The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [327]
Bobby agreed with his brother. He observed that Stevenson’s admirers considered the Illinois politician the “Second Coming,” but Bobby considered him a second coming “who never quite arrives there; he never quite accomplishes anything.”
In many respects, Kennedy had no problem with liberalism itself but with liberals, and it made him irrational when he was considering the progressive ideas that came from their mouths. It was Stevenson, the personification of 1950s liberalism, who irked the president beyond all men in his administration. Both men had gone to Choate, where Kennedy had been a devilish goad to all the rights and rituals of the place and Stevenson had been a little gentleman. He had never run the gauntlet that Kennedy’s father believed a boy had to run or else end up nothing more than a eunuch in pants. Kennedy believed that his UN ambassador was surrounded in New York by chattering, adoring ladies who pandered to his limitless vanity. He could not see beyond his belief that Stevenson was weak to appreciate the value of many of the ambassador’s ideas and the strength it took to profess them among men who ran off to defame him.
Stevenson was very aware of these slights, and now the president had handed him a reason to attack the administration. Stevenson called Senator Wayne Morse and said that he was flying down to Washington and to meet him at the ambassador’s Georgetown hideaway. “I’m going down to resign,” Stevenson told the Oregon politician. “I’ve been destroyed. No one will ever believe me again in the United Nations. They all think I’ve lied. I did not lie.” Morse talked Stevenson out of going over to the White House to submit his resignation, but the outrage boiled within him.
“I’m not signed on to this,” Kennedy replied to Rusk on the telephone, as if the decision lay elsewhere. This was hardly the response of a resolute leader, confident of his decisions. He was indeed the only one “signed on to this,” the only one capable of measuring the complex matrix of political and military decisions and deciding what should be done.
Kennedy told the secretary of State that the strikes should be canceled unless there were “overriding considerations.” The president later suggested to brigade members and others that he had pulled back because of international considerations, fearing that the Soviets might threaten him somewhere else. That was a rarefied reason, but from what Kennedy told Feldman and others later, he felt Stevenson had bludgeoned him into the wrong decision with his nagging self-righteousness. Kennedy realized the immense danger his young administration would be in if Stevenson resigned dramatically and condemned him. Kennedy never publicized that reason, for it hardly would have made sense to the Cuban patriots waiting to go ashore at the Bay of Pigs to face danger of another magnitude.
When Rusk told Bissell and Charles P. Cabell, Dulles’s deputy, about the president’s decision, they instantly tallied up what they considered the devastating military cost. The two CIA leaders were so vociferous in their protests that Rusk agreed that the planes could fly later that day at the beachhead, but not attack Cuban airfields.
At 4:00 A.M., Rusk called the president yet again and put Cabell on the phone. For hours, the CIA deputy chief had listened to the enraged, beseeching screeds of CIA officers who believed that the president’s actions were dooming brave men to death soon after dawn, when Castro’s planes would fly unchallenged across the Bay of Pigs. Cabell told Kennedy that at this hour only American planes could arrive in time to protect the