The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to. (War and Peace)

  As if he knew the decision was out of his hands, Kennedy cut off criticism of the CIA’s plan. Sorensen, considered “liberal” (i.e., soft) in the early days of the administration, was not told of it; when he heard something and sounded Kennedy out, the President quashed any expression of disapproval by using “an earthy expression that too many advisers seemed frightened by the prospect of a fight, and stressed somewhat uncomfortably that he had no alternative.” Whether he had an alternative or not, he wanted to hear of none. Wofford—whose patron, Chester Bowles, was one of those Kennedy considered “frightened by the prospect of a fight”—tells us what “earthy expression” Kennedy was using to cut off criticism: “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this.”

  Criticism of the plan was considered cowardice. Bowles and Rusk and Stevenson were counted too “ladylike” to be consulted on the manly scheme Bissell was outlining. Robert Kennedy wrote, just after the failure: “A critical time was on D plus one, when the CIA asked for air cover. Jack was in favor of giving it. However, Dean Rusk was strongly against it.” Maybe the “chickens” caused the failure. That is why, in the immediate aftermath of the landing, the fury of the people responsible was directed against those who had opposed the scheme. Pierre Salinger stopped Harris Wofford in a White House hallway and said: “That yellow-bellied friend of yours, Chester Bowles, is leaking all over town that he was against it. We’re going to get him.” Robert Kennedy confronted Bowles himself, poked his finger in his chest, and said: “So you advised against this operation. Well, as of now you were all for it.”

  Despite his campaign promise to hear all sides of an issue, Kennedy showed resentment when forced to hear less than comforting words about the future landing. After inviting Senator Fulbright to fly with him to Florida, Kennedy read through a critique of the CIA’s plan which Fulbright brought along, put it down, and did not discuss it with Fulbright, either on this flight or the return one. Schlesinger was told by Robert Kennedy: “I hear you don’t think much of this business.… You may be right or you may be wrong, but the President has made his mind up. Don’t push it any further. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can.” It was the advice Edward Kennedy later gave Schlesinger on the subject of Robert’s presidential campaign. Don’t make him lose his nerve; rally round; keep up morale. The question was one of guts, and to back off was to show a lack of guts. Sorensen captures the atmosphere: “Unfortunately, among those privy to the plan in both the State Department and the White House, doubts were entertained but never pressed, partly out of fear of being labeled ‘soft’ or undaring in the eyes of their colleagues.…”

  When Schlesinger took to the President a white paper he had composed on Cuba, he asked, “What do you think about this damned invasion?” Kennedy answered wryly: “I think about it as little as possible.” Thinking was not the problem. Thinking might take away one’s nerve. Schlesinger admits his own criticisms were checked by Kennedy’s obvious unwillingness to hear counsels of caution. He tried an indirect approach when he spelled out the unpleasant tasks that would await the President if he failed:

  When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials. At no point should the President be asked to lend himself to the cover operation. For this reason, there seems to be merit in Secretary Rusk’s suggestion that someone other than the President make the final decision and do so in his absence—someone whose head can later be placed on the block if things go terribly wrong.

  He was telling a man proud of his courage to hide, to skulk.

  Kennedy was a prisoner of his own taste for crisis, for being in the midst of the action. The CIA told him he had to move fast, before Russia supplied Castro with jet planes (actually, there were already jet trainers in Cuba, which were used effectively against the invaders). Besides, the Guatemalan government wanted the growing army, whose presence was no longer a secret, moved from its territory. And the troops were anxious to go. And the rainy season was about to begin. The basketball team had to call its signals in the rush of events, if it was to keep control—which meant that events were controlling it. A similar taste for instant decision came into play during the missile crisis, when a dubious estimate on the arming date of Castro’s missiles led Kennedy to impose a deadline on the Russians, forcing them to act in an atmosphere of panic.

  The growing size of the invasion army—1,400 men—made the administration hostage to its own agents. Their visibility made them an “asset” that had to be used immediately or moved in a way that would waste the asset. And then there was the disposal problem if they were not used—all those hotheads wandering around in loud denunciation of a government that promised to back them and then reneged. Once again, acquiring a “capability” chained one to its use, so that decision became a kind of resignation to the inevitable. Confronted with the “disposal problem,” says Schlesinger, “Kennedy tentatively agreed that the simplest thing, after all, might be to let the Cubans go where they yearned to go—to Cuba.” The simplest thing, the nondecision, was the surrender of power to one’s own instruments of power. They were acquired so the President might have the option of using them; but, once acquired on this scale, he had no option not to use them.

  The ironies multiply. Tracing the justifications for invasion, Schlesinger wrote, “If we did in the end have to send American troops to Laos to fight communism on the other side of the world, we could hardly ignore communism ninety miles off Florida.” In order to have a future (hypothetical) option, one denies oneself a present (real) option. Since one might have to go into Laos, one must go into Cuba. Thus do options bind, making “freedom of maneuver” a straitjacket for the mind. The so-called domino theory, explaining enemy tactics, was—seen from the other end—an option theory, testing the will of America: if we were going to stay free to be tough anywhere else, we had to be tough everywhere. It was a hard doctrine in terms of its result—Cubans died and were imprisoned. But it was the simplest doctrine so far as decision-making goes. Every decision came, in fact, pre-decided: the “toughest” course is the only one that can be followed, unless one wants to “grab one’s nuts” and look like a bum.

  The last irony of all is that Kennedy failed because he had always succeeded. He was a prisoner of his own luck. As Schlesinger put it:

  One further factor no doubt influenced him: the enormous confidence in his own luck. Everything had broken right for him since 1956. He had won the nomination and the election against all the odds in the book. Everyone around him thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.

  It is not mystical or perverse to say that good luck is bad luck; Machiavelli offered that as the very essence of his realism. Arguing that fortuna could undo even the man of greatest virtuosity (virtù), he gave Valentino (Cesare Borgia) as his example. Valentino was the type of virtù at its highest reach, a model for all who want, at once, “immunity from foes and attractiveness to friends, victory by force or stratagem, the love and the fear of one’s people, the obedience and respect of one’s soldiers, the destruction of those who can or might oppose one, innovative measure within an ancient system, harshness joined with charm, the disbanding of old armies to reassemble better ones, the perpetuation of friendly relations with other kings or princes, so that they welcome alliance and shy from opposition.”

  That sounds like a description of the Neustadt President, of the Roosevelt whom Burns called lion and fox. Such a range of skills, joined with favoring chance, would seem unbeatable. But Machiavelli lists all these skills to emphasize the fact that good luck made Valentino fail—it made his virtù the means of his undoing. Introduced to a spacious area of action by his papal father, Valentino both commande
d and enlarged that sphere—in fact, enlarged it in order to command it. Only his skills could keep so many opponents off balance, and he could do that only by introducing so many new aspects to the game that his opponents were befuddled. Only by reaching for three other things could he grasp the first thing given him. But because everything depended on his superintending intelligence and will, any lapse in either of those qualities would bring the whole enterprise crashing down around him. The attempt at total control led to total collapse if one thing went wrong—in Valentino’s case, an illness that immobilized him at a crucial moment. For this kind of juggler, so deftly keeping dozens of balls in the air, if one drops they all fall. Luck worked his destruction by giving him so many in the first place.

  John Kennedy had neither the ruthless character nor the restless skills of a Valentino. And no President can aspire to the everyday powers of a Renaissance prince (though the modern powers of destruction far outreach anything dreamed of in the Renaissance). Nonetheless, the euphoria of the New Frontier, the ideal of the activist President always seeking more power, did make Kennedy think he could break free of normal restraints. His experience to date had been one of risks defied, of personal control, of unconventional activity backed up with the conventional might of his father’s money. He was nothing if not confident—changing plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion on his personal authority, redirecting the invasion to a hidden cove, rescheduling it for night landing. He brought his own ideas to the matter, gave it his personal stamp, without seeking express military guidance from Eisenhower, from White House military experts, from the Department of Defense. He never suspected that he was out of his depth. Critics simply lacked his nerve, or were hidebound “experts,” paper-shuffling “bureaucrats.” They did not see how magically he had defied the odds before, how lucky he was. Wyden’s interviews with participants in the control-room direction of the landing show how inadequate Kennedy was to this kind of operation:

  Fascinated, [Harlan] Cleveland watched a “stricken look” cross Admiral [Arleigh] Burke’s face when the President picked up one of the little magnetic destroyer models and moved it over the horizon. It clearly pained the admiral to see the President bypass all channels of command—and all tradition. As a student of managers coping with crisis, Cleveland was chagrined to see how obvious it was that the President’s only excecutive experience had been as commander of a PT boat.

  Throughout the day in the Cabinet Room, Kennedy did not ask enough questions, Harlan Cleveland thought. And the President failed to ask about situations in context; he would ask a “very specific question about some little piece of the jigsaw puzzle and you had to sort of guess what the rest of the jigsaw puzzle was in his mind.”

  [Walt] Rostow was struck by Kennedy’s deep personal concern about the fate of the men on the beaches. The President had a “small unit commander’s attitude toward these people” … Rostow was chagrined that the President “really didn’t have a very good visual picture of the whole thing.”

  The student of Neustadt had come to acquire power, not question it; to enjoy it, not fear it. The possibility that the very reach for power might, with luck, take one into situations beyond the measure of one’s skill would not occur to a reader of Neustadt’s book. James Reston rather fatuously called that book America’s version of The Prince. But Machiavelli warns against the mindless reach for power—the victory that drains one’s resources, the conquered people that are more dangerous under one’s dominion than outside it, the mercenaries added to one’s troops while crippling them, the added fortresses that delude a ruler with a sense of false security. For him fortune was a tricky friend when not a beguiling enemy—better held at arm’s length in either case. When dealing with the subject of power, he did not say, “Enjoy! Enjoy!” but “Suspect! Suspect!” These are the real lessons to be learned from Machiavelli, and some of Kennedy’s friends rejoiced that he had learned them in his bruising experience at the Bay of Pigs. But had he?

  20

  “Learning”

  The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, “Will something,” that is tantamount to saying, “I do not mind what you will,” and that is tantamount to saying, “I have no will in the matter.”

  —GILBERT CHESTERTON

  Accounts of the Bay of Pigs read like one of the “bad news, good news” jokes. The bad news is that the disaster was complete. The good news is that President Kennedy learned so much from the experience. The Kennedys, Schlesinger has been saying ever since 1960, are late learners, and we may have to pay for their education with the lives of a few hundred Cubans. Roger Hilsman put it this way:

  If some extra-galactic observer with a wisdom and insight undreamed of on earth were asked to comment on the Bay of Pigs affair, he might well say that it was through this comparatively small disaster, though disaster it clearly was, that President Kennedy learned the lessons that enabled him to avoid a much greater, nuclear disaster a year and a half later by managing the Cuban missile crisis with such a sure and steady hand. If so, the price may have been cheap.

  Writers are always suspect when they introduce an imaginary being “with a wisdom and insight undreamed of on earth” to say just what the writer is saying. But many wise men on this earth have repeated this line of thought, making it a kind of orthodoxy. One of these, astonishingly, is Theodore Sorensen: “In later months, he [Kennedy] would be grateful that he had learned so many major lessons—resulting in basic changes in personnel, policy and procedures—at so relatively small and temporary a cost.” I say astonishingly because, from the Sorensen account, Kennedy learned nothing at all. If the history of the invasion sounds like a “bad news, good news” joke, Sorensen’s account of his learning process reads like the movie line, “Round up the usual suspects.” Kennedy failed, according to Sorensen, because “John Kennedy inherited the plan.” But he did not. He inherited a growing invasion force which he let grow at an even faster rate. Sorensen says the matter was out of his hands before the presidency was securely in those hands: “Unlike an inherited policy statement or Executive Order, this inheritance [of a plan] could not be simply disposed of by presidential recission or withdrawal.” But presidential directive was the only thing that could stop the plan—or, for that matter, launch the invasion; and the very man Kennedy appointed to teach him the lessons of the invasion—General Maxwell Taylor—concluded that such cancellation was the proper course.

  For the rest, Sorensen just repeats the Neustadt dicta. Kennedy was done in by experts and the bureaucracy. The planning “permitted bureaucratic momentum to govern instead of policy leadership.… He [Kennedy] did not yet feel he could trust his own instincts against the judgments of recognized experts. He had not yet geared the decision-making process to fulfill his own needs.” Kennedy, who had been too confident, is called too diffident. He who broke the rules is called their victim. Is this what Kennedy learned from his own task force of postdisaster teachers?

  The Taylor report has never been released; but its principal author has said enough in various places to show that the Sorensen account of Kennedy’s education has little to do with that report’s conclusions. General Taylor believed—and he says that his fellow investigators concurred—that it was a lack of bureaucratic procedure and expertise that doomed the landing. The military was blamed for an operation it did not control. It was asked to advise from the sidelines with only partial glimpses of the total plan (which Bissell kept as secret as possible from those above him, while it leaked out all over the place below him). Taylor wrote in his memoirs:

  [The Joint Chiefs of Staff] felt that they had been obliged to work under circumstances which made it very difficult to carry out even these duties. In the interest of secrecy, there was no advance agenda circulated before the meetings and no written record of decisions kept during them [only bureaucrats “shuffle paper”]. Furthermore, the plan prepared by the CIA was always in process of revi
sion so that the Chiefs never saw it in final form until April 15, the day of the first air strike.

  In a White House that was proud of its lack of structured meetings and orderly reporting, even the expressed doubts of the Joint Chiefs were either misunderstood (e.g., the rating of chances at the Trinidad landing as “fair”) or did not get a hearing (e.g., the rating of chances at the Bay of Pigs as even less than fair). Taylor says:

  By mid-March, the President’s growing dissatisfaction with the Trinidad plan caused the CIA authorities to propose three alternatives to the Trinidad site, one of which was the Zapata area [containing the Bay of Pigs]. Asked to comment on these alternatives, the Chiefs in a memorandum to the Secretary of Defense [McNamara] expressed a preference for Zapata from among the three but added that none of the alternatives was considered as feasible or as likely to accomplish the objective as Trinidad. Our investigation revealed the fact, never accounted for [accountability is a bureaucratic priority], that neither the Secretary of Defense nor any other senior official appeared to have been aware of this clearly stated preference and hence the views of the Chiefs never influenced the decision on this point.

  Arthur Schlesinger, given access to Robert Kennedy’s notes from the Cuban Study Group investigation, quotes this astonishing one: “Evidently no probability of uprisings written up or put in memo form. No formal statement of opinion was given or asked for” (italics added). There were many experts who could have told Kennedy that an amphibious landing is recognized, in every school of military thought, as an exceptionally difficult maneuver, and that making such a landing at night on an inadequately mapped beach would stretch the skills of a trained army properly staffed (most Cubans had been given only a few months’ training). Yet Taylor found an incredible insouciance in the White House team: