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The U.S. government supported Batista with military aid and assisted in the expansion of Cuba’s intelligence services and secret police. As a pro-American, anticommunist, moneymaking tropical den of iniquity, Batista’s Cuba found plenty of sympathetic supporters in the corridors of power in Washington.
Because of the well-known barbarism of Batista’s dictatorship, Castro’s revolutionary movement won sympathetic coverage in the American press. Life magazine, published by that noted cold warrior Henry Luce, styled Castro “a kind of Cuban Robin Hood” in one 1957 issue, while denouncing Batista’s “strong-arm rule.” New York Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews scored the scoop of the decade when
he interviewed Castro in his mountain hideout in February 1957. Matthews depicted Castro as a youthful idealist fighting for a democratic Cuba: “It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.” And, Matthews insisted, “there is no communism to speak of in Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement.” Instead “the best elements in Cuba—the unspoiled youth, the honest businessman, the politician of integrity,
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Yet both Fidel and Raúl denied any communist affiliation. “If we were Communist dominated,” Raúl asked a
journalist, “don’t you think they would supply us with all the arms and ammunition we need to defeat Batista?”
As elites and business owners in Cuba turned against Batista’s rule, the CIA tried and failed to establish contacts with political groups that might take control of the country in the wake of Batista’s removal. This failure frustrated Eisenhower and his top advisers.
Discussing Castro, they all agreed that the Cuban rebel represented
“extremely radical elements,” as Allen Dulles put it, and that Cuba could soon be in th...
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But the United States could not continue to prop up Batista. Acting Secretary of State Herter explained that Batista had lost the confidence of his people, suppressed basic democratic freedoms, and alienated “some 80 percent of the Cuban people,” as well as public opinion across Latin America and in the U.S. Congress. Batista had created “a very difficult public relations problem” and had to go. Despite their grave worries about Castro, the Americans now pre...
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A week later, on January 8, 1959, to the roar of enormous crowds, Fidel Castro and his victorious rebel army swept into the capital city and took power.
Castro had named a moderate lawyer, Manuel Urrutia, as the provisional head of state, and despite Castro’s fulminations against America, his movement appeared “free from Communist taint,” Dulles claimed. Dulles probably did not really believe that. He simply knew that the United States had lost an ally in Batista and now had no choice but to try to work with, and guide, the youthful rebel. Tacitly admitting failure, the United States recognized Castro’s new government and proffered a cautious hand of friendship.
During his trip Eisenhower insisted to his hosts that the United States “would not intervene in their local affairs.” As he put it in his 1965 autobiography, he knew that memories of such interventions in the era of “gunboat diplomacy” still burned red-hot, and he asserted that since the 1930s, “intervention as an American policy had gone into the discard, replaced by the policy of the Good Neighbor.” This statement is wholly false. The Guatemala intervention against Arbenz in 1954 contradicted Ike’s claim; so too did his Cuba policy, whose details were being hammered out at the very moment he
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The plan marked the start, and only the start, of a long campaign of deception and subversion in an effort to destroy Castro and his regime. Certainly the plan did not yet envision an amphibious landing on Cuban beaches of the kind that was eventually attempted at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 in Kennedy’s first months in office. However, it put into motion a planning structure that led directly to that botched and tragic event. Eisenhower failed to anticipate that covert operations, once started, have a curious way of expanding until they take on a life and momentum of their own. Under
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In his extraordinary three-hour address to the General Assembly on September 26, Castro gave the world a history lesson of the kind that Americans had rarely heard. He spoke
about American colonization and exploitation of Cuba. He thundered about the degradation and suffering of the Cuban people at the hands of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. He pointed an accusing finger at the U.S. government for its radio propaganda station based in Swan Island—an embarrassing revelation—and invoked the fate of Guatemala to remind his listeners of the consequences of agrarian reforms that threaten U.S. business interests. And he held out Cuba as an example to the world of how to throw off the shackles of colonial servitude. To the delegations from Asia and Africa,
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As the debates were coming to a close, Nixon suffered yet another blow, this one self-inflicted. On October 19 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested while conducting a peaceful sit-in at a segregated restaurant in Atlanta. A local judge, eager to settle the score with the civil rights leader, sentenced King to four months of hard labor in the state penitentiary. Numerous African American leaders sought Nixon’s help, and White House aide Fred Morrow rushed to write a statement for Nixon to use, calling for King’s immediate release. Inexplicably Nixon stalled and his press spokesman issued a
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Above all, Kennedy proved a gifted presidential candidate. He won voters with his charisma, his youth, and his style, combined with his intelligence and his central argument: that wise and active government could better serve the needs of the people than the penny-pinching, restrained policies of the Ike age.
His adviser and friend Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. believed that Kennedy’s relentless emphasis on the gap between America’s achievements and its promise worked: “He wisely decided to concentrate on a single theme and to hammer that theme home until everyone in America understood it—understood his sense of the decline of our national power and influence and his determination to arrest and reverse this course. He did this with such brilliant success that, even in a time of apparent prosperity and apparent peace, and even as a Catholic, he was able to command a majority (though such a slim majority) of voters.” Kennedy made the
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What if he had been a warm, personable man of exuberance and charm instead of a brooding, paranoid introvert? The questions cannot be answered.
During his time in office, his party imploded. In the elections of 1954, 1956, and 1958, Republicans lost a total of 68 seats in the House and 17 seats in the Senate—a devastating verdict from the electorate. In 1960, with Nixon as the standard-bearer, the Republicans clawed back one Senate seat and 22 House seats, but Democrats still enjoyed huge majorities in both
chambers. Eisenhower never found the new young leaders who could rebuild the party on a solid foundation. He mused about forming a Modern Republican Party but never threw himself into the task. In 1960 the Republican cupboard was bare, in part through Ike’s neglect.
Rumors and accusations of fraud began on election night and emerged chiefly from Chicago. One local Republican election official announced that 10,000 Republican voters had been wrongfully purged from the voter rolls there.
Right after the election, Senator Morton, national chairman of the GOP, called for a recount in 11 states where the vote had been
extremely close. Nixon dissociated himself from the effort in a press release on November 11. But two days later the chairman of the Cook County Republican Party, Francis X. O’Connell, asserted that “professional vote thieves” had stuff...
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On November 19 the Justice Department announced that it had ordered the FBI to investigate complaints of voter fraud. Attorney General Rogers seemed willing to use his authority to launch grand jury probes and hold up the voting in the Electoral College, scheduled for December 19.
Then he shifted terrain and spoke for 20 minutes on the growing problem of America’s unfavorable balance of payments, an issue close to his heart. The United States was spending too many dollars overseas, partly the result of a large U.S. troop presence in Europe. Since the dollar was still pegged to a fixed exchange rate for gold, these dollars could be cashed in for U.S. gold by European banks, so the United States was facing a drain on its gold reserves. Eisenhower suggested that the balance of payments problem had to be addressed by asking the NATO allies to pay a greater share of their
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Clifford also admitted that all of Kennedy’s staff looked on Eisenhower “with something bordering contempt.”
The Americans, desperate to halt the slippage of Laos into the communist camp, supported a right-wing coup in December 1959 that brought Brig. Gen. Phoumi Nosavan to power. Phoumi’s position was always weak, and during 1960 he fought against dissident factions in the army as well as Pathet Lao communists. In November and December 1960, much to Eisenhower’s alarm, the Soviet Union launched a major airlift of supplies via Hanoi to the Pathet Lao.
finished in the whole Southeast Asian area.”8 The day before Kennedy took the oath of office, he came to the White House again, chiefly to discuss Laos. Eisenhower seemed to relish the opportunity to show Kennedy just how much power the commander in chief possessed. He walked Kennedy through the procedures to launch a nuclear attack, drawing on “the satchel filled with orders applicable to an emergency and carried by an unobtrusive man who would shadow the President for all his days in office.” He also went into a detailed discussion about the acute Laos crisis with Secretary Herter. The
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In the midst of this reevaluation of the anti-Castro plan, Dulles and Bissell traveled to Florida on November 18 to meet with President-elect Kennedy and brief him on the operation. In Dulles’s account, Kennedy said that “if Mr. Dulles believed it to be in the U.S. interest to proceed with the project, he had no objection.” But what was Kennedy assenting to? The project was in flux, expanding from an infiltration and sabotage operation into a full-scale invasion. Kennedy’s presidency would clearly be shaped by Eisenhower’s decision on Cuba.
According to Bissell, Eisenhower made it clear that “he wanted all done that could be done with all possible urgency, and nothing less.” Coming just three weeks after the bitter election in which Eisenhower had been caricatured as inactive and timid in his handling of Cuba, these words reveal the degree to which he wanted to make a lasting mark in his final few days in office. He had something to prove.
Their plan called for an invasion force, spearheaded by a well-armed brigade of Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA at their Guatemala base camp. The plan initially envisioned “an amphibious force of 600–750 men,” but that number nearly doubled as the date drew near. They would be accompanied by an air bombardment of “extraordinarily heavy firepower. Preliminary strikes would be launched from Nicaragua against military targets. The strikes, plus supply flights, would continue after the landing.” This assault force would seize a landing area, “draw dissident elements to our own force,” and quickly
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Eisenhower knew the invasion of Cuba would not commence on his watch; the inauguration was only a few weeks off and there was still much planning to be done. But he could take one decision that would bind Kennedy’s hands and make it difficult for him to back away from the plan: he could break off diplomatic relations with Cuba, a move widely understood as a harbinger of armed conflict. He told Livingston Merchant on December 29 that he wanted this done “before January 20,” when he left office. He pointedly said he wanted the State Department “to work quickly.” And it did. On January 3, 1961,
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Havana, the United States broke off relations with Cuba. This move had the effect of putting Cuba on notice of America’s hostile intent, but it also intensified the pressure on the incoming Kennedy administration. John Kennedy would find it extremely difficult to resist the momentum behind the Cuba operation.
He took credit for ending the war in Korea, stamping out the fires of war over Suez and Lebanon, halting Chinese threats to Quemoy, and keeping West Berlin free. America had built global alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and enhanced the role of the United Nations as the world’s parliament. The national defenses had been built up to a state of high readiness “sufficient to deter and if need be destroy” any enemy. The age of the ballistic missile and the space satellite had dawned. The Polaris missile, housed in submarines that silently knifed through the ocean depths, stood ready
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Wages of factory
workers had risen 20 percent over the life of the administration, while inflation averaged only 1.8 percent for the decade of the 1950s. The strikes that so crippled the nation in the Truman years had been reduced by half. Unemployment insurance and social security had been expanded, and builders had erected more than a million new houses a year for the previous eight years—a record—and the government offered more home mortgages than ever. New highways were spooling out across the land. And yet the government had passed t...
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Over the course of the late fall, Eisenhower worked with his staff to hone the speech, the core of which had become a warning not about the military-industrial complex itself but about limiting its power over democratic government.
“America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world,” he began. But a “hostile ideology” of “infinite duration” had compelled the United States to build “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” This new development would have “grave implications” for the country’s democracy. Thinking perhaps of the recent calls
from Democrats for still more defense spending, more missiles, more aircraft and combat forces, and thinking too of the inexperience in managing such forces of the president-elect, Eisenhower warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
And on January 28, just a week after taking office, Kennedy received his first full briefing on the Cuba plan. Although the military cautioned that the landing forces were not sufficiently large to defeat Castro’s militia, CIA director Dulles spoke optimistically, claiming that the invasion force was adequate to bring down the regime. Kennedy showed no inclination to shelve the plan. In fact he ordered that the planning go forward and that the military do a careful evaluation of the CIA’s proposal. This review was duly undertaken, and at the start of February the military chiefs signed off on
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On April 15 the misguided and ill-conceived affair began. A few aging B-26 aircraft, flown by Cuban pilots from airfields in Nicaragua, bombed three Cuban airfields, doing only moderate damage to Castro’s tiny fleet of combat aircraft but alerting the Cuban government that the invasion was imminent. Castro accused the United States of fomenting the attack and raised the alarm at the United Nations, spooking the Kennedy administration into canceling further air support, lest the U.S. connection be discovered. Meanwhile, late at night on April 16, the invasion force of some 1,400 Cuban exiles
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sitting ducks. Castro’s forces mounted sustained attacks and by the end of the day on April 17 had effectively crippled the invasion. Kennedy, under pressure to authorize American air strikes from the nearby carrier Essex, refused. On the afternoon of April 18 the invasion force surrendered, having lost over 100 men killed and nearly 400 wounded. Kennedy was shattered by the fiasco. “How could I have been so stupid?” he repeatedly asked his advisers.25
Publicly Ike backed Kennedy and told the waiting press that all Americans must stand together when the chips were down. But privately he was appalled at the poor planning and
management of the invasion, especially Kennedy’s lack of resolve in sending in additional air power once the fight had started. In his diary Ike jotted down his real feelings: “This story could be called a ‘Profile in Timidity and Indecision.’ ”
Even as the pathetic Cuban exiles were being marched into Castro’s jails on April 20, Kennedy gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he expressed no regret for his audacious failure in Cuba. “The message of Cuba, of Laos, of the rising din of Communist voices in Asia and Latin America—these messages are all the same. The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined . . . can possibly survive.” A week later, sending the message that he would not
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increase of U.S. military personnel and military aid to South Vietnam. He then ordered Vice President Lyndon Johnson to deliver personally a letter to South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, pledging greater American support to meet the communist threat in Southeast Asia.
No wonder Schlesinger, looking back over Kennedy’s first 18 months in office, would confide in his diary this downcast assessment: “In area after area, we have behaved exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved—in spite of everything we said in the campaign. . . . The old continuities, the Eisenhower-Dulles continuities, are beginning to reassert themselves.”
In 2017 a poll of over 100 historians ranked Eisenhower among the five greatest presidents in the nation’s history, behind only the true titans, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was a judgment that would have stunned his contemporaries but seems eminently sensible now. According to the poll, historians gave Ike particularly high marks for his handling of international affairs, his management of the economy, and his moral authority.
