CHAPTER 6

“A Big Kick”

On Sunday, April l6, at the grave of seven airmen killed by the American air strike, ten thousand Cubans cried “Guerra! Guerra!” Raising his eyes toward the heavens, swinging his cupped hands up and down, Castro told them, “The whole world knows that attack was made with Yankee planes flown by mercenaries paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.” He quoted from wire service reports about the Miami “defector”: “Even Hollywood would not try to film such a story!”*

Reading the speech in Pitsunda, Khrushchev was astonished by its peroration. Castro had said, “The United States sponsored the attack because it cannot forgive us for achieving a socialist revolution under their noses.” This was the first time in public that the Cuban had called his movement “socialist.” The Chairman felt that tactically it “didn’t make much sense” because it “narrowed the circle of those he could count on for support against the invasion.”

Pravda told its readers that Allen Dulles, “the notorious American master spy,” had gone to direct the invasion from a “secret command post” in Puerto Rico. (Actually Dulles had kept a weekend speaking engagement to a business group on the island in order to keep the Cubans and Soviets from knowing that something unusual was about to happen.) Izvestia said, “Cuba is not alone. All of progressive mankind is with her.”

In London, Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had led Britain to disaster at Suez, wrote a friend that since the Americans had “only eighty miles of sea to cover and not a thousand, as we had at Suez from Malta, they ought not to have underestimated the job they have to do, and Kennedy ought to know that exiles are always optimistic. Maybe the Americans have calculated better than it appears on the surface. I pray so.”

On Monday morning at ten, the President called the Attorney General away from a speech in Williamsburg, Virginia, and asked him to return to Washington “right away”: “I don’t think it’s going as well as it should.”

Since the Inauguration, Kennedy had rarely used his brother on foreign policy matters. Robert’s first serious exposure to the invasion planning had been only the previous week, when the President asked Bissell to brief him. With the operation in trouble, the President needed someone of incontestable loyalty.

Now that the landed exile forces were under pounding attack, the President agreed to allow the U.S. Navy to move closer to the Cuban shore; he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.” But he had few illusions that this would save the operation. Robert told his press aide Edwin Guthman, “I think we’ve made a hell of a mistake.” Guthman asked if there was anything he could do. Kennedy said, “You can start praying for those fellows on the beach.”

Despite the events in Cuba, Llewellyn Thompson left Moscow on a U.S. Air Force plane for Frankfurt and a scheduled holiday in central Europe. At noon on Tuesday, April 18, Thompson’s chargé d’affaires, Edward Freers, was called to the Soviet Foreign Ministry and handed a message from Khrushchev to President Kennedy. The statement had already been broadcast by Radio Moscow forty-five minutes before. Giving the message to the world before it was given to Freers was a deliberate insult.

Khrushchev’s message, polished in the tranquillity of Pitsunda, warned that the invasion was “fraught with danger to world peace.” It was no secret that America had trained and armed the exiles. Only recently he and Kennedy had each spoken “about the common desire of both sides to make joint efforts to improve relations between our countries and avert the danger of war.” And what about the President’s pledge last week against military involvement in Cuba?

The United States must now keep the “flames of war” in Cuba from “spreading into a conflagration which will be impossible to cope with.” Kennedy must halt the aggression. “Any so-called ‘small war’ can produce a chain reaction in all parts of the world. As for the Soviet Union, there should be no misunderstanding of our position: We shall render the Cuban people and their government all necessary assistance in beating back the armed attack on Cuba.”

That afternoon in Moscow, the fun began. Hoisting Cuban flags and banners (WE ARE WITH YOU FRIENDS … VIVA CUBA … DO NOT PLAY WITH FIRE), thousands of students and workers hurled ball bearings and bottles of blue-black ink at the U.S. Embassy, shouting “Hands off Cuba!” and “Interventionists into the sea!”

A Red Army general, militiamen, and police on white horses arrived to wind things down. Some of the African students refused to stop protesting. “They didn’t realize this was a pageant,” recalled Boris Klosson. “The Soviet police pulled them off the fence, and if they didn’t come off they’d knock the living daylights out of them. These kids were not brought up in the Russian way of protest, which was to do the ballet and then go home.” Later a Soviet official told Klosson, “How terrible it is, invading a small country!” Klosson replied, “We won’t trade invasion stories.”

American embassies were stoned in Warsaw, Cairo, Tokyo, and New Delhi. The official Chinese news agency announced that “angry condemnation” of the United States was “sweeping through Chinese cities.” Kennedy was particularly pained by the bloody Latin American demonstrations against “Yankee imperialism.” In Recife, workers holding torches and Castro portraits demanded that Brazilian troops be sent to aid Cuba. In Mexico City, students shouted, “Castro si, Kennedy no!”

The President read Khrushchev’s message before he sat down in the family dining room for his regular Tuesday breakfast with leaders of Congress. He told the congressional leaders that he doubted Khrushchev would send “volunteers” to Cuba, as he had threatened to do during the Suez War of 1956, or resupply the island with military equipment: Khrushchev knew that the United States “wouldn’t stand” for a large number of Soviets in Cuba.

With the same exquisite caution he had shown throughout the weeks of secret meetings on the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy did not mention Berlin. The last thing he needed now was to have Congressmen walking out onto the White House steps and complaining before television cameras that the President was so paralyzed by fear of what Khrushchev might do in Berlin that he was about to abandon the courageous exiles on the Cuban beaches.

Nevertheless, Kennedy took the Chairman’s message as a blanket threat to march against West Berlin if the United States persisted against Cuba. He later privately told Cuban exile leaders that Khrushchev’s message had forced on him a choice between risking a Berlin confrontation, which could touch off a large-scale war, or maintaining world peace and suffering the loss of fourteen hundred men in Cuba. It was a difficult and painful decision, but the priority clearly had to be world peace.

Late on Tuesday morning, Kennedy read a note from Bundy: “I think you will find at noon that the situation in Cuba is not a bit good. The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others.” Bundy predicted that the CIA would “press hard for further air help—this time by Navy cover to B-26s attacking the tanks.”

He recommended saying yes “because it cannot be easily proven against us and because men are in need.” But the real question was “whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support, or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” (Even at this late moment, the President’s people had not discovered that from these beachheads there was no such escape.) Bundy thought “the right course now is to eliminate the Castro air force, by neutrally painted U.S. planes if necessary, and then let the battle go its way.”

Over luncheon with James Reston of the New York Times, Kennedy said that defeat in Cuba would be an incident, not a disaster; if the Cuban people were not ready to back a revolt, the United States could not impose a new regime on them by invasion. Reston asked whether American prestige would not suffer. The President said, “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? … No doubt we will be kicked in the ass for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.”

Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, McNamara, Bohlen, and others generally agreed that Khrushchev would not risk war over a country like Cuba that was so far from the Soviet Union. His message had pledged “all necessary assistance” but did not mention the rockets he had in 1960 twice specifically threatened to use for Castro’s defense.

At seven on Tuesday evening, Rusk called Menshikov to the State Department and gave him Kennedy’s response. It said that the Chairman was “under a serious misapprehension” about Cuba: “It cannot be surprising that, as resistance within Cuba grows, refugees have been using whatever means are available to return and support their countrymen in the continuing struggle for freedom.” The United States would not intervene militarily in Cuba but, if “any outside force” became involved, it would “honor our obligations to protect this hemisphere against external aggression.”

The President’s message noted Khrushchev’s comment that the events in Cuba might affect peace elsewhere: “I trust this does not mean that the Soviet government, using the situation in Cuba as a pretext, is planning to inflame other areas of the world.”

At 11:58 P.M., after the annual White House reception for members of Congress, Kennedy returned to the Cabinet Room, where the long table was littered with notes and newspapers. On a metal easel was a map of Cuba and the Caribbean adorned by tiny magnetic ships. Still in white tie and dress uniforms, the President and Vice President, Robert Kennedy, Rusk, McNamara, and General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Arleigh Burke of the Joint Chiefs of Staff listened as Bissell laid out the options that now remained.

The CIA man argued that the operation could still be saved if the President allowed the use of jets from the Essex. Admiral Burke said, “Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft.” Kennedy said he had told the Pentagon “over and over again” that he would not commit U.S. forces. Burke suggested an American show of strength by letting unmarked jets roar over the beach—or they could bring in a destroyer. The President said, “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved with this.”

The Navy chief cast off his deference: “Hell, Mr. President, we are involved!”

Finally Kennedy approved a compromise. For one hour, six jets from the Essex could fly over the beachhead to protect the Brigade’s ammunition supply flights and their B-26 escorts. The jets must not fire at Castro’s planes or ground targets unless the Brigade’s aircraft should be attacked. Rusk reminded him of his pledge not to use American forces: “The President shouldn’t appear in the light of being a liar.” Kennedy raised his right hand to the base of his nose: “We’re already into it up to here.”

Ken O’Donnell thought that his boss was as close to weeping as he had ever seen. Off to the side of the room, a miserable Robert Kennedy kept murmuring, “We’ve got to do something.” After the meeting ended, with tears in his eyes, Robert put both hands on his brother’s shoulders: “They can’t do this to you!”

Without a jacket, the President opened one of the French doors and walked out into a gentle breeze on the South Grounds. Secret Service men kept their distance as he strolled until almost three in the morning by himself through the damp grass, his head bent, his hands thrust in his pockets.

On Wednesday, April 19, after dawn, the U.S. Navy jets approved by the President took off from the Essex. A timing mistake brought them too early over the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. Without proper defense, the Brigade’s supply flights were driven away and two of its B-26s were downed. That afternoon, the demoralized exiles began surrendering. One hundred and fourteen were dead. The other 1,189 were captured by Castro’s troops.

Told what was happening, Kennedy returned to the family quarters for a nap and lunch with Jacqueline. He was haunted by the image of the brave men on the beaches who would now be shot like dogs or taken off to Castro’s jails. The only times his wife had seen him weep before were in the hospital at moments of sheer frustration over his back. He did not cry, but tears would fill his eyes and roll down his cheeks. That day in Jacqueline’s bedroom, he put his head into his hands and almost sobbed. Then he took her into his arms.

Rose Kennedy, who was visiting the White House, later wrote in her diary that she had “phoned Joe, who said Jack had been on the phone with him much of the day, also Bobby. I asked him how he was feeling and he said ‘dying’—result of trying to bring up Jack’s morale.… 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. I felt so sorry for him.”

In the Cabinet Room, Robert Kennedy barked at colleagues that they must now “act or be judged paper tigers in Moscow.”* They could not just “sit and take it.” With all that talent around the table, somebody ought to find something to do.

Walt Rostow later recalled that he “had what I can only describe as a tender feeling” toward the President’s brother. He took him outside and said, “If you’re in a fight and get knocked off your feet, the most dangerous thing is to come up swinging.” That was the way to get badly hurt. Now they should “pause and think.” There would be plenty of times and places to show the Russians that they were not paper tigers: “Berlin, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.”

Robert said, “That’s constructive.” He wrote his brother a prophetic memo: “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.” They could send American troops into Cuba, which “might have to be reconsidered,” or they could blockade the island, an act of war that would bring “worldwide bitterness.”

A third option was to ask the Organization of American States to ban all arms shipments to Cuba and guarantee the island’s territorial integrity “so that the Cuban government could not say they would be at the mercy of the United States.” The OAS might agree to such a course “if it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MiGs attacked Guantanamo and the United States made noises.… Maybe this is not the way to carry it out, but something forceful and determined must be done.… The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two the situation will be vastly worse.”

The President and First Lady attended a dinner at the Greek Embassy given by visiting Prime Minister Constantine Caramanlis. Jacqueline later told Lem Billings that she and Jack had given Caramanlis “a very boring state gift,” but at the last moment she had picked up one of her “favorite snuff boxes” and given it to the Prime Minister’s wife.

After returning from the dinner, Kennedy returned to the Cabinet Room. As Robert recalled, “Everybody really seemed to fall apart.” The Attorney General told the assembly, “We should pick ourselves up and figure out what we are going to do that would be best for the country and the President over the next six to twelve months.… What worries me most is now nobody in the government will be willing to stick his neck out, to take a chance, to plan bold and aggressive action against the Communists.”

Chester Bowles observed that by now the consensus was to “get tough with Castro.” He felt that had the President now wished to send in troops or bomb Cuba, 90 percent of the room would have approved. Bohlen strongly argued for sending U.S. troops. Rusk objected. Others spoke of blockading the island. Robert Kennedy later recalled having “a slight flare-up” with Lyndon Johnson: during a discussion of who had been in favor of the Cuban project, “we had the impression he was just trying to get off it himself.”

The President’s immediate task was to write a speech for delivery on Thursday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the same group that had invited Castro to the United States in 1959. He loped down the checkered linoleum hallway lined with filing cabinets to Ted Sorensen’s office.

This intense young man was perhaps the most serious liberal in Kennedy’s inner circle. Sorensen had the instinctive distrust of easy charm and emotionalism that was characteristic of both New England and the American Midwest. Central to his admiration for Kennedy was his conviction that “the liberal who is rationally committed is more reliable than the liberal who is emotionally committed.”

This view was tested in October 1959, when Sorensen read a draft of John Kennedy: A Political Profile, by James MacGregor Burns. Based on access to the Senator, his family, and his papers, Burns’s admiring volume concluded with a reservation: although Kennedy would bring “bravery and wisdom” to the Presidency, “whether he would bring passion and power would depend on his making a commitment, not only of mind but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.”

Sorensen wrote Burns, “The impression should never be given that he does not believe deeply in what he says or will not fight fiercely for the causes in which he believes.… I really think he is a unique figure in American politics—where he combines extraordinary qualities of strong leadership and intellectual brilliance with an uncanny sense of public relations and the public mood. Not only do I think he will be President—more than any other living man he ought to be.”*

Sorensen’s father was a progressive Nebraska lawyer who managed campaigns for the maverick Senator George Norris and was himself twice elected the state’s attorney general. Known as a crimebuster and foe of corporate wealth, C. A. Sorensen met his Russian Jewish wife, Annis Chaikin, while defending her along with other pacifists during World War I.

Born in 1928, the son registered with draft authorities after World War II as a noncombatant and helped to form local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality and Americans for Democratic Action. Arriving in Washington after the University of Nebraska Law School, he worked for two years as a government lawyer before presenting himself for an interview with the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts in January 1953.

He much later said, “I felt I could have had the job right then.… But I also felt that if I was going to throw in with him, then there were things I wanted to know.… We had another interview, and this time I asked the questions—about his father, Joe McCarthy, the Catholic Church. He must have thought I was an odd duck … but I know we satisfied each other.” For the next decade, Kennedy “was the only human being who mattered to me.”

A friend thought Sorensen saw Kennedy as “his work of art.” From the start, he worked to help the Senator become a figure of presidential quality, steering him toward the liberalism of the national Democratic Party. Sorensen also gave the Senator his voice. The hackneyed speeches of Kennedy’s congressional years gave way to the staccato phrases, contrapuntal sentences, soaring rhetoric, and quotations from the great for which Kennedy would always be remembered.* Sorensen once said, “A Kennedy speech has to have class.”

His hand was not absent from Profiles in Courage, the book that allowed Kennedy’s supporters to call him “the Pulitzer Prize-winning Senator.” Sorensen told the historian Herbert Parmet in 1977, “I do not want current history books—and maybe not even future history books—to say that Sorensen … took credit for all things that appeared with Kennedy’s name.

“That was a very sensitive subject while he was alive—very.… Nothing upset him more than the charge that he was not the author of Profiles in Courage, and I still feel some inhibitions in talking about this matter frankly even today.… I’ll tell you that I did have a substantial role in all of the output, and his role was that of being the final responsible person who signed it.”*

In 1957 and 1958, Sorensen traveled with Kennedy to all forty-eight states, filing the names of thirty thousand Democrats on index cards. Sorensen occasionally saved the Senator time by impersonating him on the telephone. When someone told him that he was “getting more like Jack than Jack himself,” Kennedy took the man aside and said, “Don’t—he gets that from all sides.” Sorensen took full part in the Senator’s political life and almost no part in his social life. The political scientist Richard Neustadt, who later helped Kennedy organize his White House staff, observed that “never have two people been more intimate and more separate.”

When the Senator hired new people in 1959 in order to run for President, Sorensen was not immune to a natural possessiveness about his boss. That fall, when Kennedy recruited the Stevenson Democrat Hy Raskin of Chicago, Kennedy said, “Don’t worry about Sorensen. Bobby’s coming onto the campaign next week, and he hates him even more than you do.” Still, the morning after the 1960 election, it was Sorensen who awakened Kennedy with the news that he was President-elect.

Kennedy worried that formal titles might tend to ossify his staff but relented when Sorensen insisted on being called Special Counsel to the President. Neustadt noticed that once Sorensen got his title, he “accepted intellectually the fact that the new situation was too much for him to dominate. Now he was established in control of speeches and programs.”

Roaming Sorensen’s large, bare office after midnight, Kennedy told his aide that he wanted his speech to the editors to forestall demands for violent retaliation against Castro, reassure the free world of America’s prudence, and dissuade the Communists from presuming that restraint meant weakness. Here, in private with the trusted Sorensen, the President said what he would not say in the larger meetings: the main reason he had been so allergic to American force against Cuba was fear that Khrushchev might use it as a pretext to move against Berlin.

As Kennedy bade Sorensen good night, he snatched a magazine from the desk. At 1:30 A.M., Sorensen telephoned the family quarters to ask him a question, but the operator said the President was still presumed to be with him. Sorensen put down the telephone, walked down the corridor, and almost fell over someone slumped in a chair, reading. With a start, he realized it was Kennedy.

On Thursday, April 20, over breakfast and throughout the morning, the President worked on his ASNE address. “Never did he look back,” recalled Bohlen. “He was always looking forward.” But during a walk together on the South Grounds, Sorensen found his boss “depressed and lonely.” Kennedy complained that he had “unnecessarily worsened” relations with the Soviet Union just as test ban talks were starting again. He had handed his critics a stick with which they would forever beat him.

At the Statler Hilton, he told the editors, “Our restraint is not inexhaustible.… I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations, which are to the security of our nation.” The next line went to the heart of Khrushchev’s Tuesday message: “Should that time ever come, we do not intend to be lectured on ‘intervention’ by those whose character was stamped for all time on the bloody streets of Budapest!” The ballroom rocked with applause.

“We face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes far beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear armaments.… They serve primarily as the shield behind which subversion, infiltration, and a host of other tactics steadily advance, picking off vulnerable areas—one by one—in situations that do not permit our own armed intervention.… We dare not fail to grasp the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to meet it, whether in Cuba or South Vietnam.”

He closed: “History will record the fact that this bitter struggle reached its climax in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Let me then make clear as the President of the United States that I am determined upon our system’s survival and success, regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril!”

Cuban exile leaders in Miami who heard the speech on radio slapped one another on the back. Ambassador Menshikov had been scheduled to breakfast with Stevenson on Friday; after hearing Kennedy’s address, he canceled his appointment.

Robert Kennedy thought his brother’s speech “very effective.” Richard Goodwin, now a White House aide, told the President that his hint about a future invasion of Cuba sounded like a vague threat, especially if the United States had no such intention. As Goodwin recalled, his boss replied in a “mild, barely distinct” voice. “I didn’t want us to look like a paper tiger. We should scare people a little, and I did it to make us appear tough and powerful.” Kennedy shrugged. “Anyway, it’s done. You may be right, but it’s done.”

Scaring people a little was calculated to protect the President against the criticism that was already being unleashed upon him. Barry Goldwater declared that Kennedy’s Cuban fiasco should fill every American with “apprehension and shame.” General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, told a friend that Cuba was the worst American defeat “since the War of 1812.”

The Cold War braggadocio of Kennedy’s ASNE address helped to vent his frustration at his inability to make the invasion succeed. It put Khrushchev on notice to think twice before moving massive armaments and Soviet troops onto the island. But the President’s pledge to fight the “new concepts” and “new tools” of Communist insurgency suggested that he was still so mesmerized by Khrushchev’s Wars of Liberation speech that he missed the meaning of the Bay of Pigs.

Khrushchev had gained an ally not by subversion of Cuba but mainly by sheer luck. Castro had come to power not because the KGB or Red Army installed him, as they had the dictators of Eastern Europe, but through a genuine popular revolution. After reading the ASNE speech, Llewellyn Thompson cabled, “At the risk of being considered an apologist, I suggest we should keep in mind that in recent trouble spots—Iraq, the Congo, Cuba, and, so far as I am informed, Laos—the Soviets did not initiate the crisis but followed their usual policy of taking advantage of opportunities.”

One of the debacle’s chief lessons was that, until Castro’s popularity crumbled, his regime would be resistant to American tactics like counterinsurgency. Nevertheless, anyone who scrutinized Kennedy’s speech, including Khrushchev’s analysts in Moscow, would have divined that the President would make another effort to topple Castro, either by covert action or full-scale invasion by United States armed forces.

The Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem about a Cuban mother camping on the beach near the grave of her son, killed at the Bay of Pigs:

The sea …

That is where the murderers came from!

I know—

They can come back again!

Kennedy faced the press on Friday morning, April 21. With a lordly stroke that later Presidents would envy, he foreclosed questions on Cuba by saying that no “useful national purpose” would be served by further public discussion: “I prefer to let my statement of yesterday suffice for the present.” Sander Vanocur of NBC asked why they could not explore the “real facts” behind the Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy replied, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.… Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility, because I’m the responsible officer of the government—and that is quite obvious—but merely because I do not believe that such a discussion would benefit us during the present difficult, uh, situation.” For the remainder of the session, no one challenged Kennedy on his silence about this most important event of his administration thus far.

The President took responsibility, but there were efforts to spread the blame. A White House aide told reporters on background how the Joint Chiefs had selected the landing beaches and the CIA had promised uprisings: “Allen and Dick didn’t just brief us on it. They sold us on it.” Hedley Donovan complained to Time-Life colleagues that Kennedy was getting “preposterous praises” for stating the constitutional fact that he was responsible while “telling scores of friends, senators, journalists, only slightly privately, that his mistake was to pay any attention to the CIA and military brass.”

The President told Jacqueline, “My God, the bunch of advisers we inherited.… Can you imagine being President and leaving behind someone like all those people there?” He told one reporter that Allen Dulles had assured him the operation’s chances for success were “as great as in Guatemala.” Telling the tale to someone else, he attributed the quote to the Joint Chiefs. On another occasion he carped, “I’ll bet Dean Rusk wishes he had spoken up in a louder voice.”

Back in his office after his Friday press conference, Kennedy was already speaking of the Bay of Pigs in the past tense. “We can’t win them all,” he told Johnson and Schlesinger, “and I have been close enough to disaster to realize that these things which seem world-shaking at one moment you can barely remember the next. We got a big kick in the ass—and we deserved it. But maybe we’ll learn something from it.”

On Saturday morning, April 22, he received Khrushchev’s response to his Tuesday message and his ASNE speech: “Mr. President, you are taking a highly dangerous road. Think about it.… No one can have any commitment to defend rebels against the lawful government of a sovereign state like Cuba.”

The Chairman noted that some Americans were suggesting that Moscow was turning Cuba into a Soviet base: “We do not have any bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any.” If the President felt aggrieved by Cuba, the Soviet Union had “no lesser grounds” against states along its border whose territory was being used to threaten Soviet security.

Khrushchev noted that Kennedy “did not like my words in my previous message that there can be no stable peace in the world if there are flames of war anywhere. But … the world is a single whole, whether one likes it or not. I will only repeat what I said: it would not do to put out the flames in one area and thereby kindle a new conflagration in another.”

The President regarded this message as one last volley in the propaganda battle over the Bay of Pigs. His Soviet experts recalled Khrushchev’s threats to send Soviet volunteers to the Middle East only after the Suez War had cooled: “He’s got this very good habit of jumping all over things when the danger is over, and not before.”

Now that the tumult over Cuba was over, Kennedy did not bother to reply to the Chairman’s message. The State Department highhandedly announced that he would not be “drawn into an extended debate with the Chairman” over “this latest … Communist distortion of the basic concepts of the rights of man.”

In retrospect, Khrushchev’s message was of cardinal importance. For perhaps the first time, the Chairman made the clear public argument that he considered Soviet interests in Cuba now to be parallel with American interests in countries along the Soviet perimeter like Turkey, where the United States maintained a substantial military establishment.

What logically followed from this was that if the United States continued to commit hostile acts against Cuba, it gave the Soviet Union the right to harass American allies along its border. For the United States to place missiles in Turkey that the Soviets considered offensive, for instance, granted the Soviet Union similar license in Cuba. As with so many other subtleties in the long history of the Cold War, this signal to Washington was overlooked.

When the failure of the Bay of Pigs was certain, Kennedy had asked Sorensen, “How could I have been so stupid as to let them go ahead?” With his narrow election margin, Kennedy had not been eager to rile the national hero who preceded him. “It was Eisenhower’s plan,” Robert Kennedy wrote in a note to himself. “Eisenhower’s people all said it would succeed.” If the President had not gone forward, “everybody would have said it showed he had no courage.”

By the time Dulles and Bissell briefed the President-elect, they had done much to tie his hands. As Dulles kept reminding him, they had a “disposal problem.” If Kennedy shut down the project, thousands of exiles trained for the invasion would fan out through the Americas, calling him a coward and his country a helpless behemoth.

The President’s anger at Castro ran deep. This was not primarily because of the Cuban’s ideology or his bloody methods; Kennedy could easily think of two dozen foreign leaders who behaved more abominably. What he resented more were the costly political choices forced upon him by Castro’s rise to power and his alliance with Moscow. He told friends that sooner or later, every politician acquired an albatross: “I’ve got Cuba.”

He knew that early 1961 could be his last chance to shake off the albatross. If Khrushchev continued to strengthen Castro’s armed forces, even a full-scale American invasion could only mire the island in civil war and threaten nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. Bundy later felt that Kennedy was looking for ways to make the CIA plan work: “He wanted it to work and allowed himself to be persuaded that the risks were acceptable.”

So new in office, so unaccustomed to failure, so prone to what Schlesinger called the “autointoxication” of the early New Frontier, Kennedy was poorly equipped to make the operation work. The Bay of Pigs turned out to be a textbook case of the problems inherent in the covert method of shaping foreign affairs. Planned by a small, closed group, lacking exposure to the press, Congress, bureaucracy, and other institutions that monitor, criticize, and thus improve other government initiatives, the Cuban operation had defects that remained largely undetected.

Eager to sell the project to the President, its planners were naturally inclined to minimize its risks. Kennedy might have avoided disaster had he given a group of experienced experts the same security clearances as Dulles and Bissell in order to police the operation for flaws and false assumptions and coldly assess the degree of probability that, in the event of failure, the President and the country would be damaged.

But Kennedy had abolished much of the apparatus devised by Eisenhower to scrutinize covert projects. This forced him to accept at face value the judgments of novice secretaries of State and Defense and other officials with their own axes to grind. With his superficial experience in management and in national security matters, he was overimpressed by its mandarins: “You always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.”

As he weighed the Cuban project, he was hamstrung by the same ambivalence that showed in his campaign statements on Cuba and the Soviet Union. He did not want to be indicted for softness on communism. Nor did he wish to inflame Latin America, the Third World, and the Stevenson liberals by approving an all-out invasion. He was anxious that American action against Cuba not trigger a Soviet action against Berlin. Wishing to intervene without paying the price of intervention, he therefore ordained an operation too small to succeed and too big to hide American involvement.

Kennedy’s concern about Berlin may have been exacerbated by the fact that three days before the start of the Bay of Pigs operation, Konrad Adenauer came to the White House for his first meetings with Kennedy. This may have caused the President to focus more than he might otherwise have done on the dangers of a Soviet move against Berlin.

Through all his deliberations on the Cuban venture, he did not once gather his Soviet experts for exhaustive consideration of his highly questionable assumption that open American involvement would provoke Khrushchev to retaliate in Berlin. Bundy said, “He would have thought more about the Russian aspect of a Cuban adventure two years later.”

Robert, Kennedy later wrote in his notes that his brother “never would have tried this operation if he knew that Cuba forces were as good as they were and would fight.” The President suffered from other large misconceptions—that the exiles’ landing would be greeted by massive Cuban uprisings, that the invaders if defeated could head for the mountains and fight on as guerrillas, that the American role could be kept secret or at least plausibly deniable.

The CIA was hardly blameless. Dulles later conceded in his notes that he had not alerted Kennedy to certain issues that might “harden” him against the project, such as the falsity of the notion that the exiles could melt into the mountains. He blamed himself for failing to make the President see that “air cover for the landing was an absolute prerequisite.” Bissell insisted years later that “if we had been able to drop five times the tonnage of bombs on Castro’s airfields, we would have had a damned good chance.”

Dulles admitted in his notes that he accepted Kennedy’s constraints on the invasion plan because he presumed that, if it should falter, “we would gain what we might lose if we provoked an argument” before it was launched. During his decade in the CIA, he had seen “a good many operations which started out like the Bay of Pigs.” When the Guatemalan coup of 1954 seemed near collapse, Eisenhower had saved it by openly rushing airplanes to the rebels. The CIA Director expected the same reaction from Kennedy on Cuba: “We felt that when the chips were down, when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”

Dulles bitterly concluded that Kennedy had been only “half sold on the vital necessity of what he was doing.” Proceeding “uncertainly toward defeat,” he was surrounded by “doubting Thomases and admirers of Castro”: “I should have realized that if he had no enthusiasm about the idea in the first place, he would drop it at the first opportunity to do the things necessary to make it succeed.”

Throughout the invasion planning, the CIA had been quietly working on another track to increase the chance that the operation would succeed. Track Two was the assassination of Fidel Castro.

Bissell said years later that Track Two was “intended to parallel” the invasion preparations: “Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing.” If Castro were killed, Bissell said, it could have made Track One “either unnecessary or much easier.”

One Sunday evening in March 1960, during a lull in the presidential primaries, John and Jacqueline Kennedy had held a dinner at their house on N Street in Georgetown. One of the guests brought along the British novelist Ian Fleming, then at work on Thunderball. Over coffee, Fleming said that the Americans were making “too much fuss” about Castro: it would be perfectly simple to take the steam out of him. Kennedy asked how.

“Ridicule, chiefly.” Fleming opined that the Cubans only cared about three things: money, religion, and sex. Cuban money should be scattered over Havana, crosses painted in the skies. Pamphlets should be dropped on the island warning that atomic testing had made the Cuban atmosphere radioactive: radioactivity made men impotent and lingered longest in beards. Cubans would shave off their beards. Without bearded Cubans, revolution would cease.

Kennedy might have guessed but did not know how close Fleming’s fantasy mimicked reality. Around this time, CIA experts were debating how Castro’s shoes could be dusted with a depilatory that would make his beard fall out and damage his virile image.

Such shenanigans were merely a sideshow. In December 1959, J. C. King of the CIA wrote a memo suggesting that “thorough consideration” be given to the “elimination” of the Cuban dictator, which would “greatly accelerate the fall of the present government.” Bissell approved, assuming that King meant “incapacitating” Castro, resorting to his murder only “if we can’t do anything else.” He asked Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the Agency’s Technical Services Division to investigate techniques of assassination.

In September 1960, Bissell’s subordinate Sheffield Edwards met in Los Angeles with a former FBI man named Robert Maheu, who undertook free-lance assignments for the CIA and Howard Hughes. The following month, Maheu met in Miami Beach with the Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, his West Coast associate John Roselli, and Santos Trafficante, a Havana underworld chief who had been jailed by Castro in 1959.* Giancana asked for poison that could be slipped into Castro’s food or drink: something “nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out-and-out ambushing.”

Bissell thought that hiring gangsters to kill Castro was the “ultimate cover,” because there was “very little chance that anything the Syndicate tried to do would be traced back” to the U.S. government.

During congressional hearings in the 1970s, CIA officials insisted under oath that the plotting against Castro was approved by someone at a high political level of the Eisenhower administration. No name was ever established. One key to the mystery may be that at the time of the conspiracy, Maheu was in business partnership with one of the closest friends of the Vice President of the United States.

Robert King was a former FBI man who had met Richard Nixon during the war when he was investigating possible Soviet spies in San Francisco and Nixon was a lieutenant in the Navy. In 1955, the Vice President hired him away from the management of the Southern Comfort distillery to serve as his chief foreign policy aide. Nixon told reporters that King was “a sort of alter ego.” After two years, King left the Nixon office and later went into partnership with Maheu in Los Angeles.

On January 4, 1960, the CIA’s confederate William Pawley called Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to pursue a dinner conversation he had had with Nixon a few evenings before “about a problem we are having just south of Miami.” The Vice President told Woods to “call Pawley” and say that “RN has been in the middle of some very intense discussions on the Cuban situation with people in government outside of State and with people outside of government. Within the next week to ten days, he will know more about what he thinks our position should be than he does now and he will contact you then.”

On January 9, Nixon invited Pawley to his home for lunch. On January 12, he met at home with King. Afterward he cryptically wrote Pawley, “On the matter we were discussing, we had a very satisfactory conversation with the President on Monday morning. Your name was well and favorably mentioned.… I have not yet heard from our West Coast inquiries, but will be in touch with you just as soon as I get some news.”

Did the “West Coast inquiries” refer to King and/or Maheu? King said in 1991 that if Cuba came up during his 1960 talks with Nixon, there was a “large blank in my memory.” He insisted that he was not aware at the time of Maheu’s collaboration with the Mafia against Castro: “Bob was interested in me because of my connection with Nixon.… When Nixon lost, the gleam faded very quickly.” He said that he did not know whether the Vice President was in direct contact with Maheu. In July 1960, Pawley wrote Nixon, “I’m in touch with Allen Dulles’s people almost daily and things are shaping up reasonably well. The matter is a very delicate problem and every care should be taken to handle it so as not to affect our Nation adversely, nor our political campaign.”

As President in 1971, Nixon showed an extraordinary interest in making sure that the CIA’s files on Cuba were not released. He told his aide John Ehrlichman to order the Agency to turn over “the full file” on the Cuban project “or else.” The President “must have the file,” said Ehrlichman’s notes. He had been “deeply involved.”

We will probably never know for certain whether Vice President Nixon flashed the green light for a CIA-Mafia attempt against Castro. But it is hard to believe that as President he would have made such a heavy-handed demand of Ehrlichman merely to retrieve evidence of his support for invading Cuba in 1960. If anything, such evidence would have helped him politically by demonstrating his foresight into Castro’s danger to the hemisphere. The demand makes more sense if Nixon was worried about public embarrassment by information showing his involvement in a murder plot against a foreign leader.

This concern may have led to Watergate. As many have noted, the risk of breaking into the office of Lawrence O’Brien, Democratic chairman in 1972, would not, on the face of things, have seemed worth the potential reward. But Nixon knew O’Brien had recently worked alongside Maheu as a consultant to Howard Hughes. He may have feared that Maheu had told O’Brien about the Nixon-King-Maheu-Roselli connection and that O’Brien might use this information to taint the President during his reelection campaign.

There is no evidence that Nixon sent the burglars into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. But if it was generally known at the Nixon White House that the President wished to know what was in O’Brien’s files, Nixon’s anxieties might have inspired the operation.

This leads to the question of what Kennedy knew about the effort to murder Castro. It was in February 1961, the month after the inauguration, that Sheffield Edwards gave Roselli a batch of CIA-produced botulinum-toxin pills. By early March, Roselli reported that his contact in Castro’s entourage had lost his access to the Cuban leader or, as Roselli thought more likely, his nerve. That same month, Trafficante arranged another effort to poison Castro.

In early April, as the Cuban exiles prepared their landing at the Bay of Pigs, the plotters were waiting to hear word of Castro’s illness and death. During these weeks, Kennedy kept postponing final approval for the invasion of Cuba. Did he do so because he was waiting to hear the same news?

As with Nixon, whether Kennedy gave a clear go-ahead for the CIA’s assassination plots against Castro will probably never be conclusively resolved. The Agency’s accountability to White House and Congress in the early 1960s was less codified than in a later age. Presidents did not normally sign written orders to assassinate foreign leaders.*

During the investigations of the 1970s, Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy all testified that they had never heard of a CIA plot against Castro. Sorensen insisted that assassination was “totally foreign” to Kennedy’s “reverence for human life and his respect for his adversaries,” his “insistence upon a moral dimension in U.S. foreign policy.” In November 1961, the President told Tad Szulc of the New York Times that “morally” the United States must not be a party to assassinations. A day or two later, he told Dick Goodwin, “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets.”

But Kennedy was in the habit of making comments intended to throw writers, aides, and friends off the scent of a potentially injurious subject. To his campaign aide John Bartlow Martin he scoffed at rumors that he was a “skirt chaser”: “You’ve heard them; they always do that.” He told Ben Bradlee, “You’re all looking to tag me with some girl, and none of you can do it because it just isn’t there.”

The fact that no authorization appears on paper or in the memories of Kennedy’s lieutenants does not prove that the President never signaled the CIA that he would not object to Castro’s murder. Richard Helms told this author in 1988 that “a lot of people probably lied about what had happened in the effort to get rid of Castro.” Bissell gave his “pure personal opinion” in 1975 to the Senate that during the Palm Beach meeting at which he and Dulles briefed the Presidentelect on Cuban invasion planning, the CIA Director told Kennedy “obliquely of this auxiliary operation, the assassination attempt.”

It is only remotely possible that the President was told of the murder plot so obliquely that he did not know what he was hearing. Dulles and Bissell would have been unlikely to take the chance that an irate Kennedy would discover what he thought to be an unauthorized Castro murder plan that could upend his foreign policy and, should Castro retaliate, endanger his life. McNamara conceded years later that the CIA was “a highly disciplined organization, fully under the control of senior officials of the government.”†

Helms said, “There are two things you have to understand. Kennedy wanted to get rid of Castro, and the Agency was not about to undertake anything like that on its own.”

George Smathers recalled in a 1964 oral history that while walking on the White House grounds in March 1961, Kennedy had asked him whether “people would be gratified” if Castro were assassinated. In a 1988 interview with this author, he expanded upon his memory: the President told him that he had been “given to believe” by the CIA that when the invaders hit the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, Castro would no longer be alive. As Smathers recalled, “Someone was supposed to have knocked him off and there was supposed to be absolute pan demonium.”

If Kennedy knew that the CIA’s murderers were loose in Cuba and ready to strike, this would help explain his approval of an invasion plan that seems otherwise so implausible. It is not inconceivable that the President forbade vital air support for the invaders after learning that the assassination attempts against Castro had failed.

We do know that Robert Kennedy later received a memo from J. Edgar Hoover reporting that “in connection with CIA’s operation against Castro,” Sheffield Edwards had contacted Maheu about “using Maheu as a ‘cut-out’ in contacts with Sam Giancana.” Since this was “dirty business,” Edwards “could not afford to have knowledge of the actions of Maheu and Giancana in pursuit of any mission for CIA.” Hoover referred to the fact that Bissell had already told the Attorney General that “some of the associated planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro.”

Had Kennedy and the President found Hoover’s information a disturbing surprise, one would have expected them to order a thorough investigation to find out what “dirty business” really meant and exactly what kind of “contacts” the CIA had with one of the most notorious criminals in the United States. There is no record of such an investigation.

After becoming Attorney General, Robert Kennedy announced that fighting organized crime would be his “number one concern”: “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who broke up the Mafia.” He compiled a target list of forty criminals, including Giancana, Roselli, Trafficante, and his old nemesis James Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union. In the spring of 1961, the Justice Department deported the New Orleans mob leader Carlos Marcello to Central America. (He soon returned.)

Therefore, at the same time the CIA was collaborating with Giancana and other mobsters on the murder of Fidel Castro, the Attorney General was working to put them in jail. Roselli complained on a telephone line tapped by the FBI, “Here I am, helping the government, helping the country, and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.”

Decades later, investigation of the Kennedy-Mafia-Castro connection has become a cottage industry. Kennedy’s severest critics argue that in 1960 he made some kind of secret unholy alliance with Giancana and other organized crime leaders. The result: once Kennedy was President, he had to navigate between his brother’s insistence on prosecuting the Mob and whatever pledge he or his representatives might have made to Giancana and his men. Such a pledge might have included a promise to move slowly on prosecuting the Mob and fast on removing Castro.*

For Giancana, the dictator’s ouster was of no small importance. Castro’s crackdown on gambling, drug, and other interests was said to have cost the Chicago boss and his allies as much as a billion dollars per year. “That syphilitic bastard,” Giancana said in his daughter’s hearing. “Do you have any idea what he’s done to me, to our friends?”

John Kennedy’s FBI files contain considerable evidence hinting at links with underworld figures during the 1960 campaign. A March 1960 document, for instance, reports an informant’s claim that Joseph Fischetti, Meyer Lansky, and “other unidentified hoodlums” were “financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure” Kennedy’s election at the behest of the Senator’s friend Frank Sinatra.† Another report has Giancana sending his ally Paul “Skinny” D’Amato into West Virginia during the state’s crucial primary to use his influence on Kennedy’s behalf with local politicians who gambled in D’Amato’s parlors.

In the summer of 1960, before the Democratic convention, Joseph Kennedy sequestered himself at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe—an eccentric choice for a man straining that year not to embarrass his son. Partly owned by Sinatra and Giancana, the resort had a reputation as a favorite Mob gambling place and watering hole. D’Amato was its sometime manager. A report in John Kennedy’s FBI files claims that, during his stay, Joseph Kennedy was “visited by many gangsters with gambling interests.”*

In November 1960, after Giancana’s West Side Chicago bailiwick helped to win Illinois for Kennedy by 8,858 votes, the gangster boasted that he had stolen the margin responsible for Kennedy’s election. This assertion ignored the fact that Illinois’s twenty-seven electoral votes alone were insufficient to swing the election to Kennedy; if any ballots were stolen, they were more likely stolen by Mayor Richard Daley’s Democratic machine.

A more verifiable tie between Kennedy and organized crime is his relationship with the young starlet and painter Judith Campbell of Beverly Hills. The affair began in February 1960 with an introduction from Sinatra. Within a year it had enmeshed the President of the United States with a woman he knew to be the paramour of Giancana.

White House telephone logs record seventy calls in 1961 and 1962 between Campbell and the West Wing. George Smathers remembered watching Campbell being taken into the President’s private quarters by William Thompson, a railroad lobbyist and roguish mutual friend who had accompanied Kennedy and Smathers on their 1958 trip to Cuba. Smathers recalled, “When Kennedy and Thompson and I were together, they would talk about her.”†

Like his father’s odd choice of the Cal-Neva, it is doubtful that this supremely self-protective President would have risked pursuing his relationship with Campbell except for a purpose. He certainly had access to other women who lacked underworld connections that made him vulnerable to blackmail by the Mafia. Campbell herself claimed in 1988 that, at Kennedy’s request, she arranged secret meetings during the 1960 campaign during which Kennedy asked and received various forms of help from Giancana—and that during 1961 she took numerous sealed envelopes back and forth between the President and the mobster.*

Thanks to FBI eavesdropping on Giancana’s telephone, we know that as 1961 wore on, the mobster was growing more and more angry at Kennedy’s failure to call off the Justice Department. One such transcript shows Roselli egging on his boss: “You fuck them, you pay them, and then they’re through.… Now let them see the other side of you.” Giancana told an FBI agent who was trailing him that he knew “all about the Kennedys” and would one day “tell all.”

We will never be able to finally verify Campbell’s assertions about the meetings and the envelopes. Scholarship on the Mafia and on Presidents’ private lives is not subject to the same precision as the study of diplomatic history, for which there are official documents drafted and preserved according to professional standards in public archives.

In 1988, Campbell said the reason she did not tell this part of the Kennedy-Giancana tale in her 1977 memoir My Story was fear for her life. If her claim is true, the President may have continued their relationship in order to use her as courier and intermediary in an effort to move between the shoals of Robert’s insistence on pursuing the Mafia and Giancana’s threats to tell all about the President’s liaison with Campbell and about whatever alliance he felt he had formed with the Kennedys in 1960.

Campbell wondered in 1988 whether by delivering the envelopes to Giancana, she may have been “helping Jack orchestrate the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.” This is doubtful. Logistics were the CIA’s province. Giancana in 1961 was more concerned about staying out of jail. The Chicago boss may nonetheless have used what opportunities he had to pressure the President to fulfill the CIA’s plans against Cuba and the removal of the Mob’s nemesis, Fidel Castro.

The Bay of Pigs dampened the “exhilarating sense that all things were possible” that Bartlett noticed during Kennedy’s first week. The President threw a copy of Time into the fireplace to avoid reading about his failure. Robert Kennedy recalled, “We’d been through a lot of things together, and he was more upset this time than he was any other.”

In a memo on the Bay of Pigs, Robert recorded, “He felt very strongly that the Cuba operation had materially affected … his standing as President and the standing of the United States in public opinion throughout the world. We were going to have a much harder role in providing leadership. The United States couldn’t be trusted. The United States had blundered.” The President told his attorney and confidential adviser Clark Clifford that a “second Bay of Pigs” would “destroy this administration.”

During the campaign, Kennedy had promised one hundred days of “exacting presidential leadership” in the style of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Columnists and reporters now noted that he was spending his own hundredth day digging out of the rubble of the Bay of Pigs.

Being President was the “most unpleasant job in the world,” he told his friend LeMoyne Billings. “Lyndon can have it in 1964.” Billings replied that he couldn’t believe that Kennedy wanted to “turn the country over to Lyndon.” The President quickly agreed; he hadn’t been “too impressed with Lyndon in the different crises that have come up to date.” Nevertheless Billings was astonished by Kennedy’s self-deprecating gloom. When he tried to cheer him up by mentioning his post-presidential library, Kennedy retorted, “Who would want to erect a monument to a tragic administration?”

A New York advertising man, Billings had known Kennedy since they led a Choate School group of rebels that called itself “the Muckers.”* He was assigned his own room on the third floor of the White House, where he kept a set of clothing. Years later, Billings said that Kennedy “may have been the reason I never got married. I mean, I could have had a wife and a family, but what the hell. Do you think I would have had a better life having been Jack Kennedy’s best friend … having had the best friend anybody ever had—or having been married, and settled down, and living somewhere?”

After a late April luncheon at Glen Ora, Billings recorded in his diary that Kennedy “constantly blamed himself for the Cuban fiasco.… However he is still extremely upset about the advice given him by the Joint [Chiefs of] Staff.… Looking back he wonders how he could have made any other decision with all his top advisers recommending he go ahead with the plan.”

The President complained that “things can’t get better,” that “the Communists will constantly be making inroads by creating crises in all parts of the world,” getting “tougher and tougher.” The “Cuban mistake” was “so far-reaching” that even the British and other allies were now “taking cracks” at him, which “they never would have done if it hadn’t been for Cuba.”

“It was the only thing on his mind, and we just had to let him talk himself out,” recalled his friend Charles Spalding. “Before the Bay of Pigs, everything was a glorious adventure, onward and upward. Afterward, it was a series of ups and downs, with terrible pitfalls, suspicious everywhere, cautious of everything, questioning always.”

Kennedy quickly protected his political flanks by conferring with Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Rockefeller, and other eminent Republicans. He told aides that he would maintain Dulles in office for the time being to keep the Republicans off his back. “Dulles is a man,” said Robert Kennedy. “He never complained, he took all the blame on himself.”

During a private meeting with Eisenhower at Camp David, the President had to bite his tongue while his predecessor dressed him down like an errant schoolboy: “Why on earth” hadn’t he provided the exiles with air cover? Kennedy said he had feared the Soviets “would be very apt to cause trouble in Berlin.”

The veteran of Iran, Guatemala, Berlin, and the early Cuban planning gave Kennedy one of the chilling stares that the public never saw: “That is exactly the opposite of what would really happen. The Soviets follow their own plans, and if they see us show any weakness, then is when they press us the hardest.… The failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would not otherwise do.”

Kennedy said, “Well, my advice was that we must try to keep our hands from showing in the affair.” Eisenhower was aghast: “How could you expect the world to believe we had nothing to do with it? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons? … I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing: it must be a success.”

The President agreed. Eisenhower pledged to support “anything” that would prevent Communist penetration of the Western Hemisphere, but he noted that Americans would “never approve direct military intervention by their own forces, except under provocations against us so clear and so serious that everybody will understand the need for the move.”

Kennedy remained polite during Eisenhower’s stiff lecture but later blew offsteam with Billings: he had been “exceedingly unimpressed” with the General, who was “completely misinformed” and “rather pleased that all the troubles inherited from him had come to roost with the new administration because it makes Eisenhower look better.” He hoped this would be “clearly pointed out by the press.”

When Goldwater came to the Oval Office, Kennedy said, “So you want this fucking job, eh?” Later the Arizonan recalled asking Kennedy why he had ruled out the follow-up air strikes. By Gold-water’s account, the President replied that if he had not, Stevenson would have told the UN that the United States was behind the Bay of Pigs invasion. Goldwater said he told the President that he should have “let that two-time loser tell them. Then I’d fire him so fast he’d barely have time to get his coat and leave the UN.”

Kennedy asked Nixon what he would do now in Cuba. The old rival said, “I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.” Nixon felt that the President could justify a full-fledged invasion by protecting American citizens in Cuba or the Guantanamo naval base.*

The President shook his head: “Both Walter Lippmann and Chip Bohlen have reported that Khrushchev is in a very cocky mood.… This means that there is a good chance that if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin.” Nixon’s reply was almost identical to Eisenhower’s: “Khrushchev will prod and probe in several places at once. When we show weakness, he’ll create crisis to take advantage of us. We should act in Cuba and Laos, including, if necessary, a commitment of U.S. air power.”

While working to disarm Republican leaders, Kennedy also considered trying to insulate himself from their criticism on Cuba by instigating a congressional study of how the problem had been handled before 1961. Bundy dissuaded him: “There would be the heaviest Republican pressure to extend the time frame up through our own period.”

Kennedy’s feeling of betrayal by the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and to a lesser extent the State Department moved him to increase his grip on his foreign policy government. Although Sorensen had never traveled outside the United States, the President asked him to plunge into foreign affairs: “That’s what’s really important these days.” He made the same request of Robert and considered appointing him CIA Director. But the Attorney General felt the job should not go to a Democrat or a presidential brother.

Shortly after the Cuban operation had begun to collapse, Henry Brandon had encountered Bundy, who looked “absolutely white in his face” and told him, “I’m guilty.” With his lofty sense of public service, Bundy scrawled out his resignation.* Kennedy refused the letter and moved him from the Executive Office Building across the street to the West Wing basement, where Bundy would be more accessible to him and more able to dominate the flow of foreign policy information in and out of the White House.

The President established a board of inquiry on the Cuban project, chaired by the D-Day hero General Maxwell Taylor, with Robert Kennedy, Dulles, and Arleigh Burke as the other members. In The Uncertain Trumpet (1959), which Kennedy had much admired, Taylor had criticized Eisenhower for overdependence on nuclear weapons and diffidence about equipping American forces for brushfire wars and counterinsurgency.

A week after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy convened his National Security Council. Chester Bowles found the NSC meeting the “grimmest” in his government experience. Bowles thought the atmosphere “emotional, almost savage.… The President and the U.S. government had been humiliated and something must be done.”

After Bowles read aloud a long argument that Castro’s authority was untouchable by anything short of an American invasion, the Attorney General exploded: “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the President. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”

As Robert ranted on, his brother tapped a metallic pencil cap against his gleaming white teeth. Richard Goodwin later wrote, “I became suddenly aware—am now certain—that Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the President’s own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation. I knew, even then, there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.”

Dean Rusk was more worried than ever that Khrushchev might next move offensive missiles into Cuba. In early May he privately reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that in the absence of a large long-range bomber force, Russia’s ability to threaten the United States rested on a small number of submarines and ICBMs. Jet bombers and missiles based in Cuba “could reach parts of this country which may be more difficult to reach otherwise.” This would “impose a degree of blackmail upon the United States in dealing with our problems in all parts of the world.”

Someone asked why the United States did not simply blockade Cuba to keep out Soviet matériel. The Secretary of State replied that a blockade would “certainly be looked upon as an act of war. Now if we get to the point if we see missile bases and things of that sort going in there—and we can watch that very closely—we may … have to force that sort of decision.”

Kennedy’s NSC resolved in May that the United States should “retain the right to intervene” in Cuba if it became a “direct military threat to the United States” or “if Castro commits aggression against any American republic.” The Taylor Board concluded in June, “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.… While inclining personally to a positive course of action against Castro without delay, we recognize the danger of dealing with the Cuban problem outside the context of the world situation.” Still the United States was locked in a “life-and-death struggle” with the Soviet Union “which we may be losing.”*

Robert Kennedy wrote to himself that month, “The Cuban matter is being allowed to slide. Mostly because nobody really has the answer to Castro. Not many are really prepared to send American troops in there at the present time, but maybe that is the answer. Only time will tell.”

From Moscow, the Canadian Ambassador, Arnold Smith, advised his government that the Bay of Pigs, so soon after the Gagarin feat, had endowed Khrushchev with new “if perhaps exaggerated self-confidence.… I think they really believe that most broad historical forces are going their way.” He thought the mood “comparable to that of the English at the end of the Victorian Era.”

Like many Americans that spring, Smith made the mistake of falling for Khrushchev’s rhetoric. The Chairman in private was anything but self-confident. He knew that in nuclear strength his country was falling farther than ever behind the United States. Soviet advances in the Congo, Laos, Cuba, and elsewhere warmed his heart ideologically but drained rubles that he might have preferred to spend on his domestic economy. Privy to economic facts he was too embarrassed to reveal to the world, Khrushchev knew how difficult it would be to “overtake and surpass” the United States by 1970 or 1980 or 1990.

The American defeat in Cuba gave Khrushchev a propaganda opportunity. But the greater effect of Kennedy’s roll of the dice in the Caribbean was probably to upset the Chairman’s plans. Arkady Shevchenko of the Foreign Ministry, who later defected to the United States, recalled that the Bay of Pigs “intensified the anti-American temper” in the Soviet military and Presidium: by forcing Khrushchev to speak in defense of Cuba, it had the effect of “exacerbating his relations with Kennedy instead of improving them, as he had wanted.”

After Kennedy’s election, the Soviet leadership had worried that the new President’s inexperience and narrow victory margin might provoke him into international adventures that a more secure and popular President like Eisenhower would have rejected. They were baffled as the rhetoric of Kennedy’s first three months oscillated between conciliation and militance (supposing that this was a privilege only Khrushchev should enjoy).

Then came Kennedy’s decision to launch the invasion of Cuba and let it fail. From their own intelligence and postmortem articles in American magazines, the Soviets learned of Stevenson’s role in the President’s ban against a second air strike.* Some wondered whether Kennedy was so inexperienced, so intimidated by his liberal intellectual advisers, and so hypnotized by his own rhetoric about self-determination and nonintervention that when it came to using force to reclaim a nation clearly embedded in the American sphere he was immobilized. Shevchenko said the Bay of Pigs “gave Khrushchev and the other leaders the impression that Kennedy was indecisive.”

An Eastern European diplomat reminded Chester Bowles that “once Khrushchev had started to face up to the problem of Hungary, he had plowed ahead, even at the cost of thirty-two thousand dead on the streets of Budapest.… Khrushchev assumed that Kennedy would do the same thing.”

Burned into Khrushchev’s memory was the unhappy outcome of his experience with the first American President he had ever dealt with. After Camp David, he had assured colleagues that Eisenhower was a sincere “lover of peace.” Then came the U-2 affair, which caused them to wonder whether the President had not played Khrushchev for a fool.

The Chairman was not about to make the same mistake again. After Kennedy’s election, he had allowed himself to hope in public that the young man might be a “new Roosevelt.” If Kennedy could have been relied upon not to embarrass him as Eisenhower had with the U-2, it might have been in Khrushchev’s political interest to try to form a relationship with Kennedy. Even during a time of tension, if the Chairman could present himself to the rest of the Soviet leadership as someone who understood and could deal with Kennedy, this would lend him an indispensability that might make his rivals more loath to throw him out.

But after watching what he considered the inconsistency of Kennedy’s early policies toward Moscow and now the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev was doubly nervous about harnessing his political future to what he saw as an unpredictable, immature new President too doubtful about his own priorities and domestic standing to act decisively. Several weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev seemed to reveal his current private feelings about Kennedy during a speech on other matters when he interjected that he had not become head of the Soviet government because his father was a rich man.

Khrushchev now sought to protect himself with his colleagues and Chinese critics by taking a harder line toward the United States. The three months of American militance culminating in Cuba seemed too great a challenge to ignore. The slapstick incompetence and weakness displayed at the Bay of Pigs seemed too great an opportunity not to exploit.

In Washington, a Soviet official informed an American that Kennedy had “not stood his test” in the eyes of the Soviet government. The President had “uselessly wasted the political credit granted him by Khrushchev.”

Despite Kennedy’s extreme care to confide to almost no one his fear that Khrushchev would move against Berlin, it took the Chairman and his analysts little effort to notice the diamond in the chandelier. They almost certainly concluded that Kennedy was so uncertain about the American commitment to the divided city that he was willing to brook the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs rather than face a new Berlin crisis now. At a time when Khrushchev felt he had few levers of power against Kennedy and the West, he could now conclude that Berlin might serve nicely.

Nine weeks had passed since Novosibirsk, when Thompson handed Khrushchev the President’s secret letter proposing a summit meeting. For nine weeks there had been no response.

Kennedy’s proposal of a summit had been based on the hopeful atmosphere of February. Now, after his embarrassment over Cuba and the souring of relations with Moscow, he was glad to be spared the ordeal of seeing Khrushchev. In a private letter to Konrad Adenauer, he wrote that the “deterioration in the general situation” had caused him to “suspend active consideration of a meeting with Khrushchev.” As Bohlen recalled, the President “thought the matter was dead.”

The Chairman had postponed his reply for nine weeks because he was waiting to see what happened in Cuba. He had no desire to embarrass himself by meeting Kennedy in the wake of a successful American invasion that had retaken the island despite Soviet promises to defend Castro. But if there was a summit now, it would be Kennedy on the defensive. After the months of confusing signals from Washington, Khrushchev also thought it important to take Kennedy’s measure.

Another reason to ask for a summit was that Khrushchev expected the President to stage another action against Cuba in the near future, before Castro liquidated his internal enemies and the Soviets had the chance to send great numbers of weapons and advisers onto the island. He knew that Kennedy would be unlikely to invade Cuba during the period immediately before or after a summit. Thus the scheduling of a meeting would give Castro several crucial months in which to eliminate his opposition and begin building a serious defense.

At the end of April, the Chairman flashed word to a Soviet intelligence agent in Washington to contact the Americans and ask the President to make good on his offer of a Kennedy-Khrushchev summit.

*Castro may have filched some of his lines from Khrushchev. After the U-2 crashed eleven months before, the Chairman had in almost identical fashion publicly and elaborately ridiculed the deceptions in the American cover story.

*In 1957, Mao Tse-tung had gained much attention with his gibe that the West was a “paper tiger.” Khrushchev not only did not share Mao’s view, but it was one of the Chinese articles of faith he decried at the eighty-one-delegation Communist Party meeting in Moscow in November 1960.

*Burns’s conclusion was not all that rankled Kennedy and Sorensen. After Burns’s editor mailed Sorensen a sampling of praise from prominent liberals who had read the manuscript, Sorensen replied by sending Burns a list of revisions he and the Senator wanted. These, he said, were “the basis for our judgment that publication of this book in the form in which we read it would be a disaster—a major setback to the campaign and a real weapon in the hands of our opponents. We are not impressed by the fact that the liberal bigots feel the book is slanted the other way—we know that is inevitably their attitude and we know it is useless to pander to their prejudices.”

Burns made some changes in cases where he felt Kennedy and Sorensen were “justified in your point of view” but insisted to them that “there has to be ultimately only one author of the book.” This greatly irritated the candidate, and especially his brother Robert. Although Burns campaigned for Kennedy in the Wisconsin primary, their relations were never the same again. Unlike scores of academics less close to the candidate than Burns, he was never offered a place in the new administration.

*In a high school valedictory address, Sorensen said, “To prove ourselves, we must improve the world.”

*After examining the Senate papers of Kennedy and Sorensen, Parmet concluded that Kennedy “served principally as an overseer or, more charitably, as a sponsor and editor” of the book: “The burdens of time and literary craftsmanship were clearly Sorensen’s, and he gave the book both the drama and flow that made for readability.”

*During his time in prison, Trafficante had American visitors, evidently including the Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

*Although when President Gerald Ford read a secret report in 1975 on the CIA’s “family jewels,” Ford said it would ruin the reputation of “every President since Truman.”

†When the Castro plots were revealed during the Senate investigations of the mid-1970s, Helms, Bissell, and other former CIA officials “walked a fine line,” as Thomas Powers, the student of the CIA, has written. “They refused to take the rap, but declined to incriminate the President. They were good’ soldiers—up to a point. Kennedy Administration officials wisely decided not to press them. Head-scratching bafflement was the only answer these officials chose to give when asked how it could have happened.”

* Giancana and partners may have hedged their bets by asking a similar pledge of Kennedy’s opponent. Trafficante and Marcello were rumored to have given Jimmy Hoffa $500,000 in a satchel for the Nixon campaign. In December 1959, former California Congressman Oakley Hunter called on Hoffa in Miami Beach. Afterward Hunter wrote Nixon that he had told Hoffa he was interested in the Vice President’s “political future and the effect the activities of the Teamsters Union might have upon it.”

The columnist Drew Pearson later charged that in August 1960 a Florida grand jury was ready to indict Hoffa for misusing union funds but that the Eisenhower administration had “sat on it while Hoffa was helping the Republicans in the presidential campaign.” Pearson wrote that Teamster influence had been vital in “switching Ohio, considered safe for Kennedy, into the Nixon column.”

†The singer’s files included so much material on alleged Mafia connections that Eisenhower spurned Sinatra’s frequent requests through their mutual friend Freeman Gosden for a presidential audience. In January 1961, Eisenhower said he could not fathom how Kennedy could let a man like Sinatra become “so prominent in his preelection activities.”

Kennedy had met Sinatra through Peter Lawford. In 1959 and 1960, he stayed at the singer’s Palm Springs house and accompanied him to Las Vegas nightclubs. A Justice Department report from Las Vegas said that “show girls from all over the town were running in and out of the Senator’s suite.”

*Rumors of association with organized crime had floated about the father since the 1920s and 1930s, when he earned a fortune in liquor and conducted a romance with the widow of a Mafia don who had been gunned down in New York. The radio commentator Walter Winchell recalled that in the mid-thirties, after he broadcast the blind item “A top New Dealer’s mistress is a mobster’s widow,” Kennedy became “a fruitful source of news.”

†The President was more discreet with others not of his innermost circle. When Thompson began talking in Hy Raskin’s presence about women he and Kennedy had seen several nights earlier, the President jerked his head in Raskin’s direction and cut off Thompson in mid-sentence.

*She also claimed that on April 28, 1961, Kennedy and Giancana briefly met in secret at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago: “Sam arrived first and then Jack, who put his arms around me.… Sam said hello; he called him ‘Jack,’ not ‘Mr. President.’ … To give them privacy, I then went into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and waited until they were finished.” The President’s official log (which Sorensen has described as “far from complete”) asserts that on April 28 he arrived at his Conrad Hilton Hotel suite at 4:55 P.M. and remained there before departing at 7:11 P.M. for a Democratic dinner. Of course, the log mentions no meeting with Giancana, but this does not exclude the possibility that the two men did meet.

*In 1939, Kennedy wrote him, “I got an especially sickening letter from Choate wanting me to recommend a boy ‘who will carry on the traditions of the present Sixth.’ So far I have not been able to think of a big enough prick but I’m giving it a lot of thought.” After a 1945 visit to Choate, he wrote Billings, “I’m enclosing a card from the head [master] which will give you the spirit of the occasion.… I wish you would send it back as I want to save it for my children to show them what their old man’s preparatory school thought of him.”

* Later American Presidents, of course, used similar justifications to invade Grenada and Panama in 1983 and 1989.

*“You know that I wish I had served you better in the Cuban episode.… If my departure can assist you in any way, I hope you will send me off.… Your assistants are yours to use—and one use is in changing the air when that is needed.” Henry Kissinger, who was commuting from Harvard to serve the NSC as a consultant on Germany, wrote Bundy by hand, “Our society is not good at encouraging people to say the things which really matter.… If you permit me to say something which may sound corny: It is important not to be discouraged or defensive, but things must still be done, and your friends and admirers would rest easier if they knew that you will continue to play a unique, indeed a leading, part in them.”

*Dulles may have had some influence over this language. In 1954, Eisenhower had appointed a similar board, chaired by General James Doolittle, to examine the CIA. The board concluded that “we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination.… We must … learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”

*After a rash of such articles, one of McNamara’s rebellious generals, James Van Fleet, a Pentagon consultant after retiring from the Army, publicly declared that Stevenson “should have been fired” when he “would not support the armed action” at the Bay of Pigs and caused the United States to “withhold air support” for the rebels. Stevenson demanded an apology. Van Fleet announced that his comments had been taken “out of context.”