Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  At the last moment, Robert Kennedy was warned not to proceed with the operation by Constantine “Gus” Kangles, a Chicago-based attorney in the unique position of being a Democratic pol friendly with the brothers Kennedy, as well as being a longtime friend of the brothers Castro. He thus became an invaluable source of Cuban intelligence for the Kennedys. “I told Bobby [that] Castro knew everything—he was waiting for them. Not only did Castro know, but he enjoyed huge popularity. As far as an uprising, I told Bobby, ‘It ain’t gonna happen.’ But Bobby didn’t care. He wanted him [Castro] out.”70

  Unknown to Kangles, Bobby may have had a secret basis for confidence in green-lighting the operation. In a recent interview, Kennedy’s great friend Senator George Smathers recalled walking with the President on the White House South Lawn just prior to the invasion. At one point, Kennedy disclosed to Smathers what was about to happen at the Bay of Pigs. According to Smathers, Kennedy told him, “There is a plot to murder Castro. Castro is to be dead at the time the thousand Cuban exiles trained by the CIA hit the beaches.”71

  Kennedy admitted as much to CIA officer Hans Tofte. One month before the invasion, Tofte was briefing the President on guerrilla activity in Colombia. Tofte was also aware of the upcoming invasion, and boldly suggested to the President that Castro should be killed as a prequel, to give the operation any chance of success. Kennedy responded, “That is already in hand. You don’t have to concern yourself about that.”72

  What happened next, regardless of who should shoulder the blame, would set off a chain of sinister events that would culminate in Dallas in 1963 and guarantee that any investigation of the death of President John F. Kennedy would be woefully, and intentionally, incomplete.

  The Bay of Pigs Invasion

  The attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961 quickly won a high place among America’s worst debacles in foreign affairs. The troops who made the landing, 100 miles southeast of Havana, were Cuban exiles formed into Brigade 2506. Quickly apparent was the conclusion that the White House and CIA would not repeat their 1953 success in replacing the elected government of Iran with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, and in overthrowing Guatemala’s leftist government of Jacabo Arbenz the following year.

  Within hours of the botched landing through hull-gutting coral (of which intelligence had failed to warn), the attempts to hide America’s massive participation, not to say conception and direction at every stage, were coming apart. Within days, they appeared farcical to most of the world. The predictions of success—two chances out of three, as Bobby Kennedy was assured when first briefed about the venture—now seemed equally absurd. Bobby had also been promised that another kind of success would be achieved even if Castro were not immediately overthrown. The invaders, operating as guerrillas from the mountains, would harass Castro, much as Castro had harassed and eventually disposed of his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista. Then again, these predictions were based on the Trinidad landing scenario.

  When the invasion took an instant turn towards disaster, and the Brigade members turned into cannon fodder, the planners approached the president for more sea and air reinforcement. Over the next few days, the CIA repeatedly begged Kennedy for it. Instead, he cut the first wave of air attacks by 80 percent. “We found out about it only hours before the invasion,” Hawkins recently recalled. The reduction was the exact opposite of what was promised when Esterline and Hawkins had their showdown with Bissell weeks earlier. (When his White House launched a coup against Guatemala, Eisenhower, in sharp contrast to Kennedy, had been the driving force behind providing air support.)

  The CIA’s Jake Esterline was “ashen-faced” as he broke the news to Hawkins. Hawkins said, “Goddamnit, this is criminal negligence!”73 Esterline added, “This is the goddamnest thing I have ever heard of.” Years later, in separate interviews, key planners assessed the disaster. Hawkins remembered these “devastating orders” coming from the White House: “Military failure was now virtually assured.”74 When the second wave of air strikes was canceled, the exiles, who had been promised air support, were left to fend for themselves in the cold, dark swamp. Kennedy’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, would later comment, “Pulling the rug like that was unbelievable. . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”75

  “I called Bissell and Rusk right away,” remembers Hawkins. “Kennedy had conveniently left town, of course. Rusk called Kennedy, and without explaining why we needed the air cover, he advised that Kennedy’s plan should proceed without changes. Kennedy agreed. Bissell didn’t take the phone.”76

  In the invasion, Captain Eduardo Ferrer led the exile air force—he had trained with them in Guatemala. He pulls no punches about where the blame should be placed: “The failure was Kennedy’s fault,” he says. “Kennedy was immature, a little bit chicken. Today, ninety percent of the Cubans are Republicans because of Kennedy, that motherfucker.”77

  “Bissell and Kennedy thought they had some kind of magic bullet for the Bay of Pigs—assassination,” says Jake Esterline. “Of course, they weren’t going to support air strikes. The Kennedys were so egotistical to think they could pull this off. They thought one of these assassination things was going to work.”78 When none of them did, and air support was canceled, disaster was guaranteed.

  “We were sending those Cubans to their deaths,” concludes Hawkins:

  “Everybody knew that’s what they were doing. Kennedy knew that’s what he was doing. Don’t think he didn’t. Fifteen hundred men’s lives were not as important as his political purposes. It was one of the most disgraceful things I ever had to be a part of. I’ve regretted it all my life.”

  In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the operation, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke begged the President for permission to use a U.S. aircraft carrier to annihilate Castro’s air force, and bring amphibious landing craft to evacuate the troops from the swamp. The president refused.79 Kennedy later attempted a different spin, telling aide Dave Powers, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to [the aircraft carrier] The Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”80

  Of course, saving face was precisely what the president was attempting to do. When the first American ashore, Grayston Lynch, found out about the cancelled air strikes, he said it was like “finding out that Superman is a fairy.”81

  Rushing armor and infantry to the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s defenders caught the invaders in the swamp. Ninety of the 1,300-odd men of Brigade 2506 were killed. Most of the others were captured, to Castro’s intensely self-satisfied glee, and the invaders were utterly crushed. The last message the U.S. received from Brigade Commander José “Pepe” San Román read, dismissively, “How can you people do this to us?” Almost two years later, JFK confided to San Román that the real reason he withdrew the air support was that after the initial (April 15) air strike, he was secretly warned by the Soviets that they would attack West Berlin if he continued. Kennedy thus had to choose, in his own mind, between the lives of the 1,300 invaders and a possible nuclear conflagration.82 (There is no independent corroboration that the Soviets actually issued this threat.)

  Rubbing salt into the Kennedys’ wounds, the Cuban premier took to the microphone ridiculing capitalism in general and the United States in particular, and his listeners cheered in delight. He strutted about the battlefield, showing foreign correspondents, with immense satisfaction, how his forces had humiliated the invaders and their Yankee sponsors.83 Soon he was delivering arm-waving, chest-thumping speeches about why the imperialists had lost: they counted on geography and weapons, whereas socialists counted on hearts and minds. Castro had a huge sign erected at the invasion site that read: “Welcome to the Site of the First Defeat of Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.”

  Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of the Bay of Pigs venture was the political judgment on which the military strategy
had been based—the analytical underpinning of the entire operation. Even before the landing, skeptics wondered how a single brigade of 1,300 exiles—never mind how well-trained and led they were—could defeat a home army of 200,000 men, operating on their own soil, with proportionate knowledge of the terrain and a good supply of war materials. The unabashed answer was that the Cuban people would rise to join the exiles in overthrowing Castro, whose rule they had come to detest. “How did I ever let it happen?” Kennedy asked later. “I know better than to listen to experts. They always have their own agenda. All my life I’ve known it, and yet I still barreled ahead.”84

  For Kennedy, the fiasco assumed consuming proportions. Dozens of commentators debated the degree of his responsibility. Was it diminished because he had inherited the invasion plan from President Eisenhower, whose military competence Kennedy naturally refrained from questioning? That was the administration’s claim, stated most impatiently by Bobby Kennedy: “It was Eisenhower’s plan. Eisenhower’s people all said it would succeed.”85 Or, to the contrary, did the president’s longstanding drive to demonstrate how tough he could be—an old inclination of the Kennedy family—make him even more guilty? The question is, of course, unanswerable, but the attitudes of the Kennedy family as manifested in Jack and Bobby are relevant, for they would bear on the full course of the tragedy that lay ahead.

  Furthermore, while President Eisenhower had indeed approved the training of the Cuban exiles for a possible invasion, he never did more than that. He never ordered the invasion that actually took place—and if he had, it is fair to assume that, with his usual caution and military expertise, he would have insisted on changes in the deeply flawed CIA plans. Richard Goodwin, a member of the high councils of the Kennedy administration, was among those who later concluded that Eisenhower would not have approved the invasion at all. “On the basis of Eisenhower’s general record [i.e., of nonintervention], we have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he would not have invaded.”86

  In either case, the defeat was officially Kennedy’s responsibility, and the first major defeat of his life. Manolo Reboso, a member of Brigade 2506 who escaped from the beach head and went on to work with Bobby Kennedy on future Cuban projects, agreed with domestic observers: “The passion of the Kennedys over Cuba was because they had never lost anything in their lives.”87 The daughter of one of the five CIA pilots who lost their lives in the invasion (officially denied for 17 years) put it more bluntly: “Life was a series of touch football games. The Kennedys wanted to win ‘the football game’ in Cuba.”88 In their mind, Castro had only won the first round.

  In future years, many of the principal players, except the Kennedys and their sycophants, came to agree on the causes of the Bay of Pigs failure. Two of the most incisive statements came from former CIA Directors. Allen Dulles said, “One never succeeds unless there is a determination to succeed, a willingness to risk some unpleasant political repercussions, and a willingness to provide the basic military necessities. At the decisive moment of the Bay of Pigs operation, all three of these were lacking.”89 John McCone, Dulles’ successor, explained, “The ‘stand down’ of the air cover. . . was the fatal error that caused the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation90. . . . The responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of President Kennedy.”91

  The Aftermath

  The Bay of Pigs represented not merely a stunning military loss for Kennedy. It was also a personal humiliation. To Richard Nixon, whom he had so recently defeated for the presidency, the president described the debacle several days later as “the worst experience of my life.”92 The Castro-hating Nixon, during this same April 20 phone conversation, advised the confused young President, “I would find a proper legal cover and go [back] in. There are several legal justifications that could be used, like protection of American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base in Guantanamo.”93

  On the first night of the invasion itself, Robert Kennedy anticipated the disaster, saying that “the shit has hit the fan. The thing has turned sour in a way you wouldn’t believe!” By all accounts, the President was stunned and devastated. Kenny O’Donnell, a long-time aide from Boston, remembered him as more distraught—“as close to crying”—as he had ever seen him.94 Bobby Kennedy took it just as badly. “They can’t do this to you,” he said privately to Jack after other advisors had retired that evening, and Jack paced the White House grounds alone for nearly an hour. “Those black-bearded communists can’t do this to you.”95

  On April 19, just two days after the disaster, RFK let it be known that he wanted revenge. He dictated a letter to his brother: “Our long-range policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in Laos or in the Congo or any other place in the world. . . The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse.” And in a phrase that would most likely haunt him, Bobby added, “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”96 What they ultimately did is now believed by many to have instigated the very occurrence they tried to prevent. On June 1, 1961, RFK issued a memo that declared, “The Cuba matter is being allowed to slide. . . mostly because nobody really has an answer to Castro.”97

  Robert Kennedy saw that his brother was “more upset at this time [the Bay of Pigs] than he was at any other”—so upset that it produced a physical reaction in the President who was always fully composed in public; who took great pains to conceal stress from even his closest advisors.98 In private, he kept shaking his head and rubbing his hands over his eyes.99 The President told advisor Clark Clifford that a “second Bay of Pigs” would destroy his presidency. “It was the only thing on his mind, and we just had to let him talk himself out,” remembered friend Charles Spalding. His depression reached such depths that he told his friend LeMoyne Billings, “Lyndon [Johnson] can have it [the presidency] in 1964,” saying that the presidency was the “most unpleasant job in the world.”100

  One of the job’s more unpleasant aspects was foisting all the blame on someone else’s shoulders in order to protect the president’s own reputation. A week before the invasion, Presidential Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had foreshadowed this possible necessity in a long memo he composed for the new president. “The character and repute of President Kennedy constitute one of our greatest natural resources,” wrote Schlesinger, who had originally opposed the Cuban venture but later sought to ensure its successful execution. “Nothing should be done to jeopardize this invaluable asset.”101 Another memo, which was entitled “Protection of The President,” went on to suggest a course of action that now seems to have been followed: “When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials.” In the event of failure, Schlesinger recommended placing the blame on the CIA, painting them as “errant idealists and soldiers-of-fortune working on their own.”102 (In Dulles’ papers is a non-published memo on the Bay of Pigs, in which he wrote of the Schlesinger tactic, “I deplore the way this is being done. . . If what is written goes entirely unanswered and without critical examination, it will go down as the history of the event. It is not the true story.”103)

  After a suitable period of time, the CIA’s Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell were asked to resign, which they did by the end of 1961. Dulles had dutifully offered his resignation to the President when it became obvious that the invasion had failed. Kennedy initially refused the tender,104 but it soon became apparent that he needed scapegoats. Kennedy told Allen Dulles that he and Bissell, men he had personally liked and admired, would have to leave their posts after things quieted down. “Under a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office. But under our system, it is you who must go.”105 E. Howard Hunt concluded, “Both Bissell and Mr. Dulles were slated to go, scapegoats to expiate administration guilt.”106

  The New York Times later ran a front page story, which documented how Kennedy, in the wake of the failed invasion, had railed
at the CIA. He would, he threatened, “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”107 In fact, Kennedy’s actions were exactly the opposite. Over the following weeks and months, Dulles and the President spoke often, and Dulles would later say of Kennedy, “There was never one harsh or unkind word said to me by him at any time thereafter.”108

  At a White House meeting, when Vice-President Lyndon Johnson attempted to point the finger of blame for the invasion’s failure at the CIA, Kennedy admonished him. “Lyndon, you’ve got to remember [that] we’re all in this, and that when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself. We should have no sort of passing the buck, or backbiting, however justified.”109

  JFK went out of his way to defend Dulles in this trying time. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, one of the Kennedys’ Palm Beach neighbors, Charles Wrightsman, with whom Dulles had often stayed, told the president that when he (Wrightsman) next came to Washington, he would not see Dulles. Kennedy then invited Wrightsman for a drink at the White House. Unbeknownst to Wrightsman, Kennedy also invited Allen Dulles. Dulles’ biographer recounts what happened next: “When Allen walked in—Wrightsman was already settled down—Kennedy stood up and, in case the rich man from Florida did not get the message, the beleaguered president put his arm around Allen’s shoulders to lead him to a comfortable chair.”110 Kennedy summed up his opinion of Dulles at a luncheon held just days after the botched invasion. Speaking privately with New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Kennedy said, “It’s not that Dulles is not a man of great ability. He is. Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures.”111

  There were solid political reasons for Kennedy to take this “colossal mistake” so seriously. The new administration wanted dearly to protect an image of a reborn America striving for a new order based on justice and ethical principles. Kennedy had entered the White House proclaiming that “the torch had passed to a new generation of Americans,” and promising a new kind of leadership for the free world. He would lead it in new, saner, and more humane directions, away from anything smacking of rigidity or behavior that could prompt memories or mistaken images of America as an imperialist power. And much of the free world responded enthusiastically to those promises. From the first, Kennedy was relatively more popular in many countries of Europe and Latin America than at home.