Essay: BAY OF PIGS REVISITED: Lessons from a Failure

LATE in 1962, White House Aide Theodore C. Sorensen relayed to President John Kennedy a request that a "distinguished author" be allowed to see the files on the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion that had ended in disaster about a year and a half before. Kennedy refused. "This isn't the time," he told Sorensen. "Besides, we want to tell that story ourselves."

Now, apparently, is the time—and two members of Kennedy's White House staff are telling the story themselves.

One is Ted Sorensen, whose account forms the first installment in Look magazine's serialization of his forthcoming book about Kennedy. The other is Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose own book is being serialized by LIFE. Their recollections will certainly not be the last; but jointly, and with remarkably few contradictions between them, they do provide the most detailed account to date. What emerges is not only the story of an appalling failure—a failure of preparation, of command and, in the end, of nerve. At a time when U.S. intervention abroad is again a major issue, the story also becomes a classic example of how not to go about the business of intervening.

A Terrible Idea

Sorensen, who was Kennedy's top staff technician both in the Senate and the White House, notes that his account is "limited by the fact that I knew nothing whatever of the operation until after it was over," although subsequently Kennedy poured his heart out to him. Schlesinger, who had left Harvard to become a presidential adviser, says that he considered the whole Bay of Pigs plan to be a "terrible idea" while it was under discussion, and had so told the President in memos and in private conversation.

Both memoirists assign to Kennedy what Sorensen calls "many and serious mistakes." Both admire Kennedy's insistence on bearing the public blame for the fiasco. Sorensen recalls how Kennedy told a news conference the obvious fact that he was "the responsible officer of government," after remarking ruefully: "Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." Yet Sorensen also remembers how, while walking in the White House garden the same day, Kennedy "told me, at times in caustic tones, of some of the other fathers of defeat who had let him down." The "fathers" were the new President's top-level advisers, particularly in the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency, most of them Eisenhower Administration holdovers. By the Sorensen-Schlesinger account, these advisers misadvised, misled and misinformed Kennedy. They are even charged with having overawed him. Schlesinger speaks of the "massed and caparisoned authority of his senior officials" and quotes Kennedy as saying after the event: "You always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals."