Khrushchev would later explain his frequent retreats from public to Pitsunda by saying, aA chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg.a Though the metaphor had a negative connotation in English, Khrushchev described its meaning in a positive manner: aIf I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.a Pitsunda was where he caught his breath in the rush of history or wrote a few pages of it himself. It had been there, between his walks through the pine grove and past cabanas on the beach, that he had crafted his 1956 speech breaking with Stalin. He liked to introduce guests to his ancient trees, many of which he had given human names, and to show off his small indoor gym and private, gla.s.s-enclosed swimming pool.
It was a measure of how important Khrushchev considered relations with Kennedy that amid all his other demands that morning he had still been willing to receive Walter Lippmann, the legendary seventy-one-year-old American columnist, and his wife, Helen. It was not just Lippmannas national influence and access to Kennedy that endeared him to Khrushchev, but also the fact that his columns had been consistently friendly to the Soviets.
With the schedule for the s.p.a.ce launch firmed up, however, Khrushchev pa.s.sed word to Lippmann on the tarmac in Washington, in the first-cla.s.s cabin of his plane to Rome, that their meeting would be postponed. aImpossible,a Lippmann boldly responded in a scrawled reply to Soviet Amba.s.sador Menshikov.
By the time the Lippmanns landed, Khrushchev had decided he would see them, but he would not breathe a word concerning plans for his potentially historic s.p.a.ce launch with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the following morning.
Khrushchev had accelerated the original May Day launch date after a training accident on March 23 killed the flightas intended cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko. Shortcuts taken by the Soviets to rush their first man into s.p.a.ce ahead of the Americans had likely contributed to Bondarenkoas death, which came after flames engulfed his oxygen-rich training chamber. The Soviets did not disclose any of the details of the accident. They did not even announce the cosmonautas death, and airbrushed Bondarenko from all photographs of the Soviet s.p.a.ce team.
Undaunted, Khrushchev grew all the more determined, and further accelerated the Soviet target launch date to April 12. The timing was chosen to keep Moscow ahead of the U.S. Project Mercury mission that was scheduled to launch astronaut Alan Shepard into s.p.a.ce on May 5. If the flight succeeded, Khrushchev would not only make history but also get a badly needed political boost. If Gagarinas mission failed, Khrushchev would bury all evidence of the launch.
Oblivious to that background drama, Lippmann and his wife arrived at Khrushchevas sanctuary at 11:30 in the morning, and would remain for eight hours of walking, swimming, eating, drinking, and talking before spending the night.
Lippmann savored his access to U.S. and world leaders, and it didnat get any better than meeting the communist worldas leader in his Black Sea lair. Before he had begun writing a column, Lippmann had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. Lippmann had coined the phrase aCold Wara and was the leading U.S. voice suggesting that Washington accept the new Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. Moscowas interest in Lippmann was so great that a KGB spy ring in the U.S. was working through his secretary, Mary Price, to gather information on his sources and subjects of interest, an infiltration Lippmann had not yet discovered.
The tall, large-boned Lippmann towered over the short, squat Khrushchev as they walked the compound. In a lively afternoon game of badminton, however, the fiercely compet.i.tive Khrushchev teamed up with the Lippmannsa portly female minder from the foreign ministry and thrashed the more athletic Lippmanns, who were surprised by his agility. Khrushchev viciously and repeatedly struck the shuttlec.o.c.k only a few inches above the net, often aiming at his opponentsa heads.
During a lunch break, Khrushchevas second-in-command, Anastas Mikoyan, joined the group for a three-and-a-half-hour conversation the focus of which was so exclusively on Berlin that Lippmann, like Amba.s.sador Thompson before him, concluded that for the Soviet leader, nothing matched the importance of Berlinas future.
White House, State Department, and CIA officials had briefed Lippmann before his departure, so he was able to float a trial balloon on their behalf. Lippmann questioned why Khrushchev considered the Berlin matter such an urgent affair. Why not negotiate a Berlin standstill of five to ten years, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union could attend to their relationshipas other problems and create an atmosphere more conducive to a Berlin agreement?
When Khrushchev sharply dismissed the notion of further delay, Lippmann pressed him for reasons.
A German solution, said Khrushchev, must come before aHitleras generals with their twelve NATO divisions get atomic weapons from France and the United States.a Before that could happen, Khrushchev said he wanted a peace treaty setting in stone the current frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteeing the permanent existence of East Germany. Otherwise, Khrushchev insisted, West Germany would drag NATO into a war aimed at unifying Germany and restoring its prewar eastern frontier.
Lippmann took mental notes while his wife scribbled down the conversation verbatim. Both tried to remain sober by pouring out the considerable amounts of vodka and Armenian wine that Mikoyan served them into a bowl the Soviet leader had provided them in an act of mercy.
Time and again, with Kennedy as his intended audience, Khrushchev told the Lippmanns he was determined to abring the German question to a heada that year. Lippmann would later report to his readers that the Soviet leader was afirmly resolved, perhaps irretrievably committed, to a showdowna over Berlin to stop the gusher of refugees and to save the communist East German state.
Khrushchev laid out his Berlin thinking to Lippmann in three parts, offering greater detail than he had previously provided for public consumption. Lippmannas three-part report on their talks would win him a second Pulitzer Prizea"and appear in 450 newspapers.
First, Khrushchev told the columnist, he wanted the West to accept athere are in fact two Germanysa that would never be reunited. The U.S. and the Soviet Union therefore should codify through peace treaties the three elements of Germany: East Germany, West Germany, and West Berlin. This would fix by international statute West Berlinas role as a afree city.a Thereafter its access and liberty could be guaranteed, he said, by symbolic contingents of French, British, American, and Russian troops and by neutral troops a.s.signed by the United Nations. The four occupying powers would sign an agreement with both Germanys that would produce that outcome.
Because Khrushchev doubted Kennedy would accept this option, he sketched for Lippmann what he called his afallback position.a He would accept a temporary agreement that provided the two German states perhaps two or three years during which they could negotiate a loose confederation or some other form of unification. If the two sides reached a deal during that period of time, it would be written into a treaty. If they failed, however, all occupation rights would end and foreign troops would leave.
If the U.S. refused to negotiate either of his first two options, Khrushchev told Lippmann, his athird positiona was to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that gave Ulbricht full control over all West Berlin access routes. If the Allies resisted this new East German role, Khrushchev said he would bring in the Soviet military to blockade the city entirely.
To cushion the blow of this threat, Khrushchev told Lippmann he would not precipitate a crisis before he had the chance to meet Kennedy face-to-face and discuss the matter. In other words, he was opening his negotiations with the president through the columnist.
a.s.suming his una.s.signed role of U.S. co-negotiator, Lippmann suggested to Khrushchev a five-year moratorium on Berlin talks during which the current situation would remain frozen, which he knew from his pre-trip briefings was Kennedyas preference.
Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively. Thirty months had pa.s.sed since his Berlin ultimatum, he said, and he would not agree to that long a delay, nor was he willing to let the Berlin matter go unsettled before his October Party Congress. His deadline for a Berlin solution was the fall or winter of 1961, he said.
Khrushchev told Lippmann that he didnat believe Kennedy was making decisions anyway. He summed up the forces behind Kennedy in one word: Rockefeller. He thought it was big money that manipulated Kennedy. Despite atheir imperialistic nature,a he felt these capitalists could be won over with common sense. If they were forced to choose between a mutually advantageous agreement or Soviet unilateral action or war, Khrushchev said that he thought the Rockefeller crowd would cut a deal.
Khrushchev said he was ready to call the Americansa nuclear bluff. aIn my opinion,a he said, athere are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish just because we would sign a peace treaty with the GDR that would stipulate a special status of afree citya for West Berlin with its 2.5 million population. Such idiots have not yet been born.a At the end of the day, it was the Lippmanns and not Khrushchev who flagged and retreated to bed. Khrushchev embraced each of them with overpowering hugs before they returned, tired and drunk, to their hotel room in nearby Garga. Lippmann noticed none of the weariness in Khrushchev that Amba.s.sador Thompson had seen just a month earlier. Nothing, however, would energize the Soviet leader as much as the news he would hear the following morning.
PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961.
Khrushchev had only one question when Sergei Korolyov, the legendary rocket designer and head of the Soviet s.p.a.ce program, phoned him with the good news: aJust tell me, is he alive?a Yes, Korolyov declared, and even better than that, Yuri Gagarin had returned to Earth safely after becoming the first human in s.p.a.ce and the first human to orbit the Earth. The Soviets had called his mission Vostok, or aEast,a to drive home the point of their rise. And the project had achieved its purpose. To Khrushchevas delight, during the 108-minute flight, Gagarin had whistled a patriotic tune composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951: aThe Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, where her son flies in the sky.a Over the protests of military leaders, the euphoric Soviet leader spontaneously promoted Gagarin two ranks to major.
Khrushchev exploded with joy and pride. As had been the case with the Sputnik mission in 1957, he had again beaten the Americans in the s.p.a.ce race. At the same time, he had demonstrated a missile technology with unmistakable military significance, given Soviet advances in nuclear capability. Most important, Vostok provided him with the political booster rocket he badly needed ahead of his October party conferencea"effectively neutralizing his enemies.
A banner headline in the official newspaper Izvestia, whose entire issue was devoted to the flight, read: GREAT VICTORY, OUR COUNTRY, OUR SCIENCE, OUR TECHNIQUE, OUR MEN.
Khrushchev exulted to his son Sergei that he would stage a grand event that would allow the Soviet people to celebrate a real hero. Sergei tried to talk his father out of an immediate return to Moscow, given the toll the stressful year already had taken on his health, but Khrushchev would not be dissuaded. The KGB hated the idea of crowds they could not completely control, but Khrushchev would not heed their warnings either.
The Soviet leader ordered the biggest parade and national celebration since World War IIas end on May 9, 1945. His sense of triumph was so great that he spontaneously jumped into the open limousine that drove Gagarin and his wife down Leninsky Prospekt to Red Square. On sunlit streets, they together waved to cheering crowds who climbed trees and hung out of windows for better views. Roadside balconies so groaned with people that Khrushchev feared they would collapse.
From atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Khrushchev used his cosmonautas nickname as he declared, aLet everyone whoas sharpening their claws against us knowathat Yurka was in s.p.a.ce, that he saw and knows everything.a He scorned those who had belittled the Soviet Union and thought Russians went abarefoot and without clothes.a Gagarinas flight seemed as much a personal confirmation for Khrushchev of his leadership as it was a message to the world about his countryas technological capability. The peasant boy who had been illiterate and shoeless had outdone Kennedy and his far more advanced country.
More than three weeks later, Project Mercury would make Alan Shepard the second human and first American in s.p.a.ce. History would always record that Khrushchev and Yurka got there first.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961.
Adenaueras timing could not have been worse.
The West German chancellor landed in Washington just a few hours after Yuri Gagarin had parachuted to safety in Kazakhstan. He sat in the Oval Office with a president who was eager to get him out of town and get on with the invasion of Cuba.
All the more awkward, Adenauer had arrived in Washington roughly a month after the visit of w.i.l.l.y Brandt, the Berlin mayor, with the speaker of the Berlin Senate Egon Bahr. It was almost unprecedented that a newly elected U.S. president would schedule a meeting with key opposition representatives of an Allied country before he had met with the national leader, but such was the nature of the strained Kennedya"Adenauer relationship.
Kennedy had told Brandt that aof all the legacies of World War II which the West had inherited, Berlin was the most difficult.a Yet the president said he could think of no good solution to the problem, and neither could Brandt. aWe will just have to live with the situation,a Kennedy had said.
Brandt joined the list of those who were telling Kennedy that Khrushchev would be likely to act to change Berlinas status before his October Party Congress. To test Western resolve, Brandt said the East Germans and Soviets were increasing their hara.s.sment of civilian and military movement between the two sides of Berlin. If the Soviets again blockaded West Berlin, he said the city had built up stockpiles of fuel and food that would last for six months. This would give Kennedy time to negotiate his way out of any Berlin difficulty.
Brandt had used his forty minutes in the Oval Office to try to instill in Kennedy a greater pa.s.sion for the cause of Berlinas freedom. He called West Berlin a window to the free world that had kept alive East German hopes for eventual liberation. aWithout West Berlin this hope would die,a he said, and American presence was the aessential guaranteea for the cityas continued existence. Brandt was relieved to hear Kennedy for the first time reject the Soviet proposal of a UNa"protected afree citya status for West Berlin, an outcome Kennedy had been rumored to support. For his part, Brandt a.s.sured Kennedy that his Social Democratsa earlier flirtations with the Soviets over neutrality were a thing of the past.
A month later, Kennedyas conversations with Adenauer would be less congenial. Kennedy asked Adenauer many of the same questions he had posed to Brandt, but with less satisfying a result. When asked what the Soviets might do during 1961 in Berlin, Adenauer told Kennedy, aAnything or nothing could happen,a noting that he was not a prophet. Adenauer said that when Khrushchev issued his six-month ultimatum in November 1958, no one had expected him to be so patient, and still he had not delivered on his threats.
Kennedy wanted to know what Adenauer believed the U.S. reaction ought to be if the Soviet Union did sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, a.s.suming Khrushchev did so without interfering with access to Berlin.
Adenauer delivered an elderly manas lecture to the young president about how complicated the legal situation was regarding Germany. Was the president aware, he asked, that there still had been no peace treaty signed by the four powers with Germany as a whole? Was the president aware, he inquired further, of athe little-known facta that the Soviet Union still maintained military missions in parts of West Germany? The three Allies had asked Adenauer not to say much about this, the chancellor said, as they also kept such outposts in East Germany, which enabled them to gather intelligence.
Since his boss had failed to answer Kennedyas direct question, Foreign Minister Brentano a.s.sessed Soviet alternatives. The first possibility was that of another Berlin blockade, which he thought unlikely. The second was the Soviet transfer of control over Berlin to the East German leadership, followed by hara.s.sing tactics impeding access to the city, an outcome Brentano considered more probable. So Brentano suggested contingency planning for that possibility.
Given such a case, Adenauer said West Germany would stand by its military commitments under NATO and intervene to defend Western forces against Soviet attack. aIf Berlin fell, it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World,a said Brentano.
What followed then was a complex discussion about which parties had what legal rights under what contingencies in a Berlin crisis. What rights did West Germany have in international law over Berlin? What rights did it want? What rights did the four powers have to supply and defend Berliners? What was the essence of the NATO guarantee for Berlin? When might it be exercised, and by whom? At what point did the West go nuclear in a Berlin conflict?
All those questions required work, Adenauer said.
Kennedy fidgeted as he listened impatiently to the translation.
For Adenauer, the solution to the Berlin Crisis was to reinforce the division of the city into East and West to match that of Germany as a whole. In his mind, West Germanyas integration into the West was a prerequisite for eventual unification, as it would provide a better chance to negotiate from strength. He told Kennedy that West Germany had no interest in entering bilateral talks with the Soviets. aIn the great game of the world,a he said, West Germany was aafter all only a very small figure.a He needed a fully committed America, however, in order for his approach of refusing direct talks with Moscow on Berlin to work.
Kennedy said he was concerned about the $350 million agold draina each year caused by keeping U.S. troops in Germany, a situation not helped by the appreciation of the deutsche mark. He called it aone of the major factors in our balance of payments accounts.a He wanted the chancellor to help him reduce U.S. costs in Germany and to increase German procurements of military and other goods in the United States. The president wasnat seeking direct budgetary relief from Adenauer, as had been rumored the previous December after the visit of Eisenhower Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson. But he did want a richer West Germany to provide more support for lesser-developed countries, in part to reduce this global burden for the U.S. Adenauer agreed to that and other economic measures that would lighten the U.S. load.
The discussion over the budget impact of the U.S. security guarantee for West Germany marked an important shift. Kennedy was less personally committed to Germany than his predecessors, and beyond that he believed a more prosperous Germany should also be more capable of offsetting U.S. costs.
The communiqu at the end of the Kennedya"Adenauer sessions was limp. It was vague concerning their points of agreement and left out entirely the issues where the sides differed. The correspondent of the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Adenauer had been bitterly disappointed by a visit that did nothing to address Bonnas major concerns. He said the three long meetings between Adenauer and Kennedy over two days ahad eaten up the bodily strength of the West German chancellor, and had annihilated his political plans.a Adenauer, he said, walked down the White House steps following their talks avisibly exhausted, his suntanned face seemingly ashen-yellow against his sunken torso.a Der Spiegel reported that the Kennedy administration had not satisfied Adenaueras request to spend the weekend after his White House meetings with his friend President Eisenhower in Pennsylvania. Instead, the magazine said, Kennedyas people abanneda Adenauer to Texas and aVice President Johnsonas out-of-the-way cattle farm.a For all the rising economic success of his country, Adenauer was suffering from the declining currency of his own leadership in Washington. The U.S. allies with whom he had executed the Marshall Plan, had rebuilt his country, had joined NATO, and had stood down the Soviets were mostly out of power. His closest co-conspirator, John Foster Dulles, had died two years earlier. A couple of German reporters had swallowed the White House spin that Adenauer and Kennedy had formed a deeper personal bond, but there was no evidence to support it.
At the end of the visit, Kennedy stepped out onto the White House lawn in the raw cold of Washingtonas April dampness to praise the Adenauer to whom he had given so little. aHistory will deal most generously with him,a Kennedy said. aHis accomplishments have been extraordinary in binding the nations of Western Europe together, in strengthening the ties which link the United States and the Federal Republic.a Adenauer returned Kennedyas favor, calling the man he so deeply doubted a agreat leadera who carried ahuge responsibility for the fate of the free world.a Little noticed was Adenaueras later response to a reporteras question at the National Press Club about a rumored concrete wall that might be built along the Iron Curtain. aIn the missile age,a Adenauer said after a short pause, aconcrete walls donat mean very much.a STONEWALL, TEXAS.
SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 1961.
At high noon on a sunny Sunday, Adenauer rode off by plane from Washington with his daughter Libet and Foreign Minister Brentano to Austin, Texas. From there he would helicopter some sixty miles to Stone wall, population about five hundred, Vice President Johnsonas birthplace and home of his LBJ ranch. Adenauer was trading a world of real problems for one of almost mythical attraction to Germansa"the open s.p.a.ces of America and the Old West made popular by the best-selling novels written by German author Karl May (who, by the way, had never visited America).
Johnsonas central Texas of ranches and wooded hills had been settled by German pioneers a century earlier, and their ancestors warmly welcomed the Bundeskanzler with signs bearing messages such as WILLKOMMEN ADENAUER and HOWDY PODNUR. Father Wunibald Schneider staged a special afternoon Ma.s.s in German for Adenauer at Stonewallas St. Francis Xavier Church.
When Adenauer visited nearby Fredericksburg, where German was still widely spoken, he said in his native tongue that he had alearned two things in his life. A man can become a Texan, but a Texan can never stop being one. And second, there is only one thing larger than Texas in the world, and that is the Pacific Ocean.a The crowd loved it, as did Johnson. With star German reporters in tow, Adenauer was using Texas as an antidote for his Washington disappointments and a campaign stop for his forthcoming elections. Though never happy being Kennedyas errand boy for lower-profile missions, Johnson nevertheless followed Kennedyas instructions that he ab.u.t.ter upa Adenauer, even though the vice president would have preferred being in Washington to push for his harder line on Cuba.
Adenauer was savoring some sausage at a Texas barbecue in two giant tents down by the Pedernales River that ran through the LBJ ranch at about the same time the CIA-supported Brigade 2506, loaded with arms and supplies, converged on its rendezvous point forty miles south of Cuba. Johnson put a ten-gallon hat on the chancelloras head, which Adenauer c.o.c.ked for a memorable photo that would appear in all the major German newspapers. Johnson gave him a saddle and spurs and praised how bravely Adenauer had been riding the horse of freedom through the Cold War. Adenauer enthused about how much he felt at home in Texas.
On their drive to the airport for Adenaueras Monday, April 17, departure, Johnson took a phone call from Kennedy. He pa.s.sed the presidentas greetings to the chancellor and the fact that Kennedy regarded West Germany as a agreat power.a Johnson then whispered to Adenauer that an uprising had begun in Cuba, triggered by an invasion of exiles, information just provided by Kennedy.
One would have to wait for developments, Johnson told Adenauer.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL 18, 1961.
With Adenauer safely back in Bonn, President Kennedy took a break from his unfolding Cuba crisis to put on a white tie and tails and sip champagne with members of Congress and their spouses at the White House. They all basked in the elegance and charm that the Kennedys had brought to Washington.
Most of Kennedyas guests didnat know that the previous morning 1,400 Cuban exiles, armed and trained by the CIA in Guatemala, had begun their landing at the Bay of Pigs, nor that the operation was already heading for disaster.
Two days earlier, eight B-26 bombers with Cuban markings, launched from a secret CIA air base in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had failed in their preparatory strikes for the a.s.sault. They had destroyed only five of Castroas three dozen combat planes, leaving the landing partyas boats vulnerable even before they had run aground on unantic.i.p.ated coral reefs.
Castroas fighters sank two freighters loaded with ammunition, food, and communication gear. Many of the U.S.-backed Cuban brigadeas men had landed in the wrong locations, and all had insufficient supplies. On the morning of the white-tie gala, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had delivered to Kennedy the bad news: aThe Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had antic.i.p.ated.a Nevertheless, the Marine Band played on that evening, striking up aMr. Wonderful.a A singer belted out the lyrics from the Broadway hit as the perfect couple with their perfect smiles, the president and the First Lady, descended red-carpeted stairs to enormous applause.
Jackie danced with senators. The president schmoozed, elevated by popularity ratings that still exceeded 70 percent.
At 11:45 p.m., the president pulled away from his guests for a meeting that would be the last chance to save the failing Cuba mission. It was a scene out of Hollywood: the president and his Cabinet members in white tie talking battle plans with a military leadership in their most formal dress uniforms, medals dripping from their chests. Meanwhile, in Cuba, men they had sent into battle were being cut apart. Although Kennedy had tried to preserve deniability by refusing to use American soldiers or planes in the operation, his fingerprints were all over the unfolding calamity.
Most of the military bra.s.s in the room had been in their jobs under Eisenhower when in January 1960 he had approved the plan to overthrow Castro. Allen Dulles, the sixty-eight-year-old CIA director whom Kennedy had kept on from the Eisenhower administration, was overseeing the operation. He had produced the first plan for the a.s.sault, modeled on a successful 1954 coup in Guatemala that had toppled a leftist government using 150 exiles and U.S. pilots flying a handful of World War II fighter planes. The CIA men involved in Guatemala had also served as Dullesas point men for the new Cuba plan.
Most important at the meeting was Richard Bissell, who was the sort of high-intellect, high-cla.s.s, high-secrecy figure that appealed to the Kennedy brothersa spy world fascination. The tall, stooped former Yale economics professor was CIA director of plans and had direct charge of the Cuban operation. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, he had amused Kennedy by describing himself as a aman-eating sharka when the two men had first met over a dinner put on for the new president by CIA officers at the all-male Alibi Club.
Now working for Kennedy, Dulles and Bissell had put the final touches on a plan for a high-profile amphibious landing of some 1,400 exile soldiers. The notion was that the a.s.sault forceas success would somehow trigger an anti-Castro uprising among what U.S. intelligence estimated to be 25 percent of the population, spurred by 2,500 members of resistance organizations and 20,000 sympathizers.
Kennedy had never questioned their numbers, yet had ordered changes in the plan that had weakened its chances of success. He had altered the landing site from Trinidad, a Cuban town on the south-central coast, to the Bay of Pigs on the argument that the new site would allow a less spectacular nocturnal landing with less chance of opposition. Kennedy had insisted there be no air or other support traceable to the U.S. and had reduced the initial air strike from sixteen to eight planesa"again, to aplay down the magnitude of the invasion.a Berlin had factored in the presidentas considerations: he wanted to avoid providing Khrushchev with any pretext for Soviet military action in the divided city through a too-direct U.S. involvement in the Cuban invasion.
Kennedyas last-minute changes to the operation had required such quick fixes that the result was a number of oversights. No one had antic.i.p.ated the Bay of Pigsa treacherous coral reefs. Nor had anyone thought to replace the earlier siteas escape route for insurgents into the mountains, should matters go amiss. Also, leaks had been widespread. Already, on January 10, the New York Times had splashed a three-column headline across its front page: U.S. HELPS TRAIN AN ANTI-CASTRO FORCE AT SECRET GUATEMALAN AIR-GROUND BASE. Then, just hours ahead of the invasion, Kennedy had to intervene through aide Arthur Schlesinger to get the New Republic magazine to withhold a story that richly and accurately detailed the Cuban invasion plans.
aCastro doesnat need agents over here,a Kennedy had complained. aAll he has to do is read our papers.a The April 17 invasion had produced a sharp exchange of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The Soviet leader, not yet knowing how badly the operation was going, fired a warning shot on April 18 at 2:00 p.m. Moscow time in the most threatening language he had yet employed with Kennedy. Making the Cubaa"Berlin link, he said, aMilitary armament and the world political situation are such at this time that any so-called alittle wara can touch off a chain reaction in all parts of the globe.a Khrushchev wasnat buying Kennedyas disclaimers, saying it was a secret to no one that the U.S. had trained the invasion force and supplied the planes and bombs. Warning Kennedy about the chances of a amilitary catastrophe,a Khrushchev vowed, aThere should be no mistake about our position: We will render the Cuban people and their government all necessary help to repel armed attack on Cuba.a Kennedy had responded to Khrushchev at about 6:00 p.m. Washington time on the same day. aYou are under a serious misapprehension,a he protested to the Soviet leader. He recited all the reasons Cubans found the loss of their democratic liberties aintolerable,a and how that had bred growing resistance to Castro among more than 100,000 refugees. That said, he stood by the fiction of American noninvolvement and warned Khrushchev to also keep his hands off. aThe United States intends no military intervention in Cuba,a he said, and if the Soviets intervened in response, then the United States would honor its obligations ato protect this hemisphere against external aggression.a With that exchange fresh in his mind, Kennedy resisted all calls for greater American involvement. He rejected Bissellas argument that he should urgently provide the exiles with limited U.S. air cover, with which Bissell argued victory could still be had. Bissell said all he required were two jets from the aircraft carrier USS Ess.e.x to shoot down enemy aircraft and support the stranded force.
aNo,a said the president.
Just six days earlier, Kennedy had been irritated when aides expressed doubts about the mission. aI know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,a he had said. Now he was just as annoyed when told by the people who had gotten him into this mess that he couldnat succeed without escalating military action in a manner that would more clearly show the U.S. hand.
aThe minute I land one Marine, weare in this up to our necks,a he told Bissell. aI canat get the United States into a war and then lose it, no matter what it takes.a Moreover, Kennedy didnat want another aAmerican Hungary,a a situation in which the U.S. was perceived to have encouraged an uprising that in the end it did nothing to defend. aAnd thatas what it could be, a f.u.c.king slaughter. Is that understood, gentlemen?a If the president didnat want to use warplanes, argued Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, a hero of World War II and the Korean War, he could use a U.S. destroyeras guns to help the Cuban brigade. Known as a31-knot Burkea for his tendency as admiral to drive his destroyers at boiler-breaking speed, Burke now wanted Kennedy to push up the throttle. He said Kennedy could change the whole course of battle if just one destroyer aknocked the h.e.l.l out of Castroas tanks,a which he insisted would be a relatively easy task.
aBurke,a the president fumed, aI donat want the United States involved in this.a ah.e.l.l, Mr. President, we are involved,a retorted Burke, speaking with the tone of a four-star to a young PT boat captain. He had seen often enough how political indecision could cost lives and shift battle outcomes.
Kennedy ended the three-hour meeting at 2:45 a.m. with a weak compromise. He approved a plan that would send six unmarked jets to protect the exile forceas B-26s as they dropped supplies and ammunition. But the bombers arrived an hour ahead of the U.S. escorts, and the Cubans shot down two of the planes.
When it was all over, Castro had killed 114 of the CIAas trainees and had taken 1,189 prisoners. He had gained his enemiesa surrender after three days of fighting.
Acheson immediately grasped the negative impact Kennedyas Cuba failure would have on Khrushchevas thinking and on Allied confidence. He considered it asuch a completely un-thought-out, irresponsible thing to do.a Speaking before diplomats at the Foreign Service Inst.i.tute, he said, aThe European view was that we were watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang, when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out.a He told his audience the Europeans were aamazed that so inexperienced a person should play with so lethal a weapon.a With a tone of dismay, Acheson wrote to his former boss Truman after returning from his Europe trip, referring to his Rose Garden meeting with Kennedy but without mentioning the presidentas name. aWhy we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure,a he said, aI cannot imagine. Before I left it was mentioned to me and I told my informants how you and I had turned down similar suggestions for Iran and Guatemala and why. I thought that this Cuban idea had been put aside, as it should have been.a He told Truman that the impact of Cuba on European thinking about Kennedy would be profound. aThe direction of this government seems surprisingly weak,a he said of Kennedy. aSo far as I can make out the mere inertia of the Eisenhower plan carried it to execution. All that the present administration did was to take out of it those elements of strength essential to its success. Brains are no subst.i.tute for judgment. Kennedy has, abroad at least, lost a very large part of the almost fanatical admiration which his youth and good looks have inspired.a Acheson told Truman that Washington was aa depressed town,a where athe morale in the State Department has about struck bottom.a Reports of Achesonas comments to diplomats-in-training made their way back to Kennedy, who asked to see a full transcript of the meeting. From that point forward, Acheson noticed aan unfortunate effecta on Kennedyas trust in him and a sharp reduction in his level of personal access.
Achesonas colorful criticism had cut too close to the bone.
MOSCOW.
THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1961.
Khrushchev could hardly believe his good fortune.
He had known in advance that Kennedy would act in Cuba, and he had told columnist Lippmann as much at Pitsunda. Yet never in his fondest dreams had he antic.i.p.ated such incompetence. In his first major foreign test, the new U.S. president had lived down to Khrushchevas lowest expectations. Kennedy had demonstrated weakness under fire. He had lacked the backbone to cancel Eisenhoweras plans or the character to make them work as his own. He had lacked the resolve to bring to a successful conclusion an action of so much importance to American prestige.
Though Kennedy had avoided giving Khrushchev a pretext for a t.i.t-for-tat response in Berlin, at the same time, through his failure, he had provided the Soviet leader valuable intelligence on the sort of man who was leading the U.S. aI donat understand Kennedy,a Khrushchev said to his son Sergei. aCan he really be that indecisive?a He compared the Bay of Pigs unfavorably to his own b.l.o.o.d.y but bold intervention of Soviet troops in Hungary to ensure the country remained firmly in the communist sphere of influence.
That said, Khrushchev was concerned by the possibility that CIA chief Dulles, whom he had blamed for the U-2 incident the year before, might have executed the invasion to undermine preparations for a U.S.a"Soviet summit. Khrushchev was also sufficiently self-centered to believe Kennedy may have launched his Cuban landing to humiliate the Soviet leader on his April 17 birthday. Instead of ruining his celebration, however, Kennedyas failure would provide Khrushchev with an unantic.i.p.ated gift.
The KGB reports on Kennedy that followed struck Khrushchev as simultaneously encouraging and troubling. On the positive side, the KGB was reporting from Londona"apparently from sources at the American emba.s.sya"that Kennedy had been telling colleagues in the wake of Cuba that he regretted having kept on Republicans like Dulles as CIA chief and C. Douglas Dillon at Treasury. At the same time, however, Khrushchev wondered what the Cuban operation said about the nature of the Kennedy presidency. Was the president really in control, or was he being manipulated by anticommunist hawks like Dulles? Was Kennedy himself a hawk? Or, more likely, did the botched plan suggest that Kennedy was perhaps something even more dangerousa"an incalculable and unpredictable adversary?
Whatever the truth, what was indisputable was that Khrushchevas fortunes had shifted dramatically for the better in the s.p.a.ce of a single week. Very little could have provided a more dramatic shift in momentum than the combination of the Gagarin s.p.a.ce triumph and the Bay of Pigs setback. It had been just six weeks since Khrushchev had met Amba.s.sador Thompson in Siberia and relayed his reluctance to accept Kennedyas invitation for a summit meeting.
Now that Kennedy had been so weakened, Khrushchev was more inclined to risk drawing him into the ring.