“I’m not signed on to this,” Kennedy replied to Rusk on the telephone, as if the decision lay elsewhere. This was hardly the response of a resolute leader, confident of his decisions. He was indeed the only one “signed on to this,” the only one capable of measuring the complex matrix of political and military decisions and deciding what should be done.
Kennedy told the secretary of State that the strikes should be canceled unless there were “overriding considerations.” The president later suggested to brigade members and others that he had pulled back because of international considerations, fearing that the Soviets might threaten him somewhere else. That was a rarefied reason, but from what Kennedy told Feldman and others later, he felt Stevenson had bludgeoned him into the wrong decision with his nagging self-righteousness. Kennedy realized the immense danger his young administration would be in if Stevenson resigned dramatically and condemned him. Kennedy never publicized that reason, for it hardly would have made sense to the Cuban patriots waiting to go ashore at the Bay of Pigs to face danger of another magnitude.
When Rusk told Bissell and Charles P. Cabell, Dulles’s deputy, about the president’s decision, they instantly tallied up what they considered the devastating military cost. The two CIA leaders were so vociferous in their protests that Rusk agreed that the planes could fly later that day at the beachhead, but not attack Cuban airfields.
At 4:00 A.M., Rusk called the president yet again and put Cabell on the phone. For hours, the CIA deputy chief had listened to the enraged, beseeching screeds of CIA officers who believed that the president’s actions were dooming brave men to death soon after dawn, when Castro’s planes would fly unchallenged across the Bay of Pigs. Cabell told Kennedy that at this hour only American planes could arrive in time to protect the brigade. Kennedy responded by ordering the American carrier Essex moved even farther away from what in a few hours would be the battle scene.
From the moment the brigade landed on the beaches on Monday, April 17, 1961, the news that Kennedy heard in Washington was not good. Just as the president had been forewarned, the skies were largely clear to Castro’s planes. Castro ordered two Sea Furies and a B-26 into the air at dawn and admonished the pilots to attack either enemy planes or the motley armada still at anchor offshore. During that first day, Castro’s planes sank two ships, one smaller craft, and damaged three other vessels. They also downed three B-26s and damaged two other planes, while a third crashed in the Nicaraguan mountains. Castro’s air force lost two planes, a B-26 and a Sea Fury.
Kennedy had been told that Castro’s troops would not be able to reach the seacoast for twenty-four hours or more, but the day was not yet over when soldiers of Cuba’s First and Third Battalions launched their first attack. The brigade fought with courage and tenacity, as did Castro’s forces, and the insurgents largely held the line. The brigade had only limited ammunition, however, and the munitions ship lay far out to sea, beyond range of Castro’s planes.
All during the day, the Kennedy men sat around trying to monitor the events, reaching desperately for bulletins and scraps of information. Kennedy knew all about the dark uncertainties of war; in the Blackett Strait a man could not tell foe from friend, island from vessel. But even here in the White House, the fog of war had seeped under the door of the Oval Office. Men who thought themselves powerful were becoming little more than impotent bystanders. The Cabinet Room had been turned into a command post, with large highlighted maps and magnetic ships on a representation of the Bay of Pigs, scores of reports, data, radio messages, and intercepts. Men scurried in and out, yet there was little they knew and little they could do.
For Kennedy, the call of blood was the deepest call of all. That was his father’s ultimate lesson. Beyond the boundaries of the family lay deception, ill will, and danger. In this moment when the president had reason to be full of a sense of massive mistrust, betrayal even, he called for the one man to whom he could tell everything and know that the bounds of secrecy would never be broken.
“I don’t think it’s going as well as it should,” the president told Bobby on the phone. Kennedy’s brother was down in Williamsburg, Virginia, giving a speech, and he flew back to Washington immediately.
Bobby had an endless fascination with the covert. Even before the inauguration, he had been involved with clandestine aspects of the Cuban situation, meeting with an attorney who told him that Raul Castro might be turning against his brother’s revolution. He had gone to the first Special Group meeting on Cuba and heard Allen Dulles make his presentation, but for the most part he had stayed away from conferences dealing with the invasion. He may have been a hawk but he flew so high above that none saw his talons.
Bobby was there beside his brother at just before noon the day after the invasion when the president met with his top advisers. The tense, impatient men gathered there were making the most crucial decisions of this young administration. As Kennedy walked into the meeting, he had just received a memo from Bundy outlining the insurgents’ plight, saying that if the brigade was to have any chance at all, Castro’s air force had to be destroyed, if necessary by unmarked American planes. Kennedy’s top national security adviser concluded, “The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” There were no mountains, only endless swamps, and it was symptomatic of the whole operation that Bundy did not even know that simple but crucial fact.
Men were dying on the sands of Cuba, continuing to thrust themselves into the bullets’ path believing that they might still win. Here in these councils of power, however, the scent of recrimination was already in the air, and men tried to sit as far away as they could from blame. Bobby cautioned all those in the room that they were to say nothing to suggest that they were not completely behind the president, nothing that indicated they questioned his judgment.
“Can anti-Castro forces go into the bush as guerrillas?” the president asked the Joint Chiefs. Kennedy and the officers had known the answer weeks before, but Admiral Burke agreed to seek an answer.
At this meeting Burke felt that “nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening and we the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] … have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths. They are in a real bad hole because they had the hell cut out of them. They were reporting, devising, and talking and I kept quiet because I didn’t know the score.”
Burke recalled that he had left his contributions primarily to the judicious sprinkling of such words as “balls” to show his manly displeasure. But he was the crucial service officer and had to speak. Harlan Cleveland, undersecretary of State for International Organizations, remembered the admiral “pressing for every yard of ground he could get in the direction of more American participation by American forces in at least limiting the damage.”
As Kennedy turned back all Burke’s entreaties, he picked up one of the little destroyers and moved it across the map. Cleveland thought that he observed Burke’s face stiffen as the president touched what was by all rites and rituals only the admiral’s to touch. By his passivity, the president had allowed Bissell to push the Joint Chiefs of Staff away from hands-on input into what was a military operation about which they knew infinitely more than the CIA. There were navy ships on the map, but it was not the military’s plan that was falling apart on the sands of the Bay of Pigs.
After the meeting, the attorney general called the admiral. “The president is going to rely upon you to advise him on this situation,” Burke recalled Bobby saying, standing now in the White House for the first time as his brother’s right arm and enforcer.
“It is late!” Burke exclaimed. “He needs advice.”
“The rest of the people in the room weren’t helpful,” Bobby said, dismissing all the other counsels of war, as Burke remembered.
&nbs
p; In trying to learn what was going on, the White House was hampering operations in the Caribbean. In times of combat the command aircraft carrier, the Essex, had to take down the vertical antennae that were needed to get distant radio communications. If they were left up, planes could not be safely launched, since the electromagnetic radiation from the antennae might set off their rockets. So much high-level radio communication was coming in, not only the high command prompted by the White House but the White House itself, and possibly Bobby in particular, that the air boss was having trouble finding time to launch planes. “There’s no doubt in my mind but that communication was coming from the White House,” asserted retired Captain William C. Chapman, the Essex air boss. “I don’t know firsthand, but everything I heard was that Bobby was calling too.”
While the fighting continued, the White House was concerned in part with tidying up the bureaucratic debris and pushing the evidence into history’s closets. Burke cabled Commander in Chief (Atlantic) Admiral Robert Dennison, asking whether the brigade could disappear into the bush: “Authorities [the president] would like to be sure CEF [the brigade] could become guerrillas whenever they desire so that point could be emphasized in our publicity, i.e., that revolutionaries crossed the beach and are now operating as guerrillas.”
The brigade would have to bring out their wounded, but these broken, bloodied men hardly represented the photographic image of victory. Burke cabled: “Wounded should be kept in Essex until suitable hospital arrangements could be made on beach in some place inaccessible to news hawks.”
About six hours later, Dennison replied: “Evacuation of wounded is completely out of the question without overt involvement of U.S. forces. Furthermore, I know of no haven in some place ‘inaccessible to news hawks.’”
The president attended the annual congressional reception that evening resplendent in white tie and tails. He waltzed with his wife and danced the social minuet. Just before midnight, he left and arrived to meet with the same tired men he had seen so many times these past two days.
The situation was desperate. Bissell and Burke implored the president to take some action. He could send two jets from the Essex to down Castro’s planes, or at least have them fly over the beachhead as a sign of support, or if not that, bring in a destroyer to shell the tanks that were killing the men of the brigade.
“Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” Kennedy said, his voice charged with anger.
The president went to his office and sat there downcast, as close to crying as O’Donnell had ever seen him. As for Bobby, he was on a manic rant, pacing back and forth, consumed with emotion. “We’ve got to do something,” he told his brother late at night. “They can’t do this to you!”
There precisely in those words lay the difference between the two men. For Bobby, politics always had a human face, and he saw Castro as attacking not the brigade but his brother, as surely as if he were stomping on Kennedy. Kennedy, as desperate and hopeless as he may have felt, was never a man to indulge in open self-pity and perceived the potentially devastating impact on his whole presidency.
This was precisely the moment Kennedy had feared most when he had signed on to the CIA plans. He did not see himself as a cowardly, cynical politician who would let men die in the sands, but he had preoccupations beyond those of the men here this evening. The president was playing with a chessboard as big as the world, not just with one or two pieces. He knew that the Soviets could make their countermove anywhere. “We are sincerely interested in a relaxation of international tension, but if others proceed toward sharpening, we will answer them in full measure,” Khrushchev had just written Kennedy.
At around four in the morning the president got up from his desk and walked out into the darkness of the south grounds and paced by himself there for forty-five minutes or more. Kennedy believed that democracy’s most crucial creations were its leaders. A great man made history and was not merely its temporary steward.
Kennedy could have heeded the call of the right wing and backed the brigade to the hilt, with shiploads of marines standing by and the might of America ready to crush Castro, running the risk of a world war and brushfire conflicts elsewhere. He could have listened to those on the left who would have sent an olive branch to Castro instead of fifteen hundred fighting men and ended the covert operations in Cuba. Instead, on national security issues he was a moderate conservative worried about communism in Cuba but worried about nuclear conflagration too. He had treated the invasion plan as if it were a piece of legislation, placating the CIA here, moving toward the State Department there, seeking an accommodation that would please everyone. He had attempted to pare the operation down, and even as it was, if much of the brigade had been able to escape into the Cuban wilderness, he would not have had his whole administration held hostage to this issue.
No matter how one turned the issue over, looking for light, all one found was darkness. He felt he had to do something or he would suffer the Republicans’ accusations of dishonor and worse. That was perhaps a tinsel treasure to weigh against the lives of these men, but Kennedy was convinced that it was better “to put the guerrillas on the beach in Cuba and let them fight for Cuba than bring them back to the United States and have them state that the United States would not support their activities. The end result might have been much worse had we done this than it actually was.” If these patriots died in Cuba fighting for their country, he would have considered them worthy martyrs as long as they did not die too loudly or shout too long, in their death throes, for American help.
Kennedy could have held to the CIA’s original plan and let the brigade stake its flag on Trinidad, or he could have decided to at least go ahead with all the planes. Then the CIA and the Joint Chiefs would have admonished him to send in American soldiers and aid, and he might well have found himself leading his country into a war he did not want. He knew that was the game plan from the day he walked into the Oval Office. He seemed now like a craven compromiser, but he was dancing along this line with fire on either side, trying to finesse a matter that in the end could not be finessed.
If the plan had worked out as it was supposed to, Castro would have been assassinated and the Communists overturned. Kennedy would have considered that the best of all outcomes, but it is doubtful that Cuba would have blossomed into a Caribbean democracy. More likely, the island would have been a sullen, subdued land, overseen by bickering politicians, all clients of the United States. And the triumphant CIA would have felt that it had proved the broad efficacy of covert activity and assassination, not only in Cuba but also across the world.
Brigade 2506 had no air cover, no ammunition resupply, and no promise of aid to its beleaguered forces. By the third day, it was not a question of whether they would win, but how long they could possibly hold out. That morning Pepe San Roman, the brigade commander, told the Americans that many of his men were standing in the water on the beach “being massacred” by Cuban fire and by three enemy Sea Furies strafing the brigade positions. He looked up and saw high in the sky four American navy jets, and he called the Essex and asked that those planes descend and fight. He was told that the navy command was doing everything possible to get permission. “God damn it,” he swore. “God damn you. God damn you. Do not wait for permission.”
In the annals of American military history—and the brigade’s story surely belongs there—there are few more pathetic messages than this: “Am destroying all equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to woods. I can not wait for you.”
As those soldiers who had not yet surrendered were being tracked down in the endless swamps, Kennedy ordered air cover to try to save at least a few of them. In the Cabinet Room, Bobby was merciless with those officials sitting in dismay and shock around the massive table. He acted as if he and his brothers had been mere bystanders to this debacle. He was not ready to assume any burden of blame for the president, but sought to parcel out the chunks of responsibility among a
ll the other major players. He seemed incapable of understanding where most of the responsibility lay. He called on them “to act or be judged paper tigers in Moscow” and not simply to “sit and take it.”
It was not Khrushchev who had sent these men in without air cover and it was not Khrushchev who had fought them on the beach, but from the fury of Bobby’s rhetoric it might have been. It was almost as if he wanted these middle-aged officials to jump out of their seats, take up arms, and run into the street in a heroic counterattack.
The president had no such fire in his voice. As Kennedy sat in a rocking chair in the Oval Office, he looked at the Washington News trumpeting the disaster and let the paper fall to the floor beside him. As the Cuban exile leaders entered the room, he did not display his despair. Kennedy kept doodling on a pad of paper, writing the phrase “Soviet Cuban” over and over again, and enclosing the two words in boxes.
These exile leaders were proud men who had been kept under de facto house arrest in Miami so that they would not betray the secrets of the invasion. The Cubans sat on two long couches beside the president in his rocking chair. The group included Varona, who had failed in his attempt to kill Castro. Kennedy told the men that he too had been in war. He had lost a brother, and he knew what they felt. It was not easy saying what Kennedy had to say, but he said it, and by all accounts the Cuban leaders listened and believed.
When these exile leaders had come together, they pretended that they were in the Cuban Revolutionary Council on their own and were not Washington’s creatures. And now, as they attempted to justify their ersatz coalition, they exited Washington with another lie. The CRC released a statement that the events at the Bay of Pigs did not amount to an invasion but “a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months … [which] allowed the major portion of our landing party to reach the Escambray mountains.”
The Kennedy Men Page 71