Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (36 page)

Whatever the remaining challenges in South Vietnam, reining in the messengers’ bad news was not going to save the country from a communist takeover. But everyone at the White House from Kennedy down believed that a pliable press more sympathetic to Diem could make a difference in helping him win his war. It was only one part of the growing illusions about Washington’s ability to save Vietnam.

At the center of the administration’s increasing investment in Vietnam was the rationalization that it mattered to America’s security. At the start of October, Kennedy asked the State Department to draft a paper updating progress in the war and explaining U.S. involvement in the conflict. The department summarized the recent gains in the fighting and described the war as important in convincing all our allies that we stood by our commitments. In addition, “a victory for us would prove that . . . underdeveloped nations can defeat ‘wars of liberation’ with our help [and] strike a telling blow to the mystique of the ‘wave of the future.’” If such a victory could be won without the involvement of American ground troops or, so to speak, on the cheap with advisers and material support, Kennedy was an enthusiastic supporter. No one at the State Department considered the likelihood that America’s prime European allies might view a growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a distraction from more important commitments. Moreover, no one seemed to think that winning in Vietnam was tied to saving Southeast Asia from communism—or at least they said nothing about this.

While the administration struggled to solve problems in Vietnam, Cuba remained a minefield of uncertainty and bad advice. With information flooding in by late August 1962 about a Soviet military buildup on the island, Bobby Kennedy urged Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs to consider what new “aggressive steps” could be taken, including “provoking an attack against Guantánamo which would permit us to retaliate.” McNamara favored heightened sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and the Chiefs urged Castro’s elimination, which could be done “without precipitating general war.” They suggested that “manufactured . . . acts of sabotage at Guantánamo . . . faked assassination attempts against Cuban exiles and terrorist bombings in Florida and Washington, D.C.” could trigger U.S. intervention. But Bundy, speaking for the president, cautioned against action that could provoke a Berlin blockade or a Soviet strike against U.S. missile sites in Turkey and Italy.

John McCone, the acting CIA director, was as eager as the Chiefs to identify ways to overthrow Castro. With Allen Dulles about to retire in November 1961, the fifty-nine-year-old McCone had become effective head of the agency. His selection by Kennedy bothered liberals, who saw him as a conservative hawk. His background only reinforced this view. The silver-haired, bespectacled McCone was the offspring of a wealthy California family: Educated at Berkeley in mechanical engineering, he had worked in the family iron foundry business, Bechtel-McCone. During World War II, the corporation had made $44 million in shipbuilding, which a General Accounting Office official described as wartime profiteering. “At no time in the history of American business,” he said, “had so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of taxpayers.”

An outspoken Republican with ties to the Eisenhower administration, McCone became head of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1958. He had been an early and forceful proponent of nuclear weapons. In 1956, after Adlai Stevenson pledged support for a nuclear test ban as a presidential candidate, and scientists at the California Institute of Technology endorsed his proposal, McCone, a trustee of the institute, attacked them as taken in by the Russians. McCone’s principal advocate for the CIA directorship was Bobby Kennedy, who saw him not only as an ally in urging all-out action against Castro, but also as a firewall against Republican criticism of the administration’s failed Cuban policy.

The minute McCone saw evidence of the Soviet buildup in Cuba he was convinced that they intended to turn the island into a missile base. At an August 21 meeting with other national security officials, he described the Russian shipments to Cuba as equipment either to guard against a future air assault or for missile sites. After the meeting, McCone privately told Bobby Kennedy that “[i]f Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.” Although the president considered McCone’s prediction hyperbolic, he accepted his advice urging an analysis of “the probable military, political and psychological impact of the establishment in Cuba of either surface-to-air missiles or surface-to-surface missiles which could reach the U.S.”

No other top administration official besides McCone voiced similar concerns. Schlesinger disputed the conclusion that the Soviet decision to make a major investment in Cuba signaled a readiness to challenge the United States head-on. “Any military construction will probably be defensive in function; a launching pad directed against the U.S. would be too blatant a provocation,” Schlesinger told Bundy.

Roger Hilsman, a West Point graduate who had served in the OSS during World War II, behind the lines in Burma and China, and became the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, shared Schlesinger’s view of the Soviet buildup. As someone who had passed the Kennedy test of physical courage and knowledge of counterinsurgency through personal experience, Hilsman enjoyed standing with the president as tough-minded. Kennedy especially enjoyed Hilsman’s nerve at a briefing when he spent ten minutes correcting General Lemnitzer about Laos. Kennedy sat smiling as Hilsman spoke and Lemnitzer did a slow boil. And so Hilsman’s view that the Russian matériel and military personnel arriving in Cuba were meant to help Castro defend himself against another U.S.-sponsored invasion carried weight at the White House. Hilsman did not discount Moscow’s direct military involvement in Cuba but rejected suggestions that it grew out of a risky plan to turn Cuba into an offensive base like those the United States had encircling Russia.

Having been so badly burned by the CIA’s miscalculations about the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was inclined to agree with Schlesinger and Hilsman and see McCone’s warnings as unconvincing and likely to stimulate pressure to invade Cuba, which step he resisted as certain to undermine the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy wished simply to shelve Cuba as an issue in the developing fall congressional campaign. At the end of August, when the CIA showed him photos of surface-to-air missile sites on the island, Kennedy saw them as defensive installations and acted to repress press leaks that could stimulate Republican demands for an attack. He instructed Marshall Carter, who was temporarily standing in as CIA director while McCone was away, to “limit access to the information. . . . ‘The President said to put it back in the box and nail it tight.’”

In trying to mute speculation about Soviet steps to make Cuba a nuclear launching pad, Kennedy had advice from Rusk and Bundy that Moscow had never risked deploying nuclear missiles outside of the Soviet Union. The intelligence bureaus of the State and Defense departments as well as their Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Security Agency counterparts agreed. The U.S. Intelligence Board, the coordinating agency or clearinghouse for all intelligence estimates, concurred. “There is no evidence that the Soviet government has ever provided nuclear warheads to any other state,” Bundy advised.

When news of the Soviet buildup in Cuba, leaked by Senate Republicans, made headlines in the United States, Bundy urged Kennedy to hold a press conference drawing a “sharp distinction between what is now going on and what we would not tolerate.” In short, the Soviet shipments did not add up to offensive weapons and posed no direct threat to the United States or any Latin American country, which is what Kennedy unequivocally told a press conference on September 13.

As with CIA and military miscalculations about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the various national security agencies were misinformed about past Soviet behavior and current Soviet intentions. Between January and May 1959, Moscow had set up nuclear missile launchers in East Germany and deployed warheads under Soviet control. In August, however, apparently eager to make sure that their capacity to strike all of Western Europe with the missiles in East Germany did not undermine prospects for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev Paris summit in the spring, Moscow dismantled the sites. Although the deployment had registered on Western intelligence services, none of them had a full report on the Soviet action until the beginning of 1961, and by then the missiles were long gone. Since none of the intelligence services could offer a satisfactory explanation for the missiles’ initial deployment and subsequent removal, they concluded that the temporary deployment was an aberration not worth serious consideration.

Neither Kennedy nor anyone in his White House knew about the deployment, nor did anyone in the intelligence services come forward in September 1962 to report it or suggest that the Soviets might be replicating their action. U.S. intelligence officials knew that shipping missiles to Cuba would be much harder to disguise than the deployments to East Germany; it was another reason to discount the 1959 episode as of no significance in assessing current events. Since Moscow had no indication that the West knew about the 1959 deployment, the Soviets could hope that similar shipments to Cuba would also go undetected. The failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to tell the White House about the East German deployment was a blunder on par with earlier misjudgments on Cuba. The failure to report the seemingly inconsequential 1959 episode may have resulted from the belief that it was of no real importance, but it can also be assumed that it grew out of a desire to defend an agency for which the new administration already had questionable regard.

Yet whatever the sources of the omission, it certainly colored assumptions about current events in Cuba. Even when information came in on September 21 from spies that twenty medium-range ballistic missiles, which could hit targets nearly eleven hundred miles inside the United States, had arrived on the island, intelligence analysts marked the report as only “potentially significant,” believing that Moscow was incapable or unwilling to take such action.

For Kennedy and his advisers in September and early October 1962, a Soviet buildup in Cuba, including offensive weapons posing a direct threat to U.S. territory, was an unwanted challenge. And not simply because it would compel consideration of an attack on Cuba that would undermine the Alliance for Progress; it would also threaten defeat in the November elections by Republicans blaming the president for having failed to topple Castro and head off grave dangers to the homeland.

The civil rights crisis in Mississippi in September also discouraged Kennedy from compounding his difficulties by describing events in Cuba as a national peril. Throughout 1961 and into 1962, civil rights had been a source of ongoing irritation to him rather than an opportunity to reform historic wrongs. He had refused to make good on his promise to integrate public housing with a stroke of the pen and he avoided tensions with segregationists by appointing five southern racists from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi to federal judgeships. In November 1962, Kennedy would finally issue an executive order integrating public housing, but his slowness to act supported Martin Luther King’s observation that Kennedy lacked the “moral passion” to fight hard for racial equality.

At the beginning of October, one consequence of the Mississippi troubles was to keep public discussion of Cuba to a minimum. The mess at the state university in Oxford was bad enough without now conceding that the White House had failed to anticipate Soviet aggression in Cuba. During the night of the Mississippi crisis, Kennedy was angered by a tip that
New York Times
columnist James Reston was publishing an article saying that Kennedy was more eager to meet with the Soviets than they were to meet with him. Distressed at the thought of how weak it would make him look when tied to the Mississippi embarrassment and news of missiles in Cuba, Kennedy told aides, “We ought to knock it [Reston’s claim] down tonight. That’s just kicking Reston right in the balls, isn’t it?” he asked, pleased at the thought of showing some toughness.

In refocusing his attention on Cuba, Kennedy hoped that he would not be dealing with a major crisis that could threaten a war with Russia. His eagerness not to face an emergency reflected itself in resistance to a McCone recommendation for additional U-2 flights. In an October 5 meeting of national security officials, McCone described the likelihood of Soviet ground-to-ground missiles as more a “probability than a mere possibility.” Bundy, who remembered Kennedy as “always edgy about McCone,” disputed McCone’s conclusion and saw little need for new U-2 flights over Cuba. Rusk, speaking for the president, opposed more flights as threatening to produce a crisis with Moscow. Moreover, Kennedy, who told Bobby that he thought McCone was “a real bastard,” directly pressed McCone not to publicize his views on Cuba for fear it would inject the island into the campaign. As it was, press reports that Khrushchev had described the United States as “too liberal to fight” to defend Berlin or oust Castro had provoked congressional Republicans to demand that the president respond with tough talk.

Kennedy was convinced that Republican assertions in September and early October about Soviet missiles in Cuba were no more than campaign rhetoric. At the end of August, when Senator Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, had complained that the administration had no plan for countering Soviet missile bases in Cuba, Kennedy had dismissed him as a “nut.” Despite assurances from Khrushchev and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington that Soviet installations on the island were strictly for defense, the pressure on Kennedy to ensure that McCone and Republican critics were wrong convinced him to authorize a U-2 flight over Cuba for October 14.

The result shocked Kennedy and all his advisers—except for McCone, who had accurately assumed that the Soviets were building medium-range missile sites. On the evening of October 15, while Bundy was hosting a dinner party at his home, Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence, phoned to report that new U-2 photos conclusively revealed four medium- and two intermediate-range installations along with twenty-one crated bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The intermediate-range weapons could travel 2,100 miles and reach America’s most populous cities, as well as Washington, D.C.