The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [296]
No evidence exists that at this time Jack knew about the assassination attempts, but in this debate Nixon had good reason to condemn Jack for his duplicitous act of pretending to know nothing about the training of Cuban exiles. To do so would have blown the cover on the CIA operation, and that he would not do. Instead, Nixon decided to lie. “I think that Senator Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign,” Nixon said. “Now, I don’t know what Senator Kennedy suggests when he says that we should help those who oppose the Castro regime, both in Cuba and without. But I do know this: that if we were to follow that recommendation, that we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. I know something else. It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war, and possibly even worse than that.”
In lying, Nixon had spoken the truth. This tragic misadventure whose existence he denied was everything Nixon said it was, though he was one of its major backers. As for Jack, his goading of Nixon was an unseemly business. Although Jack later asserted that he had not been briefed by the CIA about the invasion plans, he had probably learned of them from several other sources. Manuel Artime, the political leader of the brigade of Cuban exiles, met Kennedy in July 1960, when they almost certainly discussed the prospective invasion. In October, just before the final debate, John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, said that he flew to New York and at the Barclay Hotel secretly briefed the candidate about the members of the Alabama Air National Guard who were training the Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion. “I want you to promise me that you are never going to breathe a word about this to anybody if you do not know about it, because there are a lot of lives at stake,” he recalled telling Jack. A few weeks later, when President-elect Kennedy was formally briefed on the operation for the first time, the CIA’s Richard Bissell realized that Jack was already knowledgeable about the invasion. “I think Kennedy had obviously heard of the project,” Bissell reflected. “Just how, I don’t know, but that wasn’t surprising; a fair number of people knew about it.” The CIA would admit later that “the project had lost its covert nature by November 1960,” and surely the Democratic candidate for president had been one of those to know about it.
Jack won his debate points, but in doing so he helped to entomb himself in a prison of rhetoric out of which he and his administration would never fully escape.
It said much about Jack’s marriage that in his acceptance speech in Los Angeles he had violated one of the most sacrosanct traditions by not even mentioning his absent wife. He had fit Jackie into a compartment in his complicated life, but now that he was running for the presidency, she had become a potential problem. “She … absolutely curled up at people shouting, ‘Hello, Jackie,’ who had never seen her before,” reflected Lord Harlech. “She’d just turn away, and you could feel a strong resistance to this kind of