Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House
As Kennedy understood, Shriver’s forte was as a public servant helping the less advantaged at home and abroad. In time, he would become known for his commitment to a war on poverty, Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the Job Corps, Community Action, Legal Services for the Poor, and, in collaboration with Eunice, the Special Olympics, competitions for handicapped athletes. For the moment, however, it was the directorship of Kennedy’s Peace Corps that captured his passion for good deeds. His motto: To do well, do good.
When Kennedy signed an executive order on March 1 setting up the Peace Corps, he viewed the action as coming from a shared conviction with Shriver that it would make a difference not only in helping the less advantaged but also in advancing the national interest. Kennedy hoped the Peace Corps could become a model for how his administration would perform: a collaborative effort of the best minds and most well intentioned to create an innovative program serving both the world and the nation. By 1963, within two years of its founding, the Corps had enrolled 7,300 volunteers serving in forty-four countries.
The Alliance for Progress was a more focused expression of the Peace Corps ideal. With Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Kennedy was eager to counter and, if possible, abort his growing charismatic appeal in the Caribbean and across the Americas. During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had emphasized Eisenhower’s failure to address hemispheric dangers from the poverty and misery that gave rise to Castro and made several of the southern republics vulnerable to communism.
Kennedy’s inaugural speech partly focused on the region’s problems and his eagerness to address them. He announced, “To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge: to convert our good words into good deeds, in a new alliance for progress, to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”
The name Alliance for Progress and the promise of a new initiative in dealing with Latin America rested on the suggestions of several advisers, but especially that of Richard Goodwin. As Bobby Kennedy said later, the president credited Goodwin with the felicitous phrase that gave the Alliance its name.
Goodwin was a brilliant twenty-nine-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School. In 1959, after clerking for the storied Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, he became an aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. During the campaign, he made himself indispensable to Kennedy as a speechwriter and expert on Latin America. Goodwin was charged with describing Kennedy’s vision of how his administration would improve relations with hemisphere countries. After consulting the Washington Post’s expert on the region, who asked a Cuban émigré friend at the Pan American Union to suggest a compelling name for a program of reform, they came up with “Alliance for Progress.” Kennedy seized upon it as a worthy successor to FDR’s Good Neighbor policy.
When Kennedy announced his commitment to the program in a White House speech before Latin American representatives and congressional leaders on March 13, 1961, he had no illusion that his words would dispel doubts about U.S. motives. He knew that many in the hemisphere dismissed the Alliance as nothing more than anticommunist rhetoric, calling it the “Fidel Castro Plan.” But Kennedy hoped that in time it would produce results that could disarm some of the antagonism to the United States. Convinced that Goodwin had impressed himself on Latin American governments as a friend of the region, Kennedy made him deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. As important, Kennedy took satisfaction from the belief that his administration had a core of wise advisers who, as with the Peace Corps, were helping him launch productive experiments in developing countries, where communists were aggressively competing for influence.
The need for wise counsel in dealings with Latin America and Cuba in particular had become apparent to him well before his inauguration. When told on January 3 that Eisenhower was breaking relations with Havana, which was aligning itself with the Soviet Union, Kennedy refused to comment privately or publicly on the decision. Nor was he willing to respond to a New York Times story on January 10 that the United States was training an anti-Castro force of exiles at a Guatemalan base. Eager to focus on a constructive program for Latin America and uncertain about how to meet Fidel Castro’s challenge before hearing from national security advisers, Kennedy preserved his options by saying nothing.
At a pre-inauguration meeting on January 19, Eisenhower pressed Kennedy to adopt an aggressive policy toward Castro. He explained that he had authorized help to the “utmost” of anti-Castro Cubans and recommended an acceleration of support, declaring it essential to oust Castro before he could spread communism across the Caribbean.
Because promises of a new day in U.S. relations with Latin America implied a renewed commitment to self-determination for the southern republics, Kennedy was reluctant to adopt Eisenhower’s prescription of forcing Cuba to conform to U.S. designs. But the pressure to do something was intense. CIA director Allen Dulles, who had helped shape Eisenhower’s response to Castro, told Kennedy that Castro planned to export communism to other hemisphere countries, including Venezuela and Colombia, where they already had considerable power among the people.
Dulles’s knee-jerk anticommunism gave Kennedy second thoughts about keeping him as CIA director rather than choosing someone who might have been less doctrinaire about Castro and his threat to the United States. But national security considerations and domestic politics ruled out any reconsideration of Dulles’s tenure. Moreover, Dulles’s family and personal history, including a grandfather and older brother who were secretaries of state, and his experience in the State Department, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and in the CIA itself, where he had served as director for seven years, made him an authoritative figure whose views seemed perilous to ignore. A Dulles resignation with leaks about White House opposition to his judgments on Cuba would have created a political maelstrom. Although he masked his doubts about the new young president, Dulles wondered whether Kennedy had the commitment and courage to meet the Soviet challenge. Self-confident that he knew what Kennedy needed to do to meet Moscow’s and Havana’s threat, Dulles hoped that Kennedy would follow his lead.
In 1961, no one responsible for U.S. national security could imagine dismissing the Soviet menace to the Western Hemisphere. However strained the comparisons to communist success in winning control of Eastern Europe and China, and however much Joe McCarthy’s assault on perfectly innocent people in and out of government had been discredited, Soviet subversion and fear of being labeled soft on Reds constantly shadowed Kennedy and his new White House advisers.
Dean Rusk, the administration’s leading subordinate on foreign affairs, also held Dulles in high regard, and spoke about national security against a backdrop in which anticommunist hawks had brought down State Department professionals as having appeased Stalin at Yalta in 1945 and betrayed Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists. Rusk advised that ousting Castro represented a sensible defense of U.S. interests in the hemisphere, but he warned that an open use of U.S. power might trigger serious uprisings all over Latin America, which would undermine the credibility of Washington’s commitment to an Alliance for Progress. When the military chiefs weighed in with warnings about Castro’s strengthening hold on power in Havana and apparent determination to export communism to other Latin American countries, Kennedy accepted the need to act against him. But he doubted the wisdom of an overt U.S. sponsored invasion of the island by Cuban exiles. He saw no alternative leader who commanded Castro’s charismatic appeal in Cuba and across Latin America and could set up a representative government.
The great question then for Kennedy was not whether to strike against Castro, but how to mount an assault that brought him down without provoking accu
sations that the new government in Washington was no more than a traditional defender of selfish U.S. interests at the expense of Latin autonomy. A better question, which none of his advisers posed, was whether Castro represented a genuine threat to national security, and if not, was the administration principally responding to conservative political pressures that could throw Kennedy on the defensive and undermine his freedom to lead? The fact that no such questions were being asked spoke volumes about the mind-set that discouraged discussions of possibly more constructive actions. For all the rhetoric about a fresh approach to old problems, Kennedy and his team were as locked into conventional thinking as their predecessors.
The CIA and military chiefs saw Castro as the advance wave of Soviet control in the hemisphere. In response, they convinced themselves that the exiles could successfully invade Cuba and touch off a civil war that could be seen as an effort to replace Castro’s repressive regime with a democratic government more beholden to the Cuban people than to Washington’s dictates. But even if they were wrong about the effectiveness of an exile attack, they were convinced that Kennedy would be compelled to take military action if an invasion faltered and his new administration faced an embarrassing and perilous defeat. In short, the CIA and military believed it more important to bring down Castro with direct action, if necessary, whatever the cost to the new administration’s image, than to jeopardize U.S. control in the hemisphere.
By contrast, Rusk and subordinates in the State Department advised Kennedy that an invasion could produce very grave political consequences in the U.N. and Latin America. In response, Kennedy asked whether the exiles could “be landed gradually and quietly . . . taking shape as a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.” In short, was it possible to deceive the world about the sources of an anti-Castro attack? Even if they “landed gradually and quietly,” who would believe that they arrived in Cuba without U.S. support?
Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of operations and the heir apparent to Dulles, convinced Kennedy, or at least sold him on the fantasy, that it could be done by landing Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, an isolated inlet on Cuba’s south coast about a two-hour drive from Havana. But how could an armed force have found the wherewithal—the ships to transport them and the arms and munitions—to fight a pitched battle without the backing of the United States?
A Groton graduate and Yale Ph.D. in economics with a reputation for brilliance as an inventor of the U-2 spy plane, Bissell, with Dulles’s full backing, exuded confidence in his plans to oust Castro, which overcame Kennedy’s skepticism. Not only did Kennedy, Bobby, Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk mute concerns about the obvious criticism certain to come from complaints about U.S. complicity in making an invasion possible, but they also had to embrace the assumption that a force of fourteen hundred or so exiles could defeat a much larger army of defenders. When former secretary of state Dean Acheson asked Kennedy how many Cubans he could put on the beaches and how many Castro could bring up to oppose them, Acheson responded to Kennedy’s response by saying, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.”
Bissell advised Kennedy that if a battle on the beaches did not produce an immediate outburst of opposition to Castro across the island, the invaders would be able to escape into the nearby Escambray Mountains, where they could become a rallying force for a civil war that would eventually topple Castro. But Bissell neglected to tell Kennedy that to reach the mountains the invaders would have to cross some eighty miles of impassable swampland. Bissell didn’t think it would ever come to that; he assumed that Kennedy would feel compelled to use U.S. forces to ensure against such a setback. In fact, the CIA planners did not believe the operation could succeed without direct U.S. military intervention, which they didn’t tell Kennedy. Concerned, however, that Kennedy might just stand by his refusal to use American forces, Bissell arranged with American Mafia members, whose profitable gambling and prostitution operations in Cuba had been ended by the new regime, to try to assassinate Castro, transferring funds from the invasion budget to “pay the Mafia types.” It was a measure of the shadowy world in which the CIA and Bissell in particular operated that they could consort with shady characters to kill a foreign head of government and use secret budgetary resources to pay for such criminality.
In brief, having been tasked, in the bureaucratic jargon of the day, to take down Castro, Bissell, joined by others in the CIA and U.S. military, would not declare themselves incapable of finding a way; they had extraordinary power at their command and every confidence that they could overturn Castro’s government.
The emerging assumption of Kennedy and his White House advisers that they could successfully screen themselves off from domestic and foreign recriminations over a failed attack was more unrealistic than the conviction of U.S. officials that a stumbling attack would compel a White House response. Walt Rostow concluded that military planners as well as Bissell and others at the CIA believed administration passivity in the face of defeat was “inconceivable.” As Kennedy later told Dave Powers, the CIA and the military “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.” But not entirely: It was difficult for the CIA-military planners to imagine that a president ready to authorize an operation would not take the next logical step to ensure its success. Their motto could have been, You don’t get into a fight unless you intend to go all out to win.
Schlesinger, who had become a part of the conversation as an advocate of the president’s domestic and international standing, echoed Rusk’s concern that any invasion ascribed to the United States would produce “a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. . . . Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative,” he told Kennedy three weeks into his term. “At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world.” Schlesinger suggested a possible “black operation” that could lure Castro into “offensive action” that in turn would give Kennedy political cover for striking at his regime. Schlesinger was as intent on protecting Kennedy’s standing as on toppling Castro. It was an unconvincing response to Kennedy’s hope of finding some way to fool people about an invasion; but in the midst of the Cold War, when almost anything seemed acceptable as an answer to communist expansion, especially in defense of an admired new president whose administration could be put in early jeopardy, even the smartest of advisers succumbed to the lure of international skulduggery. Such an unworkable proposal, however, eroded Schlesinger’s credibility with Kennedy and diminished his prospects of remaining a part of the president’s inner circle.
Part of Schlesinger’s problem was that American military planners unsuccessfully cooked up a similar plan. During the Bay of Pigs attack in April, a U.S. ship with 164 troops aboard dressed in Castro army uniforms were ready to stage an assault on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo as a pretext for an American military intervention to assure the success of the exiles. The plan had to be scrapped, however, when a small advance element of the force ran into a Cuban patrol. While Kennedy had limited knowledge of the operation—assuring him of plausible deniability—he concluded that the military’s eagerness to end Castro’s government outran common sense.
During February and March, Kennedy’s advisers struggled to come up with a better plan for bringing down Castro. But on March 11, prodded by renewed warnings from the CIA and military chiefs that delay would increase the difficulty of toppling Castro’s government, Kennedy declared himself “willing to take the chance going ahead.” It was also clear to him that if he dropped the invasion plan, it would mean having the exiles wandering around the United States complaining that Kennedy had lacked the nerve to risk a Cuban attack. It would open him to conservative complaints that he had failed to defend the national security. He feared
accusations reminiscent of ones made against him during the campaign—that he was too inexperienced or, worse, that he was naïve about the Soviets and too ambivalent or wishy-washy to deal with the communist challenge.
As Bobby Kennedy said about his brother, “if he hadn’t gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed no courage. Eisenhower trained these people [the exiles]; it was Eisenhower’s plan; Eisenhower’s people all said it would succeed—and we turned it down.” Memories of McCarthy’s attacks on communist “fellow travelers” or liberal do-gooders too blind to communism’s peril and too weak to confront the Sino-Soviet threat influenced Kennedy’s decision to strike at Castro. The danger to Kennedy’s presidency was more internal than external—Castro, as Senator J. William Fulbright asserted, was “a thorn in the flesh” but “not a dagger in the heart.”
And so the safest political ground for Kennedy was to support a coup against Castro, but by means that masked America’s role. When the CIA reframed “the landing plan . . . to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials,” and Mac Bundy advised that they were close to a workable plan, Kennedy agreed to an invasion in mid-April. He tweaked the proposal by directing that it not be a “dawn landing . . . in order to make this appear as an inside-guerrilla-type operation.”
It was an act of self-deception for Kennedy and his advisers to believe that they could effectively disguise the U.S. part in an attack. How they could think that people everywhere would accept the fiction of U.S. passivity is a demonstration that even the smartest men can talk themselves into foolish actions they consider essential for their larger effectiveness. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”