Kennedy and company have returned us to barbarism. Schlesinger and company have disgraced us intellectually and morally. I feel a desperate shame for my country. Sorry I cannot be with you. Were I physically able to do so I would at this moment be fighting alongside Fidel Castro.
Actually Castro wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t necessary. At the Bay of Pigs his subordinates had the situation well in hand, and he stood to one side, a spectator for once, while they relentlessly reduced the perimeter of the rebel beachhead. Latin America had never seen weapons like those of the government troops. Monday morning four batteries of their Soviet 122-mm howitzers started to rake the beach; the exiles who had been in the target area stumbled around in a daze. Rebel tank commanders fought gallantly, but the Russian T-34 tanks outgunned them. By Monday evening the exiles were desperately short of ammunition. “The night came and we were expecting the ships,” Pepe San Roman later told Haynes Johnson. “Everybody turned their faces to the sea waiting for the ships. We knew that without the ships we could not make it.” Midnight came and there was nothing. In despair Pepe boarded an open boat with his radio operator and cruised six miles out, trying to reach the CIA boat, with his signal. Then he returned to his command post and sent another officer out to keep trying to reach the captains, whose mutinous crews had rendered them impotent. Hour after hour the message went out from the open boat: DOLORES. THIS IS BEACH. DOLORES. THIS IS BEACH. I AM TRYING TO FIND YOU. WE NEED YOU. WE NEED YOU.
At dawn Tuesday six of La Brigada’s remaining B-26s tried to bomb the Cuban air force planes at San Antonio de Los Baños. Castro’s luck held; cloud cover blanketed the field; there was no damage. On the ground at Girón, massed T-34s stood in a solid line, firing point-blank into the beachhead. Within the narrowing perimeter all omens were bad. The lack of air cover had been the exiles’ undoing. Now they couldn’t even be evacuated without it.
In the White House Tuesday evening the President was called away from the Mansion’s annual congressional reception. Incongruously dressed in white tie and tails, he stood over a map in his office while Rusk, McNamara, two of the Joint Chiefs, and Richard Bissell of the CIA told him that only the U.S. air force could save the brigade from Castro’s kangaroo courts. He compromised, authorizing a flight of six unmarked jets from the carrier Essex, on duty in the Caribbean off the Bay of Pigs. For one hour—from 6:30 A.M. to 7:30 A.M. Wednesday—the U.S. planes would keep the sky over the beachhead clear of Castro planes while the rebels’ remaining B-26s attacked the government troops on the perimeter.2
The last act of the Bay of Pigs tragicomedy followed. The rebel fliers’ base was at Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua, a three-hour-and-twenty-minute flight from Cuba. They were exhausted by their previous missions; only two of them had the strength for another effort. Four American advisers, believing that jets from the Essex would protect them, volunteered to pilot the other B-26s. They then made the last and least plausible of all the CIA mistakes in the blunder-studded operation. Nicaragua and Cuba are in different time zones. The pilots forgot to reset their watches. They arrived over Girón an hour early, while the jets which were to shield them were still on the flight deck of the Essex. Castro’s T-33s swarmed up and made short work of them; the four Americans were killed.
Only the final agony was left now. Pleas from Girón for reinforcements, tanks, and ammunition became fainter. Messages were terse: FIGHTING ON BEACH. SEND ALL AVAILABLE AIRCRAFT NOW. And: IN WATER. OUT OF AMMO. ENEMY CLOSING IN. HELP MUST ARRIVE IN NEXT HOUR. The last stand began Tuesday night. Encircled by Castro’s artillery and tanks, the exiles’ leader sent his last message at 4:32 P.M. Wednesday: AM DESTROYING ALL MY EQUIPMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS. TANKS ARE IN SIGHT. I HAVE NOTHING TO FIGHT WITH. AM TAKING TO THE WOODS. I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU.
The woods could provide only temporary shelter. Lacking the fallback plan, the rebels stumbled into enemy hands one by one. Castro’s triumph was complete. He had broken the invasion in less than seventy-two hours, turning it into what Haynes Johnson in his excellent study of the battle calls “perhaps the most heavily publicized of the many bungled, poorly planned operations since the Light Brigade charged into oblivion at Balaklava.” Ahead for the survivors in the brigade lay the humiliation of a public trial in Havana’s Sports Palace and an imprisonment which was not to end until Christmas 1962, when Robert F. Kennedy and James B. Donovan led a successful movement to ransom them.
***
In the mid-1960s contemporary historians tended to believe that in the long run the Bay of Pigs was really a blessing; that because of it Kennedy became disillusioned with experts and was better equipped to face the Cuban missile crisis eighteen months later. Seen from the 1970s, the debacle at Girón, and his reaction to it, have a very different look. On Thursday of that week, the day after the invasion collapsed, the President spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Washington. He took a fighting stance. He was letting Castro go this time, he said, but he wanted the record to show that “our restraint is not inexhaustible.” The United States was ready to act, “alone, if necessary,” to “safeguard its security,” and he warned Moscow that “should that time ever come, we do not intend to be lectured on intervention by those whose character was stamped for all time on the bloody streets of Budapest.”
This was cold war rhetoric at its most bleak. Implicit in it was the assumption that the only danger to America lay outside the country’s borders. The country’s one adversary was monolithic international Communism, whose forces were “not to be underestimated in Cuba or anywhere else in the world.” The governments and peoples of the Western Hemisphere were exhorted to “take an ever closer and more realistic look at the menace of external Communist intervention and domination in Cuba,” for it was “clearer than ever before that we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes far beyond the clash of armies and even nuclear armaments.”
The great liberal turning of the 1960s still lay ahead then. Once it had been taken, the threats to the nation would be viewed as internal—racism, militarism, pollution, technology, bureaucracy, the population explosion, “the establishment.” But in the Kennedy years all that lay ahead. The liberal hero of the hour, who in the 1930s had been the angry young workman, in the 1940s the GI, and in the 1950s the youth misunderstood by his mother, had become, in the early 1960s, the dedicated Peace Corpsman battling hunger, disease—and Communism—with tools of peace. As an American liberal of the time, Kennedy believed that the basic reasons for the revolutionary movements in underdeveloped countries were poverty and ignorance, which were being exploited by Communists for their own ends. He was sure that once those conditions had been changed by Point Four programs, the appeal of Communism would vanish. That was what the appeal of the Alianza was all about. A Latin America allied with the United States in pursuit of progress, it was held, would reject overtures from the Comintern.
These beliefs were deeply held. There was, perhaps for the last time, a liberal conviction that man would be able to solve his problems. The young idealist of the early 1960s was a pragmatist, to use a word much in vogue then. The hour of Ralph Nader, the liberal model of the next decade, had not yet struck. In the Kennedy years liberals believed, as they had believed since the years of Franklin Roosevelt, that the remedy for social wrongs lay in big government and stronger presidential powers. Later their disenchantment would shake the very foundations of the republic.
Kennedy’s speech in the Statler-Hilton that Thursday might have been delivered in the Eisenhower years, perhaps even by John Foster Dulles. There were many differences in style, but not much in substance. Like all cold warriors Kennedy invoked the name of Munich toward the end, reminding his listeners of its meaning: that democracies which failed to stand up to totalitarian dictators were doomed; that “our security may be lost, piece by piece, country by country, without the firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border.” He intended “to profit by this lesson,” he s
aid, and he concluded: “History will record the fact that this bitter struggle reached its climax in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Let me then make clear as the President of the United States that I am determined upon our system’s survival and success, regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril.”
Thus one of the worst guesses ever of what history would say. That address was Kennedy’s public response to the Bay of Pigs. Back at the White House he took another, more symbolic step. McGeorge Bundy’s status as national security adviser was sharply upgraded. He was moved from the relatively humble Executive Office Building, on the other side of West Executive Avenue, to the West Wing. There, much closer to the President’s oval office, Bundy began presiding over regular morning meetings of his National Security Council staff. In addition he extended his sway over the White House war room, with its huge maps and brightly colored telephones. Next time the forces of world Communism plotted a blow at the free world, the United States would be on guard. If they dared subvert the anti-Communist government of another weak little country anywhere, they would meet a firmer will. The White House was ready. Bundy was ready. The war room was ready. The hot lines were plugged in. The aggressors would be taught a lesson they would never forget.
Among the thoughtful readers of reports from Cuba was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. The Chairman wasn’t much impressed by cold war oratory, having delivered a lot of it himself. What interested him was that the new President, young and inexperienced, had stumbled badly. Kennedy seemed unsure of himself. This looked like a good time to pounce on him.
The White House knew that in the Kremlin this would be the interpretation of the debacle. It was the chief reason for Washington’s dismay after taking stock of the wreckage of confidence left by the Bay of Pigs. In February a meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev had been scheduled for early June, in Vienna. On May 12 the Chairman wrote that the invitation was still open. Kennedy thought of suggesting a postponement. But that, he decided, would be interpreted as a further sign of weakness. Better the summit, he said, than the brink. Instead of staying away he would redouble his preparations for the Vienna conference. He had been told that the Chairman had been disdainful of Eisenhower’s failure to bone up on his homework before his two summits with Khrushchev; whenever a tough question came up, Ike had had to turn to aides for answers. Kennedy decided that the important talks there would be just the two of them and an interpreter.
Like him, Khrushchev was under pressure from hard-liners at home, Stalinists who believed that the only way to get what you wanted from the other side was to demand it, to grab it, to be coarse and abusive and intimidating. There was a lot of this in Khrushchev himself. Stalin had admired it in him. It was what gave him his aura of primitive power. The previous autumn he had provided the U.N. General Assembly with a memorable demonstration of it. The Congo in these years was a graveyard for the reputations of geopoliticians. Khrushchev, already frustrated by the U-2 incident, the aborting of the Geneva summit with Eisenhower, and the end of his hopes for a Soviet-American detente, had been maddened at fresh humiliations in Katanga. He had blamed Dag Hammarskjöld, calling him a tool of colonial powers. Demanding that the post of secretary general of the U.N. be abolished, he had proposed that it be replaced by an executive body of three men representing the three groups of nations, western, Communist, and neutral. He had called it a “troika,” after the Russian wagon drawn by three horses abreast. For emphasis, he had removed his shoe and pounded his desk in rhythm. The General Assembly was in an uproar. Trying to restore order, the Irishman who was presiding at the time banged the gavel so hard that he broke it. The chaos delighted the Chairman. Returning to Moscow, he crowed, “How shaky the United Nations is! It’s the beginning of the end.”
On January 6, 1961, Khrushchev countered the American liberals’ policy toward underdeveloped countries—a dual plan of economic aid, with military intervention if necessary—with what was to be Communism’s great challenge of the 1960s: “unlimited support” to “peoples fighting for their liberation” in “just” wars. Six weeks later Patrice Lumumba, his Congolese ally, was murdered in Katanga. The infuriated Russian called the assassination “the crowning achievement of Hammarskjöld’s criminal activities” and again demanded the secretary general’s immediate removal.
The Russian right had other grievances for which Khrushchev was the spokesman. Laos, which had appeared to be about to drop into their lap, was veering toward a neutral course. Red Army hard-liners wanted a resumption of nuclear tests, suspended in the Soviet Union since the fall of 1958; they now had 20-, 30-, 50-, and 100-megaton weapons, and were eager to try them out. These were daily irritants, symptoms of the cold war which kept the diplomatic climate chilly without creating a world crisis. But for them one issue was vital, and transcended the others. Khrushchev had variously described it as a “bone stuck in the throat,” “a sort of cancerous tumor requiring a surgical operation,” and a “Sarajevo” likely to lead toward another world war. It was divided Berlin.
For fifteen years the Russians had regarded the presence of the West in the former German capital as unbearable. Stalin had tried to evict Allied troops in 1948 and had been thwarted by the great airlift. When the first sputnik raised Soviet stock, Khrushchev had seized the opportunity to demand that Berlin be made a demilitarized “free city.” He had given the allies a six-month deadline then, and he had postponed it only when Eisenhower had made that a condition of Khrushchev’s trip to the United States. Ike had made certain concessions. He had agreed that the Berlin situation was “abnormal.” He had offered to negotiate the size of the western garrison there and the extent to which the city would serve as a base for West German propaganda and intelligence activities.
Now Khrushchev was stalking Kennedy with the same issue. In his wars-of-liberation speech the Chairman had come down hard on Berlin. He had openly threatened Kennedy. If “the imperialists” refused “to take into consideration the true situation,” he had said, the Soviet Union would “take firm measures” and “sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic.” Thus Kennedy faced the demon Eisenhower had exorcised. Khrushchev made it clear that such an agreement would include guarantees that any “violation” of East Germany’s frontiers would be considered “an act of aggression” against all members of the Warsaw Pact—meaning that the West would have to forsake Berlin or go to war. Did he mean it? Charles de Gaulle was doubtful. He urged the President to hold firm (“tenir le coup”). If Kennedy held fast and made plans for a new airlift, he said, the Chairman would back off. Looking to Vienna, Averell Harriman agreed, though he recommended different tactics. Khrushchev, he predicted, would be fierce. He would try to frighten the young President. The best response would be to turn him aside, but it should be done gently. And Kennedy mustn’t overestimate his adversary. Khrushchev would be nervous too, Harriman said. The Chairman’s only other trip to the West had failed. Furthermore, American Kremlinologists agreed that he had never forgotten his lowly origins. Inevitably there would be tension in Vienna. The Chairman would be offensive as only he knew how to be. The President, Harriman suggested, should rise above it and laugh it off.
This advice reached Kennedy in Paris, on the eve of his flight to Austria. The French leg of the trip had turned into a triumph for the young First Lady. Eleven years earlier, she had been a student here at the Sorbonne. Now she arrived with two truckloads of luggage, a blinding array of jewels, and a retinue that included Europe’s leading hairdresser. De Gaulle could scarcely take his eyes off her. The French press cried “Ravissante!” “Charmante!” and “Apothéose!” Arriving at a press conference, the President said, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate for me to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
Vienna was different. Mrs. Kennedy teased Khrushchev—“Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics”—but the gloomy pall was too heavy to be laughed away, even by her. Almost from the moment Khrushchev’s bl
ack, Russian-built Chaika drove past the barbwire and up to the massive stone and stucco building that served as the U.S. embassy residence in the Austrian capital, the mood was as ugly as the weather. To an aide Kennedy described his adversary as a combination of external jocosity and “internal rage.” During the two days of talks the rage was external, too. James Reston had asked to interview the President after the final encounter. Kennedy was wearing a hat that day, and as he entered the room where the reporter was waiting and sank down on a couch, he pushed the hat over his eyes and uttered a great sigh. Reston thought he seemed in a state of semi-shock. He asked the President, “Pretty rough?” Kennedy replied, “Roughest thing in my life.”
Afterward Reston wrote:
He [the President] came into a dim room in the American Embassy shaken and angry. He had tried, as always, to be calm and rational with Khrushchev, to get him to define what the Soviet Union would and would not do, and Khrushchev had bullied him and threatened him with war over Berlin…. Kennedy said just enough in that room to convince me of the following:
Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs; he would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or destroyed him; but when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.
In their talks, Kennedy told Reston, the Chairman had been rude, savage; at times he had seemed to be about to lunge at Kennedy. On only one issue was he reasonable: Laos, which he regarded as unimportant. In discussing everything else his manner was vicious, sneering. Hammarskjöld had to go, he insisted; he must be replaced by the troika. Similarly, three executives from the world’s three political camps would be needed to administer any disarmament agreement between the United States and the USSR. In vain Kennedy argued that an arrangement would be rendered impotent by a veto—“Even the Russian troika has but one driver.” On the matter of Berlin Khrushchev delivered an ultimatum. The bone, he said, must be removed from the Soviet throat. With or without an American agreement, he would sign a treaty with East Germany before the end of the year. If the United States wanted to go to war on this question, there was nothing he could do about it. Madmen who sought war deserved only straitjackets.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 136