A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  We dispersed to engage in a morning of counterbriefing while the President left for his press conference in the State Department auditorium. Here he dismissed the inside stories: “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” (I later asked him where he had come upon this felicitous observation. He looked surprised and said vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know; it’s just an old saying.”*) He then told the newspapermen: “I’m the responsible officer of the Government.” He repeated this more fiercely in a White House statement the next Monday: “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility. . . . He has stated it on all occasions and he restates it now. . . . The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.”

  I had been scheduled to leave that Friday for a conference in Italy. When I asked the President whether I should still go, he said, “Yes, you might as well. We are only picking up the pieces here. Maybe you can explain to them over there what we have been doing. Do your best.” At the end of the afternoon I dropped by the West Wing to say goodbye. When I stuck my head through the open door from Evelyn Lincoln’s office, I saw Lyndon Johnson sitting by the desk; but, as I began to retreat, Kennedy beckoned me in. They were talking again about the CIA. The President said that he could not understand how men like Dulles and Bissell, so intelligent and so experienced, could have been so wrong, but added that nothing could be done about CIA immediately. So long as he kept Dulles there, he said, the Republicans would be disinclined to attack the administration over the Cuban failure. The Vice-President vigorously agreed.

  Kennedy looked exceedingly tired, but his mood was philosophical. He felt that he now knew certain soft spots in his administration, especially the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. He would never be overawed by professional military advice again. “We can’t win them all,” he said. “And I have been close enough to disaster to realize that these things which seem world-shaking at one moment you can barely remember the next. We got a big kick in the leg—and we deserved it. But maybe we’ll learn something from it.” A few hours later I was over the Atlantic on the way to Rome.

  Reactions abroad proved more intense than at home. In Latin America demonstrations were brief, communist-inspired and not very serious; but in Western Europe I found widespread disenchantment. In the brief time from the Inaugural to the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had come to seem the last hope of the west—a brilliant and exciting hope. He had conveyed an impression of United States foreign policy as mature, controlled, responsible and, above all, intelligent. Western Europe in return had made a heavy political and emotional investment in him. Now he suddenly seemed revealed as a mere continuator of the Eisenhower-Dulles past. The New Frontier looked like a collection not only of imperialists but of ineffectual imperialists—and, what was worst of all, of stupid, ineffectual imperialists. “Kennedy is to be regarded as politically and morally defeated,” said the Frankfurter Neue Presse. “For the time being, Moscow has not only maintained but strengthened its outpost on the threshold of America.” “In one day,” said the Corriere della Sera of Milan, “American prestige collapses lower than in eight years of Eisenhower timidity and lack of determination.”

  When I arrived in Bologna for the conference—it was sponsored by the magazine Il Mulino with its subject, ironically, “The Foreign Policy of the United States and the Responsibilities of Europe”—the atmosphere was one of gloom. The European participants talked about everything but Cuba; one felt as if there had been a frightful scandal in one’s family which friends refrained from mentioning for motives of delicacy. When I tried to explain privately to Dean Acheson, one of my colleagues in the American delegation, what had happened he listened with urbane disbelief, expressed his scorn for the CIA and quoted an aphorism from Adenauer, whom he had just seen in Germany: “In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.”

  The same sense of shock prevailed in Paris and London. “It was a terrible blow,” Lord Boothby said, “and it will take a long, long time for us to recover from it.” David Ormsby Gore told me that British intelligence estimates, which had been made available to CIA, showed that the Cuban people were still predominantly behind Castro and that there was no likelihood at this point of mass defections or insurrections. “It was a great blow,” Hugh Gaitskell said. “The right wing of the Labour Party has been basing a good deal of its argument on the claim that things had changed in America. Cuba has made great trouble for us. We shall now have to move toward the left for a bit to maintain our position within the party.”

  Yet, at the same time, it was clear that the fund of goodwill toward Kennedy, though somewhat dissipated, was far from destroyed, even on the democratic left. Men like Ugo La Malfa of the Republican party and Fabio Cavazza, editor of Il Mulino, in Italy, Pierre Mendès-France and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in Paris, as well as Gaitskell and R. H. S. Crossman in London, were sure that Washington could achieve a quick comeback. “You really have got off very lightly,” Crossman said. “If this had taken place under Eisenhower, there would have been mass meetings in Trafalgar Square, Dulles would have been burned in effigy, and the Labour Party would have damned you in the most unequivocal terms. But because enough faith still remains in Kennedy, there has been very little popular outcry, and the Labour Party resolutions have been the very minimum. But one more mistake like this, and you will really be through.”

  When I returned on May 3, Kennedy commented wryly on the discrepancy between the European and American reactions. If he had been a British prime minister, he remarked, he would have been thrown out of office; but in the United States failure had increased his charm: “if I had gone further, they would have liked me even more.” At this point, Evelyn Lincoln brought in an advance on the new Gallup poll, showing an unprecedented 82 per cent behind the administration. Kennedy tossed it aside and said, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.”

  5. AFTERMATH

  Afterward Kennedy would sometimes recur incredulously to the Bay of Pigs, wondering how a rational and responsible government could ever have become involved in so ill-starred an adventure. He soon designated General Maxwell Taylor, Dulles, Burke and Robert Kennedy as a commission of inquiry into the fiasco. The commission, perhaps because two of its members had been architects of the project, construed its mandate narrowly, concentrating on dissecting the military operation and on thinking up a new interdepartmental agency to coordinate future cold war ventures. The State Department successfully opposed this idea; but the Taylor report did focus the government’s attention on the problems of coping with guerrilla warfare and of improving the control of clandestine projects.

  What caused the disaster? Too much comment on the Bay of Pigs has fallen into the fallacy of Douglas Southall Freeman, who once wrote a long chapter analyzing the reasons for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg without mentioning the interesting fact that the Union Army was there too. For the reality was that Fidel Castro turned out to be a far more formidable foe and in command of a far better organized regime than anyone had supposed. His patrols spotted the invasion at almost the first possible moment. His planes reacted with speed and vigor. His police eliminated any chance of sabotage or rebellion behind the lines. His soldiers stayed loyal and fought hard. He himself never panicked; and, if faults were chargeable to him, they were his overestimate of the strength of the invasion and undue caution in pressing the ground attack against the beachhead. His performance was impressive.

  One reason Washington miscalculated Castro, of course, was a series of failures in our own intelligence. We regarded him as an hysteric. We dismissed his air force and forgot his T-33s. We thought that his troops might defect. We supposed that, although warned by advance air strikes, he would do nothing to neutralize the Cuban underground (either that, or we supposed that the underground, without alert or assistance from us, wo
uld find means to protect itself and eventually rise against the regime). And there were tactical errors. We chose an invasion site without a way of escape, and we did not in any case tell the Brigade of the guerrilla option. We put too much precious ammunition and communications equipment in a single ship. We did not give the Brigade enough pilots to keep its planes in continuous action. On the other hand, if one renounced the fall-back plan of flight to the hills, the invasion site was well chosen and easily defensible. The men of the Brigade fought with great bravery against superior force and inflicted far more casualties than they received.

  Subsequent controversy has settled on the cancellation of the second air strike as the turning point.* In retrospect, there clearly was excessive apprehension that Sunday evening; it is hard now to see why, the first strike already having taken place, a second would have made things so much worse at the United Nations or elsewhere. Kennedy came later to feel that the cancellation of the second strike was an error. But he did not regard it as a decisive error, for, even on the most unlikely assumption that the second strike achieved total success and wiped out Castro’s air force, it would still have left 1200 men against 200,000. The Brigade’s air power was already in decline because of the scarcity of pilots; and, once the mass arrests had taken place, there was no hope of uprisings behind the lines. The second air strike might have protracted the stand on the beachhead from three days to ten; it might have permitted the establishment of the provisional government; it might have made possible the eventual evacuation of the invading force. There is certainly nothing to suggest that it could possibly have led to the overthrow of the regime on the terms which Kennedy laid down from the start—that is, without United States armed intervention.

  If there were no intervention, then only an internal uprising could finally have overthrown Castro; and an internal uprising would have required both an intact underground and a far more pôtent political purpose than any which animated the CIA project. Kennedy had well defined this purpose in the Alliance for Progress and the White Paper, but the CIA had developed its operation in a different political atmosphere and on different political presuppositions. It had put together a non-political military expedition under conservative leadership, excluding the radical exiles and neglecting the internal resistance. The Kennedy Latin American policy called for a changed conception of the project. But there simply had not been time in ninety days to reconstruct the Eisenhower operation in terms of the Kennedy policy.

  The expedition was not only misconceived politically. It was also misconceived technically. If it was to be a covert operation for which we could plausibly disclaim responsibility, it should have been, at most, a guerrilla infiltration. Once it grew into a conventional amphibious invasion, it was clearly beyond the limits of disownability. Unless we were prepared to back it to the hilt, it should have been abandoned. When the President made it clear time after time that for the most cogent reasons we would not back it to the hilt, the planners should not have deluded themselves into thinking that events would reverse this decision or that the adventure would succeed on its own. Instead of trying to compromise between the claims of clandestinity and the claims of military impact, we should have chosen one or the other. The President had insisted that the political and military risks be brought into balance: given the nature of the operation, this was impossible, and someone should have said so.

  All of us, the President most of all, went through this sequence of thoughts again and again in the months to come. And yet, and yet: for all the utter irrationality with which restrospect endowed the project, it had a certain queer logic at the time as it emerged from the bowels of government. The men were there; they had been armed and trained; something had to be done with them; this was what they wanted to do themselves; and, if the worst happened, they could always turn into guerrillas and melt away in the hills. This sequence spun about in our minds for a long time too.

  The President reserved his innermost thoughts and, in the end, blamed only himself. But he was a human being and not totally free of resentment. He would say at times, “My God, the bunch of advisers we inherited. . . . Can you imagine being President and leaving behind someone like all those people there?” My impression is that, among these advisers, the Joint Chiefs had disappointed him most for their cursory review of the military plans. About Dulles and Bissell he said little. I think he had made up his mind at once that, when things settled down, they would have to go. He regretted this because he liked them both. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, a long-time acquaintance from Palm Beach, who was also an old friend of Dulles’s, arrived in Washington and told Kennedy self-righteously that he was not going to see Dulles this visit. Kennedy, disgusted, invited Dulles over for a drink with the Palm Beacher that afternoon. When Dulles came, still troubled and haggard, the President put his arm around him.

  His vocal irritation, so far as his staff heard it, was concentrated on those who he thought were trying to dodge responsibility after the fact. He was particularly, and perhaps unjustly, aggrieved over Chester Bowles, whose friends had rushed to the press with the story of his opposition in the days after the disaster. He was also disturbed by what seemed to him—and more drastically to Robert Kennedy—the feebleness of Bowles’s presentation at a National Security Council meeting to consider future Cuban policy. Here again Bowles was in part the victim of circumstance; for he brought with him two hastily prepared State Department papers, one tending toward intervention, the other against, and failed to conceal their inadequacy in his own remarks.

  But it was not Kennedy’s way to waste energy in repining. He continued the task of political recovery. A Gallup poll early in May showed that 65 per cent of the respondents agreed with his opposition to military intervention; only 24 per cent said that the Marines should be sent to Cuba. He made his only misstep when, in a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, he told the press that it should be prepared to censor itself in the interests of national security. This went much too far, and he did not urge the point again. Though he was genuinely concerned about the threat of subversive warfare, he was basically philosophical about the impact of the Bay of Pigs itself. He saw it as an episode, not as a cataclysm; and he was sure that the hope and confidence generated by the rest of the ninety days were entirely sufficient to absorb this error, if it were not repeated. He set quietly to work to make sure that nothing like the Bay of Pigs could happen to him again.

  The first lesson was never to rely on the experts. He now knew that he would have to broaden the range of his advice, make greater use of generalists in whom he had personal confidence and remake every great decision in his own terms—as, indeed, he had done with the other decisions of the ninety days. He understood too that the prestige of the presidential office had been lightly regarded by men whose primary loyalty was not to him or his administration. Thereafter he took care to make sure that the presidential interest would be represented in the large decisions. He turned from the people he had inherited in government to the people he had brought in himself—the people he had worked with longest, knew best and trusted most. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Ted Sorensen had taken part in the meetings in the Cabinet Room; both were at his right hand at every subsequent moment of crisis for the rest of his Presidency. He charged Dick Goodwin with responsibility for the next steps in policy toward Cuba and the exiles. He chose Maxwell Taylor as his personal adviser on military affairs until the time came when he could make him Chief of Staff.

  And he took a new view of the White House staff. While Bundy and I had not performed with distinction, he had not used us as he would use his White House people later; he had not, for example, called us in for a staff discussion of Cuba, away from the inhibiting presence of the grandees in the Cabinet Room. In the future, he made sure that he had the unfettered and confidential advice of his own people. For our part, we resolved to be less acquiescent the next time. The Bay of Pigs gave us a license for the impolite inquiry and the rude
comment. In addition, Bundy was moved over from the Executive Office Building to the West Wing of the White House and given new authority as a coordinator of security affairs within the White House. He instituted regular morning meetings for his National Security Council staff, to which he invited other members of the White House group involved in foreign affairs—Goodwin, Dungan and myself—as well as representatives from State, Defense, CIA and USIA. This valuable innovation provided the White House a point of information and control below the top and strengthened Bundy’s services to Kennedy. All this helped the President to tighten his personal hold on the sprawling mystery of government. This was in the course of happening anyway, as Kennedy worked to establish control over his administration; it was in line with his theory of the Presidency; but the Bay of Pigs made it happen quickly.

  The impact of the failure shook up the national security machinery. It taught every adviser something about the President, the other advisers, himself and his own department. It was a horribly expensive lesson; but it was well learned. In later months the President’s father would tell him that, in its perverse way, the Bay of Pigs was not a misfortune but a benefit. I doubt whether the President ever fully believed this; the thought of the men of the Brigade suffering in Cuban prisons prevented easy consolation. But no one can doubt that failure in Cuba in 1961 contributed to success in Cuba in 1962.

  XII

  New Departures