by Garry Wills
Furthermore, how did Robert Kennedy expect Lansdale to bring down Castro within a year, absent outright invasion or overt American participation, without a palace coup to go with the popular uprising? The prevention of palace coups had been Lansdale’s specialty in the Philippines and Vietnam; he was brought in to exercise his skills in reverse, so far as Castro was concerned; and his highest contact inside Cuba had insisted that such a coup, preceded by execution of the President, was necessary to any plan for overthrowing the government. Rolando Cubela, a major in Castro’s army, was given various weapons for killing Castro, and was actually picking up one of these in Paris on the day President Kennedy was shot. At a time when Robert Kennedy was calling Lansdale and others incessantly, charging them with inactivity, would Lansdale withhold from him the key to his whole operation? And if he did so, how could Robert, intent on discussing the “nuts and bolts” of guerrilla war, expect him to overthrow Castro? Kennedy certainly knew about various sabotage efforts—he checked frequently on the attempt to destroy the Matahambre copper mines—which involved the death of Cubans in the area. In that sense, he authorized the killing of Cuban civilians and soldiers. Why not the killing of the soldiers’ commander-in-chief?
I referred earlier to Robert Kennedy’s extraordinary lack of interest in the motives or mechanics of his own brother’s death. This man, once the pursuer of those who merely humiliated his brother, showed no such vindictiveness, or even curiosity, about Lee Harvey Oswald (whose name he garbled in referring to him) or any accomplices Oswald might have had. Harris Wofford argues that this reluctance came from disgust over his own knowledge about the plot to kill Castro. Robert Kennedy did not want any investigation if it would lead to the plans made against Castro, to his own involvement and his brother’s. The deep change in Robert’s character seems to have come from a genuine recoil against such violence and scheming. From that point on, he would seek out those for whom Castro was a hero, not a villain. Such a change did not come from any gradual learning process. In fact, the harshness of this shock indicated Robert’s failure to learn from the Bay of Pigs experience. That episode made him rely on counterinsurgency more fanatically, which opened the way to Vietnam. It made him ignore the lesson taught by the CIA’s own Inspector General’s report—that the overthrow of Castro should not have been undertaken in the first place—and seek that goal even more single-mindedly, forcing previously reluctant CIA officers into the effort. His response to failure at the Bay of Pigs was not detachment and a calm review of the CIA’s murderous activities. The response was anger, and a call for greater efficiency in those activities.
But if the Kennedys learned nothing from their first crisis with Cuba, how did they respond so wisely in the second Cuban crisis, when Russian missiles had to be removed? The orthodoxy is that such wisdom could only have been derived from lessons of the earlier mistake. But the orthodoxy assumes that the missile crisis ended in a triumph for America, and that assumption needs some looking at.
21
“Triumph”
When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with—that is when he picks up a boomerang.
—GILBERT CHESTERTON
For all the talk of “learning” from the Bay of Pigs, and for all the earlier talk of seeking options, there is one option the Kennedys considered neither before nor after the failure of the Cuban invasion: leaving Castro alone. Some people—notably William Fulbright—tried to raise that option before the landing: Castro, said the Senator, is a thorn in America’s side, not a dagger through the heart. After the landing, the CIA’s own Inspector General had the same advice—which was not seriously considered. Perhaps the best lesson was presented gnomically by Clayton Fritchie, on Adlai Stevenson’s staff at the UN. He told the President, “It could have been worse.” Kennedy wondered how. “It might have succeeded.”
Suppose the invaders had overthrown Castro’s army, killed or imprisoned Castro himself, and ushered home the “government in exile.” America would have produced José Miro Cardona, like a rabbit out of Uncle Sam’s hat. Would he have commanded popular support in Cuba? He was opposed even by some of the exile invaders, even by some of the CIA organizers. No matter what his own qualifications, which were impressive, anyone would be tainted by the treatment he was given in America. The way he was shuttled from New York to Florida, after being kept ignorant of the invasion, would be an affront to Latin pride. That might not have been true before the revolution; but after it, his presence would have been a living sign of American imperialism. He would have been our puppet, and keeping him in power would have become a full-time American task—like propping up Thieu or Ky in Saigon. At a time when even the fading colonial regimes found it impossible to retain their former possessions, how could revolutionary Cuba submit to a new round of imperialism from America? Even if we succeeded in Cuba itself, the blatant effort involved would be feared and resented throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Robert Kennedy discovered that no serious estimate of the chances for a popular uprising had been asked for. Needless to say, the further chance of keeping an American surrogate in power could not have been considered, three or four steps further down the road from a hypothetical uprising. Hard as this is to credit, the Kennedys saw the elimination of Castro as a thing so obviously desirable in itself that no serious thinking went into the aftermath of that blessed event. The same thing continued true during the period when exotic poisons and sporadic sabotage and thousands of agents were used against Castro. For the New Frontier team, power meant doing what one wanted—and the team wanted to remove Castro.
The Kennedys thought power had only two components—ample resources, and the will to use them. In the Bay of Pigs affair, Kennedy was assured by Bissell that we had ample resources, so he concentrated on toughening his will. Then, when things began to go wrong, Robert Kennedy supplied the will and demanded that people in the control room come up with the mental and other resources: with all the famous talent around the table, something could be done. I once heard Eunice Kennedy say almost exactly the same thing at the head of her dining table. It is obviously a favorite line with the Kennedys. Nothing can withstand the direction of great talent by a will to win.
It is this attitude toward power that explains the frustrating, the almost literally maddening, impact of Castro on John and Robert Kennedy. Cuba obviously had fewer resources, of every sort, than America possessed. Yet Castro continued successfully to defy the giant—which meant that, being inferior in the one component of power, resources, Castro must have a compensatory superiority in the other component, force of will. The Kennedys were winners, yet he kept winning in his contest with them—proving that he was an even more determined winner. It was macho to macho, and he came off manlier, “ballsier,” his charisma as intact as that beard the CIA scientists had tried to hex.
This Kennedy attitude was simply an exaggeration of a basically American attitude toward the postwar world. It would show up again during the Vietnam war—the fury that a “third-rate” nation could successfully defy us. Earlier, we had instituted a security program more stringent than the one imposed during the war itself, to retain our nuclear monopoly. Given that overwhelming resource, we could dispose of the world benignly, without resistance. As Philip Marlowe told the doctor, “When a man has a gun in his hand, you are supposed to do what he says.” We had the nuclear gun in our hand—and, to our amazement, people still refused to do what we told them to. We had all the resources, so the failure must be in our will. McCarthyism was a great national search for the conspirators, the enemies within, who had sapped our will. That had to be the deficient component, since our resources were so great.
But the best students of power—Machiavelli and Hume, Clausewitz and Tolstoy—have always placed the source of power in the will of the commanded not of the commanding. Political power is the ability to get others to do your will. If they refuse, you may have the ability to destroy them; but that is not political power
in any constructive sense. We can, at present, blow up the world with our nuclear weapons; but that does not mean we can rule the world. Conquest is not, automatically, control. Machiavelli is constantly teaching the difference between those two concepts: “Anyone comparing one of the countries with the other will recognize a great difficulty of conquering the Turks, but great ease in governing them once conquered.… But it is just the reverse with realms governed like that of France.” The difference lies not in the resources of the conqueror, but in the disposition of the conquered. The docile Turks resist well, but easily conform; the French are easily divided by their conquerors, but rarely if at all united by their rulers. As Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace: “Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone’s will and the execution of that will by others,” and the second factor is more determinative than the first.
Because of the tremendous modern powers of destruction, those who look only to the resources and will of America’s rulers are astonished at the impotence of power as they conceive it. The Russians, Cuba, any “third-rate nation” can refuse to obey us, even though we are able to obliterate them. Given the “realities” of the force-equation, we have tended to dismiss “world opinion” as something outside the calculus of coercion, though it is at the very center of power as a reality. People obey, said David Hume, only because of opinion—what he called opinion of right (one should obey) and opinion of interest (it will pay one to obey). Insofar as quantum-of-force theorists took opinion into account, they thought only of interest—obey us or we’ll blow you up; obey us because we have economic advantages to bestow. Vaguer forces like anticolonialism were dismissed as mere sentiment. But Hume would have recognized in them the “opinion of right” that gives stability to political power (opinion of interest can shift as the “bribes” on either side are altered). So the project for getting rid of Castro was seen simply in terms of ability to kill him, disrupt his regime, remove his person. The will of the Cuban people was never taken seriously as a factor in the power situation. How they would be ruled after we had conquered their leader—whether power to influence was coordinate with, or at odds with, power to disrupt—never entered into the Kennedys’ calculations.
From the time of Why England Slept, John Kennedy had not thought of power as the recruiting of people’s opinion, but as the manipulation of their response by aristocrats who saw what the masses could not see. Relying on his own talent and will, the leader prods them, against their instincts, toward duty and empire. Thus, in the secret war on Castro, the American people were not informed of their government’s activities—those “in the know” performed these services for people who could not understand the necessities of power. But this benevolent censorship left Americans unprepared to estimate the situation when Castro accepted Russian missiles onto his territory.
To the American public, this step looked unprovoked, mysteriously aggressive, threatening because it added resources to a side that clearly had a strong will already. There was no way for Americans to know—and, at that point, no way Kennedy could bring himself to inform them—that Cuban protestations of purely defensive purpose for the missiles were genuine. We did not know what Castro did—that thousands of agents were plotting his death, the destruction of his government’s economy, the sabotaging of his mines and mills, the crippling of his sugar and copper industries. We had invaded Cuba once; officials high in Congress and the executive department thought we should have followed up with overwhelming support for that invasion; by our timetable of a year to bring Castro down, the pressure to supply that kind of support in a new “rebellion” was growing. All these realities were cloaked from the American people, though evident to the Russians and to the Cubans.
In this game of power used apart from popular support, the Kennedys looked like brave resisters of aggression, though they had actually been the causes of it. Herbert Dinerstein has established, from study of Russian materials, that the Soviet Union considered Latin America not ripe for large Communist influence until the Bay of Pigs failure. That gave them an opportunity, as continued American activity against Castro gave them an excuse, for large-scale intervention in this hemisphere.
The Russians were aiming at influence, by their support of the Cuban David against a Goliath too cowardly to strike in the daylight. Americans, unaware of all this, did not bother to ask themselves hard questions about the real intent of the missiles in Cuba. The President said the purpose of the missiles was “to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” But why would Castro launch missiles against even one of our cities, knowing that would be a suicidal act? Just one of our nuclear bombs on Havana would have destroyed his nation.
Well, then, if Castro did not have the missiles to conquer us (and how would he control us afterward, presuming that he could conquer us), was he making himself a willing hostage to Russia’s designs? Would he launch his missiles in conjunction with a larger Russian attack—again, knowing that we could incinerate his island as a side-blow in our response to Russia? Even if Castro had wanted to immolate his nation that way, his missiles would not have helped the Russians—might, rather, have been a hindrance, because of the “ragged attack” problem. If missiles were launched simultaneously from Russia and Cuba, the Cuban ones, arriving first, would confirm the warnings of Russian attack. Or, if Cuba’s missiles were to be launched later, radar warning of the Russian ones’ firing would let us destroy the Cuban rockets in their silos.
Then why were the missiles there? For defensive purposes, just as the Cubans said. We refused to accept this explanation, because President Kennedy had arbitrarily defined ground-to-ground missiles as “offensive” after saying offensive weapons would not be tolerated. Yet we called our ground-to-ground missiles on the Soviets’ Turkish border defensive. Deterrence—the threat of overwhelming response if attacked—is a category of defense when we apply it to our own weapons; but we denied the same definition to our opponents. Which meant that we blinded ourselves to the only reason Castro accepted (with some reluctance) the missiles over which Russians kept tight control. He wanted to force the Kennedys to stop plotting his overthrow, by threatening that, if worse came to worst and we were ready to crush him, he would take some of our cities down with him.
Americans watched this drama, as it were, through a glass pane, unable to hear the dialogue. Even after the crisis, we read Khrushchev’s defense of his motives for placing the missiles, and considered it mere Communist propaganda:
Cuba needed weapons as a means of containing the aggressors, and not as a means of attack. For Cuba was under a real threat of invasion. Piratical attacks were repeatedly made on her coasts, Havana was shelled, and airborne groups were dropped from planes to carry out sabotage.… Further events have shown that the failure of [the Bay of Pigs] invasion did not discourage the United States imperialists in their desire to strangle Cuba. (Speech of October 12, 1962)
Now we know that every factual statement in that list is true. But then we were unable to credit the rationale for Russia’s advance to the defense of a Latin American country:
What were our aims behind this decision? Naturally, neither we nor our Cuban friends had in mind that this small number of IRBMs, sent to Cuba, would be used for an attack on the United States or any other country. Our aim was only to defend Cuba.
It might be argued, now, that even if we knew about our own clandestine war against Castro, and admitted that the missiles were placed for deterrence, we could not tolerate their presence so near us. After all, accident or crazy leadership might launch them. The same thing is true of Russian missiles, of course. As Robert McNamara said at the time, a missile is a missile, whether fired at us from Russia or from Cuba. If mere proximity was the threat, we are in greater danger now than during the installation of those missiles, since Russian submarines cruise closer to our shores than the ninety-mile distance to Cuba. And the Kennedy administration knew that would soon b
e the situation.
In extraordinary interviews for The New Yorker, William Whit-worth heard Eugene Rostow, part of Lyndon Johnson’s war administration, defend the Vietnam commitment in terms of America’s psychic needs, rather than outright military threat. Looking back to the Cuban decision his brother Walt took part in, Rostow admitted there was no direct danger from the missiles:
“But during the Cuban missile crisis,” I said, “were we more threatened from a technological standpoint than we had been before the missiles were installed?”
“No, I think we were just touching a nerve of concern.… The missile crisis was a situation that I think is important for us to think about, because we were ready to go.”
Rostow talks of America as feeling psychically crowded and on the edge of panic. To our citizens, uninformed of the American campaign on Castro, the Cuban provocation seemed unmotivated and therefore eerie. President Kennedy had to do something to reassure the frightened populace. His toughness calmed a people “ready to go.”
That last phrase is a key one for Rostow in defending the Vietnam war. We could feel “crowded” even by forces halfway around the world. And when that happens, we become “ready to go”—leaving our rulers with only one pressing problem: how to channel our aggression into a limited expression. “The Cuban episode is worth studying because we were ready to go then. There was a rage in the country and a sense of threat, and these were extremely dangerous.” In the same way, if the North Koreans had added one more insult to the capture of the Pueblo in 1969, the American people would have been unrestrainable: “There was a lot of rage in the country about that. And my guess is that if the Koreans acted up the Americans would hit very hard. Very hard. That would be natural, and human, but it might be dangerous.” In the same way, if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, we would feel crowded. The problem, Rostow admits, is not one of immediate military threat, but of a sense of insecurity: