A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  7. THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION

  More than once I left the meetings in the Cabinet Room fearful that only two of the regulars present were against the operation; but, since I thought the President was the other, I kept hoping that he would avail himself of his own escape clause and cancel the plan. His response to my first memorandum was oblique. He said, “You know, I’ve reserved the right to stop this thing up to 24 hours before the landing. In the meantime, I’m trying fo make some sense out of it. We’ll just have to see.” But he too began to become a prisoner of events. After another meeting on April 6, I noted: “We seem now destined to go ahead on a quasi-minimum basis—a large-scale infiltration (hopefully) rather than an invasion.” This change reflected the now buoyant CIA emphasis on the ease of escaping from the beaches into the hills. By this time we were offered a sort of all-purpose operation guaranteed to work, win or lose. If it failed of its maximum hope—a mass uprising leading to the overthrow of the regime—it would at least attain its minimum objective—supply and reinforcement for the guerrillas already on the island.

  The next morning Dick Goodwin and I met for breakfast in the White House Mess to consider whether it would be worth making one more try to reverse the drift. Though Dick had not attended the Cuba sessions, we had talked constantly about the problem. Later that morning before departing for an economic conference in Latin America he went to see Rusk. When Goodwin expressed strong doubts about the Cuban operation, Rusk finally said, “Maybe we’ve been oversold on the fact that we can’t say no to this.” Afterward Goodwin urged me to send Rusk a copy of my memorandum to the President and follow it up by a personal visit. I arranged to see Rusk the next morning.

  When I set forth my own doubts on Saturday, the Secretary listened quietly and somewhat mournfully. Finally he said he had for some time been wanting to draw a balance sheet on the project, that he planned to do it over the weekend and would try to talk with the President on Monday. He reverted to a suggestion with which he had startled the Joint Chiefs during one of the meetings. This was that the operation fan out from Guantanamo with the prospect of retreating to the base in case of failure. He remarked, “It is interesting to observe the Pentagon people. They are perfectly willing to put the President’s head on the block, but they recoil from the idea of doing anything which might risk Guantanamo.”

  I don’t know whether Rusk ever drew his balance sheet, but probably by that Saturday morning the President had already made up his mind. When Goodwin dropped into his office Friday afternoon to say goodbye, Kennedy, striding over to the French windows opening to the lawn, recalled Goodwin’s fiery campaign statement and said ironically, “Well, Dick, we’re about to put your Cuban policy into action.” I saw the President myself later that same afternoon and noted afterward: “It is apparent that he has made his decision and is not likely now to reverse it.”

  Why had he decided to go ahead? So far as the operation itself was concerned, he felt, as he told me that afternoon, that he had successfully pared it down from a grandiose amphibious assault to a mass infiltration. Accepting the CIA assurances about the escape hatch, he supposed that the cost, both military and political, of failure was now reduced to a tolerable level. He added, “If we have to get rid of these 800 men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go”—a remark which suggested how much Dulles’s insistence on the disposal problem had influenced the decision, as well as how greatly Kennedy was himself moved by the commitment of the Cuban patriots. He was particularly impressed by the fact that three members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council had sons in the Brigade; the exile leaders themselves obviously believed that the expedition would succeed. As the decision presented itself to him, he had to choose whether to disband a group of brave and idealistic Cubans, already trained and equipped, who wanted very much to return to Cuba on their own, or to permit them to go ahead. The President saw no obligation to protect the Castro regime from democratic Cubans and decided that, if the Cubans wished to make the try on the categorical understanding that there would be no direct United States military support, he would help them do so. If the expedition succeeded, the overthrow of Castro would greatly strengthen democratic prospects in the hemisphere; if he called it off, he would forever be haunted by the feeling that his scruples had preserved Castro in power.

  More generally, the decision resulted from the fact that he had been in office only seventy-seven days. He had not had the time or opportunity to test the inherited instrumentalities of government. He could not know which of his advisers were competent and which were not. For their part, they did not know him or each other well enough to raise hard questions with force and candor. Moreover, the massed and caparisoned authority of his senior officials in the realm of foreign policy and defense was unanimous for going ahead. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency advocated the adventure; the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense approved its military aspects, the Secretary of State its political aspects. They all spoke with the sacerdotal prerogative of men vested with a unique understanding of arcane matters. “If someone comes in to tell me this or that about the minimum wage bill,” Kennedy said to me later, “I have no hesitation in overruling them. But you always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The only opposition came from Fulbright and myself (he knew nothing of Bowles’s memorandum to Rusk, nor did he know that Edward R. Murrow, the new director of the United States Information Agency, who had learned about the operation from a New York Times reporter early in April, was also deeply opposed), and this did not bulk large against the united voice of institutional authority. Had one senior adviser opposed the adventure, I believe that Kennedy would have canceled it. Not one spoke against 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. Despite himself, even this dispassionate and skeptical man may have been affected by the soaring euphoria of the new day.

  On the following Tuesday the Robert Kennedys gave a party to celebrate Ethel’s birthday. It was a large, lively, uproarious affair, overrun by guests, skits, children and dogs. In the midst of the gaiety Robert Kennedy drew me aside. He said, “I hear you don’t think much of this business.” He asked why and listened without expression as I gave my reasons. Finally he said, “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.”

  8. THE POLITICS OF CLANDESTINITY

  And so we were going ahead. If this were so, the next thing was to do what could be done to minimize the damage. It was evident that the political and diplomatic planning was far less advanced than the military planning. And it was evident too that, if the invasion was to win support within Cuba, its sponsor, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, must appear not a counterrevolutionary but a revolutionary movement, offering Cuba not a restoration but a liberation.

  The formation of the Council on March 22 was only a first halting step. A few days later Tracy Barnes of CIA sent me the first draft of a proposed Council manifesto—a document so overwrought in tone and sterile in thought that it made one wonder what sort of people we were planning to send back to Havana. Barnes wholly agreed that the Council’s program was of no use in its existing form, and we discussed how to go about strengthening it. After some thought, we asked two Latin American specialists from Harvard—John Plank of the Government Department and William Barnes of the Law School—to suggest guiding principles for a sensible and progressive platform.

  In the meantime, Berle, Philip Bonsai and I held a conference with Miró Cardona. It took place, as it happened, on the afternoon of the day that Fulbright made his gallant attempt to turn the tide. Miró was
a genial man in his late fifties, bald and flushed, his great round face dominated by those inordinately heavy horn-rimmed glasses favored by Latin American politicians. Our purpose was to persuade him to give the Council’s program social and economic content. We pointed out that the Council draft was filled with impassioned appeals to the foreign investor, the private banker, the dispossessed property owner, but had very little to say to the worker, the farmer or the Negro. I remarked at one point, “It would be foolish if the Cuban Revolutionary Council turns out to be to the right of the New Frontier.” We suggested that the Council must reassure the Cubans that it had no intention of destroying the social and economic gains of the last two years.

  Miró threw his hands in the air, heartily agreed, and said that we must understand the situation in Miami: whenever he delivered a speech about social justice, half the audience went away convinced that he was a communist. This gave us the opportunity to make a second point—that the Council should move to New York. This would take it away from the feverish atmosphere of Miami, dominated by Cubans of the right, and put it in a better position to present the exile case to the United Nations. Again Miró acquiesced. We welcomed his agreement, of course, and I have no doubt that he accepted our recommendations with personal relief. But I began to understand the humiliating lot of the exile who wished above all to maintain his political group and the sources of its income and who therefore must permit himself to be buffeted about by all those in a position to open a purse, whether wealthy refugees, CIA spooks or now Washington officials.

  In Miami the recruitment effort had reached its last frantic phase. By now all pretense of discretion was gone. Talk was unrestrained in the motels and bars. On March 31 Howard Handleman of U.S. News and World Report, returning from ten days in Florida, said to me that the exiles were telling everyone that they would receive United States recognition as soon as they landed in Cuba, to be followed by the overt provision of arms and supplies. A few days later Gilbert Harrison of the New Republic sent over the galleys of a pseudonymous piece called “Our Men in Miami,” asking whether there was any reason why it should not be published. It was a careful, accurate and devastating account of CIA activities among the refugees, written, I learned later, by Karl Meyer. Obviously its publication in a responsible magazine would cause trouble, but could the government properly ask an editor to suppress the truth? Defeated by the moral issue, I handed the article to the President, who instantly read it and expressed the hope that it could be stopped. Harrison accepted the suggestion and without questions—a patriotic act which left me oddly uncomfortable.

  About the same time Tad Szulc filed a story to the New York Times from Miami describing the recruitment drive and reporting that a landing on Cuba was imminent. Turner Catledge, the managing editor, called James Reston, who was in his weekend retreat in Virginia, to ask his advice. Reston counseled against publication: either the story would alert Castro, in which case the Times would be responsible for casualties on the beach, or else the expedition would be canceled, in which case the Times would be responsible for grave interference with national policy. This was another patriotic act; but in retrospect I have wondered whether, if the press had behaved irresponsibly, it would not have spared the country a disaster.

  The Council meanwhile transferred its operations to the Hotel Lexington in New York. Soon John Plank joined them there and worked with Miró and the others to reshape their pronouncements along reasonable lines. The members of the Council knew that a climax was imminent even if they did not know how, when or where. As decent men, burning with love for their country, they were eager to do anything to free their homeland. This generated an understandable readiness to subordinate the interests of the United States to those of a free Cuba; and, however understandable this was from a Cuban viewpoint, it presented dangers to the United States—above all, the danger of losing control over our own policy and being pulled by political suction into a greater degree oí intervention than we intended. The first protection against step-by-step involvement, I suggested to the President in a memorandum on April 10, would be “to convince the Cuban leaders that in no foreseeable circumstances will we send in U.S. troops . . . We must tell the Revolutionary Council that it cannot expect immediate U.S. recognition; that recognition will come only when they have a better than 50–50 chance of winning under their own steam; that this is a fight which Cubans will have in essence to win for themselves.”

  Kennedy understood this better than anybody and needed no prodding. Two days later he seized the occasion to say in a press conference: “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. . . . The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves. I intend to see that we adhere to that principle and as I understand it this administration’s attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.” That afternoon in another meeting in the Cabinet Room he again emphasized the importance of making the operation into an entirely Cuban affair. He inquired sharply whether the Revolutionary Council fully grasped that the provisional government would not receive United States recognition until it was fully established, and that in no case would there be overt military intervention. Lest there be any misunderstanding, he said, he was instructing Berle and Schlesinger to go to New York and make this clear to Miró Cardona. These points, of course, simply recorded the assumptions on which the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had drawn up their invasion plan and predicted its success; and, as they sat around the table, they did not protest now. Did any among them think that events might override the President’s stipulations? If so, they might have wished to avoid a discussion which would only tie him all the more definitely to nonintervention.

  9. ON THE BRINK

  The meeting on April 12 was preceded by a strange incident whose significance even today remains indecipherable to me. I received a request from Georgi Kornienko, the counselor of the Soviet Embassy, for an immediate appointment. Soon a sharp-eyed, moonfaced man appeared, speaking fluent but somewhat formal English. After some preliminary palaver, he said courteously that he did not fully understand the policy of the United States toward Latin America and especially toward Cuba. I referred him to the White Paper, observing that the concern of the United States was not over the fact of revolution in Cuba but over its subsequent betrayal; if the Castro regime had any hostility to fear, it was the hostility of Cubans. When he expressed wonder that the United States cared so much about the emergence of a regime in Cuba with ties to the communist world, I suggested that he might understand if he were to transfer recent events in Havana to, say, Warsaw; I doubted whether the Soviet Union would accept such developments in the case of Poland with the same detachment he now urged on me. By Soviet standards he should be more impressed by American patience than by American impetuosity.

  After additional inconclusive talk, Kornienko asked whether we excluded the possibility of further negotiation with Castro. When I inquired what he had in mind, he said that of course all this was fantasy, since he was not under instructions and could not, in any case, speak for the Cubans, but that, if he were Castro, he would wonder whether an effort at negotiation might not be appropriate; after all, Castro had not as yet issued a formal reply to the White Paper. I wondered what issues might be negotiated, citing the President’s statement in his State of the Union message about the negotiability of social and economic issues and the nonnegotiability of communist invasion of the hemisphere. Kornienko doubted whether Castro would regard internal Cuban questions as negotiable. He then asked what sort of action Washington might take as evidence of a serious desire to negotiate. I replied that a crucial issue was the monopoly of political action enjoyed by the Communist Party. Speaking in the same spirit of fantasy which he had earlier invoked, I inquired whether he thought that the Castro regime would, for example, offer the Revolutionary Council equal freedom of political action. He evidently did not think so.
After a time the discussion moved on to other areas.

  I came to know Kornienko better in time; we used to lunch together at irregular intervals until he returned to Moscow at the end of 1963. These luncheons were never very productive. Kornienko, an exceedingly intelligent and entirely immovable defender of the current Soviet brief, whatever it might be, rarely showed any inclination to talk apart from it. For this reason, I am sure that he was acting under some sort of instruction in bringing up the possibility of negotiation. But the instruction could not have been very urgent. His talk was marked by a total absence of warnings or threats; his attitude seemed one of polite curiosity. His visit must have been either exploratory or, more probably, diversionist; for he had nothing positive to suggest. In any case, I promptly informed the President and Rusk of the meeting. Neither saw much in it, Rusk confining himself to the comment that my memorandum of conversation was unclassified and should have been stamped “secret.”

  The next day I flew to New York in a blinding rainstorm for the meeting with Miró. Berle, John Plank and I lunched with him at the Century. Miró was much irritated because CIA had not cut him in on the invasion: “There must be some military plan I don’t know about. I would like to know about it for purposes of coordination. I don’t want to know these things; but I have to know to make our efforts effective.” His particular concern, however, was with the question of United States military support. He displayed resistance and incredulity at the statement that no United States troops would be used. He waved the President’s news conference disclaimer aside as an understandable piece of psychological warfare and kept pressing us to say how far the administration really meant to go. Berle said, “We’ll take you to the beaches,” but this did not satisfy him.