The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  A final defect was the jerry-built organization improvised to run this complex operation extending from Washington to the beachhead. There was no permanent machinery in Washington designed to deal with such an undertaking, so one had to be improvised. When the action heated up, communications quickly broke down, and the Washington leaders were soon without the information necessary to guide their decisions.

  After General Taylor submitted his report, Kennedy asked him to join the White House staff as its Military Representative, where Taylor found that the style of the Bay of Pigs operation was the style of the entire White House:

  As an old military type, I was accustomed to the support of a highly professional staff trained to prepare careful analyses of issues in advance of decisions and to take meticulous care of classified information. I was shocked at the disorderly and careless ways of the new White House staff.… I found that I could walk into almost any office, request and receive a sheaf of top secret papers, and depart without signing a receipt or making any record of the transaction. There was little perceptible method in the assignment of duties within the staff, although I had to admit that the work did get done, largely through the individual initiative of its members. When important new problems arose, they were usually assigned to ad hoc task forces with members drawn from the White House staff and other departments. These task forces did their work, filed their reports, and then dissolved into the bureaucratic limbo without leaving a trace or contributing to the permanent base of governmental experience.

  This attitude toward orderly method had been derived from the President himself who, “like his subordinates, had little regard for organization and method as such.” If these were the lessons Taylor was trying to teach the President, then, according to Kennedy’s own alter ego, he did not learn them: Sorensen claims Kennedy went away from the Bay of Pigs determined to push his own antibureaucratic methods even further, in order to protect him from the experts (whose advice had not been solicited).

  But Kennedy was not really seeking to learn new things from his investigation of the Bay of Pigs. That is obvious both from the formal instruction he gave to the Cuba Study Group, and from the people he appointed to that group. He wrote to General Taylor:

  It is apparent that we need to take a close look at all our practices and programs in the areas of military and para-military, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activities which fall short of outright war. I believe we need to strengthen our work in this area. In the course of your study, I hope that you will give special attention to the lessons which can be learned from recent events in Cuba.

  Taylor himself wondered at “the almost passing mention of the Bay of Pigs” in this plan for expanding guerrilla warfare, with the Bay of Pigs used only as a cautionary tale for that purpose. An investigation of the meaning of the Cuban invasion might have called into question the very notion of paramilitary assaults on other governments. Kennedy’s instructions precluded that. The assignment was not to ask whether Americans should acquire a guerrilla warfare capability but how America might do so most efficiently.

  The choice of General Taylor was dictated by Kennedy’s determination in this matter. Taylor had been a critic of the Eisenhower doctrine of “massive retaliation.” When he retired from office (an act later regarded as a resignation in protest), he wrote The Uncertain Trumpet to plead for a new doctrine of “flexible response,” enabling America to counter “wars of liberation” with limited-warfare tactics. Senator Kennedy read this book during his campaign, and wrote a letter of enthusiastic approval to its author. Theodore Sorensen echoed one phrase from the book in the inaugural address. Taylor concluded his argument by saying: “All the foregoing actions should be taken to the sure notes of a certain trumpet, giving to friend and foe alike a clear expression of our purpose and of our motives.” Taylor criticized Eisenhower for cutting back military expenditures and for allowing a missile gap to develop. All this was useful to the 1960 candidate, even though Taylor’s missile gap evaporated when Secretary McNamara began looking for it.

  General Taylor, despite his own minimal support of a military staffing system (certainly more orderly than Kennedy’s), was also a critic of the military bureaucracy. He said: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have all the faults of a committee in settling important controversial matters. They must consider and accommodate many divergent views before action can be taken.” That was the kind of general Kennedy wanted for his Cuba Study Group—and Taylor did not disappoint. The “jerry-built” operation of the CIA was criticized only because operations of that scale should go to the Department of Defense—which, in turn, should be trained to meet paramilitary and covert-action challenges too big for the CIA to handle. Bissell’s agents should be replaced with Special Forces in the Army itself—with the Green Berets. Taylor, like most critics of bureaucracy, also suggested that a new bureau be added to run the old ones—in this case, a Cold War command center. The President rejected this idea, which challenged the State Department too directly, but then set up two secret boards to perform analogous tasks; and the leading figures on these boards were the commanding personalities of the Cuba Study Group—Maxwell Taylor and Robert Kennedy.

  The simplest proof that Kennedy learned nothing from the Bay of Pigs invasion is that his own solution was to make Robert Kennedy the Director of the CIA. He told Arthur Schlesinger: “I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there. Byron White could do that job perfectly well. Bobby should be in CIA.… It’s a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with CIA. McNamara has dealt with Defense; Rusk has done a lot with State; but no one has dealt with CIA.” Though Robert turned down the directorship, he added the CIA’s business to his crowded schedule at Justice. Robert would “deal” with the CIA, exactly as McNamara dealt with Defense. Both men spurred their organizations on to new excess.

  The President did not even know the CIA well enough to realize that the best critics of the Bay of Pigs operation were within the Agency. Richard Helms, leery of covert activity anyway, resented the way Bissell had isolated himself from internal review. Robert Amory, head of the bureau’s own intelligence, had been excluded from planning the invasion, along with the Agency’s Bureau of Estimates. The most critical report on the Cuban performance would come from the Agency—Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Inspector General, had fought for review rights over all operations, and had won them at one of Eisenhower’s regular meetings, where Dulles could not override his own Inspector General before the President. When Kirkpatrick completed his report on the Bay of Pigs, friends of Bissell considered him a traitor, much as similar agents would feel about William Colby when that Director cooperated with the Church Committee years later. Although the Inspector General’s report has never been declassified, Kirkpatrick’s later comments give the gist of it. Kirkpatrick not only listed technical reasons for the military operation’s failure; unlike the Taylor group, he derided the whole project: “If there was a resistance to Fidel Castro, it was mostly in Miami.… All intelligence reports coming from allied sources [which Bissell did not consult] indicated quite clearly that he was thoroughly in command of Cuba, and was supported by most of the people who remained on the island.”

  Now there was a lesson Kennedy could have learned from the Bay of Pigs; but he made that impossible when he told his brother to “deal with CIA,” since the Bay of Pigs just increased Robert Kennedy’s determination to “get Castro.” His emotional response to the defeat of his brother was intense. Peter Wyden describes his first reaction:

  As the planners in Washington tried to come to terms with defeat on Wednesday, Walt Rostow was concerned about Robert Kennedy, whom he hardly knew. The Attorney General, who had not attended any of the pre-invasion planning meetings, showed much more than the President how distraught he was. He refused to accept the debacle and was needlessly upsetting the other advisers. On Tuesday, RFK had warned the presidential circle harshly
in the Cabinet Room that they were to make no statements that didn’t back up the President’s judgments all the way. In midafternoon Wednesday, with the President absent from the room for a few minutes, Robert spoke, Rostow thought, “in anguish.” He called on the advisers “to act or be judged paper tigers in Moscow.” They were not just to “sit and take it.” With all the famous talent around the table, somebody ought to find something to do. Everybody stared. They were “absolutely numb.”

  Even after the failure, Robert Kennedy thought of the Cuban problem in purely military terms; he told Taylor that “the President would have gone as far as necessary for success had he known in time what had to be done.”

  Robert Kennedy endorsed the Taylor group’s request for a command center to wage the Cold War; and, when that was rejected, Robert became a moving force in the secret committees set up to oppose Communist-inspired regimes or rebellions. These new boards were added to a prior one, the Special Group, which oversaw covert activities. General Taylor was put in charge of this, with a mandate to turn a harsher eye on CIA proposals. The first new group was also chaired by Taylor, but included Robert Kennedy—Special Group CI (for counterinsurgency). This group looked to the development of guerrilla warfare skills within the Special Forces of the regular Army. The Green Berets were its pampered baby, and Vietnam is its legacy. Robert Kennedy became an ardent reader of Mao and Ho, and held seminars on guerrilla tactics at Hickory Hill. The President himself insisted on the green berets as a badge of distinction, against the Army’s reluctance to set men off from others except by rank, and a green beret became a fixture on Robert’s desk at the Justice Department. Whenever this President saw a wall, he started throwing caps over it.

  Robert’s enthusiasm for counterinsurgency made him push and prod the CI Group, enforcing his brother’s belief that America’s future power would depend on its guerrilla capacity. William Gaud, who served on the CI Group, said in his oral history report at the Kennedy Library that the President and Attorney General “gave a hell of an impetus to the study of counterinsurgency and to setting up schools to indoctrinate our own people in this subject. And also, as a result of what they did, our own public safety programs, police programs, have been greatly enlarged.” After observing Robert at the CI meetings, Gaud said: “There wasn’t any question about the depth of his interest or the depth of his understanding of the problem. He was a pretty tough customer to face if he took one point of view and you took another, or if he felt that your agency had not been doing what it should be doing in respect of some problem. I developed a very healthy respect for his ability to get things done.”

  The things Robert got done included training Latin American officers in methods for putting down popular unrest. Why, after all, wait till a Diem is in trouble to come to his rescue? The pro-American governments should share America’s expertise in preventing rebellion. Though there is no evidence that torture was taught in the American schools, there is no doubt that torturers were among their alumni, further embittering some Latin Americans against the United States.

  For President Kennedy, Vietnam offered an invaluable opportunity to try out counterinsurgent devices and train American personnel. According to General Taylor:

  The President repeatedly emphasized his desire to utilize the situation in Vietnam to study and test the techniques and equipment related to counterinsurgency, and hence, he insisted that we expose our most promising officers to the experience of service there. To this end he directed that Army colonels eligible for promotion to brigadier general be rotated through Vietnam on short orientation tours, and he was inclined to require evidence of specific training or experience in counterinsurgency as a prerequisite to promotion to general officer rank. He looked to the Special Group to verify compliance with his wishes in these matters, a duty which we fulfilled by means of recurrent spot checks on departmental performance.

  There was no reluctance to be “drawn into” Vietnam—we welcomed it as a laboratory to test our troops for their worldwide duties.

  Fort Bragg was already the center for training America’s corps of antiguerrilla guerrillas. The New Frontier philosophy of counterinsurgency had been enunciated in a famous speech Walt Rostow delivered at Fort Bragg in April of 1961. Rostow’s academic reputation rested on his theory of the stages of economic development. In the early stages, emerging nations are vulnerable to opportunistic “scavengers of the process”—the Communists. It was America’s historical role to protect the integrity of the development process by eliminating those scavengers. The counterinsurgents were technicians of progress: “I salute you, as I would a group of doctors, teachers, economic planners, agricultural experts, civil servants, or those others who are now leading the way in the whole southern half of the globe in fashioning the new nations.” America was history’s midwife, nursing freedom in numberless cradles. There could be nothing more enlightened or liberal than the learning of “dirty tricks” to undo the scavengers who specialize in them. Roger Hilsman in the State Department was another enthusiast for counterinsurgency: “The way to fight the guerrilla was to adopt the tactics of the guerrilla.” New Frontiersmen traded maxims from the handbooks of the twentieth-century revolutionaries, then visited Fort Bragg to see how these heroes could be undone in their own backyards. The White House press corps was taken there in October of 1961 to watch Green Berets eat snake meat, stage ambushes, skip over ponds with back-pack rockets that let men literally walk over water. The Americans were coming—savvy as the Viet Cong, and with fancier gadgets.

  Robert Kennedy was ardent about the Green Beret projects of the Special Group CI; but he was even more intense in pursuing the program of the second secret body set up in the wake of the Taylor report, the Special Group Augmented (SGA). This handled high-priority plots, and the highest priority of all was given to the downfall of Castro. At the very time when General Taylor, presiding over the Special Group, was supposed to curb the CIA, the Attorney General was using the SGA to increase its anti-Castro operations. The importance of this project can be seen from the fact that Robert Kennedy commandeered for its prosecution the “star” most in demand during this high season of counterinsurgent fever. Edward Lansdale was a man of mystery and glamour on the New Frontier, the man who had taught Ramon Magsaysay and Ngo Dinh Diem how to put down rebellions against their regimes. Lansdale, who opposed the Bay of Pigs operation, was now given a textbook assignment: show the CIA how it should have been done. Kennedy was ready to back him up with all the resources he might need. Operation Mongoose, the anti-Castro project, became the CIA’s most urgent clandestine operation. Its base in Miami was the Agency’s largest, with six hundred case officers running three thousand Cuban agents, fifty business fronts, and a fleet of planes and ships operating out of the “fronts.” Lansdale was told to act quickly, and he promised to bring Castro down within a year. Robert Kennedy did not want the man who had humiliated his brother to gloat long over his triumph.

  Far from checking CIA excesses, Robert Kennedy forced reluctant officials to undertake things they had resisted in the past. That was signally true of Richard Helms, an espionage man who had always opposed covert activity. Only after being “chewed out” by both Kennedys for Operation Mongoose’s lack of success did Helms, a man temperamentally and historically opposed to assassination, revive the plot to use Mafia hit men against Castro’s life. Defenders of the Kennedys naturally deny that their heroes commissioned the assassination plots; and, naturally, there is no record of a direct order—the CIA’s lack of record-keeping about “sensitive” matters was one of its attractions for the antibureaucratic Kennedys. But what else are we to make of the fact that Helms, of all people, took over the assassination plot for the first time after his meeting with the Kennedys, and that he canceled it as soon as Johnson came into office?

  Besides, Robert Kennedy was working in the closest collaboration with Edward Lansdale all through this period, and that “enlightened” guerrilla leader asked William Harvey, who ran Task
Force W (the CIA program meant to implement Operation Mongoose) to draw up papers on “liquidation of leaders” in Cuba. Harvey, a highhanded CIA veteran, told Lansdale it was stupid to put such things in writing—which does not mean that removal of it from their pages removed it from their plotting.

  The evidence that the Kennedys directly ordered Castro’s death is circumstantial but convincing. When Robert Kennedy was told of the Mafia’s use against Castro, on May 7, 1962, he blew up at the man briefing him, but expressed neither surprise nor anger at the plot against Castro, only at the killers being used. Lawrence Houston, the CIA general counsel who briefed Robert, told Thomas Powers: “He was mad as hell. But what he objected to was the possibility it would impede prosecution against Giancana and Rosselli. He was not angry about the assassination plot, but about our involvement with the Mafia.” Kennedy, who was calling CIA people at all levels to urge on Operation Mongoose, made no protest to Helms or any other CIA officer about the plan to kill Castro. That did not excite or upset him, and he did nothing—though he was by office an enforcer of the law—to make sure it was not resumed (as in fact it was). That is inconceivable unless he approved of the plan, had in fact been part of its authorization.

  Lyndon Johnson, when he took office, did not continue the attempts on Castro’s life. When he directly asked Helms about them and was given a full answer, Johnson was certain that President Kennedy had authorized the assassination attempts, that he was running “a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.” He told Howard K. Smith: “Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first.” Johnson believed the gangland hit had backfired in Dallas. One does not have to accept that inference to doubt what Johnson was in the best position to know—how and whether a President directs the CIA “unofficially.”