The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  When it was all over, Ike and Mamie slipped out quietly. They realized, Ike wrote later, that “We were free—as only private citizens in a democratic nation can be free.” He planned to write, lecture, guide his party into the future. “Believe me,” he promised friends, “I’m going to be heard from.”

  Late that afternoon he and Mamie rode in their Chrysler Imperial back to their Gettysburg farm. Now there was no motorcade, no motorcycles or sirens or lights, just a Secret Service car in front and behind. But people turned out, with WELCOME HOME signs. When they arrived at the farm, the agents honked their horns, did a U-turn, and headed back to Washington.

  That night Nixon asked his official driver to take him around the city one last time. He went to the Capitol, through the Rotunda, down a long corridor, and out onto the now empty balcony looking over the west grounds of the Capitol. The Mall was snow-white, the monuments gleaming. “I stood there looking at the scene for at least five minutes,” he recalled. But “as I turned to go inside, suddenly stopped short, struck by the thought that this was not the end—that someday I would be back here.” And then he hurried back to his car.

  Kennedy began tending the club from the very first day. The first letter he dictated was to Eisenhower, thanking him again for all his help. “I am sure that your generous assistance has made this one of the most effective transitions in the history of our Republic.”

  His first visitor at the White House was Harry Truman, finally restored to an honored place as elder statesman. After dinner, the men strolled around the mansion that the Trumans had helped preserve as a national treasure—and where he had not stepped foot in eight years. At the entrance to the East Wing, they paused in front of the gold-lettered dedication on the wall commemorating the Truman restoration of the mansion. As the story goes, Kennedy remarked dryly to Truman: “The S.O.B. [Eisenhower] had a painting over it.”

  6

  “The Worse I Do, the More Popular I Get”

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  It took less than seventy-two hours from the start of the U.S. invasion of Cuba in April of 1961 for it to become apparent that everything that could go wrong did.

  The original plan called for two waves of air strikes in support of the invading Cuban exiles that the United States had been training in Guatemala; one strike would come two days in advance to take out Cuba’s air force; at the last minute President Kennedy cut the size of that strike in half, to keep the noise level down. “I believe the president did not realize that the air strike was an integral part of the operational plan he had approved,” CIA operations chief Richard Bissell later wrote in his memoirs, and indeed much of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s airpower survived the initial bombardment. The second planned strike, to support the actual invasion at the Bay of Pigs, was canceled altogether. Again the CIA went along, assuming Kennedy would reverse course and send in U.S. forces “when the chips were down.”

  The plan also assumed that the invaders could slip into the mountains to take up guerrilla operations; but that proved impossible, which seemed to come as a surprise not only to the president but to many of the other principals involved in approving the mission. “The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped,” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote in a grim memo to Kennedy. Analysts studying the surveillance films had mistaken the sharp coral reefs of the Bay of Pigs for seaweed—so the landing crafts ran aground that first morning and were raked by Castro’s antique jet fighters. Ten days’ worth of ammunition, food, and communications equipment was lost when a single freighter was sunk. Castro, well aware of what was coming, had rounded up anyone who might have remotely considered supporting the invaders. So there was no popular support, no sudden eruption of civil war, no relief for the U.S.-trained exiles pinned down on the beach, and no escape to the mountains beyond.

  In short, a fiasco.

  On the night after the invasion, Kennedy attended a reception honoring members of Congress, then slipped away after midnight, still in formal dress, to meet in the Cabinet Room with leaders from the CIA, Pentagon, NSC, and top aides. “There were all these people in white ties and medals,” Walt Rostow, the NSC deputy, recalled. “It was a marvelous demonstration of the limitations of power, the greatest power in the world, and this little operation fails.”

  That failure would darken Kennedy’s first hundred days, enrage U.S. allies abroad, and shake his confidence in the vast military and intelligence machine over which he now presided. When the president’s men were pressed in the months and years that followed to explain the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, most of them invoked a basic club reality: that presidents inherit the foreign policy of their predecessors. They inherit their wars and their treaties and in this case their covert operations. “It wasn’t Kennedy’s plan; it was Eisenhower’s,” insisted undersecretary of state George Ball. “He was very in awe of Eisenhower and, I think, he felt he had no option but to go through with it.” It was executed by men Ike had appointed, Kennedy’s allies argued; there was no way that a young new president could have rejected the great general’s plan to rid the hemisphere of a communist menace without being crucified as a coward.

  But while blame is easy, actual responsibility is not quite so simple. Eisenhower would never have approved the absurd, jerry-built invasion plan in its final form, countered others who had served both presidents. Kennedy may have thought he was following Ike’s lead, not to mention his CIA director, Allen Dulles; but he had also rejected the checks and balances that Ike had relied on to protect him from such debacles.

  The Making of a Disaster

  “No man entering upon this office,” Kennedy declared in his January 30 State of the Union address, “could fail to be staggered upon learning—even in this brief 10 day period—the harsh enormity of the trials through which we must pass in the next four years. Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult.”

  Though you wouldn’t know it to hear him talk, “John F. Kennedy had discovered no skeletons in the Eisenhower closet, no cataclysmic secret-intelligence reports,” Time observed in a story called “Man Meets Presidency.” “But he had discovered that even a well-informed, alert Senator and President-elect has no conception of the responsibilities of the U.S. presidency.”

  Eisenhower’s attempt to introduce him to those responsibilities when they met after the election included an update on plans regarding Cuba. Eisenhower’s approach to the Castro challenge was political as well as military. At a meeting in March 1960, Eisenhower had instructed the CIA to assemble a plausible Cuban government in exile, step up internal propaganda and intelligence gathering while training a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles in Guatemala—but only training. “I will reserve to myself whether they will actually be committed or not,” he said at the time. He wanted flexibility—and secrecy. “Everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it,” Ike said.

  Eisenhower’s aide Andrew Goodpaster remembers warning him of the risk he was taking just by letting the training commence.

  “I said to him ‘there is always the danger that this will develop a momentum of its own,’” Goodpaster said. “He kind of snapped back at me, ‘Not so long as I’m here.’

  “And I said ‘Yes sir. That’s just the problem.’”

  Shortly after the election, Dulles and his operations chief, Richard Bissell, flew down to Palm Beach to brief Kennedy. Already the momentum Goodpaster warned of was building: the original underground operation was turning into a full-fledged amphibious invasion, which would require a far larger force—and therefore a larger U.S. role—to stand any chance of success. According to the CIA’s own secret history of the Bay of Pigs operation, the invasion task force had already concluded that it could not succeed without open participation by U.S. forces. “Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted.” But they didn’t mention that t
o Kennedy.

  When Ike and Kennedy met in December and January, Eisenhower still endorsed the goal of removing Castro, without appreciating how the mission was evolving. George Ball recalled that in their final session, Eisenhower told Kennedy that “I am trusting you, as a head of state, to carry this through.” The problem is, by that point the outgoing president was no longer in control of the scheme he was handing over to his successor.

  Eight days after he took office, on January 28, 1961, Kennedy got his first full Cuba briefing as president; he heard, among other things, that nothing currently on the drawing boards was sufficient to oust Castro from office. He told the CIA to continue with sabotage and propaganda efforts, while working with the Pentagon to develop a viable invasion plan.

  By February it was clear that the State Department was worried about the political risks of a plot that was fast becoming an open secret. But despite questions about the CIA’s ability to mount a major military operation, the atmosphere at most meetings was one of “assumed consensus. The CIA representatives dominated the discussion,” Schlesinger said. “The Joint Chiefs seemed to be going contentedly along.”

  At a briefing on March 11, Kennedy’s own doubts deepened. He did not want his first major foreign policy act to involve being caught invading a sovereign country in violation of all the international principles the United States charged the Soviets with flouting. The plans laid out by Dulles and Bissell were “too spectacular,” Kennedy warned. “It sounds like D-Day. You have to reduce the noise level of this thing.” The planners agreed, just to keep the operation alive—even though success depended on the invasion triggering an uprising, so it needed to be as noisy as possible. Every action taken to try to reduce the political risk had the effect of increasing the military risk—and therefore the likelihood of failure.

  So why did Kennedy let the planning move forward through the winter? In their recollections, his advisors suggest that the ghost of Eisenhower haunted the halls. “He’s in office ten days; is he going to call this thing off just because he thinks it isn’t going to work?” asked Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke, Kennedy’s chief of protocol. “He didn’t trust his own judgment at that time. He respected the Supreme Allied Commander, the twice-elected president of the United States, and this venerable figure, Allen Dulles.”

  Kennedy, who knew something about managing strong father figures, may have shown little respect for Eisenhower in the political arena; but the military was another matter. “Allen Dulles didn’t say it—but he didn’t have to,” Schlesinger recalled, “that in the United States, the notion that a fellow who had been a lieutenant JG in the Second World War would overrule a plan agreed to by the commander of the greatest amphibious invasion in history would not have gone down. He was really trapped by what he inherited.”

  It was not just the plan, but the people they inherited, Bobby Kennedy claimed in 1964, that had lulled Kennedy into false confidence. “He came into government as the successor to President Eisenhower, who was a great general, a great military figure. . . . He retained the same people in all these key positions whom President Eisenhower had. Allen Dulles was there, [Joint Chiefs chairman] Lemnitzer was there, the same Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t attempt to move any of these people out. . . . It was on their recommendations and suggestions and their intelligence information—what they found the situation to be on their homework—that he based his decision.”

  Such excuses simply ignored the fact that Eisenhower had far more experience managing spies and generals, a more careful decision-making structure, and a deep skepticism about posturing politicians. Kennedy had campaigned on the promise that he would be even tougher than Eisenhower and Nixon when it came to the communists and Castro. “Are you really going to tell this group of fine young men,” Dulles challenged him, “who are ready to die for their country that they get no sympathy and support from you?” Not to mention that if they were disbanded, they would spread the word that Kennedy had betrayed their mission to depose a dictator who was subverting the hemisphere.

  The Floating Crap Game

  As planning progressed through March into April, the doubts and debate unrolled: Dulles was not beyond invoking Eisenhower directly. “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this,” he said during one briefing. “But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala [when the CIA helped overthrow the Arbenz government in 1954], ‘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.”

  Bissell sensed that Kennedy had visions of headlines declaring how he had “lost” Cuba within a few weeks of taking office by throwing away an established plan. Bissell was in a strong position to ease that fear, since he was no ordinary spy. He had a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, had taught at Yale and MIT, even taught Bundy. He was smooth, smart, calm, compelling, a thinking man’s spymaster, who many thought was the inevitable choice to succeed Dulles. So together they worked to reassure the president; they came back on March 16 with new alternatives, including moving the invasion from the city of Trinidad to a more remote landing spot called Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs. At the end of March, Kennedy stressed again that there would be no overt U.S. military support under any circumstances—and was assured the landing could still succeed and trigger a popular uprising.

  What Kennedy did not know was that their confidence in its success depended on how they thought he would react to its failure. They counted on Kennedy to unleash the full might of the U.S. armed forces once the initial incursion met the inevitable resistance. It was either that, or face a humiliation they assumed no new president would accept. They did not mention that two of the top planners wanted to resign, convinced the scaled-back plan could no longer work.

  By this point some in the CIA were referring to the White House as “the floating crap game.” Kennedy had held only two cabinet meetings, and convened the full National Security Council only twice; he preferred ad hoc task forces that he could form and dissolve at will. “Kennedy really didn’t get himself involved in what might be called housekeeping functions; he didn’t care about them,” Fred Dutton recalled. Something about large meetings just bothered him, Dutton concluded, an invitation for people to act pretentious.

  He would pick up the phone and call professors, reporters, lowly desk officers at the State Department; it took a while for bureaucrats to realize that the voice on the phone claiming to be the president was not a crank caller. And Kennedy had a special faith in those on the front lines. “If someone comes in to tell me this or that about the minimum wage bill, I have no hesitation in overruling them,” he told Schlesinger later. “But you always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.”

  Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright, who opposed the Cuba plan, also frowned on the random quality of the meetings and decision-making process; no hierarchy, no obvious chain of command or responsibility. Kennedy’s “spokes of the wheel” management philosophy meant that “there was no locked door to the Oval Office,” Salinger said. “There were twelve of us who had access to that office at any time of the day.” In the first week of April, with D-Day less than two weeks away, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, the former dean of faculty at Harvard, was sufficiently worried about the process to send Kennedy a memo. “More than once the ball has been dropped,” he warned, “because no one person felt a continuing clear responsibility.”

  The Cuba operation was code-named Bumpy Road. And that about said it all. “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,” Kennedy told Sorensen just before the invasion. And it would not be long before their worst fears were realized.

  Damage Control

  Even as it became clear the invasion was a disaster, its promoters scrambled to avoid the worst. When the principals met in the Oval Office late into the night on April 18, after two
days of combat, Bissell was still insisting that the mission could be salvaged if Kennedy sent Navy fighters to provide air support.

  “Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” demanded the chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke.

  “I don’t want the United States to get involved in this,” Kennedy insisted.

  “Hell, Mr. President,” Burke shot back, “we are involved.”

  The meeting was still going on at 4 A.M. At one point Kennedy broke away practically in mid-sentence, went out into the Rose Garden, and walked alone in the cool spring night air for about forty-five minutes. The others just watched him out the windows. “He seemed to me a depressed and lonely man,” Sorensen said.

  Jackie Kennedy would recall the sheer weight of that failure on her eager, optimistic husband. “He came back to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me,” she told Schlesinger three years later. “Just put his head in his hands and sort of wept. It was so sad, because all his first 100 days and all his dreams, and then this awful thing to happen. And he cared so much.”

  In the end Kennedy agreed to one round of air cover for a morning bombing run—which set up one last debacle. The CIA dispatched B-26 bombers from Nicaragua; the Navy sent the fighters from the carrier Essex. Since they came from different time zones, they arrived over their target an hour apart. Two of the bombers were shot down, killing four pilots from the Alabama Air National Guard. More than a thousand of the exiles, who had fought valiantly, had no choice but to surrender. The last message from José “Pepe” San Román, the brigade commander, would be “How can you people do this to us?”

  “The President,” Sorensen observed, “having approved the plan with assurances that it would be both clandestine and successful, thus found in fact that it was too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.”