The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [331]
Kennedy could have held to the CIA’s original plan and let the brigade stake its flag on Trinidad, or he could have decided to at least go ahead with all the planes. Then the CIA and the Joint Chiefs would have admonished him to send in American soldiers and aid, and he might well have found himself leading his country into a war he did not want. He knew that was the game plan from the day he walked into the Oval Office. He seemed now like a craven compromiser, but he was dancing along this line with fire on either side, trying to finesse a matter that in the end could not be finessed.
If the plan had worked out as it was supposed to, Castro would have been assassinated and the Communists overturned. Kennedy would have considered that the best of all outcomes, but it is doubtful that Cuba would have blossomed into a Caribbean democracy. More likely, the island would have been a sullen, subdued land, overseen by bickering politicians, all clients of the United States. And the triumphant CIA would have felt that it had proved the broad efficacy of covert activity and assassination, not only in Cuba but also across the world.
Brigade 2506 had no air cover, no ammunition resupply, and no promise of aid to its beleaguered forces. By the third day, it was not a question of whether they would win, but how long they could possibly hold out. That morning Pepe San Roman, the brigade commander, told the Americans that many of his men were standing in the water on the beach “being massacred” by Cuban fire and by three enemy Sea Furies strafing the brigade positions. He looked up and saw high in the sky four American navy jets, and he called the Essex and asked that those planes descend and fight. He was told that the navy command was doing everything possible to get permission. “God damn it,” he swore. “God damn you. God damn you. Do not wait for permission.”
In the annals of American military history—and the brigade’s story surely belongs there—there are few more pathetic messages than this: “Am destroying all equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to woods. I can not wait for you.”
As those soldiers who had not yet surrendered were being tracked down in the endless swamps, Kennedy ordered air cover to try to save at least a few of them. In the Cabinet Room, Bobby was merciless with those officials sitting in dismay and shock around the massive table. He acted as if he and his brothers had been mere bystanders to this debacle. He was not ready to assume any burden of blame for the president, but sought to parcel out the chunks of responsibility among all the other major players. He seemed incapable of understanding where most of the responsibility lay. He called on them “to act or be judged paper tigers in Moscow” and not simply to “sit and take it.”
It was not Khrushchev who had sent these men in without air cover and it was not Khrushchev who had fought them on the beach, but from the fury of Bobby’s rhetoric it might have been. It was almost as if he wanted these middle-aged officials to jump out of their seats, take up arms, and run into the street in a heroic counterattack.
The president had no such fire in his voice. As Kennedy sat in a rocking chair in the Oval Office, he looked at the Washington News trumpeting the disaster and let the paper fall to the floor beside him. As the Cuban exile leaders entered the room, he did not display his despair. Kennedy kept doodling on a pad of paper, writing the phrase “Soviet Cuban” over and over again, and enclosing the two words in boxes.
These exile leaders were proud men who had been kept under de facto house arrest in Miami so that they would not betray the secrets of the invasion. The Cubans sat on two long couches beside the president in