The Kennedy connections to the CIA were long-standing. In 1956, as noted in an earlier chapter, Joe Kennedy had served on a high-level CIA review panel and had been entrusted to conduct on-site inspection visits to CIA stations abroad. Allen Dulles was an acquaintance from Palm Beach who shared the Kennedy passion for womanizing; he was a regular visitor to the Kennedy compound there. Dulles had known since the flap over Nicolae Malaxa in 1952 that Richard Nixon was not "an honorable man," as the CIA would put it.
The early relationship between Dulles and Jack Kennedy was much closer than is generally known. In his little-noted oral history for the Kennedy Library, recorded in late 1964, Dulles revealed that he and JFK had "fairly continuous" contact, beginning in the early 1950s, when he was deputy director of the CIA, "because my trips to Palm Beach were quite frequent. He [JFK] was often there, and whenever he was there we always got together. I respected his views. I thought he had a very keen appreciation of foreign problems, and being in the intelligence business, I pumped him as much as I could to get his views on things and his reaction to things, and continued on during these days until the days when I served under him for a short time as director." Dulles became CIA director in 1953 and continued talking foreign policy with Kennedy. While in Palm Beach, Dulles usually stayed at the home of Charles B. Wrightsman, a Kennedy neighbor. He specifically recalled one dinner after the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, a coup engineered in 1953 by the CIA. "Charles Wrightsman was an oilman and he was interested and we were all deeply interested in the developments of the Middle East at the time." Jack Kennedy, Dulles added, "was always trying to get information. I don't mean secrets or things of that kind particularly, but to get himself informed. He wanted to get my views ... and we had many, many talks together. As I say, very often Joe [Kennedy] was there at the same time."
Jack Kennedy had another tie to Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles---a tie that was unavailable to Richard Nixon---stemming from Kennedy's acceptance in the upper reaches of Washington society. One anecdote repeatedly published in the Kennedy literature, involving a March 1960 dinner party at JFK's Georgetown home, tells much about the senator's social ease with top-level CIA officers. The guest of honor was author Ian Fleming; other guests included Joe Alsop and his brother and fellow columnist, Stewart. John Bross, a CIA official who had successfully run covert operations in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1950s and was one of Bissell's closest personal friends, was also present, and the talk turned to Cuba. Fleming, at Kennedy's urging, described how he would use "ridicule" to force Castro out of office. Since the Cubans cared only about money, religion, and sex, Fleming said, fake dollar bills should be dropped on the island, to destabilize the currency, as well as leaflets declaring Castro to be impotent. At the time, as Fleming may or may not have known, the CIA's covert action planners were seriously contemplating a series of similarly childish operations, including the use of a depilatory powder that would make Castro's beard fall out. Allen Dulles learned of the dinner-table conversation the next morning and, according to one published account, unsuccessfully sought an immediate meeting with Fleming.*
There were few secrets in Georgetown. The socially prominent journalists, politicians, and intelligence officials shared the same dinner tables and the same fear of international communism. It would be naive to think that at the height of a close presidential campaign, a private meeting between Bissell and Kennedy---such as the one Clarence Sprouse described to me, concerning the Trinidad landing---would not deal with substantive matters. All that Jack Kennedy and his father had strived for, and paid handsomely for, during the past four years would be at stake in a few weeks, and a sudden Republican success against Castro was simply not acceptable. The Kennedy campaign had to find some way to stall the invasion.
Kennedy did not need Richard Bissell to tell him about the Republican administration's operation against Fidel Castro. He had several other sources who were only too willing, even if it meant betraying their primary loyalties. Not only was there Sam Giancana, who by September was recruited into the CIA assassination planning, but there was also Allen Dulles, who became one of two appointments (J. Edgar Hoover was the other) announced by Kennedy on the day after the election. Both were deeply involved with candidate Kennedy in ways not fully understood before now. Arthur Schlesinger, in his memoir, would call the two sudden reappointment announcements part of the president-elect's "strategy of reassurance."* As we now know in the case of Hoover, reassurance of the electorate had nothing to do with it. Was the Dulles reappointment also a reward for past confidences? While there is no explicit evidence that during the campaign Dulles told Kennedy, or arranged for Kennedy to learn, the essentials of the Cuba operation, the fact is that Kennedy did know before the election of the Eisenhower administration's secret planning for Cuba. If Kennedy knew that Dulles, his old family friend, had chosen to keep make-or-break information from him, why would the pragmatic and tough-minded president-elect honor that disloyalty by immediately reappointing him?
Any lingering public doubt about what Kennedy knew or did not know before the election about the Cuban invasion planning should have ended with a revelation six years after the Bay of Pigs from a little-known political insider, John M. Patterson, the Democratic governor of Alabama. In 1967 Patterson was asked to give an oral history to the Kennedy Library. He chose that occasion to tell, for the first time, how he became involved in the early planning in the summer of 1960 for Castro's overthrow and how he directly relayed what he knew to candidate Kennedy weeks before the election. At the time, Patterson's account was suppressed by the library, which continues to suppress it today.
In a series of interviews for this book, Patterson, who served thirteen years as a state judge in Alabama before retiring in 1997, told me the story. He first met Kennedy in 1955, when the senator came to Montgomery to make a speech, and Patterson, then an ardent segregationist, was the crime-busting attorney general of Alabama. On later visits to Kennedy's home and office in Washington, "he and I became friends," Patterson told me. In 1959, a newly elected governor, Patterson broke ranks with fellow Democrats and publicly endorsed the senator before he officially announced for the presidency. Patterson went on to lead the Alabama delegation at the 1960 convention. "I felt he was going to win," he said, "and I was happy to have access" to the White House.
That summer the CIA decided, with Eisenhower's approval, that it needed the help of the Alabama Air National Guard to train exile pilots in Nicaragua for what was initially planned to be the insertion of small guerrilla teams into Cuba. Sometime in mid-1960, Patterson recalled, Major General George R. Doster, commander of the state air national guard, telephoned him and said that a "very hush hush" meeting had to be arranged immediately---at the governor's mansion, not Doster's office. Doster arrived with a senior CIA official, who explained the mission and requested the governor's authorization. Patterson had been a young lieutenant in Eisenhower's headquarters in London during World War II; that experience, the governor reasoned, had led the CIA to him and his air national guard. "I had a high regard for Eisenhower and asked if the Old Man knew about it. They said yes. 'Is he for it?' 'Oh, yeah.' I was patriotic and agreed to let them" use the national guard.
By the fall of 1960, Patterson continued, as the CIA's Cuba planners began turning from small-unit guerrilla activity toward a full-scale ground invasion, hundreds of national guard members---including pilots, cooks, and administrative officials---were needed in Nicaragua to train Cuban flight crews. "Every time Doster came home" from Nicaragua, Patterson added, "he'd stop by and give me a report." Sometime in early or mid-October Doster visited again and said, "Any morning now you're going to read in the morning newspaper when you wake up where we've invaded Cuba."
Patterson was active at that time in the Kennedy campaign in Alabama, and immediately realized that Castro's overthrow would have deadly political implications for the Democrats. "After some thought," he told me, "I called Steve Smith [Kennedy's
brother-in-law and campaign finance manager] and said it was important for me to see Kennedy. I'd meet him anywhere, anytime." He was told to fly to New York and check into the Barclay Hotel. Kennedy showed up at nine o'clock on the night Patterson arrived. "I made him promise," Patterson recalled, "that he wouldn't breathe a word, and I told him what was going on ... that the invasion was imminent and if it occurred before the election, I believed Nixon would win. I recall watching him very closely. I couldn't read him. He heard me out and thanked me." Kennedy showed no emotion throughout, Patterson said, and gave no sign that he had received significant information. "I made him promise never to tell" that he had supplied Kennedy with such confidential---and vital---information. "I made a serious breach of security."
There was yet another business matter at hand. "I had ten thousand dollars in cash," Patterson continued. "Contributions. In a paper bag. And I gave it to him. Kennedy said good-bye and left. That's the way we did things then," the former governor said with a nervous laugh. Patterson acknowledged, in response to a question, that he "frequently made contributions" in cash during the 1960 campaign, either directly to Kennedy or, if he was not readily available, to Steve Smith. Neither Patterson nor Kennedy spoke to the other about Cuba during the campaign.
Patterson decided in 1967 to include a full account of his preelection trip to New York in the oral history he recorded for the Kennedy Library. He had answered all of the usual questions and was asked, as were all interviewees, whether he had anything to add. It was at that moment that he decided to spill the beans. Months later, Patterson told me, he was mailed the typed transcript of his interview for review. All was intact "except that portion pertaining to Cuba. It was just cut out. No reference to it. I called and asked why they did that. They said it was classified." Patterson laughed anew at the thought: "They classified my own stuff." He dropped the issue for the next fifteen years, he said, but suddenly decided to tell the story while being interviewed in October 1982, on the twentieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, by his local newspaper, the Birmingham News. No one paid much attention.
Kennedy now had a secret weapon in the 1960 campaign---Cuba. His polling showed that the Republicans, and Richard Nixon, scored high when foreign policy issues were defined in "tough versus soft" terms. Voters who wanted to do something about communists usually favored Nixon. Kennedy could publicly swing away at Cuba knowing that there would be no response in kind. In Six Crises, his 1962 memoir, Nixon explained why: "The [anti-Castro] program had been in operation for six months before the 1960 campaign got under way. It was a program, however, that I could say not one word about. The operation was covert. Under no circumstances could it be disclosed or even alluded to. Consequently, under Kennedy's attacks and his new demands for 'militant' policies, I was in the position of a fighter with one hand tied behind his back."
Kennedy swung away. In late September 1960, even before the Patterson visit, he had begun moving away from public restraint in his comments, strongly suggesting that someone---perhaps Giancana, Bissell, or Dulles---had already told him what was going on in Guatemala. Asked about Cuba by the Scripps-Howard newspapers, Kennedy, in a written response released on September 23, emphasized the failure of the Eisenhower administration to address the abuses of the Batista regime. He then suggested, apparently for the first time in the campaign, that there should be an active American role inside Cuba, saying that "the forces fighting for freedom in exile and in the mountains of Cuba should be sustained and assisted." If the next president "can help create the conditions in Latin America under which freedom can flourish," he said, "then Castro and his government will soon be isolated from the rest of the Americas---and the desire of the Cuban people for freedom will ultimately bring Communist rule to an end."
Nixon was trapped. There was no turning back on the Cuba policy, even with his election at stake. Getting rid of Fidel Castro was one of Dwight Eisenhower's highest priorities, and considered vital to national security. Nixon's response to Kennedy's hard line was to begin desperately urging the CIA to get Castro out of power before the election. His fear was that Americans who wanted to act against Castro would vote for Kennedy, when it was the Eisenhower White House that had made the crucial decisions. There were ironies all around: if Castro was not ousted before election day, Nixon would get the peace vote from Americans who disapproved of Kennedy's demands for violent overthrow.
By early October, with Nixon still pressuring the CIA to act against Castro and with the Sam Giancana assassination plotting now under way, Kennedy became much more strident. On October 6, in Cincinnati, he evoked the worst fears of the Cold War in a harsh speech that egregiously exaggerated Castro's regional ambitions, denigrated the Eisenhower administration's handling of Cuba, and provoked fear about the Cuban leader's plans to spread his political views to Latin America:
"I want to talk with you tonight about the most glaring failure of American foreign policy today---about a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere---about a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses....
"Castro is not just another Latin American dictator---a petty tyrant bent merely on personal power and gain. His ambitions extend far beyond his own shores. He has transformed the island of Cuba into a hostile and militant Communist satellite---a base from which to carry Communist infiltration and subversion throughout the Americas. With guidance, support and arms from Moscow and Peking, he has ... rattled red rockets at the United States, which can hardly close its eyes to a potential enemy missile or submarine base only ninety miles from our shores.... The American people want to know how this was permitted to happen---how the iron curtain could have advanced almost to our front yard. They want to know the truth...."
Two weeks later, well after his meeting at the Barclay Hotel with John Patterson, the Kennedy rhetoric escalated once again. Late on October 19, two days before the fourth---and final---television debate with Nixon, the Kennedy campaign issued a dramatic press statement that, in effect, envisioned the Bay of Pigs invasion: "We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic 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." The statement led to a headline at the top of the New York Times on October 21: "Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro: Urges Support of Exiles and 'Fighters for Freedom' Already on Island." The lead of the dispatch, written by veteran reporter Peter Kihss, was unambiguous: "Senator John F. Kennedy called last night for United States aid to 'fighters for freedom' in exile and inside Cuba who are seeking to overthrow Premier Fidel Castro's regime."
The sensational play in the press ensured that Cuba would become a major topic of the next evening's debate and put Nixon on the defensive. In RN, Nixon recalled his assumption that Kennedy had been briefed by Allen Dulles about Cuba and had chosen to take political advantage of that information. Kennedy's statement, he said, "jeopardized the project, which could succeed only if it were supported and implemented secretly.... I had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand and attack Kennedy's advocacy of open intervention in Cuba. This was the most uncomfortable and ironic duty I have had to perform in any political campaign."
Dulles, and Kennedy, would insist after the election that no information about covert operations against Castro had been discussed in the preelection briefings of the candidate, a position upheld by the CIA's official records. But Nixon was convinced that his opponent knew otherwise, and was enraged at Dulles for his presumed indiscretion in telling Kennedy anything at all about Cuba. Nixon was reported by his biographer Stephen E. Ambrose to have "exploded" at Dulles during a National Security Council meeting at the White House shortly before the final television debate with Kennedy, insisting, as another biographer wrote, "You never should have told him! Never!"
During the debate, Nixon, who had since mid-1959 campaigned in secret for the overthrow of the Cas
tro regime, was forced to argue on national television that the United States was barred by international law from providing any assistance to Cuban exile groups. He depicted Kennedy's proposal as "probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendation that he's made during the course of the campaign," adding that any assistance to the anti-Castro rebels would violate treaties, cause the United States to "lose all our friends in Latin America," and invite "Mr. Khrushchev ... to come into Latin America."
Ironically, Nixon received rare kudos from liberals in the American press corps for what seemed to be his principled stand against violence in Cuba. James Reston, in the New York Times, reported from Washington that Nixon's criticism of the Kennedy plan "for assisting the anti-Castro forces to regain power in Cuba was approved by well-informed people here tonight." Walter Lippmann, the preeminent syndicated columnist, rebuked Kennedy for "making so much of a campaign issue of Cuba," especially because the Eisenhower administration's handling of Castro was "about the best that was possible." The acidic Murray Kempton declared in the New York Post that "I really don't know what further demagoguery is possible from Kennedy on this subject, short of announcing that, if elected, he will send Bobby and Teddy and Eunice to Oriente Province to clean Castro out."
Nixon complained bitterly about his untenable public posture in Six Crises: "For the first and only time in the campaign, I got mad at Kennedy personally. I thought that Kennedy, with full knowledge of the facts, was jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation. And my rage was greater because I could do nothing about it."
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 21
