A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  He continued with quiet dignity: “We were told that the landings would be followed up by all necessary support. We were even told that ten to fifteen thousand men would be available. [This was an evident reference to Miró’s misunderstanding of Berle on April 13.] But nothing was done to bring our people into the operation. Two weeks ago agents unknown to us tried to make contact with our groups inside Cuba. This confused the whole underground movement. More than three weeks ago, we presented a plan for sabotage, programmed for the whole island, cutting power lines in four provinces, blowing up department stores, a cement factory, a paper factory, an oil refinery. This was accompanied by a request for explosive material. For over a month we have had a tunnel under the Havana electric power installation. But no material was ever delivered.

  “We have been brought here,” Ray went on, “without any knowledge of the operations. When we arrived, we thought we might have the opportunity to discuss strategy. We have found no one who will discuss it with us. We are not allowed to communicate with anybody. We have the feeling of being in a vacuum; nothing we can do is being coordinated with anything else.” He added that his own men had not even been permitted to join the Brigade. “It would have been possible to coordinate landings with internal uprisings, and this could have been done without mentioning dates. But it was not done. . . . The Council has no power. Action is taken in our name without our control, without our clearance and even without our knowledge. We are unable to talk to the men on the beaches, to our people in the underground or to our friends throughout Latin America. Our conclusion is that we should abandon the pretense of command, go to Cuba and fight as soldiers. Let those who really run things begin to assume the responsibility.” He ended by saying that, in the faith that President Kennedy would not desert them, they would stay with him and his decisions to the end. The knowledge gained in this undertaking may help in future battles. The interior strategy might still be resumed. But defeat would set things back dangerously.

  Then came Carlos Hevia, a graduate of Annapolis, once provisional president of Cuba, who had run Cuban price control during the Second World War and was a friend of Kenneth Galbraith’s. “This combination of accountability without authority,” he said, “makes us feel that, if these boys are to be wiped out on the beachhead, our place is to die there with them. But we are not defeatists. . . . If we have massive air attacks, we can still perhaps convert defeat into victory.”

  Varona read a list of requests: immediate transportation to the beachhead; immediate air strikes; immediate reinforcements. “Someone placed us in this position—that person will have to get us out of it.” He denounced the surveillance under which they were kept. “We don’t know whether we are your allies or your prisoners.” At noon today, he said, he was planning to leave the house despite the armed guards, go to Miami and hold a press conference. “Let them shoot me down if they dare.” He asked to be sent forthwith on a Catalina to the beachhead. Ray spoke up and said that he felt he should be dropped into Havana. The others after some talk seemed ready to settle for the command post in Nicaragua.

  It was past ten o’clock, and Berle and I retired for consultation. We were much moved by the power and bitterness of the protests. Our first thought was to get them all to Nicaragua. But, when we returned to the hangar and called Washington, we were informed that the operation was substantially over. The only signal from the beach was a wail of SOS’s. When we asked about evacuation, we were told that the time had passed even for that.

  Our hearts sank as we walked out for a moment into the dazzling sun. How could we notify the Cubans that there was no hope, that their sons were abandoned for captivity or death—and at the same time dissuade them from public denunciation of the CIA and the United States government? I said, “Can’t we do something to bring the President into it?” Adolf said, “We must take them to Washington and have the President see them.” It was clear that only Kennedy could save this situation.

  I immediately called the White House, and Evelyn Lincoln put me through to the President’s office. Dean Rusk, who answered the phone, agreed that the Council should be brought to Washington, though he seemed uncertain whether they should see the President. He gave the impression that he thought it would be enough if they saw him, or perhaps he wished to protect the President from the meeting.

  Returning to the house, we told the Council that we were taking them to Washington. When they inquired about the news from the beaches, we had to say that it was not good. They silently changed into civilian clothes. Before we finally took off for Washington, I called the President to explain why we hoped he would see them himself. He said immediately that he wanted us to bring them to the White House as soon as we arrived.

  The trip north was funereal. People murmured in low voices or walked fitfully to and fro. Some slept. I had a long talk with Manuel Ray, who seemed more reasonable and realistic than the others. Then I slept too. Colonel Godfrey McHugh, the President’s air aide, who met us at the airport, took us immediately to the White House, where we came in by the East Wing to avoid the press. The Council waited in the Cabinet Room, while Berle and I went in to see the President. Kennedy, exceptionally drawn and tired, was, as usual, self-possessed. We told him about the situation at Opa-Locka: the Council under virtual house arrest, the intensity of their resentment, the probability of public denunciations. He expressed shock at the Council’s detention; CIA, he said, had told him nothing of this.

  In a few moments the Cubans entered. They sat down on the two couches facing each other in front of the fireplace, with the President in his rocking chair. Commander Tazewell Shepard, the naval aide, gave a report, precise and bleak, on the beachhead. Then Kennedy, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, declared his sorrow over the events of the last forty-eight hours. He explained why he had decided against intervention and why he had supposed that the operation might succeed on its own. Here he paused to read the message from the Marine colonel describing the training and condition of the Brigade. The struggle against communism, he said, had many fronts; leadership in that struggle imposed many responsibilities. The United States had to consider the balance of affairs all around the world. But, however tragic this episode, no one could doubt our commitment to the eventual freedom of Cuba. He added that he had himself fought in a war, that he had seen brave men die, that he had lost a brother, and that he shared their grief and their despair.

  Miró and other members of the Council said a few words. After hearing Kennedy, they were far more subdued than in the morning. Discussion continued till six o’clock, when the President had a conference with congressional leaders. As the Cubans prepared to leave, he said, “I want you all to understand that, as soon as you leave the White House, you are all free men—free to go wherever you want, free to say anything you want, free to talk to anyone you want.” I had never seen the President more impressive. In spite of themselves, his visitors were deeply moved. Then he asked me to take them back to the family quarters and await him there. There on the second floor of the Mansion, we had tea and sandwiches. After a time Kennedy rejoined us. The talk was about a rescue program for the survivors. United States destroyers, with air cover and orders to fire if fired upon, were already searching the waters off the coast; Kennedy was prepared to run more risks to take the men off the beaches than to put them there.

  Later that night Lem Jones issued a final bulletin in the name of the Council. “The recent landings in Cuba,” the release said, “have been constantly though inaccurately described as an invasion. It was, in fact, a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months. . . . The major portion of our landing party [has reached] the Escambray mountains.”

  The routine of Washington life is implacable. The prime minister of Greece was visiting the capital that week, and the Kennedys had to go to a dinner at the Greek Embassy. Once again, the President concealed anguish under a mask of courtesy and composure. So many regrets must have flowed through his min
d during these bitter hours—the advice so authoritatively rendered and so respectfully accepted, the unexamined assumptions and the misconceived plans, the blow to the bright hopes of the new administration, the problems at home and abroad; but most of all, I think, it was the vision of the men on the beaches, who had gone off with such splendid expectations, who had fought so bravely and who now would be shot down like dogs or carted off to Castro’s prisons. This vision haunted him that week and many weeks and months to come.

  4. THE LAST ACT

  Thursday, April 20, was the ninetieth day of the Kennedy administration. The gay expectations of the Hundred Days were irrevocably over, the hour of euphoria past. Through the country and the world the debacle was producing astonishment and disillusion.

  At home the shock of defeat somewhat muted the voices of criticism. Some on the right, though fewer than one might have expected, were talking about sending in the Marines. But some on the left, more than one might have thought, now saw full vindication of their pre-election doubts about Kennedy. A telegram from Cambridge put the matter to me with sarcastic brevity: NIXON OR KENNEDY: DOES IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE? It was signed: GRADUATE STUDENTS. A number of these impassioned liberals convinced themselves that the cult of toughness, the determination to win at any cost or something else they supposed to characterize Kennedy, would now lead him to throw the book at Castro—though why he should do on Thursday what he had declined to do on Tuesday was not clear. The Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes led seventy academicians in an open letter to Kennedy, imprudently endorsing the thesis that the United States had driven Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union, calling for a restoration of diplomatic and economic relations with Castro and demanding that the government “reverse the present drift towards American military intervention in Cuba.” One of the signers, a sociologist named Barrington Moore, Jr., in a separate memorandum pronounced the New Frontier a sham and a fraud and predicted that from now on it would be “a militarist and reactionary government that covers its fundamental policies with liberal rhetoric.”

  Protest meetings erupted on a dozen campuses. A Fair Play for Cuba rally at Union Square in New York on April 21 drew three thousand people. Five literary magazines and Norman Mailer staged a demonstration; one of the marchers, a tall poetess with black hair down to her waist, carried a sign:

  JACQUELINE, VOUS AVEZ

  PERDU VOS ARTISTES

  C. Wright Mills wired a Fair Play for Cuba rally in San Francisco on April 22: KENNEDY AND COMPANY HAVE RETURNED US TO BARBARISM. SCHLESINGER AND COMPANY HAVE DISGRACED US INTELLECTUALLY AND MORALLY. I FEEL A DESPERATE SHAME FOR MY COUNTRY. SORRY I CANNOT BE WITH YOU. WERE I PHYSICALLY ABLE TO DO SO, I WOULD AT THIS MOMENT BE FIGHTING ALONGSIDE FIDEL CASTRO.* Pickets demonstrated in front of the White House.

  Most Americans of course rallied to their President in the moment of national crisis. Still even many of these had their first harsh doubts about the new administration. The nation was in a state of shock, and no one understood more acutely than Kennedy himself the need to restore perspective. Walt Rostow saw him that day in a pensive moment in his office. Britain had been through something like this, the President said, at the time of Suez—the fiasco had interrupted its political life and distorted its policy; France had been through a similar experience with Algeria. But Britain and France were only 6 or 7 per cent of the free world. The United States was 70 per cent of the free world, and we could not afford a Suez sickness, an Algeria sickness. If we let Cuba obsess our policy and poison our politics, it would damage everybody.

  His first problem on Thursday was to contain the political consequences of the debacle. He moved now with sure instinct and remarkable dexterity, showing, as he had shown nearly twenty years earlier in the Solomons, the strength to accept disaster, omit recrimination and pitch in to bring the situation back. The war generation, having survived catastrophe, knew that it was not finality. When Rostow came home early one morning that week in the mingled exhilaration and exhaustion of crisis, his wife said to him, “You know what you all are? You are the junior officers of the Second World War come to responsibility.”

  Routine remained implacable: the President was scheduled to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Statler Hilton that day. Ted Sorensen had already prepared a draft on another subject. But on April 20 only one subject was possible. After consultation with the President, Sorensen stayed up most of Wednesday night composing a speech on Cuba. Thursday morning we all met for breakfast in the small dining room on the second floor of the White House—the President, Sorensen, Bundy, Bohlen and myself—to consider the new draft.

  The President’s concern was to head off any outcry within the United States for violent retaliation against Castro, to reassure the democratic world about the prudence of Washington and at the same time to dissuade the communists from regarding restraint as evidence of weakness. He had not wavered at any point in his determination not to commit American troops; if the United States moved against Cuba, Khrushchev might seize this as a pretext for moving against West Berlin. Even his deep concern over the men on the beaches led him to nothing further than a rescue mission. The speech to the editors offered the opportunity to explain the policy of restraint and to divert the demand for action against Castro into a general strengthening of American purpose.

  Unilateral intervention, he told the editors, would have violated our traditions and international obligations. “But let the record show,” he added, “that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter-American doctrine of non-interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of non-action—if the nations of this Hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside Communist penetration—then I want it clearly understood that this Government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our Nation!”

  Having uttered this obscure but emphatic warning, he went on to define the lesson of the episode. Communism, he said, was now less interested in arms as the means of direct aggression than “as the shield behind which subversion, infiltration, and a host of other tactics steadily advance, picking off vulnerable areas one by one in situations which do not permit our own armed intervention.” This “new and deeper struggle,” Kennedy said, was taking place every day, without fanfare, in villages and markets and classrooms all over the globe. It called for new concepts, new tools, a new sense of urgency. “Too long we have fixed our eyes on traditional military needs, on armies prepared to cross borders, on missiles poised for flight. Now it should be clear that this is no longer enough—that our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country, without the firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border.”

  He concluded: “We intend to reexamine and reorient our forces of all kinds—our tactics and our institutions here in this community.” I was never quite clear what this last phrase meant, unless it referred to the CIA and the Joint Chiefs; but once again obscurity probably helped the impact of the speech. Certainly the occasion reestablished him in a fighting stance without committing him to reckless action.

  The next step was to secure the administration against partisan attack. The Republicans, of course, were a little inhibited by their own role in conceiving the operation; but Kennedy took no chances. Later that day he called in Richard Nixon (whose advice on Cuba was to “find a proper legal cover and . . . go in”*), and by the weekend he had talked to Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. Harry S. Truman, being a Democrat, required only the attention of the Vice-President.

  As part of the strategy of protection, he moved to stop the gathering speculation over responsibility for the project. When in one discussion the Vice-President ventured a general criticism of CIA, Kennedy turned to him and said, “Lyndon, you’ve got to remember we’re all in this and that, when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself, and I think we should have no sort of passing of the buck or backbiting, h
owever justified.” By Friday, however, the morning papers were filled with what purported to be ‘inside’ stories about the Cuba decision. An impulse for self-preservation was evidently tempting some of the participants in those meetings in the Cabinet Room to put out versions of the episode ascribing the debacle to everyone but themselves. Kennedy, having called a ten o’clock press conference, summoned Rusk, Salinger, Bundy, Sorensen, Goodwin and myself for breakfast in the Mansion.

  The President remarked acidly that the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was notably neglected in several stories—an omission which, by Washington exegesis, pointed to the Pentagon as the source. The best way to turn off the speculation, he said, was to tell the truth: that all the senior officials involved had backed the operation but that the final responsibility was his own. Then he added, with unusual emphasis, “There is only one person in the clear—that’s Bill Fulbright. And he probably would have been converted if he had attended more of the meetings. If he had received the same treatment we received—discontent in Cuba, morale of the free Cubans, rainy season, Russian MIGs and destroyers, impregnable beachhead, easy escape into the Escambray, what else to do with these people—it might have moved him down the road too.” He punctuated the enumeration of the items with short stabs of his hand. Bundy reminded him that I had opposed the expedition. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Arthur wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration.” Then, with a characteristic flash of high sardonic humor: “Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive. . . . And I have a title for his book—Kennedy: The Only Years.”