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Now in paperback, a “balanced, engrossing account” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of the Bay of Pigs Crisis drawing on long-hidden CIA documents and delivering the vivid truth of five pivotal days in April 1961.
THE BRILLIANT DISASTER is a remarkably gripping account of America’s Bay of Pigs crisis, drawing on long-hidden CIA documents and delivering, as never before, the vivid truth—and consequences—of five pivotal days in April 1961.
At the heart of the Bay of Pigs crisis stood President John F. Kennedy, and journalist Jim Rasenberger traces what Kennedy knew, thought, and said as events unfolded. He examines whether Kennedy was manipulated by the CIA into approving a plan that would ultimately involve the American military. He also draws compelling portraits of the other figures who played key roles in the drama: Fidel Castro, who shortly after achieving power visited New York City and was cheered by thousands (just months before the United States began plotting his demise); Dwight Eisenhower, who originally ordered the secret program, then later disavowed it; Allen Dulles, the CIA director who may have told Kennedy about the plan before he was elected president (or so Richard Nixon suspected); and Richard Bissell, the famously brilliant “deus ex machina” who ran the operation for the CIA—and took the blame when it failed. Beyond the short-term fallout, Rasenberger demonstrates, the Bay of Pigs gave rise to further and greater woes, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and even, possibly, the assassination of John Kennedy.
Written with elegant clarity and narrative verve, The Brilliant Disaster is the most complete account of this event to date, providing not only a fast-paced chronicle of the disaster but an analysis of how it occurred—a question as relevant today as then—and how it profoundly altered the course of modern American history.
- Sales Rank: #566579 in Books
- Published on: 2012-04-10
- Released on: 2012-04-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.81" h x 1.30" w x 5.69" l, 1.08 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Review
“This is history at its best: meticulous research distilled into luminous prose and a gripping narrative. This is not only the finest book ever written on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but also one of the most balanced, keen-eyed surveys of the early days of the Kennedy administration. A page-turner that packs as much of a punch as the best of fiction thrillers, Rasenberger’s The Brilliant Disaster lays bare many a bleached bone, but, in the process, also provides readers with invaluable treasure: a clearer understanding of the relation between past, present, and future.” —Carlos Eire, National Book Award winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana
About the Author
Jim Rasenberger is the author of America, 1908, and High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, he lives in New York City with his wife and twin sons.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
“The Bay of Pigs Thing”
BACK IN THE first half of the twentieth century, America was a good and determined nation led by competent men and defended by an indomitable military—that, anyway, was a plausible view for Americans to hold fifty years ago. The First World War, then the Second World War, asserted and confirmed America’s place of might and right in the world. Even in the decade after the Second World War, as a new conflict in Korea suggested there were limits to what the United States might accomplish abroad, it would have been a cynical American who doubted he or she lived in a powerful nation engaged in worthy exploits.
And then came the Bay of Pigs.
In the early hours of April 17, 1961, some fourteen hundred men, most of them Cuban exiles, attempted to invade their homeland and overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion at the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs—quickly unraveled. Three days after landing, the exile force was routed and sent fleeing to the sea or the swamps, where the survivors were soon captured by Castro’s army. Despite the Kennedy administration’s initial insistence that the United States had nothing to do with the invasion, the world immediately understood that the entire operation had been organized and funded by the U.S. government. The invaders had been trained by CIA officers and supplied with American equipment, and the plan had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president of the United States. In short, the Bay of Pigs had been a U.S. operation, and its failure—“a perfect failure,” historian Theodore Draper called it—was a distinctly American embarrassment. Bad enough the government had been caught bullying and prevaricating; much worse, the United States had allowed itself to be humiliated by a nation of 7 million inhabitants (compared to the United States’ 180 million) and smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. The greatest American defeat since the War of 1812, one American general called it. Others were less generous. Everyone agreed on this: it was a mistake Americans would never repeat and a lesson they would never forget.
They were wrong on both counts.
Mention the Bay of Pigs to a college-educated adult American under the age of, say, fifty and you are likely to be met by tentative nods of recognition. The incident still rings discordant bells somewhere in the back of our national memory—something to do with Cuba, with Kennedy, with disaster. That phantasmagorical phrase alone—Bay of Pigs—is hard to forget, evoking images of bobbing swine in a bloodred sea (or at least it did in my mind when I first heard it). But what exactly happened at the Bay of Pigs? Many of us are no longer certain, including some of us who probably ought to be. At about the time I began thinking about this book, Dana Perino, the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, good-naturedly confessed on a radio program that she confused “the Bay of Pigs thing” (April 1961) with the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). Given that Ms. Perino was born a decade after these events, her uncertainty was understandable. But coming from the woman representing the president who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003—an exercise that repeated some of the very same mistakes made in Cuba in 1961—it also was unsettling. Presumably, somebody in the Bush White House considered the history of the Bay of Pigs before sending Colin Powell to the Security Council of the United Nations (an episode, as we shall see, bearing striking similarities to Adlai Stevenson’s appearance before that same body in April 1961) or ordering a minimal force to conquer a supposedly welcoming foreign land.
Then again, if history teaches us any lesson, it is that we do not learn the lessons of history very well. Almost as soon as the mistakes of the Bay of Pigs were cataloged and analyzed by various investigative bodies, America began committing them again, not only in Cuba, but elsewhere in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa. By one count, the United States has forcibly intervened, covertly or overtly, in no fewer than twenty-four foreign countries since 1961, not including our more recent twenty-first-century entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these have arguably produced long-term benefits for the United States. Most clearly have not.
The surfeit of interventions gives rise to a fair question: considering all that has occurred since 1961, why should the Bay of Pigs still demand our attention? Next to Vietnam and Iraq, among others, the Bay of Pigs may seem a bump in the road fading mercifully in the rearview mirror. The entire event lasted a mere five days and cost the United States roughly $46 million, less than the average budget of a Hollywood movie these days. One hundred and fourteen men were killed on the American side, and only a handful of these casualties were U.S. citizens. Add to this the fact that America was embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs and the tale has everything to recommend it for oblivion.
Even if we would forget the Bay of Pigs, though, it will not forget us. There among the mangrove swamps and the coral-jeweled waters, some part of the American story ended and a new one began. Like a well-crafted prologue, the Bay of Pigs sounded the themes, foreshadowed the conflicts, and laid the groundwork for the decades to follow. And what followed was, in no small measure, a consequence of the events in Cuba in 1961. It would be facile to credit the 1960s to a single failed invasion—many currents combined to produce that tsunami—but the Bay of Pigs dragged America into the new decade and stalked it for years to come. Three of the major American cataclysms of the ’60s and early ’70s—John Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and Watergate—were related by concatenation to the Bay of Pigs. No fewer than four presidents were touched by it, from Dwight Eisenhower, who first approved the “Program of Covert Action” against Castro, to Richard Nixon and the six infamous justice-obstructing words he uttered in 1972: “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
MY TELLING OF the Bay of Pigs thing will certainly not be the first. On the contrary, thousands of pages of official reports, journalism, memoir, and scholarship have been devoted to the invasion, including at least two exceptional books: Haynes Johnson’s emotionally charged account published in 1964 and Peter Wyden’s deeply reported account from 1979. This book owes a debt to both of those, and to many others, as well as to thousands of pages of once-classified documents that have become available over the past fifteen years, thanks in part to the efforts of the National Security Archives, an organization affiliated with George Washington University that seeks to declassify and publish government files. These newer sources, including a CIA inspector general’s report, written shortly after the invasion and hidden away in a vault for decades, and a once-secret CIA history compiled in the 1970s, add depth and clarity to our understanding of the event and of the men who planned it and took part in it.
If what follows is not quite a story never told, it may be, even for those well acquainted with the event—especially those, perhaps—a different story than the one readers thought they knew. Because the Bay of Pigs was so cataclysmic and personally anguishing to so many involved, and because it raised questions about core American values, its postmortems have tended to be of the finger-pointing, ax-grinding, high-dudgeon variety. This includes personal memoirs and reminiscences, but also serious and measured works such as Johnson’s and Wyden’s, both of which were colored by the circumstances under which they were written. Johnson’s book, published just a few years after the invasion, was authored with heavy input from leaders of the Cuban exile brigade and is raw with their pain and resentment. Wyden’s book was written in the late 1970s, following Watergate and an inflammatory Senate investigation into CIA-sponsored assassinations (the so-called Church Committee), when national outrage for government subterfuge was at a high point and esteem for the CIA hit new lows. The book announces its bias on the very first page, when Wyden describes the CIA as “acting out of control” during the Bay of Pigs. Many other books, articles, and interviews have added to the riot of perspective: those by Kennedy partisans who damn the CIA; those by CIA participants who damn Kennedy; those by Cuban exiles who damn both, and Castro, too; and those by Cuban nationals who hail the events of 1961 as a great defeat of American imperialism and a defining episode in the hagiography of Fidel Castro.
With the possible exception of Castro, no one came out of the Cuban venture smelling sweet, but over time the CIA came to assume the rankest odor of all. Starting with the publication of two important memoirs by senior Kennedy aides in the fall of 1965—Arthur M. Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days and Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy—a steady stream of books championed the view that John Kennedy was a victim in the Bay of Pigs, and especially a victim of the CIA’s arrogance and malfeasance. Several recently published books that treat the Bay of Pigs suggest this view has won out and is now conventional wisdom. One recent bestseller, David Talbot’s Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years(2007), describes a defiant CIA driven by “cynical calculation” while engaged in an effort to “sandbag” President Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs. Another, Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes (2007), portrays an agency that managed to combine duplicity with dereliction, somehow running circles around Kennedy and his advisers even as it tripped over its own two feet.
The more complicated truth about the Bay of Pigs is that it was not ginned up by a nefarious band of agents in the bowels of the CIA, but rather produced by two administrations, encouraged by countless informed legislators, and approved by numerous men of high rank and intelligence, even brilliance, who either did know, or should have known, what they were agreeing to. As for why they did this—“How could I have been so stupid?” is how Kennedy phrased the question—the answer is that all of them, from the presidents to the Central Intelligence Agency, from the Pentagon to the State Department, were operating under conditions that made the venture almost impossible to resist. At a time when Americans were nearly hysterical about the spread of communism, they simply could not abide Castro. He had to go. And the CIA, in 1960, was the tool Eisenhower, then Kennedy, intended to use to speed him on his way.
Unsettling as it may be to conjure a “rogue elephant,” as the CIA was often described after the Bay of Pigs, making and executing lethal and boneheaded foreign policy on its own, more troubling may be the possibility that the Bay of Pigs—or any number of subsequent disasters abroad—was driven by irrational forces and fears in the broad American public, and that its pursuit and failure reflected not one man’s or one group’s moral or intellectual failings, but the limits of a democratic government’s ability to respond sensibly to frightening circumstances. By the time the Bay of Pigs occurred, it almost was rational—a logical conclusion arrived at from a set of premises that were, in 1961, practically beyond question. Clearly the CIA chose the wrong way to go about unseating Castro, but really, is there any good way to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation?
My goal in these pages is not to defend the CIA, or anyone else, but to treat the participants with more empathy than prejudice, the better to understand their motives. As a litany of misdeeds, the Bay of Pigs is dark comedy; only when we consider it in the full context of its time does it reveal itself, instead, as Greek tragedy. Not all participants in the affair behaved well, but of the many extraordinary facts about the Bay of Pigs, the most surprising may be that it was the work of mostly decent and intelligent people trying their best to perform what they considered to be the necessary emergency procedure of excising Fidel Castro. With a few notable exceptions—Senator William Fulbright was one—it never occurred to any of them that America could tolerate Fidel Castro’s reign. Certainly it never occurred to them that Castro’s reign would outlast the administrations of ten U.S. presidents.
IN SOME WAYS, this is a tale from the distant past. Other than the frozen state of relations between the United States and Cuba, virtually unchanged since 1961, we live in a world that is very different from the one that produced the Bay of Pigs. The Cold War is over; the War on Terror has taken its place as our national bête noire. Fidel Castro, in retrospect, seems a benign threat next to the likes of Osama bin Laden. But America is still driven by the same conflicting motives and urgencies that landed the country at the Bay of Pigs fifty years ago. On the one hand, we are a people convinced of our own righteousness, power, and genius—a conviction that compels us to cure what ails the world. On the other hand, we are stalked by deep insecurities: our way of life is in constant jeopardy; our enemies are implacable and closing in. This paradox of American psychology was apparent well before the Bay of Pigs—Fidel Castro pointed it out to Richard Nixon in 1959, as we will see in this book’s first chapter—but compounding it after 1961 were new concerns about the limits of American power, not to mention the limits of American competence and morality. The days of the “splendid little war,” as Ambassador John Hays famously called the United States’ military venture in Cuba in 1898 (during the Spanish-American War), are long gone now. Instead, we get complicated, tormented affairs that never seem to end. In this respect, at least, the Kennedy administration earned this book’s otherwise oxymoronic title, and without irony: their disaster was brilliantly brief. It could have been far worse, as a number of very smart people noted afterward. What does it tell us that some of those same smart people—“the best and the brightest,” author David Halberstam indelibly tagged them—later engineered America’s descent into Vietnam? Irony never strays far from this tale.
We are still trying to come up with the solution to the conundrum that gave rise to the Bay of Pigs: how to use American power to make the world to our liking, but do so in a manner that holds true to the values we espouse. One piece of evidence that we have not quite figured this out can be found, coincidentally, on the eastern tip of Cuba, where the United States still holds prisoners from the War on Terror at Guantánamo. What to do about this and similar matters remains the problem of our current president, Barack Obama, born in August 1961, a few months after the Bay of Pigs.
As it happens, my own life began just after the Bay of Pigs and was soon touched by it, albeit obliquely. In December 1962—when I was a few months old—my father was briefly but significantly involved in the episode’s dramatic finale. A young and politically involved lawyer at the time (he’d done advance work for John Kennedy), he was recruited to join Robert Kennedy’s pre-Christmas effort to bring home more than a thousand men who had been taken prisoner by Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs. For an intense few weeks leading up to Christmas 1962, my father and several other private attorneys, as well as men from the attorney general’s office such as Louis Oberdorfer and Nicholas Katzenbach, virtually lived at the Justice Department as they worked to secure the prisoners’ release. My father’s role was small, and came only near the end. I mention him here to point out that I grew up more attuned than most to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and yet I can’t say my understanding of it was at all clear. I suspect that to most people around my age, the Bay of Pigs is an incident of the dim, dark past, like a childhood memory of something not meant for children’s eyes. Meanwhile, for older Americans—those of my father’s generation—it’s a memory that is fading.
Not so in Cuba, as I learned when I visited the island in the spring of 2010, on the invasion’s forty-ninth anniversary. To Cubans, the Bay of Pigs episode is known simply as “Girón,” after the beach where the invasion began and ended, and the Cuban victory there is one of the founding mythologies of modern Cuba. Schoolchildren learn of it when they are young and are never allowed to forget. Every April, billboards throughout Havana herald it anew, and Playa Girón becomes a kind of mecca for invasion tourists and government officials. Passing a giant billboard that announces Girón as the site of the PRIMERA DERROTA DEL IMPERIALISMO YANQUI EN AMERICA LATINA (First Defeat of Yankee Imperialism in Latin America), busloads of schoolchildren and military personnel arrive at the small seaside hamlet. They visit the battle museum, poke into the shops, and walk down to the palm-shaded beach where the “mercenaries” first landed. Local laborers slap a fresh coat of white paint onto the base of the telephone poles and line the main road into town with palm fronds, sprucing up for the dignitaries who will arrive from Havana on April 19 and stand on a platform in front of the Hotel Playa Girón to declare the victory all over again.
Meanwhile, at the western end of the beach where the invasion occurred, two military sentries stand atop an old shack that has been turned into a military post. Day and night, they look out to sea with high-powered optical equipment, searching, waiting, as if expecting, any moment, an invasion force to arrive all over again.
© 2011 Jim Rasenberger
Most helpful customer reviews
58 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
A Story that Demands to be Told Honestly - A PAGE TURNER - 5 STARS for Jim Rasenberger
By Richard of Connecticut
It is very strange that a story as important as this one has simply not received either the historical attention or public attention that it deserves. Very simply, President Kennedy's people will tell you that prior to entering office, JFK was briefed in a meeting with Eisenhower about plans for CIA trained Cuban exiles (some 1400 in number) to invade Cuba and foment a revolution against Castro. Eisenhower's people deny that this ever happened.
Since JFK entered office on January 20th, 1961, and the Bay of Pigs occurred in early April, just a shade over two months later, it is highly likely that the invasion was planned during the previous administration. Seventy days is far too short a period to plan, train for, and execute such an operation. Nevertheless, President Kennedy must take and did take full responsibility for the mission and its failure.
The embarrassment was extensive, and as the President said to then CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell who was Deputy Director for Plans, if this were a Parliamentary form of government, it would be me leaving office, but it is a democracy and therefore you and Dulles will suffer. Dulles and Bissell over a period of months were quietly forced into retirement.
Strangely, there have been only two real books written on the Bag of Pigs invasion in the last 50 years. One was by Haynes Johnson in 1964 while the other by Peter Wyden was done in 1979. The author of this book had access to two new sources of information. The first is the national Security Archives which are kept at George Washington University, and the second is the CIA Inspector General's report on the invasion which was written right after the failed invasion, but remained classified until recently.
It is my belief that with the traffic early death of President Kennedy history seems to be completely biased towards his administration. This is completely understandable since so many of his loyalists were previously associated with universities, and when they returned to academia after their government service it was these same advisors who wrote the history of this period.
The book is a superb chronological, minute by minute account of the invasion day by day. It is spellbinding. It reads like a novel, only better because it is true. At 480 pages, it is not long enough to tell you the whole story but long enough to rivet you to your seat while you read it. When reading the book it becomes clear that there is something called institutional memory in government, which probably lasts about 20 years.
After two decades elapse, most of the lessons that must be learned from that period are forgotten. It is clear that our government like other governments simply does not learn from its own mistakes. Harvard historian and philosopher George Santayana use to say, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and this becomes clear once again with the lessons to be drawn from the Bay of Pigs.
The CIA was for the invasion, and Kennedy's entourage of advisors were completely for it with the exception of one man, Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger. Although the Bay of Pigs was under CIA supervision, the Joint Chiefs signed off on the operation, and told the young President that they thought it would work. JFK to his death told many people afterwards that "I never asked the right question."
Remember there were less than 1500 Cuban exiles involved and they were supposed to incite a revolution against Castro that would pick up steam as they headed for Havana and supposedly thousands of disgruntled Cubans would join the exile group and take back the country. So what was the question that Kennedy should have asked?
He should have looked the Joint Chiefs in the eye and said, "I want to make this an American operation, forget the exiles, how many marines do we need to send in?" The Joint Chief's response would have been 250,000. JFK would have immediately recognized that he had been had. He would have thought, they are telling me that I need 250,000 marines to do the job that they are also saying 1500 exiles can handle. He would have immediately canceled the operation. He simply never asked the right question.
The Concept of GROUP THINK
When studying the Bay of Pigs decision making processes, Professor Irving Janis asked the question how could potentially the smartest men ever to serve in government completely fall in line, and give the President some horrible advice. Simply no one stood against the President's decision despite the seeming absurdity of the plan in light of what happened. Janis came up with the concept of GROUP THINK to explain this phenomenon, and it has been studied ever since. Janis used several phrases to describe what happens and happened during the Bay of Pigs. They included:
* JFK never failed at anything
* His people felt too blessed by their brains and breeding
* Too confident in their collective brilliance
* They were a little tentative being in office just 60 days
* New to their jobs
* Anxious to fit in
* Needed to impress one another
* Went along to get along
The only one to stand against all of these individuals was Arthur Schlesinger, the Harvard professor who later when asked why you didn't speak up more forcefully against the operation when you had a chance, responded in the following way. He viewed himself as a college professor, he was fresh to government, and he felt completely uncomfortable putting his unassisted judgment in an open meeting against that of such august figures as the Secretaries of Defense, State and the Joint Chiefs. This was especially true in light of the fact that each of them was speaking with the full weight of their respective institutions behind them.
The result of all of this was the complete destruction of the Cuban exile group. Those who were not killed were taken prisoner by Castro. The United States found itself completely embarrassed, at first denying involvement with the exiles, but later taking full responsibility for the invasion.
CONCLUSION
Yes, you will love this book which is hard to put down as a reader. You will read it and only when you have finished it, will you marvel that it is a true book, not a spy novel. In the end you will start to realize the importance that the Bay of Pigs had on all history to follow including but not limited to:
* Massive impact on the Cuban missile crisis.
* Berlin wall being built
* Viet Nam involvement, build-up, subsequent tragedy
* President Kennedy's death itself which is still being explored with additional documents to be released in the next few years
* President Nixon's election
* President Nixon's Watergate decisions
The history that is the Bay of Pigs is not just about the Bay of Pigs but has impacted all American history since its failure. Is it not clear that the advisors in George W. Bush's Administration learned nothing from the Bay of Pigs regarding our invasion of Iraq? It's as though they threw out the history books, and said it doesn't matter. The Brilliant Disaster is a book that cries out to be read and I thank you for reading this review.
Richard C. Stoyeck
29 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Lessons of History
By The Ginger Man
In constructing this history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the author draws on previous books by Haynes Johnson (1964) and Peter Weyden (1977) as well as upon thousands of pages of documents declassified during the last 15 years. The book begins with a description of the "nearly hysterical" fear about the spread of communism in the fifties. Castro's visit to the United States in 1959 is reviewed as is the planning for effecting regime change in Cuba by the Eisenhower administration in the summer and fall of 1959. Finally, on 3/17/60, the author shows how Ike approved the CIA produced "Program of Covert Action" which "made the overthrow of Fidel Castro official US policy" just months before his administration was set to expire.
Rasenberger argues that planned regime change in Cuba resulted from our inability to live with a socialist government 90 miles from Florida rather than from any imminent danger to national security. He points to the "irrational forces and fears in the broad American public" combined with an attitude within American government that results were all that mattered. (CIA Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell is quoted in his memoirs saying, "My philosophy during my last 2 or 3 years in the agency was very definitely that the ends justified the means, and I was not going to be held back.")
Castro's takeover in Cuba dominated the first televised Presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy. The strong positions taken by JFK in the debate and on the campaign trail served to limit his later flexibility in decision-making. In his first 90 days in office, the new president slowly and reluctantly moved forward with the invasion plan inherited from the prior administration while trying to learn upon whom he should depend for reliable information. Ultimately, the experts (CIA, Joint Chiefs) urged him forward. Dissenting voices came from lower levels of his new administration (Arthur Schlesinger, Chester Bowles, Adlai Stevenson), from outside the current government (Dean Acheson) and from Senator J William Fulbright. The Senator told JFK that, even if the invasion succeeded, it would be a mistake because it would be "of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union." All of this leads Rasenberger to speculate that the brilliant disaster "reflected not one man's or one group's moral or intellectual failings, but the limits of a democratic governments ability to respond sensibly to frightening circumstances."
The greatest strength of the book is the middle section in which the author uses extensive sources to produce an almost hour by hour description of the events of April 5-11, 1961 from the air strip in Nicaragua, to the landing sites in Cuba, offices in Langley, deliberations at the UN and reactions of JFK at a family retreat in Virginia as events begin to quickly go bad.
In the end, Rasenberger comes down heavily on JFK. He agrees with Bissell that withholding air strikes doomed the invasion even though he also believes that an established beachhead would not have resulted in the overthrow of Castro. The author argues that the Bay of Pigs failure convinced the new president to distrust the advice of experts and to turn to his brother and trusted staff. He argues that it led to JFK drawing a line in the sand against communist aggression in Viet Nam. While he gives credit to the president for his actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, he states that history has overlooked how JFK's actions in the Bay of Pigs may have precipitated the crisis by fostering paranoia about US motives in Cuba. Finally, he describes how Lee Harvey Oswald acted in sympathy with Castro in killing the president, quoting dubious expert E. Howard Hunt in assessing Oswald's motives. The invasion becomes for Rasenberger the touchstone for many of the most critical events in American history that follow including the Watergate break in.
While the author's research is exhaustive, he seems to lean more heavily on some sources than others. For example, early in the book he mentions the importance of his access to the CIA Inspector General's post mortem report on the invasion. This report had not been available to writers of the earlier histories referred to above. Discounting Kennedy's cancellation of the air strike as a cause for failure, the CIA report itself concludes, "the whole operation was so riddled with incompetence, nothing short of a miracle could have saved it." Rasenberger dismisses this conclusion and the entire 170 page report in a mere 2 paragraphs as the work of a disgruntled employee. However, he later describes at length the exonerating article written by Allen Dulles for Harpers magazine, which the former CIA Director withdrew prior to publication. His varied treatment of these 2 documents can raise for the reader questions about how the author reaches some of his conclusions.
Continuing the effort to affix blame a half century after the fact may be less important than to provide a deeper analysis of the questions provocatively posed by the author early on. How do we preserve an informed dialogue in a democracy and make reasoned decisions about emotionally charged issues? What balance should we preserve between participation in decision-making and the need for secrecy when dealing with national security issues? Do the ends justify the means in Cuba, Viet Nam, Iraq, etc or should idealism and morality play a role in decision-making?
We would have been well served had Rasenberger utilized his balanced review of events during the Bay of Pigs invasion to initiate discussions needed to help guide us through today's challenges. It is of less value to remake the case for who was wrong and who was almost right in 1959 and 1961.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant History
By Tom/"Miracles On The Water"
It's a gifted historian and writer who manages to be prodigious in gathering reserch -- authoritative in tone -- and is never dull on the page. Of course it helps when said historian has a terrific story to tell. Five stars, then, for Jim Rasenberger and "The Brilliant Disaster" -- his at once edifying and page-turning treatment of the Bay of Pigs. Well-known as a CIA-led fiasco, this account of a true U.S. foreign-policy nightmare is also a dispiriting look at the early days of the Kennedy White House. Among the many successes of Rasenberger's book is its portrait of the newly-minted President -- the missteps made, signals missed and warnings ignored as the national security apparatus lumbered toward "disaster" just south of Florida. A young Fidel Csstro is of course the other key character here, in a story rich in characters -- Dulles to Bundy, RFK to Adlai Stevenson, Che Guevara to Nikita Khruschev, and more. Finally -- the book will likely please both Bay of Pigs experts and those who know nothing of what happened on those three days in April, a half-century ago. That, too, is an achievement for any writer of history. Well worth reading.
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