Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [143]
There were several factors contributing to the pressure put on the new president to approve this ostensibly secret plan. Kennedy had himself called for such an action during the campaign, having gotten a tip-off from, if not others, Governor John Patterson of Alabama, who knew his National Guard units were helping the CIA invasion effort. He felt another spur to action. Once he’d taken the oath of office, and had it confirmed that the operation was already well into its planning stages, he understood that to back off and shut down the preparations would paint him as a soft-liner.
Driving him the hardest were his new colleagues. Somehow, the people directing “Operation Zapata,” the invasion’s CIA code name, fully believed their plan could succeed. They were encouraged by the success Allen Dulles, the brother of the late John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had had in pulling off what was regarded as a similar scheme back in 1954, when a coup d’état had been stage-managed in Guatemala.
Richard Bissell, Dulles’s chief of operations, had slyly arranged, while Kennedy was still a candidate, to meet him at a Georgetown party, and the two Ivy Leaguers had hit it off. Not only was Bissell a persuasive and convincing supporter of Operation Zapata, but so were key Kennedy people, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
But what really clinched it for those men sitting safely in faraway Washington was the escape hatch many were led to believe was built into the plan: if the exiles found themselves unable to hold a beachhead once they landed, they could then retreat to the Escambray Mountains only eighty miles away, where they’d be able to join up with counterrevolutionary forces hiding out. Unfortunately, it was a very long eighty miles, across nearly impassable swamp—and getting even to that point meant eluding a Castro force vastly larger than the exile group. Obviously—had he known, and he should have known this—instead of signing off on it, Kennedy should have shut Zapata down while it was still possible.
Instead, there on the sands of that Cuban bay, every member of the invading Brigade 2506—mostly middle-class professionals recruited in Miami with little idea how to defend themselves against Fidel’s soldiers—was captured or killed. Quickly, in the aftermath, Kennedy asked for the resignations of both Dulles and Bissell. “In a parliamentary government, I’d have to resign,” JFK told Bissell. “But in this government, I can’t, so you and Allen have to go.”
In the end, even from this distant vantage point, nothing is perfectly clear about that ill-conceived CIA operation except for the fact that, once it was launched, it was bound to fail.
It’s hard to say just why Kennedy went along with his advisors, most of whom seem to have either had their heads in the sand or were otherwise enacting agendas of their own. Yet what does a president have such military and intelligence experts for if not to listen to them? JFK had been in office only three months, and however quick a study he was, he was still learning on the job. He was also used to being entirely his own boss, his own skipper, his own engine of accomplishment—from the Muckers to PT 109 to his extraordinary campaigns. The scope and scale, the sheer bulkiness of the apparatus around him made a difference to his sense of maneuverability. Now he’d signed on, not just to an operation, but to a government. He was surrounded by a government establishment he himself had no hand in forging.
But the contradictions buried in the Bay of Pigs scheme echoed Kennedy’s own. It was the old “two Jacks” problem. He was an idealist pursuing a new foreign policy he hoped would transcend the Cold War. He was also a Cold Warrior who had promised in the recent campaign to back “fighters for freedom” against Fidel Castro. Here he was caught going down the one road while signaling the other.
Just a month earlier, at a White House reception for Latin American diplomats, Kennedy had delivered his “Alliance