out in the absence of direct U.S. military action, on the principle of what’s known in dark diplomacy as “plausible deniability.”
To achieve this goal, Kennedy had instructed the CIA’s Bissell, whose baby the operation really was, to see that it was carried out with the minimum of “noise.” For this reason he ordered the landing point shifted from Trinidad, a busy port city, to the desolate Bahía de Cochinos. As a result, the invasion inevitably lost what chance it might have had of triggering a countrywide rebellion, with citizens coming out to join the “liberators.”
Kennedy’s conflict in purpose continued as he sought to reconcile his aggressive Cold Warrior stance, which had seen him denouncing the Truman administration’s “loss” of China, with his newly emerged recognition of postwar nationalism. The incredibly tricky challenge of toppling a despot on foreign soil by supporting an invasion was dealt another blow when Kennedy called off two of the planned air strikes in the midst of the operation. For the anti-Castro force to hold the beachhead, the small Cuban air force needed to be knocked out of action. In the event, it suffered only limited damage.
By the third day, the battle was lost. The mountains with their promise of sanctuary were little more than a mirage, real but impossible to reach. The eyes of the world were watching as Castro rounded up the poorly served and even more poorly supported surviving combatants, who would not return home to Florida for twenty more months, not until the United States bartered for their freedom with more than $50 million worth of medicine and baby food.
In the aftermath, there was certainly enough blame to go around, as JFK ironically suggested. But that mattered little in the face of such headlines as the one that ran in the New York Times on April 21: “CUBA SAYS SOVIETS SCARED OFF U.S.; Asserts Washington Feared ‘Superior’ Russian Arms.”
• • •
The question must be asked: What was Kennedy thinking? Why did he sign off on an invasion offering so slender a possibility of success? What about the thought he never seemed even to take into account: What would success actually look like? Could anyone seriously imagine the people of Cuba overthrowing Fidel Castro—or attempting to—upon hearing news of a 1,400-man invasion force landing on a remote beach? And given the strong chance of the mission’s failure, how did he imagine the United States would then appear to the world, both in Latin America and around the globe?
Those questions having been put on the table, there are others equally important. Why didn’t Dulles or Bissell tell JFK he was compromising the invasion by changing the landing area, and that the air strikes—all of them—were essential? Why had they maintained that there would be a widespread Cuban uprising against Castro? Why did they lie in saying the members of Brigade 2506 could escape into the mountains if they failed to secure a beachhead? Bissell, the chief instigator, would later admit to having misled Kennedy into believing that option was a viable one. But why hadn’t General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoken up to warn the president that the invasion plan was a fool’s game? Why had Secretary of State Dean Rusk not expressed his own doubts about the Cuban people’s willingness to embrace a general revolt? Far more important, why hadn’t Kenned
y asked the right questions, and made sure to have the solid answers such a risky undertaking demanded? Beyond the human toll, the collateral damage, after all, would be to his administration’s credibility.
To his credit, Kennedy kept disaster from becoming calamity. He decided at the most critical moment to cut his losses, refusing to send in U.S. forces, and that may have been the crucial decision of the entire episode. He took charge—far too late, admittedly—but with executive firmness. He told the military and the intelligence brass that the United States would not openly attack the island of Cuba. He would let those men meet their fate on the beach rather than commit his country to possible direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. Who knew how many Russians were on the island, how many would be killed by a U.S. air attack on Castro’s forces?
• • •
The Bay of Pigs cast a long shadow over the Kennedy White House, but the value of the early lessons it provided for Kennedy cannot be underestimated. One of them involved one of his very first presidential acts. “I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on,” the president told Arthur Schlesinger just two days later. “It’s not that Dulles is not a man of great ability. He is. But I have never worked with him and therefore I can’t estimate his meaning when he tells me things. We will have to do something about the CIA. I must have someone there with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I know I will be getting the exact pitch. I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there. Bobby should be in the CIA. It’s a helluva way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with the CIA.”
In a statesmanlike gesture, he soon met with Richard Nixon, who hawkishly urged him to “find a proper legal cover and go in.” Nixon’s idea was to use the defense of our naval base at Guantánamo as a possible excuse. Hearing this, Kennedy pointed to the inherent danger in that plan. “There is a good chance that if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin,” he said. The former vice president, always touched by any sign of respect from Jack, came away ready to rally support for him. “I just saw a crushed man today,” Nixon told his allies after the encounter, asking them to resist taking easy shots at the demoralized president.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 71
