Oh, really?
I mean, I always knew which ones. Everybody's still a friend, but you see the ones who get so excited about power and go over to the new, which is fine. You see it in what some people write, well, you always know—Mr. Kennedy always said you can always—if you can count your friends on five fingers of one hand, you're lucky. And I have the friends I always knew I'd have, which I—
I met André Meyer the other day in New York. I was having dinner with Mendès France,79 who was also staying at the Carlyle. They ran into each other in the elevator. A very nice man, he spoke with affection of you.
I sort of think he's rather a misanthrope—
He is crusty.
Until he loves you and then—and he loved and admired Jack so, without hardly ever knowing him. He always said he was the only Dem—he said, "I am so ashamed of my colleagues in Wall Street. They do not see what this man is doing"—you know.
I think that's enough for the day.
Yeah.
During the campaign, Cuba emerged as an issue. Had the President been much concerned about Castro? Do you remember in '59 when Castro first came in, what he felt?1
I remember how awful he thought it was that he was let in. We knew Earl Smith then, who'd been Eisenhower's ambassador at the time. When we were in Florida—that's all Earl could talk about.2 Yeah, then Jack was really sort of sick that the Eisenhower administration had let him come and then the New York Times—what was his name, Herbert Matthews?3
That's right.
I can remember a lot of talk about it and wasn't—didn't even Norman Mailer write something?
Norman Mailer was very pro-Castro, yeah.4
Yeah. I remember Jack being—
Did Earl Smith think it was—talk about Communists—Castro as a Communist, or working with the Communists at that time? He's written a book, as you know—5
Yeah—The Fourth Floor? Well, he was always saying his troubles with the State Department—I remember there was a man named Mr. Rubottom he kept talking about. And how hard it was—warning against Castro and how just it was like, I don't know, dropping pennies down an endless well. He just never could get through to the State Department. So, I suppose he thought he was a Communist, yeah.
And the President's view then was that, as you say, our policy was wrong in not letting it happen. But on the other hand, he wasn't—he had no sympathy with Batista.
No. No, I can just remember the talk about it, but you know. I'm not very good at—
Then came the campaign. And then after the campaign—remember when Allen Dulles came to—
Oh, Allen Dulles came to Hyannis after—yeah.6 The first two people Jack thought he had to keep were J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles, and nice as Allen—well, turned out to be not so—[chuckles]
Nixon in his book wrote that the President had been told during the campaign about this, which is wrong, since Dulles and the President both said he didn't know about it until November, about the fact that we'd been secretly training the Cuban—7
Well, he never said to me that he knew anything, so I believe that.
When did you first become aware of all this brewing?8
Well, you always knew the Cuba problem. Wasn't the weeks before it happened, every press conference or every week there was something about Cuba?
The stories began to appear in March saying that an invasion was likely, or something like that.
And then all the time at his press conferences, Jack would keep having to say United States troops won't be committed, sort of dodging everything that way. Then I knew about all those people being trained. But I just remember, well, it was like the second time, when Keating was going on every week about something that the missiles weren't out or there were more missiles there.9 I mean, it was just Cuba, Cuba, all the time in one way or another.
What did you—do you remember what the President's feeling was about the invasion before? Did he—for example, you mentioned the Fulbright meeting the last time.
Well, obviously leading up to it, he was always uneasy. But the time I really remember well was the weekend before, which would be April 13 and 14. We were down in Glen Ora with Jean and Steve Smith, and it was one afternoon—you'll know if it was Saturday or Sunday—about five o'clock in his bedroom, he got a call and he—I was in there and he was sitting in the edge of the bed, and he asked—it was from Dean Rusk—and it went on and on, and he looked so depressed when it was over. And I said, "What was it?" and everything. And I guess Dean Rusk must have told him—or just been very much for it, or something—or did Jack say, "Go ahead," then? I guess that was a decisive phone call.10
I think this was the phone call about the air strike.
Oh, that Dean Rusk wanted to take it away, I guess. That's right. So anyway—and then Jack just sat there on his bed and then he shook his head and just wandered around that room, really looking—in pain almost, and went downstairs, and you just knew he knew what had happened was wrong. But I suppose he was in—you know, it was just such an awful thing. He was just in—well, anyway. Usually, as I said, he made his decisions easily and would think about them before or once he'd made them, he was happy with them. And that's the one time I just saw him, you know, terribly, really low. So it was an awful weekend.
Do you think his being low related to that particular decision to—about the—cancel the air strike or to the general decision to have gone ahead with the invasion, or was that—
I think it was probably a combination of all of them, don't you?
Yeah.
I mean, the invasion in the beginning and then no air strike—half doing it and not doing it all the way, or should—I don't know. Just some awful thing that had been landed in his lap that there wasn't time to get out of. And then all the things that he told me about Cuba—I can't remember if he told me at the time or later—but you know, the meetings and how he'd say, "Oh, my God, the bunch of advisers that we inherited!" And then later on, when Taylor was made chief of staff, he'd say, "You know, at least I leave that to the next President"—or "If Eisenhower had left me someone like that. Can you imagine leaving someone like Lyman Lemnitzer?" and you know, all those people in there.11 I mean, just a hopeless bunch of men. And I can remember one day—would it be after it had failed, I guess, or before?—at the White House? Him especially, I was on the lawn with the children and he especially came out with Dr. Cardona12—
Oh, yes. That was after.
And, you know, well, he thought he'd been wonderful afterwards then. And he just—
I think that was a Wednesday afternoon—
Oh.
Because I was sent down to Florida on Tuesday night and brought—Adolf Berle13 and I—and brought Dr. Cardona back and took him in late Wednesday afternoon, and I think he brought him out and introduced him to you.
And then he'd keep shaking his head, and said Cardona had been wonderful. But, if you want to go back over the chronology of Cuba, there was that awf—that weekend. Then we went back to Washington Monday. Then Tuesday we had the congressional reception, and Jack was called away in the middle of it, and went over to his office and didn't come back until I was in bed.14 You know, it was funny, because the next year at a Congressional reception, he was called away for something else of a crisis. But last year it just seemed those receptions were always nights something awful happened. So then you say Wednesday was the day everything happened. And I think it was Wednesday we had to have our pictures taken—or maybe it was Thursday. But Jack was as restless as a cat. It was with Mark Shaw and he just came up and sat down for about ten minutes—we didn't have any picture of the two of us together that you could mail out.15 Oh, it was an awful time, and you know, he really looked awful.
PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY TAKEN DURING THE BAY OF PIGS DEBACLE
©2000 Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com
It must have been unbearable to go to the Greek dinner in the midst of all this.16
Yeah, then we had to go to the Greek dinner that nigh
t. We'd had a lunch for them one of those days, either the day before or the day after. And you know, they were so nice, the Greeks. They were almost our first visitors. But I remember so well when it happened, whatever day it was, it was in the morning—and he came back over to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me. You know, just for one—just put his head in his hands and sort of wept. And I've only seen him cry about three times. About twice, the winter he was sick in the hospital, you know, just out of sheer discouragement, he wouldn't weep but some tears would fill his eyes and roll down his cheek. And then that time, and then when Patrick, this summer when he came back from Boston to me in the hospital and he walked in the morning about eight, in my room, and just sobbed and put his arms around me. And it was so sad, because all his first hundred days and all his dreams, and then this awful thing to happen. And he cared so much. He didn't care about his hundred days, but all those poor men who you'd sent off with all their hopes high and promises that we'd back them and there they were, shot down like dogs or going to die in jail. He cared so much about them. And then Bobby came to see me. You know, obviously there were meetings all the time—probably that afternoon or something in the White House—and Bobby came over to see me and said to, you know, "Please stay very close to Jack, I mean, just be around all afternoon." If I was going to take the children out—you know, in other words, don't leave anywhere. Just to sort of comfort him. I mean, just because he was so sad.
He said something to me that day or the next day about Bobby and wondering about making Bobby head of the CIA. Do you remember that?
Oh, I remember him saying that a couple of times, if only he could have had Bobby as head of the CIA. Well, then I suppose he just thought politically that would be too—
Too risky.
Yeah. But you know, he so wished he could have Bobby there. Then I don't know when it was he got John McCone.17
About—not for another six months or so. He got him in the fall. One of the great things, of course, was the fact that the President, having really been led into this by very bad advice, nonetheless never blamed anyone publicly and had that wonderful Chinese proverb, so-called, do you remember? "Victory has a hundred fathers—"
"Fathers. Disaster is an orphan."18
"Is an orphan." Where did he get that? Did you ever know?
I don't know. We could see if it's in Mao Tse-tung, because I told you he had an awful lot of Chinese proverbs. [chuckles] But he was always collecting things like that.
How did he feel about—it was Lemnitzer, it was, I think, and the Joint Chiefs he held more responsible privately than anyone else, my impression.
Yes, you know, he never really spoke unkindly about them, but with sort of hopeless, wry laughter, he'd talk about Curtis LeMay. I remember the time of the second Cuba, he got a picture of all our airplanes in Florida, or all over the country just standing on all the runways.19 And he called up LeMay. But, you know, there that man was shouting to go and bomb everything and have a little war and had left all our planes out. You know, LeMay was hard to work with. But, it was the whole thing—the Joint Chiefs, and then, I guess, poor Allen Dulles. And then again, there's Dean Rusk. I don't know if you should have— It seems to me if you're going to do it, you should have had air cover. You know, Dean Rusk, being timid, but all of that—Jack coming in so late to something and everybody—I just wished if he had to do it, they'd let him alone. That was before the hundred days.20 I mean, it was silly. He never liked that hundred-day business in the papers but it was obviously some little press thing—Roosevelt. But you know, before they were even over—so you can see how early that was in the White House.
How did you feel about Dulles after this?
Well, he always liked Allen Dulles and, you know, he thought he was an honorable man, and Allen Dulles always had liked Jack. And I think Allen Dulles sort of cracked up. Oh, because a while later he went out of his way to have him to dinner—or to make someone—I know what it was. Or was it Charlie Wrightsman?21 Yes, Charlie Wrightsman and Jayne were in Washington, and they were coming to the White House. This was just a couple of weeks after Cuba, or a month—and always Allen Dulles had been their little lion. They'd have him down, and trot him out in Florida and everything. And Charlie Wrightsman was there, and he said he wasn't going to see Allen Dulles—usually when he was—when in Washington, he did—because of the way Allen had bungled the Bay of Pigs. Well, that just disgusted Jack so. He was so loyal always to people in, you know, trouble. And so he took me aside and said, "Have Dulles over here for tea or for a drink this afternoon." And he made the special effort to come back from his office and sit around with Jayne and Charlie Wrightsman, just to show Charlie what he thought of Allen Dulles. And, I mean, it made all the difference to Allen Dulles. I was with him about five minutes to ten before Jack got there. He just looked like, I don't know, Cardinal Mindszenty on trial. You know, just a shell of what he was.22 And Jack came and talked—put his arm around him. What's that thing about Morgan? "If you just walk with—through the bank with your arm around me, you don't have to give me a loan?"—or anything?23 Well, wasn't that nice? It was just to show Charlie Wrightsman. But it shows something about Jack. But I mean, he knew he—Dulles had obviously botched everything up. You know, he had a tenderness for the man. And then I guess right after that or Cuba, whenever, he got General Taylor.
Yes. First, he got General Taylor to head an investigation. Remember General Taylor and Bobby made a kind of inquiry into what happened. And then, then he brought General Taylor into the White House.
That's right.
As a kind of military adviser.
General Taylor always used to be in his gray suit then, and sometimes Jack would say, when there'd be a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, you know, that you could just feel these waves going out from them wondering about what Taylor would be like and what a difficult situation it was for Taylor.24 And it was to his amazement; it worked very well.
Had he known General Taylor before this?
I suppose he'd met him a couple of times because he was always talking about his book. And you know, and then he'd say, "Imagine, can you imagine Eisenhower doing that?"—whatever all the things were that made General Taylor leave. General Taylor and General Gavin both wrote books, didn't they?25
Yes.
But—and so he always thought so highly of him. He knew just where to turn the minute he needed his military adviser.
We in the White House staff felt very badly, quite apart from the general horror of the thing, but we felt that we'd served the President badly, and some had thought—some had been for the project and others had been against it. But all of us felt that we hadn't done the job that the White House staff ought to be doing in the way—that we'd been too intimidated by all these great figures and hadn't subjected the project to the kind of critical examination it was our job to do. Did he ever comment on that?
No, he never did—but, I mean, I don't think all of you should feel that way because look at what you did at the second Cuba. The thing was you were all cutting your teeth in there and nobody had warned you about this thing. And you—all these supposed experts when you come in fresh yourself, what can you do but sort of take their advice? That's why Lyndon Johnson's so lucky. At least he has a team of people who've been tried. And you hope to God that if the country's been run these past eight years and there'd been crises that those men would know something what they were talking about. So he used to talk later, never about his staff, but, you know, about who he was left, who he inherited to turn to for advice. And that's what he was rather bitter about.
And when the chips were really down, it was Bobby whom he turned to, wasn't it, more than anyone else to talk to and have counsel with?26
That's right. And I remember—and setting Bobby up with that committee27 and I think that's where Bobby and General Taylor's friendship started because I would say after Jack, General Taylor was the man in Washington that Bobby is the closest to, I th
ink—I mean, besides his friends or people in the Justice Department. But there's this really mutual respect they both have for each other. And it's very touching—a very young man and a man who's at the end of his career.
PRESIDENT AND MRS. KENNEDY SPEAKING WITH RETURNED MEMBERS OF THE CUBAN INVASION BRIGADE, MIAMI, 1962
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
You said, in an earlier tape, that the times that you remembered the President being most depressed and under pressure really—the state committeeman fight in 1956 and the Cuban thing.
Yes, well, not depressed at the state committeeman thing. That was more nervous, apprehensive, he couldn't stop talking about it. You know, then he had to do something to win. This one was sort of blundering along. He wasn't running his own show as he was doing in the Massachusetts fight. And then the awful depression when it ended and caring so about those people.28 And I think the compassion that shows, well, the way he used to talk to me about Cardona afterwards, and the way—then he really felt obligated to get those prisoners out. That was—was that the Christmas later or two Christmases later?
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