From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (115 page)

Appropriately code-named Bumpy Road, the operation produced what has been aptly called the "perfect failure."
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Top CIA officials blamed JFK for the debacle for refusing to authorize air support, but the agency's own internal assessment, kept under tight wraps until 1998, told of a plan fatally flawed in conception and execution.
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The CIA assumed, without any evidence, and incorrectly as it turned out, that a landing of Cuban exiles would trigger an internal insurgency that could topple Castro. Some CIA officials and the Joint Chiefs suppressed their reservations in the expectation that Kennedy, if things went badly, would do what was necessary to succeed, something he had no intention of doing. The plan quickly grew beyond the CIA's capacity to manage it, expanding from a small landing of guerrillas to a full-scale invasion force whose blown cover made plausible deniability an illusion. The exiles were poorly trained, disorganized, and divided among themselves. The air strikes that were to take out Castro's air force did not do so and tipped off the impending invasion. The site was shifted to the Bay of Pigs, an especially inhospitable spot for an amphibious landing. Without air support and asked to execute a withdrawal, the most difficult of military operations, the ragtag exile forces were sitting ducks for Castro's aircraft and well-prepared defenders. After three days of fighting, 140 were killed, 1,189 captured. The only answer to their final, tragic message—"We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help"—came in the form of rescue teams who managed to pick up twenty-six survivors.
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For the new president, the phrase "Bay of Pigs" became a haunting synonym for humiliation. Kennedy accepted full responsibility—"victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan," he publicly affirmed—and his approval ratings shot up immediately. But he was shattered by the debacle and furious at the military and CIA for misleading him. He felt personally responsible for the fate of the nearly 1,200 Cubans held by Castro. At home, liberals attacked him for intervening in the internal affairs
of a sovereign state and jeopardizing the goodwill of other Latin American nations. Conservatives charged him with spinelessness.
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The invasion took place on Khrushchev's birthday, provoking rage in the Kremlin. Anger changed to incredulity when Kennedy did not finish what he started—"Can he really be that indecisive?" the Soviet premier asked his son. Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak and could be pushed around.
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The president felt compelled to demonstrate his toughness.

The Bay of Pigs heightened the administration's determination to get rid of Castro. Fiercely competitive, the Kennedy brothers found defeat intolerable, especially at the hands of some one they viewed as a tinhorn dictator. They became obsessed with Castro, for them a cancer that had to be removed. Following the Bay of Pigs, they mounted a multifaceted effort to eliminate him that at times took the form of a personal vendetta. Since the revelation of these activities, attention has focused on the various, often bizarre plots to assassinate the Cuban leader (none apparently carried out) using such things as Mafia hit men, exploding cigars, or poison fountain pens. Such schemes are sensational and morally troubling, to be sure, but they represent a relatively small part of a much more comprehensive program. The United States tightened the economic screws by banning all Cuban imports and pushing its allies to do the same. It sought to isolate Cuba diplomatically within the hemisphere by securing its expulsion from the Organization of American States. Operation Mongoose, a covert operation aimed at Castro's removal was approved in November 1961, run out of the CIA, and monitored by a top-level group that included the attorney general. It developed into the agency's major covert operation; the CIA's Miami outpost, JMWAVE, became the largest in the world. Mongoose began slowly with contingency plans, intelligence gathering, and small-scale sabotage operations to destabilize Cuba. It intensified in the spring of 1962. The CIA and Pentagon concocted schemes for provoking U.S. military intervention, including the
Maine-
like explosion of a U.S. warship, the sinking of a boatload of refugees that could be blamed on Castro, and even holding Cuba responsible if a U.S. space mission failed. Mongoose proceeded in tandem with stepped-up planning for direct U.S. military intervention and massive spring 1962 military exercises in the South Atlantic and Caribbean involving some forty thousand troops and hundreds of ships and planes. There is no evidence that Kennedy had actually decided to intervene militarily in Cuba. Such an option was under consideration, however, and anti-Castro operations
intensified in the fall of 1962 when the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba provoked a full-fledged crisis.
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After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy suffered further frustrations. Incredibly, Laos was second only to Cuba as a foreign policy problem in the administration's early days. In an impossibly complicated and often desultory civil war in that distant, landlocked nation, leftist insurgents backed by North Vietnam and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of toppling a U.S.-backed government. Upon leaving office, Eisenhower had privately warned his successor that Laos was the "cork in the bottle" of Southeast Asia.
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Kennedy initially took a tough stance. The Joint Chiefs proposed sending sixty thousand troops plus air cover and guaranteed victory if authorized to use nuclear weapons. Fearful of a replay of Korea in Laos, wary of military advice after the Bay of Pigs, and alarmed by the chiefs' seemingly casual attitude toward war with China and the use of nuclear weapons, Kennedy in late April rejected intervention. Concluding that a negotiated settlement was the best he could get, he agreed to participate in a conference at Geneva. The decision was eminently sensible. The significance of Laos was at best debatable; in any event, it was no place to fight. It was a logistical nightmare. In the eyes of Americans, its people appeared singularly unwarlike, "a bunch of homosexuals," Eisenhower sneered, a passive, indolent people, "a feeble lot," in the words of JFK's ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. Kennedy himself wondered how he could explain sending troops to faraway Laos and not to nearby Cuba.
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But the decision to negotiate after taking a firm position reinforced the appearance of weakness and left him vulnerable to hard-liners at home.

A stormy summit with Khrushchev at Vienna added to Kennedy's problems. Over the long term, the June discussions may have helped the two
men understand each other, but the short-term results were disastrous. The president was in severe pain from various ailments and heavily medicated. Although he spent hours preparing, he was psychologically unready for the encounter. Ignoring the advice of experts, he engaged in fruitless ideological spats with Khrushchev. In substantive discussions, they agreed only on the need for peace in Laos, where neither had significant interests—or influence. They differed on terms for a nuclear test ban. Their discussions on the most pressing and dangerous issue, Berlin, were chilling. Certain that his younger and inexperienced adversary could be bullied, Khrushchev made clear that the status quo on Berlin was unacceptable. Kennedy insisted that the United States would not surrender its rights. Khrushchev renewed the six-month ultimatum and reiterated his threat of a separate peace. If the United States wanted war, he concluded, "let it begin now." "It will be a cold winter," a solemn president retorted.
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Kennedy came home severely shaken—Khrushchev "just beat hell out of me," he confided to a friend. Aides testified that for the next few months he was "imprisoned by Berlin." "If he thinks I'm inexperienced and have no guts . . . we won't get anywhere with him," the president said of Khrushchev.
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Unlike the Bay of Pigs, this time he initiated a full-scale debate among his formal and informal advisers on what to do. Perhaps reliving 1948, hard-line former secretary of state Dean Acheson proposed a major military buildup, a declaration of national emergency, and, if the Soviets restricted access to West Berlin, an airlift and readiness to go to war. Cautious voices urged continued efforts to negotiate. As on so many issues, Kennedy came down in the middle. In a major speech on July 25, he hinted at a willingness to negotiate. But he also made clear U.S. determination to defend Western rights in Berlin and proposed a major military buildup. Stopping short of a declaration of national emergency, he announced another big jump in defense spending and an increase in draft calls, a reserve call-up, and extended enlistments to expand the armed forces. Most alarming, he pushed for a federal program to assist in the building of fallout shelters.

Kennedy's speech ratcheted up an already dangerous crisis by several notches. Khrushchev denounced it as a "preliminary declaration of war" and warned an American visitor with ties to the president that "we will meet war with war."
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To underscore the seriousness of the crisis, he
decided to resume nuclear testing. His threats did nothing to resolve the immediate problem in East Berlin, where during July alone more than twenty-six thousand East Germans fled to the West. Picking up on discreet signals from Washington that the United States would not interfere in
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Berlin, the Soviet Union and East Germany decided to stop the "hemorrhaging" by building a wall to seal off East Germany from West Berlin. Construction began without warning on Sunday, August 13, 1961, starting with barbed wire and then adding concrete blocks once it was clear the West would do nothing.

Ironically, what became one of the most conspicuous, ugly, and despised symbols of the Cold War was at first greeted by some Americans with a sense of relief. To be sure, some hotheads urged knocking the wall down before it was finished despite the obvious risk of war. In fact, few were willing to risk war and some actually accepted the wall as a way to ease tensions. Kremlinologists advised Kennedy that it was Khrushchev's way of defusing an increasingly explosive situation. Thus while dispatching Vice President Lyndon Johnson and former occupation commander Gen. Lucius Clay to West Berlin and sending troops through East Germany into the city to reaffirm the U.S. commitment, the administration acquiesced. "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war," Kennedy privately mused.
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Although it brought the superpowers back from the brink, the wall did not resolve the fundamental issues. Following the summer crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev initiated personal, backchannel communications—what presidential advisers dubbed a "Pen Pal Correspondence." Lower-level discussions on Berlin and other front-burner issues took place intermittently through the fall and into the winter of 1961–62. Khrushchev dropped his deadline; JFK made conciliatory public statements. As so often with the Cold War, however, hostility coexisted uneasily with conciliation. The Soviets conducted at least thirty atmospheric nuclear tests in the fall of 1961; the United States resumed underground testing. On one occasion in mid-October, U.S. and Soviet tanks faced off ominously at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Soviet aircraft periodically harassed American planes in German air corridors. At times, Americans got the impression that Moscow had put Berlin on the shelf; on other occasions, it appeared still a top priority. In fact, it converged with Cuba in October 1962 to assume a central role in the most menacing of Cold War crises.
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Great-power conflict dominated the first year of Kennedy's presidency, but the Third World was never far from his mind. The 1960s in many ways was the decade of the Third World. From 1960 to 1963, twenty-four new nations joined an already long list. Their emergence brought about what historian Raymond Betts has called a triangulation of world politics, a "large base of 'underdeveloped' nations . . . over which was a divided apex made up of the 'developed' (highly industrial) nations either siding with the United States or the Soviet Union."
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The rise of the Third World dramatically changed the makeup of the United Nations and altered the balance of power in the General Assembly. In 1961, neutralist leaders Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana convened in Belgrade the first Conference of Non-Aligned Countries with the declared intention of limiting the effects of the Cold War on the rest of the world. Revolutionaries like Castro, his confidant Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba inspired oppressed people everywhere and even became romanticized heroes for leftists in developed nations. There was talk of an "Afro-Asian bloc." The possibility of Third World nations acquiring nuclear weapons was especially troubling. The emphasis placed on the Third World by Cold War combatants bespoke their conviction that the outcome of that conflict could be decided by what happened there.

Kennedy set out to win the allegiance of the new nations. As a senator, he had questioned Dulles's hostility toward neutralism and the denial of aid to countries who disagreed with U.S. policies. He protested the overemphasis on military hardware at the expense of economic development. He embraced the argument of William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's 1958 best seller
The Ugly American
that the United States was losing the Third World because it assigned to those countries diplomats who could not speak the languages and isolated themselves in neo-colonial style in posh embassies. As president, Kennedy sought to expand economic assistance and to appoint ambassadors with language skills and area expertise. Paraphrasing Wilson, he spoke eloquently of making the world safe for diversity. His self-interested idealism established him as a hero to many Third World peoples.

Programs like Food for Peace and the Peace Corps put on full display Kennedy's concern for the Third World. Under the enlightened management of World War II bomber pilot, former history professor, and South Dakota progressive George McGovern, Food for Peace provided cheap
food and fiber from U.S. agricultural surpluses to be used as partial wages for workers building schools, hospitals, and roads in Third World countries. By 1963, it was feeding 92 million people per day, including 35 million children—"a twentieth century form of alchemy," Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey exulted.
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The more publicized Peace Corps provided a powerful and enduring example of Kennedy's practical idealism. During the 1960 campaign, he had taken up the idea of American youth going abroad to help other people. He named his dynamic brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, a business executive, to head the new program. More than forty-three nations requested volunteers the first four years; 2,816 American volunteered in the first year alone. The aim, obviously, was to win friends in Third World countries, a goal that served Cold War interests, but Shriver resisted State Department pressures to focus on trouble spots like Vietnam and went to great lengths to keep the CIA from using the Peace Corps to plant agents in other countries. The Peace Corps's impact on Third World development was negligible. Some volunteers lacked skills, others had little to do, and many ended up teaching English.
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But its contributions in the realm of the spirit were enormous. It helped other peoples to understand the United States and Americans to understand them. It conveyed the hope and promise that represented the United States at its best. It confirmed the nation's values and traditional sense of mission.
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