“I’m Not Going to Risk an American Hungary”
At the sessions with his Soviet experts in February, Kennedy had raised the idea of invading Cuba and replacing Castro with a more traditional, pro–U.S. regime. The record of the meetings shows that his advisers agreed that Khrushchev would not respond violently: “A quick fait accompli would probably lead to only verbal reactions. On the other hand, a long civil war might well generate strong pressures upon the Soviet government to prove its greatness on behalf of an embattled ally in the great contest against imperialism.”
George Kennan told the President, “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful, because the worst thing is to undertake something of this sort and to undertake it unsuccessfully.”
Later in February, Chip Bohlen assured Kennedy that “Khrushchev would not go to war over as strategically unimportant an area as Cuba. If the invasion led to a long, protracted struggle, the Soviets would deliver arms to Cuba, but not military forces.” Bohlen nonetheless opposed an early move against Castro; he could not recall a single case in history when refugees returned and successfully overthrew a revolutionary regime, “particularly before that revolution had had any chance to use up its initial capital.”
Leaving the White House in a car with Allen Dulles and two other CIA men, he asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to infiltrate people into the mountains of Cuba and set up a local government?” The United States could recognize the shadow regime and use it as a base for guerrilla operations. Dulles and his colleagues dismissed the notion. As Bohlen recalled, he knew he “had not thought the idea through sufficiently to put up a good argument and did not press my point.”
Before 1959, the island of tobacco, sugar, melancholy legends, tarpon fishing, cockfights, and the mambo would not have seemed a likely candidate to become the first Soviet client state in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba had been an American vassal since 1898: at the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States occupied the island for four years and departed only after saddling the Cuban constitution with the notorious Platt Amendment, which authorized the U.S. to intervene at any time necessary to preserve Cuban independence.
For most of its more recent history, one Cuban leader after another had taken power pledging reform and then ruled by graft and violence. None did so more vigorously than the vainglorious and corrupt President Fulgencio Batista. As an army sergeant in 1933, he masterminded a coup that allowed him to pull the strings controlling five successive presidents of Cuba while he amassed a private fortune.
In 1940, Batista deigned to accept the presidency in name. During World War II, he enlisted Cuba behind the Allies, protecting the American naval base at Guantanamo and selling Cuba’s 1941 sugar crop to the United States at bargain prices. After the war, he retired to his Florida estate but in 1952 retook power in another bloodless coup.
By the 1950s, Americans owned 40 percent of the Cuban sugar industry, 80 percent of Cuban utilities, 90 percent of Cuban mining. The island ranked near the top among Latin American nations in per capita income, education, social services. But the wealth on such garish and provocative display in Havana casinos and nightclubs was mainly denied to the nonurban and nonwhite. Cuba’s main industry, “His Majesty King Sugar,” was in decline, throwing vast numbers out of work and fueling opposition to Batista.
The dictator reacted with violence. Dangling from the royal palms along the island’s country roads were the bloody corpses of Cubans who had made the mistake of supporting the mountain rebel Fidel Castro.
Like Lenin, Mao, and other great revolutionaries, Castro was not a son of the working class. His orphaned father, Angel Castro y Argiz, had left Spain at thirteen to live with an uncle in the Mayarí region of Cuba. The American presence was more intense in this district than almost anywhere else on the island, thanks largely to the United Fruit Company, which in 1954 helped the CIA to evict the leftist Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán after he threatened expropriation of the firm’s Guatemalan holdings.
Angel laid track for a United Fruit railway, rented some of the company’s land, and peddled merchandise from finca to finca. He used the profits to become a landowner in Oriente province, but what Fidel Castro later professed to remember was the “shame” of growing up a citizen of an American-dominated “pseudo-republic.”
Castro’s mother, Lina, was evidently a servant in Angel’s house whom Angel married in 1926 after Fidel’s birth. The boy matured under the spell of José Martí, champion of Cuban independence, who had been ambushed and killed nearby in 1895. Excitable, devious, defiant, the young Castro accused his father of “abusing” his sugarcane workers with “false promises” and vainly tried to organize them against him. Later, after he began his political career, he set the family fields afire.
Castro was sent to Belén, the leading school of the Cuban establishment. At graduation, he won a long ovation for his basketball prowess, but a friend later felt that classmates from the Havana Establishment had “inflamed him” with “hatred against society people.” At the University of Havana, noted for its volatile student politics, he joined a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist league and orated against the status quo. When the Cuban secret police chief warned him to lower his voice, he began carrying a gun.
In 1947, he joined twelve hundred Cubans, exiles from the Dominican Republic, and others in an effort against Rafael Trujillo, archetype of the bloody Latin American tyrant who opened his country to foreign interests which gave him the weapons to murder potential foes. The invasion was aborted by Cuban and American forces.
Castro went to Bogotá to help other students harass Latin American foreign ministers gathered to sign the charter of the Organization of American States. He married a schoolmate’s sister, Mirta Díaz-Balart, and, perhaps in emulation of Martí, took her on a wedding trip to America. (He divorced her in 1954, claiming that her family was too close to Batista.) In New York, he bought some books by Marx and Engels, including Das Kapital. After law school in Havana, he opened a poor people’s practice and planned to run for the Cuban parliament.
By March 1952, Batista had returned from Florida to his estate outside Havana. Before dawn, he strutted into Cuban army headquarters and was restored the next day to the Presidential Palace. Elections were canceled.
On July 26, 1953, Castro led a failed charge against the Moncada army barracks in Santiago. Seventy anti-Batista rebels were killed. In court, holding a volume of Martí quotations, Castro defended himself in a two-hour tour de force that later gave the Cuban revolution its credo: “Dante divided his hell into nine circles. What a hard dilemma the Devil will face when he must choose the circle adequate for the soul of Batista!”
Demanding free elections, land reform, profit-sharing, and public housing, Castro proclaimed that he was struggling for hundreds of thousands of unemployed Cubans: farmers “who work four months and go hungry the rest of the year,” factory workers “whose pensions have been stolen,” teachers “badly treated and poorly paid.” He cited Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau, Balzac, and the revolutions of Britain, America, and France: “Condemn me! It does not matter. History will absolve me!”
Freed from prison after nineteen months, Castro went to Mexico, where he worked with other Cubans on a plan to land on the island and vanish into the Sierra Maestra mountains as guerrillas. In November 1956, drenched by a midnight rain, he and eighty-one other armed men boarded a white yacht and set off for Cuba. Landing at Alegría de Pio, they crawled on elbows and knees through cane fields toward the mountains. Batista’s forces attacked. All but sixteen surrendered, fled, or were killed. The following month, the United States sold Batista sixteen new B-26 bombers for use against the rebellion. These bombers were refueled and equipped with napalm at the Guantanamo naval base.
In the Sierra Maestra, Castro’s guerrilla army grew. He may not have known it, but the CIA, which liked to hedge its bets, was said to be the source of at least fifty thousand dollars slipped to his movement.* But after one of Batista’s raids using American bombers and bombs, Castro wrote his mistress, “I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.”
By 1958, the tide was moving toward Castro. Landowners and businessmen fed up with Batista were showering the 26th-of-July Movement with so much money that Castro had the luxury of ordering his men to pay a dollar for a single bullet, if necessary. The British Ambassador reported home from Havana, “He undoubtedly has a considerable number of sympathisers throughout the island and has come to be regarded as a romantic hero of the Robin Hood type.” He added that Castro was “suspected of Communist sympathies.”
On December 5, 1958, Arthur Gardner, a Republican financier who was Eisenhower’s Ambassador to Batista from 1953 to 1957, sent a cryptic message “of the gravest importance” to Richard Nixon’s Northwest Washington home: “The Miami matter … should be started at once. Also, outside of ordinary Embassy channels, in an extremely confidential and personal manner, a check should be made of the situation, and probably the Head Man should be seen and given a little moral support that might save the situation for the time being, offering time for our own judgment as to what is best to do.”
Gardner knew that the Vice President had long had a special interest in Cuba. As a young man, Nixon had half seriously looked into prospects for a legal career in Havana. His great friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo was a Cuban expatriate in Miami. As soon as the Vice President read the message, he scheduled an immediate appointment with Gardner to discuss how to keep the Havana government from collapsing in a way that would damage the United States.
William Pawley was a wealthy former Ambassador to Brazil and Peru who spoke fluent Spanish, had large Cuban interests, and was close to the CIA. As Eisenhower discreetly wrote a friend, he used Pawley “frequently, as a private citizen, for chores of different kinds during my two Administrations.” In December 1958, Pawley went to Havana “to ask Batista to resign,” as Nixon was later informed, “in order that a new and responsible president might be named to forestall an irresponsible president taking over.”
It was too late. After midnight on New Year’s Day 1959, Batista and his family fled to the Dominican Republic* From the Moncada barracks, where his movement began, Fidel Castro gave his first speech as the leader of the new Cuba: “The Revolution begins now.… It will not be like 1898, when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country.… For the first time, the Republic will really be entirely free and the people will have what they deserve.… This war was won by the people!”
Cubans in Chevrolets with 26th-of-July flags honked their horns and ran stoplights. Some ransacked casinos and knocked down the parking meters that were an infamous source of graft. As Castro rode into Havana with his semiautomatic slung over the shoulder of his green fatigues and his trademark cigar jammed between his teeth, people wept, sang, embraced, and cried, “Gracias, Fidel!”
Issuing orders from his new Havana Hilton penthouse, El Líder Maximo refrained from twisting Uncle Sam’s tail so badly that American forces would quickly be once again be sent to stamp out independence. Still when the North Americans were outraged by his trials and executions of Cuban “war criminals,” he asked why they had been so silent during Batista’s torture and killing: “If the Americans don’t like what’s happening in Cuba, they can land the Marines and then there will be two hundred thousand gringos dead!”
In April 1959, he flew to Washington to speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and promised his audience a free Cuban press. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (John Kennedy was off campaigning) that he would not seize American property. Eisenhower refused to receive him. As a British diplomat in Washington recorded, “The wishes of the President’s doctor that he should take a rest coincided with the strong desire of the State Department to get the President out of Washington during the Castro visit, and he is now in Georgia.”
Instead, Castro saw Nixon and Secretary of State Christian Herter, assuring them that he could “handle” the Communists. Later Herter told the President that Castro was “very much like a child”: “quite immature” and “puzzled and confused by some of the practical difficulties now facing him.” He had “made a plea for patience while his government tries to deal with the situation in Cuba.” In English, he spoke “with restraint and considerable personal appeal.” But in Spanish, he became “voluble, excited, and somewhat wild.”
Castro addressed thirty thousand people at night in New York’s Central Park and ten thousand more in Harvard’s Dillon Field House. Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s president, was unavailable (perhaps after consulting one or more Harvard Corporation members who had large Cuban holdings subject to expropriation). Thus the job of escorting Castro fell to the Dean of the Faculty, McGeorge Bundy.
Bundy recalled, “I couldn’t get anywhere with him. He wouldn’t talk Spanish. My Spanish is a lot better than his English, which isn’t saying a whole hell of a lot.… He struck me as interested in public gain and not interested in private conversation.” Later, as Kennedy’s national security adviser, Bundy did not mention the experience to his boss: “It wasn’t relevant. I didn’t learn much about Castro.… It certainly didn’t leave me with the feeling that he was the first thing to be removed in 1961.”
Castro knew that nothing would galvanize Americans more quickly against him than suspicion that he would turn the island over to communism. His brother Raul and his colleague Che Guevara were known Marxist-Leninists, but Castro himself had always held back from such open commitment. Since at least 1958, he had quietly collaborated with old-line Cuban Communists, but this was hardly the same thing as aspiring to transform Cuba into a Soviet satellite.
The Soviet Union had done little to exploit the ancient resentment against the United States in Latin America. Stalin and his successors had not considered courtship of the banana republics to be worth challenging America’s commitment to its Monroe Doctrine. In 1959, Moscow had diplomatic relations with only three countries in the region. That fall, as he sought better relations after Camp David, Khrushchev was loath to inflame Eisenhower by forming an open alliance with an erratic young rebel whose days in power might well be numbered.
Castro needed the Soviets more than they needed him. Cuba’s bitter history taught that America would never accept a hostile regime so close by. Eisenhower’s government was already trying to keep him from buying arms usable for defending himself against mountain guerrillas or for subverting other regimes in Latin America. He concluded that if he planned to defy the United States, he could not do it forever without the help of the other superpower.
The Soviets put out a secret feeler to the new Cuban leader. In October 1959, Alexander Alexeyev installed himself in Havana. He was ostensibly a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS but actually a Soviet intelligence agent whose surname was Shitov. As he later recalled, he was “the first Soviet citizen on the island” after Castro: “We knew next to nothing about the Cuban revolution.… I found that at least ninety percent of the people were for Fidel.… They idolized him.… Every Cuban house had graffiti saying, ‘Fidel, this is your home!’”
Alexeyev called on Castro and told him that the Soviets had “great admiration” for his work for social progress. Castro replied that he would be happy to trade with Moscow. Perhaps Mikoyan could open the Havana trade fair planned for February 1960. Adzhubei warned Mikoyan, “Fidel is an ordinary American dictator. He already went to bow down to Washington and met with Nixon.”
Still the Soviet Deputy Premier went to Havana and signed a Soviet-Cuban trade pact. According to Alexeyev, Castro “never” asked Mikoyan to sell him weapons. Then in March, the French freighter La Coubre was blown up in Havana Harbor. Alexeyev: “It was clear to everyone that the time bomb was planted by CIA agents.… Only after the La Coubre explosion did Fidel and his government request Soviet military aid.” Esso, Texaco, and Shell refused Castro’s demand to process crude Soviet petroleum. As Alexeyev said, “Castro asked us for oil and bought our oil—and paid much less.” Castro seized the three companies’ refineries.
As early as June 1959, Eisenhower had privately told Cabinet members that if the Soviet Union were to “take over Cuba,” he “would have to go to Congress to start war against Cuba.” Now he retaliated by banning Cuban sugar imports to the United States. “This meant death to the Cuban revolution,” recalled Alexeyev. “So Fidel spoke to me.… He asked if we could buy some of his sugar—at least a symbolic quantity. He was preparing a rally and wanted to tell the Cubans that there was an alternative.”
The response came in the form of a cable from Khrushchev to Alexeyev, who recalled, “When I handed this to Fidel, it said that we, the Soviet Union, were ready to buy all the sugar, those 700,000 tons rejected by the Americans. And not only that year’s consignment but also all the next year’s. That was really an event! I was at the rally. There were one million people there. I could see for myself the joy of the Cuban people. They were throwing their berets in the air. They were dancing.”
Castro declared that Eisenhower’s sugar embargo would “cost Americans in Cuba down to the nails in their shoes.” Despite his earlier promises, he nationalized $850 million worth of U.S. sugar mills, ranches, refineries, and utilities. Disillusioned followers and much of the Cuban middle class departed for the United States. The President privately vowed that if American citizens were endangered, he would “blockade Cuba with the Navy and Air Force and intervene as a last resort.”
By the summer of 1960, Khrushchev’s rapprochement with the United States had vanished and there was little need to soft-pedal the opportunity in Cuba. The island offered a priceless strategic asset in America’s backyard, a chance to demonstrate to the Chinese and other skeptical allies that he was committed to world communism and that Soviet communism was indeed the wave of the future. Llewellyn Thompson informed Washington that Khrushchev and the Soviets “see in this Cuban thing their own revolutionary movement all over again.”
In exchange for Cuban sugar, Khrushchev offered credits for Cuban purchase of Soviet materials, machinery, equipment, and weapons. In July 1960, he declared the Monroe Doctrine dead: “The only thing you can do with anything dead is to bury it so that it will not poison the air.” It was “obvious” that Washington was plotting “perfidious and criminal acts” against Cuba. “Should the aggressive Pentagon forces wish to attack Cuba, then Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people with rocket fire.”
Khrushchev’s aides quickly explained that this pledge to defend Cuba with missiles was merely “symbolic.” But Che Guevara boasted that the Castro regime would henceforth be defended by “the greatest military power in history.” Eisenhower replied by warning that the United States would not “permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western Hemisphere.” That fall, during his turbulent trip to the UN, Khrushchev went to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem and gave Castro the famous bear hug.
John Kennedy’s history with Cuba began with an unpublicized trip there in December 1957. It was evidently during an unhappy period in his marriage.* Kennedy quietly flew to Havana for a bachelors’ holiday with his chum Senator George Smathers, Democrat of Florida.
Their friendship dated to Smathers’s acquaintance with Joseph Kennedy as a young district attorney in southern Florida. Smathers accompanied the older man to the Hialeah racetrack, pretending to be the escort of a young lady who was actually there with the old Ambassador. As friends in the House and Senate, Smathers and John Kennedy reputedly acquired a hideaway used for assignations with air hostesses and secretaries. The conservative Floridian conceded that their politics differed: “Sometimes we argue and he gives me hell. But we understand each other.”
Arriving in Havana in December 1957, Kennedy called on Ambassador Earl Smith, an old Palm Beach friend, and Smith’s wife, Florence, with whom he had once had a great romance. He addressed the American Embassy staff and admired the Embassy’s commanding view of Havana Harbor.
He looked up a wartime friend named Mal McArdle, played golf, sailed off Varadero Beach, visited the Tropicana and Casino Parisien, and, as Smathers years later said, “went our various ways.” The widow of Meyer Lansky, a leader of the Miami and Havana underworld, insisted that her husband gave Kennedy advice on where to find women.
“Kennedy wasn’t a great casino man,” recalled Smathers, “but the Tropicana nightclub had a floor show you wouldn’t believe. There was a girl named Denise Darcel, a French singer, whom we got to meet.… Kennedy liked Cuba. He liked the style. He liked the people. The people were warm everywhere you went, they were friendly as they could be.… Cuba had everything, a lot of wealthy people. Once they started looking after you, which naturally they would a senator, why it was just elegant.”
Later, during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy condemned the Batista regime as “one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression” and complained that Batista had “murdered twenty thousand Cubans in seven years.” These facts did not faze him during his 1957 visit. “I don’t think I ever heard Kennedy express any feeling about Batista or Castro either way,” Smathers recalled. “We were just going frankly for a vacation.” The two Senators returned for another Cuban respite in early 1958.
Batista’s security police were routinely ordered to perform surveillance on eminent American visitors to Havana. Their targets were unlikely to have excluded the Massachusetts Senator described in a December 1957 Time cover story as a possible future President. When Castro took power in 1959, he presumably inherited whatever information the files contained on Kennedy’s two Havana visits, contents of which may have helped to inform his public verdict on Kennedy’s election: “Four years of a rich illiterate.”
During the winter before his inauguration, Kennedy asked his friend the Look writer Laura Bergquist about Castro’s messianic appeal. Could it be compared to Hitler’s in the thirties? Why the long harangues? Did he have any kind of personal life, a love life? “Kennedy was the complete contrast to Castro: cool, self-possessed, a disciplined rationalist,” she later wrote. “The emotional appeal of a Castro seemed to elude him, and along with some people, I then wondered whether Kennedy for all his brightness had a visceral understanding of the angry revolutionists loose in the world.”
In the same way that he leaned on his friend David Ormsby-Gore for advice on nuclear testing, Kennedy had sought informal counsel on Cuba during the 1960 campaign from Smathers and Earl Smith, a Republican and investment banker who lacked Kennedy’s sense of detachment and humor. Kennedy’s Senate aide Fred Holborn recalled how his boss lampooned Smith after the older man departed Room 362, having delivered himself of a blistering lecture against Castro.
Smith had married one of the most important women in Kennedy’s life. Florence Pritchett was a model with whom Kennedy spent much time at the Stork Club in New York at the close of World War II. His friend Charles Spalding’s wife, Betty, recalled that after the romance died, their bond remained Kennedy’s “closest relationship with a woman I know of. She was very bright, very amusing, and by far the most intelligent, competent girl I ever saw him with. But it could never have resulted in marriage because she didn’t have what he would need politically.”
When visiting New York as President, Kennedy would slip over to her Fifth Avenue apartment, where she gathered glossy women and other friends for what one guest called a “nightclub-style evening” of the kind he could no longer have in public. Later, when Mrs. Smith entered Lenox Hill Hospital for the leukemia that finally killed her, Kennedy and his Secret Service agents rushed up the back stairs to her sickroom.
The President had tried to appoint Earl Smith as Ambassador to Switzerland, but the Swiss refused to accept a diplomat who had been so close to Batista out of fear that Swiss interests in Cuba might be jeopardized. Chip Bohlen had never found Kennedy so angry as the moment when he demanded American retaliation by showing “no intimacy” with the Swiss as long as he was President. When the order was violated, Kennedy told Bohlen in what the latter recalled as a “very sharp, unpleasant, and unmistakable” voice, “I want this stopped.”
As a Senator whose state included a growing number of Cuban exiles, Smathers lobbied Kennedy hard against Castro. At the start of the 1960 campaign, Smathers thought his friend too oriented toward Europe, too diffident about the danger from Havana: “Kennedy always identified me with pushing, pushing, pushing.”
In The Strategy of Peace, the anthology of his foreign policy statements published in early 1960, Kennedy described Castro as “part of the legacy of Bolívar” and wondered whether Castro would have behaved more rationally had the U.S. government not backed Batista “so long and so uncritically” and “had it given the fiery young rebel a warmer welcome in his hour of triumph.”
The Senator privately told a friend, “I don’t know why we didn’t embrace Castro when he was in this country in 1959, pleading for help.… Instead of that, we made an enemy of him, and then we get upset because the Russians are giving them money, doing for them what we wouldn’t do.” But by the fall of 1960, as Castro’s anti-Americanism was more obvious than ever, Kennedy moved sharply to the right on Cuba. “There are two people I’d like to get out,” he told aides. “Jimmy Hoffa and Castro.… Why doesn’t he take off those fatigues? Doesn’t he know the war is over?”
In Cincinnati in early October, Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower government for ignoring warnings about Communists in Castro’s circle: “Castro and his gang have betrayed the ideals of the Cuban revolution and the hopes of the Cuban people.… 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.” Later that month came the Senator’s call for American assistance to Cuban exile freedom fighters who might overturn the Castro regime.
Watching the campaign from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Dean Rusk thought that Kennedy “had it in for Castro.” Later, when he became Secretary of State, he was startled by the “intensity” of the antagonism: “It was a natural animosity in Kennedy’s mind that was not just political posturing. It was emotional.”
One reason for Kennedy’s campaign intensity against Castro was fear that Eisenhower would stage an October invasion of Cuba that would oust Castro and elect Nixon. It was good for his peace of mind that he did not know how relentlessly Nixon was pressing behind the scenes for action. In early October, Nixon asked the Republican chairman, Leonard Hall, to badger the President about Cuba. He asked his foreign policy aide why the CIA was taking so long to make its move: “Are they falling dead over there? What in the world are they doing that takes months?”
Secret American efforts to depose Castro had begun as early as March 1959, when Eisenhower’s National Security Council pondered how to bring “another government to power in Cuba.” Castro had yet to seize American property or establish diplomatic relations with Moscow. The announced American policy was still friendliness toward the new Havana government.
In January 1960, a dozen veterans of the 1954 Guatemala coup gathered in the office of J. C. King, the CIA’s Western Hemisphere chief. Why not use the Cuban underground to stage “a typical Latin political upheaval?” Thirty Cuban exiles could be trained in the Panama Canal Zone to serve as a guerrilla cadre. Allen Dulles showed Eisenhower how a Cuban sugar refinery might be sabotaged. The President replied, “If you’re going to make any move against Castro, don’t just fool around with sugar refineries.”
Dulles returned in March with “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime,” including a government-in-exile, a propaganda offensive, covert action and intelligence-gathering, and a paramilitary force. Dulles suggested that the coup might be ready to roll before the November election. When it was not, the defeated Nixon suspected that, just as he felt the CIA had “given” Kennedy the potent issue of the missile gap, Agency “liberals” had postponed action on Cuba to ensure Kennedy’s victory.*
On Saturday morning, November 18, 1960, Dulles and his deputy for operations, Richard Bissell, went to Palm Beach for the Presidentelect’s first full intelligence briefing. The CIA Director had golfed with Kennedy in the 1950s while vacationing in Palm Beach with the oilman and Kennedy neighbor Charles Wrightsman. Nevertheless, his intelligence deputy Robert Amory felt that the old man “didn’t really feel comfortable” with the new President, who was “young enough to be his son.”
Before the meeting, Dulles evidently studied an assessment of Kennedy’s personality by CIA psychologists using files dating to the 1930s, including material from British surveillance of Joseph Kennedy’s London Embassy as well as his son’s wartime service in the Navy. Such assessments predicted how the subject would respond when informed of the full range of CIA operations, showing Dulles the most effective method of appeal.
Included in the new President’s FBI files, and presumably in his CIA files, was evidence of his 1942 affair with Inga Arvad Fejos, a suspected Nazi spy, while he served in Naval Intelligence. There were transcripts of telephone and hotel room conversations, on which the FBI had eavesdropped by order of J. Edgar Hoover.
Kennedy and his father knew this material had the capacity to destroy his political career. If Americans learned of the wartime romance, it would seem to demonstrate the truth of suspicions, raised especially by Jewish groups during the 1960 campaign, that Kennedy had inherited what was thought to be his father’s diffidence about Nazism while Ambassador to London. Americans would have demanded to know how the young Naval Intelligence officer could have put himself literally in bed with a woman whom he knew to have been close to Hitler and Göring at a time when his country was at war with Nazi Germany.
Joseph Kennedy’s anxiety about this information had more than a little to do with his efforts to cultivate J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles through the 1950s. He wrote Hoover numerous flattering letters and volunteered for service as an FBI special contact. After exerting himself to win appointment to Eisenhower’s intelligence oversight board, he improved his acquaintance with Dulles. His insistence that Hoover and Dulles be kept friendly was a vital factor in his son’s immediate announcement after the 1960 election that both men would stay at their posts.
Fear that Hoover or Dulles would destroy him was hardly the chief influence on the new President’s relations with the two men. Kennedy knew that now he was in power, the two men could be tempered by the considerable ability of a President to make life miserable for a disloyal appointee who tried to blackmail or kill the king. Nevertheless the potentially explosive material in the FBI and CIA files made Kennedy less free to overrule Hoover or Dulles on an important matter than a President who did not have embarrassing secrets to hide.
In the gloomy Moorish revival living room of Joseph Kennedy’s house, musty from decades of exposure to salt air, Bissell used large maps and charts to show the President-elect what the CIA was doing about Castro. As Bissell recalled, Kennedy seemed to be surprised only by the scale of the plans.
He and Dulles reminded their new boss that Soviet military aid was now flowing into Cuba: the longer an invasion was postponed, the more difficult it would be. Kennedy said he needed to consider the matter. Dulles replied, “That’s understandable, Mr. President, but there isn’t much time.”
By January 1961, there were even more urgent reasons to do something about the Maximum Leader. As Dulles privately told Senators, Cuba was “being rapidly absorbed into the Sino-Soviet bloc.” The island could soon be “a significant military power that could pose great security problems to the United States.”
Not only were the Soviets sending arms in large numbers, but Czech-trained Cuban pilots would arrive “almost any day” to fly MiG jets provided by the Soviets. Inside Cuba, the “totalitarian apparatus” used by Communist powers to control “an entire population” would soon be firmly in place. Castro was supporting revolutionaries in Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The CIA feared that one or more of these states might “go like Castro in the next few months.”
Most alarming of all, “Cuba might become a Sino-Soviet bloc missile base in this hemisphere, right close to our own coastline, a threat which would be formidable not only because it would greatly threaten the United States directly if short-range and intermediate-range missiles should be established in Cuba.… If efforts were made politically or diplomatically to try to prevent or stop such a development or have them withdrawn, we would be involved in a difficult bargaining position … with … the Soviet Union.”
The day before the Inauguration, Eisenhower told Kennedy that the CIA’s Cuban project was going well; it was the new President’s “responsibility” to do “whatever is necessary” to make it succeed.
On Saturday, January 28, Dulles told Kennedy and his National Security Council that “Cuba is now for practical purposes a Communist-controlled state.” Castro’s military power and “popular opposition to his regime” were both growing rapidly. “The United States has undertaken a number of covert measures against Castro, including propaganda, sabotage, political action, and direct assistance to anti-Castro Cubans in military training.” Now they must decide whether to use “a group of such Cubans now in training in Guatemala, who cannot remain indefinitely where they are.”
In its race against time, the CIA had abandoned the idea of a guerrilla-infiltration-airdrop campaign in favor of a military operation. This meant securing a beachhead while B-26s took control of the air and destroyed Cuban transport and communications. At the same time, just as with Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Castro would be overwhelmed with rumors of numerous landings; dissidents would be encouraged to take up arms. By February, the plan had evolved into a dawn amphibious-airborne assault at Trinidad, on the southern coast, which was reputed to be a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment.
On Wednesday, February 8, Bundy told the President, “Defense and CIA now feel quite enthusiastic about the invasion.… At the worst, they think the invaders would get into the mountains, and at the best, they think they might get a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly. State Department takes a much cooler view, primarily because of its belief that the political consequences would be very grave both in the United Nations and in Latin America.”*
Kennedy wanted to get rid of Castro without suffering such political consequences. He believed what he had said in 1960 about aligning a new, young, freedom-loving United States with the emerging nations of the world—especially in Latin America, where he had high hopes for the “Alliance for Progress” proclaimed in his inaugural speech. To start his Presidency by openly ordering the demolition of the Cuban government could cast him and his country as the old imperialistic bogeyman with a younger face. He felt that if he committed full American military force to a Cuban invasion, the result could be another Hungary, with horrifying pictures of tanks crushing bodies in the streets of Havana.
More profound was Kennedy’s worry that if he moved openly against Castro, in an area in which American conventional forces were superior, then Khrushchev would feel compelled to retaliate by moving against Berlin, where the Soviets had the conventional advantage. Unlike the Soviets with Cuba, the West had guaranteed the survival of Berlin. If Khrushchev acted, Kennedy would then have to make hard choices he preferred not to have to make, especially after only three months in office. He would be forced to renege on the Western commitment, be called an appeaser, and watch NATO collapse—or else call Khrushchev’s bluff and possibly pull the two great powers into nuclear war.
As Kennedy weighed the CIA’s plans for Cuba, he confided his worries about Berlin to almost no one. If someone leaked a single such offhand presidential comment to a reporter, the result could be disastrous: headlines shouting that Kennedy was hesitant about fulfilling the Western commitment to defend its position in the city with nuclear weapons, that he was paralyzed by Khrushchev’s threats.
The President therefore asked Bissell to consider a quieter landing in Cuba, with fighting from the mountains, instead of showing the world “an invasion force sent by the Yankees.” On March 11, Kennedy said he could not endorse a plan that would “put us in so openly, in view of the world situation.” Trinidad was “too spectacular”: “This is too much like a World War Two invasion.”
Dulles said, “Don’t forget that we have a disposal problem.” The Cuban exiles in Guatemala might resist being disarmed. Even if they did not, they would spread the word that the United States had turned tail, which might inspire Communist coups all over Latin America. Dulles did not need to add that when the noisy exiles let it be known they had been abandoned, the President would be vilified by the American Right.
On Wednesday, March 15, the CIA presented a new plan, code-named Zapata, for a landing at the Bay of Pigs, west of Trinidad. Bundy wrote Kennedy that the Agency had done “a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials.” The President asked Bissell to “reduce the noise level” of the landings still further and ensure that all ships would be unloaded at night. Somehow neither Kennedy, Bundy, nor McNamara were made to realize that, unlike Trinidad, if the new plan failed the exiles could not “melt into the mountains” from Pig Bay.
The President left Washington on Thursday, March 30, to spend the long Easter weekend at Palm Beach, using Air Force One for the first time. He still had not made up his mind about Cuba. Before hitching a ride with Kennedy to Florida, William Fulbright had asked an aide, Pat Holt, to draft a paper showing why an invasion of Cuba would be a terrible idea. Soon after the plane took off, he gave it to the President.
The paper said that American planning against Castro was an “open secret”: “To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere.” If the United States then had to intervene with military force, Cuba would become another Hungary: “We would have undone the work of thirty years in trying to live down earlier interventions.” Better to tolerate and isolate the island. Castro was a “thorn in the flesh” but not a “dagger in the heart.”
On Good Friday, the President and First Lady went to Earl and Florence Smith’s house for lunch. That afternoon Kennedy golfed with his father and Bing Crosby at the Palm Beach Country Club, predominantly Jewish, which Joseph Kennedy had joined after the war partly for its proximity and partly to dispel his reputation for anti-Semitism.
The President’s troublesome back was bothering him, so he only played eleven holes. During the game, Secret Service agents told him that pro-Castro Cubans were rumored to be plotting to kidnap Caroline or otherwise harm his family. A Cuban couple and two accomplices were soon located near Palm Beach and interrogated. As the First Family attended Easter services at St. Edward’s Church, they were tightly surrounded by the Secret Service and Palm Beach police.
Throughout the weekend, in the family custom, Kennedy watched films every night at his father’s house: One-eyed Jack, Posse from Hell, All in a Night’s Work. He swam in the ocean with Jacqueline and Caroline, played more golf with Earl Smith, his father, and his brother-in-law, the British actor Peter Lawford, and pondered the invasion of Cuba.
After the President’s return to Washington on Tuesday, April 4, Bundy was startled by the change in Kennedy’s thinking about Cuba. Before the Easter weekend, Arthur Schlesinger had written in his journal that the President seemed to be “growing steadily more skeptical” and the tide was “flowing against the project.” Now Bundy discovered that Kennedy “really wanted to do this,” as he recalled years later. “Not necessarily all the way through, but when he came to the moment of truth—the decision to go or not go—he had made up his mind and told us. He didn’t ask us.”
Bundy suspected that someone had gotten to Kennedy in Palm Beach: “There are candidates—Smathers would certainly be one, his father would be another, Earl Smith would be a third. In any event, he went down there and something happened that made him come back and say, ‘We’re going ahead.’ If I’d known him and had the kind of relationship with him that we both developed, I would have said, ‘What the hell has happened to you on the weekend?’ But I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Bundy’s speculation about who might have influenced his boss was probably correct. The two men with whom the President had spent the most time that weekend were Joseph Kennedy and Earl Smith. The senior Kennedy was gung-ho for the Cuban operation; the President saw him almost constantly. He saw Earl Smith on five separate occasions that weekend, for a total of more than seven hours. He talked with George Smathers over lunch before his Easter Sunday golf game. All three men spoke their mind on Cuba, pushing, pushing, pushing.
The views of Smith and Smathers were unlikely to carry the same weight as Joseph Kennedy’s. Schlesinger recalled that after the President’s Florida weekend “some of us darkly suspected that he had been talking to his father.”
Despite his efforts to conceal the patriarch’s role as a sounding board, the President called him as many as a half dozen times a day. Had this been publicly known at the time, it would not have helped the administration. Joseph Kennedy’s views were scarcely in the Democratic mainstream. He opposed foreign aid, considered the Western commitment to Berlin “a bloody mistake,” and, after the onset of the Congo crisis, referred to American blacks as “Lumumbas.” Years later, reminded of Joseph Kennedy’s efforts to influence the President on foreign affairs, Bundy rolled his eyes.
At six o’clock on the evening of his return from Florida, the President went to the State Department to meet in secret with a dozen men, including his secretaries of State and Defense, Bissell, two of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Fulbright. The press was told that the meeting was on Laos. The actual subject was Zapata.
McNamara was enthusiastically in favor of going ahead. Not Rusk. He thought irregular warfare “self-legitimizing” if it succeeded; had the American Founders failed, “they’d have been hanged as traitors.” But he was worried about the effect of an invasion on international law and world opinion. He was willing to endorse the plan so long as Kennedy foreswore U.S. military intervention.
Rusk said little at this meeting. Striving to win the confidence of a President he had known for only four months, believing always that Secretaries of State should advise Presidents in private, he was, as he later said, “very noncommittal.”
Kennedy was worried that the operation might still be “too noisy” but said, “If we decided now to call the whole thing off, I don’t know if we could go down there and take the guns away from them.” Schlesinger, who opposed the invasion, was surprised at how much “more militant” the President had become since his weekend in Florida.
As early as October 1960, the Hispanic American Report had revealed that anti-Castro guerrillas were being trained in Guatemala. Through the fall and winter, the Nation, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Washington Post, and U. S. News & World Report had all added further fragments to the puzzle.
At the start of April, Gilbert Harrison, owner and editor of the New Republic, showed galleys of a pseudonymous piece on anti-Castro training camps called “Our Men in Miami” to Schlesinger, who took them immediately to the President. As Harrison recalled, Schlesinger called him back with a “stutter” and “shaky voice”: “I must ask you on the highest authority not to publish this piece.” Harrison was willing to pull the article, but the author saved him the trouble by doing so himself.
Scheduled to run as the lead story under a four-column headline in the April 7 New York Times was a report by the diplomatic correspondent Tad Szulc that the CIA had trained anti-Castro insurgents for an imminent invasion. The President persuaded the Times publisher, Orvil Dryfoos, to considerably muffle the story.* “I can’t believe what I’m reading!” he told Salinger. “Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers!”
Resting at his Black Sea estate, Khrushchev was suspicious about intelligence reports predicting an imminent American invasion. His son Sergei recalled that the Chairman was always skeptical of such information, assuming that much of it was “planted.” Nonetheless Khrushchev expected the United States to reclaim the island sooner or later: “The Cuban coast is only a few miles from the American shore and it is stretched out like a sausage, a shape that makes it easy for attackers and incredibly difficult for the island’s defenders.”
In July and October 1960, the Chairman issued and then relaxed his threats to use Soviet missiles in retaliation against an American invasion, if it came. On January 2, 1961, he told a Kremlin audience, “Aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on Cuba. What is more, they are trying to press the case as though the rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or are already established in Cuba. It is well known that this is a foul slander.”
Without mentioning Kennedy by name, he added, “I hope that there are people in the United States with enough common sense not to allow the execution of such aggressive plans, but will prevent the forces of reaction from placing the world on the brink of war.” Mikoyan shouted, “Cuba da! Yankee nyet!” and the room went wild. Careful about his relations with the incoming President, Khrushchev smiled but did not join in the shouting.
Four days later, on the same day Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Castro, Khrushchev declared in his Wars of Liberation speech that “solidarity with revolutionary Cuba” was the “duty” of all socialist countries but went no further. More evidence of the Chairman’s unwillingness to engage his prestige came when he saw Llewellyn Thompson in January and March. During these discussions, he barely mentioned Cuba. He left the job of sounding the Americans out on the subject to much lower-ranking officials.
In early April, Georgi Kornienko, the round-faced, sharp-eyed Counselor of the Soviet Embassy, asked Arthur Schlesinger for an immediate appointment: why did the United States care so much about the rise of a regime with ties to the Communist world? Schlesinger asked him to imagine that recent events in Cuba had occurred instead in Poland: would the Soviet Union remain so composed?
The Soviet diplomat asked whether Washington had ruled out negotiation with Castro. Under Schlesinger’s questioning, he conceded that Castro would probably refuse to discuss internal Cuban questions such as the Communist party’s monopoly on power. As Kornienko recalled many years later, the purpose of his call was to gain insight into how quickly and forcefully Kennedy was ready to back an invasion. He did not mind trying to take some wind out of the Americans’ sails by tantalizing them with the prospect of bargaining over their differences with Castro.
On Tuesday, April 11, Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen, arrived at Khrushchev’s Black Sea retreat. Before leaving Washington, the columnist was briefed by Bohlen and the CIA and had lunch with the President. Kennedy once complained, “I know Khrushchev reads him and he thinks that Walter Lippmann represents American policy. Now how do I get over that problem?”
While boarding his plane for Europe, Lippmann was handed a note from Menshikov saying that Khrushchev was on vacation and wished to postpone the meeting for a week. “Impossible,” said Lippmann. Khrushchev had never underestimated Lippmann’s influence. When the couple arrived in Rome, they were told that the Chairman would see them as scheduled, but on the Black Sea rather than Moscow. As their car swung through the iron portals, their host came out to greet them and took them on a tour of his estate.
On the Pitsunda peninsula, eighteen miles south of Gagra, Khrushchev’s preserve was surrounded on three sides by a huge state farm, on the fourth by a broad, rocky beach with boardwalks, piers, and cabanas. Once when a chilling wind blew in from the Black Sea, Khrushchev told an American visitor, “It’s coming from your ally Turkey. I presume we could expect nothing else but a cold wind from a NATO country.”
The Chairman often came here when he had to ponder an important problem or write an important speech. Ordering the telephones shut off, he would stroll down the beach or through his ancient grove of silvery pines. “A chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg,” he said. “If I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.” Here at Pitsunda he had decided to deliver his immortal Secret Speech against Stalin in 1956.
Khrushchev jovially told the Lippmanns that since his doctor was in Moscow for the day, he would break his diet. Arriving from an adjoining villa for luncheon, Mikoyan complained that the Lippmanns were “ascetics” who only sipped wine: his Armenian native custom demanded glasses of vodka drunk to the bottom after every toast. Khrushchev finally provided a bowl into which the Americans discreetly poured their wine as soon as the Deputy Premier filled their glasses.
He showed off his indoor swimming pool, which had a roof made from old Soviet bomber wings and great retractable steel-and-glass doors that opened to the outdoors. Then they went to the badminton court, a parquet floor with Oriental rug and no net. Khrushchev announced, “Now we play.” The Lippmanns obediently picked up their racquets. The Chairman teamed up with a portly female press aide from his Foreign Ministry and surprised the Americans by besting them easily.
During their formal interview, Khrushchev told Lippmann that in recent years the two main powers in the world had concluded it was useless to “test” each other by military means. What had compelled the West to reduce the threat of war was growing Communist strength. The Chairman said that Kennedy’s policies would be determined by the forces behind him—in a word, “Rockefeller.”
He flatly declared that the United States was preparing a landing in Cuba, using not American troops but Cubans armed and supported by Washington. When and if that happened, the Soviet Union would “oppose” the United States. Lippmann later wrote, “I hope I was not misled in understanding him to mean that he would oppose us by propaganda and diplomacy, and that he did not have in mind military intervention.”
Lippmann’s impression was that Khrushchev considered it “normal” for a great power to undermine an unfriendly government within its own sphere of interest: “He has been doing this himself in Laos and Iran, and his feeling about the American support of subversion in Cuba is altogether different in quality from his feeling about the encouragement of resistance in the satellite states of Europe. Mr. Khrushchev thinks more like Richelieu and Metternich than Woodrow Wilson.”
The Chairman gave the Lippmanns no inkling that the Soviet Union was hours away from launching the first man into outer space. This was one reason he was staying in Pitsunda. If the launching failed and the world discovered the failure, he did not wish to be caught in the public eye. Only the next morning, after Major Yuri Gagarin completed his mission in triumph, did Khrushchev rush back to Moscow to bask in the cosmonaut’s reflected glory.
Khrushchev masterfully used space spectaculars to conceal Soviet military inferiority and entrance the world, especially the Third World, into believing that communism was the future. He later said, “We tried to exert pressure on the American militarists and also influence the minds of more reasonable politicians so that the United States would start treating us better.”
In October 1957, the launching of Sputnik panicked much of the world into accepting the false notion that the Soviets had overnight become the greatest power on earth. This was despite the fact that Moscow was not even close to perfecting a guidance system that could pinpoint military targets. In 1959, to bolster his prestige, he timed the first Soviet moon landing for three days before his arrival in Washington.
Khrushchev evidently wished to engineer another such triumph during his visit to the UN in 1960. In his luggage were miniature spaceships for unveiling at the magic moment. But two Soviet rockets said to be bound for Mars fizzled on the launching pad.
McNamara’s well-publicized insistence that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union in missiles may have moved Khrushchev to order his scientists to hasten the first Soviet manned space flight. On March 23, 1961, during top-secret final training, the chosen cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko, was locked into a pressure chamber. After medical tests he removed the sensors from his body, used alcohol-soaked cotton wool to clean himself, and then tossed the wad onto the ring of an electric hot plate. Flame raced through the oxygen-charged atmosphere, burning off Bondarenko’s skin, hair, and eyes. He died within hours.
On Khrushchev’s orders, his government concealed the accident from the Soviet people and the world. Before Moscow released photographs of the first group of cosmonauts, Bondarenko’s image was removed by airbrush. We do not know whether the Chairman ever reflected on the fact that Bondarenko might not have died had Khrushchev not pressured his space scientists to get him into the skies so quickly. If Khrushchev had any regrets, they did not deter him from demanding that his men try again immediately.*
On Wednesday, April 12, Yuri Gagarin, who had stood over the cosmonaut’s deathbed, was strapped onto a rocket and launched into a single orbit. Only after the mission was clearly successful was it revealed to the public. With Khrushchev’s enthusiastic approval, the mission was called Vostok (“the East”), signifying the rising of communism. Pravda claimed that during his 108-minute trip, Gagarin sent greetings to the African peoples struggling below to break the chains of imperialism.
Now that he knew he had a hero, Khrushchev greeted the cosmonaut in Moscow with an enormous bear hug and repeated kisses on both cheeks. A national holiday was declared. People sang and danced in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of happy Soviets paraded in Red Square under huge Gagarin portraits. Three decades later, there were statues of Gagarin in every corner of the Soviet Union; there were none of Bondarenko.
Khrushchev boasted that Gagarin’s success demonstrated Soviet military might and the sweep of advanced technology through the Soviet economy; soon per capita production would surpass the United States. Actually it represented only the inordinate resources that Khrushchev had lavished on his space program. Nevertheless, as with Sputnik, many people around the world mistook the flight to demonstrate the predominance of the Soviet military, social, and economic system.
At the White House, told that Gagarin had returned safely, Kennedy approved a prewritten statement praising the Soviet “technical accomplishment.” At a news conference, he tried to minimize the event: “A dictatorship enjoys advantages in this kind of competition over a short period by its ability to mobilize its resources for a specific purpose.”
Still, Edwin Newman said on NBC that evening, “This is the end of an uncomfortable day for the great mass of American people, as well as for President Kennedy and his associates. Today belonged to the Russians.” Time reported that Americans were feeling “frustration, shame, sometimes fury.”
Privately the President said, “Russian housing is lousy, their food and agricultural system is a disaster, but those facts aren’t publicized. Suddenly we’re competing in a race for space we didn’t even realize we were in. No matter what progress you make, the critics bomb away that we’re second in space.”
Kennedy himself had made no effort to publicize such facts about the Soviet system in 1960. Such private talk showed how far he had come from his campaign complaints that the United States was second in space and elsewhere falling behind. With the new pressure for a dramatic American success somewhere in the world, he continued to supervise planning for the landing at the Bay of Pigs.
Sorensen noted that by now his boss was committed enough to the Cuban project to be irritated by doubters. The President told his aides, “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this.” On Wednesday, April 12, someone suggested that if the invasion succeeded but a new Cuban exile government needed military help to establish itself, the United States might have to send in some supporting forces.
“Under no circumstances!” Kennedy exploded. “The minute I land one Marine, we’re in this thing up to our necks. I can’t get the United States into a war and then lose it, no matter what it takes. I’m not going to risk an American Hungary. And that’s what it could be, a fucking slaughter. Is that understood, gentlemen?”
That afternoon, at the same press conference at which he commented about Gagarin, someone asked how far the United States would be willing to go “in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba.” Kennedy declared, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces.”
After numerous delays, the President had to make the final “go” decision by Friday, April 14. He read a telegram from a Marine colonel who had just inspected the exile group, Brigade 2506, in Guatemala. It reported that the officers had “a fanatical urge to begin battle” and that they “do not expect help from the U.S. armed forces.”
Kennedy called Bissell and approved the air strikes against the three main Cuban airfields that were scheduled for Saturday; how many B-26s would be sent? Bissell said, “Sixteen.” The President said, “I don’t want it on that scale. I want it minimal.” Bissell reduced the number.
On Saturday morning, the world learned that six B-26s with Cuban markings had bombed Cuban air bases, destroying less than half of Castro’s small air force. Following the CIA’s instructions, another exile pilot landed his bomber at Miami International Airport and claimed that he and two other “defectors from Castro’s air force” had done the bombing. At the UN, Castro’s ambassador scoffed at the pilot’s story and blamed the attack on the United States as the “prelude to a large-scale invasion attempt.”
Adlai Stevenson had not been informed that the Miami “defector” and his story were counterfeit. That afternoon, as requested by Washington, he defended the story before the UN General Assembly. Then he was told that he had disseminated a lie.
Stevenson sputtered that he had been “deliberately tricked” by his own government. Back at his Waldorf Towers suite, looking ill, he told a friend, “I’ve got to resign. There’s nothing I can do but resign. My usefulness and credibility have been totally compromised.” Then: “I can’t resign—can’t—the country is in enough trouble.”* He later complained about Kennedy’s “boy commandos” and wrote a friend that the “Cuban absurdity” made him “sick for a week.”
Stevenson feared that open U.S. action against Castro would taint the American image around the world. He cabled Rusk that “if Cuba now proves any of the planes and pilots came from outside, we will face an increasingly hostile atmosphere. No one will believe that bombing attacks on Cuba from outside could have been organized without our complicity.”
Worried that Stevenson might resign and denounce Kennedy, worried that the U.S. government was about to be humiliated, as during the U-2 affair, by revelation of its public deceptions, Rusk and Bundy telephoned the President on Sunday at Glen Ora, his newly rented 600-acre estate in the Virginia hunt country.
Kennedy would have preferred a place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, near the water, but consented to Glen Ora in deference to Jacqueline, who often spent four days a week here riding. The President found it “pretty deadly.” He asked friends, “Can you imagine me ending up in a place like this?”
This Sunday afternoon, he had played nine holes of golf and was in the master bedroom with Jacqueline when the telephone rang. The Secretary of State gave his report. Kennedy said, “I’m not signed on to this.” He forbade further air strikes that could have decimated the remainder of Castro’s air force: the strikes were not to be flown until after the exiles had secured a Cuban beachhead. Then the new attacks could be plausibly portrayed as launched from Cuban soil.
Kennedy put down the receiver and paced the bedroom in obvious distress. Jacqueline thought he seemed less upset by what he had told Rusk than by the confusion in planning. What would go wrong next? Knowing how easily he made decisions, she had never seen him so low.
Bundy called Bissell and crisply told him that the President had ordered no further air strikes. Bissell and Dulles’s number-two man, General C. Pearre Cabell, pleaded into the night with Rusk to reconsider: without another strike, Castro’s planes would easily vanquish the invaders. Rusk replied that “political requirements” were now “overriding”: Stevenson had “insisted” that further air strikes would make it “absolutely impossible for the U.S. position to be sustained.” Rusk suggested to Cabell and Bissell that they talk to the President themselves. Perhaps worried that Kennedy might cancel the entire Cuban project, they declined.
Later, after rerunning that fateful Sunday night endlessly in his mind, the President reproached himself about barring the second air strike. He thought this decision an error, although not a decisive one. Still, he told Lem Billings that if he “hadn’t stayed all weekend in Glen Ora and had gone back Sunday night,” he “might have learned more about the situation” in Cuba that might have changed the course of events.
At four-thirty on Monday morning, April 17, Cabell woke up Rusk at his Sheraton Park Hotel quarters with a new proposal: Why not let the invasion ships return to international waters and then gain air cover from the nearby U.S. carrier Essex? The Secretary of State replied that this would violate the President’s ban on U.S. military involvement. He arranged to have Cabell make his pitch directly to Kennedy at Glen Ora by telephone. Cabell awakened the President, made his appeal, and was turned down.
Through the blue darkness of Pig Bay, the lumbering old invasion ships, now protected only by machine guns, crashed into coral reefs under blinding floodlights. With infinite irony, the invasion fleet included boats from the United Fruit Company, whose domination of Oriente province had been the earliest inspiration for Castro’s anti-Americanism. Soon the vessels were bombarded by Castro’s planes.
This morning was Khrushchev’s sixty-seventh birthday. Back at Pitsunda after celebrating the Gagarin success, the Chairman was listening to Radio Moscow, which announced, “An armed intervention against Cuba has begun.”
Sergei Khrushchev said years later, “That was his present from the United States. He was very upset and honestly didn’t think that Cuba could put up serious resistance against the landing troops.”
*In 1958, the United States also used the Agency to aid both the Sukarno regime and its rebel opposition.
*According to a British diplomat’s report to London, the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, “extracted about $3 million from Batista.… Just what … for I could not elucidate—perhaps Dominican expenses for military operations, present or future, against Fidel Castro. Anyway when Batista jibbed at paying up after the first couple of million, the Saviour of the Fatherland threw him into a dungeon and tipped in a box of hungry rats for company, and after 24 hours, Batista’s purse strings soon loosened again.”
*In July 1956, after Kennedy lost his bid to run for Vice President with Adlai Stevenson, he and Smathers flew off to the Riviera, where they and female guests relaxed aboard a yacht. During the cruise, Kennedy’s wife lost their first child, a girl, in Newport. Hampered by bad communications, he did not fly home for several days. The columnist Drew Pearson, a Georgetown neighbor, wrote that “for a long time, she wouldn’t listen to his overtures for a reconciliation. He blamed himself for the estrangement.”
*Privately Nixon included Eisenhower in his criticism. He wrote a friend in 1963 that both Eisenhower and Kennedy deserved blame for what had happened in Cuba—Eisenhower “for not acting sooner” and Kennedy “for not acting decisively.”
*That same month, Bundy unsuccessfully suggested to Kennedy that he move Bissell to State, where he could “keep a sharp eye” on covert operations: “If Dick has a fault, it is that he does not look at all sides of the question, and of course, the State Department’s trouble is that it is usually doing exactly that and nothing else.”
*Managing editor Clifton Daniel said later that Dryfoos “could envision failure for the invasion, and he could see the New York Times being blamed for a bloody fiasco.”
* Soviet secrecy about the Bondarenko accident may have cost the lives of the three Apollo One astronauts who died in an oxygen-rich fire in their cabin during training in January 1967. Knowledge of the Soviet mishap would have warned NASA about the highly flammable materials in the Apollo One cabin and the absence of a quick-release hatch and effective fire-fighting equipment.
*Breakfasting with Stevenson in New York on Monday morning, Bundy found him “very decent” about the matter: “He did not fuss about the box he was in. All he wanted was more information so he would not dig deeper holes.”