by Gus Russo
It is now known that JFK never intended to fulfill the U.S. side of the missile crisis agreement. In 1997, the State Department released a 934-page compilation of previously-secret missile crisis documents. On November 5, 1962, mere days after the crisis, Kennedy instructed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that “we must operate on the presumption that the Russians may try again [to place missiles in Cuba].” The president proceeded to ask McNamara for suggestions.6 That same day, JFK sent another memo to McNamara, this time remarking, “The plans for X seem thin” and “may thus require us to build additional divisions.”7 In this case, as footnoted in the memo, “X” was a quick-reaction plan for an airborne assault on Cuba, in the event of an internal civilian or military uprising. In early 1963, the Kennedy brothers would hit high gear trying to create such an uprising.
A worried Kennedy also told the State Department’s George Ball that, missiles or no missiles, he felt he could not have his hands tied in dealing with Castro. Ball assured the president that he could break the “no invasion” pledge at any time under the provisions of the Rio Pact. Kennedy then addressed the National Security Council in December 1962, saying that he “was not going to rat on an agreement with the Russians, but we’re not going to tie on to a no-invasion pledge which allows Castro to operate from an invulnerable base.”8 Thus, Kennedy maintained his resolve to deal with the upstart dictator. The President and his brother merely switched tactics.
Evidence of Kennedy’s commitment to deal with Castro after the missile agreement is overwhelming. A retired CIA officer told the author, “Bobby wanted to deal with Castro in a way that wouldn’t start a war with Russia. The ‘crackdown’ was for Khrushchev’s benefit.” In this light, the “crackdown” can be seen as a convincing ruse, the effect of which was to comb out the more roguish exile groups launching raids from U.S. soil. To plausibly maintain that the U.S. had no role in the anti-Castro efforts, the administration had decided that any raids would have to emanate from a third party country rather than the U.S.
At the same time, the action served the Kennedys’ prestige and need for control. As former FBI agent William Turner would write, “The White House had its own Cubans, and its own plans for dealing with Castro. The rest of the exiles,” in the words of one CIA operative, “‘were told to stuff it,’ but they weren’t told why.”9
The tragedy for Bobby was that his trimmed-down stratagem would again involve training camps and activists in New Orleans, all of whom were in close proximity to Lee Harvey Oswald. Bobby hinted at his real intentions for Cuba on April 23, 1963. When his Special Group met, the Attorney General proposed a study on how to cause “as much trouble as we can for Communist Cuba,” and to culminate in “overthrowing Castro in eighteen months”—or in October 1964, one month before the U.S. presidential elections. One week after this directive, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would submit to the Kennedys just such a planned timetable. Robert Kennedy also wanted this proposed study to include “measures we should take following contingencies such as the death of Castro.”10
With the political gains the Cuban crackdown was achieving on the Soviet front, John Kennedy was now able to offer his olive branch to Khrushchev.
The USSR and The “Peace Speech”
“Recalling now President John F. Kennedy, I would like especially to note his speech at the American University. . . [which] can be called courageous and more realistic than what the Soviet Union. . . often heard from those shores. Although. . . [it] had some conflicting points and a tribute was unfortunately paid in it to the so-called policy of ‘containment and pushing back of communism,’ as a whole, however, it proceeded from acknowledgement of the inevitability and necessity of co-existence of states with different social systems. . . He said that ‘peace need not be impracticable and war need not be inevitable.”
—Nikita S. Khrushchev, June 1964
At 10:15 a.m. on June 10, 1963, John Kennedy left the White House for American University, where he would make a major address at the institution’s 49th commencement exercises.
Washington sweltered that morning, even by its own June standards. Just after 10:30, Kennedy flashed his winning smile in acknowledgment of his introduction and began his talk with familiar self-deprecation. “I have. . . chosen this time and place,” said Kennedy, rocking slightly until he hit his stride, “to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—and that is the most important topic on earth: peace.”
The “Peace Speech,” as it would become known, would be the best-written and most lyrical of the President’s life:
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. . . I speak of peace. . . as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war—and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Too many of us think [peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. . .
Historian David Halberstam called it “a landmark speech,” and it was. As Halberstam noted, after seventeen years of hard line Cold War rhetoric and action, Kennedy had taken a bold first step towards thawing the relationship between the superpowers. Kennedy’s speech continued:
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far comers of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Two weeks after it publicly played out, Kennedy said the missile crisis may have been an important turning point in East-West relations.11 Now, at the D.C. campus, he pursued the potential new course, delivering the text in his moderated Boston-Irish accent. Everyone knew Kennedy could turn on his great charm whenever needed. However, his “Peace Speech” was delivered as free of affectations as any he had ever given. He read straight, hard, and at a steady clip:
With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. . .
So let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
The President used his next breath to assert that no government or social system was so evil that its people must be considered so—and he hailed the Soviets for their courage, cultural achievements, and abhorrence of war. “No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and fa
milies were burned or sacked. A third of the national territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.”
The radical nature of this speech, replete with sympathy and praise for the putative enemy, is hard now to appreciate. It was daringly contrary to the preponderance of conventional wisdom at the time. Its emotional context was a blend of resolution, anger, dismay, and hysteria:
Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament—and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes—as individuals and as a nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude towards the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home. . .
Kennedy spoke without stopping for applause, which he seemed not to expect. In fact, his only substantial applause came after two dramatic announcements. The first was that no more American nuclear tests would be conducted in the atmosphere so long as other nations also refrained from testing.12 The other was that the United States would join the Soviet Union and Great Britain at a high-level meeting in Moscow in another attempt to agree on a nuclear test ban treaty. Recent comments by Khrushchev slightly encouraged hope that progress on nuclear control might be possible (provided the Soviet Chairman’s equally recent denunciations were ignored), and Kennedy thought his speech would be a good place to communicate his optimistic state of mind.
He also used it for other, more short-term political purposes. Norman Cousins, a U.S. writer and editor involved with American-Soviet exchanges, had seen Khrushchev two months before, and promptly afterward urged Kennedy to make some kind of dramatic approach to the Soviets before a forthcoming meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Aware that the First Secretary was increasingly disparaged for weakness by Chinese Communist leaders and under pressure from his own hawks, administration advisors agreed it was worthwhile trying to lend support to the Soviet doves. Everyone knew Kennedy had forced Khrushchev to withdraw his missiles from Cuba.13 If the belittled First Secretary could not boast of concrete results from that retreat, he would have to demonstrate his fortitude by denouncing the imperialist Washington warmongers who ignored his peaceful gesture. Hence, the conciliatory noises from Washington.
Kennedy felt very good about the speech. Evelyn Lincoln, who had been Kennedy’s personal secretary for twelve years, said he considered it the speech of his life, and it “lit” him with passion well into the evening, when he enjoyed a long swim in the White House pool. Lincoln believed June 10th marked more than a fundamental policy change. “Kennedy became President that day,” she wrote.
The full importance of Kennedy’s initiative would be revealed only during the following weeks, when American representatives arrived in Moscow for negotiations on the test-ban treaty, and the first break in the glacial Cold War was followed by the crucial first agreement to limit it. But even at first hearing, the speech made a profound impression on Khrushchev, who called it “the greatest speech by an American president since Roosevelt.”14 Fidel Castro also praised the speech and Kennedy personally, although Havana’s press insisted that American treatment of Cuba contradicted Kennedy’s remarks about noninterference in other countries’ affairs.
British newspapers were also generally favorable. The Manchester Guardian called it “one of the great state papers of American history.” Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said, “Jack Kennedy’s acceptance of Test Ban and of the policy of détente with Russia were really his own—I mean, were not shared by any except his most intimate advisers. He took great risks for them.”
The American press was more subdued, and even antagonistic. After banner headlines on the afternoon of June 10th and the morning of June 11th, mention of the speech virtually disappeared. Kennedy’s call for examination of attitudes that unnecessarily deepened animosity produced very little scrutiny or discussion, even of the superficial kind.
The public responded even more weakly. During the week following the president’s seminal statement, 50,000 letters were mailed to the White House. Just under 900 were about the speech: 25 were critical. At the same time, 28,232 people wrote to discuss impending legislation on freight rates.
In Congress, the response was disapproving and directly hostile. Senate Republican leaders saw the proposed test ban talks as a dangerous double-cross by the Soviets—as “another case,” according to Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate Minority Leader, “of concession and more concession to Khrushchev.”
As he concluded his 28 minutes at American University’s sun-drenched podium, Kennedy quietly declared:
This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough— of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation, but toward a strategy of peace.
For those who saw this as the new crux of U.S. foreign policy, the speech was very moving. But few knew about America’s hidden foreign policy. Even fewer were aware of Kennedy’s immense talent for compartmentalization which allowed him to simultaneously embrace great moral dichotomies. In short, most Americans did not know of the Kennedys’ continuing obsession with, and secret war against, Fidel Castro.
Cuba: Murder and Mayhem
“Kennedy’s infatuation with paramilitary operations, counter-insurgency, and inability to rationalize intelligence made a mockery of rhetoric that appealed to reason.”
—Herbert S. Parmet, Kennedy historian15
Only one month after the Peace Speech, Kennedy began publicly reducing his lavish praise of the Soviet Union. In a July 17 press conference, the President stated that the United States “cannot exist in a peaceful sense” with Cuba as long as it remains a “Soviet satellite.” Within four days, Castro, in a note to the United States, protested Kennedy’s statement, asserting that Cuba’s ties to the Soviet Union were “indestructible” and “unalterable.” During the next month, Cuba reported numerous sabotage bombings of fuel stockpiles, metal plants, and factories, all originating, it alleged, in the United States. These reports came as the Kennedy administration was orchestrating a public “crackdown” on exile activities. The “crackdown” was nothing more than a cover for an intensified super-secret program that promised to remove Castro once and for all.
New “Autonomous” Projects: Cuban Coordinating Committee
Many of the US’s anti-Castro operations in 1963 have, historically, been referred to as “autonomous,” a term the Kennedys introduced to provide them a layer of all-important deniability. But referring to these 1963 events as “autonomous” fooled no one on the inside. Close observers were well aware that the Kennedy administration was fully supportive of, and was, in fact, the driving force behind, the covert activity. This new, more obfuscated strategy had its genesis on June 19th, when President Kennedy approved “autonomous operations” directed against Castro—operations designed to encourage continued harassment of Castro, while at the same time distancing the administration from the efforts.
Soon after these operations were authorized, an Army Officer assigned to the CIA’s Miami JM/WAVE Station had an encounter he would never forget. Captain Bradley Ayers, attending a bash thrown by the JM/WAVE officers at a swank Key Biscayne home in late June, was astonished when he was introduced to another guest—Robert Kennedy. “His presence reinforced my belief that the Cuban situation was a prime concern to the White House,” Ayers later wrote. “With an election year just around the corner, the President had
to continue to try to silence critics of his Cuban policy.”16
As recently-released documents show, the President sought to encourage a program of sabotage directed at “four major segments of the Cuban economy,” 1) electric power; 2) petroleum refineries and storage facilities; 3) railroad and highway transportation; and 4) production and manufacturing.17 Operations under this program were to be conducted by CIA-controlled Cuban agents from a United States island off the coast of Florida and were intended to complement a similar effort designed to “develop internal resistance elements which could carry out sabotage.” All these activities came under the aegis of Bobby’s Kennedy’s newest brainchild, the Cuban Coordinating Committee, or CCC. Other, even more sinister aspects of the new approach were deemed so sensitive that they were overseen by Bobby Kennedy himself.
The CCC was formed, ostensibly, to help assimilate Cuban Brigade members into American society. This agenda, however, provided a convenient front for the CCC’s more important agenda—the coordination of anti-Castro aggression that would culminate in a coup, tentatively set for late 1963 or early 1964. This coordination involved the Cuban specialists at the State Department, Defense Department, Army, Navy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the CCC at the top of the pyramid, inter-agency memos were written planning the removal of Castro, then sent to Robert Kennedy and the National Security Council for approval.
As remembered by CCC staffer, General Alexander Haig, “The covert programs against Castro and the whole counter-insurgency program throughout the hemisphere was just amazing, and they were really the main line of work of the Cuban Coordinating Committee.”18