Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (46 page)

Two days later, Kennedy spoke to forty thousand Cuban exiles in Miami’s Orange Bowl. He had been urging that Cuban émigrés settle in different parts of the United States. He hoped to limit the concentration of exiles in Florida, where they could exert pressure on a Washington administration by bloc voting in a presidential election; it could give the state to any candidate supporting their demands for an aggressive policy to oust Castro. But with the Cubans congregated in Miami and a presidential election less than two years away, Kennedy felt compelled to appease them with an appearance. Rusk, Bundy, and Kenny O’Donnell had all urged him not to speak, arguing that it would raise doubts in Moscow about the sincerity of his non-invasion pledge. Domestic politics, however, which included keeping his Chiefs convinced that he was serious about getting rid of Castro, took priority.

But more was at work here than domestic politics. Kennedy had a profound sense of guilt toward the Bay of Pigs captives in Castro’s prisons. Cardinal Cushing of Boston remembered that when he and Kennedy talked about the prisoners, “It was the first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.” He was determined to free the 1,113 Cubans captured at the Bay of Pigs, agreeing, despite the opposition of some in the United States, to swap millions of dollars in medicines for them. Bobby Kennedy was especially committed to winning their freedom: “We put them there and we’re going to get them out,” he said to an aide. He told his brother that he could not turn his back on the brave men who had done his bidding in the invasion.

Jackie Kennedy, who shared the stage with the president and spoke in Spanish to the crowd, lauded the brigade members for their bravery. She remembered Kennedy as sincerely moved by the plight of the prisoners and their families and felt obliged to free the captives. Jackie recalled the occasion as “one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen. All those people there, you know, crying and waving, and all the poor brigade sitting around with their bandages and everything.” Some of them were obviously malnourished and sickly. Kennedy was carried away by the emotions of the moment, and when some of the brigade returnees presented him with a flag they had carried with them to the beaches at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy declared in unscripted remarks, “This flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” The crowd responded with shouts of “Guerra, Guerra, Guerra!” It aroused suspicions in Havana and Moscow that Kennedy would not honor his non-invasion pledge.

There were good reasons for suspicions. By January 1963, Kennedy and his advisers saw themselves starting over in their dealings with Cuba. The island had absorbed far more of their attention than they had ever thought likely. But they still felt compelled to devise a plan that could oust Castro and neutralize the island as a source of tension with Moscow. Bundy advised Kennedy that he was setting up a new interdepartmental group with members from State, Defense, the CIA, and Nick Katzenbach from the Justice Department representing Bobby. “The time is ripe for such a reorganization,” Bundy told the president, “because we seem to be winding up the negotiations in New York [on the missiles], the prisoners are out, and there is well nigh universal agreement that Mongoose is at a dead end.”

But what was to replace Mongoose? Sterling Cottrell, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, was to become a new coordinator with responsibility for covert operations. But the problem of organization, Bundy emphasized, was less important than how to design an effective plan. Bundy favored reducing the CIA’s role and developing ways to communicate with moderates in the Cuban government, “including even Fidel himself,” who they thought might be at odds with hard-line communists.

Kennedy liked Bundy’s plan, and when he discussed Soviet-American relations with Vasily Kuznetsov, Moscow’s deputy foreign minister, at the White House on January 9, he urged him to remove Soviet troops and armaments from Cuba; it would further relax tensions over the island and lessen areas of disagreement with the Soviet Union. Kennedy emphasized that the United States had no intention of invading Cuba and explained that his speech to the exiles in Miami signaled nothing more than a hope for a change in Cuban conditions. But he also described speeches by Castro and Che Guevara urging “armed struggle in Latin America” that would take “power from the hands of the Yankee imperialists” as provocative and a source of ongoing friction.

Kennedy wanted to reduce chances for an incident with Castro’s government by replacing U-2 surveillance flights over the island with reports from the representatives of friendly countries stationed in Havana and from visitors to Cuba with access to members of the Cuban government. CIA and Pentagon officials were unhappy with the possibility that Kennedy was ready to live with or reach some accommodation with Castro. They favored no letup in the battle to bring down Castro. The Pentagon wished to plan for undisguised, full-blown military support of any anti-Castro uprising. The Chiefs continued to believed that “we had missed the big bus” by not destroying Castro’s government during the missile crisis.

Kennedy was torn between proposals for passive acceptance of Castro and plans for renewed efforts to eliminate his regime. On one hand, he was mindful of how close they had come to a nuclear war over Cuba and was determined to avoid another such crisis. Moreover, in January, when one of Castro’s trusted advisers told James Donovan, a New York lawyer who was in Havana negotiating the release of Americans in Cuban prisons, that they should discuss reestablishing diplomatic relations and Castro invited Donovan to return in March “to talk at length . . . about the future of Cuba and international relations in general,” Kennedy was interested in the possibility of some sort of rapprochement.

On the other hand, Kennedy was wary of the political pressure that Republicans, led by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, were generating over the failure to bring down Castro’s communist government. At an NSC meeting on January 25, Kennedy complained that “Keating was alleging that there is now in Cuba ten times as much [Soviet] equipment as there was.” But when McCone publicly acknowledged that Moscow was not “withdrawing their sophisticated equipment from Cuba” and told a Senate committee that “there is about twice as much Soviet equipment in Cuba as there had been prior to the Russian buildup,” Kennedy could not ignore demands for renewed efforts to oust the communists from the island. The anti-Castro hawks constantly reminded the press and public that the communists were now “only ninety miles from our shores.” Kennedy also worried that Castro continued to promote subversion in the hemisphere and might succeed in creating other communist regimes in the region, which would threaten U.S. interests and become a new point of Republican attack on his administration.

Kennedy told the NSC that “the time will probably come when we will have to act again on Cuba.” He was interested in the possibility of using the island as a counter to threatened Soviet control of Berlin. “We should be prepared to move on Cuba if it should be in our national interest,” he said. “The planning by the US, by the Military in the direction of our effort should be advanced always keeping Cuba in mind in the coming months and to be ready to move with all possible speed. We can use Cuba to limit Soviet actions just as they have had Berlin to limit our actions.”

At an NSC meeting on January 25, the issue of Cuba provoked heated discussion between Llewellyn Thompson and John McCone. Thompson complained that Cuba was eclipsing larger foreign policy goals. An American obsession with Cuba was taking precedence over more important relations with the Soviet Union: specifically, efforts to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty and a possible chance to take advantage of a developing Sino-Soviet split. Thompson acknowledged that domestic politics, particularly congressional agitation about Cuba, stood in the way of more rational calculation, but he urged the need to educate congressmen about the country’s greater interests. Taylor doubted the likelihood of altering Congress’s focus. He complained at the next week’s NSC meeting that congressional hearings on the defense budget had turned into an investigation on Cuba. “Most of the time Secretary McNamara has spent on the Hill was taken by Cuban questions rather than military budget problems,” he told Kennedy.

McCone was pleased to see Congress maintain a steady drumbeat about Castro’s dangerous ties to Moscow. During congressional testimony, he foresaw the continued presence of Soviet troops in Cuba as well as sophisticated military equipment. He speculated that Castro wanted Russian troops as an insurance policy against an internal revolt encouraged by U.S. subversion. In White House meetings, Secretary Dillon weighed in with objections to unrealistic hopes of wooing Castro away from the communists, urging instead a renewed commitment to overthrow his government. Bobby Kennedy sided with the hawks pressing the struggle against Castro. He acknowledged that another invasion of Cuba was currently out of reach, but thought that the United States needed to work more effectively with Cuban brigade members by encouraging them to use sabotage to weaken the communists.

Kennedy, trying to square national security concerns with domestic political pressures, sought a middle ground between his advisers’ conflicting policy suggestions. Eager to keep Cuba from poisoning Soviet-American relations, he postponed orders that barred all U.S. flagships from carrying goods to Cuba and that closed U.S. ports to ships involved in trade with the island. He also rejected using balloons to drop propaganda leaflets over Cuba and refused to authorize landing groups in Cuba for intelligence gathering unless it was essential. Kennedy also wanted military and civilian officials to mute their complaints about the continuing presence of 4,500 Soviet troops in Cuba. He thought it useful to suggest that the Soviets might be acting as a check on possible reckless actions by Castro. At the same time, he was responsive to political pressure to remove Soviet forces from the island. On February 5, he gave in to congressional pressure to encourage U.S. allies to reduce trade with Havana and agreed to have reconnaissance overflights of Soviet ships leaving Cuba to track their departing troops.

It was clear to Kennedy that he could not ignore a domestic political problem over Cuba, which was partly the result of McCone’s press leaks that the situation in Cuba was more ominous than the White House believed. McCone mainly directed his fire at McNamara, who closely reflected the president’s wishes. Bundy noted that McCone “was something between concerned and angry” and feared that the conflict could become “the first big, internal, high-level personality clash of this administration. . . . McCone is afraid of the military situation in Cuba while McNamara is not.” Bundy was not unmindful of other internal conflicts between Sorensen and O’Donnell, Bobby Kennedy and Chet Bowles, Bobby and Johnson, but Cuba was an explosive issue that would command widespread public attention should the extent of their internal arguments about Cuba become fully known.

Because Rusk was much more cautious about coming down on either side of the argument, McCone felt that he could enlist him as an ally in a campaign to stiffen Kennedy’s resolve. In mid-February, he told Rusk, “I am growing increasingly concerned over Soviet intentions in Cuba.” He saw fresh signs of Soviet plans to reintroduce “an offensive capability.” He believed it “highly dangerous” for the intelligence community to make “categoric” judgments about what they were dealing with unless there were “penetrating and continuing on-site inspection.”

By March, Kennedy was finding it impossible to keep the lid on administration infighting over Cuba. He told McCone that “an attempt . . . to drive a division within the Administration, most particularly between CIA on the one hand and State and Defense on the other . . . worried him and he hoped we could avoid any statements on the Hill, publicly or to the Press, which could exacerbate the situation.” McCone saw “no reason for all the furor” but described the problem in the CIA as resulting from a concern with “an inhibiting policy” limiting overflights of Cuba. Kennedy acknowledged that he had been “one of those who did not think the Soviets would put missiles in Cuba,” but, without conceding any compelling need for a more aggressive program of U-2 missions, he urged McCone to “minimize” their “internal problem” and “not permit it to get into an interdepartmental row.”

At an NSC meeting on March 13, Kennedy was principally concerned with congressional pressure to drive out Castro. McCone reported that he had fended off such demands for anti-Castro measures by explaining that once Soviet troops had left the island, they could look forward to a military coup serving U.S. aims. Kennedy wanted to defend the White House from congressional demands for action if all the Soviet troops didn’t leave Cuba. He said that “we should protect ourselves as best we can” by emphasizing efforts to isolate Cuba, mainly through trade and shipping policies and pressure on Latin American governments to prevent students and subversives from going to Cuba.

Bobby Kennedy urged his brother to go beyond these actions. He wanted him to think of ways that the United States could facilitate the military uprising McCone had predicted. If there was “evidence of any break amongst the top Cuban leaders and if so, is the CIA or USIA attempting to cultivate that feeling? I would not like it said a year from now that we could have had this internal breakup in Cuba but we just did not set the stage for it.” When Kennedy failed to offer any reply, Bobby asked: “Did you feel there was any merit to my last memo?” He added, “In any case, is there anything further on this matter?” Again, Kennedy didn’t answer: He wanted no additional aggressive action that could trigger a new crisis with the Soviets.

But he had limited control over Cuban problems. The crosscurrents were a constant source of irritation that exasperated him. He found himself caught between the Cuban exiles supported by McCone and the CIA, and White House advisers sympathetic to Soviet complaints that Cuba kept getting in the way of reducing tensions with the United States. On March 18, Cuban exiles describing themselves as Alpha 66 attacked Soviet ships and installations in Cuba. Although the State Department, with Kennedy’s approval, condemned this hit-and-run raid as doing more to strengthen than weaken Castro’s government, Castro and the Soviets blamed Washington for facilitating it.