Page 215 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 215 of 237

train the exiles in May of 1960. Nixon and his advisers wanted the CIA invasion to take place before the voters
went to the polls on November 8.

A top Nixon campaign adviser later privately confirmed this. He explained that Nixon was hoping for an invasion
before the election because "it would have been a cinch to win" the presidency if the Eisenhower Administration -
- in which Nixon was the Number 2 man -- had destroyed Castro in the closing days of the campaign.

The best documentation of this is an article by Herbert G. Klein, press secretary to Vice-President Nixon during
the 1960 campaign. On March 25, 1962, writing in the San Diego Union, of which he was the editor, Klein
revealed what had been going on behind the scenes in the Nixon camp in 1960. It was a candid and most
interesting news story that did not gain the wide national attention it merited:

"From the start of the 1960 campaign many of us were convinced that Cuba could be the deciding issue in a close
election. Certainly, in retrospect, it was one of the decisive factors in what was the closest presidential election of
modern history ...

"Only four of us on the Nixon staff shared the secret that refugees were being trained for an eventual assault on
Castro and a return to Cuba. We had stern instructions not to talk about this, and, despite many temptations, we
protected security by remaining silent.

"For a long time, as we campaigned across the country, we held the hope that the training would go rapidly
enough to permit the beach landing. The defeat of Castro would have been a powerful factor for Richard Nixon ...

"But the training didn't go rapidly enough for a pre-election landing ..."

Klein also wrote that a pre-election Cuban invasion would have made it possible to reveal during the campaign
that Nixon had written a confidential memo in 1959, analyzing Castro as "either incredibly naive about
Communism or under Communist discipline." * Klein added that Nixon had urged a tough policy on Cuba "which
led to the training of refugees."

While the Nixon people were hoping the invasion would take place any day, that was exactly what the Kennedy
strategists hoped would not happen. They were receiving persistent, and disturbing, reports that some kind of
Cuban exile operation was in the works. The reports of invasion training were picked up from several sources,
including alert members of the press.

In mid-October, Andrew St. George and Hank Walker went to Florida to shoot pictures for Life magazine of
Cuban exiles training to invade their homeland. The Kennedy campaign staff heard about this assignment. While
in Miami, St. George received several telephone calls from William Attwood, a member of Kennedy's speech-
writing staff. *

Attwood was calling St. George for information on the state of training of the Cuban exiles. According to St.
George, Attwood expressed concern that the Republicans would try to launch an invasion of Cuba before election
day. St. George said the question, apparently, in the mind of the Kennedy aide was not whether there was to be an
invasion, but when.

St. George told Attwood that there seemed little possibility of an immediate invasion, judging by the state of
readiness of the exiles. This word was passed on to Robert Kennedy, who was managing his brother's campaign.
At one point, there had been discussion among Kennedy strategists of the possibility of the candidate's giving a
speech anticipating the invasion that seemed to be brewing, and thereby neutralizing its political effect. The idea