Things only got worse after that. A diversionary landing on Saturday was supposed to put roughly 160 anti- Castro Cuban freedom fighters ashore near Guantanamo Bay, but was canceled due to the breakdown of a crucial boat. In a separate incident, Cuban forces arrested a small band of freedom fighters who were already on the island with a large cache of arms.
By Saturday afternoon, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations was addressing the General Assembly, denouncing the United States for its attack—in response to which Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, repeated JFK’s promise that no American forces would ever wage war in Cuba.
As all this was taking place, John Kennedy hid in the country. Each event so far had been a prelude to the real invasion. But the pressure has already gotten to Kennedy. He canceled a second wave of bombings, even though he knew full well the move might doom the invasion.
In the dead of night, just after Sunday turned to Monday, the landing force of 1,400 Cuban exiles from Brigade 2506 powered toward the Bay of Pigs aboard a small fleet of freighters and landing vessels. Their hopes were high—their dream was to regain control of their homeland.
Very few of the invaders were actually soldiers. They were men from all across the social strata who had been trained by American World War II and Korea veterans—and those hardened U.S. vets were impressed by what they saw.
But when they landed, the brave freedom fighters had no idea that the president had called off a second wave of air strikes. Now the men of Brigade 2506 would have to secure the beachheads on their own—an almost impossible task.
On Monday morning, even as those Cuban freedom fighters encountered the first wave of Castro’s defenders, the president boarded Marine One and flew back to Washington, hoping that the freedom fighters might find a way to do the impossible.
Other than John Kennedy, only two men are allowed to enter the Oval Office through the Rose Garden door: Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. That privilege, along with their mutual disdain, is all the two men have in common.
The six-foot, four-inch Texan is a self-made man and career politician, a former high school teacher whose towering physique belies a fragile and sometimes insecure persona. The fifty-one-year-old LBJ, as he is known, was perhaps the most successful and powerful Senate majority leader in U.S. history, adept at building partnerships and fortifying his party faithful to pass important legislation.
Bobby, at a shade over five foot nine, speaks with the same clipped Boston accent as his brother. He is a physical fitness buff who was born into privilege and has never held elective office. LBJ knows this and revels in the fact that as leader of the Senate, he is a cut above the relatively inexperienced Kennedy political machine.
Their feud dates to the autumn of 1959, when Bobby Kennedy went to visit Johnson at his expansive Texas ranch. His brother had sent him to Texas to gauge whether Johnson would run against Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in 1960.
It was LBJ’s habit to take important guests deer hunting on his vast property, and Bobby’s visit was no different. At first, Bobby and LBJ got along extremely well—that is, until Bobby shot at a deer. The rifle’s recoil knocked him flat and opened a cut above one eye. Johnson, reaching down to help Bobby to his feet, couldn’t resist taking a swipe: “Son,” he told Bobby, “you’ve got to learn to shoot a gun like a man.”
No one speaks to Bobby Kennedy that way. Of such small moments are great feuds made.
As the election of 1960 drew nearer, it was Bobby who fought hardest against Lyndon Johnson as the choice for vice president. And it was also Bobby who personally visited Johnson’s hotel suite during the Democratic convention in Los Angeles to offer him the job—though not before trying to talk him out of accepting.
Now the Bay of Pigs will mark the moment when their careers officially veer in two radically different directions. Bobby’s stature will quickly rise, with his brother soon referring to him as the “second most powerful man in the world.”
Johnson, who privately refers to Bobby as “that snot-nosed little son of a bitch,” is already regretting leaving the Senate. LBJ is a man in decline. President Kennedy doesn’t trust him and barely tolerates him. The president is so dismissive of Johnson that he even wonders to Jackie, “Can you imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?”
Being vice president, noted John Nance Garner, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first VP, is like being “a pitcher of warm spit.” John Adams once described being in the position as “I am nothing.” Lyndon Johnson knows precisely what his predecessors meant. He no longer has a constituency, no longer has political leverage, and no longer has a whit of authority.
For instance, the vice president does not have a plane of his own. When his duties require him to travel, Johnson must ask one of Kennedy’s aides for permission to use a presidential plane. Though he is technically second in command of the nation, Johnson’s request carries no more weight than that of a cabinet member. Sometimes his request is denied. When that happens, the vice president of the United States might even be forced to fly commercial.
The greatest insult, however, isn’t that Johnson has lost his political pull in Washington, it’s that he has lost almost all his clout in his home state of Texas. Despite Johnson’s crucial role in delivering Texas to Kennedy on Election Day, Senator Ralph Yarborough is now moving in to take control of Texas politics, and Secretary of the Navy John Connally is making plans to run for governor. One, or both, of them will soon control political power in the Lone Star State. Johnson is becoming expendable. If Kennedy chooses another running mate when he seeks a second term in office, LBJ will be out of politics entirely.
For now, however, Johnson possesses that rare privilege of entering the Oval Office through the Rose Garden door. But when Kennedy picks up the phone to call for help on the morning of April 17, he does not call Lyndon Johnson.
It is Bobby Kennedy who answers the phone. He is in Virginia, giving a speech. “I don’t think it’s going as well as it could,” the president tells his younger brother. “Come back here.”
John Kennedy has purposely focused his brother on domestic policy issues, preferring to let others advise him on international matters. Despite their frequent phone conversations, the president sees his younger brother as a guy who’s benefited from nepotism, for it was Joseph Kennedy who insisted that JFK hire Bobby as attorney general. But now, in a moment of great insecurity, John Kennedy understands his father’s wisdom. Even though Bobby hasn’t had a CIA briefing on the Cuban operation in three months, he is the one man the president believes he can count on.
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson drifts farther and farther from the center of political power.
John Kennedy stands in the Oval Office, helpless to stop what he has started. The president could have called off the invasion right up to the moment on Sunday night when the highly trained men and teenage boys of Brigade 2506 clambered down from their transport ships and transferred to the boats that would carry them to shore.
But reversing course would have taken extraordinary courage. Kennedy would have lost face with Allen Dulles, the CIA, his close advisers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Yet that is the sort of unpopular decision he had been elected to make. And now Kennedy’s unwillingness to make those tough choices is threatening to devastate his administration.
He has come a long way since his days as the young commander of PT-109. But he is still learning, as Abraham Lincoln also learned, that the decision to use force should not be determined by men whose careers depend upon its use.
But it was not the CIA or the Joint Chiefs who ordered the invasion; it was John Kennedy.
Bobby has sped back from Virginia and now steps into the Oval Office to find his older brother in a pensive mood. “I’d rather be called an aggressor than a bum,” JFK laments. The news from the landing beaches is not good: the freedom fighters have failed to secure key roads and other strategic points. There is no way off the beach for the men of Brigade 2506. Cuban forces have pinned them down. The invasion is stalled.
