Excerpted from Lessons in Disaster: George Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Gordon M. Goldstein

The first major foreign policy decision in which Bundy participated became the signature failure of the entire Kennedy administration.

The new administration inherited a covert plan to topple the Cuban leader Fidel Castro with an invasion force of 1,300 exiles being trained in Guatemala. It was a CIA plot actively incubated under the Eisenhower administration—which had recently broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba—and then presented to the new president for execution within the first months of his administration. The code name for the invasion was “Operation Zapata.”

In February 1961, just weeks after the president’s inauguration, Bundy presented Kennedy with two papers on the proposed invasion. The first was from CIA deputy director Richard Bissell, a Groton graduate and Yale economics professor whom Bundy had known and been friendly with for years. Bissell had been one of the principal architects of the overthrow in 1954 of Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, in a coup that had been actively lobbied for by the United Fruit Company. As he developed his plans for the exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Bissell had reassembled members of his Guatemala team, including the future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.

The second memo Bundy presented to Kennedy was from Thomas C. Mann, the recent assistant secretary of state for inter- American affairs and the new administration’s ambassador to Mexico. In a cover memo to the president, Bundy called Bissell and Mann the “real antagonists at the staff level” on the invasion debate. Bissell, who aspired to succeed Allen Dulles as the head of the CIA, was the intelligence community’s champion of Operation Zapata and managed its planning. Mann, who was not part of the intelligence apparatus, was highly dubious of the overthrow plot. He questioned the causal logic of the regime change scenario, doubting that an invasion by the small expatriate force would actually become the catalyst for a vast popular uprising across Cuba.

Bundy was inclined to accept Bissell’s sanguine projections. “Defense and CIA now feel quite enthusiastic about the invasion,” he reported to President Kennedy in early February. “At the worst, they think the invaders would get into the mountains, and at the best, they think they might get a full- fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly.” Washington’s support for the exiles, however, was already widely known, and rumors about Zapata quickly mutated into noisy media stories. On January 10, 1961, the New York Times had run a front- page article with the not-so-covert headline “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Base.” The New York Daily News was reporting “35,000 saboteurs ready to strike from within. 6000 Cuban patriots ready to storm ashore.”

Bundy received private expressions of caution about Operation Zapata from his own colleagues. The young presidential aide Richard Goodwin anticipated the United States would fall into an untenable trap. “Even if the landings are successful and a revolutionary government is set up,” he told Bundy, “they’ll have to ask for our help. And if we agree, it’ll be a massacre. . . . We’ll have to fight house- to- house in Havana.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had also come to Washington from Cambridge to serve as an assistant to the president, sent Bundy a pair of memos opposing the invasion. “I am against it,” he bluntly declared.

Despite these pointed internal critiques of Operation Zapata—Goodwin’s heresies so annoyed the national security adviser that the young speechwriter was banished from White House meetings on Cuba—Bundy continued to support the CIA plot. In mid- March he told President Kennedy the agency had done “a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials. I have been a skeptic about Bissell’s operation, but now I think we are on the edge of a good answer.” Central questions nonetheless remained unaddressed. How probable was it that the exiles could stimulate a wider national revolt? How large would an uprising need to be to overwhelm Castro’s state security forces? If the invasion failed to stimulate a popular revolt, how long and how effectively could a force of 1,300 Cuban exile soldiers fight Castro’s much larger army? Was there any real evidence to support Bissell’s claim that the exile force could sustain itself indefinitely? What were the military risks and potential contingencies associated with the invasion, including the potential need for American air support? In light of the rumors and the media reports, had operational security already been fatally compromised? The documentary record does not reflect any effort by Bundy to evaluate and mitigate these concerns.

On April 7, 1961, Schlesinger made a final appeal to the national security adviser. “Dick Goodwin and I met for breakfast to see whether it would be worth making one more try to reverse the decision,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal. “But Bundy and Rostow joined us and discouraged our efforts.” Walt Rostow, who had been appointed as Bundy’s deputy, was another academic talent recruited to the Kennedy administration. A former Rhodes Scholar and a Yale PhD who had taught economic history at Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, and most recently the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rostow had a reputation as a bellicose anticommunist. “He is absolutely interminable,” said Bundy of Rostow’s relentless hawkishness. His “view of the world . . . is always complete, three- dimensional, graphic and wrong.”

On Monday morning, April 17, 1961, the 1,300 members of the Cuban exile brigade landed on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southwestern coast. Fighting with its back to the ocean and already infiltrated by Castro’s agents, the exile brigade was outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Within a day it was surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops. There were no stirrings of a spontaneous popular revolt that would sweep across Cuba. And in a stunningly inept lapse in planning, the exile force soon realized that eighty miles of swamp blocked its escape route into the mountains. A crushing defeat was imminent.

As the grim reports poured into the White House, Rostow drove to CIA headquarters to meet with Bissell, his former professor, who was haggard, unshaven, and panicked. As the journalist and historian David Talbot notes, President Kennedy had insisted throughout the planning for the invasion that he would not intervene militarily to salvage the operation, at one point sending a military aide to the exiles’ Central American training camp to reiterate that the U.S. Marines would not come to their rescue. As Rostow met with Bissell and his aides, however, he soon realized that the CIA planners did not believe Kennedy would continue to withhold American military support if the success of the operation was imperiled. Such an outcome, Rostow later wrote, “was inconceivable to them.”

Rostow urged Bissell to make one final appeal to the president. A meeting was convened for shortly before midnight. As Talbot recounts, President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Rusk, and Secretary of Defense McNamara were all returning from a formal reception in the East Room, dressed in white tie and tails. They were joined by General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations. Bissell, “acutely aware of the desperation of those whose lives were on the line,” as he later recalled, made a passionate case for intervention.

“Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” he implored the president.

Kennedy refused, reminding Bissell and Burke that he had consistently insisted that no American military forces would be deployed to salvage the invasion. A heated exchange ensued. Burke grew angry. He pressed the president for just one destroyer, which would be sufficient to “knock the hell out of Castro’s tanks.”

“What if Castro’s forces return the fire and hit the destroyer?” Kennedy asked.

“Then we’ll knock the hell out of them!” the admiral promised.

“Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” admonished Kennedy.

“Hell, Mr. President,” retorted Burke, “but we are involved!”

Bundy presented President Kennedy with a dire recitation of the facts on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 18: “The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others. . . . The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” Kennedy did not waver. He refused to authorize the “further intervention” raised in Bundy’s memo. The operation was doomed. “The secret hope of the leaders of the CIA,” Bundy later acknowledged, was to pressure the president into reversing his position, a fact Bissell conceded in his memoirs.  “It wasn’t in Bissell’s mind that he was tricking the president,” Bundy told me. “It was that Bissell was the inheritor of legitimacy who thought he knew what the national interest would require and what any president would see when the issue was sharply presented.”

Kennedy had anticipated Bissell’s attempted manipulation. “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go- ahead order to the Essex,” Kennedy told his confidant Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.” In 2005 a government document surfaced that confirmed the CIA expectation that the Bay of Pigs invasion would fail without direct American military support. The intelligence memorandum, dated November 15, 1960, concluded that an invasion would be “unachievable, except as joint Agency/DOD action”—in other words, a dual invasion conducted by both the CIA and the Department of Defense. But this conclusion was never shared with the White House.

By the end of the week, 114 Cuban exile fighters had been killed and 1,189 had been captured. American responsibility for the operation was quickly exposed, humiliating the Kennedy administration and prompting a wave of global condemnation. The debacle ensured that Kennedy and his top military advisers would never have confidence in one another again. “Pulling out the rug,” General Lemnitzer later remarked, was “unbelievable . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”

For his part, Kennedy was determined not to repeat his mistakes, assuring Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that he would never again be “overawed by professional military advice.” Speaking to his friend Red Fay, whom he had appointed assistant secretary of the navy, Kennedy insisted, “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interests of the country.” The president added: “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so called national pride above national reason.” Kennedy made a similar point to Schlesinger, dismissing the notion that American prestige would suffer if the cause of the Cuban rebels was not once more embraced. “What is prestige?” asked the president. “Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power. No doubt we will be kicked in the ass for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.”

As the full scope of the Bay of Pigs disaster became clear, Bundy offered his resignation. “You know that I wish I had served you better in the Cuban episode, and I hope you know how I admire your own gallantry under fire in that case,” he wrote to the president. “If my departure can assist you in any way, I hope you will send me off—and if you choose differently, you will still have this letter for use when you may need it.” Bundy was not fired. Instead Kennedy pulled him closer, installing Bundy in a basement office in the West Wing, where his proximity would provide greater access to the president and, presumably, greater influence. Kennedy also authorized the creation of the White House Situation Room, which would function as the central node of communications for the government’s disparate national security agencies. For his part, Bundy pondered the lessons of the Bay of Pigs disaster. He summarized his insights in an April 24 memorandum whose pithy conclusion was rich in dispassionate self- criticism of the young administration’s failures in Cuba and prescient in anticipating some of the same challenges for strategy in Vietnam. “The morals of those failures are readily drawn . . . ,” Bundy advised. “The President’s advisers must speak up in council. . . . The President and his advisers must second- guess even military plans. . . . We must estimate the enemy without hope or fear. . . . Those who are to offer serious advice on major issues must themselves do the necessary work. . . . The President’s desires must be fully acted on, and he must know the full state of mind of friends whose lives his decisions affect. . . . Forced choices are seldom as necessary as they seem. . . . What is and is not implied in any specific partial decision must always be thought through.”

In the aftermath of the failed invasion, Kennedy transferred authority for covert paramilitary operations from the CIA to the Department of Defense and fired Dulles and Bissell. Looking back on the Bay of Pigs disaster, Bundy wrote sympathetically about Bissell, suggesting that his “mistakes, large as they are, pale in comparison to his achievements,” such as the implementation of the Marshall Plan and the creation of the CIA’s U-2 aerial surveillance system. Yet Bundy also admitted that “one of the reasons I was inefficient was that my favorite college teacher was in charge, Dickie Bissell.” Bundy’s close relationship with Bissell may have compromised his judgment and thus his counsel to President Kennedy. “It never occurred to me,” he explained, that Bissell “was so captured by his own goddamned invention of this invasion that he would accept adjustments and limitations, because his political judgment was when you really get down to it you need to be rescued or surrender. The president will have to act. So it was an entrapment.”

Bundy retrospectively focused on the military’s responsibility for the failed invasion. “One could imagine the Brigade succeeding on its own,” he wrote, “but should one really bet a brand- new Presidency on such a gamble?” In the aftermath of the failed invasion, Bundy observed, President Kennedy assigned particular blame to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who possessed the greatest expertise for judging the operation’s prospects for military success yet still appeared to endorse it. “What he neglected, and what I for one was too green to recognize and point out,” was the perceived inhibition on the part of the Pentagon to challenge the CIA’s plans. The chiefs “were bureaucratically cautious about dissecting another agency’s most cherished enterprise.”

The Bay of Pigs was an “initial baptism of power,” Bundy concluded, “because it’s sitting there, right there, loaded, ready to go off, won’t keep, has to be decided.” It also remained somewhat mystifying. “You know what we still don’t know about the Bay of Pigs?” asked Bundy. “What did Eisenhower think he was going to do? He never told anybody.”

Despite its enormous political costs, Bundy believed the Bay of Pigs ultimately strengthened Kennedy. “This is a detached and self- contained human being who, as far as I perceive him, had enormous inner confidence,” Bundy told the political scientist Richard Neustadt in 1964, speaking of the president. Bundy noted “the number of times he had accomplished things that people said could not be accomplished. So that ‘no’ was a word he was used to hearing and used to disproving. . . . The great blow of the Bay of Pigs was that it broke the picture of infallibility and its great service to him was that it did exactly that.”

At a moment just before that aura of infallibility was shattered, President Kennedy met at the White House with Bundy and four other advisers: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Dean Rusk, Richard Bissell, and Adolf Berle, a Columbia Law School professor affiliated with the State Department. It was Saturday, April 15, according to Schlesinger, “as the pace of action began to mount in Cuba.” The group, he recalled, was “discussing the next step with the president, when Mac brought down the house—and especially JFK—by saying . . . ‘Mr. President, do you realize that you are surrounded by five ex-professors?’” Bundy recalled telling Kennedy “in a cheerful way that this was bound to be all right” because of his advisers’ academic stature, “and I’ve often hoped that he didn’t remember that remark, because I remember it so well. But he did go through a process of saying there must never be another Cuba. I remember his remarking to me that in any other form of democratic government he would be out of office on the strength of the Bay of Pigs, and that no English Prime Minister could have survived. . . . He used to say, ‘Well, at least I’ve got three more years—nobody could take that away from me.’”

There was at least one other lesson to be learned from the Bay of Pigs. Despite pressure from the CIA and the Joint Chiefs, Kennedy did not capitulate on the basic question of maintaining firm presidential authority over the deployment of military force. “Kennedy had refused that support and the lesson was burned into his mind: the Commander-in-Chief had better be careful to ensure his own control over the use of American combat forces. He is the one who will inevitably be held accountable for their success or failure.” Bundy added that while counselors to the president may pursue agendas of their own which were “usually honorable and sometimes right,” he cautioned such aides were “not necessarily thinking about the President’s responsibility.”