Bfgrn
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- Apr 4, 2009
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Like it or not Cuba was a sovereign country then as it is now. It isn't surprising that the CIA offered the JFK administration "plausible deniability" for the disaster at the Bay of Pigs but the point is that JFK and his strange brother crafted the plan and authorized the CIA to raise, equip, feed and train an illegal invasion force. What were they thinking? Whatever they were thinking it was an impeachable offense.
Either you have a reading problem or a comprehension problem. Which one is it?
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Washington's national-security apparatus had decided there was no living with Castro. During the final months of the Eisenhower Administration, the CIA started planning an invasion of the island, recruiting Cuban exiles who had fled the new regime. Agency officials assured the young President who inherited the invasion plan that it was a "slam dunk," in the words of a future CIA director contemplating another ill-fated U.S. invasion. J.F.K. had deep misgivings, but unwilling to overrule his senior intelligence officials so early in his Administration, he went fatefully ahead with the plan. The doomed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the Kennedy Administration's first great trauma.
We now knowfrom the CIA's internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was declassified in 2005that agency officials realized their motley crew of invaders had no chance of victory unless they were reinforced by the U.S. military. But Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the top CIA officials, never disclosed this to J.F.K. They clearly thought the young President would cave in the heat of battle, that he would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force to rescue the beleaguered exiles brigade after it was pinned down on the beaches by Castro's forces. But Kennedywho was concerned about aggravating the U.S. image in Latin America as a Yanqui bully and also feared a Soviet countermove against West Berlinhad warned agency officials that he would not fully intervene. As the invasion quickly bogged down at the swampy landing site, J.F.K. stunned Dulles and Bissell by standing his ground and refusing to escalate the assault.
Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME
Are the JFK defenders claiming that the "washington-national security apparatus" was independent of the JFK administration? Was the president ignorant of the fact that the rag-tag invasion army he authorized was incapable of doing the job that he authorized the CIA to perform? The fact that JFK left the Cuban invasion force to die on the Bay of Pigs beach is no defense for the incompetence that created the problem.
Reading aversion whitehall? Do I have to copy and paste the whole article??
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This would become the major theme of the Kennedy presidencyJ.F.K.'s strenuous efforts to keep the country at peace in the face of equally ardent pressures from Washington's warrior caste to go to war. Caught between the communist challenges in Laos, Berlin, Vietnam and Latin America and the bellicosity of his national-security élite, Kennedy again and again found a way to sidestep war. In each crisis, he improvised a strategycombining rhetoric that was alternately tough and conciliatory with aggressive backdoor diplomacythat found the way to a peaceful resolution.
Kennedy never again trusted his generals and espionage chiefs after the 1961 fiasco in Cuba, and he became a master at artfully deflecting their militant counsel. "After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had contempt for the Joint Chiefs," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled over drinks in the hushed, stately rooms of New York City's Century Club not long before his death. "I remember going into his office in the spring of 1961, where he waved some cables at me from General Lemnitzer, who was then in Laos on an inspection tour. And Kennedy said, 'If it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, I might have been impressed by this.' I think J.F.K.'s war-hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men. He thought Lemnitzer was a dope."
President Kennedy never thought much of the CIA either, in part because he and his indispensable brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, became convinced that the agency was not just incompetent but also a rogue operation. After the Bay of Pigsand particularly the Cuban missile crisisthe Kennedys seemed more concerned with defusing Cuba as a political issue at home, where it was a rallying cry on the right, than with actually enforcing a regime change. The darker efforts against Castrothe sinister CIA plots to assassinate him in partnership with the Mafiabegan before the Kennedy Administration and continued after it ended. Robert Kennedya legendary crusader against organized crimethought he had shut down the murder plots after two CIA officials sheepishly informed him of the agency's pact with the Mob in May 1962. But there was much that the Kennedys did not know about the agency's more shadowy operations.
"I thought and I still feel that the CIA did wet work on its own," says John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy's administrative aide at the Justice Department and later publisher of the Tennessean. "They were way too in thrall to 007... We were caught in the reality of the cold war, and the agency obviously had a role to play. But I don't think the Kennedys believed you could trust much of what they said. We were trying to find our way out of the cold war, but the CIA certainly didn't want to."
Nor did President Kennedy have a firm hand on the Pentagon. "Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff," said Schlesinger, looking back at the Kennedy White House. It was a chilling observation, considering the throbbing nuclear tensions of the period. The former White House aide revealed that J.F.K. was less afraid of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's ordering a surprise attack than he was "that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way"with a politically unstable U.S. general snapping and launching World War III.
Kennedy was particularly alarmed by his trigger-happy Air Force chief, cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, who firmly believed the U.S. should unleash a pre-emptive nuclear broadside against Russia while America still enjoyed massive arms superiority. Throughout the 13-day Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was under relentless pressure from LeMay and nearly his entire national-security circle to "fry" Cuba, in the Air Force chief's memorable language. But J.F.K., whose only key support in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, kept searching for a nonmilitary solution. When Kennedy, assiduously working the back channels to the Kremlin, finally succeeded in cutting a deal with Khrushchev, the world survived "the most dangerous moment in human history," in Schlesinger's words. But no one at the time knew just how dangerous. Years later, attending the 40th anniversary of the crisis at a conference in Havana, Schlesinger, Sorensen and McNamara were stunned to learn that if U.S. forces had attacked Cuba, Russian commanders on the island were authorized to respond with tactical and strategic nuclear missiles. The Joint Chiefs had assured Kennedy during the crisis that "no nuclear warheads were in Cuba at the time," Sorensen grimly noted. "They were wrong." If Kennedy had bowed to his military advisers' pressure, a vast swath of the urban U.S. within missile range of the Soviet installations in Cuba could have been reduced to radioactive rubble.
Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie deliberate, contrived and dishonest but the myth persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
President John F. Kennedy Commencement Address at Yale University, Old Campus, New Haven, Connecticut, June 11, 1962