Brooks Brothers. His suit coats are invariably charcoal or deep blue. But it is not vanity that drives John Kennedy’s obsession with clothing. Rather, it is a peculiar quirk of his personality that he is uncomfortable if he wears a garment too long. He drives his longtime valet, George Thomas, crazy with his constant changes.
But right now Kennedy is not concentrating on his personal appearance, even though he does, as always, pat the top of his head to make sure every strand of hair is in place. Habits are hard to break.
Kennedy is preoccupied with Cuba. Roughly twelve hundred miles due south of Washington, D.C., a battlefield is taking shape. Kennedy has authorized a covert invasion of the island nation, sending fourteen hundred anti-Castro exiles to do a job that the U.S. military, by rule of international law, cannot do itself. The freedom fighters’ goal is nothing less than the overthrow of the Cuban government. The plan has been in the works since long before Kennedy was elected. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have assured the president that the mission will succeed. But it is Kennedy who has given the go-ahead—and it is he who will take the blame if the mission fails.
Once the UH-34 helicopter touches down on the metal pads specially placed on the South Lawn as a landing spot, JFK emerges headfirst out the door, stepping down onto the new spring grass. The president looks calm and unflappable, but his stomach is churning, literally. The stress of the weekend, with its last-minute planning of the risky attack, has brought on severe diarrhea and a debilitating urinary tract infection. His doctor has prescribed injections of penicillin and a diet of liquefied food to make his afflictions more bearable. Yet he feels miserable. But as awful as things seem right now, the president knows that his Monday is about to get much worse.
The president walks purposefully through the serenity of the White House Rose Garden, even as the Cuban exiles comprising Brigade 2506 are in grave danger, pinned down on a remote stretch of sand in Cuba.
This inlet will go down in infamy as the Bay of Pigs.
John F. Kennedy steps through the Rose Garden entrance into the Oval Office, with its gray carpet and off- white walls. During the winter, when there are no leaves on the trees, it is possible to gaze out toward the National Mall from the tall windows behind Kennedy’s desk. At the far end, hidden from JFK’s view by the Old Executive Office Building, rises the Lincoln Memorial. But Kennedy doesn’t sit down, nor does he glance out in the direction of Mr. Lincoln.
He is much too anxious about the events in Cuba to have a seat.
It has not been a good week for America. On April 12 the Soviets stunned the world by launching the first man into space, proving to one and all that they have rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads all the way to the United States. The cold war that has raged between the two nations for more than a decade is now clearly tipped in the Soviets’ favor. Many in Washington believe that overthrowing the pro-Soviet Castro will go a long way toward restoring equilibrium to the cold war.
Kennedy knew he had the backing of the American people when he authorized the invasion. Fear about the global spread of communism is rampant in the United States. Anything he does to stop it will be applauded. And while invading another country is an enormous diplomatic risk, the president enjoys a 78 percent approval rating after his first months on the job, political capital with which to gamble. Newspapers and magazines are gushing about the young president, calling Kennedy “omniscient” and “omnipotent.”
But no man is all-knowing, and even the president of the United States is not all-powerful. Kennedy is about to make the sort of sworn enemies that come with a colossal blunder. By the time the Bay of Pigs is over he will count among these enemies not only Castro but also one of the highest-ranking officials of the U.S.government: the wily CIA chief, Allen Dulles.
Kenny O’Donnell greets Kennedy in the Oval Office and quickly briefs him on the day’s schedule. The president then strides out through another of the Oval Office’s four doors. His path takes him past the desk of his loyal personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and into the Cabinet Room, where Secretary of State Dean Rusk awaits.
A brilliant man, Rusk attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and served as a chief of war plans as an army officer in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II, organizing covert missions very much like the Bay of Pigs. The Georgia native sat in on the many planning meetings leading up to the weekend’s invasion. Yet he was not Kennedy’s first choice to head the State Department, and just three months into his new job, the new secretary of state remains tentative with his boss, wary of speaking his mind. At a time when Kennedy desperately needs solid advice, Rusk is unwilling to share his professional misgivings about the Bay of Pigs, including his belief “that this thin brigade of Cuban exiles has a snowball’s chance in hell of success.”
Rusk’s reluctance to advise him in an open and honest fashion is the least of the president’s troubles at this point. Nobody, it seems, will level with Kennedy. As JFK awaits word from the battlefront, he craves the company of someone who will tell him the unvarnished truth.
Sensing a crisis, the president picks up a phone and dials.
Cuba.
Americans of means once made this steamy, rum-soaked paradise their favorite tropical playground. The country’s sandy white beaches are sensual and the casinos legendary. Ernest Hemingway wrote of Cuba’s many charms, then unwound with his favorite rum libation, the daiquiri. Behind the scenes, America’s organized crime bosses such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were as comfortable in the Cuban capital, Havana, as they were in New York City. And for decades, U.S. corporations took advantage of Cuba’s climate and thoroughly corrupt government to set up vast sugarcane plantations, oil fields, and cattle ranches.
In fact, ever since that epic moment in 1898 when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill to liberate Cuba from Spain, the Cuban-U.S. relationship was mostly peaceful, free of tension, and, in a word, easy.
Until 1959.
Corruption reached an all-time high under the American-friendly regime of General Fulgencio Batista, sparking rebellion among Cubans. After four years of fighting, Fidel Castro, the thirty-two-year-old bastard child of a wealthy Cuban farmer, led his guerrilla army into Havana and toppled Batista. (The general died of a heart attack in exile in Portugal, just two days before Castro’s team of assassins could complete its mission.) The United States responded to Batista’s overthrow by officially recognizing the new government.
Castro is a man of many secrets. In perhaps his most egregious episode, eleven days after overthrowing Batista’s government in 1959, seventy-five political prisoners were marched in the dead of night toward an open field outside the city of Santiago, hands tied behind their backs. There was no path, and those who slowed down or stumbled felt the sharp jab of a soldier’s bayonet in their ribs. Suddenly, a row of army trucks turned on their headlights, revealing a trench six feet deep and fifty yards long. Bulldozers were parked alongside the trench, blades lowered and ready to plow the fresh mounds of dirt back into the massive hole.
The executions were supposed to be a secret, but the prisoners’ wives and girlfriends found out and kept vigil, following the procession from a distance and gasping with horror as those headlights illuminated what would soon be a mass grave. As the women’s sobs and wails punctured the still night air, Castro’s soldiers lined their husbands and sons and boyfriends shoulder to shoulder along the edge of the ditch, all the while taunting the women with jeers and catcalls. The women wept and prayed right up until that inevitable moment when the machine guns opened fire and their loved ones toppled into the abyss.
Thus marked the beginning of Fidel Castro’s reign of terror. Soon after, a Cuban judge was shot through the head for pardoning military pilots who had flown against Castro’s forces during his guerrilla campaign. Castro then ordered the pilots convicted of genocide. When the new judge sentenced them to hard labor instead of death, he, too, was shot dead. The Cuban leader, in his own words, is “violent, given to tantrums, devious, manipulative, and defiant of all authority.”
The Cuban people soon realized that they were paying a high price for supporting the rise of Castro. But overseas, Castro’s popular facade as a revolutionary hero took hold. One British newspaper wrote that “Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.” In April 1959, Castro spoke at the Harvard University Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even though he had used his knowledge of the law to suspend Cuba’s writ of habeas
