The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [326]
After the attack, a bullet-ridden B-26 landed at Miami International Airport. The excited pilot said that he and three of his colleagues had defected from Castro’s air force and staged an attack. Suspicious reporters could not know that the CIA had shot up the fuselage and that the plane had not been one of the planes making the attack. They did, however, observe that the machine guns had not been fired and that the B-26’s nose was metal, not plastic, as in Castro’s planes.
The grand deception had begun to unravel even before all its elements had been set in place, and it now became a matter of placing lies on top of lies on top of lies. Even before the brigade landed, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations was denouncing an American invasion, and Stevenson was sullying his reputation by unwittingly lying in his country’s defense. Stevenson had the quaint idea that without honor a public man was nothing, and he was outraged that Kennedy had let him stand up before the world and say that America was not involved.
Kennedy went out to Glen Ora, the home that he had rented in the hunt country of Virginia, to try to make Jackie happy. Steve Smith, a weekend guest, thought that the president appeared moody. When Kennedy talked to his brother-in-law, he confided that even though he had given the go-ahead, he was still worrying about whether he should proceed with the invasion. The president seemed to be still in control, but he had lost that control the moment the ships carrying the brigade left Nicaragua. What Kennedy did not know was that many of the men of the brigade had vowed that if the president called off the mission, they would take over the boats and stage their own invasion in name and fact.
Rusk called to discuss plans that called for the B-26s to fly another air strike at dawn against Cuba just as the brigade finished landing on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The story would be put out that the planes had flown from the airstrips that had just been liberated by the brigade forces.
Rusk had begun receiving urgent reports from Stevenson. The UN ambassador was full of justifiable rage that he had not been told about his own government’s involvement in the air strike. “If Cuba now proves any of [the] planes and pilots came from outside we will face [an] increasingly hostile atmosphere,” the UN ambassador cabled the secretary of State. “No one will believe that bombing attacks on Cuba from outside could have been organized without our complicity.”
Stevenson told Rusk about the severe damage already done to American prestige, warning him that if the administration went ahead with this new air strike, he would no longer be able to sustain his nation’s position in the UN. Rusk decided that it was time, whatever the military price, to limit the political costs.
The president listened as Rusk told of Stevenson’s unbridled anger and explained that if the planes were launched, the cover story would hardly last until the craft had returned to their Nicaraguan base. Kennedy had kept the UN ambassador uninformed about the invasion. Stevenson personified the liberal political animal that both Kennedys abhorred. Even Joe Alsop, hardly a liberal but a man of good manners, was appalled at the way the president “regularly harassed and even teased the virtuous Adlai Stevenson. The president disliked Stevenson nearly to the