Of more immediate concern was Vietnam’s inland neighbor, Laos, a beleaguered, rural land Ike had called “the cork in the bottle.” Instinctively sensitive to public relations, Kennedy felt that one cause of America’s trouble in Asia was its “Ugly American” image; U.S. diplomats were still as elitist as those he had met on his first 1951 trip to the region. Facing a group of new ambassadorial appointees, the young president cited a recent New York Times article that accused American diplomats of hanging around the embassy compound and not getting out in the countryside. Hoping to reverse the practice, he issued orders: “Remember, you’re ambassador to the country, to the whole country. Don’t get deskbound.”
As Kennedy accustomed himself to life in the Oval Office and basked in a 78 percent approval rating, the only program that grabbed his attention was space. It was a matter of national image. Kennedy saw the global struggle with the Soviets and Chinese much like a political campaign in which the third world was the swing vote. To impress the Asian, African, and Latin American masses, the United States had to overtake the Russians in space. With Soviet cosmonauts orbiting the earth and American rockets crashing on takeoff, Kennedy asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) if the United States could possibly “leapfrog” the USSR to the moon. To improve the third world in its daily life, he created the Peace Corps. He would send Americans not just to the moon but to far-off lands like Swaziland.
* * *
LEAVING his wife and two daughters behind in Washington to complete the school year, Richard Nixon assumed a Los Angeles law practice. Taking an apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, he cooked his meals and avoided social events. The one thing he craved was the latest scuttlebutt from Washington. Luckily for him, it was an appetite the Republican National Committee (RNC) was eager to sate. Soon after the inauguration, the RNC hired Eisenhower speechwriter Stephen Hess to help keep the former president and vice president up-to-date on political news. Hess’s new clients displayed vastly different appetites for his service. “The RNC wanted to keep Eisenhower alive for political purposes, to use him in campaigns and so forth,” he recalled. “Eisenhower just wanted to have a nice time in Gettysburg.”
Nixon was different. Hess could see that his heart and mind had never made the move from Washington. Eager to meet Nixon’s need for news, the twenty-seven-year-old Hess began sending regular political updates from the capital to Los Angeles. “I’m writing a newsletter once a week. Because I was reading all these newspapers, I would keep a list each month of people who had gotten an honor, like an honorary degree, or been appointed to a . . . board of directors. I drafted these little letters.” Again, Nixon and Ike had different reactions. “Eisenhower was signing them like crazy. He loved them. All over town people would say, ‘Hey! I got this terrific note from Ike.’ Nixon says to me, ‘Don’t bother sending me those letters anymore. I don’t want to be known as a guy who remembers people’s birthdays!’ ”
A grander vocation tugged at Nixon. Even as he settled in at the law firm of Adams, Duque and Hazeltine, he and those close to him knew that he remained the Republicans’ obvious candidate to challenge Kennedy in 1964. “I traveled with him after the election to Chicago, Washington, and New York,” Bob Finch recalled. “We knew that he had enough support if he wanted to get the nomination.” The man who believed he had gotten the most votes in 1960 even had a slogan ready: Reelect Nixon. What scared the once-and-future candidate, Finch said, was being seduced by party leaders, as Adlai Stevenson had been, into a second drubbing, losing twice to Kennedy, a spectacle that would make him, still in his fifties, a political cadaver. “He was mortally afraid of that.”
* * *
JOHN Kennedy had an affinity for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Its style was nothing like the effete diplomats at Foggy Bottom. “The State Department takes four or five days to answer a simple yes or no.” The CIA was more to Kennedy’s liking, more like James Bond, the suave and deadly agent 007, whose adventures Kennedy had enticed his countrymen into sharing. The CIA got things done.
Or so Kennedy was led to believe. CIA efforts to kill Castro had been a pathetic failure. At first, the agency had asked mobsters Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana to carry out a gangland-style assassination of the Cuban leader, having a hit man shoot him down in the street. Giancana insisted on a subtler method: poison. By March 1961, that plan was also going nowhere. Roselli returned poison pills given him by the CIA, and the mob’s contact lost the job that had given him access to Castro.
That same month, the CIA deputy director, Richard Bissell, briefed Kennedy on the planned invasion of the island. Anti-Castro exiles, drawn from the huge Cuban community in Miami, were being trained in Guatemala. Pilots from the Alabama National Guard were teaching the Cubans to fly some B-26s the CIA had recovered from government surplus. The new president’s prime concern was that the operation not create so much international “noise” that it triggered a Soviet grab for always-vulnerable West Berlin. But “noise” was precisely what the CIA planners believed was needed to transform an invasion into an insurrection against Castro; that and the complete elimination of the Cuban air force.
Almost from the outset, however, the CIA’s goals grew well beyond the resources and risks the president was willing to invest. The original strategy of infiltrating the island with small units lost favor because such commando groups kept getting caught. This led to the plan for a full-scale invasion. Troop readiness was another problem. While some of the Cuban recruits had military experience under the old Cuban regime, many in the brigade were middle-class sons of professionals, more adept at winning arguments in cafés than in amphibious assaults. The CIA had failed, moreover, to establish an exile government of Cubans with sufficient appeal to their compatriots on the island. When the assigned agent, E. Howard Hunt (“Eduardo”), failed to organize a credible group, Bissell replaced him. A more basic problem lay with the military plan itself. When the exiles asked the Americans how such a small force could defeat a 200,000-man army, they were assured by the CIA that an “umbrella” of air cover would keep every Cuban car, truck, tank, or airplane from moving the day of the attack. “It was on this premise that all related plans were made,” CIA agent Hunt insisted. Unfortunately, that particular promise had never come from the top.
On Sunday morning, April 16, the operation was under way. B-26 bombers, taking off from Nicaragua, struck at the Cuban air force, but with minimal success. Only a handful of planes had been disabled. With fifteen hundred exiles prepared to land at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy, worried about Moscow’s reaction, called off a second air strike. From Nicaragua there would be no more strikes, the White House ruled, until the exiles had secured a takeoff strip in Cuba, thereby giving the invasion the plausible cover of being a covert act by Cuban defectors. “I thought Kennedy was tough,” the CIA’s deputy chief Richard Bissell said later, “that he wouldn’t cancel air strikes and lose his first main effort.”
When distress calls came from the landing beach, Bissell and the military chiefs urged Kennedy to commit U.S. forces immediately to the attack, navy jets to give air cover to those pinned down on the beach and naval artillery to destroy Castro’s tanks. The young commander in chief rejected the plea, believing that the invasion did not justify the risk of a Soviet countermove in West Berlin, a confrontation that could trigger nuclear war.
Kennedy’s partial commitment to the Cuban invasion incurred the wrath of both the left and right. A group called Fair Play for Cuba picketed the UN in New York, yelling: “Cuba, sí! Yankee, no!” At the CIA war room in Washington, a group of gung-ho agents, including Hunt, were screaming in four-letter language, pleading for an air strike. What they and the rest of the agency had stubbornly refused to admit was that the invasion had never stood a chance without a far greater American role than the one Kennedy had approved. Without a full-scale invasion, a people’s revolt against Castro was not in the cards. And if the United States was not going to enter big and win the fight, and if i
t had little expectation of the Cuban populace rising up, certainly the small forced landing at the Bay of Pigs could not do the job.
The effort to topple the Cuban leader, Kennedy’s first enterprise as president, was thus a debacle. Used to victory, he took the defeat hard. For the first time, people witnessed him in tears. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he said, denying that the central failure had been his. The new commander in chief had backed a military effort that required greater resources than he was ready to commit, greater risks than he wanted to take. He’d been “given to believe,” he told George Smathers, that Castro would be assassinated, creating “pandemonium” on the island as the exiles hit the beach. But the person controlling the main operation, giving the go-ahead, and then calling off the second air strike had been the president.
By happenstance, Richard Nixon had requested and been granted a foreign policy briefing by Allen Dulles on April 19. It was to prepare him for a May speaking tour. The two men met, as scheduled, at Nixon’s Washington home. Prospects for the Cuban operation were still being publicly portrayed as murky. But when the host asked Dulles if he wanted a drink, the CIA director had showed the strain. “I certainly would—I really need one. This is the worst day of my life.” Dulles then revealed to Nixon for the first time that the long-planned invasion of Cuba had failed. The decisive factor, Nixon recalled him saying, was the unwillingness to make full use of America’s military power in the operation. It had been mindless to proceed halfheartedly, to hold back from completely supporting the mission.
The next day Kennedy had Nixon, as well as Eisenhower, to the White House for separate meetings. “JFK called,” said the note Nixon found left by daughter Tricia. “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you to help.” The two men greeted each other in the Oval Office with solemn handshakes. After Vice President Johnson left the room, Nixon took a seat on a small sofa. Kennedy was in his rocking chair. It was “the worst experience of my life,” he said of a meeting he had just had with the Cuban exile leaders, many of whom had lost sons in the disaster. Both politicians knew the irony at work: Nixon had been secretly supporting the Cuban invasion plan throughout the previous year, at the same time publicly declaring such a move as wrong. Kennedy had pitched for bold action against Castro while privately aware the invasion was already in the works.
Now, for the first time since their early days in the House, Nixon and Kennedy stood momentarily united. “I was assured by every son of a bitch I checked with, all the military experts and the CIA, that the plan would succeed,” the young president raged, Nixon relishing his venom. “His anger and frustration poured out in a profane barrage. He jumped from his chair and began pacing back and forth in front of his desk,” the former vice president wrote in an article for Reader’s Digest years later. “Pacing around the room cursing, using his down-to-earth Irish vocabulary rather than his Harvard vocabulary, he told me how disappointed he had been in the advice he had received.”
Kennedy asked what he, Nixon, would do. “I would find a proper legal cover, and I would go in.” But Kennedy reminded his guest of the danger: An open move against Castro would free the Soviets to grab West Berlin. That could mean war. The Russians only respond to strength was Nixon’s response. “I will publicly support you to the hilt if you make such a decision with regard to either Laos or Cuba,” he promised in words laced with the threat of criticism should the Democrat choose an alternative course. For his part, Kennedy did his best to charm his 1960 rival. “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president,” Kennedy allowed, resuming the banter of the Senate cloakroom. “Who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like this?”
Kennedy encouraged Nixon in the writing of his memoirs, reciting his father’s views on the public relations value of having one’s name on a book jacket. “There’s something about being an author which really builds the reputation of a politician.”
Then Kennedy shared with Nixon a nugget of political news from the West Coast. Gov. Pat Brown was worried, he told him, by polls showing Nixon could beat him were he to run for governor of California in 1962. Flattered by Kennedy’s rare display of intimacy, Nixon proceeded to spend the rest of the day urging Republican leaders to back the administration during the Cuban crisis. “He kept making call after call while I waited for nearly an hour,” an eyewitness recalled. “Some he asked. Others he begged. Some he even threatened. He was telling them not to attack Kennedy on this thing.”
“I just saw a crushed man today,” Nixon was heard to say. “He needs our help. I told him to go upstairs and have a drink with his wife and avoid making any decision until the thing brightens up a bit.”
Nixon, who was struck by how “alone” Kennedy must have felt, remained buoyed by the meeting. A week later, he wired the White House: “I greatly appreciated the message which Pierre Salinger transmitted to me in California this morning,” he wrote. “You may be sure that I shall continue to urge bipartisan support for programs of effective action to meet the threats to United States security presented by direct and indirect Communist aggression in Cuba, Laos and other areas of the world. Regards, Dick Nixon.”
* * *
KENNEDY’S angry Oval Office outburst divulged a deepening passion. “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” Robert Kennedy and JFK’s military aide Maxwell Taylor wrote in a June memorandum to the president.
“Bobby is a wild man on this,” the CIA’s Bissell recalled of the months after the Bay of Pigs. “Get off your ass about Cuba!” the attorney general barked at another CIA official. “No time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared.” The attorney general himself was to head the operation. In November he “chewed out” Bissell for what he saw as inaction on the Castro front. That month “Operation Mongoose” was created. Its mission—help someone inside Cuba do the dirty work. Richard Helms, who had replaced Bissell as head of covert operations and reported directly to Bobby on a daily basis, said there were to be “no limitations” placed on methods. A CIA report would later note the “severe pressure” from the Kennedy administration. Bissell later pronounced it “inconceivable” that the president himself hadn’t known about the plotting.
* * *
THE pressure to rid the hemisphere of the Red blotch just ninety miles from Florida heightened after the Bay of Pigs. “The worst thing that can flow from our failure in Cuba is that this failure may discourage American policy makers from taking decisive steps in the future because there is a risk of failure,” Richard Nixon warned in a May speech to the Executive Club of Chicago. “We should not start things in the world unless we are prepared to finish them.” The former vice president told a reporter it was “near criminal” for Kennedy to have called off the air cover once the invasion was launched.
Cuba was not the president’s only source of pain. That month the president made his first foreign trip, meeting with Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker in Ottawa. After speaking to the Canadian Parliament, the visitor participated in a local groundbreaking ceremony. As he lifted a silver shovel of dirt, Kennedy suddenly wrenched his weak back so terribly that he grabbed his forehead in anguish. Back in Washington, he needed crutches to get from the helicopter to the White House. Ignoring the severity of his rival’s condition, Nixon made the injury the occasion for humor. Interviewed as he moved his family out to California, he described the tedious chore of packing up his household and heading West. “Now I’ve got something in common with President Kennedy,” he told journalists at the airport. “A sore back.”
By early June, Kennedy was recovered enough to head for Europe and his first summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. In Paris, press secretary Pierre Salinger released, to his subsequent horror, the first report that Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo had been assassinated. Having armed the plotters, the U.S. government had good reason not to show its
elf so well informed on such murderous matters.
Introduced to Khrushchev, Kennedy now tried breaking the ice with an approving reference to Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko. “My wife says that Gromyko looks so kind, so pleasant, that he must be a nice man.”
His eyes fixed on his doleful diplomat, Khrushchev seemed puzzled. “Really? Some people say Gromyko looks like your Richard Nixon.”
Khrushchev boasted that he had cost Nixon the presidential election by delaying the release of Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot captured during a spy flight over the Soviet Union. Had he released Powers before the election, the Soviet leader announced, Kennedy would have lost by at least 200,000 votes. “Don’t spread that story around,” the American parried.
The meetings in Vienna confirmed Kennedy’s worst fears about Soviet intentions toward West Berlin. The Soviet premier was intent on recognizing East Germany, a step seen as denying America and its allies access to the surrounded city. “The USSR will sign a peace treaty, and the sovereignty of the GDR [East Germany] will be observed,” Khrushchev said in a formal pronouncement. “Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression. If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it do so.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 130