Former President Dwight Eisenhower Tells His Friend Jock Whitney That All Americans Must Be “Unified” Behind President Kennedy After the Bay of Pigs Disaster

“Let every nation know,” President John F. Kennedy declared on a frigid January afternoon during his inaugural speech, “that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It was not an idle pledge. Less than three weeks after his election in November 1960, Kennedy began plotting with his advisors how to destroy Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. (Castro had come into power in early 1959 at the age of thirty-one after overthrowing Fulgencio Batista’s government, which even Kennedy perceived as a “brutal, bloody, and despotic dictatorship.”) On the morning of April 17, 1961, Brigade 2506—comprised of an estimated fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles—went ashore at the Bay of Pigs, hoping to inspire a popular uprising. They hardly made it off the beach. Without the air and naval support they had been promised by the U.S., virtually all of the invaders were easily overwhelmed by Castro’s forces. Many were killed. “I am taking to the swamps,” radioed one survivor to his American contact. “I can’t wait for you. And you, sir, are a son of a bitch.” The assault was a public relations catastrophe for the young American president, and he called on his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for advice. The two men met for lunch at Camp David on April 22, and a few days later Eisenhower wrote a personal letter to his old friend John Hay “Jock” Whitney to express his views on the debacle.

April 24, 1961

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Jock:

After talking to you on the phone, I began to fear that I might have expressed myself unclearly or inadequately, and this decided me to write you.

My feeling is that particularly in any period of crisis—and the present is one of strain—the attitude of all Americans must be of a unified front before the world—and this can be achieved only by support of our Constitutional leader. This does not mean blind approval of every diplomatic or operational tactic, but it does place upon each of us such a burden of personal responsibility that any criticism, if voiced, must be clearly on the constructive and helpful, and if possible, on the confidential side.

The foregoing deals, as I said, with basic considerations applying to the citizen’s duty. While all of us support the purpose of excluding Communism from our hemisphere, the details of techniques, timing and other deciding factors in the Cuban operation may never be known to all of us until history will make them available. We of course could neither approve nor disapprove of these unless such knowledge should be in our hands.

Since the Administration has already said that a military man is to be called in from the outside to examine into all these things and point up lessons from the experience, I assume that the added intention is to make these findings public, although even on this point I have no assurance. But if the assumption is correct, I see no reason for failing to express an opinion at that time as to the wisdom or unwisdom of any such detail and to editorialize concerning the matter if in your judgement this seems desirable.

You will recall that in the U-2 incident—which in magnitude and in real significance to our nation was not to be compared with what we now know about the action in Cuba—newspaper and political criticism was frequently bitter and persistent. It may be because of the newness of the present Administration that both editors and political leaders are making excuses for lack of experience and therefore exercising some moderation in these respects. Whatever the reason I approve of the moderation.

We cannot now be speaking to the world with many voices. There will be plenty of time when the facts all become known to the public to express personal and institutional convictions on the matter. None of this means that we surrender our wills and our souls to any one individual or to any one idea, but I believe that our own enlightened self-interest compels us to take an attitude that gives the fact and the appearance of strength in unity, not of futility in division. Timing, in such criticisms, could easily become just as important as was the matter of timing in the action under discussion.

When Batista was dictator of Cuba, he was of course a thorn in our sides. While he appeared to be friendly enough to the United States, it had been for many years our policy to try to develop Latin American governments that were responsive to the will of their people rather than agencies of repression. So when Castro started fighting in the hills, we were very much in favor of his success except that we suspected one of two things might happen. The first was that he might take his government, when established, into the Communist camp, and the other—which would have followed the traditional Latin American pattern—to establish himself as just another dictator in that region.

We of course watched developments very carefully and as quickly as Castro succeeded in driving Batista out of the country, we found that he was turning into a vindictive and almost irrational type of man that we would have to watch very closely indeed. Within a short time his selection of assistants who were known Communists and his establishment of close and friendly ties with the Soviets convinced us that we had a real problem on our hands.

It was not long after this that refugees began coming out of Cuba, many of them landing in Florida, others in different countries of the hemisphere. Those remaining in Cuba were helpless under the strong arm methods of Castro and, of course, successful revolution can come from only one source—the people of the country affected. But the refugee bands grew rapidly in numbers and these included many of the natural leaders of the country. It was only natural that they began to plan the overthrow of Castro and their return to their homeland. For a time the different bands and leaders seemed to be pulling in different directions, and it was likely that each leading figure wanted to become the “Big Boss.” In the meantime, however, all of them wanted to get the equipment and the training by which they could hope, when the time came, to overthrow the new dictator.

In March, 1960, our government decided to move forward in several ways, the most important of which were propaganda, and training and equipping of volunteer refugees. Locations were selected where the training could go forward. But much time consuming work had to be done by the refugees themselves.

Up to the time that I left the White House, no definite plans had been made, or could have been made, for a future invasion, to say nothing of such details as timing, location, strength and the commander of the invasion forces.

Two other factors helped slow up the development and for this I think the two principal reasons were the lack of early action on the part of the refugees themselves to choose a man who would, in effect, head a government-in-exile, and so energize the whole movement, and the other was the need for keeping the matter as nearly secret as possible. It was clear, of course, that finally all these matters would become known, but under the circumstances that then existed, specific planning was impossible.

All of the above is meant for your eyes only; it may be or may not be helpful. It is one of those things that cannot be completely black or completely white, and we have to deal with it with this truth always in our minds.

Give my love to Betsey and, of course, the best to yourself.

As ever,

D.E.

The repercussions of the Bay of Pigs invasion extended far beyond mere national humiliation. In August 1961 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev brazenly defied the West by constructing a twenty-eight-mile wall around East Berlin to keep its citizens from fleeing to the West. Fourteen months later the Kennedy administration discovered that Soviet nuclear weapons were being installed in Cuba. (Castro had aligned himself with the Soviet Union after the Bay of Pigs and allowed the Soviets to use Cuba as a military base.) Just ninety miles from the U.S., the missiles could kill an estimated eighty million Americans within minutes of being launched. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island and demanded that Khrushchev have the remaining missiles dismantled. After the world held its breath for nearly two excruciating weeks, the Soviets relented. (Khrushchev was appeased by Kennedy’s pledge that the United States would not attempt another invasion of Cuba and that it would remove its missiles from Turkey.) In the decade to come, the world’s attention would turn to the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam, where the United States would become embroiled in its longest and most divisive war of the twentieth century.