Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  The contrast with John Kennedy could not have been more dramatic. Kennedy’s entire Presidential campaign was based on the argument that the way to defeat the Soviet Union in the global Cold War was to understand and harness the forces reshaping the world. He had called for Algeria’s independence from France in 1956, looked with skepticism at the string of alliances the United States had made with dictators across Latin America whose anti-Communism was all the credential they needed to win Washington’s favor. During the campaign, he’d proposed a program to send thousands of young people into the Third World to teach and build, and he meant to make that program a key part of his appeal to young Americans as President. Kennedy brought that same skepticism to his approach to the military. As a Lieutenant JG in the South Pacific in World War II, who almost died in the Solomon Islands when his boat was sunk, he had learned to be wary of the wisdom emanating from the chain of command, noting in letters home the military’s “capacity to screw everything up.” And late in the campaign, in Seattle, he’d made a speech where he said, “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, that we cannot impose our will on 94 percent of mankind . . . that there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

  Johnson’s combat experience was confined to a single reconnaissance flight in New Guinea in 1942—a flight of dubious danger, for which he was awarded the Silver Star. His instincts were to trust the military, and to trust the “wise men” who formed the more or less permanent Democratic Party foreign policy elite, men like Paul Nitze and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The two men had been the principal shapers of NSC-68, the 1950 report of the National Security Council, which described the conflict with the Soviets in near-apocalyptic terms. (“The issues that face us are momentous . . . involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.”) They believed the Soviet Union would respond only to force, or the credible threat of it; that any identification with anti-colonial sentiments in the Third World was a betrayal of America’s traditional and vital European allies. With Nitze installed as the key State Department policy planner, and Acheson as an éminence grise on more or less permanent call, one of John Kennedy’s central notions—to position the United States as a friend of a democratic revolutionary spirit—died in the Palm Beach bombing. When Dick Goodwin, the young Kennedy aide who had agreed to help Johnson with speeches, broached the idea of the Peace Corps that Kennedy had proposed during his campaign, Johnson dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

  “The last thing we need is a bunch of snot-nosed know-it-all college kids getting themselves in trouble in a dozen different countries they can’t even spell. If they have that much time on their hands, they can go build a road or clean up a park in Kentucky.”

  But because he saw foreign policy through a political prism, he was acutely aware of what a major military entanglement would mean to his domestic ambitions. His father had taught him that America’s entry into World War I had brought the Progressive Era to an end, ushering in a spasm of repression—dissidents by the hundreds rounded up, jailed, deported. FDR himself had proclaimed after Pearl Harbor that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win the War,” and with that war had come the incarceration of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in camps across the western United States.

  With the Cold War and Korea had come the rise of McCarthyism, when an alcoholic tin-horn demagogue had terrorized the United States Senate, as good, solid Republicans like Bob Taft and Ev Dirksen decided: Yes, he’s a fear-monger, a liar, but he’s bringing working-class Catholics to our party; let him be, and when Eisenhower himself had been intimidated into silence as McCarthy defamed his longtime colleague, General George C. Marshall.

  Those finely honed political instincts also taught him that when American boys were summoned to kill and die for a cause that could not be understood, it was a threat to political survival—especially his. In 1954, when French forces found themselves surrounded in Dien Bien Phu in the hills of northwestern Vietnam by the Communist Viet Minh, some of the most important voices in the Eisenhower administration called for American troops to help lift the siege. Admiral Radford of the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Vice President Nixon, all said this was the domino whose fall would jeopardize the whole region; Thailand would be next, and Indonesia, and maybe Australia would be at peril. American planes were sent to the Philippines, with French markings on them to disguise their origins. But President Eisenhower hesitated; not without the British, he said. And Johnson, still feeling the political effects of the Korean War stalemate, helped convince Ike not to intervene.

  So from the moment he assumed the Presidency, there was division in the House of Lyndon Johnson, between his political instincts and his assumptions, and between his advisors as well. Yes, Nitze and Acheson and the ultimate insider Democrats like lawyers Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas were locked into the consensus Cold War notions. But the man he’d chosen as his Secretary of State, Senator William J. Fulbright, was a confirmed skeptic about the use of American military power, and about the whole idea that the United States could remake the world in our image.

  “Maturity,” he’d said, “requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.” More pungently, he thought that America could be heavy-handed, even bullying in trying to persuade other countries to become more like us. “We are,” he said, “still acting like Boy Scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across the streets they do not want to cross.” (Fulbright could also be one stubborn Arkansas mule, Johnson knew; when Joe McCarthy was riding high, he’d been the only senator to vote against funding for McCarthy’s investigations.) And then there was Johnson’s successor as Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana. In his younger days, Mansfield had spent years in the military and later in the Philippines and China, and his notions about the Communist Chinese regime were complicated enough to have almost cost him his first Senate race back in ’52. He was convinced that you couldn’t lump every Communist in the world into the same category, and was powerfully drawn to leaders in the Third World who were trying to break their nations away from old traditions—leaders like that young fellow in South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem (a lot of progressive thinkers, Justice William O. Douglas and Hubert Humphrey among them, embraced “the miracle man” who was saving his half of Vietnam from the Communists with land reform and economic development). And, like Fulbright, Mansfield was highly skeptical about the effectiveness, the wisdom, or the morality of using America’s might to shape the world in its image.

  It did not take long for this divided house to face its first internal clash: a clash with consequences Americans would be living with for generations.

  WHEN FIDEL CASTRO and his guerrillas came down from the Sierra Maestra Mountains on New Year’s Day, 1959, and seized power in Cuba, his victory was met with substantial approval in Washington. The man he overthrew, Fulgencio Batista, was a notoriously brutal and corrupt figure, even by the standards of Latin America, and the thirty-two-year-old Castro, with his beard and his green fatigues, was the very embodiment of the romantic revolutionary. Within a few months, everything had changed. His summary executions of his adversaries, his seizure of American companies and investments, his increasingly anti-American rhetoric convinced U.S. officials that he was a Communist, determined to foment revolution throughout the hemisphere. When Castro came to New York in September 1960 to attend the United Nations General Assembly meeting, he delighted in poking figurative sticks in Uncle Sam’s eye. He stayed at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, where he met with Black Muslim spokesman Malcolm X, and broke bread with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. On September 26, Castro delivered a four-hour speech attacking American “aggression” and “imperialism,” and charging that the United States had “decreed the destruction” of his revolutionary government.

  On this point, at least, Fidel Castro was absolutely right.

  As early as March 19
60, President Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. The Agency responded by drawing up a top secret plan dubbed “Project 40”—whose goal was “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more . . . acceptable to the U.S. in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.” When Washington suspended the import of Cuban sugar a few months later, delivering what would have been a crippling blow to the Cuban economy, the Soviet Union happily stepped in, confirming the idea that Havana was becoming a full-fledged partner of Moscow. By the fall, CIA plans for the landing of an exile army on Cuban soil were accelerating. As those plans were gaining force, so was the determination of candidate John Kennedy not to be tarred with the brush that had stained so many recent Democrats: the charge that its leaders were soft on Communism. A decade earlier, in 1950, a year after Mao Tse-tung overthrew Chiang Kai-shek, Democrats around the country had been damaged by the accusatory question: “Who lost China?” In 1952, Republicans summed up their campaign theme in three alliterative words: “Korea, Corruption, and Communism.” As a candidate that year, Richard Nixon had struck the same rhetorical note when he condemned Secretary of State Dean Acheson for heading the “cowardly college of Communist containment.”

  Kennedy himself had been dealing all year with Nixon’s attack on Kennedy’s suggestion that the U.S. should have expressed “regrets” over Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 flight over Soviet territory that had been shot down. He would make sure he was insulated from such attacks—which is why, just before the fourth televised debate, he had called for the U.S. to assist “democratic forces” in Cuba to overthrow Castro. Nixon felt he had no choice but to attack Kennedy’s proposal as “reckless” and “dangerous,” even though he was a principal advocate of precisely that course of action. He was also convinced that CIA officials, drawn from the upper class, Ivy League circles in which Kennedy moved so effortlessly, had tipped off the Democratic candidate about the invasion plans, forcing Nixon to seem less tough on Cuba than Kennedy. It was impossible to prove Nixon’s suspicions, especially since Nixon was suspicious about just about everyone whose path he crossed. What was undeniable was that on November 16, Richard Bissell—the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans—briefed President-elect Kennedy about the plans for a Cuban invasion, one designed to depose Castro without leaving any American fingerprints. Bissell was the perfect person to deal with Kennedy: son of New England aristocrats, educated at Groton and Yale, he was a core member of the fashionable “Georgetown Set” that included such Establishment figures as columnist Joseph Alsop, Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, and a dozen others. Bissell had also been the driving force behind “PBSUCCESS,” the project that overthrew leftist Guatemalan President Jacob Arbenz in 1954 by stirring up protests and unrest when Arbenz proved too unfriendly to American business interests.

  Kennedy had every reason to trust Bissell . . . except that there was something Bissell wasn’t telling the incoming President: The CIA did not believe for a minute that an invasion of Cuba could succeed without the direct intervention of American military forces. Indeed, on November 15, the day before Bissell met with Kennedy, a CIA memo prepared for Bissell had concluded: “Our concept to secure a beach with airstrip is now seen to be unachievable, except as joint Agency/Department of Defense action.” The CIA, to put it simply, was planning to launch an invasion by Cuban exiles, watch it founder, and then watch the President call in the cavalry—the Marines and Air Force, actually—to wipe out the Cuban military and depose Castro. There was no way a President could let an invasion fail, the Agency was sure, without being branded a weakling who let a Communist dictator defeat the most powerful nation on earth.

  John Kennedy never told Lyndon Johnson about the CIA briefing; whoever he might have shared this information with, it was certainly not the incoming Vice President, whom he was not about to entrust with any significant role in the shaping of foreign policy (nor had Bissell mentioned to the soon-to-be-President that the Agency was tapping into the talents of worthies such as Jimmy Rosselli and Sam Giancana, two of organized crime’s most prominent players, who had suffered grievous losses when Castro closed down Havana’s casinos). When Kennedy was killed less than a month later, the unprecedented collision of shock, grief, a Constitutional crisis, and the need to put together a government under emergency conditions fully occupied Johnson’s time. It wasn’t until the week before inauguration that Bissell managed to secure an appointment with Johnson to brief him about the operation. The President-elect squeezed Bissell in between meetings to plan strategy on a federal aid to education bill, and a push to get senior citizens medical care under Social Security. What Johnson wanted most from the rest of the world was quiescence, a period when nothing much happened that would distract him from making 1961 a year of major domestic achievements. On the other hand, the prospect of inflicting a major defeat on the Communist empire was a very attractive possibility—one that could only be seen as a blessing for the new Johnson administration. So when Bissell came to see Johnson in his opulent Senate office suite, Johnson was distracted and intrigued and wary. He was also inherently distrustful of Bissell’s background, bearing, credentials, and attire: the three-piece light gray pin-striped wool, the light blue oxford button-down shirt, the tie bearing the insignia of some college or club. Johnson signaled his attitude by conducting his end of the briefing from the toilet in his baronial bathroom, as Bissell stood as far outside the door as he could. You sure you can do this without leaving our fingerprints all over it? Johnson wanted to know.

  “I can assure you,” Bissell said, “we have the same team we had in Guatemala in ’54. We’ve got one of our best staffers—Howard Hunt—on the case. Back then as soon as the demonstrations started, the army rose up and removed Mr. Arbenz. We firmly believe the same thing will happen this time. Even if Castro is not immediately toppled, the expeditionary force will simply melt into the Escambry Mountains, and begin doing to Fidel the same thing he did to Batista.”

  Dammit, come closer, Biss, I can barely hear you, Johnson shouted from the bathroom where he was seated. On that note, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans hastily concluded his briefing and fled the office with dispatch. The plan, he assured the President-to-be, would be another feather in the Agency’s cap, to go along with their successes in Guatemala and in Iran.

  THE NEXT TIME Richard Bissell stood face-to-face with President Lyndon Johnson was just after midnight on April 18, 1961, when an agitated Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Humphrey, Secretary of State Bill Fulbright, and two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gathered in the Oval Office. It was the night of the annual Congressional Reception in the White House East Room, a highly formal occasion; the civilians were dressed in white-tie and tails, Chief of Staff Chairman Lymen Lemnitzer and Naval Chief Arleigh Burke were in full dress attire, their chests gleaming with medals. Bissell was wearing a rumpled suit and had sweated through his white broadcloth shirt. The Oval Office was suffused with a powerful aroma of cigar smoke and mutual recriminations.

  From start to finish, the CIA’s plan had gone straight into the crapper.

  First, the “stealth” invasion had leaked like a rusty drainpipe. Between Cuban intelligence agents scattered across Latin America and throughout the Miami exile community, and the loose talk in bars and restaurants of half a dozen cities, word of an impending attack was everywhere. Radio Moscow had warned of a coming “criminal” act by the American government—a broadcast that confirmed what the CIA already knew, that Soviet intelligence was on to the plan (the Agency never bothered to inform President Johnson of this detail). Reporters from Miami to Tegucigalpa had picked up the stories of an impending American strike—they would have had to be equipped with the faculties of Helen Keller not to—and when the New York Times’s Tad Szulc asked the White House for comment about an invasion story he was preparing, it took all of Lyndon Johnson’s persuasion-threat skills to get the paper to downplay
the story.

  (“The blood of American boys will be on your hands,” Johnson thundered to Times publisher Orville Dryfoos. “I thought there weren’t any American boys involved,” Dryfoos muttered—after the President hung up the phone.)

  Second, every logistical detail that could go wrong went wrong; every bad piece of information, every miscalculation that could have fouled up the plan, turned from worst-case fears into reality. Was the Cuban military ripe for revolt, as had been the army in Guatemala? No. Castro had ruthlessly purged the army of anyone remotely suspected of disloyalty, and the government’s own army of informants was seeded throughout the armed forces (and just about everywhere else in Cuban society, for that matter). Was the Cuban Air Force substantially crippled by attacks from exiled Cuban pilots? No. On April 15, eight Douglas B-26B Invader bombers had taken off from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and attacked three Cuban airfields. They inflicted only minimal damage, but reported back to their CIA handlers that they had struck grievous blows against Castro’s fleet. The Agency took the pilots at their word, thus assuring that when the beach landing did come, the forces and their leaders would be moving under a wholly false set of assumptions about Cuba’s ability to resist. Were the landings executed well? No. When the 1,300 members of Brigade 2506 arrived off of Playa Giron from Puerto Cabezas, they transferred from the Landing Craft Infantry ships into small aluminum boats, while those coming ashore at Playa Larga were moved into fiberglass boats, some of which were immediately disabled by mechanical breakdowns, others of which were damaged when they struck coral reefs whose presence was unknown to anyone who had planned the landing.