by Nancy Gibbs
The full cabinet met the next day: it was, observed Ambassador at Large Chester Bowles, “about as grim as any meeting I can remember in all my experience in government, which is saying a good deal. The President was really quite shattered, and understandably so.” Bowles had been among the liberal opponents of the whole enterprise. Now that it had gone bad, Bowles recounted, “reactions around the table were almost savage, as everyone appeared to be jumping on everyone else.” As he saw it, Kennedy’s confidence had been fed by a life of near misses and lucky escapes. “Here for the first time he faced a situation where his judgment had been mistaken, in spite of the fact that week after week of conferences had taken place before he gave the green light.”
But Fred Dutton saw something different at that meeting. He remembered Kennedy talking through what had happened, brutally, painfully, but taking full responsibility for it. “Even with the Cabinet there at a moment like that, he didn’t ask them to rally round,” Dutton argued. “He didn’t say that they were to avoid criticism; he didn’t give them a public line they were to take.” And the same held true when he faced reporters that Friday. “There’s an old saying, that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he said. “I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious.”
But privately, his aides said, he was asking the same question again and again. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he told Sorensen. “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” The problem was not just that he didn’t know them, know their strengths and weaknesses; it was that they didn’t know him either. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face,” Kennedy said, realizing at last that the whole plan depended on him sending troops to salvage the mission. “Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
The response around the world was blistering; the denunciation every bit as great as if he had openly invaded. Khrushchev called the effort “a crime which has revolted the entire world.” America appeared aggressive and weak at the same time. “You succeeded in Guatemala, and that left a scar,” a Latin American diplomat told a U.S. diplomat at the U.N. “You failed in Cuba, and that will leave a double scar.” Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson was in Europe at the time—“and this really shattered the Europeans. It was such a completely unthought out, irresponsible thing to do,” he said. “They had tremendously high expectations of the new administration, and when this thing happened they just fell miles down with a crash.”
Columnist Walter Lippmann, making his television debut, complained that all Kennedy had accomplished in his first months in office was to be a pale shadow of his predecessor. The administration, he argued, was “like the Eisenhower Administration thirty years younger.” In the Kennedy White House there was no crueler taunt.
So he began the damage control, and here Kennedy wanted help from people he could hardly have imagined calling just four months earlier. He reached out to Nixon, whose daughter Tricia, when she saw the message from the White House, said, “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.” Nixon called back, and Kennedy asked that he come to the White House. They met in the Oval Office: “The atmosphere was tense,” Nixon said. He recalled Kennedy pacing angrily, cursing the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the White House staff: “I was assured by every son of a bitch I checked with—all the military experts and the CIA—that the plan would succeed.”
The two talked for nearly an hour. “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle isn’t it?” Kennedy admitted. “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?” As Nixon left, he recalled, “I felt empathy for a man who had to face up to a bitter tragedy that was not entirely his fault but was nonetheless his inescapable responsibility.”
Kennedy knew Herbert Hoover would not be a problem either. He paid a call on the former president at the Waldorf. “You know I’m a Quaker and I loathe war, but, by heavens,” Hoover told Kennedy, “if I were President of the United States I would order the necessary forces into the Bay of Pigs and I would decimate that Cuban army while they’re there. . . . I’d end the thing forthright [sic].”
But the only meeting that mattered was the one with Eisenhower, who was maybe the only man on the planet with the power to help Kennedy put the disaster behind him. The two hadn’t been in touch much: Eisenhower had cabled a thanks in March for Kennedy’s proposal that Congress restore his Army rank. But relations were formal and distant, until the moment came when Kennedy needed a serious second opinion.
To this point, Kennedy had never stepped foot on the grounds of Camp David, the presidential retreat established by FDR and renamed for Eisenhower’s grandson. The next day, Kennedy climbed into a helicopter to make his maiden trip to the Catoctin, Maryland, mountains—where he would commune with Eisenhower, who came in from nearby Gettysburg and would show him around the place.
“You go down there and tell that little boy to be careful,” one woman wired Ike from Iowa. “In fact, you’d better go and take over yourself.”
Because this was no time for rookies. “Is there a possibility that if you had been president, the Bay of Pigs would have happened?” his son John asked. Eisenhower reminded him of D-Day.
“I don’t run no bad invasions.”
To the Woodshed
Kennedy may not have cared what Ike had to say. But he knew he at least had to appear to. If nothing else, the image of the two of them consulting would go a long way to reassuring people that the young president was getting the advice he needed.
Dulles had briefed Eisenhower the day before, so the former president had at least an outline of what had gone wrong.
When Ike arrived at Camp David, Kennedy came to the helipad to meet him, and they immediately set to reviewing the facts. Kennedy struck the older man as candid, and chastened. “He seemed to be very frank but also very subdued and more than a little bit bewildered,” Eisenhower said later. “I quizzed him rather closely. He seemed himself at that moment.” The two men had quite a different, more raw and private, encounter than they had had during their formal transition meetings only months before.
They had a fried chicken lunch in Aspen Cabin, then sat in the picture window, looking out over the two-hole putting green.
“No one knows how tough this job is until he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy admitted.
“Mr. President,” Eisenhower replied, “if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
“I certainly have learned a lot since.”
Kennedy ran through the whole story, the pressures he had faced, the promises he’d been made, the serial failures of intelligence, timing, transport, tactics. The general listened, and then called him on the carpet.
“The point of pride between the two men,” argues Ike’s grandson David Eisenhower in his memoir, Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961–1969, “had to do with their differing views about the NSC and Eisenhower’s elaborate staff system, which Schlesinger later said Bundy was ‘slaughtering’ with such glee. To Ike, Kennedy’s most irritating campaign promise had been to restore Roosevelt’s improvisational methods of organization.”
So Eisenhower pressed Kennedy on how the decision had been made, who had weighed in and how. Eisenhower’s military life taught him that talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. The only way to guarantee smart decisions, Ike believed, was to bring all the responsible parties together and have them fight it out. “I do not believe in bringing them in one at a time and therefore being more impressed by the most recent one you hear,” he said later. “You must get courageous men, men of strong views and let them debate and argue with each other.”
So he pressed the case: “Mr. President, before you approved this plan, did you have everybody in front of y
ou debating the thing so you got the pros and cons yourself and then made the decision, or did you see these people one at a time?”
“Well, I did have a meeting,” Kennedy said. But it was never the whole Security Council. “I just approved a plan that had been recommended by the CIA and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I just took their advice.”
But did you change the plan after the Joint Chiefs had signed off? Having commanded the chiefs himself, he understood that when the generals are talking to the president, their verbal support for a plan carried little weight; a commitment has to be in writing. Kennedy admitted to scaling back the air cover. Ike pressed him on this: why did he change plans after the troops were already at sea?
The challenge, Kennedy reminded him, was to try to hide America’s hand in the whole operation. “We thought that if it was learned that we were really doing this and not those rebels themselves, the Soviets would be very apt to cause trouble in Berlin.”
That was exactly wrong, Eisenhower shot back. The men in the Kremlin admire strength, and understand coldly calculated self-interest. “If they see us show any weakness, that is when they press us the hardest. The second they see us show strength and do something on our own, that is when they are very cagey.” The failure of the Bay of Pigs, Eisenhower predicted, will just embolden Khrushchev to do something that he would not otherwise do.
On that point, Eisenhower would soon be proven right.
As for concealing the U.S. role, Eisenhower was derisive. “Mr. President, how could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to do with it? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons? Where did they get all the communications and all the other things they would need? How could you possibly have kept from the world any knowledge that the US had been involved?”
And then he suggested, as he had during their pre-inauguration meetings, that success mattered more than secrecy—which was just what the CIA had assumed Kennedy would think. “I believe there is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,” Eisenhower said. “It must be a success.” Or, of course, don’t get in at all.
“Well,” Kennedy replied, “I assure you that hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.”
Eisenhower said he would support anything that prevented the communists from strengthening their position in the Western Hemisphere. But the American people will not support a direct invasion, he warned, unless faced with extreme provocation. At no point, Eisenhower was relieved to find, did Kennedy suggest that the problem was an inherited plan gone wrong.
The two men walked the paths of the 125-acre compound and talked into the spring afternoon. It was surrounded by an electrified fence, guarded by Marines, the cameras corralled at a safe distance—all designed to give them the privacy they needed.
The encounter ended with the all-important photo op, the show of presidential solidarity that would signal the world that even a humbled America remained united in its resolve. “Eisenhower Urges Nation to Back Kennedy on Cuba” ran the front-page headline in the New York Times, next to the picture of them walking the paths, heads down, Ike’s hands and hat clasped behind his back. “I asked President Eisenhower here to bring him up to date on recent events and get the benefit of his thoughts and experience,” Kennedy said. Eisenhower dutifully declared, “I am all in favor of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs.”
When it was over, Eisenhower was eager to show his pupil the grounds; he knew his way around, knew some of the personnel. The compound included a bowling alley and movie theater, an unheated pool, a skeet range, and the one- and two-room cabins Roosevelt had had built and equipped with his favorite chiming Navy clocks. He walked him down to a small cottage called Dogwood. “I want you to see what these are like,” he said. Then Kennedy drove Eisenhower back to the helipad, and suggested they play golf together soon.
Eisenhower had renamed Roosevelt’s Shangri-La as Camp David, and it was of course Kennedy’s prerogative to change the name again. Three days after the visit, the White House announced that contrary to any speculation, the official presidential retreat would continue to be known as Camp David.
The Loyal Opposition
Eisenhower proved to be a faithful ally in the days that followed. When New York’s Republican congressman Bill Miller charged that Kennedy had crippled the invasion by calling off Eisenhower’s air cover plan, Ike spoke up to deny that there had ever been such a specific plan.
A week after the Camp David meeting, the Republican congressional leadership made a pilgrimage to Gettysburg to meet with Eisenhower, hoping to hear a ringing denunciation of his callow successor. Instead he warned them sternly against “witch-hunting.”
“Don’t go back and rake over the ashes,” he insisted, “but see what we can do better in the future.”
But privately Eisenhower bristled at the persistent story line quietly pushed by some Kennedy loyalists that Eisenhower was somehow complicit, perhaps even to blame. He was under growing pressure to take Kennedy on; the mystique had cracked—and the Republicans were without a strong voice of loyal opposition. “In the wake of the Cuba news,” David Eisenhower recalled, “Eisenhower gave serious thought to the idea of forming something like a ‘shadow government’ built on maintaining close links to his former cabinet and GOP elective officials.” He invited some old friends and counselors to a lunch in Gettysburg, including former commerce secretary Sinclair Weeks, Senator Thruston Morton, former budget director Maurice Stans, Attorney General William Rogers, U.N. Ambassador James Wadsworth, NSC Secretary Gordon Gray, and Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson.
The lunch guests argued that Kennedy’s honeymoon was over; that the administration was doing everything it could to undermine Eisenhower’s record and reputation; that the Republicans needed a strong presence on the stage to challenge Kennedy’s media dominance. On the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy only reached out to Republicans after the fact, “in an effort to diffuse responsibility,” Eisenhower observed. “I will not be held to blame for Cuba having been consulted after the fact.”
“People still have faith in you,” said Benson, a member of the newly formed archconservative John Birch Society. “Take the gloves off. Opposing Kennedy is not the same thing as disloyalty to the United States.” But Eisenhower had always had strong views about not getting into specific personalities; and by this time he had fully internalized the protocols of the club.
“As emeritus,” he told them, “I must be silent.”
Gordon Gray warned about yelling “failure” after one hundred days, and the group agreed that Eisenhower would remain above the fray.
In the weeks that followed Eisenhower would hear after-action reports from friends back in Washington and around the country. He included in one diary entry a sketch of the invasion zone that he had been given by a former Latin American ambassador who had served as an advisor to the planning. It laid out how at one point the necessary air cover was over the target area but called back on orders from the White House, abandoning the invaders to their fate on the beaches.
He continued to be supportive in public, but his private contempt was sharp. “It is a very dreary account of mismanagement, indecision, and timidity at the wrong time,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. Were it to become public, as he suspected it would, there would be a huge furor. “If true, this story could be called a ‘Profile in Timidity and Indecision.’”
Lessons Learned
That wasn’t far from the conclusion reached by the CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, when he conducted a postmortem. His report, one of the most secret documents of the Cold War, accused Bissell and his aides of “playing [the invasion] by ear” by setting up an “anarchic and disorganized” command structure. The operation was doomed by “bad planning,” “poor” staffing, bad intelligence, and “a failure to advise the President that success had become dubious.�
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NSC Advisor Bundy offered to resign, but Kennedy refused. Bundy wrote a long memo, laying out the flaws in Kennedy’s manner and methods and comparing them unfavorably to Truman’s and Eisenhower’s. “We can’t get you to sit still,” Bundy charged. “Calling three meetings in five days is foolish—and putting them off for six weeks at a time is just as bad.” Half the reports Kennedy had asked for were never reviewed because by the time he was available to read them, he had moved on.
Bundy invoked his predecessors, with the clear suggestion that maybe Kennedy could learn something from the old guys. “Truman and Eisenhower did their daily dozens in foreign affairs the first thing in the morning,” he noted, “and a couple of weeks ago you asked me to begin to meet with you on this basis. I have succeeded in catching you on three mornings, for a total of about eight minutes, and I conclude that this is not really how you like to begin the day.”
The Bay of Pigs changed Kennedy’s approach to executive management. He stopped believing that the judgment of professionals was infallible, and he rebuilt part of the Eisenhower system, even reviving some of the committees he had been so intent on stamping out. In 1956 Eisenhower had established the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities—with Joe Kennedy as one of the original members. Kennedy originally planned to abolish it, along with the rest of the bureaucratic clutter that interfered with vigorous foreign policy. After the Bay of Pigs he “reactivated it,” with a new title, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and named as chairman the man Eisenhower had chosen as his science advisor: MIT president James Killian Jr. And he fired Dulles.
Kennedy found a way to show his gratitude at the end of so tumultuous a year, to the man who had warned him, and then supported him when it counted. He sent his new CIA director, John McCone, an old friend of Ike’s, out to Palm Desert, California, to brief the general; McCone arrived a few days after Christmas, bearing a box of golf balls with the Presidential Seal and a handwritten note from Kennedy.