The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [332]
When these exile leaders had come together, they pretended that they were in the Cuban Revolutionary Council on their own and were not Washington’s creatures. And now, as they attempted to justify their ersatz coalition, they exited Washington with another lie. The CRC released a statement that the events at the Bay of Pigs did not amount to an invasion but “a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months … [which] allowed the major portion of our landing party to reach the Escambray mountains.”
That same day, Kennedy received a memo from his brother. Love is expressed in many tongues, and few who read Bobby’s terse words would imagine that they were reading not only a serious political document but also an act of devotion. Kennedy was despairing, and Bobby was speaking to him in the one idiom that mattered to him now, justifying what he had done and not done. “The present situation in Cuba was precipitated by the deterioration of events inside that state,” Bobby began. His brother the president must not blame himself, but understand that everything that happened had been because of Castro. “Therefore, equally important to working out a plan to extricate ourselves gracefully from the situation in Cuba is developing a policy in light of what we expect we will be facing a year or two years from now!” Bobby went on, underlining this sentence in his own hand.
Bobby wrote his brother that what had “been going on in Cuba in the last few days must also be a tremendous strain on Castro,” as if the Cuban leader were suffering too. Even as the recriminations crescendoed, Bobby sought to direct the president toward the future, and a battle with Castro that he was sure would come again. For Kennedy, Cuba was an unseemly nuisance, but to Bobby it was the most important and most dangerous country in the world. “Our long-range foreign policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in Laos or the Congo or any other place in the world,” he wrote his brother.
Bobby was investing in the island enormous amounts of psychic energy, fierce anger, and intensity. He seemed willing to do anything to bring Castro down, even staging false provocations. Bobby wrote: “If it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MIGs attacked Guantánamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war and that we might very well have to take armed action ourselves, would it be possible to get the countries of Central and South America through OAS to take some action to prohibit the shipment of arms or ammunition from any outside force into Cuba?” He was not for waiting either. “The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse,” he wrote. “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”
Everything Bobby had seen told him that communism was an evil malignancy that had to be attacked without qualms and without waiting. Not only did he believe this, but now he shouted it with a force and confidence not shared by any of the other bruised players in the White House. He was the attorney general, and if he had not been the president’s brother, the other cabinet officers would have been tempted to hush him up, dismissing his remarks as the mindless impressions of a man who knew less about foreign affairs than anyone in the room. But in this malaise of uncertainty, he stood boldly and made this Cuban issue his own.
At the NSC meeting the next day, April 20, the cabinet members and other officials got their first rich taste of the Robert F. Kennedy who had terrorized faltering subordinates during the campaign. The attorney general saved the worst of