The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [329]
“Can anti-Castro forces go into the bush as guerrillas?” the president asked the Joint Chiefs. Kennedy and the officers had known the answer weeks before, but Admiral Burke agreed to seek an answer.
At this meeting Burke felt that “nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening and we the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] … have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths. They are in a real bad hole because they had the hell cut out of them. They were reporting, devising, and talking and I kept quiet because I didn’t know the score.”
Burke recalled that he had left his contributions primarily to the judicious sprinkling of such words as “balls” to show his manly displeasure. But he was the crucial service officer and had to speak. Harlan Cleveland, undersecretary of State for International Organizations, remembered the admiral “pressing for every yard of ground he could get in the direction of more American participation by American forces in at least limiting the damage.”
As Kennedy turned back all Burke’s entreaties, he picked up one of the little destroyers and moved it across the map. Cleveland thought that he observed Burke’s face stiffen as the president touched what was by all rites and rituals only the admiral’s to touch. By his passivity, the president had allowed Bissell to push the Joint Chiefs of Staff away from hands-on input into what was a military operation about which they knew infinitely more than the CIA. There were navy ships on the map, but it was not the military’s plan that was falling apart on the sands of the Bay of Pigs.
After the meeting, the attorney general called the admiral. “The president is going to rely upon you to advise him on this situation,” Burke recalled Bobby saying, standing now in the White House for the first time as his brother’s right arm and enforcer.
“It is late!” Burke exclaimed. “He needs advice.”
“The rest of the people in the room weren’t helpful,” Bobby said, dismissing all the other counsels of war, as Burke remembered.
In trying to learn what was going on, the White House was hampering operations in the Caribbean. In times of combat the command aircraft carrier, the Essex, had to take down the vertical antennae that were needed to get distant radio communications. If they were left up, planes could not be safely launched, since the electromagnetic radiation from the antennae might set off their rockets. So much high-level radio communication was coming in, not only the high command prompted by the White House but the White House itself, and possibly Bobby in particular, that the air boss was having trouble finding time to launch planes. “There’s no doubt in my mind but that communication was coming from the White House,” asserted retired Captain William C. Chapman, the Essex air boss. “I don’t know firsthand, but everything I heard was that Bobby was calling too.”
While the fighting continued, the White House was concerned in part with tidying up the bureaucratic debris and pushing the evidence into history’s closets. Burke cabled Commander in Chief (Atlantic) Admiral Robert Dennison, asking whether the brigade could disappear into the bush: “Authorities [the president] would like to be sure CEF [the brigade] could become guerrillas whenever they desire so that point could be emphasized in our publicity, i.e., that revolutionaries crossed the beach and are now operating as guerrillas.”
The brigade would have to bring out their wounded, but these broken, bloodied men hardly represented the photographic image of victory. Burke cabled: “Wounded should be kept in