Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [145]
The Bay of Pigs cast a long shadow over the Kennedy White House, but the value of the early lessons it provided for Kennedy cannot be underestimated. One of them involved one of his very first presidential acts. “I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on,” the president told Arthur Schlesinger just two days later. “It’s not that Dulles is not a man of great ability. He is. But I have never worked with him and therefore I can’t estimate his meaning when he tells me things. We will have to do something about the CIA. I must have someone there with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I know I will be getting the exact pitch. I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there. Bobby should be in the CIA. It’s a helluva way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with the CIA.”
In a statesmanlike gesture, he soon met with Richard Nixon, who hawkishly urged him to “find a proper legal cover and go in.” Nixon’s idea was to use the defense of our naval base at Guantánamo as a possible excuse. Hearing this, Kennedy pointed to the inherent danger in that plan. “There is a good chance that if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin,” he said. The former vice president, always touched by any sign of respect from Jack, came away ready to rally support for him. “I just saw a crushed man today,” Nixon told his allies after the encounter, asking them to resist taking easy shots at the demoralized president.
President Eisenhower was more hard-nosed, wanting to know why Kennedy had called off the air strikes. When the younger man said it was to conceal the country’s role in the operation, Ike was contemptuous. The very concept was obviously contradictory. Here was the United States offering training, equipment, transportation, and air cover to a military operation in which it intended to deny involvement. “How could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to do with it?” When Kennedy said he feared how the Russians might retaliate in Berlin, Ike’s response was to tell his successor that the Soviets didn’t react to what we did. Rather, they “follow their own plans.” The general, now a partisan proud of his presidential service, refused to allow that Soviet strength and belligerence had grown toward the end of his watch. The new president had to.
Accustomed to success, Jack took the defeat hard. For the first time, witnesses actually saw him in tears. Yet, recognizing that he’d backed a military effort requiring greater resources than he was ready to commit and greater risks than he, in the end, wanted to take, he accepted the responsibility. “I’m the responsible officer of the government,” JFK assured reporters and the country.
The American people decided they liked the fact that Kennedy, whatever his failings heading into the disastrous mission, had acquitted himself as a true commander in chief at its conclusion. The record shows that he gained his highest job approval rating—scoring 83 percent in a Gallup poll—in the weeks thereafter.
Close friends such as Red Fay could see the toll it had taken. “In the months that followed, no matter how you tried to avoid touching on the subject, by one route or another it seemed to find its way back into the President’s conversation.” Even on vacation in Hyannis Port, it obsessed him, much to the distress of Jackie, who was ready to put the nightmarish scenes on that Cuban beach that haunted her husband behind