Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [137]
5. Smith's 1962 book The Fourth Floor lambasted Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom and other Eisenhower officials for being too relaxed about letting Castro seize power in Cuba.
6. ALLEN DULLES (1893–1969) was a Wall Street lawyer and brother of Eisenhower's secretary of state who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961. Along with J. Edgar Hoover, he was JFK's first reappointment as President-elect—and, like Hoover, in the name of continuity. On July 23, 1960, Dulles came to Hyannis Port to brief the newly minted Democratic nominee on national security.
7. In his 1962 memoir Six Crises, former Vice President Nixon insisted that during the July briefing, Dulles told Kennedy that for months, the CIA had "not only been supporting and assisting, but actually training Cuban exiles for the purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself." Nixon complained that JFK had abused this access to classified information in October 1960 to criticize Eisenhower's government for failing to help "fighters for freedom" eager to overthrow Castro. In Nixon's telling, in order to preserve the operation's secrecy, he felt compelled during the debates with Kennedy to argue the other side, although in secret he had actually been a champion of CIA plans to upend Castro.
8. Referring to the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 by anti-Castro Cubans, backed by the CIA. The Agency had given Kennedy to believe that if the exiles, after landing, managed to establish a beachhead in Cuba, public dissatisfaction with Castro might generate a national uprising that would topple the dictator and put the exiles in power—and that if they failed, they could "melt into the mountains" of Cuba as guerrillas. None of these assurances proved accurate, which inflicted a severe blow to Kennedy's prestige. JFK's circle blamed the CIA for its faulty intelligence and planning. The CIA and its partisans blamed Kennedy for refusing to suspend his order that U.S. military forces stay out of the battle.
9. In September 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, charged that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba and that the Kennedy administration was trying to conceal their presence. This was weeks before the CIA provided President Kennedy with the first hard evidence, gathered from U-2 photographs, of the missiles on the island.
10. By that Sunday afternoon, April 16, 1961, six American B-26s painted with Cuban insignia had already destroyed almost half of Castro's air force. CIA officials had presumed that, once the invasion was under way, JFK would be willing to discard his public pledge not to invade Cuba and authorize U.S. military forces to openly support the freedom-fighters then landing on Cuban beaches. Rusk's call warned the President of the importance of concealing any American role in the invasion. Kennedy thus witheld U.S. air power until the exiles were established on Cuba, at which time such a strike might be plausibly explained as coming from Cuban soil. At that moment, a ban on American air strikes was likely to doom the invasion, and Kennedy knew it.
11. LYMAN LEMNITZER (1899–1988) had been appointed by Eisenhower in 1960 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In March 1962, Lemnitzer approved a highly classified plan, called Operation Northwoods, for the U.S. government to commit acts of terrorism in Miami and other American cities and blame them on Castro as a pretext for a full American invasion of Cuba. The plan even had suggested that if a U.S. astronaut perished during a mission, the finger should be pointed at Castro. Appalled by Lemnitzer's proposal and still fuming over the general's ham-handed advice during the Bay of Pigs, JFK denied him a second term that fall as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
12. JOSE MIRO CARDONA (1902–1974) was a Havana lawyer, professor, and prominent Batista critic who, after the revolution, was briefly Castro's prime minister before he broke with him and fled to Florida. Before the Bay of Pigs, Cardona was leader of the committee of anti-Castro