"I don't run for the office of the Presidency to tell you what you want to hear. I run for the office of President because in a dangerous time we need to be told what we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom". This was a theme of many of Kennedy speeches during the 1960 presidential campaign. "When Jack laid it out like that", remembered William Manchester, an old friend of the future president, "you felt challenged. We were perhaps the last liberal patriots to stride down the campaign trail. This was our country, and it was on the wrong track, and we were going to set it right."0
The Kennedy family was reared in a competitive ethos. Rose Kennedy, the family matriarch, once said revealingly that her husband "likes the boys to win at sports and everything they try. If they don't win, he will discuss their failure with them, but he doesn't have much patience with the loser." Their father, Joe, Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain 1937-40, was tough, ambitious and dictatorial. He had made several dubious fortunes, one from bootlegging during Prohibition, which he was determined to use to advance his sons' political careers.
The Kennedys were Irish, Catholic and south Boston in origin and although Jack had been to Choate and Harvard, in the 1940's when Jack and Bobby started out on the political train, the Catholic-Irish label was still a stigma in many parts of the U.S. and were used against Jack during the 1960 campaign. The determination to prove the doubters wrong, the drive to win, the belief in muscular laissez faire - all these factors ensured that the Kennedy White House would be action-oriented.
There was not much difference in substance between Kennedy and Eisenhower in foreign policy, but Kennedy thought that his predecessor had been too cautious. Kennedy was a young and vigorous cold war warrior, willing to rethink traditional arguments and positions in the struggle against communism. He was fascinated by the opportunities which American power and influence offered him, a fascination all the more potent because of his lack of experience. Rejecting his father's isolationism, he was very much a product of the post-war era, a period in which New Deal principles of mobilisation were put into action in foreign policy. He was influenced by the ideals of Woodrow Wilson and FDR but he was determined to make his own mark.
The excitement generated by a new activist President found ready echoes in the CIA. Dulles quickly realised the kind of impression the agency would have to make on a White House concerned with vigour and management. He and his director of plans, Richard Bissell, moved rapidly to demonstrate their power and skill to key Kennedy officials. They invited a dozen White House aides close to the President to dinner with ten top CIA men. As one of the Kennedy aides present recalled:
"After most had relaxed with several cocktails, the inside stories of past secret exploits were recounted: it was heady wine. Bissell was asked to introduce himself and talk about his work. 'I'm your man-eating shark', he said. CIA man Robert Amory thought that Bissell had set just the right note ... Before long, McGeorge Bundy reported to Amory that the President had said, 'By gosh, I don't care what it is but if I need some material fast or an idea fast, CIA is the place to go. The State Department takes four or five days to answer a simple yes or no.'"1
It was indeed heady wine, all the more heady because the Kennedy brothers were in love with all the mystery and glamour of clandestine operations. Not for nothing were Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers among the President's favourite books.
THE BAY OF PIGS
One of the first items on Kennedy's foreign policy agenda was the newly-established regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Castro's predecessor, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, had been supported by the U.S. government although Batista ignored advice to reform his government and its pervasive corruption. In January 1959, not entirely to American surprise, Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro who had been waging a long guerrilla campaign against Batista's regime.
At first Castro was something of an unknown quantity. A CIA man, Jerome Droller, met him in 1959 but did not think he was pro-communist, a view shared by others in the agency. However, over the next year Castro turned increasingly left and American anxiety mounted. He confiscated $1 billion worth of U.S. property and when no compensation was offered the U.S. retaliated with a ban on imports of Cuban sugar. More ominous were Castro's moves towards the Russians. In 1960 he met Khruschev for the first time at the United Nations and made a four-and-a-half hour speech accusing the Americans of economic aggression. He agreed to exchange Cuban sugar for Russian arms, while Khruschev declared that if the U.S. took any hostile action against Cuba he would "support Cuba with rocket fire". Castro also began sending out guerilla invasion teams to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Haiti and Nicaragua. In January, 1961, just before John
Fitzgerald Kennedy's inauguration, Castro ordered the U.S. Embassy staff in Havana to be cut from eighty-seven to eleven. In one of his last acts in office, Eisenhower ordered diplomatic relations with Cuba to be severed.
Plans to oust Castro had been in preparation for a full year before Eisenhower left the White House and were in place by the time Kennedy took office. They reflected the same tangled, lurid, and occasionally comic developments which were to dog the agency's long involvement with Cuba. The CIA had prepared a plan for Castro's "elimination" as early as December 1959, and in January 1961 Kennedy directed that the agency should start "covert contingency planning to accomplish the fall of the Castro government". In March Colonel J C King, chief of the CIA's western hemisphere division in the directorate of Plans, had organised a task force and had made it clear that assassination was being considered. In July the CIA station in Havana was given authorisation to assassinate Castro's brother, Raul, but the authorisation was withdrawn within hours of being granted. Such stop-go, last-minute orders were to be a marked feature of the whole Bay of Pigs operation.
Soon after the cancellation of the assassination plan, an even more sinister and murky thread was woven into the anti-Castro plot which was to have far-reaching repercussions - the Mafia connection. In September 1960 Robert Maheu, a former FBI officer turned private investigator and occasional CIA go-between, approached three prominent underworld figures, John Rosselli, Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana, offering them $150,000 to kill Castro.
The Mafia connection bristled with danger. There was the deeply unsavoury background of the trio. In the 1920's Rosselli was a member of Longy Zwillman's gang in New Jersey. He then joined up with Al Capone in Chicago where he became an expert in extortion and racketeering. After Capone's arrest he moved westwards to Hollywood where he got involved in union racketeering and was sentenced to ten years for extortion. Giancana was another member of the Capone gang and was a prime suspect in the St Valentine's Day massacre of the Bugs Moran gang. Trafficante had strong links with Cuba where he had a thriving pornography business under Batista's regime, undisturbed by the authorities.
Their backgrounds were bad enough but what was worse was that one of Jack Kennedy's many mistresses, Judith Campbell, was also Giancana's mistress. Giancana was not slow to sniff the blackmail potential of that relationship, particularly since the new president's brother Robert, appointed attorney general, was determined to crack down on organised crime and had targeted Giancana. The Mafia connection was soon discovered by J Edgar Hoover who told Richard Bissell on 18 October 1961 that Giancana and his friends were being indiscreet about their Castro assassination plans. Although several attempts were made to kill Castro over the next few months by means of poison pills, none of them succeeded b
