Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 10, Cuba: 1961-1962.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.
• Position: Review

U.S. Department of State, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 1120 pages, $57.

Within weeks of coming to power in January 1961, the administration of John F. Kennedy had "changed the face of American foreign policy." Such at least was the view of presidential special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Indeed, according to Schlesinger, the hallmarks of the new administration - "the soberness of style, the absence of Cold War cliches, the lack of self-righteousness and sermonizing, the impressive combination of reasonableness and firmness, the generosity to new ideas, the dedication to social progress, the tough-minded idealism of purpose" - had transformed America's image abroad. Having awakened from the long national nightmare of the Eisenhower era, the United States was "emerging again as a great, mature, and liberal nation."(1)

Schlesinger drafted this smarmy memo to his boss on April 10, 1961. Precisely one week later, in an effort conceived, organized, and directed by the United States, some 1,500 Cuban exiles, heavily armed if indifferently trained and led, splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs. The initial aim of this operation was to secure a lodgment on Cuba's southern coast. But the U.S. officials who had devised Operation Bumpy Road had persuaded themselves that a successful landing would detonate a popular uprising leading to the overthrow of Fidel Castro's communist regime.

The operation collapsed almost as quickly as it began. Within hours, the exile force was fighting for its life. Unwilling to order nearby U.S. naval forces into the fray - and thereby abandon the pretense that the invasion was a Cuban enterprise - Kennedy instead cut his losses. Two days after it had begun, Bumpy Road reached an abrupt dead-end. All but twenty-six of the invaders were killed, wounded, missing, or captured, a casualty rate of some 98 percent. Despite continuing official insistence that the United States was uninvolved, American fingerprints were all over the operation. The embarrassing defeat left the new administration looking neither great nor mature nor liberal.

Early chroniclers of Camelot insisted that this debacle was not without redeeming features. According to Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy himself "would be grateful that he had learned so many major lessons" as a result of the Bay of Pigs, and "at so relatively small and temporary a cost."(2) In this view, humiliation provided JFK with a crash course in statesmanship. Thus, Professor Schlesinger would assert that "no one can doubt that failure in Cuba in 1961 contributed to success in Cuba in 1962."(3) In short, the Bay of Pigs steeled Kennedy for the supreme crisis when he would save mankind from Armageddon.

If less preoccupied with burnishing the reputation of the martyred President, more recent accounts have tacitly endorsed this evaluation. The plaintive question that Kennedy himself posed in the immediate aftermath of failure - "How could I have been so stupid?"(4) - has defined the research agenda. Writers intent on documenting American stupidity have unearthed an abundance of evidence: a half-baked operational plan based on preposterously optimistic assumptions and faulty intelligence; a decision-making process within the executive branch that was sloppy and amateurish; incompetence, gross negligence, and dishonesty in the national security bureaucracy; and eleventh-hour presidential meddling in tactical details that transformed a long-shot into a sure loser. This focus on operational miscalculation has left intact the inclination to view the Bay of Pigs simultaneously as an anomaly (not a true reflection of American statecraft in the Kennedy era) and as an essential precursor (the President emerging stronger and wiser) to the heroics that would follow.

The great virtue of this recent addition to the Foreign Relations series is that it places the Bay of Pigs in an altogether different context. The materials reprinted in this collection span the period from January 1961, when the outgoing Eisenhower administration severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, until September 1962, on the very eve of the missile crisis. To be sure, the 443 documents, many culled from the files of the Central Intelligence Agency, illustrate in excruciating detail the myriad flaws in the planning and execution of Bumpy Road. But this collection demolishes the notion that the chief legacy of misjudgment in April 1961 was an acumen that a chastened President would subsequently put to good use in October 1962. On the contrary, the setback resulting from Kennedy's reckless approval of Bumpy Road prompted greater recklessness still. It led directly to Operation Mongoose, the administration's frenetic effort to even the score with Castro - of which more...