And because the Cuban Air Force, contrary to the exile pilots’ optimistic reports, was essentially whole, Cuban jets attacked the invading ships, sending much of the arms and equipment on board to the bottom of the sea. An airdrop of hundreds of exiles, whose mission was to block the road down which Castro’s forces would come, went wretchedly wrong. About thirty men from the parachute battalion of Brigade 2506, along with tons of heavy equipment, were dropped south of an Australia sugar mill on the road to Palpite and Playa Larga, but the equipment was lost in the swamps and the troops failed to block the road. Later that day, Osvaldo Ramirez, the chief organizer of the rural resistance forces, was captured in Aromas de Velázquez and immediately executed. That should have raised serious concerns about the likelihood of widespread anti-Castro uprisings, but didn’t. That evening, a night air strike by three FAL B-26s on San Antonio de Los Baños airfield failed, reportedly due to incompetence and bad weather.
By nine p.m. on April 16, thousands of Cuban troops and militia—commanded by Fidel himself—had taken complete control of the Bay of Pigs, and the Agency’s chiefs were now ready to play their last card: a Presidential decision to double down on the mission with the full, open involvement of the United States Armed Forces.
Except . . . they were confronting that divided house that was Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy universe. It wasn’t that he had serious principled reservations about the use of force, especially in Latin America. Many of his longtime political and financial backers were men who had grown rich extracting oil, sugar, copper, and fruit from the hemisphere, and whose sole concern with the local governments were that they keep the streets safe and the labor markets cheap. In fact, when Dick Goodwin showed Johnson a draft of John Kennedy’s Inaugural that pledged a “new Alliance for Progress” in Latin America, Johnson waved it away without a second thought. But that same need for tranquility on the foreign front, that same determination to use all of his energy to become the second Franklin Roosevelt, had tempered his enthusiasm for the invasion.
And there was also the increasingly dissident voice of Secretary of State Fulbright: Whatever you do, he repeatedly cautioned Johnson, make absolutely certain this can’t be traced back to Washington. I can’t think of a worse way to begin your Presidency . . . it’ll set us back a decade or more all over the world.
Confronted with these conflicting voices—the CIA confidently promising success, his Secretary of State and his own instincts signaling caution—Johnson did what he had done at every stage in his political life: He split the difference. On the night of April 16, just before the invasion began, he told the CIA that he would approve the second wave of pre-dawn air strikes on Cuban airfields, but approved only half the number of sorties, to lessen the chances of compromising the U.S.’s “plausible deniability.” That decision inflamed officials of the CIA, who argued fruitlessly that in this case, half a loaf was worse than none, that the Cuban Air Force would be able to defend against the smaller number of strikes. Johnson, for his part, was growing progressively angrier as reports of failure after failure flooded into the White House situation room. (“You people,” he snapped at top Bissell deputy Tracy Barnes, “couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time. I thought you said yesterday that their Air Force was damn near wiped out.”)
So at this midnight meeting, there was only one question left: Would Johnson order the American military to attack Cuba? Bissell spoke of the hundreds of exiles now trapped at the Bay of Pigs, whose freedom and lives were on the line. Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke, who had moved the U.S. aircraft carrier Essex close to Cuba’s shore, urged Johnson to let him move a destroyer close in to attack Castro’s troops.
As the President thought for a moment, Bill Fulbright got up and walked to the other side of the Oval Office, motioning the President to join him.
“It’s obviously your decision,” Fulbright said. “But you need to know that if you order a strike on Cuba, it would violate every rule of international law . . . and it would be a disaster on every conceivable level. It would also make it impossible for me to remain as Secretary of State.”
Johnson appeared stricken; he surreptitiously grabbed his side.
“Damn gallstones,” he said. It was a classic Johnson moment; Johnson always seemed to suffer a sudden assault on his body when faced with a crisis that was building to a head. His decision was classic Johnson as well: to deny the Agency and the military the war they sought while handing the disappointed chiefs a crucial marker.
I won’t do this, he told the small group around him, then turned angrily to Bissell. You had your chance; I even gave you the air cover you needed. But you screwed up every single phase of this chicken-shit operation. And you managed to make this government, and me, look like a fool in front of the whole world. Poor Adlai up at the UN, holding that picture of the damaged “defecting aircraft”? Hell, you think there’s anyone in the world with a brain larger than his balls who couldn’t smell out that story? But it’s the only one we’ve got left, and we have to play with the hand we’re dealt. A shooting war with Cuba right now is just the last thing we—I—need.
Shortly before three a.m., the meeting broke up, and Johnson summoned the White House physician to check with him about those gallstones.
The fallout from the doomed invasion was, to put it mildly, embarrassing. The ten-plus dead fighters from Brigade 2506, the 1,200 captured exiles paraded through Havana by a triumphant Fidel Castro, fed the picture of an American-made fiasco. The fallout at home was intense. Fed by sources in the Agency and the military, Republicans in Congress denounced the President for “pulling out the rug” from the chance to depose a Communist tyrant, as Joint Chief Chairman Lemnitzer put it. Intriguingly, one of the most notable criticisms came from freshman New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In his maiden speech in the Senate, Kennedy, channeling his brother’s campaign rhetoric and his own highly unevolved Cold War beliefs, recalled how his brother “eloquently voiced the aspirations for freedom of all those who live under tyranny, and pledged that this nation would stand with the democratic forces fighting for a free Cuba. Let us hope that the disaster we have just witnessed does not tempt our adversaries into searching for further signs of weakness in our leaders.” Far more important, as it turned out, was what lesson President Johnson took from the failure; what lesson he determined to remember the next time he was faced with such a decision.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what a different President—say, John F. Kennedy—might have taken from the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy’s anger at the misinformation the CIA had deliberately and repeatedly fed him might have prodded him not just to shake up the Agency, but to bring even more skepticism to its casual assumption that it was entitled to topple governments, even those freely elected. And his skepticism about the military, drawn from his World War II experiences, might have led him to entertain serious doubts about its casual optimism about the use of force, as well as its indifference to potential responses by the Soviet Union in Berlin or elsewhere. A President like John Kennedy might well have been highly dubious about taking the military at face value when a crisis erupted.
But John Kennedy wasn’t President. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. And Lyndon Johnson took a very different set of conclusions from the Bay of Pigs failure. For Johnson, it was more proof that the high-society, aristocratic tea drinkers and cookie pushers, the kind of people who ran the CIA and threw the parties in Georgetown and put on tuxedoes to listen to chamber music, had screwed him five ways from Sunday. He couldn’t give the Chiefs what they wanted, couldn’t have a war with Cuba and worry about the Soviets taking Berlin, but he didn’t blame them for their anger. And at some level, he even sympathized with their anger. It was, after all, Speaker Sam Rayburn, his fellow Texan and first mentor in Washington, who once said, “If we don’t trust our generals, we’ve wasted a lot of money on West Point.” Next time, he would be a lot more inclined to bend their way—if there was a next time.
AT FORTY MINUTES PAST noon on Sun
day, July 16, 1961, President Lyndon Johnson stood on the red-carpeted front steps of the U.S. Embassy residence in Vienna, Austria, waiting to greet his guest. Behind him stood a phalanx of American diplomats and Soviet experts: Secretary of State William Fulbright; outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson; his successor, Foy Kohler; State Department policy chief Paul Nitze. Below them, on the street, hundreds of reporters, photographers, and cameramen jostled for position, waiting to capture the first meeting between Johnson and his guest—Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
It was a summit meeting that almost didn’t happen. Preliminary talks for the meeting had begun shortly after Johnson’s inauguration, prompted in good measure by the still-shocking circumstances of Johnson’s Presidency. Moscow had been preparing for months for the possibility of a John Kennedy Presidency; their “Americanologists” had produced reams of political, biographical, and psychological evaluations of the candidate. Johnson, though a vaguely familiar figure in Soviet circles, was barely given a second thought. Who cared about an American Vice President? Now that he was in the Oval Office, the thought on both sides of the East-West divide went, it was important that he and the Soviet leader get a clear understanding of each other, beyond the hastily prepared analysis by the KGB—Moscow’s secret police—that characterized Johnson as a friend of monopolists and militarists whose views were essentially no different from those of Richard Nixon’s.
The Bay of Pigs debacle almost consigned the summit notion to the dustbin of history. Just as Khrushchev had blown up the 1960 summit in Geneva after President Eisenhower had tried to lie his way out of responsibility for the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union, so he was bristling with anger at the covert U.S. attempt to overthrow the first Marxist revolutionary who had come to power in Latin America. As Khrushchev put it in his characteristically pungent way, “You don’t shit in your neighbor’s yard and expect an invitation to dinner.” There was also reluctance in some of the inner councils of the Johnson administration, a reluctance fueled by concerns that the President’s indifference to foreign policy might leave him at a disadvantage in dealing with the mercurial, wily, and fiercely determined Soviet leader. With an ambitious domestic program taking shape, and with his voting rights effort already underway, Johnson’s aides feared the focus and energy required to prepare for a face-to-face summit might be one burden too many.
It was Johnson himself who pushed hard for the meeting. “I’ve been studying up on Khrushchev and his people,” he told a surprised Averell Harriman one May afternoon in the Oval Office, when FDR’s wartime ambassador to Moscow came to call.
“They don’t have the least understanding of our system. They think I’m nothing but the front man for a bunch of oil billionaires and munitions manufacturers, part of the, what do they call it, ‘reactionary ruling circles.’ It might mean something if they come to realize that my hero is Franklin Roosevelt—they worship Roosevelt, right?” he said to the diplomat who’d been Roosevelt’s envoy to Joseph Stalin during World War II. “And besides, I think Khrushchev and I have a whole lot in common. We walked the same roads to get where we are. I mean”—Johnson added with a grin at the multimillionaire Harriman—“neither of us had a daddy who owned a railroad . . . or made a Wall Street killing, like Jack’s.”
Indeed, both of the men who now had the power to wipe out most of the planet’s life had walked hard roads. Both were raised without money. Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, had lost what he had through bad cotton trading, and Johnson’s early life in Stonewall, Texas, in a farmhouse on the Pedernales, was far from easy. Nikita Khrushchev came from Kalinovka in the Ukraine, grandson of a serf, son of a miner. Both found their way out through political skills.
Johnson began attaching himself to older, powerful men from the time he was a student at Southwest State Teacher’s College in San Marcos, Texas, when he made himself indispensable to the school’s president. He leveraged that work into a job in Washington, where his obsequious attention to his colleagues soon made him the most influential aide in the House; a body to which he was elected at twenty-nine. Khrushchev joined the Communist Party at twenty-four. A few years later, he entered the Donets Industrial Institute, a worker’s school run by the Soviets, where he became secretary of the school’s Communist Party Committee. He graduated in 1925 to full-time Party work, and while working in Yuzovka, he became the protégé of Lazar M. Kaganovich, the secretary general of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee and a close associate of future Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Johnson worked himself into the orbits of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, and Senator Richard Russell. Khrushchev was pulled into the orbit of Stalin, for whom he executed—often literally—purges in the Ukraine, and whose growing madness he survived. Khrushchev not only made it through the Stalinist era, but also beat back every rival to become the dominant—albeit not the absolute—power figure in the Soviet Union (Johnson, of course, was propelled into power by the act of a lunatic).
And there was one other strikingly similar trait the two men shared: Both were acutely conscious of their lack of first-class education and breeding; both knew that others in their ranks condescended to them, sneered at them behind their backs for their social clumsiness, their often crude vocabularies. Both were more than willing to flaunt their language and their customs in public. While Lyndon Johnson never banged his shoe on a desk at the United Nations to protest a speaker, as Khrushchev had done in the fall of 1960, he was more than capable of performing the most basic of functions—including excremental—in the presence of others. (Richard Bissell was not the only highborn official to be summoned for a colloquy with the President seated on the toilet.)
As Johnson waited for Khrushchev, he mentally rehearsed the strategic and tactical guidance he’d been given by the men who’d briefed him over the last days. Harriman and Ambassador Thompson had given him almost identical advice: Do not get into an ideological debate about the merits of Communism and capitalism. Khrushchev spent years being drilled in Marxist dogma, they told him; what’s more, he believes it. When he starts hammering away, Harriman said, laugh it off; make him get down to specifics. This was the kind of advice that was right in Johnson’s sweet spot: He held no strong ideological convictions, he wanted to make life better for people who needed his government’s help, and he wanted to know what kind of ideas he could get people to support. He was sure it was the same whether you were talking about money to bring electricity to the rural South, or the resolution of a border conflict, or arms control. From Paul Nitze and especially from Dean Acheson came the perspective they’d shared from the first days of the Cold War: The only thing the Russians respect is strength, firmness. Khrushchev has to know you’re prepared to fight for the vital interests of the United States. The Bay of Pigs made us—you—look weak, indecisive in his eyes. You must disabuse him of this quickly. And he reminded himself one last time of his own certainty: Put me face-to-face with a man, give me enough time, and I can reason with him, deal with him, bend him to my will.
At 12:45 p.m., a black ZIL limousine pulled into the circular gravel driveway of the embassy. Khrushchev emerged from the car and walked quickly up the steps to shake hands with the President. The photographers body-slammed each other for the best angle of the handshake; it did not go unnoticed by any of them that the head of the five-foot three-inch Soviet leader barely reached the chin of the six-foot three-inch President. (One for our side, Secretary of State Fulbright noted silently.)
The two men retreated with their aides to the red, gray, and gold music room and sat side by side on a rose-colored sofa. Facing them stood Johnson’s team and Khrushchev’s court: Foreign Minster Andrei Gromyko, U.S. Ambassador Menshikov, diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin. When the pool photographers were dismissed, the men began with some forced small talk.
“I hope Gromyko doesn’t make you too uncomfortable, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said with
a smile. “There are many in Moscow who think he looks very much like Mr. Nixon.”
“In my country,” Johnson said, smiling back, “we work across party lines. It is easier for you—you only have one party. Sometimes I envy you that.”
Khrushchev saw his opening and ran with it; he immediately launched into a forceful denunciation of the Cuban invasion. You always claim to be on the side of “freedom,” but whenever a nation tries to be free in a way you do not like, you want to snuff that freedom out . . . like you did in Iran, like you did in Guatemala, like you tried to do in Cuba. You called Fidel a Communist; I think you made him a Communist when you cut off his oil and tried to starve his people. We believe socialism will triumph through the force of its ideas, but your country doesn’t seem to trust anyone who wants to travel a different path.
Khrushchev’s attack was premised on the Soviet view of Johnson as an ally of the more “conservative and reactionary views,” as the KGB analysis of the new President had put it. But it was precisely the kind of attack Johnson had been cautioned about, and he played it just as planned.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, leaning closer to Khrushchev and putting his hand on the Chairman’s knee with just a bit more pressure than was fully comfortable, “I think both of our peoples have too much at stake here to watch us spend our time in debate. We have our interests, and we are determined to protect them; you have yours, whether it be in Warsaw or East Berlin or Budapest”—pointedly noting three cities where Soviet armies had ruthlessly suppressed uprisings in the 1950s. “But I doubt I am going to make a capitalist out of you, and I am reasonably sure all of your eloquence is not going to make a Communist out of me; so why don’t we see if we can make this a slightly safer world before we go home? Why don’t we see if we can take some of the billions we both spend on machines to kill and bring that money back home to build dams and roads and schools?”
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