Essay: BAY OF PIGS REVISITED: Lessons from a Failure

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The CIA planners therefore proposed other possible landing sites, and the Bay of Pigs was chosen. Sorensen reports that the Joint Chiefs failed to inform "either Kennedy or McNamara that they still thought Trinidad preferable," while Schlesinger recalls that the Chiefs said they still preferred Trinidad—but said it "softly." At one point Dean Rusk suggested that the operation be launched from Guantanamo, thereby providing the invaders with an opportunity for retreat; but the Joint Chiefs rejected that idea, and Rusk later complained to Schlesinger that "the Pentagon people" were willing to risk "the President's head" but not the U.S. base.

Again, by the accounts of both Sorensen and Schlesinger, Kennedy was done in by his advisers. He was assured that the invasion might well set off an anti-Castro uprising in Cuba—which constituted a bad misreading of the political situation. Moreover, he had been told all along that if the invasion as such failed, the anti-Castro forces could melt into the mountains and fight as guerrillas. According to Sorensen, the trouble was that Kennedy, who could not have looked at a map very carefully, did not realize that from the Bay of Pigs, "the 80-mile route to the Escambray Mountains, to which he had been assured they could escape, was so long, so swampy and so covered by Castro's troops, that this was never a realistic alternative."

Everyone was agreed upon one thing: the invasion would have no chance of success unless Castro's own little air force was knocked out beforehand. Kennedy gave permission for Cuban-piloted B-26s, flown out of Nicaragua nearly 600 miles from Cuba, to strike at Castro's airstrips on April 15, two days before the actual invasion. An elaborate "cover" story—to the effect that the planes were actually flown by defectors from Castro's own air force—was devised. As Sorensen says, the B-26s were "World War II vintage planes possessed by so many nations, including Cuba, that American sponsorship would be difficult to prove."

That first B-26 flight attacked on schedule, with indifferent results. Still according to the plan, a second B-26 bombing strike against Castro's airfields had been laid on for D-morning itself. But the "defector" cover for the first raid, as Sorensen puts it, "was quickly torn apart—which the President realized he should have known was inevitable in an open society." It was at about that point that the realization finally dawned on Kennedy: he had approved a plan on the supposition that it would be "both clandestine and successful" but which was, in fact, "too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful."

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