“When you asked me after the meeting yesterday what I thought about the Cuban proposal, I am afraid that I did not give a properly ordered answer.”
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian working as a White House special assistant, sent that line to President Kennedy on April 5, 1961. The rest of his memo was ordered enough. Whatever flag the invaders flew, he argued, the United States would be held to account, and if the landing stalled, the logic of the situation could lead step by step to sending in the Marines. “On balance,” he wrote, “I am against it.”
The meeting he meant had run from 6 to 8:18 the evening before, at the State Department. The plan came from the CIA and dated from the Eisenhower years. About 1,400 Cuban exiles would land on Cuba’s southern coast, and the Cuban people were expected to rise up and join them.
Kennedy had invited an outsider, Senator J. William Fulbright, who spoke out against the plan. In Irving Janis’s account, built largely on Schlesinger’s, the President did not open Fulbright’s points for discussion. He went round the table asking each man for his verdict. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara approved. The conversation drifted to how the landing could be made quieter, and the meeting broke up before the round reached Schlesinger.
In those weeks, at a large birthday party for his wife, Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and attorney general, took Schlesinger aside and asked why he was opposed. He listened, by Schlesinger’s account, and then said: “You may be right or you may be wrong, but the President has made his mind up. Don’t push it any further.”
Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17. Within two days, Cuban forces under Castro’s direct command had defeated it. More than 100 invaders were killed and almost 1,200 surrendered. They spent 20 months in captivity, until Castro settled for $53 million worth of baby food and medicine.
In A Thousand Days, his 1965 book on the Kennedy White House, Schlesinger wrote: “In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the Cabinet Room.” He had raised, by his own count, no more than a few timid questions.
Eighteen months later, on October 14, 1962, a U-2 photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites going up in Cuba. By Janis’s account, the meetings now ran differently. Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen, the two men the President trusted most, neither of whom had sat in on the final Bay of Pigs sessions, were told to pursue every point of contention. Robert Kennedy often became the devil’s advocate. There was no formal agenda. Outside experts were questioned on how they had reached their views. Some sessions went ahead without the President. “I felt there was less true give and take with the President in the room,” Robert Kennedy said.
How often he really stayed away is less clear. Robert Kennedy later described his brother staying away from some meetings on purpose. Sheldon Stern, a historian who studied the White House tapes, found that the President missed sessions only when he left Washington to campaign, trips made to keep the crisis secret.
This time the disagreement reached him. All of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for an air strike followed by an invasion. Others favored stern warnings. Kennedy took a middle course and on October 22 ordered a naval “quarantine” of Cuba.
On October 28, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed.