The Orphan Policy

Who runs U.S. policy on Latin America, and who in particular is responsible for Cuba? For three weeks the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Latin America, headed by Oregon's Wayne Morse, has been working on the answer to that question. One after another, the Kennedy Administration's top officials--Secretary of State Rusk, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Latin America Task Force Chief Adolf A. Berle--have marched up Capitol Hill to give their answers. The hearings are closed, but enough testimony has leaked out to prove President Kennedy's wry comment. "Victory has 100 fathers, and defeat is an orphan." Everyone, it seems, blames everyone else.

Ask the Pentagon. Much of the testimony blamed the Cuban rebels. Rusk admitted that the U.S. trained, financed and equipped the invaders. But he insisted--despite statements to the contrary by Cuban leaders--that the decision to attack was made not by either the CIA or the Pentagon, but by the Cubans themselves. He also denied the exiles' claim that the U.S. provided "weak counsel." The CIA's Dulles found fault with misleading reports that anti-Castro forces inside Cuba would rise as soon as the invaders hit the beach.

General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke for the Pentagon. Before Lemnitzer went on the Senate grill, it was widely reported that the Joint Chiefs presented President Kennedy with a written, signed approval of the Bay of Pigs operation. The rebuttal prepared for delivery by Lemnitzer blamed the subsequent failure on the withholding of key information by civilians. After hearing Lemnitzer, Tennessee's Albert Gore stalked out with an angry demand that all the Chiefs of Staff "be replaced by new, wiser and abler men."

The civilian at whom most fingers point is Task Force Chief Berle, onetime Columbia University law professor and F.D.R.'s chief Latin American braintruster from 1938 to 1944. Berle passes the buck right back to the Pentagon. Yet it is well known that when he stepped in with his task force immediately after Kennedy's inaugural, one of his first steps was to relieve State Department men from liaison work with the CIA, the Pentagon and the Cubans. Before the committee, Berle referred many questions to the Pentagon. Then, says Morse: ''He was asked who really set policy, and he said that it was his task force." When asked how long the task force would be setting policy, Berle was noncommittal. He agreed that it was high time the Administration found itself an Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, hinting that he himself might "soon be back writing books."

Shattered Authority. Even before the Cuban disaster, the main difficulty in finding a topflight man for the Latin American job was the fact that all real authority was tightly held by Berle and his task force. Since then, so many men have had a hand in policy that no one really has responsibility. Not counting the investigating teams looking into the Cuba failure itself, and Kennedy's proposal to send U.N. Ambassador Stevenson on a fence-mending swing around South America, at least four top-level men are handling various facets of inter-American affairs:

P: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 43, Harvard historian turned White House aide, slipped into Latin American affairs first by traveling south with President Kennedy's Food-for-Peace mission, then by writing the famed State Department "White Paper" on Cuba. His influence touches all aspects of policy.

P: Lincoln Gordon, 47, a Harvard economist working part-time with Berle's task force, has become Kennedy's leading expert on Latin American economics. Gordon drew up the U.S. agenda for the July inter-American economic meeting approved last week by the Organization of American States.

P: Theodore Achilles, 55, U.S. Ambassador to Peru during the Eisenhower Administration, worked on economics with Gordon during the first Berle task force days. After the Cuban invasion he worked with Paul Nitze, Assistant Secretary of Defense chosen by Kennedy to coordinate all Cuban operations. Achilles is now a director of a special State Department crisis section.

Author of the Alliance. Closest to being a top man in Latin American affairs these days is White House Aide Richard Goodwin, 29, who has just taken over control of Cuban operations from Nitze at Kennedy's orders. A former TV quiz-scandal investigator who proved a valuable campaign speechwriter for Kennedy last fall, Goodwin wrote Kennedy's highly successful speech introducing his hemispheric "Alliance for Progress." Later, Goodwin was sent to size up Brazil's U.S.-shy President Janio Quadros shortly before the abortive Cuban venture. So sweeping is Goodwin's new authority that the State Department has been instructed to consult him on all matters dealing with Cuba.

Last week Goodwin was busy trying to rebuild on the wreckage of the exile Revolutionary Council. At best, the council was a shaky coalition of the leftist People's Revolutionary Movement (M.R.P.) of Engineer Manolo Ray and the more conservative groups behind the Democratic Revolutionary Front (the Frente) of Manuel Antonio Varona. The Frente faction talks wishfully of organizing an anti-Communist crusade of 20,000 Latin Americans to storm Castroland.

The Kennedy Administration is urgently anxious to repair the damage of the Cuban disaster. But it is not likely that U.S. money and equipment will be going to any invaders from now on (U.S. troops have also been ruled out, unless Castro provokes their use). This means that the effort will probably be directed toward men already inside Cuba, mainly Manolo Ray's M.R.P. underground, most of whose agents, Ray insists, are still in business.

Cold War Currency. Writing his own postscript to the invasion, Fidel Castro last week turned the 1,000 prisoners he took at the Bay of Pigs into cold war currency. Recalling Spain's exchange of Napoleon's soldiers for pigs,* Castro told a crowd of whooping peasants: "We are a little more refined. We will exchange them for bulldozers." The price would be 500 bulldozers. "Otherwise they must pay by hard work, very hard work, digging trenches and building fortifications." After a weekend celebration of his newly awarded Lenin Peace Prize, Castro sent a committee of ten prisoners to the U.S. to discuss the deal. In a grotesque side offer, Castro said he would trade invasion Commander Manuel Artime, 28, for his own man Francisco ("The Hook") Molina, 29, awaiting sentencing in Manhattan for the murder of a nine-year-old Venezuelan girl in a restaurant brawl last September.

On humanitarian grounds, Milton Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Reuther sent Castro a telegram offering to raise funds for his 1,000-prisoner deal "as proof that free men will not desert those who risked all for what they thought was right." The U.S. State Department, which must grant export licenses for any bulldozer ransom payment, said it would give the matter its "most sympathetic consideration."

* And carefully not citing Adolf Eichmann's more recent World War II offer of 1,000,000 Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks.

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