Macmillan didn’t prevail in their Key West meeting, however, as Kennedy insisted on keeping the military option open in Laos. The President had already made a tough televised statement and moved troops and warships into position. JFK’s plan was to secure the Laotian capital of Vientiane with several battalions of American soldiers joined by troops from regional allies such as Pakistan and Thailand. Although Kennedy “pressed very hard,” Macmillan couldn’t offer British forces, explaining that he needed cabinet approval for such a commitment. “Kennedy obviously thought this was an excuse,” said Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent for London’s Sunday Times. Against his better judgment, Macmillan agreed that Kennedy might have to take action out of political necessity “in order not to be ‘pushed about’ by the Russians.”
Privately, Kennedy assured dovish aides such as Schlesinger that his maneuvers were more theatrical than real—bluffs intended to convince the Soviets to support a cease-fire. Kennedy thought Laos was not “worthy of engaging the attention of great powers,” Schlesinger wrote. But the hawks on his staff believed Kennedy intended to proceed. In Walt Rostow’s view, “Kennedy was ready to fight in Laos to hold the Mekong Valley”—the strategic linchpin of the country.
A crucial factor in Kennedy’s thinking had nothing to do with Southeast Asia. By late March he was immersed in plans for an American-backed invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro—the infamous landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. The scheme had been hatched during the Eisenhower administration by the CIA, which trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala for what was known as Operation Pluto.
The numerous mistakes Kennedy made in authorizing and directing the ill-conceived invasion resulted from inexperience and overconfidence. In dismantling Eisenhower’s national security apparatus, Kennedy had intended to broaden his sources of information for decision-making. Yet the ultimate irony of the Bay of Pigs was that Kennedy limited himself to advice that he couldn’t test or analyze. “He tried to keep it very secret, and he succeeded too well,” said Douglas Dillon. JFK’s susceptibility to a covert preemptive operation also hearkened back to themes in Why England Slept, in which he argued that the cautious nature of democracy could hamper a nation’s response to totalitarian aggression.
Having taken a stand as an anti-communist fighter committed to oust Castro, Kennedy considered several options. The simplest was to help a small cadre—perhaps several hundred men—infiltrate Cuba to strengthen an indigenous resistance movement. The most ambitious was a full-scale invasion including American troops, which was unacceptably imperialistic. JFK compromised on what Macmillan called “a complete muddle”—an amphibious landing of 1,400 men that was expected to provoke a popular uprising against Castro. Disguised American planes piloted by Cuban exiles would neutralize Castro’s air force, enabling the invaders to entrench themselves in a key region of Cuba. As originally conceived, the operation was slated for the port of Trinidad, adjacent to mountains offering a haven for escape if necessary. But Kennedy wanted a quieter scheme, so the planners shifted to the more remote Bay of Pigs, which, as it turned out, was fatally hemmed in by impassable swamps.
Among Kennedy’s closest advisers, only Bundy and McNamara participated fully in deliberations that included a tight group of officials from the military, CIA, and State and Defense departments. Both men embraced the plan, relying on the expertise of the masterminds from the military and intelligence communities. “Boss, it checks out one hundred per cent,” Bundy told JFK. But as McNamara ruefully noted later, “We were led to believe the cost of failure would be small.”
Arthur Schlesinger expressed skepticism in several memos, although he later reproached himself for declining to speak up in meetings in the “curious atmosphere of assumed consensus.” Rusk seemed dubious but never voiced strong reservations. More outspoken dissenters were Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles and Arkansas senator William Fulbright.
Kennedy had serious doubts from the start; he questioned the likelihood of mass uprisings, for example. “He couldn’t quite bring himself to trust his own sense,” wrote Stewart Alsop. But a greater concern was that he would seem the appeaser—the ghost of his father’s legacy—if he derailed the plan, handing the Republicans “the issue forever,” said Rostow. “The President was quite passive, quite deferential to the brass and the CIA,” said Ted Sorensen, who did not participate in the decision-making. “He was indecisive and vacillating. He made decisions on a piecemeal basis.”
Kennedy and George Smathers had visited Cuba together at the end of 1957, scarcely a month following the birth of Caroline, when Jackie was still recovering from a cesarean section. The Cuba trip was “frankly for a vacation,” said Smathers. They stayed at the U.S. Embassy as guests of Kennedy’s longtime friends Ambassador Earl Smith and his wife, Flo. On December 23 the two senators were honored at an embassy Christmas party, followed by gambling at the Sans Souci casino. Kennedy also went sailing, played golf, and visited various nightspots. “Kennedy wasn’t a great casino man,” said Smathers, “but the Tropicana nightclub had a floor show you wouldn’t believe. . . . Kennedy liked Cuba. He liked the style.”
Many in the State Department dismissed Earl Smith as a lightweight, but Kennedy gave him more credit. “He loved Earl Smith, who was a great personality,” said Charley Bartlett. “Earl had a very sharp mind, was a very good investor, a bit of a gambler. Earl had good judgment and was shrewd.” A graduate of Yale who was fluent in three languages, Smith had been visiting Cuba since 1928 and had made many friends there before arriving in Havana as ambassador in July 1957, seven months after Castro landed with a guerrilla force he had trained while exiled in Mexico.
For the next eighteen months, Smith tried to manage an increasingly explosive situation as Castro gathered strength and Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s longtime president, tightened his dictatorial grip. Unlike Smith’s predecessor, Arthur Gardner, who was friendly enough with Batista to play canasta with him several times a week, Smith kept his distance and reached out to an alternative “anti-Batista element” in the intelligentsia, middle class, and Catholic Church. Smith recognized early that Castro was an avowed Marxist, which the State Department and influential reporters such as Herbert Matthews of the New York Times (“Castro’s own boy,” according to Charley Bartlett) chose to ignore.
Shortly after Batista fled on New Year’s Day 1959 and Castro seized power, Earl and Flo returned to the United States. Within the next year, Castro declared himself a communist and ally of the Soviet Union, prompting the Eisenhower administration to impose economic sanctions. The U.S. government viewed the close proximity of a Soviet client state as a significant military threat, not only to Latin American countries but to the United States as well. While Smith’s warnings about Castro were vindicated, State Department mandarins continued to belittle the former ambassador.
In February 1961, Kennedy named Smith ambassador to Switzerland, but the Swiss government, which represented U.S. interests in Cuba, objected to the appointment because of Smith’s strong stance against Castro. Smith quickly withdrew his name, telling Kennedy, “the pro-Castro elements have succeeded in creating a tempest over my appointment. I don’t believe that you should longer be burdened with this problem.”
Kennedy spent the long Easter weekend in Palm Beach, where he had more than three hours of private meetings with Smith at his friend’s beachfront home. The topic, according to Earl Smith Jr., was the proposed attack on Cuba. “My father said they were talking about how could one remove the threat without an all-out military exercise,” said Smith. “Kennedy said, ‘What happens if we get bogged down?’ My father said, ‘Don’t undertake it unless you do it 100 percent.’ Jack Kennedy said, ‘There are things at hand you are not aware of.’”
When he returned to Washington on April 4, Kennedy didn’t disclose the substance of his Florida discussions. But Mac Bundy and Schlesinger detected a toughening of Kennedy’s attitude and suspected that Joe Kennedy, Earl Smith, and Smathers were responsible. On April 5, JF
K approved the CIA plan. Bundy was not yet comfortable enough in their relationship to say to the President, “What the hell has happened to you on the weekend?” Bundy recalled. “But I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Yes, sir.’” By the time JFK entertained Chuck Spalding at Glen Ora on April 9, he appeared confident when he revealed the plans to his old friend. “He told me . . . he expected a success. . . . He didn’t expect any troubles,” recalled Spalding. Ben and Tony Bradlee, who were also weekend guests, got no whiff of the plans.
Although there had been a surprising number of press accounts on the CIA training in Guatemala, journalists were strikingly timid on reporting the invasion plans. With the assistance of Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy managed to kill a story about the operation in the New Republic after convincing the editor, Gilbert Harrison, that publication would endanger the national interest. A similar article in the New York Times was watered down after JFK leaned on publisher Orvil Dryfoos.
Charley Bartlett had the story as well, and censored himself. Bartlett had been tipped by no less than Ernesto Betancourt, Castro’s representative in the United States who had just returned from Florida. “In Miami everyone is talking about the invasion, Bay of Pigs,” Betancourt told Bartlett. “It will be a disaster.” Bartlett refrained from telling Kennedy because “I thought, ‘Why add to his burdens?’” Instead, Bartlett told Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, who denied the account. “I had a lot of detail,” Bartlett recalled. “As a newspaperman I should have broken the story.” Years later, declassified documents confirmed that the KGB had been alerted on April 8 about an imminent invasion, but the message “did not land on Khrushchev’s desk.” However, neither the Soviets nor the Cubans knew the precise location of the attack.
On Saturday, April 15, two days before the invasion, Kennedy authorized the first of two air strikes. Out at Glen Ora, he appeared anxious and restless. Jackie attempted to divert him by organizing an outing to the Middleburg Hunt races with Steve and Jean Smith and Paul and Eve Fout. JFK arrived between races, “striding suddenly into the paddock at a Tennessee walking-horse pace.” He was too impatient to wait for the next race, although on the way out he emerged from his car to watch the steeplechase for a few minutes from a distant hill. Otherwise, he passed his time hitting golf balls in the Glen Ora pasture and taking long walks.
The initial air assault went badly, managing to destroy only a handful of the thirty or so planes in Cuba’s air force. A CIA cover story claimed the pilots were defectors from Castro’s air force. When the Cuban government protested at the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson insisted the United States was not involved. He lied unintentionally because he had been inadequately briefed by Schlesinger and CIA official Tracy Barnes. When the cover story collapsed and Stevenson learned the truth, he was furious that his integrity had been jeopardized and threatened to resign. Shaken by Stevenson’s plight and filled with second thoughts, Dean Rusk urged Kennedy on Sunday to cancel the second air strike, which was slated for dawn on Monday the seventeenth, the scheduled time for the amphibious attack.
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, Kennedy gave the green light for the invasion. As he pondered Rusk’s request, JFK tried to distract himself by whacking golf balls, first at Glen Ora with the Smiths, then at Fauquier Springs Country Club, where Lem Billings joined them for three holes. It was a truncated game typical of Kennedy, with lots of topped balls—“menacing the field mice,” as singer Bing Crosby once described JFK’s weakness with his long irons.
Late that afternoon, following a long talk with Rusk on the phone, Kennedy canceled the second air strike. He hung up the phone and, Schlesinger wrote, “sat on in silence for a moment, shook his head and began to pace the room in evident concern, worried perhaps less about this decision than about the confusion in the planning: what would go wrong next? Those with him at Glen Ora had rarely seen him so low.”
Kennedy had doomed the invaders even before they landed, leaving them vulnerable to attack by air. “Kennedy understood part of the plan, but he never understood that the navy planes were essential to the plan,” said Douglas Dillon, who had been involved in the Cuba operation under Eisenhower. After a day of fighting, the refugee force was surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops, and more than 1,000 were taken prisoner. It was a humiliating rout—and the biggest failure of Kennedy’s life.
On Tuesday night the eighteenth, Jack and Jackie hosted a gala reception for members of Congress. Wearing a Cassini-designed sheath of pink-and-white straw lace, a feather-shaped diamond clip in her hair, and “an impish look,” Jackie twirled around the dance floor with LBJ, while the President greeted guests at one end of the East Room. After the First Couple left a few minutes before midnight, Kennedy shed his white tie and tails and hurried to the West Wing to meet with his top aides until 2:46 a.m. Then, as Salinger and O’Donnell watched, Kennedy slowly paced the Rose Garden for nearly an hour in the dark.
The next day, he had a seven-hour meeting with top aides, during which he smoked “his normal quota of two cigars” and “showed no signs of anguish,” according to Time. He also had lengthy phone conversations with his father and Bobby. Jackie later told Arthur Schlesinger that during lunchtime JFK described his sorrow over the men dying on the Cuban beaches. As Jackie sought to comfort him before his nap, he embraced her. That night, after the Kennedys dutifully attended a dinner at the Greek Embassy given by Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis, Jackie confided to her mother-in-law that JFK had been “so upset all day and had practically been in tears.”
The following weekend at Glen Ora with Chuck and Betty Spalding, Kennedy labored to shake the gloom. “That’s the only time in all the time that I knew him that he was really beside himself over a mistake,” recalled Spalding. “He had this golf club and six or seven balls. Once in a while he’d just take a wild swing at a ball and knock it into the cornfield. We just walked and walked all over the place, and he couldn’t talk about anything else. . . . We just had to let him talk himself out.”
Reaction around the world ranged from harsh condemnation to expressions of regret. Khrushchev called the botched invasion “a crime which has revolted the whole world.” French politician Jean Monnet told David Bruce that Kennedy had “suffered heavily in prestige.” Harold Macmillan privately expressed disappointment; he and Kennedy had met twice in the weeks before the decision—first in Key West, and then in a series of wide-ranging discussions during the prime minister’s visit to Washington in early April—and Kennedy had neither sought his advice nor revealed any details. Macmillan believed that Kennedy “should have committed U.S. air power to support the landings rather than let it fail, or should not have accepted the CIA plan in the first place.” In all likelihood, even air strikes couldn’t have saved the overmatched invaders, who would doubtless have been crushed in the end by Castro’s far more numerous forces.
The press offered the predictable dissections. Time described the “sour fog of failure” that enveloped the administration, but James Reston portrayed a “sadder and wiser young President.” Reston also pointedly mentioned that Kennedy had proceeded “against the advice of Rusk and Bowles,” and that Arthur Schlesinger “had serious misgivings and expressed them.”
Charley Bartlett sent Kennedy a memo with suggestions for an inquiry into the landings. “I think a public panel of three outstanding men would be best,” Bartlett wrote. “From a public relations standpoint, I would love to see the thing launched in the Sunday papers.” Instead, Kennedy appointed only one outsider, retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, along with Bobby, Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, the navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, considered by JFK an “admirable, nice figure without any brains.” The composition of the commission was unfortunate, since the presence of two Bay of Pigs planners forever cast doubt on the group’s conclusions.
In his public statements, Kennedy appropriately took full responsibility for the debacle, and the American press and citizenry were in a forgiving mood. Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy’
s approval rating registered at 82 percent. “It’s just like Eisenhower,” Kennedy cracked to Schlesinger. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.” (Richard Nixon bitterly observed that if he had been in charge, “I would have been impeached.”)
But the Bay of Pigs snapped the Kennedy spell and altered the course of his presidency. “Before the Bay of Pigs everything was a glorious adventure, onward and upward,” Spalding said. “Afterwards it was a series of ups and downs with terrible pitfalls, suspicion everywhere, [with him] cautious of everything, questioning always.”
Contrary to his public protestations, Kennedy assigned blame and meted out punishment. He never again listened so credulously to the military chiefs or assumed, as Joe Alsop put it, “that the odds would break for him.” After a decent interval, he would fire Allen Dulles as well as Richard Bissell, the chief CIA strategist for the invasion. Kennedy turned on Chester Bowles for leaking (“somewhat deviously,” Time noted) his opposition to the press. JFK already considered Bowles a “soft” Stevenson man and found his windy style irritating.
Reston’s mention of Schlesinger caused no harm, although Kennedy couldn’t resist tweaking his unofficial historian for a memo “that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration.” Rusk lost favor for failing to weigh in more vigorously with his objections—the beginning of a “certain mistrust” of Rusk that “lasted through the rest of Jack Kennedy’s administration . . . on his part and on Bobby’s part,” said State Department official Richard Davies.
Grace and Power Page 25
