Presidential mistress (while a teenager) Mimi Alford claims the President who remains the most popular in modern U.S. offered her amyl nitrate poppers during a nude swimming party at the Palm Springs estate of Bing Crosby, the most popular entertainer of America’s Norman Rockwell era. The party took place around “White” Christmas of 1962.
“The shouts and shrieks of the partygoers,” writes Seymour Hersh in his earlier (but corroborating book) ‘The Dark Side of Camelot,’ “had the California State policeman guarding the estate that night assuming the sounds were actually the nighttime calls of coyotes.”
But as the whoops and shrieks got louder the alarmed state troopers finally called Kennedy’s Secret Service agents Joe Paolella and Larry Newman to ask if some coyotes were bothering the President. The agents, long accustomed to averting their gaze during these frequent episodes, finally went around the back fence and investigated.“ (Kennedy’s top aide) Dave Powers was banging a girl on the edge of the pool,” recalled Newman, “while the President was sitting across the pool having a drink and talking to some broads. Everybody was buck**s naked.”
But no word from the Secret Service agents if Bingo’s “Silent Night, Holy Night” played in the background during this solemn Yuletide celebration.
Mere months earlier dozens of Cuban exiles (many of them college kids about Mimi Alford’s age) were infiltrating Cuba and bringing out eye-witness reports of what remains the biggest military threat to the U.S. since 1812. In the process dozens were also dying by firing squad and torture at the hands of Castro and Che Guevara’s KGB- tutored secret police.
For all the good the Cubans did:
“Nothing but refugee rumors,” sneered JFK’s National Security advisor, McGeorge Bundy on ABC’s Issues and Answers on October 14, 1962. “Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued the Ivy League luminary, barely masking his scorn for these hot-headed and deceitful Cubans and their sensational reports of missiles. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba,” he scoffed.
And for all the thanks the Cubans got:
“There's fifty-odd-thousand Cuban refugees in this country," sneered President Kennedy himself the following day, "all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They're the ones putting out this kind of stuff."
Exactly 48 hours later U-2 photos sat on the President’s desk revealing those “refugee rumors,” complete with nuclear warheads, and pointed directly at Bundy, JFK and their entire staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards.
After the Missile Crisis "resolution," the U.S. Coast Guard and even the British navy (when some intrepid exile freedom fighters moved their operation to the Bahamas and Kennedy notified his chum, British PM Harold Mc Millan of their intrepidness) shielded Castro from exile attacks. In the Florida Keys and Bahamas they were arresting and disarming the very exiles the CIA had been training and arming the month before.
18 months after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, two months after his deal with Khrushchev (and shortly after Bing Crosby’s party) a guilt-stricken JFK ransomed the surviving Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters back from Castro's dungeons. Living under a daily firing-squad sentence for almost two years these Cuban freedom-fighters (all volunteers and overwhelmingly civilian) –aware it would probably save their lives--had refused to sign the confession damning the “U.S. Imperialists” (the very nation, which for all they knew at the time, that had betrayed them on that beachhead.) “We will die with dignity!” responded their second-in-command Erneido Oliva to his furious KGB -trained interrogators, again and again and again.
To Castroites such an attitude not only enrages, but baffles.
On Dec. 29, 1962, these Cuban freedom fighters, many on crutches others in wheelchairs gathered with their destitute and traumatized families in Miami’s Orange Bowl to hear President Kennedy address them. “I am here today not to be honored—but to pay honor,” intoned the U.S. President. “I know of no men in modern history who showed more courage under more difficult conditions than those before me today.”
The president continued in this vein and upon completing his tribute the Cuban freedom-fighters handed him their sacred battle flag, a gesture which surprised and seemed to deeply move the U.S. president.
“I will never abandon Cuba to Communism!” declared JFK while addressing the recently ransomed Bay of Pigs freedom fighters and their families in Miami’s Orange Bowl Dec. 29, 1962. “I promise to deliver this Brigade banner to you in a free Havana!”
“That was the first time it snowed in the Orange Bowl,” later wrote CIA man named Grayston Lynch who was in attendance. Lynch helped train many of the Bay of Pigs freedom fighters and he landed on the beach with them, firing the first shots of the invasion. Then — from 1961-64 — he led several dozen commando raids into Cuba, as part of Operation Mongoose. Probably nobody had the “hands-on” experience with the actual nuts and bolts of Mongoose as Grayston Lynch. The “snow” comment appears in Lynch’s book Decision to Disaster published in 1998, after years of analyzing the entire Mongoose matter, and obviously refers to the “snow job” JFK was pulling by claiming he’d help overthrow Cuban communism.
But at Kennedy’s promise on that Dec. 29th 1962 the stadium had erupted: “CUBA LIBRE!” yelled the delirious crowd while hugging and cheering and sobbing. “CUBA-LIBRE!” yelled men (and boys) who’d snickered in the face of KGB torturers weeks earlier, but now wept openly. The hour of liberation seemed nigh, and with the full backing of “The Leader of the Free World.”
Ah, but unbeknownst to most of them, two months earlier this same Leader of the Free World had made a different pledge to Khrushchev, ensuring anything but a Cuba Libre; promising, in fact, that Havana would remain Communist, as enforced by U.S. arms.
And the following 60 years showed which pledge the U.S. honored. The pledge to the Butcher of Budapest to preserve Castroite Stalinism has proven sacrosanct--while the pledge of liberty to the men who risked their lives to warn the U.S. of the greatest threat in her history was trashed.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member