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 principal advisers, “nobody knew what to do. . . . They are in a real bad hole,” Burke recorded, “because they had the hell 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 bypass “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 shell 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 principal supply ship with ten days’ ammunition and most of its communication equipment. By late that afternoon, Castro had pinned down the invaders with a force of twenty thousand men and Soviet tanks, while his arrest of twenty thousand potential opponents had guarded against the CIA-predicted internal uprising. As for plans of escape to the Escambray Mountains, an eighty-mile stretch of swampland between the beach and the mountains made this impossible. The outgunned and outmanned invaders faced dying on the beaches in a hopeless fight or surrender. Almost 1,200 of the 1,400-plus attackers gave up.
Kennedy at first tried to put the best possible face on the failed invasion, which was obviously a U.S.-sponsored operation. During lunch on Tuesday with Schlesinger and James Reston, he described the defeat as “an incident, not a disaster.” When asked about the blow to American prestige, he responded philosophically: “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power. No doubt we will be kicked in the can for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.” He felt he had made a mistake in keeping Dulles at the CIA. He did not know him and had been unable to assess his advice wisely. He saw the necessity for someone in the Agency “with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I know I will be getting the exact pitch.” He believed he would be better off with brother Bobby as director. “It is a hell of a way to learn things,” he said, “but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with CIA.”
A six-month secret review by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s inspector general, blamed the Bay of Pigs failure largely on the CIA and confirmed Kennedy’s conviction that both Dulles and Bissell would have to resign. “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving office,” Kennedy told Dulles. “But under our system it is you who must go.” Although Dulles and Bissell blamed the canceled air strikes for the defeat, Kirkpatrick concluded that this was not “the chief cause of failure”; a better-conceived plan would never have confronted Kennedy with such a decision. Kirkpatrick saw the root cause in the CIA’s poor “planning, organization, staffing and management.” More specifically, he blamed the false assumption that “the invasion would, like a deus ex machina, produce a shock . . . and trigger an uprising,” and the “multiple security leaks” that alerted Castro to the attack and allowed him to respond effectively. CIA officials “should have gone to the President and said frankly: ‘Here are the facts. The operation should be halted.’ . . . The Agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically.”
Although the invasion had become a fiasco that cost more than a hundred lives and deeply embarrassed Kennedy and the United States, the president was determined not to compound his problems by publicly denying a U.S. role. But while he responded philosophically to the defeat in public, he was anything but composed in private. On April 19, Jackie told Rose that Jack “was so upset all day & had practically been in tears. . . . She had never seen him so depressed except once at the time of his operation.” Dave Powers recalled that “within the privacy of his office, he made no effort to hide the distress and guilt he felt.” At the end of the late-night meeting on April 18, he went into the Oval Office with Salinger and O’Donnell, where in the middle of a sentence he broke off the conversation and walked out into the Rose Garden. He stayed there for almost an hour, walking on the wet grass and keeping his grief to himself. The next morning, Salinger found him crying in his bedroom. At a meeting shortly after with Albert Gore, Kennedy, with messed hair and tie askew, seemed “extremely bitter” about the defeat.
Wire service journalist Henry Raymont, who had been in Cuba during the invasion, had similar recollections of Kennedy’s distress. When Raymont returned to the United States after several days in a Cuban jail on charges of being a CIA agent before being expelled from the country, Kennedy invited him to the White House. Raymont was eager for the chance to chide the president for being so foolish as to think that an uprising would greet the invasion. Any high school student in Cuba or any diplomat in Havana could have told you otherwise, Raymont planned to tell Kennedy. But when he got into the Oval Office, he found the president so full of self-recrimination and so dejected at his short-sightedness that Raymont only gently reinforced what Kennedy already understood about the reasons for the failure.
Ill-timed health problems further rattled Kennedy. Immediately prior to and during the invasion on April 17 and 18, he struggled with “constant,” “acute diarrhea” and a urinary tract infection. His doctors treated him with increased amounts of antispasmodics, a puree diet, and penicillin, and scheduled him for a sigmoidoscopy.
For days after the defeat, Kennedy’s anguish and dejection were evident to people around him. At a cabinet meeting on April 20, Chester Bowles saw him as “quite shattered.” He would talk to himself and interrupt conversations with the non sequitur “How could I have been so stupid?” He felt responsible for the deaths of the valiant Cubans on the beaches. The episode even seemed to revive memories of his brother’s death in World War II. When he met at the White House to console the six-member Cuban Revolutionary Council, three of whom had lost sons in the invasion, Kennedy produced a photograph of Joe and explained, “I lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the war.” Kennedy described the meeting and the Bay of Pigs episode as “the worst experience of my life.” Weeks after the invasion, he told an aide one morning that he had not slept all night. “I was thinking about those poor guys in prison down in Cuba.”
Kennedy was not only angry at himself for having signed on to what in retrospect seemed like such an unworkable plan but also at the CIA and the Chiefs for having misled him. When newspapers began publishing stories blaming different officials except the Joint Chiefs for the debacle, Kennedy took note of the omission and to
ld his aides that none of the decision makers was free of blame. He named Fulbright as the only one in the clear but thought that he also would have backed the operation if he had been subjected to the same barrage of misleading information about “discontent in Cuba, morale of the free Cubans, rainy season, Russian MIGs and destroyers, impregnable beachhead, easy escape into the Escambray, [and] what else to do with these people.”
To Kennedy’s credit, he had no intention of publicly blaming anyone but himself. He authorized a White House statement saying, “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility. . . . The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” He understood the impulse of some to shun their role in a failed operation. He quoted “an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” This was his defeat: “I’m the responsible officer of the Government,” he told the press.
Later that year, when Time began trying to use the Cuban disaster against the administration to help Republicans in 1962, Kennedy wrote publisher Henry Luce that “the testimony of the participants in an ill-fated failure should be taken with a good deal of caution.” If Time aimed “to clear the Defense Department and the CIA from all responsibility,” Kennedy declared an article it had published “a success.” The same was true if Time intended to demonstrate “the incompetence of the men who played a part in this venture.” But if the article hoped “to set the record straight,” Kennedy sardonically described its success as “more limited.” For the time being, he believed it not a good idea to rehash the Bay of Pigs failure. “I have felt from the beginning,” he told Luce, “that it would not be in the public interest for the United States to take formal responsibility for the Cuban matter other than the personal responsibility which I have earlier assumed.”
He was more interested in understanding why he had allowed so unsuccessful an operation to go forward than in assessing blame. True, he had some impulse to think, “They made me do it”: The false hopes pressed on him by the CIA and the Chiefs had led him astray. But “How could I have been so stupid?” was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed, he later told Schlesinger, that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The experience taught him “never to rely on the experts.” He told Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
More immediate concerns than understanding what had gone wrong were repairing the damage to Kennedy’s prestige and deciding what to do next about Cuba. Initially, the Bay of Pigs seemed like a terrible blow to Kennedy’s reputation. When journalist Henry Brandon told Kennedy that Peter Lisagor had suggested he make fun of Castro, JFK replied, “Well, for the time being, they’re making fun of me.” The hope and excitement of the first ninety days had turned to cynical complaint, especially in western Europe, about an administration whose progressive, inspiring rhetoric seemed nothing more than a cover for old-fashioned imperialism. Worse yet, the fiasco raised Moscow’s standing in the Third World, strengthened Castro in Cuba, and increased his appeal across Latin America. There was also the concern that political opponents would use the failure to score points against the administration. “Not much time remains for the education of John F. Kennedy,” one hostile southern newspaper declared. “In his first great crisis, he bungled horribly.” Nixon and Republican congressional leaders privately agreed to hold their fire only until the crisis had passed, but the Republican Congressional Committee’s newsletter said, “It is doubtful if any President had gotten the United States in so much trouble in so short a time.”
The setback infuriated Jack and Bobby. Losing or even second best was not in their vocabulary, and except for the sinking of PT-109 and the vice presidential contest in 1956, Kennedy had (publicly) nothing but a string of high-profile victories. Even the loss of his boat had been less a defeat than an opportunity to become a hero who had rescued his crew.
Now, in response to the Bay of Pigs, no one was allowed to seem wiser than Kennedy or to overshadow him. When Mac Bundy toldKennedy that, like Fulbright, Schlesinger had been prescient, Kennedy not only played down Fulbright’s wisdom, he also dismissed Schlesinger’s advice as calculated to make him “look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” Bowles, whose warnings against the operation were leaked to the press, also earned the Kennedys’ wrath. “When he disagreed with the President,” Bobby said later, “he talked to the press. He was rather a weeper. He came up in a rather whiny voice and said that he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that he was against the Bay of Pigs.” Such self-righteousness was “resented.” When Bowles, substituting for Rusk, presented some State Department reflections at White House and National Security Council meetings on the impossibility of doing anything about Castro without another ill-advised U.S. invasion, Bobby, who had written his brother a memo urging decisive action on Cuba, “savagely” and “brutally” tore into Bowles. “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby shouted. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the President. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.” Richard Goodwin, who watched JFK calmly tapping his teeth with a pencil, suddenly realized that “Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the president’s own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation. I knew, even then, there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger, beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.”
But worries about Kennedy’s loss of political clout in the United States evaporated quickly, in part because he personally appealed to Nixon’s vanity and Eisenhower’s patriotism. He called Nixon, whose daughter told him, “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.” Although Kennedy rejected Nixon’s suggestion of direct intervention in Cuba, he flattered him by speaking candidly about politics and their shared interest in international relations. “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn’t it?” Kennedy asked, knowing that Nixon agreed. “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?” Nixon promised to support him to the hilt if Kennedy attacked Cuba.
With Eisenhower, whom he invited to lunch at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, Kennedy played the student being lectured by the master teacher gently reprimanding him on a poor performance. “There is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,” Eisenhower told him. “It must be a success.” Kennedy replied, “Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.” Eisenhower said that he was “glad to hear that.” Before the press, Eisenhower declared, “I am all in favor of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs.”
With Nixon, Eisenhower, and most other public officials backing Kennedy, a Gallup poll at the end of April showed him with an 83 percent approval rating. As reassuring, 61 percent of the public supported Kennedy’s “handling [of] the situation in Cuba,” and 65 percent specifically opposed sending “our armed forces into Cuba to help overthrow Castro.” But Kennedy could not put the failure aside. He dismissed the polls, saying, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
Because he believed that Castro now more than ever represented a threat
to U.S. interests in the hemisphere, and because defeat at the Bay of Pigs gave an added incentive to topple Castro’s regime, Kennedy gave a high priority to finding an effective policy for dealing with the Cuban problem. On April 21, he set up a task force to study “military and paramilitary, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activities which fall short of outright war.” The task force chairman was General Maxwell Taylor, a World War II hero whose 1959 book, The Uncertain Trumpet, had “reoriented our whole strategic thinking,” Bobby said. Taylor’s book affirmed JFK’s opposition to massive retaliation with nuclear weapons and support for counterinsurgency forces designed to fight guerrilla wars. Bobby, Burke, and Dulles (who did not leave office until later in the year) served with Taylor and agreed to “give special attention to the lessons that can be learned from recent events in Cuba.”
Though ostensibly a study group to work against a replay of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the committee quickly became a vehicle for suggesting ways to overturn Castro. At a National Security Council meeting on May 4, Kennedy and his advisers “agreed that U.S. policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro,” but that neither a blockade nor direct military action should be the means for doing it, though U.S. intervention should remain a possibility. The study group’s report of June 13 concluded, “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” He constituted “a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of weak Latin American republics.” But action against him needed to rest on a wide range of international and domestic considerations. With only 44 percent of the American public favoring aid to anti-Castro forces and 41 percent opposed, a program of clandestine subversion seemed the best of the planners’ options. Decisions on exactly how to proceed were left for the future.