But Kennedy’s opponents would not allow him to keep Sorensen’s beliefs discreetly concealed. In September 1961, the White House aide’s pacifism exploded as a public issue when Walter Trohan, the Washington bureau chief of the anti-Kennedy Chicago Tribune, wrote that “the man behind President Kennedy’s rocking chair in a world [filled] with war tensions, escaped military service as a conscientious objector.” Republican presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater promptly turned the Tribune article into a political issue by inserting it into the Congressional Record, remarking, “I can’t help but wonder at the thoughts of the fathers and mothers of American boys who are right now being called up for active military service when they learn that one of the president’s closest advisors is an objector because of conscience.”
Sorensen insists today that Kennedy simply brushed aside the controversy: “It didn’t bother the president at all.” But it was just one more unsettling fact about the new administration that gnawed at the national security chiefs, who believed that the country’s defense rested first and foremost on their shoulders no matter who occupied the Oval Office. They knew, of course, about family patriarch Joe Kennedy’s shameful record of appeasement toward the Nazis, which cut short his service as President Roosevelt’s ambassador to England and ruined his political future. Now they saw his son surround himself in the White House with men they regarded as Cold War appeasers. From the very beginning of his administration, the young president himself was regarded with a wary suspicion by Washington’s warrior culture. They feared JFK was a lightweight who might very well put the nation at risk, a physically and morally compromised man whose victory had been purchased by his cunning crook of a father.
For these men, Kennedy’s inauguration was not an occasion for celebration. During the inaugural ceremony, while waiting for a luncheon in Eisenhower’s honor at the exclusive F Street Club, a group of senior military officials, including Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stood grimly watching the TV as the new president called upon the nation to follow him into the future. The military men were focused less on Kennedy’s inspiring words than on his forehead, which was perspiring profusely in the frigid winter air. “He’s all hopped up!” shouted out General Howard Snyder, the retiring White House physician. Snyder, who had access to FBI and Secret Service files on Kennedy, told Radford that Kennedy—who suffered from Addison’s disease—was “prescribed a shot of cortisone every morning to keep him in good operating condition” and on this particularly stressful day he had obviously been administered an extra dose, resulting in his heavily beaded brow. Snyder worried aloud about the nation being placed in the hands of a man so obviously medically impaired: “I hate to think of what might happen to the country if Kennedy is required at three a.m. to make a decision affecting the national security.”
It would not be long before Kennedy did face the first such crisis of his administration—and the way he handled it confirmed the warrior elite’s worst fears about him.
JACK KENNEDY AND THE CIA seemed made for each other. The spy agency’s cloak and dagger derring-do appealed to the James Bond–loving imagination of the young president. But the agency’s main attraction was its promise of accomplishing strategic objectives on the cheap and sly, without embroiling the nation in the rampant, unpredictable violence of all-out war.
Kennedy had moved smoothly through the Georgetown social milieu of the CIA’s bright, young, Ivy League–educated men. Joe Alsop (Groton ’28, Harvard ’32), who presided over salon gatherings frequented by the CIA elite with his unique combination of effete mannerisms and Cold War machismo, helped pave the rising young politician’s entrance into this world. Among those he introduced to Kennedy was his old Groton friend Richard Bissell, who had been plucked from academia by spymaster Allen Dulles and later groomed as his successor. Some CIA hands were still wary of Kennedy from the McCarthy days, when Jack looked the other way while Bobby served as counsel for the demagogic senator, whose witch hunt grew so feverish that its flames began to lick at the CIA itself, menacing bright young idealists in its top ranks like Cord Meyer and William Bundy, until Dulles boldly told the boozy politician with the five-o’clock shadow of a movie crook to take his business elsewhere. The WASPy agency’s snubbing of the crude, publicity-grubbing Irish-Catholic McCarthy echoed the Kennedys’ own treatment at the hands of the Protestant establishment. But Jack was too smooth to bring up old tribal resentments like this as he deftly navigated his way through the intelligence culture during his run-up to the presidency.
Bissell was a tall, bespectacled man whose professorial bearing concealed a ruthless character. His wealthy Connecticut family had colonial roots, with one ancestor serving as a spy for General George Washington. Like Dulles, who came from a family of secretaries of state and international financiers, he had a proprietary sense about America. During the 1960 campaign, Bissell responded enthusiastically to Kennedy’s aggressive international posture, seeing in him someone like himself—a bright, young leader who would not be content with the global status quo but would seek to roll back the advances of communism, not simply by waving the big nuclear stick, like Eisenhower, but by confronting the Soviets with a variety of counterinsurgency and espionage methods more suited to the world of modern conflict. Meeting privately with Kennedy during the campaign, Bissell, who still worked for a Republican administration, told him he could not flaunt his choice for president, but made no secret of his support for Kennedy.
The Republican Dulles, hedging the agency’s bets, voted for Nixon. But Nixon would nurse a deep resentment against the agency for the rest of his life, believing that the CIA director secretly briefed his Democratic opponent about the Bay of Pigs plan, giving Kennedy an edge in the final debate. He also suspected the agency helped tip the election to Kennedy by delaying the Cuba invasion until after the election, depriving Nixon of an October surprise.
After Kennedy’s victory, Bissell wrote a friend that he looked forward to the new administration because “I think Kennedy is surrounded by a group of men with a much livelier awareness than the Republicans of the extreme crisis that we are living in…. What I really mean is that the Democrats will be far less inhibited in trying to do something about it. My guess is that Washington will be a more lively and interesting place in which to live and work.”
Dulles, for his part, did not expect any significant change in his role under Kennedy. The spymaster and his late brother—Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles—had largely run America’s foreign policy between the two of them during the 1950s. And he expected to continue the family’s policies undisturbed under the new, inexperienced president. Kennedy confidante Bill Walton was stunned to hear Dulles declare his sense of entitlement out loud at a dinner party at journalist Walter Lippmann’s home after Kennedy took office. “After dinner,” Walton recalled, “the men sat around awhile in an old-fashioned way, and he started boasting that he was still carrying out his brother Foster’s foreign policy. He said, you know, that’s a much better policy. I’ve chosen to follow that one.” The loyal Walton, who detested Dulles (the feelings were mutual), rang his friend in the White House at dawn and told Kennedy everything the CIA director had said the night before. “God damn it!” a furious Kennedy responded. “Did he really say that?”
For Dulles and Bissell, the world had been their espionage playground under Eisenhower, with their agents romping freely from Iran to Guatemala to Indonesia to the Congo. Under Kennedy, their splendid “monkey business”—as agency masterminds referred to their 1954 military coup in Guatemala—promised to become even more unrestrained. Ike made an effort to tighten the reins on Dulles and his outfit in his second term, but he finally threw up his hands. “I’m not going to be able to change Allen,” Eisenhower conceded to his national security advisor, Gordon Gray. He learned to live with a CIA director who firmly believed that the “gentlemen” of U.S. intelligence were not bound by the same moral code that other mortals were.
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sp; Dulles and Bissell were sublimely untroubled by any scruples when they plotted the overthrow of the duly elected government of Guatemala’s president Jacobo Arbenz, who was deemed too left-wing and too hostile to the continued reign of United Fruit, the corporate colossus that was represented by the Dulles brothers’ former Wall Street law firm. Indeed the top two CIA officials waved the coup’s success as a gleaming trophy when, less than three months after Kennedy took office, they persuaded the new president to go ahead with the CIA operation against Castro that had been set in motion by Eisenhower the year before.
Bissell, the principal architect of the Arbenz coup, would reassemble the key members of his Guatemala team for the Bay of Pigs operation, including Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, Howard Hunt, and David Sanchez Morales. These men would soon find, however, that Cuba was no Guatemala. The doomed Bay of Pigs mission would lead to the downfall of spymaster Allen Dulles and the ambitious man in line to succeed him, Richard Bissell. And it would abruptly terminate JFK’s romance with the spy agency, turning the Kennedy brothers and their national security apparatus explosively against one another.
IT WAS THE EVENING of Tuesday, April 18, 1961, the day after some 1,500 U.S.–trained Cuban exiles landed on the moonlit shores of their native land to wage war on Fidel Castro. By Tuesday, the invaders’ situation was dire, with what remained of Castro’s motley air force in control of the skies over the Bay of Pigs and the exile brigade pinned down by relentless enemy fire in the vast Cienaga de Zapata swamp surrounding the landing site, whose primordial muck was infested with crocodiles, mosquitoes, and huge buzzing flies. The brigadistas’ supplies and ammunition were running low. It was agonizingly clear to CIA officials in Washington that their attempted liberation of Cuba was hours from a crushing, degrading defeat. The mood at Quarters Eye, the old Army barracks near the Lincoln Memorial that still served as the CIA’s headquarters, was frantic.
White House advisor Walt Rostow, already established as the administration’s hard-liner against Third World insurgency, drove over to the CIA quarters in his Volkswagen to check in with Bissell, his old Yale professor. He found the normally unflappable espionage wizard unshaven and haggard, surrounded by a number of his distraught men, several of whom were shouting and demanding that Bissell do more to save the brave Cubans the CIA had sent into battle. “We’ve got to persuade the president! The president must send the Air Force in,” one of Bissell’s men pleaded.
Kennedy had repeatedly made it clear to Dulles and Bissell that he would not commit the full military might of the United States to the Bay of Pigs operation. He knew that such a display of gunboat diplomacy would destroy his effort to transform the United States’ image in the hemisphere from bullying Yankee imperialists to benevolent partners for reform in the new “alliance for progress” he had promised in his inaugural. And he feared that such a heavy-booted action might provoke a dangerous countermove by the Soviets against West Berlin. The president insisted that the exiles’ invasion not create a lot of “noise”—a stricture he would continue to place on all anti-Castro operations during his days in office, to the immense frustration of the CIA and Pentagon. To make sure that the brigade soldiers themselves knew that they could not expect to be reinforced by the U.S. Marines, he had sent a military aide to their Central American training camps to deliver the message directly. Kennedy—who was intrigued by the legend of Fidel Castro, the only other leader in the hemisphere whose charisma could rival his own—was taken by the idea that the Bay of Pigs invaders could slip quietly into Cuba and start an insurgency in the mountains, as the bearded revolutionary had done almost five years earlier. The prospect of the Cuban people themselves taking back their country from the Communist dictator was vastly preferable in Kennedy’s mind to a counterrevolution enforced by U.S. bayonets.
But that evening at Quarters Eye, Rostow realized that Bissell and the other CIA men had never truly believed that Kennedy would stick to his ban on direct U.S. intervention. “It was inconceivable to them that the president would let [the operation] openly fail when he had all this American power,” Rostow later wrote. In the heat of battle, the CIA expected Kennedy to cave and send in warplanes and troops. Realizing it was the agency’s last chance to convince Kennedy to do so, Rostow prevailed on Bissell to go to the White House to make his case one final time directly to the president. Rostow phoned Kenny O’Donnell, who by now also realized the invasion “was going in the shit house,” and reaching him in the Oval Office, set up a meeting for late that night.
It was minutes before midnight when the extraordinary meeting convened. Kennedy, McNamara, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had all just come from the annual Congressional Reception in the East Room and were still wearing their white ties and black tails. They were joined by General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Admiral Burke, the Navy chief, both of whom were in full dress uniform. Bissell presented his case for U.S. intervention to the assembled group in urgent tones, “acutely aware of the desperation of those whose lives were on the line,” he later recalled. The invasion was “on the brink of failure,” he told them, but there was “still hope.” Burke was “very much on my side,” recalled Bissell. The two men implored Kennedy to unleash the military.
“Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” pleaded Burke.
Kennedy refused. He reminded Bissell and Burke that he had warned them “over and over again” that he would not commit U.S. combat forces to save the operation.
The president was beginning to realize that his top military and intelligence chiefs did not take his instructions that seriously. Kennedy would later learn that the Bay of Pigs operation had been riddled with insubordinate behavior. Up until the moment he finally approved the invasion, Kennedy repeatedly emphasized to Bissell that he reserved the right to abort the operation. But Bissell had sent a very different message to the military leaders of the Bay of Pigs brigade in their Guatemala training camp. They were informed that “there are forces in the administration trying to block the invasion” and if these “forces” succeeded, the brigade leaders were to mutiny against their U.S. advisors and proceed with the invasion. This stunning act of CIA defiance would provoke a public furor when it was later revealed by Haynes Johnson in his 1964 book about the Bay of Pigs. Burke, it was subsequently disclosed, had also flirted with insubordination on the first day of the invasion, “leaning on his orders” in the polite description of a sympathetic chronicler and sending the U.S. aircraft carrier Essex and helicopter landing ship Boxer close to Cuban shore, in violation of Kennedy’s order to keep U.S. ships fifty miles away.
The blunt-spoken admiral grew increasingly angry during the midnight White House meeting as Kennedy repeatedly brushed aside his and Bissell’s pleas. Finally, Burke asked for just one destroyer, so he could “knock the hell out of Castro’s tanks.”
“What if Castro’s forces return the fire and hit the destroyer?” Kennedy appropriately asked.
“Then we’ll the knock the hell out of them!” roared the admiral. The man who had commanded a destroyer squadron in the South Pacific during World War II, winning fame as “31-Knot” Burke for his speed and daring during the battles of Empress Augusta Bay and Cape St. George, was grappling with someone who had been a junior ensign on a PT boat in the same seas—and the blustery Navy commander was appalled to find himself in such an ignominious position.
But the junior ensign was now president, and he was not easily intimidated. “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” Kennedy snapped, beginning to lose his own temper.
“Hell, Mr. President,” the Navy chief shot back loudly, “but we are involved!” Burke wanted to be “as forceful as I could be in talking to the president,” he later recalled. But Kennedy was unmoved.
As the meeting finally came to an end shortly before 3:00 a.m., the president stood by his decision to keep U.S. forces out of the Bay of Pigs and the mission met its doom later that day, w
ith more than 200 brigadistas killed and nearly 1,200 captured and marched off to Castro’s prisons. The country’s military and intelligence chiefs had clearly believed they could sandbag the young, untested commander-in-chief into joining the battle. But he had stunned them by refusing to escalate the fighting.
“They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the Essex,” Kennedy said to Dave Powers. “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.”
What JFK suspected about the CIA—that the agency knew all along that its plan was doomed to fail unless Kennedy could be panicked into sending in U.S. forces at the eleventh hour—was confirmed years later. In 2005, a secret internal CIA history of the Bay of Pigs was finally released to the public. The 300-page document contained proof that Bissell concealed the operation’s bleak prospects from Kennedy when he briefed him about it for the first time shortly after JFK’s election. The internal history quoted a CIA memo dated November 15, 1960, that was prepared for Bissell before the Kennedy briefing. In it, the agency conceded that “our concept…to secure a beach with airstrip is now seen to be unachievable, except as joint Agency/ DOD [CIA/Pentagon] action.” In other words, “The CIA knew that it couldn’t accomplish this type of overt paramilitary mission without direct Pentagon participation—and committed that to paper and then went ahead and tried it anyway,” explained Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, the George Washington University–based research group that made public the CIA document. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Bissell informed Kennedy of the CIA’s bleak assessment.
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