live and learn

{excerptgraceandpowerbysallybedellsmithcopyright2004randomhousenewyork}
----------------------- When he returned to Washington on April 4, Kennedy didn't disclose the substance of his Florida discussions. But Mac Bundy and Schlesinger detected a toughening of Kennedy's attitude and suspected that Joe Kennedy, Earl Smith, and Smathers were responsible. On April 5, JFK approved the CIA plan. Bundy was not yet comfortable enough in their relationship to say to the President, "What the hell has happened to you on the weekend?" Bundy recalled. "But I didn't say that. I said, 'Yes, sir.'" ...

Although there had been a surprising number of press accounts on the CIA training in Guatemala, journalists were strikingly timid on reporting the invasion plans. ...

Charley Bartlett had the story...and censored himself. Bartlett had been tipped by no less than Ernesto Betancourt, Castro's representative in the United States who had just returned from Florida. "In Miami everyone is talking about the invasion, Bay of Pigs," Betancourt told Bartlett. "It will be a disaster." Bartlett refrained from telling Kennedy because "I thought, 'Why add to his burdens?" Instead, Bartlett told Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, who denied the account.
...

Kennedy had doomed the invaders even before they landed, leaving them vulnerable to attack by air. "Kennedy understood part of the plan, but he never understood that the navy planes were essential to the plan," said Douglas Dillon, who had been involved in the Cuba operation under Eisenhower. After a day of fighting, the refugee force was surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops, and more than 1,000 were taken prisoner. It was a humiliating rout -- and the biggest failure of Kennedy's life.

...In his public statements, Kennedy appropriately took full responsibility for the debacle, and the American press and citizenry were in a forgiving mood. Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's approval rating registered at 82 percent. ...

But the Bay of Pigs snapped the Kennedy spell and altered the course of his presidency. "Before the Bay of Pigs everything was a glorious adventure, onward and upward," Spalding said. "Afterwards it was a series of ups and downs with terrible pitfalls, suspicion everywhere, [with him] cautious of everything, questioning always."

...
Even more consequential was Kennedy's immediate expansion of the duties of Ted Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, placing them at his side for all further foreign policy deliberations. Bobby had appeared at an early briefing on the Cuba plan two days after the inauguration and again five days before the scheduled landing, but otherwise he had been out of the loop. "I need someone who knows me and my thinking and can ask me the tough questions," Kennedy told Sorensen...According to Lem Billings, JFK knew that "Bobby was the only person he could rely on to be absolutely dedicated....From that moment on, the Kennedy presidency became a sort of collaboration between them." ...

------------ The first major reverberation from the Bay of Pigs was in Southeast Asia.

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