Reclaiming History (296 page)

“Hell, Mr. President,” Burke said, “we
are
involved…Can we send a few planes [U.S. Navy jets aboard the carrier
Essex
]?”

“No, because they could be identified as United States,” Kennedy retorted.

“Can we paint out their numbers?”

“No.”

“Can we get something in there?”

“No.”

“If you’ll let me have two destroyers, we’ll give gunfire support and we can hold the beachhead with two ships forever.”

“No.”

“One destroyer, Mr. President?”

“No,” Kennedy said.
¹¹⁹
In speaking of the pilots of the U.S. jets aboard the
Essex
, Wyden writes that their “inability to help the brigade moved them to tears.”
¹²⁰
Robert Kennedy would later say that “D plus one” (April 18, the second day of the invasion), when “the CIA asked for air cover, Jack [JFK] was in favor of giving it. However, Dean Rusk was strongly against it. He said that we had made a commitment that no American forces would be used and the President shouldn’t appear in the light of being a liar.”
¹²¹

What follows is just one of many desperate pleas for American military help before the invasion ended in defeat on April 19. At 11:52 p.m. on April 18, the Cuban exile brigade commander, Pepe San Román, radioed from the beach, “Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us up or quit? All we want is low jet cover and jet close support. I need it badly or cannot survive. Please don’t desert us. Am out of tank and bazooka ammo. Tanks will hit me at dawn. I will not be evacuated. Will fight to the end if we have to. Need medical supplies urgently.”
¹²²

The Cuban exile community is virtually unanimous in its belief that American jets could have saved the invasion. Exile leader Dr. José Miro Cardona, in testimony on May 25, 1961, before a committee appointed by Kennedy and headed by General Maxwell Taylor to determine the cause of the invasion’s failure, said that “in talking with the refugees and everyone who has come back [from the invasion], it seems apparent that but for three jets, the invasion force would have won the fight.”
¹²³
A “Mr. Betancourt,” the air liaison officer for the second brigade battalion that landed at Red Beach, testified, “We know the success of the Brigade depended on the success of the air strikes. Otherwise, it’s just like sending a bunch of human beings to get killed. There’s no point in asking why the American jet planes didn’t help us. They could have very well. They could have been our planes as far as we were concerned. We could have arranged to take all the insignia off.”
¹²⁴
Exile leader Manuel Antonio (Tony) de Varona told the committee on May 18, “I would just like to state that we would be in Cuba today if it was not for the lack of air support that our forces suffered. All those who’ve returned said that [with] three airplanes, they would have been successful in their invasion attempt.”
¹²⁵
*

Kennedy felt enormous sorrow over the failed invasion and the fate of the captured rebels, and encouraged and authorized the formation of a group of citizens to raise millions of dollars from private Americans to pay ransom for the prisoners’ release. In December of 1962 Castro was paid $2,925,000 in cash and given $53 million worth of medicine and baby food, meeting his conditions for the release of the brigade prisoners. “As a Christmas bonus,” Castro also allowed one thousand Cuban relatives of the prisoners to leave Cuba by ship.
¹²⁶

Richard Bissell, who was the perspicacious brainchild behind the invasion and who, with CIA Director Allen Dulles in tow, had sold the merits of it to President Kennedy and the Departments of State and Defense, would later write sourly that Kennedy’s cancellation of the second air strike was “certainly the gravest contributing factor in the operation’s failure.”
¹²⁷

As deputy director of plans, Bissell was in charge of all covert and clandestine operations of the CIA at the time of the invasion. There are those who maintain that Bissell, of all people, had no right to complain. The nature of the invasion was ill advised to begin with. Also, when Rusk was speaking to the president over the phone from Rusk’s office close to 9:00 p.m. on Sunday evening, April 16, Charles Cabell (Dulles’s deputy), Bissell, and Bissell’s deputy, C. Tracy Barnes (whom Bissell, back in March of 1960, had delegated the operational responsibility of “putting together a team to overthrow Castro”), were there too. At one point in Rusk’s conversation with the president, Rusk held the phone out to Bissell, giving him an opportunity to repeat his arguments in favor of a second air strike (which he and Cabell had made to Rusk to no avail) to the president himself. But after starting to reach for the phone, Bissell withdrew his hand and shook his head, apparently feeling no further argument would succeed. In a later report on the episode by the presidential committee, Bissell’s failure to press his case with the president was severely criticized. If Bissell had spoken to the president, who apparently, along with everyone else, had great respect for Bissell’s intellect, just maybe the president would have reversed his order canceling the second air strike, and this might have changed the outcome of the invasion.
¹²⁸

In any event, when we’re talking about motive on the question of who killed President Kennedy, the issue is not whether the exiles were correct in their belief that air support and cover was promised, but whether they had that belief, which they clearly did. One cannot read Schlesinger’s account of the Bay of Pigs debacle as well as Haynes Johnson’s without concluding that what the Kennedy administration was telling the exile leaders in the United States, and what the CIA and American military advisers were telling the brigade force of 1,390 men,
*
were two very different things. The latter—mostly in training at the main invasion training camp at Trax in the Guatemala mountains, but also in Nicaragua, Panama, Miami, New Orleans, Phoenix, Camp Peary (a CIA training base near Williamsburg, Virginia), and even Fort Knox—were told that U.S. military and air support
would
be involved in the invasion.
¹²⁹
Pepe San Román, the brigade commander, said that at Camp Trax, “Frank,” the American leader of the camp, told him that there would be more than air support. “He assured us,” San Román said, “that we were going to have protection by sea, by air, and even from under the sea.”
¹³⁰
Peter Wyden, in
Bay of Pigs
, writes that “Colonel Frank and other CIA briefers” used one word to reassure the brigade leaders more than any other. There would be an “umbrella” above, they said, to guard the entire operation against Castro’s planes.
¹³¹

It may not have been intentional misrepresentation on the part of those like “Frank” who were dealing directly with the brigade. Virtually no one, including the exiled leaders, believed that an operation organized and directed by the CIA, and sponsored and almost completely funded by the U.S. government, one that had been originally approved by President Eisenhower and then by President Kennedy, would not have American military might behind it. This is why, notwithstanding Kennedy’s press conference statement on April 12 that the United States would not be involved militarily, he nonetheless dispatched a contingent the very next day to meet with Miro Cardona, the president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, to make sure he understood. But even that wasn’t enough. Schlesinger writes that Cardona “displayed resistance and incredulity at the statement that no United States troops would be used. He waved the President’s news conference disclaimer aside as an understandable piece of psychological warfare…‘Everyone knows,’ Miro said, ‘that the United States is behind the expedition.’”
¹³²
The exiles were not the only ones who did not believe the president. CIA agent Howard Hunt, who worked at the operational level of the Bay of Pigs project, spending much time with exile leaders at his safe house in Miami, and also visited the brigade at the training camps in Guatemala, said that when the president made his April 12 declaration, “my project colleagues and I did not take him seriously. The statement was, we thought, a superb effort in misdirection.”
¹³³

In
Bay of Pigs
, Haynes Johnson writes,

From the beginning, the Cuban counter-revolutionists viewed their new American friends with blind trust…Virtually all of the Cubans involved believed [so] much in the Americans—or wanted so desperately to believe—that they never questioned what was happening or expressed doubts about the plans. Looking back on it, they agree now their naivete was partly genuine and partly reluctance to turn down any offer of help in liberating their country. In fact, they had little choice; there was no other place to turn…To Cubans, the United States was more than the colossus of the north, for the two countries were bound closely by attitudes, by history, by geography and by economics. The United States was great and powerful, the master not only of the hemisphere but perhaps of the world, and it was Cuba’s friend. One really didn’t question such a belief. It was a fact; everyone knew it. And the mysterious, anonymous, ubiquitous American agents who dealt with the Cubans managed to strengthen that belief.
¹³⁴

Johnson quotes Pepe San Román, the brigade military commander, as saying that “most of the Cubans [in the brigade] were there because they knew the whole operation was going to be conducted by the Americans, not by me or anyone else. They did not trust me or anyone else. They just trusted the Americans. So they were going to fight because the United States was backing them.”
¹³⁵

In
Dagger in the Heart
, Cuban attorney Mario Lazo writes, “The Bay of Pigs defeat was wholly self-inflicted in Washington. Kennedy told the truth when he publicly accepted responsibility…The heroism of the beleaguered Cuban Brigade had been rewarded by betrayal, defeat, death for many of them, long and cruel imprisonment for the rest. The Cuban people…were left with feelings of astonishment and disillusionment, and in many cases despair. They had always admired the United States as strong, rich, generous—but where was its sense of honor and the capacity of its leaders? The mistake of the Cuban fighters for liberation was that they thought too highly of the United States. They believed to the end that it would not let them down. But it did.”
¹³⁶

Lest there be any doubts that the invasion brigade expected U.S. military help, the anguished cry of Pepe San Román at the Bay of Pigs to the American military, “Do you back us up or quit?…Please don’t desert us,” should dispel all of them. So the motive to kill Kennedy would seem to be there. But there is more to the story (see later text).

I
n a June 1, 1961, memorandum, RFK said that his brother “felt very strongly that the Cuba operation had materially affected…his standing as president and the standing of the United States in public opinion throughout the world…The United States couldn’t be trusted. The United States had blundered.”
¹³⁷

Though it is stated in all the books that Kennedy publicly acknowledged full responsibility for the failure of the invasion (e.g., “In the orgy of national self-recrimination that followed the Bay of Pigs operation, President Kennedy took the full blame”),
¹³⁸
considered by many to be the most humiliating incident during the Kennedy presidency, the authors
¹³⁹
normally give Kennedy’s remark to the press on April 21 that “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan” as their support for this. But this remark could just as well be construed as a reference to an unfortunate fact of public life than as an acknowledgment of responsibility or blame. However, on April 24, Kennedy removed all ambiguity about responsibility for the Bay of Pigs by authorizing the release of a White House statement that said, “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility…and he restates it now…The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.”
¹⁴⁰

But privately Kennedy was incensed at the CIA for misleading him by its gross miscalculation that the invasion would succeed, even without U.S. military participation, and at himself for being naive enough to believe the spy agency. One of the elements in the CIA’s calculus that was sold to Kennedy was that the invasion would trigger an insurrection by the Cuban people against Castro that would aid and coalesce with the invading force. That didn’t, of course, happen. Was CIA intelligence unaware of the popularity Castro enjoyed at the time among the Cuban masses?

The defeat at the Bay of Pigs had another consequence. In August 1961, four months after the invasion, Richard Goodwin, assistant special counsel to the president, reported back to President Kennedy on his return from a meeting of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, on August 17, that he had spoken to Castro’s chief lieutenant, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the latter “wanted to thank us very much for the invasion…It had been a great political victory for them, enabled them to consolidate, and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal.”
¹⁴¹
Apparently unwittingly, the invasion had succeeded in transforming a revolution merely to overthrow Batista and capitalism into one now identified with Cuban nationalism.

Though Kennedy did not want to make his displeasure with the CIA a public matter, it was clear that the CIA leadership behind the disastrous invasion would have to go. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs he called CIA Director Allen Dulles, Lieutenant General Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director for plans, into his office. (Bissell was the brainy former professor of economics at Yale who developed the U-2 spy plane, was one of the key formulators and implementers of the Marshall Plan, and, as indicated, the architect behind the Bay of Pigs invasion.) “Under the British system,” he told them with a smile, “I would have to go. But under our system, I’m afraid it’s got to be you.”
¹⁴²
After the intentional passage of a decent amount of time following the failure at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy accepted the resignation of Dulles on September 27, 1961, the retirement of Cabell on January 31, 1962, and the resignation of Bissell on February 17, 1962.