Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, Telling JFK How He Erred at the Bay of Pigs)

“Wasn't there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. You listen to intelligence agents and fail to interpret the style of the prose in which they submit their reports. You, with your shrewd sense of character, neglect to see that none of your boys and men can tell you the truth about Cuba because it would flagellate them too psychically to consider the existential (that is, indescribable) quality of what they report. So they turn nuances into facts, and lose other nuances, and mangle facts into falsities. It keeps you perhaps from recognizing what all the world knows, that we have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet, as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and essayist Norman Mailer (1923-2007), “An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro,” originally published in The Village Voice, Apr.27, 1961, reprinted in Collected Essays of the1960s (2018)

Sixty-five years ago this week, a CIA-backed brigade of exiles attempted to take back their country from Fidel Castro, landing at the Bay of Pigs on the southwestern coast of Cuba. Within two days, the invaders were overwhelmed by Castro’s army.

JFK’s authorization of the invasion (concocted in the waning days of White House predecessor Dwight Eisenhower) led Norman Mailer to reevaluate his prior appreciation for the young President as a candidate the year before in the Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”:

“I think it is not impossible he will become a great President, but I also think he could lead us into dictatorship. It is not only up to him, but to many of us, whether he becomes a good leader or a bad one. The question is whether he has a mind deep enough to comprehend the size of the disaster he has inherited here.”

Suffice it to say that in his short tenure in the White House, Kennedy, no matter his faults, showed no signs of leading America into a dictatorship.

But it is doubtful that Mailer—within a few years, and certainly by the end of his long life—could still labor under the illusion, as he put it in his post-invasion “Open Letter” to the caudillo, that the Cuban leader evinced “some sense that there were heroes left in the world.” 

Like other intellectuals who were part of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” he could only cling to the belief that American foreign policy had driven Castro towards Communism. (Documents released in 2022 show that, as early as July 1960, Raul Castro told Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev that his brother was "discreetly" placing Communist sympathizers in key government positions.)

Dennis Wrong’s February 1962 Commentary post-mortem on Castro’s December 1961 announcement that he was, in fact, a “Marxist-Leninist” predictably took to task Mailer, other members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the burgeoning “New Left” movement in general for naivete.

That pronouncement was not without justice, especially in the case of Mailer, who, in addition to his still somewhat starry-eyed view of Castro in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, urged him to invite Ernest Hemingway—who had just left Cuba and was in precarious physical and psychological health—to come back to the island, meet with the new leader, and write about what he saw.

But Mailer was right about one thing: JFK’s “boys and men”—i.e., the CIA—had planned a scheme with little to no chance of success, even if Kennedy had authorized more than the limited air support provided. 

The exile brigade totaled 1,500 against Castro’s regular army of 25,000; there was no real groundswell of support within the island; and the Castro regime was aware in advance that an operation would be coming.

To JFK’s astonishment, his assumption of responsibility for this fiasco only three months into his administration boosted rather than lowered his approval ratings. 

But the shadow of that operation’s failure haunted the rest of his thousand days in office—most dramatically, in the Cuban missile crisis a year later—as well as, to an only somewhat lesser degree, those of the 11 men who succeeded him in the Oval Office.

In her 1987 impressionistic portrait Miami, Joan Didion noted that embittered Cuban exiles—conspicuously missing from the chorus of approval for JFK, because of his late refusal for additional support for the landing force—had been involved in multiple foreign and domestic misadventures, including assassination plots against Castro, the Watergate burglary, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, and Iran-contra. 

In no small measure, they have also anchored GOP support as Florida migrated from being a purple to a red state at election time.

Though even Kennedy court historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acknowledged early on that the exiles had been forgotten in the crush of events, I doubt that any policymakers at the time could have imagined that Cuba would remain a Marxist regime today.

Both Cuban exiles and those still living on the island used to joke that even Castro was mortal. Yet even after his death, control of the government remained in the hands of his aging brother Raul, and now his designated successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

But how much longer that continues is very much a live question.

Late last year, as New Yorker contributor Jon Lee Anderson noted in late March,

“[T]he island had faced daily electricity blackouts owing to a lack of fuel, along with severe shortages of food, water, and medicine. Economic activity had all but stopped, and the government, which was essentially broke and unable to secure new loans, had been incapable of providing solutions. Even garbage collection was virtually nonexistent, with huge mounds of refuse piling up on street corners.”

Starting in January, encouraged by the successful extraction of the Cuban regime’s post-Soviet benefactor, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump Administration decided to exert maximum pressure on the government of Diaz-Canel, issuing an executive order that declared it a national security threat in terms not even used by Dwight Eisenhower and JFK at the height of the Cold War. The administration also authorized tariffs on goods from third countries that sell or provide oil to the island.

Even if the Trump administration succeeds in destabilizing the government of Diaz-Canel, it has operated under wishful thinking reminiscent of both Mailer’s and the JFK-era CIA, an amnesia about history that brings to mind the legendary remark about the benighted Bourbon restoration in France: “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

A change in regime will not by itself bring political freedom or economic opportunity, especially considering the lack of clearly defined goals for Trump’s military operations against Venezuela and Iran. Indeed, new leaders under American aegis may only revive for a new generation resentment towards yanqui exploitation.

In the Reagan administration, as Iran-contra came to light, Didion harked back to the post-Bay of Pigs atmosphere of the Kennedy administration, believing that again it was “time to talk about runaway agencies, arrogance in the executive branch, about constitutional crises and the nature of the presidency, about faults in the structure, flaws in the process." 

The need for that “talk” is certainly even more urgent now.

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Hollywood’s Spirit)

“The place [Hollywood] makes everyone a gambler. Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form.”—American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Joan Didion (1934-2021), “Hollywood: Having Fun,” The New York Review of Books, Mar. 22, 1973

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Character)

“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”—American essayist-novelist Joan Didion (1934-2021), Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Why She Wrote)

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to know what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”—American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Joan Didion (1934-2021), “Why I Write,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1976

The same goes for me, I think, along with the need to tell someone somewhere about it in a manner that involves expression in an orderly fashion.

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on New York as ‘An Infinitely Romantic Notion’)

“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (‘Money,’ and ‘High Fashion,’ and ‘The Hucksters’), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.”— American essayist-novelist Joan Didion, “Goodbye To All That,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

For someone like me, who has spent all but seven of the past 42 years commuting to New York daily as student or worker, it has been weird not spending a minute in the city since early March, when my former company, like many other employers, decided to have its staff work virtually. But it was positively painful, at the height of the pandemic later that spring, to see the city gripped by fear by COVID-19, with much of its once-bustling downtown closed down.

That’s why I felt even worse than I have these last several months when I heard that the city’s infection rate is rising at worrisome levels again, so much so that all public schools may have to close starting Monday, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

I remember the dingy city of my college days, a metropolis still wobbly from its close call with bankruptcy just a few years before. The pictures I see on Facebook and the things that people tell me make me fear a return to that dark time.

It’s easy to say that New York bounced back from bankruptcy and 9/11 and that it can do so again. I’m afraid it’s also dangerously complacent to think that way.

COVID-19 has harmed its business base already, and without more funds from the federal government, thousands of more companies may go under before the end of this coming winter. Worse, the ability to work remotely means that people can live just about anywhere, with not even a reasonably close geographic connection to their companies. Which means: Why stay in the Big Apple anymore?

America needs its cities, and even more New York City. As Ms. Didion (and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose lush cadences I find echoed in the passage above) recognized, New York also represents America’s optimism. When so many of its businesses close and its residents flee, that sense of national possibility may be terribly difficult to recover.

(I took the attached photograph 11 years ago in Central Park, a site that I—and, I suspect, millions of others throughout its existence—have always associated with the “infinitely romantic notion” that Ms. Didion summons.)

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Notebooks)

“But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’  We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”–Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on the Manson Murders and Evil)

“This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”—Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

When did “The Sixties” end? Dotson Rader, in an Esquire essay nearly 30 years ago, believed it came during an antiwar event at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in December 1971. Yesterday, I heard WNYC-FM deejay Jonathan Schwartz point to the year 1976. I’ve heard others say 1980—the year that Reagan was first elected President and that John Lennon was murdered.

Joan Didion’s title essay in The White Album looked within the decade proper: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969”—the day of the murders of Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, along with four friends in their home and, across town, near Griffith Park, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. The seven deaths resulted from a conspiracy hatched in the morally malignant brain of Charles Manson.

Normally on Sundays, I try to offer spiritual uplift for the week ahead—strength for the journey, if you will. But a contrary force exists in the world that the modern age—which prides itself on being tolerant but is really, increasingly, only secular (not at all the same thing)—prefers to ignore or ascribe to something else.

I’m talking here about radical evil--"sin," in Didion's bald summation--seldom exemplified more nakedly than in the case of Manson.

In an interview with Newsweek for its cover story this past week on “true crime,” Vincent Bugliosi—the prosecutor who won convictions of Manson and his accomplices, then wrote about it with Curt Gentry in the bestseller Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders—describes the factors that made the case so unique in the annals of crime and law enforcement. (I didn’t realize that it was the longest, most expensive trial in American history up to that point, nor that so many of Manson’s minions came from such comparatively privileged backgrounds).

Yet, for all his immersion in the trial and his ability to masterfully explicate one aspect of Manson’s twisted psyche (the manner in which he induced others to carry out his crimes rather than himself), I think even Bugliosi failed to identify one element of the case that tapped into an enduring human fear.

In the late summer of 1969, Manson stained the American psyche as surely as a pool of blood. Didion heard about the crimes as an early middle-aged woman living in the heart of L.A.’s film colony with her husband, novelist-screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, and their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo. She renders the tension and wave of fear among her fellow inhabitants that day with unforgettable brittleness and verisimilitude.

As a nine-year-old vacationing with my family in East Durham, an enclave for working-class Irish-American families like mine, in the Catskill Mountains, I read about the Bel Air horrors in The New York Daily News, which splashed the events and personalities from the crime scene all through its front pages. I read the tabloid during that week with the same fascination that, I suspect, Alfred Hitchcock did with the penny-dreadfuls of his childhood in Edwardian London.

For someone so small and quiet, Didion has created in her essays a persona as unforgettable as those loud males, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Much of that fascination comes from this particular piece, in which she links her own anomie to the free-floating tension of the late Sixties.

Not everyone bought this, especially the late fearless iconoclast Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who subjected Didion’s persona to devastating critical analysis in a review in her collection Off Center.

One point where Harrison gains the most traction on her subject, it seems to me, comes when Didion confesses to averting her eyes from a framed verse in the home of her mother-in-law in Connecticut. The sentiments of the house blessing were familiar to thousands of middle-class Irish-American homes of the past century: “God bless the corners of this house,/And be the lintel blest…./And bless the windowplane that lets the sunlight in,/And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.”

Though born Episcopalian, Didion appears, at least at the time of this piece, to be untouched by religious sentiment. By the turn of the millennium, in Political Fictions, she would even the insertion into politics of any faith- or moral-based claims as “perilous.” (Using similar logic, abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could be regarded as threats to the republic as Manson.)

All of this is ironic, because, as she announces in the very first sentence of “The White Album,” “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Among the most powerful sets of stories are the Old and New Testament.

Had she plumbed the first of these in particular, Didion would not have regarded, as some newfound horror loosed upon the age, the fear of strangers bred by Manson and by Paul and Tommy Scott Ferguson, the male hustlers who murdered silent-film star Ramon Novarro the prior year.

Take Genesis, for example, and especially the case of Lot. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is relevant to the Manson case in ways that few people, from what I can tell, have ever remarked upon.

Nowadays, fundamentalist preachers cite the threats made to two messengers of the Lord by homosexuals as eliciting divine retribution against the cities. Yet something basic, something now buried in the subtext of the biblical verses, like artifacts hidden under layers of Mideast sand, is far more likely to be relevant here.

Abraham and his kin were nomads. Their survival across vast, largely unpopulated deserts depended very much on, to employ the Tennessee Williams phrase, “the kindness of strangers.”

The rape threats to the messengers of the Lord in the house of Abraham’s nephew Lot broke the informal but real compact that allowed these strangers in a strange land not merely to live in harmony, but to live at all.

By the 1960s, California had become the 20th century’s version of these nomads, a vast state of transplants gathered at the edge of the continental U.S. The Tate-LaBianca massacres occurred in the entertainment heart of this land of dreams.

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” Didion wrote toward the beginning of her famous essay. Manson spread fear not just because of the free-floating anxiety that afflicted Didion during this time, nor even because of the fear that finally, going “too far” had led to a denouement more gruesome than Euripedes' The Bacchae.

No, Manson created terror by violating the ability to trust—as necessary for the survival of the species in the Sixties and afterward as it was in biblical times—that lay at the heart of the Eden known as California 40 years ago.