That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution

8 He’s Going to Be There until He Dies: The Johnson Administration

There would be no popular uprising, no pretext American invasion of Cuba, no coup, and no assassination of Castro. The bearded devil had won. —CIA Miami Station Chief Theodore Shackley 8 HE’S GOING TO BE THERE UNTIL HE DIES THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION Lyndon Johnson’s first recorded presidential comment about Cuba came six days after John Kennedy’s assassination, when the new president asked CIA director John McCone “how we planned to dispose of Castro.” According to McCone’s memorandum of the conversation, LBJ “said he did not wish any repetition of any fiasco of 1961, but he felt that the Cuban situation was one that we could not live with and we had to evolve more aggressive policies.” Two days later McCone came back to the Oval Office for another meeting, and his notes indicate that LBJ was persistent : “The President again raised the question of what we were going to do in Cuba.” He was promised a presentation of policy options in forty-eight hours.¹ The record of that 2 December presentation is lost to history. “I have never attended a Presidential meeting,” wrote NSC staffer Gordon Chase, asking to participate, and at first Bundy agreed that Chase could sit in as the note taker. But then someone remembered that LBJ did not like large meetings, Chase was uninvited, and no minutes were taken.² But the participants ’ briefing notes indicate that all of them went into the meeting prepared to advocate the same thing. Chase readied Bundy with a memo advocating “a vigorous, tough, and nasty policy . . . in order to make life 214 He’s Going to Be There until He Dies as difficult for Castro and as expensive and unpleasant for the USSR as possible.” Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Martin primed his boss, Dean Rusk, to recommend employing “all means available to the U.S. Government , short of military force, to bring about a degree of disorganization, uncertainty and discontent in Cuba”; Martin specifically advocated both “sabotage of Cuban ships outside Cuban territorial waters” and “hit-an[d]run strikes against appropriate selected targets.” A CIA briefer advised McCone to recommend “a continuation of present policy with certain intensification . . . designed to create and maintain a high state of anxiety within the Castro regime regarding US intentions.”³ Although all of this pointed to increased sabotage, LBJ responded by asking the NSC Standing Group to expand the range of options. Then he went back to his office and called the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, J. William Fulbright, who warned against doing anything dramatic. “I’m not getting into any Bay of Pigs deal,” Johnson interrupted to agree. “No, I’m just asking you what we ought to do to pinch their nuts more than we’re doing.”⁴ As LBJ was talking with Fulbright, the Standing Group was instructing John Crimmins, the State Department’s coordinator of Cuban affairs, to produce a paper listing the pluses and minuses of every possible option, from doing nothing to a full-scale U.S. invasion; at the same time, the CIA prepared a fresh analysis of the situation inside Cuba. The agency concluded that “Castro’s position within Cuba appears to be eroding gradually ” but that he was improving both his ability to stifle internal dissent and his capacity to counter exile raids, so that only a U.S. invasion or a blockade would guarantee the elimination of his government, and “both of these actions would result in a major crisis between the US and the USSR (in Cuba and/or Berlin) and would produce substantial strains in the fabric of US relations with other countries—allied as well as neutral.” Since no one wanted to trigger a major international crisis only days after JFK had been buried, the CIA simply recommended more of what was already being done—“expanding and intensifying the category of sabotage and harassment .”⁵ Doing so required reopening the question of raids by freelance (or “autonomous ”) Cuban exiles, which the CIA had continued to fund while keeping them somewhat leashed. Now it asked the Standing Group to recommend removing the tether—the “relaxation of our present policy banning all independent (non-CIA controlled or sponsored) Cuban exile maritime raids and air strikes.” The bland pluses-and-minuses document prepared He’s Going to Be There until He Dies 215 by Crimmins neither specifically agreed nor disagreed. As instructed,Crimmins simply laid...