“Presidents, like great French restaurants, have an ambiance all their own,” Douglass Cater observed. The Kennedy image was forming, an amalgam of, among other things, Jacqueline Kennedy’s camellia beauty, three-year-old Caroline’s Kate Greenaway charm, the elegant rhetoric of the President’s speeches, the football on the attorney general’s desk, and the new idealism. Gone were the former administration’s flannel phrases—“bigger bang for a buck,” “rolling readjustment,” “agonizing reappraisal.” Instead, the country learned, there was to be a dynamic policy of action, typified by the new Secretary of Labor, who settled a strike during his first twenty-four hours in office. Like the harassed senator, everyone in the new cabinet appeared to be driving like blazes, working twelve-hour days and displaying signs of Kennedy hypomania. It was mostly illusion, of course, and later there was bound to be some disillusion, but at the time it was undeniably impressive. One secretary was observed simultaneously signing his mail, carrying on a telephone conversation, and relaying instructions to an aide by crude semaphore; a second was said to be training himself to carry on with only six hours of sleep; and a third member of the cabinet, Robert McNamara, startled Pentagon guards by showing up at 7:30 each morning.
Restoration of green berets to the Special Forces reflected Kennedy’s belief in excellence. Later David Halberstam would write of those first days that the members of the Kennedy team “carried with them an exciting sense of American elitism”—elitism was not yet a term of opprobrium—“a sense that the best men had been summoned forth from the country to harness this dream to a new American nationalism, bringing a new, strong, dynamic spirit to our historic role in world affairs.” Examples abounded, particularly in the recruiting of distinguished scholars. An astonishing number of them came from Cambridge, Massachusetts; a mot of the time offered a new definition of a failure: a Yale man driving an Edsel with a Nixon sticker on it. Asked how he happened to be chosen Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman said, “I’m not really sure, but I think it had something to do with the fact that Harvard does not have a school of agriculture.” Freeman did indeed lack a Harvard degree, but what was more important in this administration was that at Minnesota he had been graduated magna cum laude and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. A Mauldin cartoon depicted a Phi Beta Kappa key as the new key to the capital. Disdain and even contempt for intellectuals, so conspicuous in Washington eight years earlier, had vanished. In cultivating this image, New Frontiersmen soft-pedaled certain inconvenient facts—their President loved golf, for example, and his two favorite songs, “Bill Bailey” and “Heart of My Heart,” were anything but classical. Yet picturing him as a Brahmin was not inaccurate. As Truman had admired generals and Eisenhower tycoons, Kennedy turned to academics. Among his advisers were fifteen Rhodes scholars, led by the Secretary of State, and four professional historians. The Secretary of Defense, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, and the ambassadors to India, Japan, and Yugoslavia were former college teachers. The President’s expert on gold was a professor. Even the President’s military adviser, General Maxwell D. Taylor, came to him from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and for the first time in history the White House had a cultural coordinator.
The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam would later call them in a bitter reckoning of their foreign policy failures. His appraisal came eleven years later and was largely an indictment of their role in Vietnam. Unquestionably that was the worst of their handiworks, but it was not their only disaster, a fact to be weighed in putting the Kennedy years in perspective. The new administration had stumbled earlier. The responsibility for their first outstanding nonsuccess was far from theirs alone. They were executing a plan drawn up by the outgoing administration. Nevertheless, they should have been more skeptical of it. The fact that they were not is illustrative of how fallible the cleverest politicians can be. Their error lay in confusing image and reality. Looking back on those first weeks in power, Robert Kennedy would observe almost wistfully, “Those were the days when we thought we were succeeding because of the stories on how hard everybody was working.” Their discovery of their mistake was a spin-off of one of American history’s most farcical misadventures, which took its name from Cuba’s Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.
***
Of that debacle Halberstam was to write: “How a President who seemed so contemporary could agree to a plan so obviously doomed to failure, a plan based on so little understanding of the situation, was astounding.” Afterward Kennedy himself asked Ted Sorensen, “How could I have been so far off base? All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” Again and again, Arthur Schlesinger noted, the remorseful President would “recur incredulously to the Bay of Pigs, wondering how a rational and responsible government could ever have become involved in so ill-starred an adventure.”
All that, of course, was after the fact. In the beginning the scheme had not seemed so harebrained. President-elect Kennedy had first learned of it from Allen Dulles on November 29, 1960. Two days after the inaugural, Dulles and General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed the leading members of the new administration—Rusk, McNamara, Robert Kennedy. On January 28 the President called the first White House meeting to discuss the future of La Brigada. Schlesinger observed that Kennedy was “wary and reserved in his reaction.” The CIA men told their new chief not to worry. There were no loose threads, they assured him; every base was covered.
Kennedy at that time had been President one week. He wanted time to mull the thing over, but the CIA said he couldn’t have much of it. For La Brigada it was now or never. Castro was about to receive crated MIGs from Russia. By June 1 enough of them would be assembled and in service, piloted by Cuban fliers who were being trained in Czechoslovakia, to wipe but the brigade on the beaches. In addition, President Ydígoras said the trainees couldn’t stay in Guatemala after April. By then the rainy season would turn the Sierra Madre into one vast bog. Further training there would be impossible. The CIA reported that La Brigada was fit and eager to fight. The liberation of Cuba awaited a word, a single word, from the President.
Still he hesitated. The pressure mounted. Allen Dulles bluntly put it to him: either he approved the plan or he would be refusing to allow freedom-loving exiles to deliver their homeland from a Communist dictatorship, encouraging Cuba to undermine democratic governments throughout Latin America, and creating an ugly ’64 campaign issue as the disbanded, disillusioned brigade toured the United States under Republican auspices, revealing how Kennedy had betrayed them and the cause of anti-Communism. Dulles asked the President whether he was ready to tell this “group of fine young men” who asked “nothing other than the opportunity to try to restore a free government in their country” that they would “get no sympathy, no support, no aid from the United States?”
Kennedy asked what the chances of success were. Dulles reminded him that in June 1954 the CIA had overthrown Guatemala’s Marxist government. He said, “I stood right here at Ike’s desk, and I told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed, and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one.” The Joint Chiefs unanimously endorsed it. Late in February Kennedy asked for a second opinion from the Chiefs. They sent an inspection team to the Guatemalan base. After reading the report and studying La Brigada’s tactical plan, General Lemnitzer again predicted that it would succeed, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, seconded him. Looking for still another opinion, the President ordered to Guatemala a veteran Marine Corps colonel with a brilliant combat record. The result was this evaluation:
My observations have increased my confidence in the ability of this force to accomplish not only initial combat missions, but also the ultimate objective, the overthrow of Castro. The Brigade and battalion commanders now know all details of the plan and are enthusiastic.1 These officers are young, vigor
ous, intelligent and motivated by a fanatical urge to begin battle….
They say they know their own people and believe that after they have inflicted one serious defeat upon the opposition forces, the latter will melt away from Castro, whom they have no wish to support. They say it is a Cuban tradition to join a winner and they have supreme confidence they will win against whatever Castro has to offer.
I share their confidence.
At that, Kennedy yielded, conceding that there was some logic in the argument that an administration which was prepared to send U.S. troops to fight Communism in Laos, on the other side of the world, could not ignore an aggressive Communist regime ninety miles south of Florida. Yet even then he expressed misgivings. Schlesinger later believed that if one senior adviser had spoken out against the expedition, it would have been canceled. Only he and Senator William Fulbright protested. (Chester Bowles and Edward R. Murrow knew of it and were against it, but as their sources of information were unofficial, they couldn’t appeal to the White House.) Schlesinger asked Kennedy, “What do you think about this damned invasion?” Kennedy replied dryly, “I think about it as little as possible.”
On Monday, April 10, the brigade was moved by truck to its point of embarkation, Puerto Cabezas, in Nicaragua. Thursday the men boarded the boats. On Friday their CIA leaders told them their objectives: the capture of three beaches in the Bay of Pigs, with brigade paratroops seizing key points in the great marshy swamp—Cienaga de Zapata—that lay between the island proper and the sea. At noon Sunday the expedition passed the point of no return. The rebels, their armada, and their tiny air force were committed.
The real nature of that commitment and the plan Kennedy thought he had approved were not the same thing, however. The President had been assured that the brigade comprised 1,400 elite troops who had been trained as guerrillas. Their objective in the Bay of Pigs, he—and they—had been told, was a remote, abandoned beach whose only signs of habitation were deserted resort houses. Landing at night, the briefers explained, the rebels’ presence would be unknown to Castro. CIA intelligence further assured the President that the Cuban dictator would be unable to act for at least seventy-two hours. Even then he would be bewildered; to divert him, 168 brigade commandos would make a diversionary landing on the coast of Oriente province over three hundred miles away.
Dulles, Richard Bissell—chief architect of the CIA plan—and their advisers, including E. Howard Hunt Jr., were confident that enough Cubans were disillusioned with Castro to guarantee the success of the main landing. They reported that 2,500 of them belonged to resistance organizations, that another 20,000 sympathized with the resistance, and that 25 percent of the population, at the very least, was prepared to give the insurgents active support. This was essential, for both in private and in public Kennedy had emphasized that the American military would play no part in an assault on Castro. He was locked in on this. At an April 12 press conference he said that “there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States forces, and this government will do everything it possibly can—and I think it can meet its responsibilities—to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba…. The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves.”
Should the exiles fail to establish a beachhead in the Bay of Pigs and hold it, he was told, they would break off the action and “melt into the hills.” With that, the President thought that all bets had been covered. Believing such a diversion would alter the plan from one for a spectacular amphibious assault to a low-key infiltration, he felt that any chance that U.S. credibility and prestige might be damaged had been eliminated.
He was mistaken. The CIA to the contrary, none of the exiles had received any instruction in guerrilla warfare since November 4, 1960, at which time their force had numbered just 300 men. Many of the more recent recruits were not fit for an arduous jungle campaign. Only 135 members of the brigade were really soldiers. The rest were clerks, lawyers, bankers, physicians, geologists, teachers, cattlemen, newspapermen, musicians, draftsmen, engineers, artists, and mechanics. Three were Catholic priests and one was a Protestant clergyman. Crack troops should be young, in their late teens or early twenties. The average age of these men was twenty-nine; some of them were in their sixties, and some of the late arrivals had not learned to fire a rifle.
That was only the beginning of Kennedy’s misapprehensions. Actually the question of how the rebels would fare in the hills was never tested, because, incredibly, the nearest range was the Escambray Mountains, eighty miles inland and separated from the Bay of Pigs by a hopeless tangle of swamps. Being Cubans, the exiles might have pointed that out. The difficulty was that nothing had been said to them about the possibility of melting away there or anywhere else. On its own, without consulting either the President or the Joint Chiefs, the CIA had decided to withhold the alternative plan from the insurgents. Its reasoning was that if the exiles knew of it, their determination to fight might be weakened; they might be tempted to abandon their beachhead while they still had a good chance of winning.
Everything possible was done to build up the insurgents’ morale, and that included making promises that could not be kept. Frank Bender said to them: “You will be so strong, you will be getting so many people to your side, that you won’t want to wait for us. You will go straight ahead. You will put your hands out, turn left, and go straight into Havana.” Furthermore, the CIA agents assured the exiles that if they foundered Americans would rescue them. Long afterward their leader, José Pérez San Román, learned of the option, the last resort of flight to the hills. He said bitterly, “We were never told about this. What we were told was, ‘If you fail we will go in.’” In Miami, Manuel Ray of the Frente believed that U.S. troops would come in as a second wave. He said later, “We were told that the landings would be followed up by all necessary support. We were even told that ten to fifteen thousand men would be available.”
The first setback came in the air, and it was crucial. CIA appraisals of the Cuban air force had been scornful. Its combat efficiency was rated “almost nonexistent,” its planes “for the most part obsolete and inoperative,” and its leadership “entirely disorganized.” Castro had fifteen B-26 bombers, ten Sea Furies, and four fast T-33 jet trainers. To knock them out, the CIA scheduled a strike against Cuban airfields on Saturday, April 15, two days before the landing. Eight exiles were to fly World War II prop-driven B-26s; afterward two of them would identify themselves in Miami as defectors from the Cuban air force. It wasn’t good enough. Castro, after all, knew who was deserting from him and who wasn’t, and to assure confusion among the Americans a real defector chose this awkward time to land in Jacksonville. The lumbering B-26s were slow, unwieldy, and plagued by engine trouble. Saturday evening Frank Bender sent a message to Pepe San Román. The bombing mission had been a success, he said; nearly all Castro aircraft had been destroyed on the ground—twelve at his Santiago de Cuba airfield, six to eight at Ciudad Libertad, and eight to ten at San Antonio. This would have been marvelous if it were true, but it wasn’t; the Cuban air force had been left with six B-26s, two Sea Furies, four fighters and, most important, two T-33 jets. Unaccountably, both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had assigned no value to the T-33s because they were trainer planes. They were jets all the same, and as such could fly circles around the insurgents’ B-26s. Armed with 50-caliber machine guns, they would hop on the tails of the B-26s. Moreover, the bombers were particularly vulnerable to attack from the rear. As flown in World War II, B-26s had been defended by tail gunners, but the CIA had eliminated tail guns in these planes to put in extra gas tanks, giving the fliers more time in the air over Cuba. Now the exiled fliers were doomed. Air mastery would belong to Castro. Always important in an amphibious operation, this was especially so for this one because of another CIA error. For reasons which have never been explained, the agents had ordered all the supplies for the first ten days of fighting—the am
munition, gasoline, food, hospital equipment—loaded on one ship.
***
The name of the vessel was the Río Escondito. It was one of five hulking old World War II troop transports and two escort ships bearing the cover name García Line for this operation, and in a way it was a symbol of the entire undertaking. Unpainted and covered with rust, its engines temperamental and its hold reeking of foul odors, the Río listed like The African Queen. The exiles were appalled by it. One of them, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, a mortarman with some knowledge of the sea, was shocked—it gave him what he later described as “a cold feeling”—and Erneido Oliva felt “a great deception when we got over to the ships. It was something we didn’t expect. That was not what we were waiting for.” The idea that such a boat had been chosen for a mission of stealth was ludicrous. Its hoists and winches shrieked when used. Its rust-caked loading machinery was even noisier. The Río was already in trouble. Moving down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, one of its propellers had struck a log. Brigade frogmen found it completely bent. Its maneuverability sharply limited, it limped onward on its way to a duel with enemy aircraft.
Kennedy’s understanding that young Cuban patriots would be landed quietly on an isolated coast was first jarred by a Manhattan public relations firm. Without a word to the White House or anyone else, including the Cuban Frente, whose authority was being preempted, the CIA had hired Lem Jones Associates to issue press releases in the name of the “Cuban Revolutionary Council.” The bulletins were being telephoned to Jones’s Madison Avenue office by CIA agents and then distributed to the press. One, “for immediate release,” reported: “The principal battle of the Cuban revolt against Castro will be fought in the next few hours. Action today was largely of a supply and support effort.” At the end it called for “a coordinated wave of sabotage and rebellion.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 134