The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [338]
One hundred and fourteen members of the brigade had died. Castro had imprisoned 1,189 of those who survived. A few escaped, including Roberto San Roman, whose imprisoned brother, Pepe, had been the brigade’s military leader. San Roman had been sick and weak when a cargo ship picked him up in an open boat that had been drifting for nineteen days. By then, 10 of the 22 men on the boat had died, and Roberto was still in a daze when the CIA flew him up from Miami Naval Hospital to Washington to meet the president and testify before the Cuban Study Group. And when he testified before Bobby and those other men of power and majesty, he started to cry, and through his sobs, he looked up at them and said: “How could you send us and leave us there?” And Bobby came down from the platform and held his hand, saying he would be there for him whenever he needed somebody, and San Roman thought that was true.
On June 1, 1961, after the last of the twenty sessions of the Cuban Study group, Bobby wrote a memorandum: “He [Kennedy] was taking them at face value and when they told him that this was guerrilla country, that chances of success were good, that there would be uprisings, that the people would support this project, he accepted it … Their study of the Cuba matter was disgraceful.” This was all true, but he didn’t ask why these judgments had been false, why the CIA’s intelligence officers had been silenced, and why his brother was led into the Cuban swamps.
The president’s back was troubling him when Bobby and the other members presented their final report to him in mid-June. Kennedy listened carefully and accepted the thick portfolio of documents. The report, one of the most important documents of the young administration, not only supposedly detailed why the Bay of Pigs had gone so wrong but set out a blueprint of how the government should act in the future toward Cuba and much of the rest of the world.
All his adult life, the president had wrestled with the puzzle of how a democracy could win in the struggle against totalitarian regimes. In England, he had seen how the “pacifists” had worked against rearming Britain. He thought as little of them as he did of those American leftists who now saw nothing but benign goodwill coming from the Soviet Union. On the right, he had seen those who he believed were equally wrong, men like Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was calling for the air force to go in and bomb Castro away. Kennedy tended to stand somewhere in the middle because he believed that was where the best answers lay.
Bobby and his study group colleagues, however, were for getting on with it within the context of an overall cold war strategy, taking what they called “a positive course of action against Castro without delay” and destroying the malignancy that lurked so close to American shores. The group made a few perfunctory criticisms of the decision-making structure in the administration. They suggested no reorganization of the CIA; the only change in that organization immediately contemplated in the White House was to change the agency’s name to a less recognizable one. They said nothing about the underlying social realities that nurtured Castro. They said not one word about Castro’s surprisingly strong support but wrote only that “Castro’s repressive measures following the landing made coordinating uprisings of the populace impossible.”
In the report that sat on Kennedy’s desk, Bobby and his three colleagues presented ideas that, if they had been accepted, would possibly have changed the entire nature of American democracy. They wrote that this struggle against Castro and the seven million Cubans was “a life and death struggle” that would require America to fight with wartime intensity and means. They called for the consideration of “such measures as the announcement of a limited national emergency” and “a re-examination of emergency powers of the president.” They gave no details, but such an announcement would probably have led to the