The Dark Side of Camelot
Page 26
Robert Kennedy, worried about the political fallout from a leak about the Alabamans' deaths, sought to delay or deny military pensions for the men. The wife of one of the pilots got in touch with Oscar Wyatt, the wealthy Texas oilman who was a strong supporter of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960. "I went up to see Jack," Wyatt said in an interview for this book in 1995. "Bobby was there. I said, 'The woman has kids.' Bobby said, 'The hell with this foolishness'"---making the point that if the pilots were paid, word of their link to the Kennedy White House would be known. "I said," Wyatt continued, "'Look, if you don't do this, I'll walk over to the New York Times and the Washington Post and tell them the whole story about the pilots.'" The president finally ended the dispute by saying, "We'll do it. We'll pay the pensions." The CIA eventually retained a Miami attorney named Alex Carlson to serve as a financial buffer between the U.S. government payments and the families of the four pilots.* The families were paid, but did not receive the full value of the military pensions.
Bissell paid the inevitable price for his failure: he was cast out of the White House loop and permitted to resign in early 1962. There were a few quiet years at a Washington think tank, but his government career was over. He held no more high-level jobs before moving back to a life of yachting, reading, and reflection in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.
Bissell remained loyal to the presidents he had served, or to the presidency, throughout the tense months of 1975, when the Church Committee was seeking to find out whether Eisenhower and Kennedy had known of and authorized assassination plotting against Castro. The senators on the committee never seemed to comprehend the obvious: the whole point of covert action is to provide the president with a secret channel for carrying out foreign policy without accountability. The men running the agency, when called to testify before the Senate, viewed it as their duty to blur any authorization by Eisenhower or Kennedy. Even in secret testimony, telling the truth would be a breach of faith with the presidency, and would turn the CIA into just another finger-pointing federal bureaucracy.*
Bissell gave the senators a primer on plausible deniability, explaining that the goal was to indicate "the general objective of the operation that was contemplated," thus giving the president the option of terminating the operation while also providing "just as little information ... as possible beyond an understanding of its general purpose." Thus, Bissell added, the president would be able "to deny knowledge of the operation if it should surface."
Plausible deniability meant that those who briefed the president could not testify honestly about having done so. At one point, a frustrated Senator Church expressed surprise that Bissell and Dulles would admit to briefing President-elect Kennedy about the planned invasion of Cuba but also claim that they had not told him of the Castro assassination plans: "It just seems too strange ... that you would tell Mr. Kennedy about one matter and not the other." Bissell's answer was double-talk: "It is quite possible that Mr. Dulles did say something about an attempt to or the possibility of making use of syndicate characters for this purpose. I do not remember his doing so at that briefing. My belief is that had he done so, he probably would have done so in rather general terms and that neither of us was in a position to go into detail on the matter."
In their memoirs, both Schlesinger and Sorensen sought to depict Jack Kennedy as a victim of the CIA's ambitions, a leader who inherited an invasion plan from his predecessor and reluctantly let it unfold. "The whole project seemed to move mysteriously and inexorably toward execution," wrote Sorensen, "without the President able either to obtain a firm grip on it or reverse it.... In later months, he would be grateful that he had learned so many major lessons ... at so relatively small and temporary a cost." Schlesinger described Kennedy as "wondering" for months after the Bay of Pigs "how a rational and responsible government could ever have become involved in so ill-starred an adventure."
Marcus Raskin had one answer. His first day on the job, as a disarmament expert for McGeorge Bundy, had been the fateful Monday of the Bay of Pigs landings. A few days later he was invited to attend a staff postmortem on the invasion in the office of Walter W. Rostow, a hard-line political economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was Bundy's deputy. Many of the White House staff were there, including Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Bromley Smith, the administrator of Bundy's staff. "Walt always had a large bowl of fruit in his office," Raskin recalled, "and so a dozen of us sat around eating the fruit, much the way, I suppose, the Roman emperor's assistants would sit around eating fruit and talking about the outlying provinces and the outlying wars. Mac Bundy then walks into the room and says, 'Well, I guess Che learned more from Guatemala than we did.'" Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the radical Latin American leader, was widely seen in Washington as the intellectual guru of Castro's revolution. Guevara had been in Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA, successfully using air cover, overthrew the Arbenz regime.
Raskin asked, "Well, Mac, it's very interesting that Che learned something from Guatemala. What have we learned from Cuba?" There was a moment of silence, and Bromley Smith then remarked, "There should be no recriminations. There must be loyalty." Later that day, or perhaps the next morning, Raskin got a telephone call from one of Bundy's aides, who told him, "Mac would appreciate it very much if you did not go to any more staff meetings." If he had something to say, Raskin was told, he could see Bundy personally in his office. Raskin remained on Bundy's staff until June of 1962, but he understood that in terms of effectiveness, as he recalled with a laugh, "I was done after two days."
President Kennedy, devastated, turned to his father for solace. Rose Kennedy, in her memoir, wrote of telephoning her husband late on April 19 and learning that "Jack had been on the phone with him much of the day, also Bobby. I asked how [Jack] was feeling and he said 'dying'---[the] result of trying to bring up Jack's morale after the Cuban debacle.... Jackie walked upstairs with me and said he'd been so upset all day. Had practically been in tears, felt he had been misinformed by CIA and others.... Said she had never seen him so depressed except at time of his operation [in 1954]."
Kennedy called in Clark Clifford, who had advised Democratic presidents since Harry Truman, and asked him to reconstitute Eisenhower's Board of Consultants on intelligence activities; the advisory board had been disbanded, along with many others, when Kennedy took office. Clifford, who had been shunted aside during the 1960 campaign by the Irish Mafia, was obviously still aggrieved during a 1994 interview for this book. "My God," he told me of his post-Bay of Pigs visit to the White House, "you never saw such a whipped bunch. [Kennedy] was at the bottom of the barrel---totally, totally discouraged." Clifford, the political veteran, said he saw it coming. He had listened to Kennedy aides Kenny O'Donnell and Lawrence O'Brien after the election and thought to himself: "Oh boy, they think they're going to change politics and change government---like a road sign that says, 'Brilliance ahead.'
"Three months later," Clifford said, "I saw the roof fall in."
The Bay of Pigs was the first political defeat of Jack Kennedy's life and he sought revenge---but not on the advisers and the government agencies that, so he told everyone, had misled him. His target was Fidel Castro, and he spent his remaining days in office determined to make Castro pay---with his life, preferably---for staining the Kennedy honor.
But there were other, more immediate, concerns in the world, and not all of them were on America's doorstep. On April 21, Walt Rostow sent the president a memorandum arguing that "the greatest problem we face is not to have the whole of our foreign policy thrown off balance by what we feel and what we do about Cuba itself." Rostow informed the president that he had urged caution to Bobby Kennedy, whose instinct was to deal immediately, and brutally, with Castro's Cuba. "As I said to the Attorney General the other day, when you are in a fight and knocked off your feet, the most dangerous thing to do is to come out swinging wildly. Clearly we must cope with Castro in the next several years.... But let us do some fresh homework."
America needed to learn how to deal with communist aggression, Rostow said, and he had a recommended learning ground: "Vietnam is the place where---in the Attorney General's phrase---we must prove that we are not a paper tiger.... We have to prove that Vietnam and Southeast Asia can be held."
At a National Security Council meeting on April 29, according to the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government's secret history of the Vietnam War, the president approved a series of clandestine actions to escalate the war. Within a few weeks four hundred members of the army's Special Forces were on their way to South Vietnam, where they were to begin training agents for operations against the North. The Americans were to help the South Vietnamese "form networks of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment." The quagmire was forming.
John F. Kennedy turned again to the world of stealth and secret armies to solve a foreign policy problem. He had learned a valuable lesson from the Bay of Pigs. In South Vietnam there would be far more presidential control and far more secrecy. He and his brother would handle it themselves.
* * *
* Vandenbroucke interviewed Bissell in May 1984, after discovering an unpublished essay dealing with the Bay of Pigs among the papers of Allen Dulles, which were donated after Dulles's death to Princeton University. In his essay, entitled "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs," Vandenbroucke described how Dulles had written a number of drafts of the essay before he abandoned his effort to explain away the failed invasion. But Vandenbroucke buried the lead. Bissell's admission linking the assassination plotting to the Bay of Pigs was relegated to a footnote in the last paragraph of the article. In his posthumous memoir, published in 1996, Bissell was far more circumspect about the link between Castro's murder and the Bay of Pigs: "No doubt as I moved forward with plans for the brigade, I hoped the Mafia would achieve success."
* The documents supplied to Fursenko and Naftali show that the Soviet leadership took the intelligence seriously and believed, correctly, that Washington wanted Castro dead. The Cuban state security service was continually arresting alleged counterrevolutionaries and extracting "confessions" of their plotting, on behalf of the CIA, to assassinate Castro.
* Polgar also got a firsthand glimpse into the acute tensions inside the CIA over Bissell's operation. The clandestine service was essentially divided into two camps in 1960 and 1961---those agents who followed Bissell's leadership and supported the exile invasion, and those who were loyal to Richard Helms, the deputy chief of operations, who was convinced that large-scale maneuvers like the Bay of Pigs would destroy the CIA. Late in 1960, Polgar recalled, he was offered a Cuba-related job by Bissell and asked Helms for advice. "Remember, I didn't offer that job to you," Helms said. Polgar understood, he said, that Helms was warning him to "stay away." A few months later Polgar, again in Washington, was given an unofficial briefing about the planned invasion and was "appalled. I went to see Helms and said it was a terrible mistake. Helms's response was, 'No one's asked for your opinion. Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole.'"
* Kennedy opened his news conference by flatly declaring a moratorium on any questions about Cuba: "I do not think that any useful national purpose would be served by my going further into the Cuban question this morning." It was a device, after the travails of Vietnam and Watergate, that would be denied to future presidents. When one journalist dared to bring up the subject, Kennedy merely repeated his view that talking about Cuba would not "benefit us during the present difficult situation." He suggested, however, that what the reporters were hearing---presumably from Castro and his supporters around the world---was not true and added, without any evident irony: "One of the problems of a free society, a problem not met by a dictatorship, is this problem of information."
* "I was hired by the CIA [after the Bay of Pigs] to handle the families," Carlson readily acknowledged in a telephone interview in 1995. Kennedy "really screwed them [the pilots]," he added. "It would have been so easy to let the navy come in." The attorney added that, at the time of his involvement, the fact that four Americans had been shot down over Cuba was considered a vital national security secret. Janet Weininger, who was in first grade when her father was killed in Cuba, recalled receiving $1,000 per month in government funds until she finished her college education. Her mother, Mrs. Margaret Ray, received a stipend of $225 a month until she remarried in 1965, when the funds were cut off.
* Telling the truth about who had ordered what, as a few journalists understood, also would have made the truth teller a pariah inside his community. In his perceptive study of Richard Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Thomas Powers noted that Helms's impossibly vague testimony before the Church Committee was based on two factors: his promise not to tell the secrets and the fact that "there would not be one single piece of paper to support anyone who had the temerity to tell the truth." The truth was, Powers concluded, that the Kennedy brothers had ordered Castro's assassination. "If Helms had said that," wrote Powers, "(which in my opinion he could have), he not only would have been the target of some extremely caustic comment, but from that day forward he would have lunched alone."
15
SECRET SERVICE
Image saved Jack Kennedy and his White House from the political consequences of the Bay of Pigs. There was no political bloodletting---no demand for congressional hearings, no exhaustive analyses by the New York Times or Washington Post. Americans rallied around their attractive and contemporary leader, and his approval rating rose to a remarkable 83 percent. Kennedy's glamour made him the 1961 equivalent of a Teflon president, someone to whom no bad news could stick.
The manipulation was extraordinary. The president was living a public lie as an attentive husband and hardworking chief executive, a speed reader who spent hours each night poring over bulky government files. But the Secret Service agents assigned to the White House presidential detail saw Jack Kennedy in a different light: as someone obsessed with sex, and willing to take enormous risks to gratify that obsession. They saw a president who came late many mornings to the Oval Office, and was not readily available for hours during the day to his immediate staff and his national security aides; a president, some thought, whose behavior was demeaning to the office. In a series of unusual on-the-record interviews for this book, four of these men agreed to tell what they saw.
The mythmaking and media wooing began soon after Kennedy took office. Newspapers and magazines were filled with articles and photographs, usually touted as exclusive, of family life in the White House or a day in the life of the president. Even the most earnest publications fell prey. In March 1961 the deadly serious U.S. News & World Report devoted ten pages to photographs of JFK at work. In April a Washington Star photographer who had been granted access to the Oval Office in order to capture the president at his desk came away with a winsome series of photos of Caroline, then three years old, chatting on her father's telephone with her grandfather Joe. The photos were syndicated to newspapers around the nation.
That month Life magazine published a glowing account of Kennedy's "voracious" reading habits, depicting---undoubtedly with accuracy---the president's absorption with newspaper stories about his administration. The article, written by Hugh Sidey, was accompanied by a photograph of Kennedy poring over a morning paper. Sidey's story noted that the rate at which Kennedy read "has not been precisely determined, but his speed is at least 1,200 words per minute and sometimes more than that (the average person reads 250 words per minute)." One Kennedy adviser told Sidey that he watched as the president read a dense twenty-six-page memorandum on economics in ten minutes and then "asked 25 questions about it---intelligent questions."*
A professional photographer named Jacques Lowe was hired by the family itself and given carte blanche to roam through the White House, taking photos at will. The major American television networks were also given unprecedented access. In February 1961 CBS presented a half-hour taped telecast, narrated by Walter Cronkite, that purported to be the first time
television was permitted to show "the actual conduct of official business" in the Oval Office. Two months later CBS was invited to film a documentary about presidential family life in the second-floor living quarters of the White House, known to the staff as the Mansion. Jacqueline Kennedy told the cameras, without any apparent irony, that she wanted her daughter, Caroline, to have a "normal" life. John F. Kennedy, Jr., was then five months old.
Kennedy was the first president to hold televised news conferences, averaging one every two weeks in his thousand days. An estimated 65 million Americans tuned in to the first conference, five days after the inauguration, and saw the president at his informative best, answering questions---especially tough ones---with charm and wit. The news conferences and TV specials furthered the image, enunciated by Joe Kennedy years earlier, of John Kennedy as a celebrity politician, a leader whose presence inspired confidence and loyalty as it sold magazines and attracted huge television audiences.
There was nothing accidental about JFK's decision to use television as a White House bully pulpit, just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt had used radio for his fireside chats. Before his inauguration, Kennedy met privately in Palm Beach with Blair Clark, a classmate from Harvard who was a reporter for CBS News. There was talk of an ambassadorial appointment for Clark but, more important, much talk about how to use television. "I don't think he had anything but an instinct about television," Clark recalled in a 1997 interview for this book. "He knew newspapers were less important. He instinctively knew that it was absolutely vital that he use it right." The president-elect understood that he was a good performer, Clark added. "Jack Kennedy never forgot that he was an actor in a public drama. He had a quip and a smile---he was an actor about that. And that's what you should be. Roosevelt was too, of course."