I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
—Abraham Lincoln, April 4, 1864
Though the President is Commander-in-Chief, Congress is his commander.
—Thaddeus Stevens, January 3, 1867
ALTHOUGH KENNEDY DISCOURAGED the belief that his first hundred days would produce major achievements, he understood that to sustain the momentum created by his inaugural he would need quickly to demonstrate a mastery of some issues. He doubted that he could do it in domestic affairs. At his first press conference five days after becoming president, a reporter asked him why his inaugural speech had dealt only with international problems. “Well,” Kennedy replied, “because the issue of war and peace is involved, and the survival of perhaps the planet, possibly our system.” He also explained that the views of his administration on domestic affairs were already well known to the American people and would become better known in the next month. By contrast, he said, “we are new… on the world scene, and therefore I felt there would be some use in informing countries around the world of our general view on the questions which… divide the world.”
Fourteen years in Washington had taught Kennedy that presidents had greater control over foreign than domestic policy and had a better chance of promoting national unity with foreign initiatives than domestic ones, which were certain to provoke acrimonious political divisions. Yet he also understood that he could not shelve domestic issues, despite a conviction that Congress would not agree to bold reforms. The House promised to be a particular problem. Although the Democrats held an 89-seat advantage, 262 to 173, 101 of the Democrats were from the Old South, and a majority of them seemed certain to side with conservative Republicans on domestic issues. Worse, conservative southerners Howard Smith of Virginia and William Colmer of Mississippi dominated the twelve-member House Rules Committee, which decided whether a bill would reach the House floor for a vote. Smith and Colmer invariably joined the four Republicans on the committee in turning back reform proposals. To give his administration a better chance of eventually winning House support for economic, education, health, and civil rights reforms, and to signal his determination to fight for these gains, Kennedy joined Speaker Sam Rayburn in trying to expand the committee to fifteen members, including two more progressive Democrats.
The fight on the Rules Committee was a formidable first test of Kennedy’s political skills. When a reporter asked him at his January 25 news conference whether he was living up to his commitment to be in the thick of the political battle, Kennedy voiced his support for Rayburn’s proposed change, saying that the whole House should have the opportunity to vote on the many controversial measures that his administration would present and that a small group of men should not prevent the majority of members from “letting their judgments be known.” At the same time, however, he declared his commitment to allowing the House “to settle this matter in its own way” and pledged not to “infringe upon that responsibility. I merely give my view as an interested citizen,” he concluded with a broad smile and to the amusement of the press corps, which erupted in laughter. The fight, which lasted eleven days, was touch and go, and moved Bobby at one uncertain moment to phone Richard Bolling of Missouri, who was a leading reform advocate, to complain that he was destroying his brother by getting him into a battle he was going to lose. “Bullshit, buddy,” Bolling told him. “It’s a tough fight and we’re going to win it.” Which they did, on January 31, by a 217 to 212 vote.
Bolling acknowledged later that the victory over Smith and the other conservatives on the Rules Committee actually guaranteed nothing, since the composition of the House made it difficult for Kennedy to exploit the change in the committee. Because Kennedy anticipated such a problem and because he wished to create some sense of forward movement on domestic problems, he began his administration with executive actions that signaled his determination to get things done with or without the Congress.
As one of his first Executive Orders, Kennedy directed the Agriculture Department to increase food distributions to the unemployed, which would ensure that they received a more varied diet. The press wanted to know how Kennedy could do something that Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s agriculture secretary, said he lacked legislative authority for. Kennedy refused to comment on Benson’s inaction, but assured the journalists that he had the power to act and emphasized instead that the diet provided to the unemployed was “still inadequate.” It was smart politics and bolstered him with liberals: Let’s not quibble over fine points of the law, he was saying, when the fundamental right to an adequate diet is at stake.
Civil rights reform was more difficult to manage. Kennedy’s only mention of racial justice in his inaugural address was a sentence describing America as committed to human rights at home and around the world. He understood that a southern-dominated Congress was unlikely to advance black equality by legislative action, despite passage in 1957 of the first civil rights law since 1875. To win approval of more progressive measures would have meant investing much of his political capital in a potentially losing fight. Consequently, he intended to rely on executive authority in behalf of racial equality to satisfy liberals and encourage blacks to expect more and bolder steps in the future.
As an opening move, Kennedy appointed Robert C. Weaver, a black expert on housing, as administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA). In a meeting with JFK, Weaver asked for assurances that Kennedy would make him secretary of a housing and urban affairs department, should Congress create one, but Kennedy would not commit himself; persuading Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia senators to confirm Weaver as head of HHFA was challenge enough. Although complaining that Weaver was “pro-Communist,” southern Democrats, reluctant to undermine their party’s new president, grudgingly agreed to accept Kennedy’s recommendation.
Kennedy also established a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) to eliminate discrimination in hiring federal employees, help expand the number of black government workers, and deny federal contracts to businesses refusing equal opportunity to blacks. Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson to chair the committee. Johnson was reluctant to take on an assignment that could antagonize southern congressmen and senators and undermine his chances of ever running for president. But Kennedy, who believed that Johnson could help blunt southern opposition to civil rights advances, was insistent, and Johnson, who had led the 1957 civil rights bill through Congress and sincerely believed in equal justice, accepted the challenge.
Kennedy’s strategy on civil rights became public immediately after he took office. As he watched coast guard marchers troop by during the inaugural parade, he noted the absence of blacks in their ranks and instructed his treasury secretary, who had jurisdiction over the coast guard, to bring them into that branch of the service. Similarly, at his first cabinet meeting, he asked each cabinet secretary to expand opportunities for blacks in his department. He took special note of the foreign service, where he felt an absence of blacks hurt America’s image abroad. He appointed Clifford R. Wharton as ambassador to Norway, the first African American to become the top U.S. diplomat in a predominantly white country.
By the middle of February, Kennedy’s dealings with the Congress had confirmed his judgment that he could not secure passage of a significant civil rights bill in the current session. Winning a cloture vote to halt a filibuster by southerners was clearly out of reach. But he did not want anyone to think that he was abandoning civil rights reform. On February 16, he told White House aide Mike Feldman to maintain close contact with Pennsylvania senator Joe Clark and Brooklyn congressman Emanuel Celler, whom he had asked to implement the civil rights commitments of the platform. “It may be proper for them to hold hearings this year on various legislative proposals and then have the fight next year,” Kennedy wrote Feldman, “but I don’t want statements to be issued that we have withdrawn our support of this matter.” The announcement on April 7, 1961, that pursuant to Executive Order 10925, issued by Kennedy on March 6, the CEEO would begin its work heartened some of those disappointed at the new administration’s failure to ask Congress for a major civil rights law guaranteeing equal treatment in places of public accommodation and the right to vote.
Kennedy gained additional standing with civil rights advocates by opposing the slated expiration in the fall of the Civil Rights Commission, a six-member agency mandated to keep watch on the state of civil rights around the country. As a signal that he would not let the commission die, Kennedy asked sitting commissioners John Hannah and Father Theodore Hesburgh to continue to serve. Although willing, they doubted that Kennedy would take bold initiatives. When Hesburgh emphasized the urgency of action by citing statistics about the absence of blacks in southern state universities and in the Alabama National Guard, Kennedy replied, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.” It was a clear signal of Kennedy’s priorities.
Understanding the constraints on Kennedy, Hannah and Hesburgh wanted the commission to exert counterpressure by having special access to the White House through a liaison. Kennedy said that Harris Wofford, whom he had made a full-time special assistant on civil rights, was already on the job, which was false. But Hannah and Hesburgh responded that Wofford was taking an office at the administration’s new Peace Corps. Kennedy replied, “That’s only temporary.” As soon as they had left, a Kennedy aide called Wofford to come to the White House at once. There, “a solemn-looking man in a dark suit, carrying a book,” approached Wofford. The man said that the president had ordered him to swear Wofford in, although neither he nor Wofford knew to what position. Wofford swore to uphold the Constitution and then was ushered into the Oval Office. Kennedy made it clear that Wofford would become a special assistant to the president on civil rights and would devote himself to making sure that civil rights advocates were “not too unhappy, and beyond that [Kennedy] wanted to make substantial headway against what he considered the nonsense of racial discrimination.” The strategy for 1961, he told Wofford, was “minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.”In March, when two conservative Civil Rights Commission members resigned, Kennedy appointed antisegregationists, who won Senate approval over the objections of southerners. At the same time, however, Kennedy hesitated to make a direct request to Congress to extend the life of the commission. Reluctant to risk losing ground on civil rights by a possible negative vote in Congress, he kept the agency alive by executive action.
In the first hundred days, the economy was Kennedy’s biggest domestic worry. The 1960 recession that had helped elect him continued into 1961. In his State of the Union Message on January 30, he made economic expansion his primary domestic goal. “We take office,” he declared, “in the wake of seven months of recession, three and one half years of slack, seven years of diminished economic growth, and nine years of falling farm income.” With five and a half million unemployed—nearly 7 percent of the workforce—and business bankruptcies at their highest level since the Great Depression, Kennedy justifiably described the economy as “in trouble. The most resourceful industrialized country on earth ranks among the last in the rate of economic growth,” he said.
But, as with civil rights, Kennedy felt he had limited capacity to force immediate change. He had already ruled out a tax cut as politically unacceptable when he was asking people to sacrifice for the good of the country. Nor did he believe that he could force a big economic program through Congress that included spending a lot of money on public works programs. When one liberal economist proposed a 60 percent increase in the federal deficit in order to help with unemployment, Kennedy told him: “With the seven percent unemployment we have now, ninety-three percent of the people in the country are employed. That other seven percent isn’t going to get enough political support to do it. I don’t believe that, right or wrong, there’s any possibility of doing the kind of all-out economic operation that you want.” Nor was he inclined to talk conservative Federal Reserve chairman William McChesney Martin into reducing interest rates, another means liberals saw for stimulating a recovery. He thought a rate reduction would antagonize bankers, as would replacing Martin, and would worsen the country’s balance of payments by discouraging foreign investments in U.S. Treasury bonds.
So once again, he relied on executive action. A special message to Congress on February 2 cautioned against expecting “to make good in a day or even a year the accumulated deficiencies of several years.” It was better to be “realistic” about what they could achieve in 1961: reverse the downward trend, narrow the gap of unused potential, “abate the waste and misery of unemployment,” and maintain reasonable price stability. Then, in 1962–63, they could hope to expand “American productive capacity at a rate that shows the world the vigor and vitality of a free economy.” Kennedy announced more rapid federal spending on building highways and post offices; speedier payment of tax refunds, veteran benefits, and farm subsidies; and stepped-up efforts to implement urban renewal programs. Wherever possible, federal purchasing would be channeled into areas of high unemployment. State and local governments were also urged to spend federal allocations for public programs as fast as possible. Recognizing that these proposals might not promptly “restore momentum to the American economy,” Kennedy promised that “if these measures prove to be inadequate to the task, I shall submit further proposals to the Congress within the next 75 days.”
After only six weeks, however, with evidence that the economy was getting weaker rather than stronger, CEA chairman Walter Heller had prepared a “second-stage recovery program.” As Kennedy joked at the press’s annual Gridiron dinner in early March, “The Secretary of Treasury reported that the worst of the recession was not yet spent—but everything else was.”
Heller may have had “profiles in courage” in mind as he urged Kennedy to do the right thing for the economy—a tax cut, lower interest rates, and deficit spending—without regard for political constraints. But liberal economists Paul Samuelson and Leon Keyserling had little confidence that Kennedy would respond positively to such an appeal. Keyserling, who was particularly cynical about Kennedy, said, “Kennedy never thought of anything except in terms of how it will affect [him] in reelection four years from now.” Keyserling was being far too critical. The political consequences of a failed economic initiative with Congress and the Federal Reserve were unquestionable constraints on Kennedy, but he nevertheless asked the CEA to develop “bold” proposals for implementation should the economy continue a slow recovery from its latest decline.
Happily for Kennedy, an upturn that became evident in early April freed him from having to make immediate hard choices about the economy. “The financial program of the Administration is now beginning to show impressive results,” the CEA told him. At the end of May, Heller reported a likely $9 billion rise in GNP from the first to the second quarter, with an additional $50 billion expansion forecast over the next fifteen months. Although Heller did not expect this economic growth to reduce unemployment much below 6 percent, it further eased Kennedy’s need to invest political capital in bold economic measures to get the country moving again.
As it was, he could take comfort from the fact that administration proposals being enacted by Congress—an Area Redevelopment Act aimed at depressed regions, a twenty-five-cent rise in the minimum wage to $1.25, expanded Social Security benefits, and a nearly $5 billion low-and-middle-income-housing bill—were promising to provide enough economic stimulation to make Americans more hopeful about the future. In early March, 35 percent of Americans had expressed the belief that more people in their community would be out of work in the next six months, but by late April, only 18 percent said this. In the same two polls, the number of optimists about the economy increased from 34 to 58 percent.
Judging from a series of other opinion surveys from March and April, the public was warmly disposed toward Kennedy’s presidency. On March 13, Newsweek reported that the “new, young, and untried President… now had the great part of the American people behind him.” Lou Harris told JFK that his approval rating was at 92 percent, and Gallup put it at a still-impressive 72 percent. Kennedy understood that more than economic steps and hopes were generating public goodwill. Even before his inauguration, columnist Joe Alsop thought Kennedy had changed the public mood. “I don’t think you’ve put a foot wrong since election day,” Alsop told him. “It’s been an astonishing performance…. I can all but see my friends, including a most surprising number of Republican friends, breathing in new hope, and… getting ready to move forward in the rough times that lie ahead.” One Kennedy aide ascribed the shift to “the simple fact that an active, do-something administration has now replaced a passive, do-nothing administration.”
Kennedy himself believed that weekly press conferences, which were broadcast live on television and radio for the first time in American history, were making a difference. Apprehensions that live appearances with occasional inadvertent statements might have “grave consequences” did not deter him. Columnist James Reston, warning that the format could lead to a catastrophe, characterized it as “the goofiest idea since the hula hoop.” But convinced that such fears were overdrawn and that direct communication with the public made the small risk of misstatements worth taking, Kennedy dismissed the concerns as unwarranted.
He also knew that news conferences allowed him to put his intelligence and wit on display. Schlesinger remembered the conferences as “a superb show, always gay, often exciting, relished by the reporters and by the television audience…. The conferences,” he added, “offered a showcase for a number of [Kennedy’s] most characteristic qualities—the intellectual speed and vivacity, the remarkable mastery of the data of government, the terse self-mocking wit, the exhilarating personal command.” Some of his funniest responses, which he gave at breakfast prep sessions, were too barbed for public consumption. Still, he thought of these conferences as “The 6 O’Clock Comedy Hour.”
His quick mastery of the press interviews before TV cameras and microphones persuaded Kennedy that “we couldn’t survive without TV.” It allowed him not only to charm the public, but also to reach people directly without the editorializing of the news media through interpretation or omission. Perhaps most important, whether on television or in person, Kennedy came across to the public as believable. Unlike Nixon, who never overcame a reputation for deceitfulness, Kennedy’s manner—his whole way of speaking, choice of words, inflection, and steady gaze—persuaded listeners to take him at his word. And the public loved it. By April 1962, a Gallup poll would show that nearly three out of every four adults in the country had seen or heard one or more of the president’s news conferences. Ninety-one percent of them had a favorable impression of his performance; only 4 percent were negative. In addition, by a 61 to 32 percent margin, Americans favored the spontaneous TV format.
ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENTS in relations with the Soviet Union from the first week of Kennedy’s presidency also contributed to his high approval ratings. Back in July 1960, a U.S. patrol plane had been lost while flying a mission over the Barents Sea north of Russia. Ten days later, Moscow had announced that the plane had invaded its air space and been shot down but that two crew members had survived and were in Soviet custody. During the next six months—the remainder of Eisenhower’s term—the two governments argued about the appropriateness of the Soviet attack. After Kennedy’s inauguration, Khrushchev had announced that “step by step, it will be possible to remove existing suspicion and distrust and cultivate seeds of friendship and practical cooperation.” Kennedy’s noncommittal response that his government stood ready “to cooperate with all who are prepared to join in genuine dedication to the assurance of a peaceful and a more fruitful life for all mankind” suggested that the new administration would measure Khrushchev’s words by future deeds.
At his first press conference, on January 25, Kennedy announced that the Soviets had released the two fliers. Khrushchev privately revealed that just before the election, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson had told him that if he released the fliers, “he would set himself in right with Mr. Nixon.” But Nixon’s reputation as an anticommunist ideologue and Khrushchev’s falling-out with Eisenhower over the U-2 incident had made Moscow partial to a more flexible Democrat like Kennedy. The Soviet decision to release the fliers after January 20 was a gift to the new president that gave Kennedy instant credibility as a foreign policy leader. In response, Kennedy declared that Moscow had “removed a serious obstacle to harmonious relations.”
Kennedy’s responses to unauthorized public statements by U.S. military chiefs demonstrated that he intended to assert the closest possible control over the making of foreign policy, particularly toward Moscow. His critical view of some World War II navy chiefs, skepticism about investing so much in defense at the expense of foreign economic aid, and a January 17, 1961, Eisenhower farewell speech warning against “unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex” had increased Kennedy’s sensitivity to what Ike described as “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Speeches by Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, on the U.S.-Soviet rivalry particularly impressed Kennedy as destructive to potential initiatives for easing tensions. Arthur Sylvester, McNamara’s press officer, remembers that he “hardly had been in the damn job, didn’t even know where the men’s room was,” when the navy chief of information brought him a speech in which “this stupid Burke was going to… [attack] the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast not knowing all the facts.” Sylvester took the speech to the White House, where Kennedy ordered Burke to rein in his rhetoric. “You old son-of-a-bitch,” Burke told Sylvester, “I’ll write a new speech.” Burke apparently leaked the story to the New York Times, which brought charges of muzzling from senators on the Armed Services Committee. But seeing limits on the military as essential to gains in Soviet-American relations, Kennedy told Sylvester, “Arthur, the greatest thing that’s happened in the first three months of my administration was your stopping the Burke speech.” To prevent Burke and other military chiefs from publicly challenging Kennedy’s freedom to make conciliatory gestures toward Moscow, the administration announced in January that all officers on active duty would have to clear public statements with the White House.
The clash with Burke, followed by a McNamara revelation in February that there was no missile gap, encouraged public faith in Kennedy’s foreign policy leadership. Initially, the missile gap revelation threatened to embarrass the president by suggesting that he had used national defense for cynical purposes during the campaign. And indeed, when McNamara told reporters in a background briefing that the United States had more operational missiles than the Soviets, it provoked a furor in the press. Kennedy refused to confirm McNamara’s assertion, saying at a news conference that a study was under way to determine the facts and that it was “premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap.”
But to Kennedy’s surprise, the issue did not resonate with the public. On the contrary, it seemed to care much less about who had said what about the missile gap than about America’s advantage over Moscow. It was as if Kennedy’s presence in the White House had magically granted the United States military superiority over the Soviet Union. In April 1960, 50 percent of the country had believed it a good idea to raise taxes to help eliminate the missile gap. A few days after the press reported McNamara’s comment, 49 percent of Americans accepted that the United States was stronger than Russia, while only 30 percent continued to think that it was the reverse. By June, despite little additional press discussion of the issue, 54 percent of Americans believed that the United States led Moscow in long-range missiles and rockets, with only 20 percent seeing the Soviets as ahead. The public was more concerned that the Soviets seemed to be eclipsing the United States in a global contest for hearts and minds. Sixty-six percent wanted to equal Moscow’s public relations budget to tell “our side of the story to Europe and the world.”
Kennedy partly satisfied the national yearning to outdo Moscow in the promotion of national values by setting up the Peace Corps. The proposal had originated with Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy had been considering the idea for a number of months, having discussed it during a late-night campaign stop at the University of Michigan. On March 1, he issued an Executive Order authorizing the dispatch of American men and women “to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower.” The corps was not to be “an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict.” Instead, it would allow “our people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the great common cause of world development.” And life in the corps would “not be easy.” Volunteers would receive “no salary and allowances will be at a level sufficient only to maintain health and meet basic needs. Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals of the country in which they are stationed—doing the same work, eating the same food, talking the same language.” Kennedy hoped that service in the corps would be “a source of satisfaction to Americans and a contribution to world peace.”
The response in the United States to the proposal was all Kennedy hoped it would be. Seventy-one percent of Americans declared themselves in favor of such a program, and thousands of young Americans volunteered to share in the adventure of helping less-advantaged peoples around the world. Over the next two years, the program maintained a high profile among Americans and overseas, with 74 percent of the American public well-disposed toward the work of the corps.
One measure of the program’s success was the antagonism it generated in Moscow and among some Third World citizens. They complained that the Peace Corps was nothing more than a propaganda trick that would also allow the CIA to plant agents in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Critics dubbed the corps “Kennedy’s Kiddie Korps,” “a lot of kids bouncing around the world in Bermuda shorts.” But Kennedy understood that the corps would help combat Soviet depictions of the United States as a typical capitalist country, entirely self-interested and only too willing to take advantage of weaker, dependent nations. He knew that American self-interest and idealism were not mutually exclusive; indeed, one was as much a part of the national tradition as the other. And he believed that Peace Corps workers would make a genuine contribution not only to the well-being of the peoples they served but also to U.S. national security by encouraging emerging nations to take the United States rather than Soviet Russia as their model.
To underscore the Peace Corps’ commitment to idealistic aims, Kennedy appointed Sargent Shriver as director. Shriver later joked that JFK chose him because no one thought it could succeed, “and it would be easier to fire a relative than a political friend.” But, in fact, Kennedy picked him because he was a recognized idealist who believed that “if you do good, you’ll do well” and wished to do his “best for folks who couldn’t do theirs.” Shriver was known for the motivating mottoes on his office walls. “There is no place in this club for good losers,” one said. “Bring me only bad news; good news weakens me,” another declared. He was also a man of unquestioned integrity and boundless energy. He directed that no member of the corps was to engage in any diplomatic activities or intelligence gathering. “Their only job was to help people help themselves,” he told them. He was indefatigable, working sometimes until three or four o’clock in the morning. He wanted only devoted evangelists around him, telling the chairman of AT&T that he wished there were a telephone system that “had us all plugged in like an umbilical cord so we could never get away.”
The Peace Corps proved to be one of the enduring legacies of Kennedy’s presidency. As with some American domestic institutions like Social Security and Medicare, the Peace Corps became a fixture that Democratic and Republican administrations alike would continue to finance for over forty years. It made far more friends than enemies and, as Kennedy had hoped, convinced millions of people abroad that the United States was eager to help developing nations raise standards of living.
In no region of the world was Kennedy more determined to encourage a positive image of the United States than in Latin America. Fidel Castro’s summons to peoples of the Western Hemisphere to throw off the yoke of U.S. domination challenged Kennedy to offer a competing message of hope that countered convictions about Yankee imperialism. Khrushchev deepened Kennedy’s concern in January 1961, when he publicly declared Moscow on the side of “wars of national liberation.” Kennedy believed that Khrushchev’s speech “made clear the pattern of military and paramilitary infiltration and subversion which could be expected under the guise of ‘wars of liberation.’ ” Kennedy told his ambassador to Peru that “Latin America required our best efforts and attention.” This was not simply rhetoric on Kennedy’s part: His presidency generated more documents and files on Cuba than on the USSR and Vietnam combined.
Part of Kennedy’s response to the communist challenge in Latin America was the Alliance for Progress. He believed it essential for the United States to put itself on the side of social change in the hemisphere. He understood, said Schlesinger, whose White House work included Alliance projects, “that, with all its pretensions to realism, the militant anti-revolutionary line represented the policy most likely to strengthen the communists and lose the hemisphere. He believed that, to maintain contact with a continent seized by the course of revolutionary change, a policy of social idealism was the only true realism for the United States.” Though Kennedy would not be able to resist pressures for old-fashioned interventionism, and though he worried that the problems of the southern republics might prove more intractable than he imagined, he nevertheless enthusiastically proposed an alliance between the United States and Latin America to advance economic development, democratic institutions, and social justice. He believed that the contest with communism and old-fashioned American idealism dictated nothing less.
On March 13, in a speech before congressional leaders and hemisphere ambassadors in the East Room of the White House, Kennedy spoke passionately about the opportunity to realize the dream articulated by Simón Bolívar 139 years before of making the Americas into the greatest region in the world. “Never in the long history of our hemisphere has this dream been nearer to fulfillment, and never has it been in greater danger,” Kennedy said. Science had provided the tools “to strike off the remaining bonds of poverty and ignorance. Yet at this very moment of maximum opportunity, we confront the same forces which have imperiled America throughout its history—the alien forces which once again seek to impose the despotisms of the Old World on the people of the New…. Let me be the first to admit,” Kennedy disarmingly acknowledged, “that we North Americans have not always grasped the significance of this common mission, just as it is also true that many in your own countries have not fully understood the urgency of the need to lift people from poverty and ignorance and despair.” He then called on “all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—Alianza para Progreso—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”
Kennedy, who had little facility for foreign languages or much talent for pronouncing them (his struggles with high school Latin and French are well documented), had spent part of the afternoon before giving his speech practicing his Spanish. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had drafted the address, tried to help him, but it was pretty useless. Amused at his own imperfect pronunciations, Kennedy asked Goodwin later, “How was my Spanish?” “Perfect,” Goodwin lied. “I thought you’d say that,” Kennedy said with a grin.
Although everyone in the room understood that Kennedy was launching a memorable program and that he sincerely wanted to achieve a dramatic change in relations with the southern republics and in their national lives, the president’s rhetoric did not dispel all doubts. One speech, however sincerely delivered, was not enough to convince the audience that traditional U.S. neglect of the region—the conviction, as Henry Kissinger later facetiously put it, that Latin America is a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica—was at an end. Latin American representatives to the United States also believed that American idealism was little more than a tool for combating the communist challenge. Some derisively called the Alliance for Progress the Fidel Castro Plan.
There was some justification in the Latin American dismissal of the Alliance. Kennedy and the great majority of Americans could not ignore Soviet rhetoric and actions, which demonstrated a determination to undermine U.S. power and influence by propaganda, subversion, and communist revolutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. True, Khrushchev ruled out a nuclear war as madness, a prescription for destroying hundreds of millions of lives and civilization. But his assertions about Soviet missile superiority and predictions that communism would win control of Third World countries made it impossible for Kennedy or any American president to set Khrushchev’s challenge aside.
In private, Kennedy was never a knee-jerk anticommunist. In a meeting with a group of Soviet experts on February 11, he displayed “a mentality extraordinarily free of preconceived prejudices, inherited or otherwise… almost as though he had thrown aside the normal prejudices that beset human mentality,” State Department Soviet expert Charles Bohlen said. “He saw Russia as a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.”
Kennedy friend and British economist Lady Barbara Ward Jackson urged Kennedy to mount “a sustained offensive on current clichés” in a speech she proposed he give before the United Nations General Assembly. “The animosities, the festering fears of the Cold War so cloud our minds and our actions that we no longer see reality save through the distorting mirrors of malevolent ill-will.” She paraphrased W. H. Auden, “We must love each other or/ We must die.” Kennedy, who had promised to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,” was sympathetic to Jackson’s appeal. But he saw no way to go before the U.N., or, more to the point, before the country’s many cold warriors, and quote Auden about the choice between love and death. Perhaps he might eventually “find another forum,” he told Jackson, “in which to present your thoughts, which are important.”
NUCLEAR WAR was Kennedy’s “greatest nightmare,” Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, “I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election.” He had assured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would “help you to proceed—unhindered by thoughts of the coming election—with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace.”
Once in office, Kennedy made clear to his subordinates that he was eager to sign a test ban treaty. He saw it as “in the overall interest of the national security of the United States to make a renewed and vigorous attempt to negotiate a test ban agreement.” But the Soviets, whose nuclear inferiority to the United States made them reluctant to conclude a treaty, showed little inclination in talks at Geneva to sustain a current informal ban on testing. The Soviet “stand at Geneva,” Kennedy told British prime minister Harold Macmillan in April, “raises the question of whether to break off the talks and under what conditions. There is a great deal of pressure here to renew tests,” Kennedy added. Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric remembers that “every approach toward arms control” agitated opposition among some in the White House, the State Department, and especially the military. “They felt this was as much of a foe or a threat as the Soviet Union or Red China. They had just a built-in, negative… knee-jerk reaction to anything like this.” If it became necessary for the United States to resume testing, JFK told West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it must be clear to the world that this was done “only in the light of our national responsibility.”
However strong his determination to avoid a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, Kennedy could not rule out the possibility. The Soviet acquisition of a nuclear arsenal had provoked American military planners into advocacy of a massive first-strike stockpile, or what they called “a war-fighting capability over a finite deterrent [or] (retaliatory) posture.” They believed that the more pronounced the United States’ nuclear advantage over Moscow was, the more likely it would be “to stem Soviet cold war advances.” But such a strategy would also mean an arms race, which seemed likely to heighten the danger of a war. It was a miserable contradiction from which Kennedy was never able entirely to escape.
The possibility, under “command control” rules he had inherited from Eisenhower, that “a subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” added to JFK’s worries about the inadvertent outbreak of a nuclear conflict. When Henry Brandon asked Strategic Air commander General Thomas Powers “whether he was not worried by the fearful power he had at his fingertips, he said he was more worried by the civilian control over him and equally frightened by both.” Gilpatric said later, “We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the President really had over the use of this great arsenal of [thousands of] nuclear weapons.” A February 15 report from a subcommittee of the Atomic Energy Commission reviewing NATO procedures deepened Kennedy’s concern that accidental use of a nuclear weapon “might trigger a world war.” In response, Kennedy tried to guard against a mishap and to assure himself of exclusive control over the nuclear option. But even with this greater authority, the conviction of the military chiefs that in any Soviet-American war we would have to resort to nuclear force made Kennedy feel that he might be pressured into using these weapons against his better judgment.
Perhaps not surprisingly, from the start of his term, Kennedy felt little rapport with the military chiefs. His World War II memories of uninspiring commanders with poor judgment, military miscalculations in the Korean fighting, and the Eisenhower policy of massive retaliation made him distrustful of the U.S. defense establishment. Specifically, neither Kennedy nor McNamara saw Lyman Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, taking “the lead in bringing the military along to a new doctrine such as flexible response,” the freedom to choose from a wider array of military responses in a conflict with the Soviet Union. And of course Burke had already fallen out of favor.
Kennedy’s greatest tensions, however, were with NATO commander General Lauris Norstad and air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay. Harvard’s dean of faculty McGeorge Bundy, whom Kennedy had brought to Washington as national security adviser, told the president that Norstad “is a nuclear war man,” meaning that he believed any war with the Soviet Union would quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange if the United States were to have any hope of emerging victorious. Bundy urged Kennedy to make clear to Norstad that “you are in charge and that your views will govern…. If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss.”
LeMay was even more of a problem. In charge of firebombings on Japan during World War II and the Berlin airlift in 1948–49, he enjoyed widespread public support. A gruff, cigar-chewing, outspoken advocate of air power who wanted to bomb enemies back to the Stone Age and complained of America’s phobia about nuclear weapons, he became the model for the air force general Jack D. Ripper in the 1963 movie Dr. Strangelove. After McNamara opposed some of his demands for additional air forces, LeMay privately complained, “Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?” Gilpatric described LeMay as “unreconstructable.” Every time the president “had to see LeMay,” Gilpatric said, “he ended up in a fit. I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay because, you know, LeMay couldn’t listen or wouldn’t take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered… outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the president never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay…. And he had to sit there. I saw the president right afterwards. He was just choleric. He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got…” Gilpatric said without concluding the sentence.
Paul Nitze, who had worked with Acheson at the State Department on defense issues and had become McNamara’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, believed that Kennedy “was always troubled with… how do you obtain military advice; how do you check into it; how do you have an independent view as to its accuracy and relevance?” Kennedy saw the decision to make the “transition from the use of conventional weapons to nuclear weapons” in a conflict as his responsibility, not that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I don’t think he ever really satisfied himself that he had found a way to get the best possible military help on such matters,” Nitze said.
“The plan that he inherited,” Rostow said, “was, ‘Mr. President, you just tell us to go to nuclear war, and we’ll deal with the rest.’ And the plan called for devastating, indiscriminately, China, Russia, Eastern Europe—it was an orgiastic, Wagnerian plan, and he was determined, from that moment, to get the plan changed so he would have total control of it.” It was clear to Kennedy that an all-out nuclear conflict would be “a truly monstrous event in the U.S.—let alone in world history.” Despite the understanding that the United States had a large advantage over the Soviets in nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them, it was assumed that a nuclear exchange would bring “virtual incineration” to all of Europe and the United States. Kennedy staff members attending the briefing by the Joint Chiefs remembered how tense the president was listening to Lemnitzer, who used thirty-eight flip charts sitting on easels to describe targets, the deployment of forces, and the number of weapons available to strike the enemy. There could be no half measures once the war plan was set in motion, Lemnitzer explained. Even if the United States faced altered conditions than those anticipated, he warned that any “rapid rework of the plan” would entail “grave risks.” Kennedy sat tapping his front teeth with his thumb and running his hand through his hair, indications to those who knew him well of his irritation with what was being said. Lemnitzer’s performance made him “furious.” As he left the room, he said to Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
The pressure wasn’t just from the Pentagon; America’s European allies also expected Kennedy to answer a Soviet attack with nuclear weapons. But the president preferred a strategy of “flexible response” to the current plan of “massive retaliation.” He told Adenauer that he was “not so happy… with having ballistic missiles driven all over Europe. Too many hazards were involved in this enterprise and this aspect therefore required careful examination.” In order to raise “the threshold for the use of atomic weapons,” Kennedy proposed that the United States and NATO increase their conventional armies to levels that could “stop Soviet forces now stationed in Eastern Germany.” Because the West Germans feared that “these plans might lessen the prospects for the use of atomic weapons in defense of Western Germany,” Kennedy “made it clear” that the United States was as much committed to their use as before. Kennedy would have been happier if he could have disavowed a first-strike strategy, Nitze said, but without a continuing commitment to “first strike,” Washington feared Franco-German abandonment of NATO, a negotiated compromise with the Soviet Union, and the neutralization of Europe, which would “have left the United States alone to face the whole communist problem.” Nevertheless, Kennedy urged McNamara publicly to “ ‘repeat to the point of boredom’ that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the U.S. or the allies; that we were not contemplating preventive war; and the Europeans should not believe that by firing off their own nuclear weapons they would drag the United States into a war, that we would withdraw our commitment to NATO first.”
For all his anxiety about nuclear war, Kennedy, supported by McNamara, kept LeMay in place. It would be good to have a Curtis LeMay commanding U.S. air forces if the country ever went to war, Kennedy explained. And the reality of Soviet weakness, which became increasingly clear to Kennedy and American military planners in the first months of 1961, did not deter the president and the Pentagon from an expansion of nuclear weapons. Instead, Kennedy feared that Khrushchev still might push the United States into an all-out conflict and he saw no alternative to expanded preparedness. “That son of a bitch Khrushchev,” he told Rostow, “he won’t stop until we actually take a step that might lead to nuclear war…. There’s no way you can talk that fella into stopping, until you take some really credible step, which opens up that range of possibilities” for improved relations. A meeting with Khrushchev in June only confirmed JFK’s view that he might have to fight a nuclear war and that the United States had no choice but to continue building its arsenal and even consider a first strike as an option against an aggressive Soviet Union. “I never met a man like this,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. “[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.”
At the end of March 1961, Kennedy announced increases in the defense budget that would expand the number of invulnerable Polaris submarines from 6 to 29 and their nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Soviet targets from 96 to 464. He also ordered a doubling of total Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles from 300 to 600 and a 50 percent increase in B-52 strategic bombers on fifteen-minute ground alert.
In Kennedy’s judgment, there was nothing strictly rational about the expansion of forces. Would it deter the Soviet Union from aggression? How much of a buildup was necessary to keep Moscow in check? Could Khrushchev’s aggressive Cold War rhetoric be ignored or discounted? Could the Soviets, despite their inferiority to the United States in missile, bomber, and submarine forces, get some of their nuclear bombs past U.S. defenses? How much of a defense expansion would be enough to satisfy the Congress, the public, and the press that America was safe from a devastating attack? When a reporter at a news conference repeated “charges that we have not adequately maintained the strength or credibility of our nuclear deterrent and that we also have not fully convinced the leaders of the Soviet Union that we are determined to meet force with force,” Kennedy systematically described his administration’s defense increases. Afterward, his frustration with the pressure to meet the Soviet threat with ever stronger words and actions registered on Pierre Salinger. “They don’t get it,” Kennedy said to him about critics of his defense policies. Khrushchev’s bluster combined with U.S. fears left Kennedy unable to stand down from the maddening arms race.
Kennedy biographer Herbert S. Parmet said that JFK “would have been profoundly disturbed to know that so many historians would later stress that his contribution to human existence was the extension of the cold war and the escalation of the arms race.” Such distress would have been understandable. Despite irresistible pressures to add to American military power and overreact to communist “dangers,” Kennedy ensured that a decision for nuclear war would be his alone, which meant that he could avert an unprecedented disaster for all humankind—which he did. His management of one international crisis after another to avert what he described as “the ultimate failure” was the greatest overall achievement of his presidency.
AS A SENATOR who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was “brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder.” Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country’s richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The assassination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to assert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba’s followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, “I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.” He felt “it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality.” He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to “massive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring.” As he said repeatedly in private, “The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart.”
At every turn, Kennedy emphasized American backing for the U.N. as the only appropriate agency for ending the civil strife, and he sent messages to Khrushchev urging that the Congo not become an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. But a conversation between Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev in March gave little hope that Moscow would show any give on the Congo. Khrushchev claimed that U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld had connived to kill Lumumba, and that the U.N. was being “used to oppress peoples and help colonialists retain colonies.” Thompson’s reply that it would be “wise to keep [the] cold war out of Africa” moved Khrushchev to ask “how socialist states could support a policy of assistance to those who betray their own people.” He promised that the Soviet Union “would struggle against this policy with all its means.”
Although, as events made clear in the coming months, Khrushchev was more interested in scoring propaganda points with Africans than in risking a Soviet-American confrontation, Kennedy, taking Khrushchev at his word, sent Johnson to Africa to counter Soviet initiatives. Johnson left a strong impression on everyone he met in Senegal, an East-West battleground. He insisted that a seven-foot bed, a special showerhead that emitted a needlepoint spray, cases of Cutty Sark, and boxes of ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with L.B.J. inscribed on them accompany him to Dakar. Against the advice of the ambassador, who urged him to shun contact with villagers he described as dirty and diseased, Johnson visited a fishing village, where he handed out pens and lighters, shook hands with everyone, including some fingerless lepers, and urged the uncomprehending natives to be like Texans, who had increased their annual income tenfold in forty years. The contrast with what Johnson called “Cadillac diplomacy,” the failure of U.S. representatives to get out of their limos and meet the people, was, however much professional foreign service officers saw it as cornball diplomacy, just what Kennedy wanted from his vice president.
Kennedy had seen the Khrushchev speech in January promising to support “wars of liberation or popular uprisings” of “colonial peoples against their oppressors” as a direct challenge to Western influence in developing areas. Kennedy, who took the speech “as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions,” read it “time and again—in his office, at Cabinet meetings, at dinners with friends, alone. At times he read it aloud and urged his colleagues to comment.” Perhaps with the speech in mind, he ordered the Defense Department to place “more emphasis on the development of counter-guerrilla forces.” Because this was not a high priority with the army and because he believed it would encourage views of his administration as receptive to fresh thinking about military threats, he suggested that a paper by General Edward Lansdale on special forces be converted into a popular magazine article. Lansdale’s reputation for successful counterinsurgency in the Philippines against communist subversion seemed likely to excite public interest in antiguerrilla warfare. But Kennedy saw more at work here than good public relations. He believed that training and deploying such forces would prove to be a valuable tool in “the subterranean” or “twilight” war with communism. He instructed the National Security Council to distribute Lansdale’s study to the CIA and to U.S. ambassadors in Africa and Asia. He also endorsed a $19 million allocation to support a three-thousand-man special forces group, which promised to give the United States “a counter-guerrilla capability” in meeting insurgencies in future limited wars. The Green Berets, a name and appearance that set these special forces apart from regular army troops, would become a receptacle for fantasies and illusions about America’s ability to overcome threats in physically and politically inhospitable places around the world. Although Kennedy assumed that the effectiveness of these units would largely depend on joining their military actions to backing for indigenous progressive reforms, he could not entirely rein in wishful thinking about how much counterinsurgency units or “freedom fighters” alone could achieve at relatively small cost in blood and treasure.
The first test in the contest for the “periphery,” as Kennedy had feared, came in Laos. He was not happy about it. No foreign policy issue commanded as much attention during the first two months of his presidency as this tiny, impoverished, landlocked country’s civil war. “It is, I think, important for all Americans to understand this difficult and potentially dangerous problem,” he declared at a March 23 news conference. He explained that during his conversation with Eisenhower on January 19, “we spent more time on this hard matter than on any other thing.” A constant stream of questions about Laos had come up at press conferences, and numerous private discussions with American military and diplomatic officials paralleled exchanges with British and French leaders about how to prevent a communist takeover, which could make the country a staging ground for assaults on South Vietnam and Thailand. On March 21, the New York Times carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration’s determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell, “I don’t think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I’m embarked on a military venture” would jeopardize the future of the administration.
Winthrop Brown, the U.S. ambassador to Laos, told Kennedy during a meeting at the White House on February 3 that it was unrealistic to expect that “any satisfactory solution of the problem in the country could be found by purely military means.” Brown believed that “Laos was hopeless… a classic example of a political and economic vacuum. It had no national identity. It was just a series of lines drawn on a map.” The people were “charming, indolent, enchanting… but they’re just not very vigorous, nor are they very numerous, nor are they very well organized.” Galbraith, who had become JFK’s ambassador to India and was helping to bring the Indians into a diplomatic solution to the Laos conflict, wrote from New Delhi, “These jungle regimes, where the writ of government runs only as far as the airport, are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead…. The rulers do not control or particularly influence their own people…. As a military ally the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.” Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman told Brown, “We must never face the President with the choice of abandoning Laos or sending in troops.”
Publicly Kennedy made loud noises about preserving Laos’s independence. He stated at the March 23 news conference, “Laos is far away from America, but the world is small…. The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all.” Shortly after, he privately told Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He “said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner.” At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard ships in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that “the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means.”
It was all a bluff. At the same time Kennedy was talking a hard line, he asked Harold Macmillan to convince Eisenhower that military intervention in Laos was a poor idea. Eisenhower’s opinion would be influential in how the public gauged Kennedy’s Laos policy, and Macmillan was happy to help. We all feel strongly about keeping Laos out of communist hands, Macmillan wrote Ike. “But I need not tell you what a bad country this is for military operations…. President Kennedy is under considerable pressure about ‘appeasement’ in Laos.” Macmillan said that he understood the impulse not to forget the lessons of history, but he believed it a poor idea to “become involved in an open-ended commitment on this dangerous and unprofitable terrain. So I would hope that in anything which you felt it necessary to say about Laos you would not encourage those who think that a military solution in Laos is the only way of stopping the Communists in that area.”
Happily for Kennedy, neither Eisenhower nor the Russians saw fighting in Laos as a good idea. Despite urging Kennedy in their second transition meeting not to let Laos fall under communist control, Ike told journalist Earl Mazo after JFK’s March press conference, “That boy doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He doesn’t even know where Laos is. You mean have Americans fight in that goddamned place?” The Soviets, likewise, had no appetite for a punishing conflict in so remote a place, especially since it might provoke Chinese intervention and a wider conflict between the United States and China.
But the Russians had little control over events, as renewed fighting at the end of April in a civil war demonstrated. On April 26, Ambassador Brown reported the likelihood that communist forces would gain control in Laos unless the president authorized the use of U.S. air and land forces. At a National Security Council meeting the next day, members of the Joint Chiefs urged just that. Kennedy wanted to know what they intended if such an operation failed. They answered, “You start using atomic weapons!”Lemnitzer promised that “if we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” Someone suggested that the president might want to ask the general “what he means by victory.” Kennedy, who had been “glumly rubbing his upper molar, only grunted and ended the meeting.” He saw Lemnitzer’s guarantee as absurd: “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, his principal advisers, and congressional leaders vetoed the military’s recommendations. Although he left open the possibility that he might later use force in Laos, Kennedy accepted the “general agreement among his advisers that such a conflict would be unjustified, even if the loss of Laos must be accepted.”Democratic and Republican congressional leaders unanimously confirmed the feeling that despite concern about the rest of Southeast Asia, it would be unwise to become a party to the Laotian civil war. When Kennedy visited Douglas MacArthur at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York the weekend of this crisis, the general told him, “It would be a mistake to fight in Laos. It would suit the Chinese Communists.”
The Laotian crisis extended into the fall of 1961, when the exhausted opponents agreed to establish a neutral coalition government. Although critics complained about Kennedy’s irresolute response to a communist threat, more compelling concerns pushed Laos aside and the issue temporarily “dribbled to a conclusion.” One of these more urgent concerns was South Vietnam. In the early fifties, Kennedy had seen the area as a testing ground for innovative U.S. policies toward a colony struggling to establish autonomy without communist control. By the late fifties, however, he had shifted his attention to Algeria as the latest Soviet-American battleground for Third World influence. But South Vietnam, where an insurgency supported by North Vietnam’s communist regime threatened Diem’s pro-Western government, reclaimed Kennedy’s attention after he became president.
In January, Lansdale, who had made a fact-finding mission to Vietnam for the Pentagon, described the country as in “critical condition and… a combat area of the cold war… needing emergency treatment.” In a meeting with Lansdale and other national security advisers, Kennedy told the general that his report “for the first time, gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem.” It is “the worst one we’ve got,” Kennedy told Rostow about Vietnam. Commitments by Eisenhower of military supplies, financial aid, and some six hundred military advisers had made the United States an interested party in Vietnam’s six-year-old civil war. To deal with the mounting danger, Kennedy authorized funding for an increase of twenty thousand additional South Vietnamese troops and the creation of a task force to help avert a South Vietnamese collapse.
The Laotian crisis added to worries about Vietnam. A possible communist victory in Laos threatened cross-border attacks on “the entire western flank of South Vietnam.” To bolster the South Vietnamese, Kennedy decided to send Johnson on “a special fact-finding mission to Asia.” When asked whether he was “prepared to send American forces into South Viet-Nam if that became necessary to prevent Communist domination,” Kennedy evaded the question. Sending troops, he said, “is a matter still under consideration.” Although he had great doubts about making such a commitment, it made sense to keep the communists guessing as to what the United States might do if Vietnam seemed about to collapse. In the meantime, as he had done in Africa, Johnson could show the flag and quiet fears that Kennedy’s refusal to send troops into Laos implied that he was abandoning Southeast Asia.
Johnson’s trip was an exercise in high-visibility diplomacy. (After his Asian swing, one U.S. diplomat said, “Saigon, Manila, Taipei, and Bangkok will never be the same.”) The six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch Texan, who had made a reputation as a larger-than-life figure in the Senate, was perfectly suited to the job. On his way into Saigon from the airport, he stopped the motorcade several times to shake hands with people in the crowds lining the roads. As in Africa, he handed out pens, cigarette lighters, and gold-and-white passes to the U.S. Senate gallery. “Get your mamma and daddy to bring you to the Senate and Congress to see how the government works,” he told bewildered children. Trying to draw connections to British resistance to Nazi tyranny in World War II, Johnson made an arm-waving speech in downtown Saigon comparing South Vietnamese president Diem to Winston Churchill. The campaign continued the next day, when Johnson staged a photo op by chasing a bunch of Texas steer around a ranch. He then carried American informality to something of a new high—or low—by changing clothes before a group of foreign correspondents invited to a press conference in his hotel room.
Part of Johnson’s mission was to get out and meet the people and sell them on the virtues of American democracy and free enterprise. But there was also the more important business of bolstering a shaky South Vietnamese government. A letter Johnson carried from Kennedy to Diem promised funds for an additional twenty thousand troops the South Vietnamese army wanted and proposed collaboration in “a series of joint, mutually supporting actions in the military, political, economic and other fields” to counter communist aggression. Johnson’s visit reassured him, Diem wrote Kennedy, that America would continue to support Vietnam, and he expressed particular pleasure at being asked by the vice president for ideas on how to meet the crisis. “We have not become accustomed to being asked for our own views as to our needs,” Diem wrote.
Diem’s satisfaction with Johnson’s visit partly rested on his understanding that he had won a convert to his cause. “I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, and other efforts,” LBJ told Kennedy on his return. “The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination,” Johnson advised, “… or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores.” Though Johnson did not urge the dispatch of combat troops, only military advisers, his rhetoric was apocalyptic: “The basic decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a ‘Fortress America’ concept.”
Kennedy had other advice that challenged Johnson’s evangelism and encouraged skepticism about larger commitments to a repressive Saigon government and a region of questionable importance to U.S. national security. From India, Galbraith, echoing his comments about Laos, warned JFK that spending “our billions in these distant jungles” would be of no value to the United States and of no harm to the Soviets. He wondered “what is so important about this real estate in the space age” and urged any kind of political settlement as preferable to military involvement. He conceded that this was a choice between “the disastrous and the unpalatable.” But he wondered “if those who talk in terms of a ten-year war really know what they are saying in terms of American attitudes.”
IN THE FIRST MONTHS of his term, Kennedy’s focus on Laos, Vietnam, and the Congo paled alongside that on Cuba. Look journalist Laura Berquist Knebel observed that, whenever she saw Kennedy, he “nearly always” wanted to discuss Cuba, “his ‘albatross,’ as he used to call it.” During the 1960 campaign, he had already learned how frustrating Cuba could be as an issue. In 1958–59, he had been sympathetic to Castro’s revolution against the corrupt and repressive Batista regime. By 1960, however, he shared the growing perception in the United States that Castro, who may have begun as a “utopian socialist,” had abandoned his romantic idealism for an alliance with Cuban communists who were likely to help solidify his hold on power. The new regime in Havana seemed hell-bent on making the U.S. into a whipping boy and using widespread anti-American sentiment in Cuba to tie itself to Moscow and Peking. After facing attacks by liberals and Nixon during the presidential campaign for favoring an invasion by Cuban exiles, Kennedy had accepted Acheson’s advice and conspicuously avoided further comments on Cuba.
In early January 1961, Kennedy tried to stay above the battle, refusing to comment “either way” on Eisenhower’s decision to break relations with Cuba. He did not want to rule out the possibility of “a rapprochement” with Castro. He asked John Sharon, a Stevenson adviser on foreign policy, what he thought of the idea. He also questioned him about the Eisenhower economic sanctions: Were they working? Would the United States gain any advantage by ending them? A week before he took office, Kennedy had received a report Adlai Stevenson passed along from Chicago union leader Sidney Lens, who had just returned from Cuba. It confirmed the loss of freedoms under Castro but emphasized that the country largely supported him and that reporting by American journalists there was unreliable: They were “culling the negative and not reporting the positive.” In addition, Lens said that the U.S. embargo was not effective because other countries were filling the vacuum. Lens also warned that Castro spies had infiltrated the anti-Castro groups in America and were informing Castro about “their plans and conspiracies.” At the same time, Allen Dulles briefed the president-elect on a CIA plan to use Cuban exiles being trained in Guatemala to infiltrate Cuba and topple Castro. Without endorsing anything, Kennedy instructed Dulles to go ahead with the planning.
Two days after he became president, the CIA had begun urging Kennedy to move against Cuba. At a January 22 meeting of Rusk, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, Lemnitzer, Dulles, and other national security and foreign policy experts, Dulles emphasized that the U.S. had only two months “before something would have to be done about” the Cubans being trained in Guatemala. The urgency rested partly on the belief that Castro had plans to promote communism in Latin America, and that he “already had power among the people in the Caribbean countries and elsewhere, particularly in Venezuela and Colombia.” Because the CIA planners were now considering direct U.S. intervention, Rusk “commented on the enormous implications of putting U.S. forces ashore in Cuba and said we should consider everything short of this, including rough stuff.” He feared “we might be confronted by serious uprisings all over Latin America if U.S. forces were to go in.” He also worried that such a move might trigger “Soviet and Chi[nese] Com[munist] moves in other parts of the world.” The meeting ended with admonitions to consider “the so-called ‘shelf-life’ of the Cuban unit in Guatemala… [and] the question of how overtly the United States was prepared to show its hand.”
During the last week in January, Kennedy held two White House meetings on Cuba in which Lemnitzer and CIA planners emphasized that time was working against the United States. Castro was tightening his hold on the island and seemed likely to make Cuba a permanent member of the communist bloc, “with disastrous consequences to the security of the Western Hemisphere.” They proposed overthrowing Castro’s government by secretly supporting an invasion and establishing a provisional government, which the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS) could support. In response, Kennedy authorized continuing covert CIA operations, a revised CIA invasion plan, a prompt diplomatic initiative to isolate Castro, and a strenuous effort to keep these discussions secret. He also tried to ensure that no decision would be taken without his authority. “Have we determined what we are going to do about Cuba?” he asked McGeorge Bundy on February 6. “If there is a difference of opinion between the agencies I think they should be brought to my attention.”
Differences among his advisers about the results of an invasion did not give Kennedy much assurance. Bundy told him on February 8 that Defense and the CIA were much more optimistic than State about the outcome of an invasion. The military foresaw an invasion touching off “a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly.” And should there be no immediate uprising, the invaders could take refuge in the surrounding mountains and work toward the day when a critical mass of Cubans joined their cause. By contrast, State anticipated “very grave” political consequences in the United Nations and Latin America. Troubled by State’s predictions, Kennedy pressed advisers later that day “for alternatives to a full-fledged ‘invasion,’ supported by U.S. planes, ships and supplies.”
Kennedy now faced two unhappy choices. If he decided against an invasion, he would have to disarm the Cubans in Guatemala and risk public attacks from them for failing to implement Eisenhower’s plans to combat communism in the hemisphere. The CIA offered Kennedy no alternative: They “doubted that other really satisfactory uses of the troops in Guatemala could be found.” As O’Donnell later put it, a decision to scrap the invasion would then make Kennedy look like an “appeaser of Castro. Eisenhower made a decision to overthrow Castro and you dropped it.” Kennedy would have been faced with “a major political blowup.”
But an invasion might also produce an international disaster. “However well disguised any action might be,” Schlesinger told Kennedy, “it will be ascribed to the United States. The result would be a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States). Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative. At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.”
Kennedy shared Schlesinger’s concern. He remembered his own rhetoric about liberty, justice, and self-determination, and understood that a visible U.S. role in an invasion would justifiably be seen as a betrayal of the progressive principles to which he was supposedly committed. But he was also attracted to the idea of toppling a Castro government that seemed to have little regard for the democratic freedoms promised by the Cuban revolution or for the autonomy of other Latin countries, which Castro hoped to destabilize and bring into the communist orbit. During the February 8 meeting, Kennedy asked CIA planners if the Cuban brigade could “be landed gradually and quietly and make its first major military efforts from the mountains—then taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.”
The CIA and the military gave him assurances that the Cuban exiles could succeed without the participation of U.S. forces. On March 10, the Joint Chiefs told McNamara that “the small invasion force” of some twelve to fifteen hundred men “could be expected to achieve initial success. Ultimate success will depend on the extent to which the initial assault serves as a catalyst for further action on the part of anti-Castro elements throughout Cuba.” The Chiefs also predicted that the invading brigade “will have a good chance of sustaining itself indefinitely.”
In turn, the CIA endorsed and went beyond the Chiefs’ recommendations. At a meeting with JFK on the eleventh, Dulles and Richard Bissell, the agency’s deputy director of plans, predicted that Castro would not fall without outside intervention and that within a matter of months his military power would reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. “The Cuban paramilitary force if effectively used [in the next month] has a good chance of overthrowing Castro, or of causing a damaging civil war, without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action against Cuba.” Kennedy declared himself “willing to take the chance of going ahead; [but]… he could not endorse a plan that put us in so openly, in view of the world situation. He directed the development of a plan where US assistance would be less obvious.”
The CIA now assured the president that an invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in the Zapata region some hundred miles west of Trinidad, the original site for the attack, would look less like a “small-scale World War II amphibious assault” and more like “an infiltration of guerrillas in support of an internal revolution.” Although Dulles and Bissell warned that communist accusations of U.S. involvement were inevitable, they thought it preferable to the “certain risks” of demobilizing the Cuban exiles and returning them to the United States, where they seemed bound to launch ugly political attacks on the administration for losing its nerve.
Schlesinger urged Kennedy not to let the threat of political attacks push him into a questionable military operation. He saw “a slight danger of our being rushed into something because CIA has on its hands a band of people it doesn’t quite know what to do with.” Allen Dulles worried that if the CIA scotched the invasion and transferred the exiles from Guatemala to the United States, they would wander “ ‘around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.’ Obviously,” Schlesinger concluded, “this is a genuine problem, but it can’t be permitted to govern US policy.”
CIA revisions of the invasion plan muted Schlesinger’s warning. The CIA, Bundy told the president on March 15, “[has] done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials…. I have been a skeptic about Bissell’s operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer.”
Kennedy was still not so sure. At a meeting that day, he seemed to accept the essentials of the new plan but objected to a dawn landing, suggesting instead that “in order to make this appear as an inside guerrilla-type operation, the ships should be clear of the area by dawn.” Though the CIA returned the next day with the requested changes, which Kennedy approved, he “reserved the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing.”
Although planning went forward for an early-April invasion, Kennedy remained hesitant, and even a little distraught about what to do. Admiral Burke deepened Kennedy’s concerns on March 17, when he told him that “the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising.” On March 28, Schlesinger asked JFK, “What do you think about this damned invasion?” Kennedy replied, “I think about it as little as possible,” implying that it was too painful a subject with too many uncertainties for him to dwell on it. But of course it was at the center of his concerns. At yet other meetings about Cuba on March 28 and 29, Kennedy instructed the CIA to inform Cuban Brigade leaders that “U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to participate in or support the invasion in any way.” Kennedy also wanted to know whether the Cubans thought the invasion could succeed without U.S. military intervention and whether they wished to proceed under the limitations he had described. Brigade leaders responded that despite Kennedy’s restrictions, they wished to go ahead.
The willingness of the Cubans, the CIA, and the U.S. military to proceed partly rested on their assumption that once the invasion began, Kennedy would have to use American forces if the attack seemed about to fail. One of the invaders remembers being told, “If you fail we will go in.” The pressure for U.S. intervention was evident to Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, who opposed the plan. On March 31, he told Rusk, “If the operation appears to be a failure in its early stages, the pressure on us to scrap our self-imposed restriction on direct American involvement will be difficult to resist.” The danger, Bowles added, is that a failure would “greatly enhance Castro’s prestige and strength.” And Bowles saw the odds of a failure as two to one. He believed it better to scrap the invasion and live with Castro’s regime. The United States could then blockade any Soviet attempt to provide Cuba with large amounts of arms and use force, with likely OAS backing, against any overt Castro aggression in Latin America.
“No one,” Schlesinger said later, “expected the invasion to galvanize the unarmed and the unorganized into rising against Castro at the moment of disembarkation. But the invasion plan, as understood by the President and the Joint Chiefs, did assume that the successful occupation of an enlarged beachhead area would rather soon incite organized uprisings by armed members of the Cuban resistance.” Dulles and Bissell, Schlesinger also pointed out, “reinforced this impression” by claiming “that over 2,500 persons presently belonged to resistance organizations, that 20,000 more were sympathizers, and the Brigade, once established on the island, could expect the active support of, at the very least, a quarter of the Cuban people.” A CIA paper of April 12 on “The Cuban Operation” estimated that “there are 7,000 insurgents responsive to some degree of control through agents with whom communications are currently active.” The paper conceded that the individual groups were “small and very inadequately armed,” but after the invasion the Agency hoped to supply them with air drops and make “every effort… to coordinate their operations with those of the landing parties.”
In the days leading up to the attack on April 17, Kennedy continued to hear dissenting voices. At the end of March, he asked Dean Acheson what he thought of the proposal to invade Cuba. Acheson did not know there was one, and when Kennedy described it to him, Acheson voiced his skepticism in the form of a question: “Are you serious?” Kennedy replied, “I don’t know if I’m serious or just… I’m giving it serious thought.” When Acheson asked how many men Castro could put on the beach to meet the nearly 1,500 invaders and Kennedy answered 25,000, Acheson declared, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.” Schlesinger peppered JFK with memos and private words about the injury to U.S. prestige and his presidency; Rusk lodged muted protests; and Fulbright, who as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had been briefed about the plan, spoke forcefully against U.S. hypocrisy in denouncing Soviet indifference to self-determination and planning an invasion of a country that was more a thorn in the flesh than a dagger in the heart.
These warnings reinforced Kennedy’s own considerable doubts about so uncertain an operation. Allen Dulles countered them by saying, “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this. But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, ‘I believe it will work.’ And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala.” Dulles emphasized that there was small risk of failure and no risk of U.S. involvement that would sacrifice American credibility when it came to professing regard for self-determination. Dulles clearly could not foresee later critical assessments by historians complaining that CIA operations overturning a popular government in Guatemala City solidified America’s reputation as an imperial power hypocritically ignoring commitments to democracy for all peoples. Or, if he did foresee this, he found it easy enough to ignore when pressing the president about Cuba.
Other subtle psychological impulses were at work in persuading Kennedy to approve the invasion plan. One element was Kennedy’s conception of military action. The possibility of a nuclear war was abhorrent to him, but the idea of patriotic men prepared to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their country was an entirely different matter. He saw no higher recommendation for someone than patriotic courage. Schlesinger remembered how much the commitment of the Cuban Brigade moved Kennedy. The invasion also had a romantic appeal for him, the quality of an adventure like that which had drawn Kennedy to command a PT boat. He and Bobby shared an affinity for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and their urbane hero. Bissell, who did so much to sell Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, seemed to be something of a real-life Bond himself—an Ivy League graduate, socially sophisticated, tall and handsome, “civilized, responsible,” “a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts.” His description of himself as “a man-eating shark” delighted the Kennedys.
Despite Dulles’s assurances, the operation had the code name “Bumpy Road.” Moreover, because Kennedy did not entirely trust Dulles’s predictions, he kept emphasizing in the two weeks before the invasion that it needed to “appear as an internal uprising” and that “the United States would not become overtly engaged with Castro’s armed forces.” At a meeting on April 6, he insisted on “everything possible to make it appear to be a Cuban operation partly from within Cuba, but supported from without Cuba, the objective being to make it more plausible for US denial of association with the operation, although recognizing that we would be accused.”
Newspaper stories about anti-Castro forces being trained by Americans made it all the harder to deny U.S. involvement. Castro “doesn’t need agents over here,” Kennedy said privately. “All he has to do is read our papers.” At a news conference on April 12, with press stories predicting an imminent invasion, Kennedy was asked how far the United States would go “in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba.” He replied, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This Government will do everything it can… to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.” Two days later, Kennedy ordered Bissell to “play down the magnitude of the invasion” and to reduce an initial air strike by Cuban pilots flying from outside Cuba from sixteen to eight planes.
On Saturday, April 15, eight B-26s flying from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields. It was the beginning of what historian Theodore Draper later called “one of those rare events in history—a perfect failure.” The bombers destroyed only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes and left the invaders, traveling by boats from Nicaragua, vulnerable to air attacks before and after landing on the beaches. To give credence to a CIA cover story, the Agency arranged to have a ninth bomber with Cuban air force markings and bullet holes fly from Nicaragua to Miami, where it made an “emergency” landing and the CIA-trained pilot declared himself a defector who had flown from Cuba.
Adlai Stevenson, who was not among those the White House believed needed to know the truth, sincerely denied U.S. involvement before a U.N. General Assembly committee considering charges of United States “imperialist aggression” against Cuba. When the implausibility of the CIA cover plot quickly became evident, an outraged Stevenson complained to Rusk and Dulles on April 16, “I do not understand how we could let such an attack take place two days before debate on the Cuban issue in GA.” Nor could he understand “why I could not have been warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us.” He saw the “gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action.”
A second planned air strike in support of the invasion on the morning of April 17 became a casualty of the CIA’s unraveling ruse. Until the brigade could establish a beachhead and make a plausible case for the fiction that their B-26s were taking off from and landing on the beach, Kennedy, who was keeping a low profile at his retreat in Glen Ora, Virginia, grounded the exiles’ sixteen planes. After giving the order by phone to Rusk, Kennedy paced “the room in evident concern,” worried now that the whole operation might prove to be a fiasco. “Those with him at Glen Ora,” Schlesinger recorded, “had rarely seen him so low.” When Bundy passed Kennedy’s order along to Dulles’s two principal deputies, they warned that “failure to make air strikes in the immediate beachhead area the first thing in the morning (D-Day) would clearly be disastrous.” When informed of the president’s decision, other CIA planners concluded that “it would probably mean the failure of the mission.”
The failure, which became evident by Tuesday afternoon, April 18, resulted less from any decision about air attacks than from the flawed conception of the plan—illusions about an internal uprising and 1,400-plus invaders defeating Castro’s much larger force. By noon of April 18, Mac Bundy told Kennedy 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…. The real question is 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.” Kennedy had no intention of sending in a U.S. rescue mission, however bad the situation might be.
Kennedy’s poise in the face of the Bay of Pigs defeat began to crumble during the afternoon and evening of April 18. Admiral Burke recalled that at an hour-and-a-half White House meeting with the president and his principal advisers, “nobody knew what to do…. They are in a real bad hole,” Burke recorded, “because they had the hell cut out of them…. I kept quiet because I didn’t know the general score.” Because Burke had been less demonstrative than Lemnitzer in his support of the invasion, Bobby Kennedy called him after the meeting to say that the president needed his advice and intended to bypass “the usual channels of responsibility in the management of the crisis.” Burke had no answers, and Kennedy reconvened his advisers around midnight in the Cabinet Room. Coming from a White House reception for Congress dressed in white tie and tails, Kennedy reviewed the deteriorating situation for four hours without success. Bissell and Burke pressed for the use of carrier planes to shoot down Castro’s aircraft and for a destroyer to shell Castro’s tanks. But Kennedy stuck to his resolve not to intervene directly with U.S. forces. He later told Dave Powers that the Chiefs and the CIA “were sure I’d give in to them…. They couldn’t believe that a new President like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
On Tuesday morning, Castro’s air force had sunk the brigade’s principal supply ship with ten days’ ammunition and most of its communication equipment. By late that afternoon, Castro had pinned down the invaders with a force of twenty thousand men and Soviet tanks, while his arrest of twenty thousand potential opponents had guarded against the CIA-predicted internal uprising. As for plans of escape to the Escambray Mountains, an eighty-mile stretch of swampland between the beach and the mountains made this impossible. The outgunned and outmanned invaders faced dying on the beaches in a hopeless fight or surrender. Almost 1,200 of the 1,400-plus attackers gave up.
Kennedy at first tried to put the best possible face on the failed invasion, which was obviously a U.S.-sponsored operation. During lunch on Tuesday with Schlesinger and James Reston, he described the defeat as “an incident, not a disaster.” When asked about the blow to American prestige, he responded philosophically: “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power. No doubt we will be kicked in the can for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.” He felt he had made a mistake in keeping Dulles at the CIA. He did not know him and had been unable to assess his advice wisely. He saw the necessity for someone in the Agency “with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I know I will be getting the exact pitch.” He believed he would be better off with brother Bobby as director. “It is a hell of a way to learn things,” he said, “but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with CIA.”
A six-month secret review by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s inspector general, blamed the Bay of Pigs failure largely on the CIA and confirmed Kennedy’s conviction that both Dulles and Bissell would have to resign. “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving office,” Kennedy told Dulles. “But under our system it is you who must go.” Although Dulles and Bissell blamed the canceled air strikes for the defeat, Kirkpatrick concluded that this was not “the chief cause of failure”; a better-conceived plan would never have confronted Kennedy with such a decision. Kirkpatrick saw the root cause in the CIA’s poor “planning, organization, staffing and management.” More specifically, he blamed the false assumption that “the invasion would, like a deus ex machina, produce a shock… and trigger an uprising,” and the “multiple security leaks” that alerted Castro to the attack and allowed him to respond effectively. CIA officials “should have gone to the President and said frankly: ‘Here are the facts. The operation should be halted.’… The Agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically.”
Although the invasion had become a fiasco that cost more than a hundred lives and deeply embarrassed Kennedy and the United States, the president was determined not to compound his problems by publicly denying a U.S. role. But while he responded philosophically to the defeat in public, he was anything but composed in private. On April 19, Jackie told Rose that Jack “was so upset all day & had practically been in tears…. She had never seen him so depressed except once at the time of his operation.” Dave Powers recalled that “within the privacy of his office, he made no effort to hide the distress and guilt he felt.” At the end of the late-night meeting on April 18, he went into the Oval Office with Salinger and O’Donnell, where in the middle of a sentence he broke off the conversation and walked out into the Rose Garden. He stayed there for almost an hour, walking on the wet grass and keeping his grief to himself. The next morning, Salinger found him crying in his bedroom. At a meeting shortly after with Albert Gore, Kennedy, with messed hair and tie askew, seemed “extremely bitter” about the defeat.
Wire service journalist Henry Raymont, who had been in Cuba during the invasion, had similar recollections of Kennedy’s distress. When Raymont returned to the United States after several days in a Cuban jail on charges of being a CIA agent before being expelled from the country, Kennedy invited him to the White House. Raymont was eager for the chance to chide the president for being so foolish as to think that an uprising would greet the invasion. Any high school student in Cuba or any diplomat in Havana could have told you otherwise, Raymont planned to tell Kennedy. But when he got into the Oval Office, he found the president so full of self-recrimination and so dejected at his short-sightedness that Raymont only gently reinforced what Kennedy already understood about the reasons for the failure.
Ill-timed health problems further rattled Kennedy. Immediately prior to and during the invasion on April 17 and 18, he struggled with “constant,” “acute diarrhea” and a urinary tract infection. His doctors treated him with increased amounts of antispasmodics, a puree diet, and penicillin, and scheduled him for a sigmoidoscopy.
For days after the defeat, Kennedy’s anguish and dejection were evident to people around him. At a cabinet meeting on April 20, Chester Bowles saw him as “quite shattered.” He would talk to himself and interrupt conversations with the non sequitur “How could I have been so stupid?” He felt responsible for the deaths of the valiant Cubans on the beaches. The episode even seemed to revive memories of his brother’s death in World War II. When he met at the White House to console the six-member Cuban Revolutionary Council, three of whom had lost sons in the invasion, Kennedy produced a photograph of Joe and explained, “I lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the war.” Kennedy described the meeting and the Bay of Pigs episode as “the worst experience of my life.” Weeks after the invasion, he told an aide one morning that he had not slept all night. “I was thinking about those poor guys in prison down in Cuba.”
Kennedy was not only angry at himself for having signed on to what in retrospect seemed like such an unworkable plan but also at the CIA and the Chiefs for having misled him. When newspapers began publishing stories blaming different officials except the Joint Chiefs for the debacle, Kennedy took note of the omission and told his aides that none of the decision makers was free of blame. He named Fulbright as the only one in the clear but thought that he also would have backed the operation if he had been subjected to the same barrage of misleading information about “discontent in Cuba, morale of the free Cubans, rainy season, Russian MIGs and destroyers, impregnable beachhead, easy escape into the Escambray, [and] what else to do with these people.”
To Kennedy’s credit, he had no intention of publicly blaming anyone but himself. He authorized a White House statement saying, “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility…. The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” He understood the impulse of some to shun their role in a failed operation. He quoted “an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” This was his defeat: “I’m the responsible officer of the Government,” he told the press.
Later that year, when Time began trying to use the Cuban disaster against the administration to help Republicans in 1962, Kennedy wrote publisher Henry Luce that “the testimony of the participants in an ill-fated failure should be taken with a good deal of caution.” If Time aimed “to clear the Defense Department and the CIA from all responsibility,” Kennedy declared an article it had published “a success.” The same was true if Time intended to demonstrate “the incompetence of the men who played a part in this venture.” But if the article hoped “to set the record straight,” Kennedy sardonically described its success as “more limited.” For the time being, he believed it not a good idea to rehash the Bay of Pigs failure. “I have felt from the beginning,” he told Luce, “that it would not be in the public interest for the United States to take formal responsibility for the Cuban matter other than the personal responsibility which I have earlier assumed.”
He was more interested in understanding why he had allowed so unsuccessful an operation to go forward than in assessing blame. True, he had some impulse to think, “They made me do it”: The false hopes pressed on him by the CIA and the Chiefs had led him astray. But “How could I have been so stupid?” was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed, he later told Schlesinger, that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The experience taught him “never to rely on the experts.” He told Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
More immediate concerns than understanding what had gone wrong were repairing the damage to Kennedy’s prestige and deciding what to do next about Cuba. Initially, the Bay of Pigs seemed like a terrible blow to Kennedy’s reputation. When journalist Henry Brandon told Kennedy that Peter Lisagor had suggested he make fun of Castro, JFK replied, “Well, for the time being, they’re making fun of me.” The hope and excitement of the first ninety days had turned to cynical complaint, especially in western Europe, about an administration whose progressive, inspiring rhetoric seemed nothing more than a cover for old-fashioned imperialism. Worse yet, the fiasco raised Moscow’s standing in the Third World, strengthened Castro in Cuba, and increased his appeal across Latin America. There was also the concern that political opponents would use the failure to score points against the administration. “Not much time remains for the education of John F. Kennedy,” one hostile southern newspaper declared. “In his first great crisis, he bungled horribly.” Nixon and Republican congressional leaders privately agreed to hold their fire only until the crisis had passed, but the Republican Congressional Committee’s newsletter said, “It is doubtful if any President had gotten the United States in so much trouble in so short a time.”
The setback infuriated Jack and Bobby. Losing or even second best was not in their vocabulary, and except for the sinking of PT-109 and the vice presidential contest in 1956, Kennedy had (publicly) nothing but a string of high-profile victories. Even the loss of his boat had been less a defeat than an opportunity to become a hero who had rescued his crew.
Now, in response to the Bay of Pigs, no one was allowed to seem wiser than Kennedy or to overshadow him. When Mac Bundy told Kennedy that, like Fulbright, Schlesinger had been prescient, Kennedy not only played down Fulbright’s wisdom, he also dismissed Schlesinger’s advice as calculated to make him “look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” Bowles, whose warnings against the operation were leaked to the press, also earned the Kennedys’ wrath. “When he disagreed with the President,” Bobby said later, “he talked to the press. He was rather a weeper. He came up in a rather whiny voice and said that he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that he was against the Bay of Pigs.” Such self-righteousness was “resented.” When Bowles, substituting for Rusk, presented some State Department reflections at White House and National Security Council meetings on the impossibility of doing anything about Castro without another ill-advised U.S. invasion, Bobby, who had written his brother a memo urging decisive action on Cuba, “savagely” and “brutally” tore into Bowles. “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby shouted. “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.” Richard Goodwin, who watched JFK calmly tapping his teeth with a pencil, suddenly realized 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.”
But worries about Kennedy’s loss of political clout in the United States evaporated quickly, in part because he personally appealed to Nixon’s vanity and Eisenhower’s patriotism. He called Nixon, whose daughter told him, “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.” Although Kennedy rejected Nixon’s suggestion of direct intervention in Cuba, he flattered him by speaking candidly about politics and their shared interest in international relations. “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn’t it?” Kennedy asked, knowing that Nixon agreed. “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?” Nixon promised to support him to the hilt if Kennedy attacked Cuba.
With Eisenhower, whom he invited to lunch at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, Kennedy played the student being lectured by the master teacher gently reprimanding him on a poor performance. “There is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,” Eisenhower told him. “It must be a success.” Kennedy replied, “Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.” Eisenhower said that he was “glad to hear that.” Before the press, Eisenhower declared, “I am all in favor of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs.”
With Nixon, Eisenhower, and most other public officials backing Kennedy, a Gallup poll at the end of April showed him with an 83 percent approval rating. As reassuring, 61 percent of the public supported Kennedy’s “handling [of] the situation in Cuba,” and 65 percent specifically opposed sending “our armed forces into Cuba to help overthrow Castro.” But Kennedy could not put the failure aside. He dismissed the polls, saying, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
Because he believed that Castro now more than ever represented a threat to U.S. interests in the hemisphere, and because defeat at the Bay of Pigs gave an added incentive to topple Castro’s regime, Kennedy gave a high priority to finding an effective policy for dealing with the Cuban problem. On April 21, he set up a task force to study “military and paramilitary, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activities which fall short of outright war.” The task force chairman was General Maxwell Taylor, a World War II hero whose 1959 book, The Uncertain Trumpet, had “reoriented our whole strategic thinking,” Bobby said. Taylor’s book affirmed JFK’s opposition to massive retaliation with nuclear weapons and support for counterinsurgency forces designed to fight guerrilla wars. Bobby, Burke, and Dulles (who did not leave office until later in the year) served with Taylor and agreed to “give special attention to the lessons that can be learned from recent events in Cuba.”
Though ostensibly a study group to work against a replay of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the committee quickly became a vehicle for suggesting ways to overturn Castro. At a National Security Council meeting on May 4, Kennedy and his advisers “agreed that U.S. policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro,” but that neither a blockade nor direct military action should be the means for doing it, though U.S. intervention should remain a possibility. The study group’s report of June 13 concluded, “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” He constituted “a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of weak Latin American republics.” But action against him needed to rest on a wide range of international and domestic considerations. With only 44 percent of the American public favoring aid to anti-Castro forces and 41 percent opposed, a program of clandestine subversion seemed the best of the planners’ options. Decisions on exactly how to proceed were left for the future.
Despite his high approval ratings, Kennedy was disappointed with the results of his first hundred days. To be sure, he had established himself as an attractive and even inspirational leader, but rising tensions with Castro and ongoing communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Africa joined with a sluggish economy and civil rights divisions at home to shake Kennedy’s confidence in mastering the challenges of his presidency. The May 5 edition of Time declared, “Last week, as John Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his administration, the U.S. suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic.” Asked how he liked being president, Kennedy replied that he liked it better before the Bay of Pigs. He also described himself as “always on the edge of irritability.” “Sons of bitches,” Kennedy said after reading Time’s critical assessment of his first hundred days. “If they want this job they can have it tomorrow.”
Yet however frustrated he was by events and his own stumbles, Kennedy was determined to use the problems of his first months as object lessons in how to be more effective. His resolve stood him in good stead: He managed coming crises with greater skill and a growing conviction that he might be an above average and maybe even a memorable president after all.