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Two days after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy still stunned and suffering grief, drawing on strength.

Batista, Cuban Liberals and the United States

Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant, had stepped down from power in Cuba in 1944 - a wealthy man. He returned to power in a coup d'etat in 1952, his regime quickly recognized by the United States. The United States had just signed an agreement with Cuba to install an Army, Navy and Air Force mission on the island and to provide military equipment under a mutual defense assistance act. Strategists in the U.S. were pleased with Batista, who was known to them as a reliable friend and a good anti-communist.

Batista took power with claims that he would honor all international agreements, guarantee lives and property and continue public work projects. The army was Batista's main support in Cuba, and also many Cuban businessmen gave Batista their support. Some from the middle and upper classes were opposed to Batista, while his major opposition was from students - also from the upper and middle classes.

Students were planning a massive demonstration and a symbolic burial of Cuba's 1940 Constitution. Four student leaders were arrested and taken to Batista. He told them they were free but that he had a great desire to talk with them. He told them he had taken power to avoid a civil war, that he needed the cooperation of all Cubans in order to reorganize the institutional life of the nation and that the Constitution had not died. One of the student leaders accused Batista of planning to ban all opposition, and Batista denied it, saying opposition was a necessity, especially a constructive opposition. Batista said he had once been an idealist youth like they, that he admired them and was not against their demonstration itself but against the "profession agitators" who will capitalize on it.

One of the agitators that Batista worried about was a law student, Fidel Castro. Castro was the son of a wealthy plantation owner who leased a large tract of land from the United Fruit company and sold his cane back to it. Fidel presented himself as an idealist. His hero, he said, was José Martí, Cuba's poet and fighter for independence of the 1890s. Fidel was an aggressive idealist - one of the gun-toting student activists involved in the sometimes violent conflicts between rival student political groups.

Castro wanted to be rid of Batista through armed uprising, and in 1953, at age 26, he organized a dawn assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. He had a hundred youths willing to follow him, poorly armed but aiming to capture weapons. The plan went awry. The insurgents were overwhelmed, and the defending soldiers went on a rampage, beating to death those who had surrendered, and they fanned out and killed anyone they believed had taken part in the attack. In Santiago de Cuba, it was a bad time to be bandaged after some minor mishap.

The bishop in Santiago de Cuba, with others, met with Batista and stopped the killing and torture of those suspected of having taken part in the attack on the barracks. Only a few of Castro's hundred followers survived. Castro and his half-brother Raúl were captured a week after the attack, Castro found hiding in the hills, after widespread protest had made treatment of prisoners more circumspect. Cuba's middleclass, liberals, and professional people had been outraged by the army's rampage - especially people in Santiago de Cuba. Castro was imprisoned and tried. He made a speech and won considerable publicity and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, Raúl to 13 years.

On November 1, 1954, Batista held elections, and, with only half of the electorate going to the polls, he won for himself the presidency. No one had run against him. He constructed a cabinet and was inaugurated in February 1955. The Constitution of 1940 was said to have been restored, and Batista told Cuba's Congress that he wanted amnesty and peace but that there could be no amnesty during terrorism. He was referring to occasional bombings by dissidents and the continuing political turmoil at the university.

But congressmen in the weeks ahead were enthusiastic for an amnesty. Prosperity was in the air, brought on in part by an agreement to sell reserve sugar to the Soviet Union. Vice President Richard Nixon came in February and gave Batista the Eisenhower administration's blessing. Batista was relaxed and confident. The period of uncertainty, he believed, was over. In mid-April, he granted amnesty, and among the prisoners released were Fidel and Raúl Castro, who went into exile in Mexico.

Economically, Cuba was thriving in the mid-fifties. Cuba's main export, sugar, was getting a good price in the United States. American investors were pouring money into the country and already owned half of Cuba's sugar industry. International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) bought Cuba's telephone service. U.S. citizens were investing in petroleum and mining. And U.S. goods of all kinds were marketed in Cuba. The United States and Cuba were enjoying a good relationship. Seventy-one percent of Cuba's imports were from the United States and 67 percent of its exports went to the United States.

Tourism was Cuba's second largest industry - before tourism had become common for the average U.S. citizen. People with money went to Cuba to enjoy its fine beaches - for their exclusive use - for the casino gambling, lewd shows and open prostitution of all kinds. A percentage of the money won from the tourist industries went straight to Batista, and Batista paid his go-betweens well.

The best casino was run by a U.S. gangster, Meyer Lansky, a casino that for a while had the only honest gaming. The Cuban government had Lansky instruct and transform Cuban-owned casinos into honest establishments similar to his.

Among Latin American nations, Cuba was third in per capita income. (Venezuela was first at around 38 percent of the average income of U.S. citizens, and Argentina was second at 24 percent.) The average Cuban made 19 percent of what the average U.S. citizen earned, and in Cuba a large gap existed between better off families and the common Cuban worker. Forty-three percent of the population was still rural. Sugar cane harvesting occurred only a couple months of the year, leaving cane cutters unemployed the rest of the year. Telephones were still for the middle and upper class in the major cities - one person in 38 having a telephone.

On paper everyone had the same rights. The races got along, the Cubans accustomed to intermixing. Batista was one of the mixed - part Chinese, Spanish-Indian and Afro-Cuban. But there was some elitism. Even Batista had been refused membership in Havana's elitist yacht club.

What concerned U.S. strategists about Cuba was its Communist Party. Cuba had a Communist Party of about 25,000 - in a population of a little more than 6 million. The Party had described Castro's assault on the military barracks as putschist, a dirty word for Marxist-Leninists. They saw Castro as politically immature, and they believed in working peacefully within Cuba's labor movement while waiting for that wonderful day when the Cuban masses would acquire the correct consciousness for taking power.

Batista had tolerated them for years before 1954. He had had communists in his cabinet during the Second World War, and between 1952 and 1954 he had had a couple of communists in his cabinet representing labor. Then in 1954 he had outlawed the Party. That was the year that John Foster Dulles had gone to a meeting of the Organization of American States in Venezuela and had asked for a strong resolution against "intervention" in Latin America by "international Communism." And in April 1955, Dulles' brother Allen, head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, visited Cuba, inspected Cuban security and complained about the danger posed by the Cuban communists.

Fidel Castro and the Overthrow of Batista

The attack on the army barracks in 1953 increased Fidel Castro's prominence among those opposed to Batista. Castro went to the United States and gathered $9,000 in contributions from Cubans there, before complaints from the Batista regime resulted in the U.S. taking away his visa, forcing him to leave. Castro also received donations from Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, Venezuelans and from Cuban businessmen who hoped that Castro would end corruption and mismanagement.

It was about corruption that Castro complained. People with Batista were enriching themselves, he said, while the pockets of his movement were empty. Castro also complained of "foreign trusts" stealing millions from Cuba and of money being wasted in "gambling, vice, and the black market."

Castro's movement was called the 26 of July Movement, named for the day he had attacked the Moncada barracks. For his movement, Castro bought arms, and he bought a boat named Granma for $20,000 from an American living in Mexico City. With Castro were 130 others, but only 81 could fit on the boat, and, on November 25, 1956, the 81 chugged down the Tuxpan River (halfway between Tampico and Veracruz) and into the Gulf of Mexico, hoping they were not noticed by Batista's agents. After a miserable seven days at sea they ran aground in a swamp at the foot of the Sierra Maestras in eastern Cuba. An airplane had spotted them, and Batista's army was waiting for them. A government report claimed that forty of the invading rebels had been killed, including Castro. Only a few of the rebels made it into the Sierra Maestras - among them Fidel, his brother Raul and a gun toting, asthmatic Argentinean physician, Che Guevara.

These few survived with the help of people who lived in the mountains, while outside the Sierra Maestras few knew of the rebel's existence. In early 1957, Herbert Mathews of the New York Times sneaked by army checkpoints, interviewed Castro, and returned to New York. Publication of his interview was a sensation and was followed by Cuba's minister of defense calling the story a fantasy. The New York Times published a photo of Mathews and Castro, making the Batista regime look foolish, and some who disliked Batista drew hope. Soon a cell of support among Cubans working at the US naval base at Guantánamo, in Cuba, was stealing arms for the rebels in the hills.

Castro had competition in his fight against Batista. On March 13, 1957, a student-based urban group stormed Batista's palace, seized a radio station and tried to assassinate Batista. After fierce fighting they were crushed. Castro denounced the assault. The real fight, he said, was in the mountains. Batista denounced the communists for having participated in the attack, although the communists were not involved.

Through 1957, Cuba's economy boomed, and investments continued to pour into the country, while few tourists came. Castro's guerrilla campaign won an occasional small battle here and there around the Sierra Maestras, his purpose not to kill but to capture more weapons. And his force grew slightly, to nearly a hundred.

It was the attitude of the great numbers outside the Sierra Maestras that Batista had to worry about, including those who filled the ranks of his army. If a significant number of them went over to Castro then Castro would win. And the Eisenhower administration worried about this also. By 1958, the Eisenhower administration was concerned about the war for hearts and minds being lost in Cuba. The United States was also facing criticism from the middle and left side of the political spectrum.

It was in May, 1958, that Vice President Richard Nixon made his goodwill tour of Latin America. Young people hostile to dictatorships and American support for them attacked Nixon's motorcade. A thousand troops rushed to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo in preparation to rescue the vice president. The president of Costa Rica, José Figueres, said he was sorry about the treatment of Nixon, but he criticized the U.S. for talking much about the human dignity that the people in the Soviet Union should have and nothing about the dignity of people living under dictatorships in Latin America, and he said that the U.S. should not sacrifice human rights for the sake of "investments."

The Eisenhower administration refrained from intervening militarily to rescue Batista, and Batista supporters were angered, claiming that the U.S. was not being as tough as it should and reminding U.S. leaders that communism threatened Latin America.

In 1958 Batista launched a major military offensive against Castro, sending a force of some 10,000 against him. But his troops performed poorly in the mountains. And, fortunately for Castro, it was not a point in history in which helicopter gunships and their trained crews would be available to Batista's forces.

Batista's forces were more exposed than the rebels who waited for them, striking when they wanted to and then withdrawing. Communications between the various army units was poor, while Castro's communications were superb. Batista's offensive failed. Morale among his troops fell. Castro acquired more weapons, including a tank, and more people saw the coming of a Castro victory and a Batista defeat..

By December, a force under Che Guevara was expanding into central Cuba, and soldiers were deserting Batista's army in droves. Castro's success was creating support for revolution in the cities - to be described as a little engine (the guerrillas) driving the big engine (the masses). Batista decided that the game was up. On New Year's Eve he and a group he had invited to his party boarded three planes. Batista's plane flew to the Dominican Republic - ruled then by the brutal Trujillo family. The other two planes went to the United States, avoiding Miami, where many Cubans were hostile toward Batistianos.

On New Year's Day, people in Cuba were joyed by Batista's departure. In the days that followed, people cheered the rebels riding in trucks coming from the hills to proclaim the success of the revolution. Castro came and walked among the cheering crowds, unafraid of assassination and relishing the opportunity to appear as a man of the people.

Castro versus the Eisenhower Administration

On January 4, Castro named a judge, Manuel Urrutia, president. Urrutia's cabinet consisted of other anti-Batista liberals, but it was Castro's opinion that Urrutia would wait for him before making a decision.

The immediate agenda for Castro was Cuba's economy, which had been declining in 1958 - a year of recession in the United States. In March, the telephone industry was nationalized in response to a special hostility that had risen in Cuba against International Telephone and Telegraph.

Also on Castro's agenda was his version of war-crime trials. Around 700 of Batista's enforcers were executed, the firing squads creating discomfort in the United States where they were shown on television - a discomfort Castro attributed to people in the U.S. not knowing Batista-like repression and torture except through novels and movies. Castro compared his shootings of Batista murderers favorably against the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where innocent women and children had been killed. And there was other rhetoric from Cuba that displeased people in Washington.

In April, Castro went to the United States, invited by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Castro and his entourage went determined to avoid appearing to be begging for help from the Yankees. Some in the Eisenhower administration recognized that Cuba could use loans to restore its economy, and they hoped that help and good relations might tame Castro. Others in the administration were uninterested in helping Castro. They disliked Castro's talk of neutralism in the Cold War as much as they did the neutralism of Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India. Some saw Castro's rhetoric as a danger to the standing of the United States in various nations across Latin America. The new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, did not like Castro's emotionalism and his waving his arms around when he spoke. And suspicions existed that Raul Castro and Che Guevara had communist sympathies.

Eisenhower snubbed Castro, leaving town to play golf. Instead, Vice President Nixon met Castro in his office, and they talked for three hours. Nixon asked about elections, and Castro told him that the Cuban people did not want elections, that they were suspicious of elections and believed that elections produced bad government. Nixon asked him about the over-ruling of the acquittal of Batista's aviators, and Castro spoke of carrying out the will of the people, leaving Nixon with the impression that Castro was too inclined to follow the passions of the mob rather than leading a nation in a rule of law. Nixon asked Castro about communism, and, after Castro left, Nixon complained that Castro was "either incredibly naive about communism or under communist discipline." His guess, he said, was the former.

Castro laid a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial, and he was invited to meet the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, telling them that he would not expropriate the property of Americans and that he was against dictatorships and for a free press.

The Eisenhower administration chose to wait and see how Castro behaved rather than to offer him any assistance. The director of the CIA, Allen Dulles (brother of John Foster Dulles who had just died of cancer) spoke of the possibility of using punishment politics. He spoke of Congress reducing the purchasing of Cuban sugar if Castro did not prove cooperative.

Castro returned to Cuba having said to a Social Democrat friend that he was not a communist because communism was the dictatorship of a single class and meant hatred and class struggle. On television he told the Cuban people that extremists had no place in the Cuban revolution. He appeared to be a free-enterprise nationalist but in search of remaking Cuban society.

By now Cuba's Communist Party had joined the Castro's revolution - not unlike the Bolsheviks in early 1917 had joined the revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas of Russia. And the Communist Party complained that Castro was endangering Cuba's revolution.

Castro instituted agrarian reform. With exceptions having to do with productivity, estates larger than 1,000 acres were subject to expropriation, with compensation paid to the owners in 20-year bonds at 4.5 percent annual interest - higher interest than MacArthur's land reform in Japan, and repayment faster than the land reform in Taiwan. In the future, land could be bought only by Cubans; after the harvest of 1960, sugar plantations would have to be owned by Cubans; and agricultural holdings were to be no less than 67 acres. Sugar company stocks fell on the New York Stock Exchange. U.S. executives protested to the U.S. government. More talk erupted in the U.S. about communism in Cuba, and the Eisenhower administration argued with Cuba over its new agrarian reform.

During the agrarian reform, hostility was in full swing between anti-communist members of Castro's revolution (the 26 of July Movement) and its communist members. The anti-communists were calling the communists melons (green on the outside, as in green fatigues, and red on the inside). The Communists denounced the red-baiting and spoke of the need for unity. Bombs exploded in Havana, believed to be the work of counter-revolutionaries, and Castro veered to the side of those supporting unity.

In increasing numbers anti-communists began abandoning Castro. President Urrutia objected to the heightened radicalization of Castro's movement and resigned. So too did had his prime minister, José Cardona. Osvaldo Dorticós was now Cuba's new president and Castro was the prime minister. One of Castro's old anti-communist compañeros, Hubert Matos, was soon to be arrested for treason and having disrupted agrarian reform. He was to be tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In September, Khrushchev visited the United States and met Eisenhower at Camp David, creating what was called the "spirit of Camp David." The Eisenhower administration believed it was doing enough for peace, and it was facing criticism from some who thought it was being too soft on communism.

In February, 1960, the Soviet Union's Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba to inaugurate a Soviet trade exhibition. He signed a five-year trade agreement with Cuba, promising the purchase of one million tons of sugar annually. Cuba was to receive petroleum products in exchange. The Eisenhower administration decided to work with anti-Castro groups inside Cuba in hope of overthrowing Castro.

In March, a French ship, carrying a shipment of Belgian small arms, exploded in Havana harbor, killing dozens of workers and soldiers. Castro publicly accused the CIA of sabotage, and the U.S. protested the accusation. Also in March, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba - with Batistianos forbidden to join the force. Eisenhower approved $13 million for the project.

Soviet tankers arrived with crude oil. The three oil refineries in Cuba - the Esso and Texaco refineries and a refinery owned by the British - refused to refine the oil. Castro nationalized the refineries. Castro saw the U.S. as having declared economic war on Cuba. And the following month - July - the Cuban government passed a nationalization law providing for the expropriation of foreign holdings in Cuba. Two days later, President Eisenhower reduced the purchase of Cuban sugar by 95 percent, cutting off 80 percent of Cuban exports to the United States. Then the Soviet Union announced that it was willing to buy the sugar that had been destined for the United States.

Anti-Castro Cubans in the Sierra Maestras, trying to replicate Castro's success, were caught and shot. Neighborhood watch groups had arisen, watching for people bent on sabotage, treason and violence against the revolution. Castro was now more strongly on the side of those advocating unity and opposing "red-baiting," and his old friend Che Guevara was describing himself openly as a communist.

Seeing a threat of U.S. intervention, Khrushchev announced that Cuba could be defended with rockets. He declared the Monroe Doctrine an anachronism and said that the Soviet Union would purchase the sugar that the U.S. was rejecting. On August 16, members of the CIA launched their first assassination attempt against Castro, with poisoned cigars.

A leading journalist in the U.S., Walter Lippmann, anticipated the tactics from the 1970s towards Communist China, favoring economic cooperation and friendly relations with Cuba. He criticized the Eisenhower administration for having "pushed the Cubans behind the iron curtain." The right thing to do, he wrote, "is keep the way open for their return."

President Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs Invasion

John Kennedy was a liberal Democrat concerned about vulnerability to attacks on being soft on communism. In his campaign for president, in the fall of 1960, he was unaware of Eisenhower and the CIA organizing an invasion of Cuba, and he criticized the Eisenhower administration for failing to support anti-Castro Cubans in their "fight for freedom." Nixon could not disclose the plan against Castro, but in his second televised debate with Kennedy he sought credit for the decline of dictators in Latin America since the Eisenhower administration had taken office. Nixon stated that a treaty with all of the Organization of American States prohibited the U.S. from interfering in the internal affairs of any other state, but he added:

Let me make one thing clear. There isn't any question but that we will defend our rights there. There isn't any question but that we will defend Guantánamo if it's attacked. There also isn't any question but that the free people of Cuba - the people who want to be free - are going to be supported and that they will attain their freedom. No, Cuba is not lost, and I don't think this kind of defeatist talk by Senator Kennedy helps the situation one bit.

Kennedy replied that he had "never suggested that Cuba was lost except for the present." And he criticized Nixon for describing the Batista dictatorship as competent and stable in a press conference in Havana in 1955, a dictatorship, Kennedy added, that "killed over twenty thousand Cubans in seven years" - an apparent reference to the years 1952 to 1959.

During the campaign, John Kennedy attempted to link Nixon to another purported Eisenhower administration Cold War complacency: a missile gap that favored the Soviet Union. Kennedy said he would close that gap and that he would be firm with the Soviet Union. Benefiting from intelligent reports, Eisenhower knew there was no missile gap, but to protect U.S. intelligence he kept silent.

The vote count gave Kennedy a lead of 0.2% of the popular vote - or 118,574 votes. Nixon admitted defeat but was often to say that he had been robbed of victory. The voting in Chicago had been crucial. The Chicago gangster, Sam Giancana, had delivered a lot of votes for Kennedy, a deal said to have been brokered by Frank Sinatra and initiated by Kennedy's father, Joseph, with Sam Giancana believing that he might someday benefit from good will with the Kennedys.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

On November 18, 1960, Allen Dulles of the CIA had briefed President-elect Kennedy on Eisenhower's plan to overthrow Castro. And, on December 6, President Eisenhower met with the president-elect regarding the plan. Having criticized the Eisenhower administration during the campaign for having failed to support anti-Castro Cubans, Kennedy could not easily turn his back on Eisenhower's project. Allen Dulles, moreover, was arguing that if Kennedy ended the project it would demoralize those Cubans already training in Central America and send them scattering elsewhere in Latin America with negative talk about the Kennedy administration and the United States. Dulles argued too that the Soviet Union was training Cubans as pilots and was expected to deliver MiG aircraft to Cuba and that it was important to overthrow Castro soon rather than waiting and watching.

Khrushchev was still at odds with Communist China and in a speech he bragged about how revolutionist the Soviet Union was and referred to Soviet support for wars of national liberation. He said that colonialists did not grant independence, that resistance to imperialism was inevitable, and that wars of national liberation would lead to communism. Kennedy was alarmed by Khrushchev's bluster, and he was moved to include in his inaugural speech defiant words about paying any price, bearing any burden, meeting any hardship "in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

The CIA's preparations for the invasion of Cuba continued, and on January 11 the Joint Chiefs of Staff were informed and consulted for the first time about the CIA's plan. Kennedy's advisor, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., told Kennedy that he was against the plan, claiming that the U.S. would be unable to disguise its complicity and that it would dissipate the good will that his administration was gaining in the world.

William J. Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued against the invasion. The operation, he said, was wildly out of proportion to the threat. It would, he said, compromise the moral position of the U.S. in the world and make it impossible to protest treaty violations by the communists.

Within the CIA was also doubt about the invasion. Rich Helms, a future director, smelled failure. One CIA report described Castro as invulnerable to insurrection. But Dulles and some operatives who had taken part in the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala were confident that they could take care of Castro the way they had taken care of Arbenz.

Kennedy wanted it to appear that it was the Cubans who were overthrowing Castro. Whatever happens, he said, there would be no direct U.S. involvement. This he told to the CIA and others around him, but it was not communicated to the Cubans training for the invasion - in Guatemala.

The plan against Castro included air strikes two days before the invasion, with B-26 bombers flown by Cuban pilots - the bombers supposedly belonging to a liberated airforce from within Cuba. There was to be a diversionary landing of 160 men near the Sierra Maestras. And the main invasion was to land near the town of Trinidad and link with an anti-Castro guerrilla force of 1,000 men already in the nearby Escambray Mountains.

On April 12, Kennedy held a news conference at which he was asked whether the U.S. was going to help an uprising against Castro. Kennedy answered:

First, I want to say that there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This government will do everything it possibly can, I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba… The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves.

On April 15, the air strike began, with eight B-26 bombers, at three Cuban air bases, in hopes of destroying Castro's ability to attack the invaders from the air. Those taking part in the bombing saw more damage than they had actually created. And the diversionary invasion never made it to shore. Seeing a militia on shore, the 164-man force turned back.

Kennedy decided that nighttime landing at the Bay of Pigs would be better than an early morning at landing Trinidad. At the Bay of Pigs was an air-strip that the invasion could use, for bombing raids. Once the bay was secured a provisional Cuban government was to be set-up, which the U.S. would recognize.

The invading force learned at the last minute that they were heading for the Bay of Pigs rather then Trinidad. They landed at midnight as planned, but nothing else went right. They were exposed to Castro's airforce, and no air cover from the U.S. came to rescue them. There was no popular rising against Castro in favor of the invaders, and Castro's troops, with Russian tanks, moved against them. The invading force lost 89 as killed, and 1197 were taken prisoner. Castro's Cuba suffered 157 killed.

The invaders felt betrayed, and they blamed Kennedy for not sending help. Although Kennedy had never promised it, they believed that there was supposed to be back-up insurance by the U.S. military. The invasion failed, it was said, because Kennedy lacked cojones (balls).

Kennedy blamed the CIA and asked how he could have been "so stupid." Before the end of 1961 he fired Allen Dulles and his deputy, Richard Bissel. But publicly he took responsibility for the failure, with familiar words about failures being orphans.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The Bay of Pigs invasion reinforced Khrushchev's view that the U.S. was determined to destroy the Castro regime, but he was also impressed by Kennedy's failure to use American military might. In August, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, according to Khrushchev to protect East Germany from intrigues by the West. East Germany was having trouble controlling illegal currency transactions, and a campaign to lure skilled Germans from East Germany to West Germany had been underway. East Germany, claimed Khrushchev, had a right to protect its borders. With the wall, East Germany crippled schemes against it, and by force East Germany was able to keep people inside its border.

Following through on his talk of a missile gap during the campaign, Kennedy was accelerating the deployment of nuclear missiles, forcing the Soviets to do the same. An arms race with the Soviet Union was running at full speed. And the Kennedy administration was doing its best to make up with the anti-Castro Cubans and others. President Kennedy backed Edward Lansdale's Operation Mongoose - a program of psychological warfare and designed to provoke, harass and disrupt - a program supported with zeal by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

An operation called Dirty Tricks tried to pin on Cuba staged incidents. Hit and run saboteurs burned cane fields and blew up oil storage tanks. More assassination attempts were made against Castro. Robert Kennedy, learned of a CIA connection with gangsters regarding assassination attempts against Castro, and he demanded a stop to it.

The Kennedy administration banned all imports of Cuban products and won support from its NATO allies to isolate Cuba economically. In early 1962, the Kennedy administration engineered the eviction of Cuba from the Organization of American States. U.S. politicians were calling for an invasion of Cuba. And near Puerto Rico were practice amphibious landings by 40,000 U.S. Marines.

In September 1962, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution sanctioning the use of force against Cuba should it be necessary "to curb Cuban aggression and subversion in Latin America," or to prevent the creation or use of "an externally supported offensive military capability endangering the security of the United States." The vote was 85 to 1.

The standard belief in the United States was that the Soviet Union was aggressive, while in the Soviet Union it was the United States that was viewed as aggressive. To not appear vulnerable to a U.S. first launch of missiles, the Soviet Union had been lying about its success in building long-range missiles. Khrushchev was claiming that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles "like sausages" and that these missiles could hit a fly at a distance of 8,000 miles. In fact, his long-range missiles were ineffective, and he could not rely on bombers delivering nuclear bombs as retaliation because his bombers were vulnerable to U.S. defensive capabilities. Khrushchev had hundreds of effective "medium range" missiles decided to defend the Soviet Union by putting medium-range missiles in Cuba. This, he argued would serve as a deterrent to another U.S. assault on Cuba. Castro bought the idea. The United States had its missiles in Turkey, as he described it "under the very nose" of the Soviet Union. The U.S. had not kept out of the Soviet Union's neighborhood, he reasoned. Why should the Soviet Union be allowed to put missiles into Cuba, a sovereign nation, in agreement with that nation. The Monroe Doctrine, he believed was not relevant. The Kennedy administration would make a fuss and then accept. Congressional elections were coming up in early November (1962) but he would keep the delivery of the missiles secret and announce their existence in Cuba, when Kennedy would be under less pressure to make a show of standing up to the Communists. 

The Russian missiles were detected by U.S. air reconnaissance. The Kennedy administration took offense at what it described as offensive Russian missiles ninety miles off the U.S. shoreline. The Cuban missile crisis was underway, and it became the most dangerous time in history.

Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted war, but Khrushchev was under pressure from his colleagues and military not to give in to threats from the United States. President Kennedy settled for a naval blockade of Cuba - which traditionally was an act of war. But this was not the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and Kennedy wanted above all a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The Soviet bloc was on war alert. In a Gallup survey only 4 percent of those polled was opposed to the naval blockade and only one in five Americans believed that it would lead to World War III. In other words, twenty percent were terrorized by the belief that their lives and their world were about to end.

Some U.S. military leaders were excited and eager to strike at the Russian-manned missile sites in Cuba. Castro was also excited and eager to strike at U.S. surveillance airplanes. Russian commanders in Cuba approved the shooting down of a U2 plane with a Russian anti-aircraft missile. The U.S. pilot was killed. U.S. military leaders were dismayed by Kennedy's reluctance to retaliate against the downing of the U2. At planning sessions, the head of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, was furious. He described Kennedy's position "as almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." LeMay declared that "if we don't do anything to Cuba, then they're going to push on Berlin, and push hard because they've got us on the run." LeMay said that he saw no solution "except direct military action right now."

Kennedy chose what LeMay called an "appeasement policy." This was without Kennedy and the U.S. military knowing that already in Cuba were nuclear warheads to go with the Russian missiles - 162 warheads according to Robert McNamara (Kennedy's Secretary of Defense) in the year 1961. It is now known that Fidel Castro and his comrade Che Guevara were arguing in favor of the Russians using the missiles against the United States. They were ready for their martyrdom and the martyrdom of Cuba. But Anastas Mikoyan, in Cuba participating in the crisis on behalf of the Soviet Union, was opposed to any such "beautiful death." The United States had 180,000 troops at its southern ports ready to invade Cuba. According to McNamara, had we known that the nuclear warheads were already in Cuba we may have attacked.

Had the military men around Kennedy had their way a nuclear holocaust might have followed. Kennedy and McNamara struggled to keep the military from over-reacting and striking against the Russians, and the greatest of all tragedies was averted. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and to refrain from invading Cuba. It was now Khrushchev's turn to be accused of having no cojones, by Castro, who was furious with Khrushchev for taking back his missiles. And there was no "push on Berlin" as predicted by LeMay.

Regarding the missile crisis, Mao Zedong denounced Soviet leadership for giving in to the U.S. The China-Soviet split was still on,, and, in 1963, Mao found fault with the Russians for signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United States and Britain - on July 25. The treaty prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in space, above ground, and under water, and a telephone "hot line" was established between the White House and the Kremlin.

President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald is reported to have had an unhappy childhood, in grade school a bully and later picked on. In high school he felt isolated, tended to be unfriendly toward others his age, and he read a lot, including books on the big subject of those times: communism. He read the Communist Manifesto and other writings which gave him the impression that communism was something other than what the public in general thought of it. To an acquaintance he said that communism was good for the worker. And at his school he told someone that he would shoot Eisenhower if he could because Eisenhower was exploiting the workers.

Oswald's life had been without a father and filled with continual disruptions and family discord. He worshipped his older brother, who had joined the Marine Corps in 1952. In 1956, at the age of seventeen, Oswald joined the Marine Corps - despite the views he had expressed on communism. It is said that he wanted to get away from home and his mother and to be like his brother - Oswald having been one of many who joined the Marine Corps without much thinking about political philosophy.

In boot camp he had the firing range training with the heavy World War II rifle, the M-1, and qualified as a "sharpshooter," meaning he could hit a ten-inch target at 200 yards, eight out of ten times at a reasonably rapid rate, in some uncomfortable positions - without a scope.

In the Marine Corps, Oswald was still isolated. He saw himself as different from those around him. He was not happy in the Marine Corps, and while stationed in Japan he went out on liberty alone and befriended Japanese communists. Oswald became insolent with other Marines, including those who had command over him. He did time in the brig - with its tortuous routine of standing at attention for hours. Out of the brig his dislike of duty led to one nervous breakdown. He recovered, and, on the grounds that his mother was ill and in need of support, he left the Marines on a hardship discharge a month before the end of three years of service.

Some conspiracy theorists concluded that Oswald, while on his first tour of duty in the Marine Corps, had been selected to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Any enlisted Marine recruited for work for Central Intelligence Agency would have had to demonstrate to the Corps exceptional intelligence, competence and dedication to duty - and most likely would have been someone who had re-enlisted at least once. There were among enlisted Marines a norm and below norm, and anybody who knows a few basic facts about Oswald's tour of duty in the Marine Corps knows that Oswald was somewhere among this group rather than exceptional. [note]

Oswald to the Soviet Union

Rather than take care of his mother, with money he had saved he bought passage on a ship to Europe. In 1959, during a time of goodwill between the Eisenhower administration and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was accepting tourists from the United States. By October 16, Oswald was in Moscow with a tourist visa. He announced that he wanted to become a Soviet citizen and was dismayed when the Soviet Union turned him down. Oswald had just turned twenty. Depressed and with no alternative hopes he slashed his wrist. Tourists were watched closely, and when Oswald failed to put in an appearance his roomed was entered, blood was found everywhere, and he was rushed to a hospital. Asked why he had attempted suicide he said that he was not leaving the Soviet Union alive.

The Soviet Union did not trust U.S. journalism, and they wanted to avoid misrepresentations arising from the death or mistreatment of an American tourist in the Soviet Union, so they decided to let him stay. But they kept an eye on him, unsure of his stability or whether he was a CIA agent.

Back in the U.S.A.

Oswald did leave the Soviet Union alive. Routine, menial work did not appeal to him, and he learned that the Soviet Union was something less than a workers' paradise. In June 1962 he returned to Texas, with a wife, Marina. Oswald was miserable also in the United States. Life for the unskilled was a struggle everywhere, but, like some others who favored social revolution but looked with distaste upon the Soviet Union, Oswald was enthusiastic about Castro's revolution.

Oswald had difficulty holding a job and remaining settled, and he blamed these on FBI visits to his employers and landlords. Oswald was attached to Marina, his only companion and partner, but his frustration led to his occasionally beating her. Oswald was fascinated with guns. He had a pistol and a Mannllicher-Carcano rifle that he practiced with - not at a range but in open country outside town.

Rightists in Texas were outspoken in their hostility towards Cuba, and Oswald decided to strike against the most outspoken rightist in Texas, former general, Edwin Walker, whom he described as a fascist. For two months Oswald planned his attack on Walker, and, on the night of April 10, 1963, he shot into Walkers house. The bullet nicked the side of the window, was deflected and missed Walker. Oswald returned home, and with only a few words he explained to Marina what he had done. She was distressed but kept quiet about it, no doubt ashamed. She decided that Oswald was sick and unstable and hoped that somehow he would snap out of it.

Later in April, Marina watched Oswald pack his pistol excitedly and leave the house. She thought he was going to meet Richard Nixon, who was rumored to be coming to Dallas. But Nixon did not arrive and Oswald returned home without incident.

Oswald was an avid reader of newspapers, especially of political news. He had learned of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald and Marina moved to New Orleans, and there he became the only member of a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - self appointed. He handed out leaflets calling for hands off Cuba, and he argued. He decided to defect to Cuba and hatched a plan to hijack a plane with Marina, who was pregnant. She refused, and Oswald decided to travel by bus to Mexico City, using money from an unemployment check. He planned to send for Marina after he had established himself in Cuba.

In Mexico City the Cubans refused him a visa. He returned to Dallas, cursing bureaucrats. His wife was living with a friend and keeping some of Oswald's belongings, and Oswald found a room in a district on the outskirts of the city. He found a minimum wage job at a school book depository building. While on the job he learned that President Kennedy was coming to Dallas and would be driving by his place of work -. Kennedy, whom Castro had been vilifying.

Oswald took his rifle, with scope, to work disguised as a package of curtain rods. Alone, on the sixth floor of the building he built a wall of boxes around a window with a view of the roadway over which Kennedy would be traveling. The boxes shielded him from view of anyone who might happen onto the sixth floor. Kennedy's motorcade arrived, with Kennedy's limousine having its top off for the sake of visibility for the crowds. Directly below Oswald on the fifth floor, one of his co-workers heard three distinct shots and the clicking of a bolt action rifle between each shot.

Oswald was the only employee missing in a line up of employees a few minutes or so after the assassination. Oswald had fled to his rooming house, where he grabbed his pistol and a jacket and left, with the kind of manner that attracts suspicion. Police showed up at the house where his wife Marina was living. She showed the police where she thought Oswald's rifle was, wrapped up in a roll. There was no rifle in the roll, and Marina went ashen. Oswald, meanwhile, shot and killed a suspicious policeman and was captured in a movie theater. In front of newsmen Oswald professed his innocence, but when questioned by the police he gave them what are now known to be lies.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro was surprised and alarmed by the assassination. He had had nothing to do with it, and fearing the unknown he put Cuba on full alert. Two days after the assassination, an emotional owner of a Dallas girly club, Jack Ruby, tried to make himself a hero by killing Oswald. The assassination had moved many people patriotically, including Ruby, and he wanted to prove that Jews had guts.

It was a time when the U.S. Department (led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy) was investigating organized crime and was making extensive tapes of unsuspecting gangsters, including the conversations of Sam Giancana, the operations head for the old Capone organization in Chicago. Also under investigation was Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union. No evidence emerged of interest in or knowledge about any plans to assassinate Kennedy among those whose conversations were taped - only remarks after the assassination, including expressions of delight, none of which indicated involvement in the assassination.

A week after the assassination, only 29 percent in a Gallup poll believed that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy. Those who watch cases being presented in court can often see great bodies of testimony and evidence presented by the opposing sides - the prosecution and the defense - one of which is always in error. The government's official investigation, called the Warren Commission, was viewed with distrust because its conclusions had been made in secret. As of September 2001 many still believe that Oswald was either innocent or part of a conspiracy. In the manner of lawyers fighting a difficult case, a number of writers have marshaled what they see as evidence of a conspiracy, relying on skepticism where it suits them, citing gaps of information here and there and making associations with confidence where it suits a conspiratorial theory. Their point is usually that government agents (the FBI, CIA and/or military) managed to work together to cover up a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in order to hide their deeds - deeds that would have been disapproved by society at-large.

Books with the rival points of view are available with greater detail than can be presented here. Some of them are listed under books in "links and books" available below. And there are links with additional coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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