Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

  At the same time, however, Kennedy remained determined to undermine Castro’s communist regime through all possible clandestine means. He signed on to proposals from Goodwin to quietly intensify economic pressure on Cuba. Economic warfare, including sabotage by anti-Castro paramilitary forces using American-supplied equipment to destroy industrial plants such as refineries, was to be a high priority. Propaganda aiming to convince Cubans and others in Latin America that Castro was sacrificing Cuba’s welfare to international communism was another weapon in the anti-Castro campaign. Kennedy told Frondizi that “[i]t was important to take action to discredit the Cuban revolution, identifying it as foreign, alien, and anti-Christian, and not permitting it to be considered as a revolution that was trying to improve the living conditions of the Cuban people.” He hoped that others in the hemisphere would understand that Castro aimed to subvert their governments and that the Cuban leader was as much a problem for them as for the United States.

  But White House discussions of how to bring Castro down made clear that President Kennedy and his brother were involved in score settling. Castro had bested them in the first clash and they were determined to see to his demise. They assigned responsibility for the project to a new set of advisers. Because McNamara, Bundy, Schlesinger, Sorensen, and Goodwin had fallen short on ousting Castro and his communist government, Kennedy turned to other planners and operatives. On November 3, he and Bobby set up Operation Mongoose, with Bobby at the head of the program. He expected “to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate,” Bobby recorded in some notes he made after initial discussion of the planning.

  While Bobby assumed the central role in directing the operations, his principal collaborators were Taylor, Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, and William Harvey at the CIA, with a supporting cast of approximately four hundred CIA agents located at agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and its Miami station. Bundy was made the chairman of an interagency group known as SGA, Special Group Augmented, which was charged with direction of Mongoose operations, but it was Lansdale and Harvey who were instructed to develop and implement anti-Castro actions. Although McNamara wouldn’t say until much later—“We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter”—his skepticism about investing too much in bringing down Castro had registered sufficiently on the president and Bobby to keep him in the background.

  Likewise, Bundy was no enthusiast about making Castro a prime foreign policy consideration. True, he kept on his desk only two boxes, one marked “President’s box” and the other “Cuba,” but he saw the focus on Castro as a case of overkill. He thought Bobby was trying to repair the damage to his brother’s standing from the Bay of Pigs and seemed to view the conflict with Castro as some kind of contest or game: “It was almost as simple as goddammit, we lost the first round, let’s win the second.” The Alliance for Progress was one counterweight to Castro’s threat and Mongoose was the covert side of the campaign.

  Whatever ambivalence McNamara and Bundy had about the attorney general as the lead operative in trying to bring down Castro and making this a leading foreign policy goal, they passively went along with the plans. The shadow of Bowles’s dissent and displacement hung over the new initiative. They weren’t going to challenge something the president and Bobby were so eager to do. But it didn’t quiet their doubts about whether the administration could actually affect Cuban affairs. McNamara and Bundy were happy to be largely shut out of the administration’s new anti-Castro campaign. They took their counsel from a National Intelligence Estimate. At the same time the White House set Operation Mongoose in motion, they read an NIE report saying that Castro had “sufficient popular support and repressive capabilities to cope with any internal threat likely to develop within the foreseeable future. . . . The bulk of the population” accepted the regime and “substantial numbers still support it with enthusiasm.” Moreover, Castro’s “capabilities for repression” were well ahead of “potentialities for active resistance.”

  Yet the administration or at least the Kennedys and their new team of advisers didn’t want to hear about limitations; they wanted to know what could be done. On November 22, Kennedy asked John McCone, the new director of the CIA, who had replaced Dulles, to give him “an immediate plan of action” to overthrow Castro, and Kennedy instructed his principal national security officials to make this a high, if not the highest, priority with a commitment of all available assets. Similarly, Bobby began hectoring Lansdale and Harvey to move aggressively against Castro. “Why can’t you get things cooking like 007?” Bobby asked Harvey, whom he and the president hoped might prove to be their James Bond. When Harvey described problems in training CIA agents for infiltration of the island, Bobby sarcastically proposed to take them to Hickory Hill, his home in rural Virginia, where he would train them himself. “And what will you train them in? Baby-sitting?” Harvey snidely asked Kennedy, who had seven children.

  Lansdale was the president’s and Bobby’s great hope for toppling Castro’s government through well-disguised skulduggery. There is not a single reference to Lansdale by Kennedy in any of his public comments, but the idea was to keep his involvement secret or at least as low profile as possible. Lansdale had a track record for brilliant secret operations, and if it were common knowledge that he had been tapped to fix his attention on Cuba, it would have revealed Kennedy’s obsession with Castro.

  The fifty-three-year-old Lansdale was an up-through-the-ranks commissioned officer with a background in advertising. Entering the service in 1943 at the age of thirty-five, he was an OSS operative in World War II. At the close of the war, he served in the Philippines, where he made a name for himself as a counterinsurgency adviser to Ramon Magsaysay, the Philippines’ national defense secretary. He helped the Philippine army build its intelligence services, and in collaboration with Magsaysay, he devised a successful strategy for combating the Hukbalahaps, the Philippines’ communist guerrillas, who were trying to overturn the pro-American government.

  Lansdale’s success in the Philippines brought him to Saigon as the CIA station chief, where he hoped to defeat Viet Cong communist guerrillas with the same counterinsurgency strategy: By contrast with advocates of repressive military action like Kennedy’s new Green Beret Army units, who declared “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow,” Lansdale preached a soft policy of wooing the Vietnamese with actions that made the United States appear as “pro-people.” It was an approach born of his conviction that American values had universal appeal, and echoed Wendell Willkie’s 1943 bestselling book, One World, in which Willkie argued that the Russians and Chinese were adopting American ideals. The success of the United States in transforming Germany and Japan from totalitarian societies to representative democracies was evidence to Lansdale that missionary diplomacy was a realistic means for bringing adversaries to our side. As Lansdale said in a later description of his work in the Philippines and Vietnam, “I took my American beliefs with me into these Asian struggles, as Tom Paine would have done.”

  Two novels in the fifties, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1956) and William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958), encouraged many to see Lansdale as the principal character in both books: Greene’s CIA agent Alden Pyle, whose hopes of finding a “Third Force” in Vietnam between the communists and France’s colonial occupiers echoed Lansdale’s idea of promoting American democratic values; and The Ugly American’s Colonel Edwin B. Hillendale, whose aims to pass along American ideas to Vietnamese peasants resembled Lansdale’s strategy for defeating the Viet Cong. Lansdale’s appeal to the Kennedys rested on his opposition to working with repressive dictators against communists for the sake of American national security or relying on U.S. forces to overturn leaders tying themselves to Moscow
and Beijing. Instead, he urged defeat of left autocratic governments through support for indigenous democrats proposing to serve the people with policies advancing economic development and social justice.

  As much as the Kennedys preferred his plans for toppling Castro, Lansdale found himself in competition with the CIA’s William Harvey on how to change the Cuban government. The forty-six-year-old Harvey grew up in Indiana, where he earned a law degree and served as an FBI agent from 1940 to 1947. He was an unstable, erratic personality and Hoover had fired him for drunkenness and insubordination. It didn’t bar him from entering the newly organized CIA, where he established himself as a master spy by building a tunnel between West and East Berlin that allowed the U.S. military to listen in on Soviet telephone conversations.

  In 1961, Harvey became the head of a CIA executive action committee, dubbed “capability,” committed to assassinating Castro. Plans to kill Castro had been hatched in August 1960 during Eisenhower’s presidency. No scheme was too nutty for the CIA operatives charged with the assignment: The plans included getting Castro to smoke a botulism-filled cigar that could kill him at first puff; poison capsules hidden in a jar of cold cream that a Castro mistress was supposed to put in his drink, but couldn’t use when she found that they had melted; and a contract with a former FBI agent with mob contacts who tried to put lethal pills in Castro’s drinks or food. After the Bay of Pigs, discussion of assassination plans were suspended; they were reactivated in April 1962, however, with poison pills, assassination teams, and then an exploding seashell at a site where Castro might be skin diving becoming the weapons of choice. When nothing came of these plots, in February 1963 the CIA gave up trying to assassinate Castro.

  Harvey’s principal assignment in Operation Mongoose was to promote infiltration by exiles into Cuba, where they were supposed to commit acts of sabotage that would destabilize Castro’s government. But nothing he initiated came to any constructive end and Bobby Kennedy and Lansdale saw him as an unreliable loose cannon. He was in fact a paranoid character, notorious for carrying guns, saying, “If you ever know as many secrets as I do, then you’ll know why I carry a gun.” Although Bobby disliked and distrusted him, Harvey’s credentials as a resourceful agent had allowed him to join the Mongoose team. Harvey reciprocated Bobby’s antagonism. One of his CIA colleagues said he “hated Bobby Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.”

  The Joint Chiefs also got into the act. Lyman Lemnitzer endorsed a madcap plan called Operation Northwoods. It proposed terrorist acts blamed on Castro against Cuban exiles in Miami, including assassinations and the possible destruction of a boatload of Cubans escaping the island. Terrorist strikes in other Florida cities were to be considered in order to inflame enough Americans and win support from the world community for an invasion that could bring down Castro’s communist regime. Kennedy rejected the plot as too extreme and the memo was too embarrassing to see the light of day until the National Security Archive at George Washington University forced it into the open in 2001. Kennedy may have rejected the plot as excessive, but it was the atmosphere set by Mongoose that gave Lemnitzer license to suggest such outlandish plans.

  Unhappily for the president and Bobby, Lansdale had no better luck in deciphering how to topple Castro than did Harvey and the hundreds of other CIA operatives assigned the job. Lansdale’s idea was to foment an internal revolution, but Castro’s grip on his country was too firm and Lansdale’s schemes were no more effective than Harvey’s: a chemical assault on the sugar crop that would destabilize the economy; appeals to Castro’s government associates to see him as undermining the island’s well-being; a bizarre scheme to persuade Cubans that Castro was the Antichrist by exciting expectations of the Second Coming with star shells launched from a U.S. submarine off the Cuban coast—“elimination by illumination,” one skeptic called it; and finally, a six-part program with thirty-three steps or tasks that would produce “the Touchdown Play,” an internal revolt turning out the communists in October 1962. Cuba had turned into one of those problems about which everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

  While nuclear talks and Cuba bedeviled Kennedy’s hopes for some kind of international progress, worries that Soviet-American differences over Berlin could erupt in war shadowed everything the White House did in the summer of 1961. For Kennedy, the Berlin problem now stood as a kind of two-front war. On one hand, he needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around and forced into humiliating concessions on Berlin. On the other, he wished to mute the domestic pressures for military steps toward a confrontation with Moscow. On July 3, Newsweek ran a story allegedly coming out of the Pentagon describing preparations for war, including “some demonstration of U.S. intent to employ nuclear weapons,” as Acheson had advised. No one could identify the source of the leak, but the White House was a likely candidate: It not only sent a sharp message to Khrushchev but also blunted demands from Dean Acheson and Alsop for stronger leadership in confronting the Soviet threat.

  The Newsweek article, however, did not appease Acheson. On July 12, at a meeting of an interdepartmental group on Germany and Berlin, he pushed hard for a military buildup. Kennedy must decide “at the earliest possible moment” whether he would implement Acheson’s advice or follow Walter Lippmann’s conciliatory approach to the Berlin challenge, which Acheson described “as doing it with mirrors.” Acheson warned that “there would be a revolt in Congress if it was not given strong leadership soon on the Berlin question.” He wanted the president to declare a national emergency, which would then allow the needed strengthening of our military posture. The absence of such a declaration would limit the sort of buildup that could discourage the Russians from intemperate actions. Kennedy held Acheson off by insisting on the need for additional study and discussion before crucial decisions were made. Speaking for the president at a July 19 NSC meeting, McNamara persuaded the group to postpone a national emergency declaration and a call-up of reserve forces until it seemed necessary.

  Although in Kennedy’s presence Acheson diplomatically went along with the president’s decision to defer any action, he doubted the wisdom of further deliberations. In conversations outside Kennedy’s earshot, Acheson made no secret of his doubts about Kennedy’s understanding of what he needed to do. “Gentlemen, you might as well face it,” he told a working group on Berlin. “This nation is without leadership.” It was clear to Bundy that Acheson held Kennedy in contempt. He saw him as weak: Kennedy “is not the sort of man that is worth my while to be advising,” Bundy thought Acheson believed.

  On July 25, distressed by the shift of authority from the secretary of state and Foreign Service professionals to the president’s national security team, Acheson attacked Kennedy’s administration in a public address: He decried the State Department’s decline, warning that it was playing havoc with the country’s foreign policy. Acheson ended his talk by facetiously declaring that despite his “treasonous” speech he hoped the audience would be willing to hear from him again sometime.

  To counter Acheson’s assault on his authority and put Moscow and critics at home on notice that he was a resolute leader with a plan to preserve Western rights in Berlin, Kennedy held a press conference on July 19 and gave a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on July 25. At the press briefing, he forcefully declared that any Soviet attempt unilaterally to deny their former allies access to Berlin and deprive the people of West Berlin the freedoms they currently enjoyed would jeopardize the peace. Asked if he intended to declare a national emergency in order to call up reserve units, Kennedy promised to address these questions in his coming speech. When asked by a reporter whether he agreed with a statement by the Soviet ambassador to the United States that Americans were not prepared to go to war over Berlin, Kennedy replied “that we intend to honor our commitments.”

  The questions to Kennedy suggested the crisis of confidence in his leadership after the Bay of Pigs failure revealed his reluctance to use American forces to topple Castr
o. How he intended to defend the Western presence in Berlin without a war and how he would overcome the evident divisions in his administration were the implied questions behind the reporters’ questions. It was no secret that Acheson doubted Kennedy’s foreign policy competence. It was clear to Washington insiders how on edge Kennedy was about finding his way through these dilemmas.

  The questions about his leadership were more than Washington gossip. He was full of anguish about the possibility of a nuclear war, especially since several national security advisers and the Kremlin didn’t seem to share his fears. Acheson, Alsop, McCone, and the Joint Chiefs, like Khrushchev, impressed Kennedy as equally oblivious to the costs of such a conflict. After a meeting with the Chiefs, Kennedy remarked that “only fools could cling to the idea of victory in a nuclear war.” After Vienna, he thought that convincing Khrushchev was as big a problem: “That son of a bitch won’t pay any attention to words,” Kennedy said. “He has to see you move”—meaning the United States might have to go to the brink of war before the Soviets would back down and agree to productive talks about Berlin. Schlesinger recalled: “While Kennedy wanted to make this resolve absolutely clear to Moscow, he wanted to make it equally clear that we were not, as he put it to me, ‘war-mad.’”