The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [333]
“I understand that you advised against this operation,” Bobby replied at one point, drumming his finger on Bowles’s chest. “Well, let me tell you as of right now you did not. You were for it.”
“When I took exception to some of the more extreme things he said by suggesting that the way to get out of our present jam was not to simply double up on everything we had done, he turned on me savagely,” Bowles recalled.
The undersecretary’s fear was not groundless. On that very day, the president asked the Joint Chiefs to come up with a new plan to overthrow Castro, this time not with Cuban surrogates but with the full application of American military. They replied with a plan to invade Cuba in the west with an amphibious force in an operation slated to take place in sixty to ninety days, beginning before the hurricane season but no later than July 9, 1961.
Two days later, at the next full-scale NSC meeting on Cuba, Bobby once again dominated the thirty-five policymakers. As for the president, his questions led only one place—back to the bloody shores of Cuba. Of all the men who sat there, only Bowles dared boldly to speak otherwise. The undersecretary was a pedantic gentleman whose sonorous moralizing was hardly the best way to convince the president. That said, he spoke important cautionary words, warning that as bad as things were now, percipitent action “would almost surely be ineffective and … would tend to create additional sympathy for Castro in his David and Goliath struggle against the United States.”
“That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby raged at Bowles. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”
Kennedy sat listening, tapping his pencil against his pearly white teeth.
The president was running out of stamina. The evening of the surrender, he went to a dinner at the Greek embassy, accompanied by Jackie and his mother. Kennedy smiled at the ladies and made small talk. Rose had taught her son never to show public weakness, and even in the limousine back to the White House he did not drop his stoic poise for a minute. Only after Kennedy left did Jackie tell her mother-in-law about her son’s sad spirits. “Jackie walked upstairs with me and said he’d been so upset all day,” Rose wrote in her diary afterward. “Had practically been in tears, felt he had been misinformed by CIA and others. I felt so sorry for him. Jackie so sympathetic and said she had stayed with him until he had lain down that afternoon for a short nap. Said she had never seen him so depressed except at time of his operation.”
While the president morosely contemplated his losses, pilots from the Essex flew mission after mission looking for survivors. As the pilots skimmed fifty feet above the endless swamps, they were fired upon by the Cuban military, at times returning to the carrier with bullet holes in their planes. The pilots, who had orders not to fire back, flew back again and again to the shores of Cuba. When the brigade soldiers saw the American planes above, they knew they were saved, and they hurried to the beach, where American teams took them to an unmarked destroyer just offshore.
On one of the last days when the bedraggled, desperate men came out of their hiding places and stumbled toward the beach, Castro’s forces chased after them. The American commander of the planes that had set