More than forty-five years after his death, President John F. Kennedy remains a subject of fascination for both scholars and citizens. In public opinion polls, US citizens consistently rate Kennedy as a great President. When asked to explain their choice, respondents cite Kennedy's quality of leadership. Scholars similarly rate President Kennedy in favorable terms. On President's Day, 16 February 2009, C-Span, the public-affairs cable channel, released a survey conducted among sixty-four presidential scholars. The survey placed Kennedy in sixth place among the forty-three Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush. This was a remarkable result for a man who served only two years and ten months, about a thousand days, in office. The scholars cited Kennedy's wise management of the economy, his commitment to civil rights, and his successful conduct of the Berlin and Cuban missile crises as justification for his high standing.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was not one of President Kennedy's bright and shining moments. On 17–19 April 1961, 1,500 Cuban exiles backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stormed ashore at the Bay of Pigs, hoping to incite a widespread rebellion that would lead to the overthrow of Fidel Castro. Castro's forces quickly routed the invaders, killing 114 and capturing 1,179. Castro had a disciplined army of 25,000 and an extensive militia of over 200,000. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson had warned Kennedy prior to the invasion that it did not take an accounting firm “to figure out that fifteen hundred Cubans aren't as good as twenty-five thousand” (65). In this new history of the invasion, Howard Jones asks the familiar scholarly question, “why did such an intellectually talented president approve an invasion plan so obviously and egregiously flawed” (91)? Like earlier chroniclers of the invasion, such as Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer (1962) and Peter Wyden (1979), Jones agrees that Kennedy's decision to cancel planned air strikes doomed the invaders. But Jones has also combed the records of congressional committees that investigated both President Kennedy's assassination and US plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Jones persuasively argues that invasion plans were linked to efforts to assassinate Castro. The CIA counted on mass uprisings by the Cuban people, if CIA assets could “eliminate” Castro, his brother Raúl Castro, and the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Jones further speculates, albeit he cannot prove, that President Kennedy cancelled air strikes when he learned in mid-April that efforts to assassinate Castro had fallen short (92).
The educated public will enjoy this book. The book jacket appropriately publicizes Jones's writing style as “dramatic,” “hard-hitting,” and “riveting.” Scholars, however, will ask hard questions about the substance of the work. This is the “view-from-Washington” approach. Jones has not interviewed Cubans, used Spanish-language sources, or cited major studies on Cuban history. A review of Cuban sources might lead a scholar to depict the Bay of Pigs as less a US disaster and more a Cuban victory. The Cubans took heavy casualties during the invasion. But Castro led well, his forces fought fiercely, and the population remained loyal to the Cuban Revolution. Jones's extensive research in US records also does not add much to what has already been revealed by James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (1998), Don Bohning (2005), and Piero Gleijeses (2002). Jones insists that the invasion “marked the beginning of a new and more dangerous era in American foreign relations” (171), and the book is part of a series, Pivotal Moments in American History. But the Bay of Pigs invasion was not a new endeavor. The cast of CIA characters who planned the Bay of Pigs carried out the covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954.
An exclusive focus on US miscalculations and misjudgments may miss a larger truth about President Kennedy's foreign policies. Kennedy acted aggressively, precipitating confrontations with the communist world. He and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, remained obsessed with Castro's Cuba from 1961 to 1963. But Kennedy has won high marks from presidential scholars because the President behaved in a restrained manner in the midst of crisis. During both the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, he rejected advice that could have led to nuclear conflict. Historians like Robert Dallek (2003) have made the case that Kennedy, with his characteristic caution, would have never followed the military course that President Lyndon Baines Johnson did in Vietnam. An extensive US role during the Bay of Pigs – massive air strikes and the dispatch of US marines – would have had incalculable consequences for US standing in Latin America and the world. A US “victory” could have led to a lengthy, costly, and dangerous occupation of the island. Perhaps President Kennedy deserves credit for turning his back on this.
