JFK, Conservative by Ira Stoll

Author:Ira Stoll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The president himself summed it up in his January 30, 1961, State of the Union message to Congress. Speaking of the Soviet Union and China, he said, “We must never be lulled into believing that either power has yielded its ambitions for world domination.”

Kennedy and his advisers, in other words, felt encircled, embattled, under siege by a menacing, expansionist, subversive Communist empire. Fighting back was the top priority. “I had no doubt that his number one issue was foreign policy, his number one interest,” Kennedy’s domestic civil rights adviser, Harris Wofford, later recalled.2

Geographically, the closest front in the struggle with communism was Cuba, ninety miles from the coast of Florida. During the campaign, Kennedy had advocated “encouraging those liberty-loving Cubans who are leading the resistance to Castro.” Now, as president, he was in a position to do so with more than just words.

Notwithstanding Vice President Nixon’s contention in the 1960 presidential debates that American backing of the Cuban opposition would violate the United Nations charter,3 Eisenhower’s staff had left Kennedy plans for precisely such an operation against Castro. Liberals within the Kennedy administration and outside it argued against going through with the plans. “It’ll be a massacre . . . an American Hungary,” Richard Goodwin told national security adviser McGeorge Bundy over breakfast in the White House mess.4 Chester Bowles wrote a memo to the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, warning that the covert operation would be “a grave mistake.”5 Senator William Fulbright, the Democrat from Arkansas who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Kennedy that the plans were “ill-considered” and that Castro was a mere “thorn in the flesh . . . not a dagger in the heart.”6 Schlesinger told the president in person that he was against any such plan and wrote two memos to him explaining why.7

Yet Kennedy ignored or overrode the warnings and instead allowed the operation, an invasion of Cuba by a force of anti-Castro exiles who had been trained by the CIA in Guatemala, to go ahead. It was a flop from start to finish. First, an advance air strike by eight B-26 bombers piloted by the Cuban exiles failed to disable Castro’s air force. Then, one of the seven boats carrying the exiles—the boat with most of the communications equipment and ammunition on board—was sunk by one of Castro’s planes. When the 1,400 exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, they were soon outnumbered by tens of thousands of Castro’s troops. Kennedy eventually approved the use of carrier-based U.S. Navy fighter planes to provide cover for the B-26s flown by Cuban exiles and CIA contractors, but even that failed; the jet fighters, off by a time zone, arrived an hour late. Rather than fading into the Escambray Mountains, the backup in the CIA contingency plans, the American-backed exile fighters were captured or killed.8

Kennedy has been faulted by some critics on the right for contributing to the defeat by not acting more aggressively to order American naval, air, or ground support for the Cuban opposition.

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