Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Read online

  It is also now known that the CIA still pushed ahead with the ill-fated mission, even after it discovered that the cover for the clandestine invasion had been blown. One of the operation’s key CIA planners, Jacob Esterline, later admitted to a government panel that the agency discovered in advance that the plan had been leaked to Soviet intelligence. “There was some indication that the Soviets somewhere around the 9th [of April] had gotten the date of the 17th,” Esterline said, in secret testimony that was later revealed through the indefatigable National Security Archive.

  Charles Bartlett, the Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times and old Kennedy friend who had introduced JFK to his future wife at a 1951 dinner party, also got advance word about the invasion—not from his friend in the White House, but from Castro’s former Washington lobbyist, Ernesto Betancourt. “He came to see me after Kennedy had just been in office a few weeks,” Bartlett recently recalled. “And he said, ‘The CIA is about to make a huge mistake. Terrible things are about to happen and Castro knows all about it.’ I was walking around the Oval Office later and it would have been easy to tell Jack. But I figured he had all these pressing appointments, let’s not hit him with another one. So I took the information to Allen Dulles. It was the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever done. He was sitting there in his office at the CIA smoking his pipe. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about this. I’ll look into it and give you a call.’ So I get a call about five days later, but by then the boats were already going ashore. Dulles was really the wrong guy to tell.”

  Dulles clearly did not care whether Castro and his Soviet patrons knew the invasion was coming, because his agency regarded the band of Cuban exiles who were about to hit the beaches as mere cannon fodder, a device to trigger the real invasion by the U.S. military—one that would be so overwhelming it would quickly sweep aside any resistance. When this cynical calculation failed, short-circuited by the surprisingly resolute Kennedy, Dulles and the CIA high command were stunned. For years they had gotten their way in Washington, with the Dulles brothers running the government as a family franchise, and the secretive agency deceiving and manipulating President Eisenhower under the convenient Cold War cover that dangerous times called for drastic measures. But now a new president was signaling that those days were over.

  Dulles believed that “great actions require great determination” and “at the decisive moment of the Bay of Pigs operation,” Kennedy showed himself lacking in this quality of leadership. He thought that Kennedy was “surrounded by doubting Thomases and admirers of Castro.” On the evening the invasion collapsed, sitting down for dinner with Richard Nixon—the man who had spearheaded the plan as vice president—a visibly distraught Dulles asked for a drink, exclaiming to Nixon, “This is the worst day of my life!” Nixon agreed that Kennedy lost his nerve when he failed to send in U.S. war planes to cover the invasion. This lament about the lack of air cover would become the central fixation of Kennedy critics for decades to come. They were convinced that air strikes could have saved the day for the would-be liberators of Cuba.

  As for Bissell, the chief architect of the Bay of Pigs would remain silent about the disaster until shortly before his death in 1994. In his final interview, the former CIA golden boy whose glittering intelligence career would come to an end in the Zapata swamp, made a strange, unnerving remark about his onetime White House patron: “I was probably taken in by Kennedy’s charisma. He was such a complicated mix of accomplishments and mistakes that when he died, my children didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  The Bay of Pigs catastrophe sent shock waves through the agency, particularly among the agents who had worked closely with the Cuban émigrés on the operation. CIA men muttered darkly among themselves that Kennedy was guilty of “criminal negligence” or even worse. Years later, Robert Maheu, the shadowy private intelligence operator whom the CIA had asked to serve as a go-between with the Mafia in their plots to kill Castro, would testify bitterly to the Church Committee that the bloodiest crimes in the whole Cuba saga were not those committed by mobsters or CIA agents but by President Kennedy. “I think I rattled some cages. I said something like: ‘Senator, I find it difficult to understand all the time and money that is being spent to determine if our country plotted to murder a foreign leader—a murder that never took place—when there is no [effort] to turn the spotlight on the murders that in fact did take place,’” recalled Maheu in his memoir. “I tell you everybody jumped out of their seats.”

  “Are you saying that murders actually took place?” Church asked.

  “I said, ‘yes,’ but my explanation wasn’t what he was expecting. The murders I meant were the boys killed during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion.”

  Anti-Kennedy spleen seeped into the Cuban exiles from their CIA handlers, like Howard Hunt. The night Kennedy was elected, “the Cuban barrio in Miami went wild with joy,” noted Hunt in his 1973 memoir, since JFK’s campaign rhetoric had raised exuberant expectations about the overthrow of Castro. But after the Bay of Pigs, the hatred of Kennedy became just as florid in Little Havana. The United States now owed the Cuban people a blood debt “so tremendous that it can never be paid,” Hunt declared. Captain Eduardo Ferrer, who led the exile air force, bluntly explained the shift in opinion about Kennedy: “The [Bay of Pigs] failure was Kennedy’s fault. Kennedy was a little bit immature, a little bit chicken. Today, 90 percent of the Cubans are Republicans because of Kennedy, that motherfucker.”

  The Bay of Pigs disaster was also viewed with great distress in the Pentagon, where Kennedy’s hesitation was seen as sending a dangerous signal of U.S. weakness to Moscow. “Pulling out the rug,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Lemnitzer, was “unbelievable…absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, told a friend that the failed invasion was the worst American defeat “since the war of 1812.”

  “Their big mistake was that they didn’t realize the tremendous importance of the operation or the effect it would have on the world,” said Admiral Burke in an oral history for the Naval Institute over a decade later, still furious at Kennedy and his civilian team. “They didn’t realize the power of the United States or how to use the power of the United States. It was a game to them…. They were inexperienced people.”

  “Mr. Kennedy,” Burke added, “was a very bad president…. He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation.”

  The heavens ripped open for the Kennedy administration following the Cuba crisis and they never came back together. Cuba was the Iraq of its day, no more than a swath of sugar cane afloat in the Caribbean, but to the national security elite who determine such things, it was where the forces of good and evil were arrayed against one another, the epicenter of a struggle that would come close to a literally earth-shattering climax. And in his first test in this supreme confrontation, Kennedy was judged by military and intelligence officials to be a dangerously weak link at the top of the chain of command. He would never again enjoy their complete trust or loyalty.

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY, FOR HIS part, was equally estranged from his national security team after the Bay of Pigs. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” he raged. He also lashed out at the Joint Chiefs, with their rows of colorful ribbons that boasted of all their military experience: “Those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work.” While the president famously took responsibility for the debacle in public, CIA and Pentagon officials knew that he privately spread the word that they were to blame. Never again, he told liberal advisors like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., would he be “overawed by professional military advice.”

  Weeks after the fiasco, playing checkers at his Cape Cod family compound with his World War II pal Red Fay, whom he had installed as assistant secretary of the Navy, Kennedy was still fuming. “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interest of the country,” he said, referring to the intense pressures that had
been put on him to escalate the Bay of Pigs fighting. “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.”

  Kennedy grew more passionate, thinking about the carnage that would have resulted from an all-out U.S. assault on the island. “Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw [playing] here this evening? Do you think I’m going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn’t think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he’s crazy.”

  In his fury, Kennedy threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds.” He did not follow through on this vow, but after waiting for a politically expedient interval, he did fire Dulles and Bissell. And shortly after the Cuba fiasco, when the Joint Chiefs urged him to respond to the advances of Communist insurgents in Laos by invading the remote Southeast Asian country, Kennedy did not hesitate to rebuff their advice. “After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had contempt for the Joint Chiefs,” Schlesinger recalled before his death in early 2007, over drinks in the hushed, stately rooms of New York’s Century Club. “I remember going into his office in the spring of 1961, where he waved some cables at me from General Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was then in Laos on an inspection tour. And Kennedy said, ‘If it hadn’t been for the Bay of Pigs, I might have been impressed by this.’ I think JFK’s war hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men. He thought Lemnitzer was a dope.”

  But Kennedy was acutely aware of how formidable the institutional powers were that he confronted. While still reeling from the Bay of Pigs, the president took his concerns to an old family friend, liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. “The episode seared him,” said Douglas, recalling their conversation. “He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, president of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect…it shook him up!”

  Since he had won the White House by the slimmest of margins, Kennedy thought it politically wise to retain icons from the Eisenhower era like Dulles in his administration, even though friends like journalist Ben Bradlee had urged him to replace the aging “godfather of American intelligence.” In the case of Dulles, his reappointment might also have been a reward for his discreet—and wily—political assistance to the Kennedy campaign. JFK “came into government the successor to President Eisenhower, who was a great general, a great military figure…. He retained the same people in all these key positions whom President Eisenhower had,” recalled Bobby Kennedy in a 1964 oral history. “Allen Dulles was there, Lemnitzer was there, the same Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t attempt to move any of these people out…. They had had the experience; they had had the background; they evidently were trusted by his predecessor. So he thought he could trust them.”

  But when he realized he could not, Kennedy moved to get rid of this old guard or sideline them. After the cataclysm in Cuba, JFK pulled away from these national security “wise men” and began to surround himself with his most trusted personal advisors, men who had fought with him in the political trenches and were known for their intense loyalty as well as liberal passion: Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, Schlesinger, Galbraith. He asked Sorensen to start advising him on foreign affairs even though the young aide had never traveled beyond the country’s borders.

  Above all, Kennedy turned to his brother. On the morning that the Cuba mission began to fail, Kennedy tracked down Bobby at a newspaper editors’ convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was speaking, urgently asking his brother to “come back here.” Like Sorensen, Bobby had no foreign policy experience, but he would move into the center of national security decision making for the rest of his brother’s presidency. Kennedy offered his younger brother the CIA, but Bobby thought it politically ill-advised. While he rejected the position of CIA director, however, the attorney general began to unofficially take on the responsibility of supervising the agency for his brother. At this juncture, it seemed JFK would have put Bobby in charge of every vital part of his government if he could have.

  This is the point where the Kennedy administration began becoming “a family affair,” in the words of Berkeley scholar Peter Dale Scott, with the two Kennedys at the center, encircled by the small group of men they considered their band of brothers. “Kennedy couldn’t work through the CIA, the Pentagon or even the State Department. There was so little institutional support in Washington for the Kennedys’ policies. The bureaucracies were very committed to the Cold War,” Scott observed.

  Their close relationship fortified the two brothers, gave them confidence that they could take charge of a government that was in many ways hostile to their enterprise. “They were totally loyal to each other,” recalled Fred Dutton, who served as JFK’s Cabinet secretary, in an interview not long before his death in 2005. “They almost didn’t need to communicate with each other, they almost knew what the other person was thinking and doing. Bob’s sole focus was to make sure everything was working for his brother. He gave him everything. He did all the unpleasant tasks for Jack…. Bob had no problem running interference for his brother, handling the messy things. He was willing to be Mr. Bad Guy.”

  Cabinet members felt excluded from the meshing of fraternal minds that often replaced formal discussions, Dutton said. “The two brothers often held these sessions by themselves, they’d go off in the corner of the room away from the rest of the Cabinet and staff. During a crisis like the Bay of Pigs, you’d see them talking off to the side of the room. There was a level of conversation they engaged in that not even the senior staff was privy to.”

  In the beginning, Bobby brought a militant energy to foreign policy councils, especially on Cuba, a reflection of his youthful anticommunism and his deep resentment over the humiliation his brother suffered at the hands of Castro. A government postmortem on the Bay of Pigs that Bobby spearheaded with General Maxwell Taylor in late spring 1961 declared there could be “no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor” and Bobby demanded in meetings about Cuba that the “terrors of the earth” be invoked against the dictator. But over time he would fall under the sway of his brother’s more temperate personality and philosophy.

  John Kennedy was more viscerally antiwar than has been recognized in some quarters, where he has continued to be portrayed as an aggressive Cold Warrior, even a forerunner to Ronald Reagan. “I am almost a ‘peace-at-any-price’ president,” he once confided to Bill Walton.

  “[JFK] brought into the presidency the knowledge of history that many presidents didn’t have when they became president,” recalled Robert McNamara during a fortieth anniversary retrospective on the administration at the Kennedy Library. “And I think his view was that…the primary responsibility of the president is to keep the nation out of war if at all possible.”

  While Kennedy’s foreign policy councils included hawks like Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, what set apart his presidency from previous Cold War administrations was the surprising presence of pacifists like Sorensen and global visionaries like Chester Bowles, who sought to align the United States with the revolutionary nationalism sweeping the developing world. And it was these voices of peace and progressivism to which JFK seemed more attuned, as Acheson discovered during the 1961 Berlin Crisis when the president rejected his bellicose counsel, prompting Truman’s old, mustachioed secretary of state to harrumph about Kennedy, “Gentlemen, you might as well face it. This nation is without leadership.”

  After Bowles, a liberal patrician from the Stevenson wing of the party, took office as Kennedy’s number two man at the State Department, he lost no time in recruiting othe
r innovative foreign policy thinkers, including legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, George Kennan, and Roger Hilsman. The wave of progressive policymakers brought to Washington by the new Kennedy administration shook the centurions of the old order. J. Edgar Hoover tried mightily to block Murrow’s appointment as head of the United States Information Agency, digging as far back as his childhood to find subversive evidence about the television journalist, who had antagonized the FBI chief with his broadsides against the anticommunist excesses of Joe McCarthy. But Murrow finally was confirmed by the Senate, and with Kennedy’s backing he promptly began cleansing the agency of its hard-line Cold War propaganda and rehabilitating victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist by finding jobs for them in his agency.

  As Murrow told senators during his confirmation hearing, the fundamental message that Kennedy wanted delivered to the world was “that we as a nation are not allergic to change and have no desire to sanctify the status quo.” When McCarthy’s old Senate ally Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa brought up Murrow’s muckraking CBS documentaries and asked why we couldn’t follow the Soviet lead and keep our propaganda more upbeat, the newsman, barely restraining himself, shot back: Because we live in a free society and you couldn’t convincingly “tell the American story” if you masked all its flaws.

  To his deep disappointment, Murrow would never become more than a second-string advisor for Kennedy. But the president still valued his voice at National Security Council meetings, where he could be counted on to help JFK fend off the more alarming militaristic proposals. His advice on the Bay of Pigs—he was one of the few in Kennedy’s circle to warn against it, calling the venture unworthy of a great power and destined to fail—went unheeded. But Kennedy made certain his voice was heard on other issues, from nuclear arms control to Vietnam. Young foreign policy maverick Roger Hilsman would consider him “a staunch ally” in the movement within the Kennedy administration to shift U.S. policy from its regimented Cold War line.