Contents

Duty, Honor, Country
by General Douglas MacArthur

Chile: From Allende to Bachelet
by Lloyd Billingsley

The Bullet's Song
by Leon Hadar

Fidel Castro
by Jack Skelly

Duty, Honor, Country
by General Douglas MacArthur: Thayer Award Acceptance Address, West Point, New York, May 12, 1962

General Westmoreland, General Grove, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps!

As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, “Where are you bound for, General?” And when I replied, “West Point,” he remarked, “Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?”

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long, and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code—the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always: Duty, Honor, Country.

Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean. The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory? Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then as I regard him now — as one of the world’s noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give.

He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast. But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. From one end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage.

As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory’s eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs, on many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.

I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death.

They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.

Always, for them: Duty, Honor, Country; always their blood and sweat and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth.

And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts; those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms; the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails; the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished; the deadly pestilence of tropical disease; the horror of stricken areas of war; their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory—always victory. Always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men reverently following your password of: Duty, Honor, Country.

The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.

The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.

In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him.

However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.

You now face a new world—a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles mark the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier.

We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.

And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars.

Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment. But you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.

Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men’s minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation’s war-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.

Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.

You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation’s destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

This does not mean that you are war mongers.

On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.

Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.

I bid you farewell.

Chile: From Allende to Bachelet
by Lloyd Billingsley

The socialist Michelle Bachelet has been elected president of Chile and is being hailed not only as that nation’s first female leader but as a victim of Augusto Pinochet, whose 1973 military coup toppled Salvador Allende. In left-wing legend, Allende was an independent Marxist and patriot, also a martyr done in by Nixon and the CIA. That legend will now have to be scrapped, thanks to an important work that has drawn little attention.

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (Basic Books) is the recently published second volume of revelations from the archive that Soviet intelligence officer Vasili Mitrokin smuggled to the West in 1992. The volume does not mention Michelle Bachelet, who doubtless has a KGB file from her time in East Germany—a rather strange place for an alleged independent democrat to take refuge—but there is plenty about Salvador Allende. His KGB code name was LEADER, and the Soviets considered him their most important asset after Fidel Castro.

Allende first attracted KGB attention during the Stalin era of the early 1950s, when, as leader of Chilean Socialist Party, he formed an alliance with the banned Communist Party of Chile, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the USSR. For their part, the Chilean Communists regarded Allende as a “demagogue” and a “weak and inconsistent politician” with Maoist sympathies. Allende had visited China and ranked Mao Tse-tung on a level with Marx, Engels, and Lenin. But that deviation proved no obstacle.

The KGB’s systematic contact with Allende began in 1961 after the Soviets established a trade mission in Chile that served as a cover for covert operations. According to the files, Allende stated his willingness to cooperate on a confidential basis and provide any necessary assistance, since he was a friend of the USSR. Allende willingly shared sensitive political information with KGB handlers such as Svyatoslav Kuznetsov.

He [Kuznetsov] was sent from Mexico to Chile to maintain contact and coordinate covert operations to ensure Allende’s success. Allende asked for Soviet funds and got them. At that time, the Soviets spent more in Chile than any country in Latin America, including a personal subsidy of $50,000 directly to Allende, the LEADER who combined Marxist dogma with aristocratic tastes and an eye for the ladies.

KGB handler Kuznetsov arranged meetings with Allende through Maria Contreras Bell, his personal secretary, code name MARTA and Allende’s favorite mistress. The KGB also maintained close relationships with Allende’s wife Hortensia and daughter Beatriz, both in Chile and during their stays in USSR. There were other channels of access, including the many Cubans in Allende’s personal guard.

The KGB also paid off other Chilean politicians not to run against Allende, who in 1970 headed the Unidad Popular (UP) a coalition of Communist, Socialist, and various radical parties. The forces against Allende were divided and he won with a paltry 36.3 percent of the vote.

After the election, according to LEADER’s KGB file, the Soviets told Allende he needed to reorganize Chile’s army and intelligence services, and set up a relationship between the intelligence services of the two countries. Allende agreed, something no independent could do. The KGB files reveal nothing about CIA involvement with the Pinochet coup, during which Allende likely killed himself, but the KGB promoted him as a martyr who had been murdered by the Chilean military, which captured Chilean Communist boss Luis Corvalan. The KGB abandoned an elaborate plan to spring Corvalan from a remote prison and eventually swapped him for dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.

As part of operation TOUCAN, the KGB also forged a letter tying the CIA to an assassination campaign by Chile’s DINA. The World Was Going Our Way includes the entire letter, for which many fell, including columnist Jack Anderson. The volume also notes that, in 1976, the New York Times published 66 articles on human rights abuses in Chile and only four on Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 million out of that nation’s 7.5 million people. The authors find no adequate explanation for this “extraordinary discrepancy,” but there is one.

KGB disinformation specialists did their job well and found many on the American Left disposed to believe them. The Allende legend will have to be revised. He was not an independent leader, Chilean patriot, and committed democrat. He was a long-term tool of the KGB and Soviet Union, but one should not look for second thoughts from the American radicals who hailed him. Their ideological outrigger has no rear-view mirror, and they have long since rowed it to new fronts, through which the United States can be denounced.

Unlike Fidel Castro, still in power after all these years, Pinochet stepped aside and allowed democratic elections. The ensuing Chilean governments have been cordial toward the United States. The current coalition is friendly to markets, entered a free-trade pact with the United States, and has seen growth rates of six percent. Whether that will continue remains to be seen.

Hernando de Soto’s “other path” of free markets is out of favor in Latin America, where the trend is leftward and anti-American. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez appears to be constantly channeling his inner Castro and Mussolini. The leftist Evo Morales has been elected in Bolivia, and left-leaning governments prevail in Brazil and Argentina. There is no longer a Soviet Union to intervene, but as history shows, Latin American leaders are perfectly capable of wrecking their own economies and confusing their friends with their enemies. 

New Chilean president Michelle Bachelet is a socialist, an agnostic, and a divorcee. When asked whether she would marry again, she complained that a man would not be asked that sort of question. Reporters might ask her about East Germany, not only a much more repressive dictatorship than Chile under Pinochet (and that shot those who attempted to flee), but also an economic basket case. Or they could ask her about the recently revealed ties between the LEADER and the KGB. Her reaction will tell the tale. 

If Michelle Bachelet retains affection for command-and-control economics, she will invoke the memory of Allende and align with the Chavez bloc. If she is the true independent Allende was not, she will follow another, pro-American path. 

—FrontPageMagazine.com, January 24, 2006

The Bullet’s Song
by Leon Hadar

When we recall the very violent 20th century that spanned from the start of the Great War to the end of the Cold War—the short 20th century, as British historian Erica Hobsbawm dubbed it—the names that come to mind are those of the leading monsters who masterminded the mass murders of that era (Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tsetung) and the buffoons (Hermann Goring, Nikita Khrushchev), serial killers (Heinrich Himmler), and rapists (Lavrenty Beria) who played supporting roles. We sit through this long horror movie, which opens with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and ends with the scene of the collapsing Berlin Wall in 1989, and we feel a sense of revulsion and disbelief watching the sickening images of Kristallnacht, Babi Yar, Auschwitz, the Russian Gulag and the liquidation of the Kulaks, China’s Great Leap Forward to Starvation and Cultural Revolution, Dresden and Hiroshima. Is it possible that a homeless and failed artist from Vienna, a paranoid gangster from Georgia, and a pedophile and drug addict from Beijing led to the ruin of millions and millions of lives?

Well, they certainly did. There is no doubt that if Hollywood gave a prize for the best movie with the theme of mass murder, the three dictators would win, trouncing such deserving nominees as Il Duce, Generalissimo Franco and Marshall Tito, Fidel and Pinochet. But if you watched the entire awards ceremony, you would know that before the trophy was given for the best picture, there would be all those prizes for best direction, best script, and best soundtrack conferred to all those who generate the many elements that together constitute the soul of a film. By applying his organizational skills and leadership, the director makes the movie happen. But it is the screenwriters, the musicians, and the artists who dream the intricate plot, fantasize about the various scenes, visualize the color schemes, and hear the music playing in their heads. Through their minds and imagination, they inspire and create the movie.

In a way, The Bullet’s Song [:Romantic Violence and Utopia, William Pfaff, Simon and Schuster] is dedicated to the creative and sick minds that helped write the script and compose the soundtrack for the man-made death and destruction of the 20th century. From their imaginations sprang the delusions of utopia and the ideology of transcendent violence without which Nazism, fascism, and communism could not have succeeded in stirring up so many people to commit so much mass murder for such a long time. The achievement of the revolutionary artists, writers, and intellectual warriors was remarkable in its effectiveness in helping the big and little dictators mobilize popular support for war and revolution at home and abroad. These intellectual confidence men turned out to be the prime public relations operatives of the last century. After all, they created the conditions for the favorable reception accorded the likes of Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and other bloodthirsty madmen by the glitterati of the day in New York, London, and Paris and by the “useful idiots” in the great intellectual centers of the West.

One of our violent age’s leading propaganda geniuses was Willi Münzenberg, a founder of the Comintern, who invented that masterful disinformation device known as the political front organization. He seduced a generation of innocents to support the Soviets, including fellow travelers in the West, but ended his life as a dissident who was strangled by Soviet agents in a French forest. It’s not surprising that Münzenberg is one of the leading intellectual soldiers and revolutionaries that Pfaff implicates in the 20th century’s physical and moral violence. He was a masterful intellectual con artist who served as the role model for communist and fascist propagandists everywhere, as well as for their liberal counterparts in the West, starting with one of Willi’s earliest collaborators, Arthur Koestler, who after years of serving the communist cause became author of the influential novel Darkness at Noon. Koestler ended up out-Münzenberging Münzenberg when he helped launch a successful anticommunist front group, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).

Connecting the dots among a dozen or so emblematic lives like those of Münzenberg and Koestler, Pfaff describes the uprisings they led, the political styles they invented, the propaganda they created, and the intellectual and aesthetic influences they wielded in the 20th century. He also tries to discover their Rosebud, that is, the yearning after transcendence that motivated Münzenberg, Koestler, and the other central characters who “in their lives and public experience provided individual accompaniment to the political history of the century.” They include the British archeologist and spy T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”); the Italian poet and nationalist buccaneer Gabriele D’Annunzio; the world-renowned French novelist and “Byron” of the 1930s, Andre Malraux; and German novelist and nationalist Ernst Junger. Other intellectuals, storm troopers, assassins, and terrorists such as Filippo Marinetti, a leading Italian Futurist intellectual; French writer Jean-Paul Sartre; and Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara appear in cameo roles in his story.

Pfaff is a child of the 20th century, who not unlike Malraux became, as he puts it, “an ‘engaged’ intellectual in the painful foreign policy controversies of the 1950s (and since).” In fact, at one time he was affiliated with some of the anticommunist groups modeled after Münzenberg’s front organizations that were financed by the U.S. government and American foundations, including as an executive of the Free Europe Committee (the parent organization of Radio Free Europe) and as the deputy director of the European affiliate of the Hudson Institute, a think tank that worked closely with the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies during the Cold War. Indeed, it seems that at one stage in his life Pfaff was a Koestler wannabe and had the makings of a leading counterrevolutionary intellectual warrior who could still have been crusading for global democracy into the early 21st century.

As an eager child watching such sagas of Hollywood imperialism as Gunga Din, Pfaff dreamt of joining his hero Lawrence of Arabia in exporting Western ideas to the exotic Near East. Lawrence, the “Uncrowned King of Arabia,” was perhaps the prototypical romantic figure of the early 20th century and had significant influence on moral sensibility. Pfaff was ripped by the personality of the man and his intensely romantic character, as were the other intellectual warriors of that era, including Malraux, who tried to emulate Lawrence as a make-believe leader of the Chinese revolution.

Malraux was also an admirer of D’Annunzio and served as a Münzenberg agent in the Spanish Civil War. And D’Annunzio was worshipped by the Futurists and inspired Mussolini. Junger, like Lawrence, entered World War I with the chivalric and romantic assumptions of the Edwardian period, becoming like D’Annunzio an avid nationalist and enemy of the post-World War I order and an ideological ally of Hitler. But like Munzenberg, he turned against the monster he helped to create and eventually conspired to overthrow him. Malraux also ended as an enemy of the French Communists and fellow travelers he once admired, like Koestler and the first generation of neoconservative intellectuals affiliated with the CCF (Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky). Malraux was transformed into an intellectual warrior in the service of the counterrevolutionary forces of the West.

Now the torch has been passed from one Kristol to another, to a new generation of writers, scholars, and pundits serving the warfare state in contemporary front organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the American Enterprise Institute, and the “new” Hudson Institute, whose success in cheating Americans into the quagmire in Mesopotamia would make even Münzenberg and Koestler proud. Pfaff resides in what seems to be self-imposed exile in Paris, where he continues to write provocative neocon-bashing columns for the International Herald Tribune. He is a recovering warrior intellectual whose aversion to the neocons reflects the sad recognition that he will never be able to recover his own Rosebud, that intense yearning for the security, hope, and innocence of childhood that encourages men and women to dream of utopia and to recreate themselves as heroic warriors. The history of the 20th century taught him something about “the ability of secular utopian thought to inspire a lethal dogmatic idealism served by increased cruelty.” Growing up, you learn that the answers to life cannot be invented and imposed on reality like a fine work of art. You become an adult and, like Pfaff, you can enjoy your peaceful retirement in Paris.

Reading Pfaff is like drinking good French wine. You have to be in the right mood and sip it unhurriedly so as to appreciate the aroma and flavor. In addition to the colorful portraits of his protagonists, there are bits and pieces of philosophy, theology, military history, dirty gossip, and poetry, not to mention the moving personal accounts. Even the long footnotes are worth reading. And the “liberal” Pfaff, like another one of my favorite writers, the “conservative” historian John Lukacs, cannot be pigeonholed with simplistic ideological labels. Indeed, The Bullet’s Song, which laments the death of a code of national and personal chivalry, could have been written by Lukacs himself. Pfaff argues that one of the key elements in the development of the violent utopian movement was the loss of the chivalric moral code that had limited what individuals or societies could do to one another.

The mechanized savagery of the First World War put an end to chivalry in the West, replacing it with a nihilism that people subsequently reacted to through individual transcendence and collective will, on one hand, and a longing for social utopias based on historical fiction on the other. The ends therefore justify the means; in fact, they provide a sense of legitimacy to the most degrading personal behavior. Why torment our consciousness with despair over the horrors of Abu Ghraib when we should keep our eyes on the big prize, a democratic and free Iraq that could serve as a model to the entire Middle East?

Indeed, it seems that the late century’s commitment to the redemptive power of violence has reappeared in the early 21st century as many Americans have embraced the utopian vision of exporting democracy and free markets into Iraq and the entire Middle East through the barrel of the gun. Today we have Fox News to provide a platform for the intellectual successors of Italy’s Futurists who, as Pfaff recalls in his book, demanded the “reconstruction of the universe” through the redeeming power of violence and war.

But while the bullet’s song is being delivered today with great effect by the intellectual warriors at AEI and the Weekly Standard, we should recall that their predecessors at least had the guts to fight and even die in the revolutions they promoted. They were interesting characters—some of them had written great literature and were great lovers. You may be repulsed by their behavior, but you will enjoy reading about it, which is something that no one would say about our own chickenhawks. They aren’t very romantic.

—The American Conservative, February 28, 2005, p. 33

Fidel Castro
by Jack Skelly

Today the “Maximum Leader” of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, begins his 47th year in power. Beginning with President Eisenhower, Mr. Castro has outlasted 10 U.S. presidents.

Cuba is only 90 miles from Florida. Since the Cold War ended, Mr. Castro has been the most outspoken enemy of the United States (the only remaining superpower). It seems hardly a day passes that he doesn’t insult the president of the United States — while always taking care to emphasize his love of the American people. An obvious question: How is it that 47 years later this brutal tyrant is still around to continue his mischief? This leads to another question: Who lost Cuba?

From the very beginning, Mr. Castro offered the United States many opportunities to get rid of him, but not one of the 10 presidents he has survived found the magic formula.

Most exile political leaders I have interviewed agree the Cuban people in 1959 and early 1960 were enthusiastic for Mr. Castro and his Revolution. Mr. Castro’s movement, the 26 of July, was based on democratic principles, aimed at restoring the 1940 Constitution set aside when former President Fulgencio Batista overthrew the freely elected regime of President Carlos Prio Socarras on March 10,1952. Thus the Cuban people are partly responsible for Mr. Castro consolidating power in 1959-1960.

However, the Soviet Union entered the picture in early 1960, sending weapons and “technical advisers” to Cuba. Once the Soviet Union showed up, it was a new ballgame. It was up to Cuba’s big brother, and longtime friend and neighbor, the United States to protect the Cuban people from communism.

President Eisenhower watched Soviet ships unload the weapons. The CIA knew that from early 1959 Mr. Castro had set up centers all over the island to train Latin American and Palestinian terrorists to return to their countries to overthrow democratically elected governments, like Venezuela.

In January to August 1959, Castro’s forces invaded the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama. All these expeditions were captured. Mr. Castro’s actions were clear violations of at least four articles of the Organization of American States’ Charter, including the 1947 Rio de Janeiro Reciprocal Assistance Treaty.

Eisenhower could have invoked the Monroe Doctrine when the Soviet Union entered the picture. All he had to do was convoke the OAS foreign ministers and present evidence of Cuba’s interference in the internal affairs of OAS countries. All the treaties allowed “use of arms.” Instead, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to get rid of the Castro regime.

Mr. Castro has admitted he took (stole) $1 billion of American-owned properties in 1960. According to U.S. Commerce Department figures, there were 252 U.S. companies and subsidiaries in Cuba on Jan. 1,1959. What did President Eisenhower do about the stolen American properties? Nada. What would Teddy Roosevelt, or Harry Truman have done? Cuba was lost on President Eisenhower’s watch.

I have often been asked: Why don’t the Cuban people rise against Mr. Castro? I reply: You can’t fight Soviet machine guns with homemade slingshots.

President Kennedy could have rescued Cuba and spared Cubans 46 years of communist hell. But he failed them at the Bay of Pigs and 18 months later in the October 1962 Missile Crisis.

At the Bay of Pigs, Cuban freedom fighters of the 2506 Brigade were defeated by Castro forces only when, after three days of courageous fighting, the Brigade ran out of ammunition. One of Mr. Castro’s jet trainers sank an invasion ship carrying ammunition and rifles and machine guns to arm the 1,400 Brigade soldiers for 30 days, plus arms for 10,000 who were expected to join the invaders.

Kennedy signed off on a plan that allowed qualified U.S.- trained Cuban exile pilots to bomb Fidel Castro’s meager air force (16 planes) at three major airports, three days before the invasion, April 17. Marine Col. Jack Hawkins, special adviser to Kennedy for the invasion, warned in writing that unless Mr. Castro’s air force was eliminated, the invasion should be called off.

Without informing the chiefs of staff, Kennedy called off the second and third bombings, leaving half of Castro’s air force free to pick off the invasion ships and the brigade on shore. According to Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, US. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson complained to the president he was not informed of the first bombing and could no longer defend Kennedy’s position. (After the first bombing, Mr. Castro’s U.N. ambassador called for an emergency meeting and denounced the invasion).

According to Mr. Sorensen, Kennedy called Stevenson a “national treasure” and said “we cannot afford to lose him” (but it was all right to abandon without ammunition 1,400 U.S.- trained and -equipped freedom fighters to the mercy of the Soviet-equipped Cuban militia).

In their books following President Kennedy’s assassination, his aides Mr. Sorensen, Pierre Salinger and Arthur Schlessinger Jr. deliberately omitted the three bombings Kennedy approved by arguing he never promised the exiles U.S. air support and the exiles knew there would be no U.S. air support.

But the competent, experienced Cuban exile pilots knew they could eliminate Mr. Castro’s air force. Sorensen and company don’t mention their boss called off the vital bombings.

(Anyone who wants to know the truth about the Bay of Pigs disaster should read Decision for Disaster— Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs by Grayston L. Lynch, CIA case officer on the Brigade command ship, who led the first combat team ashore and broke silence after 35 years because he wanted to set the record straight. In a review, Seymour M. Hersh wrote: “This is not a book for those who love Camelot”)

Eighteen months later during the October 1962 Missile Crisis, when the Soviets were caught preparing to activate missiles they secretly introduced into Cuba, the United States should have acted like a superpower. The chiefs of staff and important senators like William Fulbright of Arkansas and George Smathers of Florida recommended a surgical strike to knock out the missiles, followed by an invasion.

Instead, Kennedy listened to brother Bobby who said bombing the Soviet missiles would be equivalent to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “My brother is no ‘Tojo’” Bobby said.

President Kennedy made a secret agreement with the Soviets whereby the Soviets promised to remove the missiles and the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba, thus condemning 8 million (12 million today) Cubans to 46 years of communist oppression. This was considered an enormous victory by the Camelot lovers. But was it?

At the time of the missile crisis, the United States had an overwhelming advantage over the Soviets in intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Atlas in Wyoming could hit any block in Moscow. More than 200 B-52’s with atomic bombs were continually in the air headed straight for the Soviet Union, turning around and coming back. Are we to believe Soviet generals and admirals would risk their country’s total destruction to save a bearded maniac called Fidel Castro from a justified U.S. invasion?

Probably Mr. Castro’s “cruelest cut of all” was, starting in 1962, pushing tons of drugs into the United States. He is still doing this, according to recent defectors from his regime.

How many thousands of American youth are basket cases because of Mr. Castro’s drugs? About three years ago, Bobby Kennedy’s oldest son David was reported dead from a drug overdose in a West Palm Beach Hotel. Could they have been Mr. Castro’s drugs? History has its own form of revenge.

Mr. Castro’s pushing drugs into the United States was reason enough for any of 10 presidents of the world’s only superpower to wipe out the Castro-communist regime that has made an art form of torturing political prisoners.

(Jack Skelly retired to South Florida in 1991 after 40 years in Washington. He worked 30 years in journalism, (on Latin American and Hispanic-American affairs) and 10 years in public relations and lobbying. He lived in Cuba 30 years.)

—The Washington Times, January 1, 2006, p. B4