Essay: BAY OF PIGS REVISITED: Lessons from a Failure

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Perhaps the most persuasive of the invasion advocates was CIA Director Allen Dulles, who, according to Sorensen, reminded Kennedy of the success of the CIA-sponsored overthrow of a pro-Communist Guatemalan government in 1954. Said Allen Dulles to Kennedy: "I stood right here at Ike's desk and told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed. And, Mr. President, the prospects for this [Cuba] plan are even better than they were for that one." There was a strong suggestion that Kennedy could not afford to back away from a long-prepared anti-Castro project and appear to be soft on Communism—softer than the Republicans had been. If the Cuban exile brigade were disbanded, it was argued, they would fan out all over Latin America, and explain how the U.S. "had lost its nerve" in the fight against Communism. "Having created the brigade as an option," says Schlesinger, "the CIA now presented its use against Cuba as a necessity." Later, Kennedy told Schlesinger: "I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on. It's not that Dulles is not a man of great ability. He is. But I have never worked with him and therefore I can't estimate his meaning when he tells me things . . . Dulles is a legendary figure, and it's hard to operate with legendary figures." Kennedy also said: "I made a mistake in putting Bobby into the Department of Justice. He is wasted there . . . Bobby should be in CIA."

In any event, when the time came, Kennedy approved the proposed invasion. According to Schlesinger, the President strictly stipulated that "the plans be drawn on the basis of no U.S. military intervention." Sorensen recalls that stipulation with slight but highly significant differences. Kennedy, he said, insisted that there be no "direct, overt" participation of "American armed forces in Cuba."

Overt was the key word. Sorensen says that what Kennedy wanted—and was misled into thinking he would get —was a "quiet, even though large-scale, infiltration of 1,400 Cuban exiles back into their homeland"; an air strike or so would have been the "only really noisy enterprise."

In the interests of keeping things quiet, Kennedy vetoed the original plan—approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff— for the exiles to land at Trinidad, a town on the southern coast of Cuba, 178 miles southeast of Havana with, as Schlesinger says, the "advantages of a harbor, a defensible beachhead, remoteness from Castro's main army, and easy access to the protective Escambray Mountains." But Kennedy thought a Trinidad landing would be "too spectacular."