Chapter 11
Kennedy, who had little facility for foreign languages or much talent for p.r.o.nouncing them (his struggles with high school Latin and French are well doc.u.mented), had spent part of the afternoon before giving his speech practicing his Spanish. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had drafted the address, tried to help him, but it was pretty useless. Amused at his own imperfect p.r.o.nunciations, Kennedy asked Goodwin later, "How was my Spanish?" "Perfect," Goodwin lied. "I thought you'd say that," Kennedy said with a grin.
Although everyone in the room understood that Kennedy was launching a memorable program and that he sincerely wanted to achieve a dramatic change in relations with the southern republics and in their national lives, the president's rhetoric did not dispel all doubts. One speech, however sincerely delivered, was not enough to convince the audience that traditional U.S. neglect of the region-the conviction, as Henry Kissinger later facetiously put it, that Latin America is a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica-was at an end. Latin American representatives to the United States also believed that American idealism was little more than a tool for combating the communist challenge. Some derisively called the Alliance for Progress the Fidel Castro Plan.
There was some justification in the Latin American dismissal of the Alliance. Kennedy and the great majority of Americans could not ignore Soviet rhetoric and actions, which demonstrated a determination to undermine U.S. power and influence by propaganda, subversion, and communist revolutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. True, Khrushchev ruled out a nuclear war as madness, a prescription for destroying hundreds of millions of lives and civilization. But his a.s.sertions about Soviet missile superiority and predictions that communism would win control of Third World countries made it impossible for Kennedy or any American president to set Khrushchev's challenge aside.
In private, Kennedy was never a knee-jerk anticommunist. In a meeting with a group of Soviet experts on February 11, he displayed "a mentality extraordinarily free of preconceived prejudices, inherited or otherwise... almost as though he had thrown aside the normal prejudices that beset human mentality," State Department Soviet expert Charles Bohlen said. "He saw Russia as a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up."
Kennedy friend and British economist Lady Barbara Ward Jackson urged Kennedy to mount "a sustained offensive on current cliches" in a speech she proposed he give before the United Nations General a.s.sembly. "The animosities, the festering fears of the Cold War so cloud our minds and our actions that we no longer see reality save through the distorting mirrors of malevolent ill-will." She paraphrased W. H. Auden, "We must love each other or/ We must die." Kennedy, who had promised to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hards.h.i.+p," was sympathetic to Jackson's appeal. But he saw no way to go before the U.N., or, more to the point, before the country's many cold warriors, and quote Auden about the choice between love and death. Perhaps he might eventually "find another forum," he told Jackson, "in which to present your thoughts, which are important."
NUCLEAR WAR was Kennedy's "greatest nightmare," Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, "I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election." He had a.s.sured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would "help you to proceed-unhindered by thoughts of the coming election-with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace." was Kennedy's "greatest nightmare," Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, "I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election." He had a.s.sured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would "help you to proceed-unhindered by thoughts of the coming election-with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace."
Once in office, Kennedy made clear to his subordinates that he was eager to sign a test ban treaty. He saw it as "in the overall interest of the national security of the United States to make a renewed and vigorous attempt to negotiate a test ban agreement." But the Soviets, whose nuclear inferiority to the United States made them reluctant to conclude a treaty, showed little inclination in talks at Geneva to sustain a current informal ban on testing. The Soviet "stand at Geneva," Kennedy told British prime minister Harold Macmillan in April, "raises the question of whether to break off the talks and under what conditions. There is a great deal of pressure here to renew tests," Kennedy added. Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric remembers that "every approach toward arms control" agitated opposition among some in the White House, the State Department, and especially the military. "They felt this was as much of a foe or a threat as the Soviet Union or Red China. They had just a built-in, negative... knee-jerk reaction to anything like this." If it became necessary for the United States to resume testing, JFK told West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it must be clear to the world that this was done "only in the light of our national responsibility."
However strong his determination to avoid a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, Kennedy could not rule out the possibility. The Soviet acquisition of a nuclear a.r.s.enal had provoked American military planners into advocacy of a ma.s.sive first-strike stockpile, or what they called "a war-fighting capability over a finite deterrent [or] (retaliatory) posture." They believed that the more p.r.o.nounced the United States' nuclear advantage over Moscow was, the more likely it would be "to stem Soviet cold war advances." But such a strategy would also mean an arms race, which seemed likely to heighten the danger of a war. It was a miserable contradiction from which Kennedy was never able entirely to escape.
The possibility, under "command control" rules he had inherited from Eisenhower, that "a subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative" added to JFK's worries about the inadvertent outbreak of a nuclear conflict. When Henry Brandon asked Strategic Air commander General Thomas Powers "whether he was not worried by the fearful power he had at his fingertips, he said he was more worried by the civilian control over him and equally frightened by both." Gilpatric said later, "We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the President really had over the use of this great a.r.s.enal of [thousands of] nuclear weapons." A February 15 report from a subcommittee of the Atomic Energy Commission reviewing NATO procedures deepened Kennedy's concern that accidental use of a nuclear weapon "might trigger a world war." In response, Kennedy tried to guard against a mishap and to a.s.sure himself of exclusive control over the nuclear option. But even with this greater authority, the conviction of the military chiefs that in any Soviet-American war we would have to resort to nuclear force made Kennedy feel that he might be pressured into using these weapons against his better judgment.
Perhaps not surprisingly, from the start of his term, Kennedy felt little rapport with the military chiefs. His World War II memories of uninspiring commanders with poor judgment, military miscalculations in the Korean fighting, and the Eisenhower policy of ma.s.sive retaliation made him distrustful of the U.S. defense establishment. Specifically, neither Kennedy nor McNamara saw Lyman Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, taking "the lead in bringing the military along to a new doctrine such as flexible response," the freedom to choose from a wider array of military responses in a conflict with the Soviet Union. And of course Burke had already fallen out of favor.
Kennedy's greatest tensions, however, were with NATO commander General Lauris Norstad and air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay. Harvard's dean of faculty McGeorge Bundy, whom Kennedy had brought to Was.h.i.+ngton as national security adviser, told the president that Norstad "is a nuclear war man," meaning that he believed any war with the Soviet Union would quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange if the United States were to have any hope of emerging victorious. Bundy urged Kennedy to make clear to Norstad that "you are in charge and that your views will govern.... If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss." are in charge and that your views will govern.... If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss."
LeMay was even more of a problem. In charge of firebombings on j.a.pan during World War II and the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, he enjoyed widespread public support. A gruff, cigar-chewing, outspoken advocate of air power who wanted to bomb enemies back to the Stone Age and complained of America's phobia about nuclear weapons, he became the model for the air force general Jack D. Ripper in the 1963 movie Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove. After McNamara opposed some of his demands for additional air forces, LeMay privately complained, "Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?" Gilpatric described LeMay as "unreconstructable." Every time the president "had to see LeMay," Gilpatric said, "he ended up in a fit. I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay because, you know, LeMay couldn't listen or wouldn't take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered... outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the president never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay.... And he had to sit there. I saw the president right afterwards. He was just choleric. He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got... " Gilpatric said without concluding the sentence.
Paul Nitze, who had worked with Acheson at the State Department on defense issues and had become McNamara's a.s.sistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, believed that Kennedy "was always troubled with... how do you obtain military advice; how do you check into it; how do you have an independent view as to its accuracy and relevance?" Kennedy saw the decision to make the "transition from the use of conventional weapons to nuclear weapons" in a conflict as his responsibility, not that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I don't think he ever really satisfied himself that he had found a way to get the best possible military help on such matters," Nitze said.
"The plan that he inherited," Rostow said, "was, 'Mr. President, you just tell us to go to nuclear war, and we'll deal with the rest.' And the plan called for devastating, indiscriminately, China, Russia, Eastern Europe-it was an orgiastic, Wagnerian plan, and he was determined, from that moment, to get the plan changed so he would have total control of it." It was clear to Kennedy that an all-out nuclear conflict would be "a truly monstrous event in the U.S.-let alone in world history." Despite the understanding that the United States had a large advantage over the Soviets in nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them, it was a.s.sumed that a nuclear exchange would bring "virtual incineration" to all of Europe and the United States. Kennedy staff members attending the briefing by the Joint Chiefs remembered how tense the president was listening to Lemnitzer, who used thirty-eight flip charts sitting on easels to describe targets, the deployment of forces, and the number of weapons available to strike the enemy. There could be no half measures once the war plan was set in motion, Lemnitzer explained. Even if the United States faced altered conditions than those antic.i.p.ated, he warned that any "rapid rework of the plan" would entail "grave risks." Kennedy sat tapping his front teeth with his thumb and running his hand through his hair, indications to those who knew him well of his irritation with what was being said. Lemnitzer's performance made him "furious." As he left the room, he said to Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race."
The pressure wasn't just from the Pentagon; America's European allies also expected Kennedy to answer a Soviet attack with nuclear weapons. But the president preferred a strategy of "flexible response" to the current plan of "ma.s.sive retaliation." He told Adenauer that he was "not so happy... with having ballistic missiles driven all over Europe. Too many hazards were involved in this enterprise and this aspect therefore required careful examination." In order to raise "the threshold for the use of atomic weapons," Kennedy proposed that the United States and NATO increase their conventional armies to levels that could "stop Soviet forces now stationed in Eastern Germany." Because the West Germans feared that "these plans might lessen the prospects for the use of atomic weapons in defense of Western Germany," Kennedy "made it clear" that the United States was as much committed to their use as before. Kennedy would have been happier if he could have disavowed a first-strike strategy, Nitze said, but without a continuing commitment to "first strike," Was.h.i.+ngton feared Franco-German abandonment of NATO, a negotiated compromise with the Soviet Union, and the neutralization of Europe, which would "have left the United States alone to face the whole communist problem." Nevertheless, Kennedy urged McNamara publicly to "'repeat to the point of boredom' that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the U.S. or the allies; that we were not contemplating preventive war; and the Europeans should not believe that by firing off their own nuclear weapons they would drag the United States into a war, that we would withdraw our commitment to NATO first."
For all his anxiety about nuclear war, Kennedy, supported by McNamara, kept LeMay in place. It would be good to have a Curtis LeMay commanding U.S. air forces if the country ever went to war, Kennedy explained. And the reality of Soviet weakness, which became increasingly clear to Kennedy and American military planners in the first months of 1961, did not deter the president and the Pentagon from an expansion of nuclear weapons. Instead, Kennedy feared that Khrushchev still might push the United States into an all-out conflict and he saw no alternative to expanded preparedness. "That son of a b.i.t.c.h Khrushchev," he told Rostow, "he won't stop until we actually take a step that might lead to nuclear war.... There's no way you can talk that fella into stopping, until you take some really credible step, which opens up that range of possibilities" for improved relations. A meeting with Khrushchev in June only confirmed JFK's view that he might have to fight a nuclear war and that the United States had no choice but to continue building its a.r.s.enal and even consider a first strike as an option against an aggressive Soviet Union. "I never met a man like this," Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. "[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, 'So what?' My impression was that he just didn't give a d.a.m.n if it came to that."
At the end of March 1961, Kennedy announced increases in the defense budget that would expand the number of invulnerable Polaris submarines from 6 to 29 and their nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Soviet targets from 96 to 464. He also ordered a doubling of total Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles from 300 to 600 and a 50 percent increase in B-52 strategic bombers on fifteen-minute ground alert.
In Kennedy's judgment, there was nothing strictly rational about the expansion of forces. Would it deter the Soviet Union from aggression? How much of a buildup was necessary to keep Moscow in check? Could Khrushchev's aggressive Cold War rhetoric be ignored or discounted? Could the Soviets, despite their inferiority to the United States in missile, bomber, and submarine forces, get some of their nuclear bombs past U.S. defenses? How much of a defense expansion would be enough to satisfy the Congress, the public, and the press that America was safe from a devastating attack? When a reporter at a news conference repeated "charges that we have not adequately maintained the strength or credibility of our nuclear deterrent and that we also have not fully convinced the leaders of the Soviet Union that we are determined to meet force with force," Kennedy systematically described his administration's defense increases. Afterward, his frustration with the pressure to meet the Soviet threat with ever stronger words and actions registered on Pierre Salinger. "They don't get it," Kennedy said to him about critics of his defense policies. Khrushchev's bl.u.s.ter combined with U.S. fears left Kennedy unable to stand down from the maddening arms race.
Kennedy biographer Herbert S. Parmet said that JFK "would have been profoundly disturbed to know that so many historians would later stress that his contribution to human existence was the extension of the cold war and the escalation of the arms race." Such distress would have been understandable. Despite irresistible pressures to add to American military power and overreact to communist "dangers," Kennedy ensured that a decision for nuclear war would be his alone, which meant that he could avert an unprecedented disaster for all humankind-which he did. His management of one international crisis after another to avert what he described as "the ultimate failure" was the greatest overall achievement of his presidency.
AS A SENATOR who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was "brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder." Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country's richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The a.s.sa.s.sination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to a.s.sert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba's followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, "I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step." He felt "it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality." He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to "ma.s.sive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring." As he said repeatedly in private, "The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart." who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was "brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder." Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country's richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The a.s.sa.s.sination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to a.s.sert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba's followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, "I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step." He felt "it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality." He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to "ma.s.sive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring." As he said repeatedly in private, "The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart."
At every turn, Kennedy emphasized American backing for the U.N. as the only appropriate agency for ending the civil strife, and he sent messages to Khrushchev urging that the Congo not become an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. But a conversation between Amba.s.sador Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev in March gave little hope that Moscow would show any give on the Congo. Khrushchev claimed that U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold had connived to kill Lumumba, and that the U.N. was being "used to oppress peoples and help colonialists retain colonies." Thompson's reply that it would be "wise to keep [the] cold war out of Africa" moved Khrushchev to ask "how socialist states could support a policy of a.s.sistance to those who betray their own people." He promised that the
Although, as events made clear in the coming months, Khrushchev was more interested in scoring propaganda points with Africans than in risking a Soviet-American confrontation, Kennedy, taking Khrushchev at his word, sent Johnson to Africa to counter Soviet initiatives. Johnson left a strong impression on everyone he met in Senegal, an East-West battleground. He insisted that a seven-foot bed, a special showerhead that emitted a needlepoint spray, cases of Cutty Sark, and boxes of ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with L.B.J. inscribed on them accompany him to Dakar. Against the advice of the amba.s.sador, who urged him to shun contact with villagers he described as dirty and diseased, Johnson visited a fis.h.i.+ng village, where he handed out pens and lighters, shook hands with everyone, including some fingerless lepers, and urged the uncomprehending natives to be like Texans, who had increased their annual income tenfold in forty years. The contrast with what Johnson called "Cadillac diplomacy," the failure of U.S. representatives to get out of their limos and meet the people, was, however much professional foreign service officers saw it as cornball diplomacy, just what Kennedy wanted from his vice president.
Kennedy had seen the Khrushchev speech in January promising to support "wars of liberation or popular uprisings" of "colonial peoples against their oppressors" as a direct challenge to Western influence in developing areas. Kennedy, who took the speech "as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions," read it "time and again-in his office, at Cabinet meetings, at dinners with friends, alone. At times he read it aloud and urged his colleagues to comment." Perhaps with the speech in mind, he ordered the Defense Department to place "more emphasis on the development of counter-guerrilla forces." Because this was not a high priority with the army and because he believed it would encourage views of his administration as receptive to fresh thinking about military threats, he suggested that a paper by General Edward Lansdale on special forces be converted into a popular magazine article. Lansdale's reputation for successful counterinsurgency in the Philippines against communist subversion seemed likely to excite public interest in antiguerrilla warfare. But Kennedy saw more at work here than good public relations. He believed that training and deploying such forces would prove to be a valuable tool in "the subterranean" or "twilight" war with communism. He instructed the National Security Council to distribute Lansdale's study to the CIA and to U.S. amba.s.sadors in Africa and Asia. He also endorsed a $19 million allocation to support a three-thousand-man special forces group, which promised to give the United States "a counter-guerrilla capability" in meeting insurgencies in future limited wars. The Green Berets, a name and appearance that set these special forces apart from regular army troops, would become a receptacle for fantasies and illusions about America's ability to overcome threats in physically and politically inhospitable places around the world. Although Kennedy a.s.sumed that the effectiveness of these units would largely depend on joining their military actions to backing for indigenous progressive reforms, he could not entirely rein in wishful thinking about how much counterinsurgency units or "freedom fighters" alone could achieve at relatively small cost in blood and treasure.
The first test in the contest for the "periphery," as Kennedy had feared, came in Laos. He was not happy about it. No foreign policy issue commanded as much attention during the first two months of his presidency as this tiny, impoverished, landlocked country's civil war. "It is, I think, important for all Americans to understand this difficult and potentially dangerous problem," he declared at a March 23 news conference. He explained that during his conversation with Eisenhower on January 19, "we spent more time on this hard matter than on any other thing." A constant stream of questions about Laos had come up at press conferences, and numerous private discussions with American military and diplomatic officials paralleled exchanges with British and French leaders about how to prevent a communist takeover, which could make the country a staging ground for a.s.saults on South Vietnam and Thailand. On March 21, the New York Times New York Times carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration's determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O'Donnell, "I don't think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I'm embarked on a military venture" would jeopardize the future of the administration. carried a front-page story based on conversations with high government officials about the administration's determination to keep Laos out of the Soviet orbit. But as Kennedy told Kenny O'Donnell, "I don't think there are probably 25 people [in the United States] other than us in the room who know where it is. And for me to explain how in my first month in office that I'm embarked on a military venture" would jeopardize the future of the administration.
Winthrop Brown, the U.S. amba.s.sador to Laos, told Kennedy during a meeting at the White House on February 3 that it was unrealistic to expect that "any satisfactory solution of the problem in the country could be found by purely military means." Brown believed that "Laos was hopeless... a cla.s.sic example of a political and economic vacuum. It had no national ident.i.ty. It was just a series of lines drawn on a map." The people were "charming, indolent, enchanting... but they're just not very vigorous, nor are they very numerous, nor are they very well organized." Galbraith, who had become JFK's amba.s.sador to India and was helping to bring the Indians into a diplomatic solution to the Laos conflict, wrote from New Delhi, "These jungle regimes, where the writ of government runs only as far as the airport, are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead.... The rulers do not control or particularly influence their own people.... As a military ally the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I." a.s.sistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman told Brown, "We must never face the President with the choice of abandoning Laos or sending in troops."
Publicly Kennedy made loud noises about preserving Laos's independence. He stated at the March 23 news conference, "Laos is far away from America, but the world is small.... The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all." Shortly after, he privately told Chalmers Roberts of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He "said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner." At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard s.h.i.+ps in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that "the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means." that military intervention in Laos was a realistic option. He "said that if he had to go in and if it meant he would be around only one term, nonetheless he would do it. All that was said in a highly convincing manner." At the end of March, Kennedy sent five hundred U.S. Marines to the Thai-Lao border and others were deployed aboard s.h.i.+ps in the South China Sea. Llewellyn Thompson advised Khrushchev that "the United States as a great power could not stand by if forces hostile to the United States sought to take over the country by military means."
It was all a bluff. At the same time Kennedy was talking a hard line, he asked Harold Macmillan to convince Eisenhower that military intervention in Laos was a poor idea. Eisenhower's opinion would be influential in how the public gauged Kennedy's Laos policy, and Macmillan was happy to help. We all feel strongly about keeping Laos out of communist hands, Macmillan wrote Ike. "But I need not tell you what a bad country this is for military operations.... President Kennedy is under considerable pressure about 'appeas.e.m.e.nt' in Laos." Macmillan said that he understood the impulse not to forget the lessons of history, but he believed it a poor idea to "become involved in an open-ended commitment on this dangerous and unprofitable terrain. So I would hope that in anything which you felt it necessary to say about Laos you would not encourage those who think that a military solution in Laos is the only way of stopping the Communists in that area."
Happily for Kennedy, neither Eisenhower nor the Russians saw fighting in Laos as a good idea. Despite urging Kennedy in their second transition meeting not to let Laos fall under communist control, Ike told journalist Earl Mazo after JFK's March press conference, "That boy doesn't know what the h.e.l.l he's doing. He doesn't even know where Laos is. You mean have Americans fight in that G.o.dd.a.m.ned place?" The Soviets, likewise, had no appet.i.te for a punis.h.i.+ng conflict in so remote a place, especially since it might provoke Chinese intervention and a wider conflict between the United States and China.
But the Russians had little control over events, as renewed fighting at the end of April in a civil war demonstrated. On April 26, Amba.s.sador Brown reported the likelihood that communist forces would gain control in Laos unless the president authorized the use of U.S. air and land forces. At a National Security Council meeting the next day, members of the Joint Chiefs urged just that. Kennedy wanted to know what they intended if such an operation failed. They answered, "You start using atomic weapons!" Lemnitzer promised that "if we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory." Someone suggested that the president might want to ask the general "what he means by victory." Kennedy, who had been "glumly rubbing his upper molar, only grunted and ended the meeting." He saw Lemnitzer's guarantee as absurd: "Since he couldn't think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory," Kennedy said.
Kennedy, his princ.i.p.al advisers, and congressional leaders vetoed the military's recommendations. Although he left open the possibility that he might later use force in Laos, Kennedy accepted the "general agreement among his advisers that such a conflict would be unjustified, even if the loss of Laos must be accepted." Democratic and Republican congressional leaders unanimously confirmed the feeling that despite concern about the rest of Southeast Asia, it would be unwise to become a party to the Laotian civil war. When Kennedy visited Douglas MacArthur at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York the weekend of this crisis, the general told him, "It would be a mistake to fight in Laos. It would suit the Chinese Communists."
The Laotian crisis extended into the fall of 1961, when the exhausted opponents agreed to establish a neutral coalition government. Although critics complained about Kennedy's irresolute response to a communist threat, more compelling concerns pushed Laos aside and the issue temporarily "dribbled to a conclusion." One of these more urgent concerns was South Vietnam. In the early fifties, Kennedy had seen the area as a testing ground for innovative U.S. policies toward a colony struggling to establish autonomy without communist control. By the late fifties, however, he had s.h.i.+fted his attention to Algeria as the latest Soviet-American battleground for Third World influence. But South Vietnam, where an insurgency supported by North Vietnam's communist regime threatened Diem's pro-Western government, reclaimed Kennedy's attention after he became president.
In January, Lansdale, who had made a fact-finding mission to Vietnam for the Pentagon, described the country as in "critical condition and... a combat area of the cold war... needing emergency treatment." In a meeting with Lansdale and other national security advisers, Kennedy told the general that his report "for the first time, gave him a sense of the danger and urgency of the problem." It is "the worst one we've got," Kennedy told Rostow about Vietnam. Commitments by Eisenhower of military supplies, financial aid, and some six hundred military advisers had made the United States an interested party in Vietnam's six-year-old civil war. To deal with the mounting danger, Kennedy authorized funding for an increase of twenty thousand additional South Vietnamese troops and the creation of a task force to help avert a South Vietnamese collapse.
The Laotian crisis added to worries about Vietnam. A possible communist victory in Laos threatened cross-border attacks on "the entire western flank of South Vietnam." To bolster the South Vietnamese, Kennedy decided to send Johnson on "a special fact-finding mission to Asia." When asked whether he was "prepared to send American forces into South Viet-Nam if that became necessary to prevent Communist domination," Kennedy evaded the question. Sending troops, he said, "is a matter still under consideration." Although he had great doubts about making such a commitment, it made sense to keep the communists guessing as to what the United States might do if Vietnam seemed about to collapse. In the meantime, as he had done in Africa, Johnson could show the flag and quiet fears that Kennedy's refusal to send troops into Laos implied that he was abandoning Southeast Asia.
Johnson's trip was an exercise in high-visibility diplomacy. (After his Asian swing, one U.S. diplomat said, "Saigon, Manila, Taipei, and Bangkok will never be the same.") The six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch Texan, who had made a reputation as a larger-than-life figure in the Senate, was perfectly suited to the job. On his way into Saigon from the airport, he stopped the motorcade several times to shake hands with people in the crowds lining the roads. As in Africa, he handed out pens, cigarette lighters, and gold-and-white pa.s.ses to the U.S. Senate gallery. "Get your mamma and daddy to bring you to the Senate and Congress to see how the government works," he told bewildered children. Trying to draw connections to British resistance to n.a.z.i tyranny in World War II, Johnson made an arm-waving speech in downtown Saigon comparing South Vietnamese president Diem to Winston Churchill. The campaign continued the next day, when Johnson staged a photo op by chasing a bunch of Texas steer around a ranch. He then carried American informality to something of a new high-or low-by changing clothes before a group of foreign correspondents invited to a press conference in his hotel room.
Part of Johnson's mission was to get out and meet the people and sell them on the virtues of American democracy and free enterprise. But there was also the more important business of bolstering a shaky South Vietnamese government. A letter Johnson carried from Kennedy to Diem promised funds for an additional twenty thousand troops the South Vietnamese army wanted and proposed collaboration in "a series of joint, mutually supporting actions in the military, political, economic and other fields" to counter communist aggression. Johnson's visit rea.s.sured him, Diem wrote Kennedy, that America would continue to support Vietnam, and he expressed particular pleasure at being asked by the vice president for ideas on how to meet the crisis. "We have not become accustomed to being asked for our own views as to our needs," Diem wrote.
Diem's satisfaction with Johnson's visit partly rested on his understanding that he had won a convert to his cause. "I cannot stress too strongly the extreme importance of following up this mission with other measures, other actions, and other efforts," LBJ told Kennedy on his return. "The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and determination," Johnson advised, "... or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own sh.o.r.es." Though Johnson did not urge the dispatch of combat troops, only military advisers, his rhetoric was apocalyptic: "The basic decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a 'Fortress America' concept."
Kennedy had other advice that challenged Johnson's evangelism and encouraged skepticism about larger commitments to a repressive Saigon government and a region of questionable importance to U.S. national security. From India, Galbraith, echoing his comments about Laos, warned JFK that spending "our billions in these distant jungles" would be of no value to the United States and of no harm to the Soviets. He wondered "what is so important about this real estate in the s.p.a.ce age" and urged any kind of political settlement as preferable to military involvement. He conceded that this was a choice between "the disastrous and the unpalatable." But he wondered "if those who talk in terms of a ten-year war really know what they are saying in terms of American att.i.tudes."
IN THE FIRST MONTHS of his term, Kennedy's focus on Laos, Vietnam, and the Congo paled alongside that on Cuba. of his term, Kennedy's focus on Laos, Vietnam, and the Congo paled alongside that on Cuba. Look Look journalist Laura Berquist Knebel observed that, whenever she saw Kennedy, he "nearly always" wanted to discuss Cuba, "his 'albatross,' as he used to call it." During the 1960 campaign, he had already learned how frustrating Cuba could be as an issue. In 1958-59, he had been sympathetic to Castro's revolution against the corrupt and repressive Batista regime. By 1960, however, he shared the growing perception in the United States that Castro, who may have begun as a "utopian socialist," had abandoned his romantic idealism for an alliance with Cuban communists who were likely to help solidify his hold on power. The new regime in Havana seemed h.e.l.l-bent on making the U.S. into a whipping boy and using widespread anti-American sentiment in Cuba to tie itself to Moscow and Peking. After facing attacks by liberals and Nixon during the presidential campaign for favoring an invasion by Cuban exiles, Kennedy had accepted Acheson's advice and conspicuously avoided further comments on Cuba. journalist Laura Berquist Knebel observed that, whenever she saw Kennedy, he "nearly always" wanted to discuss Cuba, "his 'albatross,' as he used to call it." During the 1960 campaign, he had already learned how frustrating Cuba could be as an issue. In 1958-59, he had been sympathetic to Castro's revolution against the corrupt and repressive Batista regime. By 1960, however, he shared the growing perception in the United States that Castro, who may have begun as a "utopian socialist," had abandoned his romantic idealism for an alliance with Cuban communists who were likely to help solidify his hold on power. The new regime in Havana seemed h.e.l.l-bent on making the U.S. into a whipping boy and using widespread anti-American sentiment in Cuba to tie itself to Moscow and Peking. After facing attacks by liberals and Nixon during the presidential campaign for favoring an invasion by Cuban exiles, Kennedy had accepted Acheson's advice and conspicuously avoided further comments on Cuba.
In early January 1961, Kennedy tried to stay above the battle, refusing to comment "either way" on Eisenhower's decision to break relations with Cuba. He did not want to rule out the possibility of "a rapprochement" with Castro. He asked John Sharon, a Stevenson adviser on foreign policy, what he thought of the idea. He also questioned him about the Eisenhower economic sanctions: Were they working? Would the United States gain any advantage by ending them? A week before he took office, Kennedy had received a report Adlai Stevenson pa.s.sed along from Chicago union leader Sidney Lens, who had just returned from Cuba. It confirmed the loss of freedoms under Castro but emphasized that the country largely supported him and that reporting by American journalists there was unreliable: They were "culling the negative and not reporting the positive." In addition, Lens said that the U.S. embargo was not effective because other countries were filling the vacuum. Lens also warned that Castro spies had infiltrated the anti-Castro groups in America and were informing Castro about "their plans and conspiracies." At the same time, Allen Dulles briefed the president-elect on a CIA plan to use Cuban exiles being trained in Guatemala to infiltrate Cuba and topple Castro. Without endorsing anything, Kennedy instructed Dulles to go ahead with the planning.
Two days after he became president, the CIA had begun urging Kennedy to move against Cuba. At a January 22 meeting of Rusk, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, Lemnitzer, Dulles, and other national security and foreign policy experts, Dulles emphasized that the U.S. had only two months "before something would have to be done about" the Cubans being trained in Guatemala. The urgency rested partly on the belief that Castro had plans to promote communism in Latin America, and that he "already had power among the people in the Caribbean countries and elsewhere, particularly in Venezuela and Colombia." Because the CIA planners were now considering direct U.S. intervention, Rusk "commented on the enormous implications of putting U.S. forces ash.o.r.e in Cuba and said we should consider everything short of this, including rough stuff." He feared "we might be confronted by serious uprisings all over Latin America if U.S. forces were to go in." He also worried that such a move might trigger "Soviet and Chi[nese] Com[munist] moves in other parts of the world." The meeting ended with admonitions to consider "the so-called 'shelf-life' of the Cuban unit in Guatemala... [and] the question of how overtly the United States was prepared to show its hand."
During the last week in January, Kennedy held two White House meetings on Cuba in which Lemnitzer and CIA planners emphasized that time was working against the United States. Castro was tightening his hold on the island and seemed likely to make Cuba a permanent member of the communist bloc, "with disastrous consequences to the security of the Western Hemisphere." They proposed overthrowing Castro's government by secretly supporting an invasion and establis.h.i.+ng a provisional government, which the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS) could support. In response, Kennedy authorized continuing covert CIA operations, a revised CIA invasion plan, a prompt diplomatic initiative to isolate Castro, and a strenuous effort to keep these discussions secret. He also tried to ensure that no decision would be taken without his authority. "Have we determined what we are going to do about Cuba?" he asked McGeorge Bundy on February 6. "If there is a difference of opinion between the agencies I think they should be brought to my attention."
Differences among his advisers about the results of an invasion did not give Kennedy much a.s.surance. Bundy told him on February 8 that Defense and the CIA were much more optimistic than State about the outcome of an invasion. The military foresaw an invasion touching off "a full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly." And should there be no immediate uprising, the invaders could take refuge in the surrounding mountains and work toward the day when a critical ma.s.s of Cubans joined their cause. By contrast, State antic.i.p.ated "very grave" political consequences in the United Nations and Latin America. Troubled by State's predictions, Kennedy pressed advisers later that day "for alternatives to a full-fledged 'invasion,' supported by U.S. planes, s.h.i.+ps and supplies."
Kennedy now faced two unhappy choices. If he decided against an invasion, he would have to disarm the Cubans in Guatemala and risk public attacks from them for failing to implement Eisenhower's plans to combat communism in the hemisphere. The CIA offered Kennedy no alternative: They "doubted that other really satisfactory uses of the troops in Guatemala could be found." As O'Donnell later put it, a decision to sc.r.a.p the invasion would then make Kennedy look like an "appeaser of Castro. Eisenhower made a decision to overthrow Castro and you dropped it." Kennedy would have been faced with "a major political blowup."
But an invasion might also produce an international disaster. "However well disguised any action might be," Schlesinger told Kennedy, "it will be ascribed to the United States. The result would be a wave of ma.s.sive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States). Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative. At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions."
Kennedy shared Schlesinger's concern. He remembered his own rhetoric about liberty, justice, and self-determination, and understood that a visible U.S. role in an invasion would justifiably be seen as a betrayal of the progressive principles to which he was supposedly committed. But he was also attracted to the idea of toppling a Castro government that seemed to have little regard for the democratic freedoms promised by the Cuban revolution or for the autonomy of other Latin countries, which Castro hoped to destabilize and bring into the communist orbit. During the February 8 meeting, Kennedy asked CIA planners if the Cuban brigade could "be landed gradually and quietly and make its first major military efforts from the mountains-then taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees."
The CIA and the military gave him a.s.surances that the Cuban exiles could succeed without the partic.i.p.ation of U.S. forces. On March 10, the Joint Chiefs told McNamara that "the small invasion force" of some twelve to fifteen hundred men "could be expected to achieve initial success. Ultimate success will depend on the extent to which the initial a.s.sault serves as a catalyst for further action on the part of anti-Castro elements throughout Cuba." The Chiefs also predicted that the invading brigade "will have a good chance of sustaining itself indefinitely."
In turn, the CIA endorsed and went beyond the Chiefs' recommendations. At a meeting with JFK on the eleventh, Dulles and Richard Bissell, the agency's deputy director of plans, predicted that Castro would not fall without outside intervention and that within a matter of months his military power would reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion. "The Cuban paramilitary force if effectively used [in the next month] has a good chance of overthrowing Castro, or of causing a damaging civil war, without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action against Cuba." Kennedy declared himself "willing to take the chance of going ahead; [but]... he could not endorse a plan that put us in so openly, in view of the world situation. He directed the development of a plan where US a.s.sistance would be less obvious."
The CIA now a.s.sured the president that an invasion at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in the Zapata region some hundred miles west of Trinidad, the original site for the attack, would look less like a "small-scale World War II amphibious a.s.sault" and more like "an infiltration of guerrillas in support of an internal revolution." Although Dulles and Bissell warned that communist accusations of U.S. involvement were inevitable, they thought it preferable to the "certain risks" of demobilizing the Cuban exiles and returning them to the United States, where they seemed bound to launch ugly political attacks on the administration for losing its nerve.
Schlesinger urged Kennedy not to let the threat of political attacks push him into a questionable military operation. He saw "a slight danger of our being rushed into something because CIA has on its hands a band of people it doesn't quite know what to do with." Allen Dulles worried that if the CIA scotched the invasion and transferred the exiles from Guatemala to the United States, they would wander "'around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.' Obviously," Schlesinger concluded, "this is a genuine problem, but it can't be permitted to govern US policy."
CIA revisions of the invasion plan muted Schlesinger's warning. The CIA, Bundy told the president on March 15, "[has] done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials.... I have been a skeptic about Bissell's operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer."
Kennedy was still not so sure. At a meeting that day, he seemed to accept the essentials of the new plan but objected to a dawn landing, suggesting instead that "in order to make this appear as an inside guerrilla-type operation, the s.h.i.+ps should be clear of the area by dawn." Though the CIA returned the next day with the requested changes, which Kennedy approved, he "reserved the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing."
Although planning went forward for an early-April invasion, Kennedy remained hesitant, and even a little distraught about what to do. Admiral Burke deepened Kennedy's concerns on March 17, when he told him that "the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising." On March 28, Schlesinger asked JFK, "What do you think about this d.a.m.ned invasion?" Kennedy replied, "I think about it as little as possible," implying that it was too painful a subject with too many uncertainties for him to dwell on it. But of course it was at the center of his concerns. At yet other meetings about Cuba on March 28 and 29, Kennedy instructed the CIA to inform Cuban Brigade leaders that "U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to partic.i.p.ate in or support the invasion in any way." Kennedy also wanted to know whether the Cubans thought the invasion could succeed without U.S. military intervention and whether they wished to proceed under the limitations he had described. Brigade leaders responded that despite Kennedy's restrictions, they wished to go ahead.
The willingness of the Cubans, the CIA, and the U.S. military to proceed partly rested on their a.s.sumption that once the invasion began, Kennedy would have to use American forces if the attack seemed about to fail. One of the invaders remembers being told, "If you fail we will go in." The pressure for U.S. intervention was evident to Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, who opposed the plan. On March 31, he told Rusk, "If the operation appears to be a failure in its early stages, the pressure on us to sc.r.a.p our self-imposed restriction on direct American involvement will be difficult to resist." The danger, Bowles added, is that a failure would "greatly enhance Castro's prestige and strength." And Bowles saw the odds of a failure as two to one. He believed it better to sc.r.a.p the invasion and live with Castro's regime. The United States could then blockade any Soviet attempt to provide Cuba with large amounts of arms and use force, with likely OAS backing, against any overt Castro aggression in Latin America.
"No one," Schlesinger said later, "expected the invasion to galvanize the unarmed and the unorganized into rising against Castro at the moment of disembarkation. But the invasion plan, as understood by the President and the Joint Chiefs, did a.s.sume that the successful occupation of an enlarged beachhead area would rather soon incite organized uprisings by armed members of the Cuban resistance." Dulles and Bissell, Schlesinger also pointed out, "reinforced this impression" by claiming "that over 2,500 persons presently belonged to resistance organizations, that 20,000 more were sympathizers, and the Brigade, once established on the island, could expect the active support of, at the very least, a quarter of the Cuban people." A CIA paper of April 12 on "The Cuban Operation" estimated that "there are 7,000 insurgents responsive to some degree of control through agents with whom communications are currently active." The paper conceded that the individual groups were "small and very inadequately armed," but after the invasion the Agency hoped to supply them with air drops and make "every effort... to coordinate their operations with those of the landing parties."
In the days leading up to the attack on April 17, Kennedy continued to hear dissenting voices. At the end of March, he asked Dean Acheson what he thought of the proposal to invade Cuba. Acheson did not know there was one, and when Kennedy described it to him, Acheson voiced his skepticism in the form of a question: "Are you serious?" Kennedy replied, "I don't know if I'm serious or just... I'm giving it serious thought." When Acheson asked how many men Castro could put on the beach to meet the nearly 1,500 invaders and Kennedy answered 25,000, Acheson declared, "It doesn't take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren't as good as twenty-five thousand." Schlesinger peppered JFK with memos and private words about the injury to U.S. prestige and his presidency; Rusk lodged muted protests; and Fulbright, who as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had been briefed about the plan, spoke forcefully against U.S. hypocrisy in denouncing Soviet indifference to self-determination and planning an invasion of a country that was more a thorn in the flesh than a dagger in the heart.
These warnings reinforced Kennedy's own considerable doubts about so uncertain an operation. Allen Dulles countered them by saying, "Mr. President, I know you're doubtful about this. But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, 'I believe it will work.' And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala." Dulles emphasized that there was small risk of failure and no risk of U.S. involvement that would sacrifice American credibility when it came to professing regard for self-determination. Dulles clearly could not foresee later critical a.s.sessments by historians complaining that CIA operations overturning a popular government in Guatemala City solidified America's reputation as an imperial power hypocritically ignoring commitments to democracy for all peoples. Or, if he did foresee this, he found it easy enough to ignore when pressing the president about Cuba.
Other subtle psychological impulses were at work in persuading Kennedy to approve the invasion plan. One element was Kennedy's conception of military action. The possibility of a nuclear war was abhorrent to him, but the idea of patriotic men prepared to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their country was an entirely different matter. He saw no higher recommendation for someone than patriotic courage. Schlesinger remembered how much the commitment of the Cuban Brigade moved Kennedy. The invasion also had a romantic appeal for him, the quality of an adventure like that which had drawn Kennedy to command a PT boat. He and Bobby shared an affinity for Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and their urbane hero. Bissell, who did so much to sell Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, seemed to be something of a real-life Bond himself-an Ivy League graduate, socially sophisticated, tall and handsome, "civilized, responsible," "a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts." His description of himself as "a man-eating shark" delighted the Kennedys.
Despite Dulles's a.s.surances, the operation had the code name "b.u.mpy Road." Moreover, because Kennedy did not entirely trust Dulles's predictions, he kept emphasizing in the two weeks before the invasion that it needed to "appear as an internal uprising" and that "the United States would not become overtly engaged with Castro's armed forces." At a meeting on April 6, he insisted on "everything possible to make it appear to be a Cuban operation partly from within Cuba, but supported from without Cuba, the objective being to make it more plausible for US denial of a.s.sociation with the operation, although recognizing that we would be accused."
Newspaper stories about anti-Castro forces being trained by Americans made it all the harder to deny U.S. involvement. Castro "doesn't need agents over here," Kennedy said privately. "All he has to do is read our papers." At a news conference on April 12, with press stories predicting an imminent invasion, Kennedy was asked how far the United States would go "in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba." He replied, "There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This Government will do everything it can... to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba." Two days later, Kennedy ordered Bissell to "play down the magnitude of the invasion" and to reduce an initial air strike by Cuban pilots flying from outside Cuba from sixteen to eight planes.
On Sat.u.r.day, April 15, eight B-26s flying from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields. It was the beginning of what historian Theodore Draper later called "one of those rare events in history-a perfect failure." The bombers destroyed only five of Castro's three dozen combat planes and left the invaders, traveling by boats from Nicaragua, vulnerable to air attacks before and after landing on the beaches. To give credence to a CIA cover story, the Agency arranged to have a ninth bomber with Cuban air force markings and bullet holes fly from Nicaragua to Miami, where it made an "emergency" landing and the CIA-trained pilot declared himself a defector who had flown from Cuba.
Adlai Stevenson, who was not among those the White House believed needed to know the truth, sincerely denied U.S. involvement before a U.N. General a.s.sembly committee considering charges of United States "imperialist aggression" against Cuba. When the implausibility of the CIA cover plot quickly became evident, an outraged Stevenson complained to Rusk and Dulles on April 16, "I do not understand how we could let such an attack take place two days before debate on the Cuban issue in GA." Nor could he understand "why I could not have been warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us." He saw the "gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action."
A second planned air strike in support of the invasion on the morning of April 17 became a casualty of the CIA's unraveling ruse. Until the brigade could establish a beachhead and make a plausible case for the fiction that their B-26s were taking off from and landing on the beach, Kennedy, who was keeping a low profile at his retreat in Glen Ora, Virginia, grounded the exiles' sixteen planes. After giving the order by phone to Rusk, Kennedy paced "the room in evident concern," worried now that the whole operation might prove to be a fiasco. "Those with him at Glen Ora," Schlesinger recorded, "had rarely seen him so low." When Bundy pa.s.sed Kennedy's order along to Dulles's two princ.i.p.al deputies, they warned that "failure to make air strikes in the immediate beachhead area the first thing in the morning (D-Day) would clearly be disastrous." When informed of the president's decision, other CIA planners concluded that "it would probably mean the failure of the mission."
The failure, which became evident by Tuesday afternoon, April 18, resulted less from any decision about air attacks than from the flawed conception of the plan-illusions about an internal uprising and 1,400-plus invaders defeating Castro's much larger force. By noon of April 18, Mac Bundy told Kennedy that "the situation in Cuba is not a bit good. The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others.... 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." Kennedy had no intention of sending in a U.S. rescue mission, however bad the situation might be.
Kennedy's poise in the face of the Bay of Pigs defeat began to crumble during the afternoon and evening of April 18. Admiral Burke recalled that at an hour-and-a-half White House meeting with the president and his princ.i.p.al advisers, "n.o.body knew what to do.... They are in a real bad hole," Burke recorded, "because they had the h.e.l.l cut out of them.... I kept quiet because I didn't know the general score." Because Burke had been less demonstrative than Lemnitzer in his support of the invasion, Bobby Kennedy called him after the meeting to say that the president needed his advice and intended to bypa.s.s "the usual channels of responsibility in the management of the crisis." Burke had no answers, and Kennedy reconvened his advisers around midnight in the Cabinet Room. Coming from a White House reception for Congress dressed in white tie and tails, Kennedy reviewed the deteriorating situation for four hours without success. Bissell and Burke pressed for the use of carrier planes to shoot down Castro's aircraft and for a destroyer to sh.e.l.l Castro's tanks. But Kennedy stuck to his resolve not to intervene directly with U.S. forces. He later told Dave Powers that the Chiefs and the CIA "were sure I'd give in to them.... 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."
On Tuesday morning, Castro's air force had sunk the brigade's princ.i.p.al supply s.h.i.+p with ten days' ammunition and most of its