Epilogue to a Failure

One of Washington's worst kept secrets in the initial bargaining with Castro over the Bay of Pigs prisoners was the U.S. Government's role in the ill-fated Tractors for Freedom Committee. Though private citizens headed the committee, they were working for the White House--which blandly denied any involvement. Last week one of the committeemen, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, brother of the former President, told his story in detail. In a book, The Wine Is Bitter (Doubleday; $4.95), he flatly accuses President Kennedy of reneging on a promise to let the world know that the committee was an agent of the U.S. Government, and not just a group of "do-gooders who had decided to take important foreign policy matters into our own hands."

According to Dr. Eisenhower, Kennedy telephoned him one evening in May 1961. The President explained that the U.S. had a moral obligation to help the prisoners, but could do nothing openly because it had broken diplomatic relations with Cuba. Writes Dr. Eisenhower: "The President, therefore, wanted to establish a committee of private citizens for the sole purpose of raising private funds to buy the tractors that Castro demanded in ex change for the captives. He would explain the matter to the American people the next day."

Dr. Eisenhower agreed to take part, and so did the late Mrs. Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Walter Reuther and Joseph Dodge, Ike's budget director. But the presidential explanation never came. In fact, writes Milton Eisenhower, as criticism mounted Kennedy sharply denied that the U.S. Government had anything to do with it. "I now realized, in chilling clarity, that the President intended to maintain the fiction that all aspects of the case, from negotiation to critical decision, from raising funds to actually freeing the prisoners, were private."

When Castro insisted that the tractor exchange be considered "indemnification" for war damage and suggested that negotiations be conducted in Havana, Dr. Eisenhower could take it no longer. "I sent President Kennedy the bitterest letter I have ever written," he says. Eisenhower never got a reply from Kennedy, and Castro was by now playing an impossible cat-and-mouse game. There was nothing left but to disband the committee and return all contributions. "And so ended," says Eisenhower, "the most exasperating, frustrating and enervating six weeks of my life."

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