BAY OF PIGS REVISITED: Lessons from a Failure

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In their defense of Kennedy, Sorensen and Schlesinger may have inadvertently done him a disservice—by suggesting how easily he allowed himself to be misled. More important, they call into question the basic decision-making process of American government. For Schlesinger insists that Kennedy was a prisoner of events, surrounded by "a collection of officials prepared to sacrifice the world's growing faith in the new American President in order to defend interests and pursue objectives of their own." And according to Sorensen, the whole Bay of Pigs project "seemed to move mysteriously and inexorably toward execution without either the President's being able to obtain a firm grip on it or reverse it." Still, whatever weaknesses there may have been —or may remain—in government decisionmaking, there seems nothing wrong with the apparatus that firm leadership at the top cannot cure. The trouble at the time, both chroniclers argue, was the President's newness. He had been in office only twelve weeks and, writes Sorensen: "He did not fully know the strengths and weaknesses of his various advisers. He had not yet geared the decision-making process to fulfill his own needs, to isolate the points of no return."

Schlesinger and Sorensen stress the fact that early in 1960 President Eisenhower gave a go-ahead to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to train, supply and support anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala. It went without saying that those exiles would eventually strike at Cuba and try to overthrow Castro. Ike crossed no t's and dotted no i's as to the specifics of the plan. In Sorensen's words, Kennedy "inherited the plan, the planners and, most troubling of all, the Cuban exile brigade—an armed force, flying another flag, highly trained in secret Guatemalan bases, eager for one mission only."

Sorensen reports that Kennedy, "when briefed on the operation by the CIA as President-elect in Palm Beach, had been astonished at its magnitude and daring. He told me later on that he had grave doubts from that moment on." Schlesinger also reports that Kennedy was deeply dubious of the whole idea. But at one of the formal meetings that Kennedy held on the subject after he became President, he was persuaded by the plan's advocates that "the simplest thing, after all, might be to let the Cubans [meaning the exiles] go where they yearned to go—to Cuba." He also was not unmindful of what benefits a successful invasion could bring, and in early April all the hot inside talk in Washington was that "the Kennedys would knock off Castro soon."

Trying to Keep It Quiet