The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [335]
“Fuck!” Bobby exclaimed. He turned away from the set as if he had been struck in the face and hurried from the room. A blow against his brother was a blow against him. The epithet resonated deeply within him. Bobby’s life was in part an all-consuming, never-ending struggle to prove that he was not a coward. He could play football on a broken leg, confront Communists in their very lair in Central Asia, and destroy this bearded interloper who called his brother such an unspeakable epithet and dared to dance on wreckage strewn where men better than he had died. Bobby hated Castro as the personification of evil. He believed, wrongly, that Castro had personally flown across the swamps of Zapata to “pick out these fellows who were in the swamps—and just shoot them.” From now on, Bobby was like an ancient knight who had taken a vow to slay his brother’s enemy.
The president named a commission of inquiry headed by General Maxwell Taylor and including Dulles and Burke. Bobby, his brother’s representative, was the fourth member of the Cuban Study Group, and the only one who had the motive and strength to move the inquiry beyond the narrow parameters of military policy. The president had thought about naming his brother the new director of the CIA, but he decided that he had even better uses for him.
Bobby slouched in his chair like a disgruntled teenager, his hair messy, his tie askew, but he showed subtle deference to these men. He valued physical courage above all virtues, and these men all wore badges of bravery that he did not wear. He admired Taylor, one of America’s most decorated war heroes, so much that he would name his sixth son Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
The accused rarely are their own best judges, and by naming Dulles and Burke to the study group, Kennedy was making it clear that he did not want to look too deep or too hard into the debacle. Bobby had the same mandate as the others. He was protecting his brother, and no one dared suggest that Kennedy had made all the crucial decisions, from changing the invasion site to limiting the aircraft that were to have cleared the skies of Castro’s planes.
Failure is often a great teacher, but those who rush through its pages, turning away from unpleasantness, do not easily understand its lessons. It was Cuba that the study group would be focusing on, but the lessons here, whatever they were, would be used elsewhere. This was one of the most crucial moments in the Kennedy presidency. If the administration could not figure out what had happened so close to its shores, how would it deal with these quiet, purposeful men who were moving through the jungles of Laos and Vietnam carrying guns and revolution?
Bobby put in a full day at these sessions before heading over to the Justice Department to do another day’s work. The witnesses came on one after another, justifying their actions as best they could, rarely being pressed, at times making modest mea culpas. Privately, Bobby felt that both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had in some measure betrayed the president. Bissell, as the attorney general saw it, had been so inept as to base his judgment that the Bay of Pigs was guerrilla country on a survey done in 1895. He did not dare contemplate the possibility that the CIA had willfully led the president into approving its plans knowing that swamps surrounded the Bay of Pigs. As for the military chiefs, he believed that the generals had deliberated for no more than twenty minutes before signing on to the plan. These men were not quite so cavalier in their actions, but their judgment deserved the closest scrutiny. Nevertheless, Bobby asked only a few pointed questions but showed none of the prosecutorial zeal that had made witnesses fear him so on the Rackets Committee.
During one session, Dulles sat down on the other side of the table to tell his tale. He told his fellow commission members