The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [337]
The next morning other American pilots flew back after being promised that the navy would be flying cover for them. But the navy pilots were still in the ready room when the planes arrived over the Bay of Pigs. Castro’s planes shot down one of the planes and later in the day shot down another plane piloted by Americans.
The White House had given approval for the use of napalm, but an inquiry might have asked whether these Americans should have flown and died in what was to have been a Cuban struggle. There were all kinds of questions that could have been asked, but Bobby did not ask them, and neither did anyone else. It would be years before Americans learned that four of their fellow citizens had died in what they had been told was a Cuban battle.
Grayston Lynch was the first witness who had been at the Bay of Pigs. Lynch was not a politician. He was a soldier trained to fight his country’s clandestine wars. He went ashore at the Bay of Pigs in large part because he would not think of leaving his men alone. His was a pure soldier’s voice that asked only that he and his comrades be unleashed, not harnessed to the will and whim of politicians. His was a voice without which battles are not won, and a voice that when it drowns out all others leads to the loss of wars. He believed that, if only Kennedy had not called off the planes, he and his men would have won not only the day but also the country. He was as fearless in what he told Bobby and the others as he had been fearless at the Bay of Pigs.
“I told ‘em to kiss my ass practically. ‘You people are the ones who failed, and this is why you failed,’” Lynch recalled. “Why, they tried to interrupt me and I wouldn’t even stop talking. I laid it all out, and finally Maxwell Taylor turned and said, ‘Well, it all goes back to the planes.’ He did that a second time, and when he did Bobby stared across the table at him like, ‘Buddy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ “
Lynch had the dog soldier’s version of things, but there were matters to consider that went far beyond what happened on the beach. The reports the CIA had given Kennedy before the invasion suggested that Castro was barely tolerated by most Cubans. In these secret hearings, Hawkins said that as late as the previous September, the agency “thought he still had 75 percent of the population behind him, although his popularity was then declining.” That was a startling admission, and if true suggested a willful duplicity on the part of the CIA leaders to maneuver the president into an exercise in which he would have no choice but to involve American troops.
“I don’t specifically remember that statement,” Colonel Hawkins said. “I had been given the understanding that everybody was ready to revolt. That must have come up after the operation was over. All I know is that I came away from the Bay of Pigs feeling that I had been cheated as well. Afterwards, what they were all trying to do, including Taylor, was covering Kennedy’s rear end.”
At minimum, Hawkins’s statement should have signaled a serious investigation. Bobby and the others, however, were not about to look under that dark carpet. These men treated the Cuban revolution as little more than a conspiracy. They did not grasp, as did others in the administration, that Castro’s revolution had been born out of a compost heap of poverty, inequality, and foreign exploitation, and that the sooner social justice reigned across