The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [328]
From the moment the brigade landed on the beaches on Monday, April 17, 1961, the news that Kennedy heard in Washington was not good. Just as the president had been forewarned, the skies were largely clear to Castro’s planes. Castro ordered two Sea Furies and a B-26 into the air at dawn and admonished the pilots to attack either enemy planes or the motley armada still at anchor offshore. During that first day, Castro’s planes sank two ships, one smaller craft, and damaged three other vessels. They also downed three B-26s and damaged two other planes, while a third crashed in the Nicaraguan mountains. Castro’s air force lost two planes, a B-26 and a Sea Fury.
Kennedy had been told that Castro’s troops would not be able to reach the seacoast for twenty-four hours or more, but the day was not yet over when soldiers of Cuba’s First and Third Battalions launched their first attack. The brigade fought with courage and tenacity, as did Castro’s forces, and the insurgents largely held the line. The brigade had only limited ammunition, however, and the munitions ship lay far out to sea, beyond range of Castro’s planes.
All during the day, the Kennedy men sat around trying to monitor the events, reaching desperately for bulletins and scraps of information. Kennedy knew all about the dark uncertainties of war; in the Blackett Strait a man could not tell foe from friend, island from vessel. But even here in the White House, the fog of war had seeped under the door of the Oval Office. Men who thought themselves powerful were becoming little more than impotent bystanders. The Cabinet Room had been turned into a command post, with large highlighted maps and magnetic ships on a representation of the Bay of Pigs, scores of reports, data, radio messages, and intercepts. Men scurried in and out, yet there was little they knew and little they could do.
For Kennedy, the call of blood was the deepest call of all. That was his father’s ultimate lesson. Beyond the boundaries of the family lay deception, ill will, and danger. In this moment when the president had reason to be full of a sense of massive mistrust, betrayal even, he called for the one man to whom he could tell everything and know that the bounds of secrecy would never be broken.
“I don’t think it’s going as well as it should,” the president told Bobby on the phone. Kennedy’s brother was down in Williamsburg, Virginia, giving a speech, and he flew back to Washington immediately.
Bobby had an endless fascination with the covert. Even before the inauguration, he had been involved with clandestine aspects of the Cuban situation, meeting with an attorney who told him that Raul Castro might be turning against his brother’s revolution. He had gone to the first Special Group meeting on Cuba and heard Allen Dulles make his presentation, but for the most part he had stayed away from conferences dealing with the invasion. He may have been a hawk but he flew so high above that none saw his talons.
Bobby was there beside his brother at just before noon the day after the invasion when the president met with his top advisers. The tense, impatient men gathered there were making the most crucial decisions of this young administration. As Kennedy walked into the meeting, he had just received a memo from Bundy outlining the insurgents’ plight, saying that if the brigade was to have any chance at all, Castro’s air force had to be destroyed, if necessary by unmarked American planes. Kennedy’s top national security adviser concluded, “The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” There were no mountains, only endless swamps, and it was symptomatic of the whole operation that Bundy did not even know that simple but crucial fact.
Men were dying on the sands of Cuba, continuing to thrust themselves into the bullets’ path