The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [438]
“In foreign affairs Kennedy was having almost as many problems with those considered friends, such as President de Gaulle, as those deemed enemies. In South Vietnam, on June 11, a Buddhist priest immolated himself in protest against the repressive Diem regime. There were 15,600 American troops and advisers in Vietnam, and soon Kennedy would have to make some brutally difficult decisions about that growing crisis. As for Cuba, the Caribbean island remained a preeminent crisis in part because the Kennedy administration chose to make it one.
They’re not certain yet where the ship went from,” Bobby said to the president enthusiastically over the phone in March 1963, “but they got the ammunition here in Alexandria.”
“Virginia?” Kennedy asked, as he sat in the Oval Office talking to his brother about the operation that a Cuban exile group had just run against a Soviet ship.
“Yeah,” Bobby replied enthusiastically. “And then they got a small boat with two outboards on the back. Went fifty-five miles an hour.”
“Fifty-five miles an hour?” the president replied incredulously.
“Yeah,” Bobby said definitively. “And then they got a little smaller boat … put a small outboard on it, filled it with explosives, and ran up alongside the ship and started the outboard motor and ran it into the ship.”
“And where’d they jump off?” Kennedy asked, impressed with the derring-do.
“Well, either that or they ran it off, see, from their own little bigger boat. There were five of them. So they had some guts.”
The president and attorney general celebrated these acts of bravery against an evil foe, even if they concluded reluctantly that they might have to prosecute the Cubans. There remained a boyish bravado in both men, and an unwillingness to realize the immense danger in creating an international vigilantism in the waters off Florida. Russian ships were for the most part transporting food and medicine, not military goods, and were sailed by civilian crews who had not envisioned themselves as combatants in the cold war. The president at least always drew back from the precipice of action, held in check by the exigencies of power. Bobby, however, maintained his obsession; he stood so close to the problem that Cuba loomed monstrous in his mind, far out of proportion to its reality.
In the immediate aftermath of the missile crisis the president’s preeminent concern had been to make sure that the missiles and the Russian soldiers left the island, and once that happened, to make sure that the men of the brigade finally were freed. Bobby led the efforts to release the prisoners. The American government could not be perceived as paying a bribe for the men. Instead, Castro agreed to accept $50 million worth of drugs and medicine. The drug companies contributed not only worthwhile medicines but outdated drugs and a fortune in Ex-Lax, Listerine, Gill’s Green Mountain Asthmatic Cigarettes, General Mills powdered potatoes, and a rich variety of menstrual supplies. The Americans placed pallets of the finest pharmaceutical goods on the first planeloads and reloaded the ships with the worthwhile goods salted on the top. After Bobby came up with the $3 million in cash that Castro demanded as a final payment, the 1,113 brigadistas flew out of Havana on Christmas Eve.
The president addressed the brigade in an emotional ceremony at the Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962. In a phrase that was not in the original speech, he told a stadium full of Cubans that they would indeed return to a “free Cuba.” As if on signal, the crowd began chanting “Guerra, Guerra.”
“The time will probably come when we will have to act again on Cuba,” the president told an NSC meeting on January 22, 1963. “We should be prepared to move on Cuba if it should be