What's a prez to do? Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs

John Kennedy began to think he had underestimated his predecessor. In his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon, Kennedy and his team had criticized Dwight Eisenhower—and Vice President Nixon by association—for the lack of imagination and energy that stereotypically comes with advancing age. In his inaugural address, Kennedy made a point of identifying with a new generation, born in the 20th century and attuned to modern challenges that had to be dealt with in fresh ways.

Yet within weeks Kennedy came to realize how thoroughly Eisenhower had boxed him in. Cuba was the issue on which the constraints were most conspicuous. Eisenhower had failed to keep Fidel Castro from coming to power. The embargo Eisenhower had ordered on Cuba had failed to prevent Castro from aligning with the Soviet Union. Covert operations Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to conduct against Cuba had failed to dislodge Castro.

The biggest of the covert operations was yet to come. That is, if Kennedy gave the order to go ahead. He wasn't sure he should. Yet Ike had so stacked the deck that Kennedy wasn't sure he couldn't. 

For months the CIA had been organizing an army of Cuban exiles. Trained and paid by the United States, they had been led to believe the United States was committed to the liberation of their homeland from Castro and communism. If Kennedy pulled the plug on the operation, they would be quick to tell the world that the new Democratic president lacked the cojones of his Republican predecessor. And if by some chance they didn't spill the word, Kennedy had to assume that Allen Dulles, the CIA chief he had inherited from Eisenhower, would do so. Either way, Kennedy would walk into the trap of appearing soft on communism.

Moreover, Kennedy realized that Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was watching carefully. Berlin, Moscow's pressure point against the West in Germany, was again under duress. Khrushchev would love nothing more than to squeeze the United States out of West Berlin. If Kennedy looked weak on Cuba, in America's backyard, Khrushchev could reasonably conclude he would be no firmer on Berlin.

The trouble was that the CIA's Cuba operation was full of holes. Already word of the planned invasion was leaking. Kennedy had to assume Castro had spies within the exile army. Then there was the question of whether the exiles could fight. The soldiers Castro would throw against them had been tested by years of revolution. Did the CIA's ragtag group stand a chance?

Sketchiest of all was the assumption that the Cuban people were eager to rise up against Castro, requiring only the inspiration of the America-funded landing force. Kennedy had no way of knowing if this was true. The CIA, his intelligence eyes and ears, told him it was, but of course that's what it would say. Under Allen Dulles the agency had toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala. Cuba would make it a trifecta. Kennedy couldn't prove Dulles wrong, but he certainly wasn't sure Dulles was right.

Despite his doubts, Kennedy gave the go-ahead. He refused to run the risk of being tagged as weak, only three months into his presidency. And who knew?—maybe the operation would succeed.

It didn't. It failed miserably. When the exile army landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southern coast, Castro's troops were waiting for them. The planners of the invasion had hoped that in such an eventuality, Kennedy would authorize airstrikes against the Cuban defenders. Kennedy suspected that he had been suckered—that Dulles oversold the chances of initial success judging that the president would have no choice but to escalate.

Kennedy angrily refused. By this time the American cover had been blown. The United States was caught conducting a military operation against a country with which it was not at war. Kennedy decided to cut his losses.

The Bay of Pigs operation made a hero of Castro and a fool of Kennedy. The president appeared not merely dishonest but ineffectual. The United States was not the hemispheric good neighbor administrations reaching back to Franklin Roosevelt’s had proclaimed it to be. Nor, to judge by its inability to topple the government of a poor country on its very doorstep, was it much of a superpower.

The lesson Khrushchev learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle was that Kennedy was neither decisive nor strong. The lesson Kennedy took was that in the next crisis he had better be both decisive and strong. 

That next crisis, over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, nearly caused World War III.