Tuesday, April 17, 2007
This Day in the Short History of American Disasters
On this day in 1961, about 1500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a failed attempt to do what Castro did to Batista a few years before, namely, overthrow the government, this one a communist dictatorship under Fidel Castro, by force of arms. Kennedy, whom I never liked as a man or as a President, gets high marks for fighting Communism and for attempting to depose Castro, something no other administration has attempted, to their discredit not to mention the long suffering of the Cuban people. However, allowing the CIA to plan it without military support was stupid, at least in hindsight, and not supplying air cover was even worse a mistake; and when it began to go bad, Kennedy lost his nerve completely. That's never good. Humiliation and disaster with no up-side. The weakness Kennedy displayed led almost directly to the missile crisis a few years later, when Kennedy, to his eternal credit, successfully navigated between the Scylla of invasion and the Charybdis of weak acceptance of a fait accompli.
Labels: Bay of Pigs; Kennedy criticism
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 6:21 AM 
