Read Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Online
Authors: Robert Dallek
The raids opened a new round of arguments about Cuba. Kennedy complained to the NSC that despite State Department condemnations, Havana and Moscow refused to believe that the exiles weren’t supplied by Washington, even if they weren’t launching the raids from U.S. bases. Kennedy wanted to cut off their supplies or at least advise them not to attack any of the Russians on the island. He thought the raids would then “draw less press attention and arouse less acrimony in Moscow.”
McCone defended the exiles. It “would be extremely difficult to control them because they are brave men fighting for the freedom of their country,” he told Kennedy at an NSC meeting. Besides, “the raids would cause trouble inside Cuba and would discredit Castro in Latin America if he were unable to prevent them.” The Soviets then might have second thoughts about backing Castro. Should the United States try to stop them, it would provoke widespread press criticism as well as congressional objections. He suggested officially condemning the raids while not barring the raiders from using the United States as a base. Rusk saw nothing but trouble in McCone’s recommendations. But characteristically walking a middle ground, he suggested that the administration plan the raids if they were worthwhile. Dillon, who had consistently sided with advocates of militant action toward Cuba, wanted simply to accept the raids as impossible to control.
Kennedy was unconvinced by McCone and Dillon. He said, “These in-and-out raids were probably exciting and rather pleasant for those who engage in them. They were in danger for less than an hour. This exciting activity was more fun than living in the hills of Escambray, pursued by Castro’s military forces.” He then read a dispatch describing the Soviet protest, underscoring the damage the raids were doing to relations with Moscow. At the same time, he didn’t want the public to think that the United States was “prosecuting Cuban patriots.” And he hoped to blunt domestic criticism by letting the exiles strike at Cuban but not Soviet targets. In short, he was eager to make this issue disappear from Soviet-American relations as fast and fully as possible, but without provoking a public outcry against appeasing communists.
Under pressure from the CIA and the Florida exile community, the administration continued covert operations against Castro and did little to halt raids striking Soviet as well as Cuban targets. Kennedy acknowledged that sabotage aimed at disrupting the Cuban economy and promoting Soviet-Cuban tensions and exile attacks would not bring down Castro. Nevertheless, he felt compelled, if simply to answer domestic pressures and boost the morale of the exiles, to maintain some kind of “noise level” in anti-Castro operations.
As a consequence, Cuba remained a serious irritant in relations with Moscow. On April 3, Soviet ambassador Dobrynin visited Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department, where he presented a twenty-five-page paper describing Khrushchev’s anger toward the president for allowing Cuba to remain an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. Khrushchev complained that the United States was dismissive of Soviet concerns, that McNamara was making “warlike pronouncements,” and that “the United States was only interested in . . . building up their efforts to dominate the world through counter-revolutionary activity. . . . We should understand that we could not push the Soviet Union around.” For Khrushchev, the raids and sabotage were like rubbing salt in open wounds. The retreat in Cuba had humiliated him: The Chinese snidely described his response to the quarantine as “capitulationism” and reported Kennedy as saying, “I cut his balls off.” Press stories saying that Castro described Khrushchev as a man with “
No cojones
[balls]” and a “
Maric
ó
n
[homosexual]” enraged the Soviet leader.
Khrushchev wasn’t the only one who was angry. The message and Dobrynin’s verbal presentation incensed Bobby Kennedy. He considered them “so insulting and so rude to the President of the United States” that he refused to accept the message or transmit it. He said that he had never “insulted or offended” Dobrynin or “his country or Mr. Khrushchev” and considered such a message distinctly unhelpful in advancing their relations. As a principal architect of the anti-Castro campaign, Bobby took the Soviet rebuke personally and refused to give any ground, despite his brother’s desire to keep Cuba from impeding an improvement in Soviet-American relations. It seems likely, however, that Kennedy endorsed Bobby’s hard line, believing that he could not allow impressions either in Moscow or the United States that Khrushchev could address him in abusive language.
Had Kennedy’s advisers, including his brother, been of one mind about forcing Cuba off the front pages by ending the raids and subversion, Kennedy might have dropped the anti-Castro campaign. True, the exiles would have howled at his betrayal of their fight against communism, and congressional Republicans would have echoed their complaints. With approval ratings of between 66 and 76 percent, however, he was in a strong position to resist their pressure. But with a divided administration, including a CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff warning not to be fooled again by Khrushchev, and a need for a cooperative Senate should he win agreement to a nuclear test ban treaty under negotiation, he found it impossible to shelve plans for a change of regimes in Cuba.
In response to all the cross pressures, Kennedy moved in two directions at the same time. On April 9, he rejected CIA and U.S. Army proposals for radio broadcasts spreading anti-Castro propaganda in Cuba, except for some inciting Cubans to strike out against Soviet personnel in Cuba, and those messages only if they could not be traced back to the United States. He also approved the training of exiles for sabotage in Cuba and for advance attacks within the island should they ever decide to invade. Simultaneously, Kennedy expressed great interest in Castro’s statement to James Donovan, who was discussing the release of U.S. citizens imprisoned in Cuba, “that relations with the United States are necessary” and he “wanted these developed.” There is little doubt that Kennedy wanted a resolution of the distracting troubles with Cuba. As he wrote Khrushchev on April 11, “I have neither the intention nor the desire to invade Cuba. . . . The pressures from those who have a less patient and peaceful outlook are very great—but I assure you of my own determination to work at all times to strengthen world peace.” As he had told Bundy after the missile crisis, indulging “his taste for understatement, ‘nobody wants to go through what we went through in Cuba very often.’” Bundy, who was reinforcing the president’s wish to find some way out of the Cuban dangers, added, “We must make it our business not to pass this way again.”
On the same day Kennedy wrote Khrushchev, the committee charged with planning Castro’s fall reviewed “Black Operations” and “Sabotage Targets” that would meet the president’s demand for “some action” and “a program which will show continuous motion,” but without clear evidence of direct U.S. involvement. On April 15, when McCone met with Kennedy in Palm Beach, he described two possible ways to resolve the Cuban problem: Woo Castro away from the Russians and get him to follow a more benign path in Cuba, or use every possible pressure to get the Soviets out of the island, followed by means to topple Castro. Kennedy “suggested the possibility of pursuing both courses at the same time.”
In the coming months, Kennedy’s advisers were distinctly unhelpful in suggesting ways to make Cuba a less compelling concern in the reach for some sort of accommodation with Moscow. The U.S. National Archives are awash in boxes of files between 1919 and 1941 about war debts. An argument over how to collect the money owed to the United States and whether to tie it to the reparations payments dictated by the Versailles Treaty proved to be a debate devoid of a solution. Except for Finland, none of the debtor countries ever repaid the loans and the issue disappeared with the onset of World War II.
The discussion of how to deal with Castro proved to be every bit as sterile. “The elimination of Castro was a requirement,” McNamara told the NSC on April 23, as it considered “A Sketch of the Cuba Alternatives.” But he did not see how “our present policy” would bring the desired result. We needed to “create such a situation of dissidence within Cuba as to allow the U.S. to use force in support of anti-Castro forces without leading to retaliation by the USSR.” McNamara’s convoluted language reflected the emptiness of the plan, if one can call it that. “Are we keeping our contingency plans up to date?” Kennedy asked McNamara at the end of the month. McNamara assured him that they were. But the “small-scale sabotage” they were doing was producing “no real change in the situation.” In fact, Castro was gaining ground in Latin America. Since the communists could not stand being made fun of, a State Department adviser said, maybe they could “destroy Castro’s halo” with ridicule. Desperate for a solution to the Castro problem, the planners reverted to wondering whether “an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited” to end Castro’s regime. It was a variation on the stale get-them-to-attack-Guantánamo idea, which McNamara raised anew with the standing committee on Cuba at the end of May.
The advisers were as much at sea as ever. “All of the courses of action discussed were singularly unpromising,” the NSC agreed at a May 28 meeting. Bundy saw no date certain when “we could overthrow Castro” and acknowledged that none of their planning seemed very promising. But McCone refused to confess failure. It suggested that his CIA was incapable of meeting the challenge to national security supposedly posed by Castro. His prescription: Increase economic hardship in Cuba, continue sabotage, and maybe the Cuban military would overthrow the communists and restore relations with the United States. And Bobby Kennedy, as out of ideas as the rest of the advisers, said that “the U.S. must do something against Castro, even though we do not believe our actions would bring him down.”
And so the CIA just continued to hammer away at the same proposals—sabotage and propaganda—that had yielded no constructive results before. At a June 19 White House meeting about covert policy toward Cuba, McCone told Kennedy of “the importance and necessity for continuous operations.” Although they “would create quite a high noise level” and although “no single event would be conclusive,” they should not be abandoned.
No one at the CIA, above all McCone, thought to ask: Couldn’t we live with Castro? Was his regime really more than a “thorn in the flesh,” as Fulbright had described it? When Castro spent a month in Moscow in May, McCone believed it “was inspired by a Russian desire to forestall any effort by the U.S. to negotiate with Castro.” After Castro returned from Russia, McCone dismissed “conciliatory” statements by him toward the United States as meaning that the Cuban had tied himself more closely to Russia than ever, and that “any reconciliation with the U.S. would have to be on Castro’s and the Soviet Union’s terms,” which would be entirely unacceptable. Any such agreement would enhance Castro’s standing in Latin America and fuel his ambitions to spread communism in the hemisphere. Moreover, McCone warned that domestic politics made this “very dangerous” for the administration. The American people would oppose a rapprochement unless Castro disavowed subversion, broke with Moscow, and opened his country to U.S. inspection. In making his views clear to the White House, McCone was putting Kennedy on notice that the president could face a political firestorm from McCone if he gave up trying to end Castro’s rule. However much Kennedy disliked McCone’s message and his boorish insistence on reminding him of the dangers to the White House from not following his advice, Kennedy believed that he could not risk a dispute with his CIA chief over communism in the hemisphere.
McCone especially worried that ABC reporter Lisa Howard, who had recently had several interviews with Castro, might be facilitating discussions aimed at an accommodation with Havana. He told Bobby Kennedy that he could not “overemphasize the importance of secrecy in this matter,” predicting that “gossip and inevitable leaks . . . would be damaging.” He warned against “active steps . . . on the rapprochement matter,” urging that if the issue surfaced, it should be described as “a remote possibility” alongside “various levels of dynamic and positive action.”
Others in the administration were more sanguine about the prospects for some sort of reconciliation that could tone down the agitation over Cuba and remove it from the list of problems dogging Soviet-American relations. Averell Harriman “flatly disagreed” with McCone’s reading of Castro’s visit to the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had used it “to prove the success of Russian policy toward Cuba and to refute Chinese accusations that Khrushchev ‘softness’ toward the U.S. had produced no returns.” Harriman also doubted that the Soviets would try to make Cuba a showcase for communism in the Western Hemisphere and that even if they wanted to, it would not work. Rusk also doubted the CIA’s hard-line approach to Cuba and saw “some opportunity of a rapprochement.” Bundy was skeptical but did not think “we should say now that we would never talk to Castro.”
Kennedy continued to find himself betwixt and between on how to deal with Castro and Cuba. Less than eighteen months away from his reelection, he wasn’t going to take the political risks involved in an open effort at reconciling with Castro. Nor would he risk overt attacks on his regime that rekindled a crisis with the Soviet Union.
“The Two of You Did Visit the Same Country, Didn’t You?”
I
n the second half of 1963, Kennedy remained convinced that his paths to reelection and global peace passed through a quiet time on civil rights, an arms control agreement with Khrushchev, a resolution of difficulties with Castro, and some kind of settlement in Vietnam. It was an intimidating agenda. But remembering what he had told Bobby about countering the burdens of political life with humor, he enjoyed poking fun at critics accusing him of gambling with U.S. security. In a phone conversation on June 4, 1963, with his old Senate colleague and friend George Smathers, Kennedy told him that he was writing to tell a foreign policy hawk that his worries about an assault on the United States by the United Nations were overdrawn. While he did not think that the United States “would be attacked by the United Nations, Iceland, Chad or the Samoan Islands,” he was ready to do his duty as commander in chief. The following month, when the seventy-nine-year-old Harry Truman called to offer support for a test ban treaty, Kennedy told him, “You sound in good shape.” To Kennedy’s great amusement, Truman replied: “The only trouble with me . . . is keeping the wife satisfied.” “Well, that’s all right,” Kennedy assured him through his laughter.
Kennedy’s first order of business as the summer began was building on his peace speech and Khrushchev’s apparent receptivity to test ban talks. But could it be converted into a treaty fulfilling some of Kennedy’s goals and then pass a cautious Senate?
Kennedy sent a stellar delegation to Moscow headed by Harriman. As Schlesinger said, “from the viewpoint not only of ability and qualification but of persuading the Russians we meant business, he was the ideal choice.” Moreover, his work on Vietnam as an assistant secretary, offering more realistic assessments than the Joint Chiefs or embassy officials in Saigon, had put him in Kennedy’s good graces. Because both sides were prepared for a quick resolution, the negotiations lasted only an amazingly brief ten days in July. After all the years of discussions and acrimony about reining in armaments, it was an astonishingly quick agreement. Even before Harriman had arrived in Moscow, Khrushchev had declared his interest in a limited test ban treaty that would require no on-site inspections and would forbid explosions in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. Although Harriman would have to maneuver his way around Soviet pressure for a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, he was able to convince Khrushchev and Gromyko that a pact could be the subject of separate future discussions.
The more difficult battle was to assure Senate approval of the treaty. Remembering Woodrow Wilson’s blunder in excluding leading senators from the Versailles negotiations, Kennedy sent Rusk with a bipartisan group of senators to Moscow to participate in a signing ceremony. Khrushchev, mindful of the Senate’s importance in completing the agreement, fêted the delegation at a signing ceremony in the ornate Catherine Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, followed by “a gala luncheon featuring brandy, speeches, and a Soviet orchestra playing Gershwin’s ‘Love Walked In.’” The delegation then joined Khrushchev at his summer retreat for games and swimming, where Khrushchev drubbed Rusk at badminton.
Kennedy’s principal problem was to mute objections from the Joint Chiefs. In June 1963, the Chiefs had advised the White House that “every limited test ban proposal they had reviewed . . . contained shortcomings ‘of major military significance.’” They believed that a test ban would erode America’s strategic superiority. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Anderson stated that the Joint Chiefs opposed a comprehensive test ban agreement. LeMay followed up with the warning that without testing the United States could lose its military superiority. To achieve some kind of broad consensus, McNamara organized a series of interagency consultations, but the result was not harmony but a divide in which White House science advisers and the CIA disputed the Chiefs’ view that a test ban could change the basic U.S.-Soviet balance.
In July, as Harriman prepared to leave for Moscow, the Chiefs declared a limited test ban “at odds with the national interest.” Kennedy saw them as his largest domestic impediment to an agreement: “I regard the Chiefs as key to this thing,” he told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. “If we don’t get the Chiefs just right, we can . . . get blown.” They have “always been our problem.” To quiet their objections to Harriman’s mission, Kennedy promised that they would have the chance to speak their minds in Senate hearings if there were a treaty. The restive Chiefs then drafted a statement, which they did not send to the White House, saying a limited test ban was militarily disadvantageous. To further blunt their opposition, Kennedy directly told them that they “should base their position on the broadest considerations, not just military factors.” At the same time, he refused to include any military officers in the Moscow delegation and instructed that none of the cables reporting developments at the conference go to the Defense Department. “The first thing I’m going to tell my successor,” Kennedy said in private, “is to watch the generals and avoid feeling that just because they are military men their opinion on military matters is worth a damn.”
Bringing the Chiefs to support ratification or at least refrain from registering strong objections to the treaty required the inclusion of clauses that permitted the United States to resume testing if essential to the national safety, and intensive lobbying by the White House. One can only imagine the pressure Kennedy brought to bear on the unhappy Chiefs to reverse themselves. Republicans asked if the Chiefs had been brought under “rack and screw” to follow Kennedy’s lead. They diplomatically denied suggestions that they were cajoled into changing their minds. (An eighteen-minute tape from July 19, 1963, of JFK and LeMay talking that might show otherwise remains closed.) In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, LeMay could not resist planting doubts: He explained that Kennedy and McNamara had promised to maintain a test program in case changed circumstances required testing. “We have not, however, discussed with them what they mean by that—whether what we consider an adequate safeguard program coincides with their idea on the subject,” LeMay said.
Getting the treaty approved by the Senate proved to be less problematic than the White House had feared. President Eisenhower’s support of a test ban agreement, Kennedy’s success in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had greatly boosted public confidence in his handling of foreign affairs, public statements by him and President Truman describing the treaty as reducing the likelihood of a nuclear war, and favorable media coverage made clear to Senate Republicans and some conservative Democrats that opposition to treaty ratification would be politically unwise. In September, as the Senate deliberated ratification, 81 percent of the public approved of the treaty. “I can’t believe this fellow would be so stupid as to vote against this treaty,” Fulbright told Kennedy about one opponent. On September 24, the Senate ratified it by a vote of 80 to 19.
Although the agreement would not mark the end of the Cold War arms race or fulfill Kennedy’s hopes of nonproliferation, it was an initial step in reducing East-West tensions and encouraging hopes that the world might avoid the catastrophe of a nuclear war.
As he was winning his fight for a test ban, Kennedy continued to struggle with questions about Castro and Cuba. He remained leery of the domestic political risks in reconciling with Castro. He also saw overt attacks on his regime that rekindled a crisis with Moscow as unacceptable. Secret raids, however, were another matter. In June and July, when the NSC proposed renewed sabotage, Kennedy agreed, but only if the administration could “flatly deny” any involvement. He also ordered a declaration notifying the Russians and Latin Americans that the United States would not allow another Castro in the hemisphere. It was excellent politics: The Russians could not object to an admonition against renewed tensions with Washington over communism in America’s backyard, and it gave Kennedy cover against allegations of letting the communists expand their foothold in the region.
Still, no matter how much raids and sabotage might appear to be the work of exiles operating without U.S. support, few would believe that Washington was not involved. Exile incursions aroused suspicions, particularly in Havana and Moscow, that Kennedy remained intent on bringing down Castro, which, of course, was true. On September 10, Dobrynin told Kennedy that U.S. denials of complicity in saboteur landings in Cuba and attacks on the island’s industrial facilities were simply not credible. “If such attacks continued,” Dobrynin said, “this could only lead to a new crisis,” which Khrushchev and the president clearly did not want. Cuba should not jeopardize the interests of both countries and world peace. Without acknowledging a U.S. part in the assaults, Kennedy reminded Dobrynin of “how deeply the Cuban problem was felt in the United States,” indicating that the island remained a major domestic political threat to his administration. He was asking Khrushchev to understand that he could not see a good way to quiet the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida without agreeing to some of their operations and neutralizing their ability to give political opponents an issue that appealed to considerable numbers of Americans.
Despite Kennedy’s plea to Dobrynin for greater understanding of the domestic pressures compelling his aggressiveness toward Cuba, Dobrynin’s warnings about the dangers to U.S.-Soviet relations were not lost on him. He sent word through Bundy to the NSC of his interest in ending all exile raids on Cuba. It brought immediate pushback from Gordon Chase, the NSC’s Cuba expert. Chase did not dispute the danger to Soviet-American relations from U.S.-based raids. But attacks from other points in the Americas might be hurting Castro. In addition, blocking external raids would agitate exile protests, provoke loud objections from anti-Castro activists everywhere, and give Castro something to crow about: “The U.S. has capitulated.”
Kennedy, supported by Bundy and McNamara, was not convinced that the raids were worthwhile—except as a shield against a political uproar in the United States. He was ready to hear something new on how to mute his Castro problem. And so when William Attwood, the ambassador to the West African nation of Guinea since 1961 and current assistant to Stevenson at the U.N., suggested a different approach to Cuba, Kennedy was ready to listen. The forty-three-year-old Attwood, who had been editor of
Look
magazine and a speechwriter for Stevenson in both his presidential campaigns, had interviewed Castro in 1959 as he took power in Cuba. Convalescing in New York in 1963 from polio, which he had contracted while in Guinea, Attwood had persuaded the State Department to let him temporarily work at the U.N. In a report to the department, Attwood related that the Guinean ambassador to Cuba, who was in New York for the opening of the U.N.’s 1963–64 session, told him that Castro was “unhappy about his present dependence on the Soviet bloc; that he does not enjoy being a satellite; that the trade embargo is hurting him—though not enough to endanger his position; and that he would like to establish some official contact with the U.S. and go to some length to obtain normalization of relations with us—even though this would not be welcomed by most of his hard-core Communist entourage, such as Che Guevara.”
Attwood could not vouch for the accuracy of the ambassador’s assessment of Castro’s interest in improving relations, though he had similar reports from “neutral diplomats and others I have talked to at the U.N. and in Guinea.” Consequently, he thought a rapprochement with Castro was worth looking into as a “course of action, which, if successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” He did not suggest “offering Castro a ‘deal’—which could be more dangerous politically than doing nothing.” But it might provide a means “of neutralizing Cuba on our terms,” which he saw as getting Soviet troops out of Cuba, an end to Cuban subversion in other Western Hemisphere countries, and a Cuban pledge of neutrality in the Cold War. Because existing policy had almost no chance of toppling Castro, Attwood thought that exploring the possibility of a rapprochement made good sense. He asked permission to speak to Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban ambassador to the U.N., and to arrange a meeting with Castro, which would be hidden from the press.
The CIA immediately countered Attwood’s suggestion with renewed recommendations for undermining Castro’s government. In fact, they saw evidence that Castro was losing his hold on the Cuban people. It was time not for conciliatory actions, but for stepped-up pressure on Havana through a wider trade embargo and more sabotage. To appease administration hawks, Kennedy pressed the British to restrict shipping to the island. He told the British ambassador that their ships led free-world trade with Cuba and it was embarrassing his administration.
At the same time, Kennedy saw the wisdom of resolving the Cuban problem by diplomacy. He was more than skeptical of CIA recommendations on Cuba. During a meeting with Kennedy at the White House on October 10, Foreign Minister Gromyko complained that the United States was subjecting Cuba to constant pressure and provocation. Kennedy conceded that there was no “benefit to the US from harassment. This would not unseat Castro and serve no useful purpose.” To mute worries about Cuba in the United States and pressure on him to topple Castro, Kennedy asked that Khrushchev publicly announce the departure of all Soviet military personnel from the island. Remembering that the Joint Chiefs had emphasized how important it was to get Soviet troops out of Cuba—they described the Western Hemisphere as having been invaded, as long as Russian forces were in Cuba—Kennedy saw their departure as certain to ease the pressure on him to help exiles drive the communists from the island.
Ending agitation about Cuba by reaching a modus vivendi with Castro also appealed to Kennedy and several of his top advisers—Bobby Kennedy, a convert to his brother’s softer line, Bundy, McNamara, and Stevenson. After Kennedy had given Stevenson approval to pursue Attwood’s initiative, Bundy instructed Chase, his deputy at the NSC, to speak to Attwood about the results of a conversation with Lechuga. Attwood reported that Lechuga suggested an envoy travel to Cuba for a conversation with Castro, but Attwood, mindful of the political embarrassment to the White House from any leak of an administration approach to Havana, urged Lechuga to hold secret conversations in New York at the U.N. headquarters. Lechuga was not hopeful that Castro would let anyone speak for him outside of Cuba or that anything would come of conversations: He saw Castro as “too well boxed in by such hardliners as Guevara to be able to maneuver much.”