Tim Carroll

"Tim, Judyth's story, if true, proves Oswald was CIA, no commie nut, and innocent of the assassination of JFK. You don't think that matters much? Then what are we all doing here? Wim" Wim, Did you miss my response to Judyth's response to me when I thanked her for her succinct and direct answer to my question? I believe that proof of Oswald's CIA employment, or proof of Judyth's credibility together with her story would be completely significant. Logic agrees with Wim that "Judyth's story, if true, proves Oswald was CIA, no commie nut, and innocent of the assassination of JFK." But history won't come to that without the aforementioned "proof." We already have Veciana reporting a meeting with David Phillips with Oswald present. We have McKewon, we have people who saw Ruby and Oswald together, and none of that has mattered. I know what I think that shows, but it doesn't qualify as "proof." Witness testimony by itself won't add anything to the history. Tim

The times in which we live are very reflective of the beginning of the National Security State era. America had come out of World War II with the opportunity to forge a mutuality of interests with the Soviet Union. By 1949, however, with the detonation of an atomic device by the Russians and the impending success of the communist revolution in China, U.S. policy-makers concluded that coexistence with the USSR was impossible. The early policy of containment of Soviet expansionism in Europe was expanded to Asia and the first formal statement of American anti-communism policy was issued in a document known as National Security Council (NSC)-68. Overextending and misapplying considerations presented in an incredibly influential essay known as the “X” article, it stated, “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” It went on to say: "The Kremlin is inescapably militant . . . because it possesses and is possessed by a world-wide revolutionary movement, because it is the inheritor of Russian imperialism, and because it is a totalitarian dictatorship. . . . It is quite clear from Soviet theory and practice that the Kremlin seeks to bring the free world under its dominion by the methods of the cold war." NSC-68 concluded that the Soviet Union’s “fundamental design” required the destruction of the United States and therefore “mortally challenged” the U.S. Contrary to the apparent conviction and certainty of NSC-68, the man who had authored the very document upon which it was based had serious misgivings. George Kennan was more afraid of the mind set being represented than about the need to generate more anxiety about Soviet intentions. NSC-68 would sanctify the rejection of diplomatic options and pretextualize a vast growth in the military establishment, as well as the militarization of foreign policy. Noting the attraction of promoting an enemy’s formidability, Kennan wrote: "It is safer and easier to cease the attempt to analyze the probabilities involved in your enemy’s processes or to calculate his weaknesses. It seems safer to give him the credit of every doubt in matters of strength, and to credit him indiscriminately with all aggressive designs, even when some of them are mutually contradictory." By the beginning of 1950, the chickens had come home to roost. The attack of “the primitives,” as Secretary of State Dean Acheson referred to the fervent anti-Communists, was reaching fever pitch. His own prior encouragement of such thinking notwithstanding, Acheson was dismayed by the perjury conviction of his friend, Alger Hiss, for denying his alleged involvement in Soviet espionage. Less than two weeks after Hiss’ conviction, Klaus Fuchs confessed to spying on the Manhattan Project for the Soviet Union. By February 9th, anti-Communist hysteria reached new heights with Senator Joe McCarthy’s allegation of Communist spies in the State Department. That spring, a Gallup Poll found that 39 percent of the respondents considered McCarthy’s charges “a good thing.” The commencement of the Korean War in June of that year was the icing on the cake. There remained little doubt in the minds of Americans that the battle against communism was at least as immediate and threatening as the Nazi movement of the late 1930s. Bringing Cold War containment and hemispheric sphere of influence considerations together, a document classified as NSC-141 was issued. Applying the logic of NSC-68, it declared a commitment to “make the Latin American nations resistant to the internal growth of communism and to Soviet political warfare.” A secondary stated objective was to promote “hemispheric solidarity in support of our world policy.” This would be accomplished “through individual and collective defense measures against external aggression and internal subversion.” This document became the blueprint for the United States’ future Latin America policy just as NSC-68 had become the blueprint globally. The Monroe Doctrine had now been deftly adapted to new Cold War considerations.

Judyth wrote: "I state that I intimately knew the accused assasssin and that he told me he was trying to save Kennedy's life. He also helped me in a project to try to eliminate Fidel Castro. I was in contact with him ending 37 1/2 hours before the assassination. People who know me well and have seen the evidence and records I retained and have collected, and who have seen films and heard audiotapes of living witnesses affirming that Lee and I had a love affair/were lovers. . . . IT DOES MATTER. INFINITELY. I AM A WITNESS TO THE INNOCENCE OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD." Judyth: Thank you. That was very succinct and aswered my question directly - UNTIL YOU WENT BACK AND EDITED. Tim

Martin is certainly correct that the Judyth Baker stuff heavy-handedly overwhelms forums. A check of Lancer right now would lead one to think it to be the Judyth Baker Forum. I don't get the issue, personally, as it wouldn't matter much if this woman did experience the things I've read. If someone can give me a one or two sentence explanation of why the story matters one way or another I would appreciate that (not an item by item examination of veracity). Tim

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The Cuban Missile Crisis was as dangerous as dangerous gets. JFK's turning back the momentum toward war that had been building since the nuclear age began represents, IMO, his single greatest contribution. Since the late 1950s, when the Russian leader had boasted of “building missiles like sausages,” the American public had feared a Soviet superiority in strategic weapons, otherwise known as “the missile gap.” This misconception grew out of a mutual deception by Khrushchev and Eisenhower, who both knew that the U.S. was overflying the Soviet Union with the top secret U-2 reconnaissance plane, and who also both knew that Khrushchev’s boasts were false. But Eisenhower was served well by the deceit: it forestalled an actual Soviet buildup, it created a pretext for a massive American increase in strategic weapons, and it fostered the continuation of rabid anti-communism in domestic American politics. For Khrushchev, the boasts were an integral part of his blustery campaign to bolster Soviet prestige throughout the Third World and in China. The impression that the Soviet Union was equal or superior to the U.S. in terms of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was essential to both his domestic and international standing. This deception by the two leaders was the most tightly held secret within both superpower governments. One of Kennedy’s most effective arguments during his election campaign had been the notion of a missile gap, which held that the Soviets had a greater industrial capability for missile manufacturing than the U.S. He had declared from the floor of the Senate in 1958: “We are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival.” Sending Allen Dulles to brief Kennedy during the election, Eisenhower told his CIA director to emphasize the fact of the U.S.’ commanding military superiority. But Dulles decided on his own to tell the candidate that he could not be sure of the true status of the missile gap until the U.S. had full satellite coverage of the Soviet Union. Richard Nixon would later assert that the CIA, and Dulles in particular, had deliberately held back the truth in order to provide Kennedy with a powerful campaign issue. Nixon may well have been correct given the fact that the CIA was better informed on the issue than even the Air Force as a result of its own U-2 reconnaissance overflights. The Bay of Pigs, however, would quickly dispel the CIA of the notion that Kennedy would be a more favorable friend to have in the White House. Only three weeks after the Inauguration, Secretary of Defense McNamara told a group of reporters in a casual briefing that there actually was no missile gap. He was so naïve at that point that he had misunderstood the difference between “off the record” and “on background.” As soon as he had entered the Pentagon he had made it his first order of business to “determine the size of the gap and the remedial action required to close it.” He had quickly concluded that “the CIA was right and the Air Force was wrong. There was a gap—but it was in our favor!” When he told this to the reporters, they “nearly broke down the door in their rush to get to the phones.” When he went to Kennedy to apologize and offer his resignation, the President said, “Oh come on, Bob, forget it. We’re in a helluva mess, but we all put our foot in our mouth once in a while. Just forget it. It’ll blow over.” The construction of the missile gap fears was not so easily dismissed for the public or the military bureaucracy. When the Kennedy administration had come to power it quickly become apparent that Kennedy could not match his predecessor’s military credentials. By the autumn of 1961, the Soviets were threatening to seize West Berlin. After refusing to commit American forces at the Bay of Pigs, and then being beaten in debate with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy feared that the Soviets might seek to exploit his perceived weakness. However, information from the new Corona satellite had revealed the location and provided for the targeting of all Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Kennedy knew that the few (perhaps only three ) Soviet ICBMs that actually existed were suddenly obsolete. He expected that if the United States revealed the Soviet inferiority, Khrushchev would be dissuaded from pursuing his risky policy on West Berlin. Thus, Kennedy arranged for the Soviets to learn the true situation. In hindsight, it can be surmised that Khrushchev did not anticipate that pressing his agenda on West Berlin would result in Kennedy being forced to reveal the degree of the Soviet ICBM inferiority; and Kennedy did not anticipate that his public revelation would require Khrushchev to produce a remedy that would more quickly redress the exposed strategic imbalance than a crash ICBM buildup would offer. The strain such a buildup would have placed on an already beleaguered economy, the impatience of the hard-line Soviet generals, and the potential loss of face with the Chinese and the Third World, were all elements that demanded an immediate solution. The constructions of political spectacles and impressions management had come to result in the deployment of medium and intermediate range missiles to Cuba, thereby precipitating the most dangerous confrontation in the history of the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis, far less than being the strategic danger of historical representation, was the political payment due bill for the myth of the missile gap, which began with the impression management performances of Khrushchev and Eisenhower in the 1950s. The Russian’s promises “to obliterate Western Europe” and to “bury” capitalism , accompanied by the quiet complicity of Eisenhower, resulted in a deeply rooted misperception. The public necessity generated by this misperception severely limited the range of options available to Kennedy, who remarked to his brother that if he had responded less forcefully, he “would have been impeached.” With the demise of the Soviet Union, a wealth of new information has emerged, exposing more clearly than ever before the methods and motives of Soviet command and control structures. Recent oral history conferences involving both American and Soviet participants have generated startling revelations about the nature and degree of the threat represented by the Crisis. Ironically, a quarter of a century earlier, in a movie called "Dr. Strangelove," there was a popular culture depiction of what Robert McNamara has now described as “the most dangerous element of the entire episode.” Analysts would learn that the absurdity of an unknown, unannounced deterrent had actually been in place in Cuba in 1962, revealing to some degree the illegitimacy of the deterrence doctrine itself. A former Soviet general has revealed that his country intalled more than medium and intermediate range missiles in Cuba during those dangerous days. Soviet field commanders also had six mobile launchers and nine Luna tactical missiles with nuclear warheads. The officers were pre-authorized to use the missiles at their discretion to repel a U.S. invasion, which the Soviets believed to be imminent. Although Kennedy was in Washington lobbying and stalling ExComm from its demands to invade, it is entirely possible that failing in these efforts, he would have had no choice but to give his generals the go-ahead. Had the invasion taken place, it is likely that at least one of the tactical nukes would have been used against U.S. forces. McNamara has said that the resulting pressure for the United States to launch a nuclear counterstrike at Cuba or the Soviet Union would have been irresistible. He has called this “the most dangerous element of the entire episode.” In hindsight it can be seen that the apocalypse would have been initiated “not by a head of state in consultation with his best informed and thoughtful aides, but by some panicked colonel in fatigues on a beleaguered island far from home who was just trying to do the best he could to save his men and himself.” The question raised by the gauntlet thrown down by Khrushchev seemed to be whether Kennedy would choose holocaust or humiliation. But the President, never one to play by the rules, sought to find his own path without regard for the advice of the so-called experts. . . . Tim

Shanet: It wasn't just John Kennedy's. This same group came straight out of WWII with a mission of total military dominance. The mindset that led the U.S. to cross the evolutionary threshold of strategic rather than tactical warfare at Dresden and the other mass firebombings directed at civilian populations, then to unnecessarily use the atomic bomb, then to incorporate the Nazi intelligence as our own in Eastern Europe, and ultimately through the late 1940s and 1950s to build toward a level of sufficiently overwhelming force mixed with total demonization of liberal godless communism, to pretextualize a "preemptive" first strike. The moment had technically been reached in the summer of 1961 when the Corona satellite rendered the few existent Soviet ICBMs suddenly useless. The hairtrigger was in place in Berlin and Kennedy's range of choice was absurdly narrow, as he well knew. His response was to show strength, call up troops, authorize 1,000 new ICBMs (LeMay's request being for 10,000, and JFK saying 1,000 was the least he could get away with), while at the same time he engaged in secret correspondence with Khrushchev. When the showdown came in October 1962, and the "militant reactionary political opposition" finally had reason to believe they had JFK cornered, with the Chairman of the JCS actually informing JFK that he had until Monday, JFK gave away the store in the form of a secret deal to dismantle U.S. missiles in Turkey within 6 mos. This secret deal was huge. It was not just JFK being soft, or afraid of the nuke, as was said in hip Pentagon circles, it was treason of the first order. And it wasn't just a treasonous way out of that one crisis, it was an almost religious betrayal of a military theology - like a high priest reaching the culminating moment only to suddenly throw off his garments and walk away. There is ample evidence of how changed JFK was by the joust at the abyss. Tim

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Question: Did JFK play the key role in ending the Cuban Missile Crisis? Was the final decision his or did he follow advice from others? The divergence between good reasons and real reasons is at the root of the issue of why Khrushchev chose to deploy nuclear missiles to the Western Hemisphere. Publicly, Khrushchev always maintained that the U.S. created the need for the deployment by attempting the invasion of Cuban at the Bay of Pigs, and by continuing to wage war, albeit secretly, against Castro’s regime. Although Operation Mongoose was an extreme provocation, leading Castro to believe, with good reason, that the U.S. was preparing to invade, there is still cause for skepticism that Khrushchev would have been willing to risk nuclear war to defend the island. It would not have served his interests to announce, especially to Castro, that Cuba provided a means of rectifying a problem of deeper significance to the Soviet Union. At a meeting early in the Crisis, the plainspoken William Harvey had the temerity to bluntly tell both Kennedys in front of all those assembled that they were to blame for the present state of affairs: if they hadn’t publicly distinguished offensive from defensive, thereby signaling that certain missiles would be tolerated, then none of this would be happening. Others attending the meeting were absolutely horrified that Harvey would exercise such poor professional judgment and so openly criticize the Kennedy brothers. He would not be long for the Washington scene, but before leaving he would, unbeknownst to his superiors, dispatch ten teams of commandos to Cuba at the very time that measures were being taken not to enflame the already dangerous situation. His initiative came to light when he was asked, at a National Security Council executive meeting in the Joint Chiefs of Staff war room, if all operations had been stopped according to directive. “Well,” he said, “all but one.” He told them that a number of the agents had already landed and there was no way to call them back. When Harvey was later sent packing, E. Howard Hunt claimed the reason to be a wall poster in Harvey’s office that, in a reference to the Bay of Pigs, read: “The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots” Supposedly this represented too much “Gunsmoke stance” for the Attorney General. Since the late 1950s, when the Russian leader had boasted of “building missiles like sausages,” the American public had feared a Soviet superiority in strategic weapons, otherwise known as “the missile gap.” This misconception grew out of a mutual deception by Khrushchev and Eisenhower, who both knew that the U.S. was overflying the Soviet Union with the top secret U-2 reconnaissance plane, and who also both knew that Khrushchev’s boasts were false. But Eisenhower was served well by the deceit: it forestalled an actual Soviet buildup, it created a pretext for a massive American increase in strategic weapons, and it fostered the continuation of rabid anti-communism in domestic American politics. For Khrushchev, the boasts were an integral part of his blustery campaign to bolster Soviet prestige throughout the Third World and in China. The impression that the Soviet Union was equal or superior to the U.S. in terms of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was essential to both his domestic and international standing. This deception by the two leaders was the most tightly held secret within both superpower governments. One of Kennedy’s most effective arguments during his election campaign had been the notion of a missile gap, which held that the Soviets had a greater industrial capability for missile manufacturing than the U.S. He had declared from the floor of the Senate in 1958: “We are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival.” Sending Allen Dulles to brief Kennedy during the election, Eisenhower told his CIA director to emphasize the fact of the U.S.’ commanding military superiority. But Dulles decided on his own to tell the candidate that he could not be sure of the true status of the missile gap until the U.S. had full satellite coverage of the Soviet Union. Richard Nixon would later assert that the CIA, and Dulles in particular, had deliberately held back the truth in order to provide Kennedy with a powerful campaign issue. Nixon may well have been correct given the fact that the CIA was better informed on the issue than even the Air Force as a result of its own U-2 reconnaissance overflights. The Bay of Pigs, however, would quickly dispel the CIA of the notion that Kennedy would be a more favorable friend to have in the White House. Only three weeks after the Inauguration, Secretary of Defense McNamara told a group of reporters in a casual briefing that there actually was no missile gap. He was so naïve at that point that he had misunderstood the difference between “off the record” and “on background.” As soon as he had entered the Pentagon he had made it his first order of business to “determine the size of the gap and the remedial action required to close it.” He had quickly concluded that “the CIA was right and the Air Force was wrong. There was a gap—but it was in our favor!” When he told this to the reporters, they “nearly broke down the door in their rush to get to the phones.” When he went to Kennedy to apologize and offer his resignation, the President said, “Oh come on, Bob, forget it. We’re in a helluva mess, but we all put our foot in our mouth once in a while. Just forget it. It’ll blow over.” The construction of the missile gap fears was not so easily dismissed for the public or the military bureaucracy. When the Kennedy administration had come to power it quickly become apparent that Kennedy could not match his predecessor’s military credentials. By the autumn of 1961, the Soviets were threatening to seize West Berlin. After refusing to commit American forces at the Bay of Pigs, and then being beaten in debate with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy feared that the Soviets might seek to exploit his perceived weakness. However, information from the new Corona satellite had revealed the location and provided for the targeting of all Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Kennedy knew that the few (perhaps only three ) Soviet ICBMs that actually existed were suddenly obsolete. He expected that if the United States revealed the Soviet inferiority, Khrushchev would be dissuaded from pursuing his risky policy on West Berlin. Thus, Kennedy arranged for the Soviets to learn the true situation. In hindsight, it can be surmised that Khrushchev did not anticipate that pressing his agenda on West Berlin would result in Kennedy being forced to reveal the degree of the Soviet ICBM inferiority; and Kennedy did not anticipate that his public revelation would require Khrushchev to produce a remedy that would more quickly redress the exposed strategic imbalance than a crash ICBM buildup would offer. The strain such a buildup would have placed on an already beleaguered economy, the impatience of the hard-line Soviet generals, and the potential loss of face with the Chinese and the Third World, were all elements that demanded an immediate solution. The constructions of political spectacles and impressions management had come to result in the deployment of medium and intermediate range missiles to Cuba, thereby precipitating the most dangerous confrontation in the history of the world. Upon learning of the placement of the missiles in Cuba, the President’s first move was to assemble a special group of advisers, designated as the Executive Committee, or ExComm for short. This team of experts concluded that the defense of Cuba was not a sufficient reason to explain the Soviet action. It was their conclusion that Khrushchev’s primary motivation was to accomplish a quick fix countermove against what later came to be known as the missile gap in reverse. The group considered attempting to exploit the Soviet motive by driving a wedge between the Soviets and Cubans. The President suggested “getting some word to Castro, perhaps through the Canadian ambassador in Havana or through his representative at the U.N.” Kennedy thought a back channel approach to Castro would be best, “get him apart privately and tell him that this is no longer support for Cuba, that Cuba is being victimized here, and that the Soviets are preparing Cuba for destruction, or betrayal.” He noted that the New York Times had quoted high Soviet officials as saying: “We’ll trade Cuba for Berlin.” Even Kennedy’s most severe critics laud “his skillful management of the early phase of the Crisis.” He kept the secret for almost a week during which time he withstood the pressure of demands from the military and other hard-liners within ExComm for a complete invasion of Cuba. After extensive deliberation and debate over the proper course, the President made the crisis move of establishing a naval blockade of Cuba. Seeking to enhance the perceived legitimacy and avoid the connotation of an act of war, he decided to term the blockade a “quarantine,” which he announced to the public in what was perhaps the most alarming speech ever delivered by an American president. His address was designed to divert public attention from his private belief that the missiles did not significantly alter the balance of power and that he had failed to warn against them until after they were already on their way. He knew that a less apocalyptic speech would not have been as effective in arousing the public and rallying support, as well as silencing the domestic political criticism he expected to receive. For his part, Castro accepted Soviet missiles into his country to reduce the risk of another American invasion attempt, such as the Bay of Pigs a year before. He could have had little doubt that some pretext would be found or created to legitimize the use of American forces the next time. But with the missiles at the assembly stage and Kennedy having imposed a quarantine of Cuba, Castro found himself and his country to be pawns in a battle between superpowers. The Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, has noted that Castro “didn’t know what was going on” and wasn’t consulted on key issues. Although his anger would later be tempered by revelations of the seriousness of the situation, at the time, Castro was very indignant about this circumstance and desired the onset of what he considered to be the inevitable military clash with the United States. He considered, along with most foreign policy experts in the world, that a blockade was an act of war deserving of the most aggressive kind of response. Although critics have questioned whether the imposition of the quarantine was risk-taking incommensurate with any expected gain, a more relevant question is whether Kennedy could have gotten away with any less belligerent posture, given the edifice of Cold War constructions which contextualized the situation and constricted the range of options available. The true nature of the problem was revealed in a comment made by Secretary of Defense McNamara to the ExComm on the first day of the Crisis when he said, “I’ll be quite frank. I don’t think there is a military problem here. . . . This is a domestic political problem.” In this it can be seen that the Cuban Missile Crisis, far less than being the strategic danger of historical representation, was the political payment due bill for the myth of the missile gap, which began with the impression management performances of Khrushchev and Eisenhower in the 1950s. The Russian’s promises “to obliterate Western Europe” and to “bury” capitalism , accompanied by the quiet complicity of Eisenhower, resulted in a deeply rooted misperception. The public necessity generated by this misperception severely limited the range of options available to Kennedy, who remarked to his brother that if he had responded less forcefully, he “would have been impeached.” Bobby Kennedy’s role at the beginning of the Crisis was quite different than the history-making rendition he was to later promote. At the first meeting of the ExComm group, the President’s brother adopted his then-usual militant stance, endorsing an invasion of Cuba even at the cost of an all-out war. He suggested that a pretext be engineered to validate the legitimacy of attacking Cuba. Making reference to historical rumors that the battleship Maine had been deliberately sunk in Havana harbor by the U.S. to pave the way for entrance into the Spanish American War, Bobby Kennedy is heard on tape to say, “Sink the Maine again or something.” This is a flagrantly clear example of the instinct to construct, to completely fabricate out of whole cloth, false pretexts for actions which on their face may be unpalatable by the governed masses. The more moderate approach of quarantine, as opposed to air strikes followed by full invasion, was consistent with Kennedy’s policy of Gradual Escalation Strategy, which mirrors the process of legitimacy construction in its piecemeal character, precluding any overall or comprehensive examination. It is an incremental approach that is intended to steadily squeeze a resolution out of the enemy. It can, however, lead to a quagmire which is unseen going in, and from which extrication is very difficult. In the short-run, it avoids the kind of extreme action that requires public explanation or even serious decision-making. That is why the myth that Gradual Escalation worked during the Cuban Missile Crisis is thought to have misled official leaders to later apply it to Vietnam, where this policy constituted a kind of quicksand. Another pitfall of this approach is that it makes official leaders unduly dependent on the actions and information generated by the military along the way. The quarantine was a classic example of this, being far more dangerous and far less effective than generally reported. There are sometimes apparently layers of the legitimation process being enacted, such as when the military or an intelligence agency submits data designed to force a political leader’s decision-making in a certain direction. Such was the case with the Navy’s execution of the quarantine, which bore mixed results. As Joseph F. Bouchard reports in his detailed study of the U.S. Navy’s activities during the crisis: “Submerged Soviet submarines essentially ignored the sonar and explosive charge signals.” Bouchard found “no reported instances of a Soviet submarine immediately surfacing” in response to signals to do so: “The Soviet submarines did not react to the signals with other than their normal efforts at evasion.” Particularly noteworthy, and contrary to the impression conveyed in previous accounts, the data obtained by Bouchard from U.S. Navy sources indicate that the three Soviet submarines that were headed toward the Caribbean from the Atlantic “had all but reversed their course and were headed home by the time U.S. Navy ASW [anti-submarine warfare] forces were able to locate them and prosecute them.” This is contrary to the information the President himself was given to work with. With the demise of the Soviet Union, a wealth of new information has emerged, exposing more clearly than ever before the methods and motives of Soviet command and control structures. Recent oral history conferences involving both American and Soviet participants have generated startling revelations about the nature and degree of the threat represented by the Crisis. Ironically, a quarter of a century earlier, there was a popular culture depiction of what Robert McNamara has now described as “the most dangerous element of the entire episode.” This was contained in Peter Sellers’ classic movie parody of ExComm, Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Love The Bomb. The movie portrays the absurdity of the nuclear deterrence doctrine, whereby knowledge of an opponent’s nuclear capability supposedly forecloses the use of one’s own. When the fictional Soviet Ambassador is brought in and informed that a lunatic general has launched a fleet of B-52 bombers, he informs the Americans that this will trigger a newly-constructed “Doomsday Device,” an ultimate deterrent that will destroy the world. To this disclosure, the leading American mad scientist, a former Nazi German mad scientist, explains the fundamental logic of such deterrence. Exposing the absurdity, he declares that such a deterrent only has value “if you tell the other side about it.” In the movie, the Ambassador explains that the announcement of the device’s existence was to take place within a couple of weeks, in celebration of Lenin’s birthday. Twenty-five years after the release of this motion picture, analysts would learn that the absurdity of an unknown, unannounced deterrent had actually been in place in Cuba in 1962, revealing to some degree the illegitimacy of the deterrence doctrine itself. A former Soviet general has revealed that his country intalled more than medium and intermediate range missiles in Cuba during those dangerous days. Soviet field commanders also had six mobile launchers and nine Luna tactical missiles with nuclear warheads. The officers were pre-authorized to use the missiles at their discretion to repel a U.S. invasion, which the Soviets believed to be imminent. Although Kennedy was in Washington lobbying and stalling ExComm from its demands to invade, it is entirely possi-ble that failing in these efforts, he would have had no choice but to give his generals the go-ahead. Had the invasion taken place, it is likely that at least one of the tactical nukes would have been used against U.S. forces. McNamara has said that the resulting pressure for the United States to launch a nuclear counterstrike at Cuba or the Soviet Union would have been irresistible. He has called this “the most dangerous element of the entire episode.” In hindsight it can be seen that the apocalypse would have been initiated “not by a head of state in consultation with his best informed and thoughtful aides, but by some panicked colonel in fatigues on a beleaguered island far from home who was just trying to do the best he could to save his men and himself.” The question raised by the gauntlet thrown down by Khrushchev seemed to be whether Kennedy would choose holocaust or humiliation. But the President, never one to play by the rules, sought to find his own path without regard for the advice of the so-called experts. To his mind, this was the big test he had been preparing for all his life—the negotiation to end all negotiations. And in that context, knowing that the United States was vulnerable on the purpose of the Turkey-based Jupiter missiles, yet also knowing that he could not be seen as conceding American or NATO assets at the point of a gun, Kennedy admitted in private that the Jupiters would be negotiated away, but not too soon. If he folded his cards prematurely, the stakes would rise. To his sense of how the game is played, timing was key in such gamesmanship. Despite their post-World War II expansionism, the Soviets had never based nuclear weapons beyond their own borders, whereas the Americans had placed nuclear weapons all along the periphery of the communist world. Particularly egregious to the Soviets had been the Eisenhower administration’s treaty with Turkey, establishing an agreement to base Jupiter missiles there, right along the Soviet border. Politically, these missiles helped solidify Turkey as part of NATO, but militarily they represented an offensive, first-strike capability on the part of the United States against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s concern about the American impetus toward such a first-strike capability was reflected in a remark he had made to then-Vice President Richard Nixon, “If you intend to make war on us, I understand; if not, why [do this]? The U.S. could hardly have done a better job of provoking the historical Russian fear of attack. A still-debated issue is whether the U.S. deployment to Turkey was a Kennedy or Eisenhower policy. In the midst of the Crisis, the Soviets claimed they had placed missiles in Cuba in response to the United States deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Kennedy’s aides have recounted the President’s exasperation that the Jupiters were still there, despite his repeated requests that they be removed. Ken O’Donnell reported the President as saying, “Just to set the record straight, will you find out when was the last time I asked to have those damned missiles taken out of Turkey? Not the first five times I asked for their removal, just the date of the last time.” According to Barton Bernstein, Kennedy did not actually order the removal of what he called “those frigging missiles” out of Turkey, “but only implied a study of its feasibility.” This dispute about what constitutes a presidential order seems somewhat semantical when one considers that it is not a monarchy being discussed. There is a process that must be engaged, involving State Department and Defense Department reviews, embassies to be contacted, etc. While noting that “presidents rarely order moves that reverse a previous president’s promise to an ally,” Roger Hilsman reports that “Kennedy made his desires very clear on at least three occasions at which [he] was present.” On the last full day of the Crisis, later to become known as Black Saturday, the president decided to add an ultimatum to his demand that the missiles be removed. The elements of this ultimatum were a time limit for compliance and a credible threat of punishment for noncompliance. The President sent his brother, Bobby, to deliver the final word to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, with whom he had been conducting secret meetings throughout the Crisis. There has been considerable debate over the nature of the message actually delivered and whether it constituted an ultimatum. In an oral history interview not published until a quarter century later, Bobby admitted to having “delivered [Dobrynin] some ultimatums, particularly the one that Saturday night.” Ambassador Dobrynin would later support Bobby Kennedy’s public version that “This was not an ultimatum . . . but just a statement of fact.” Perhaps this perspective reflects the Soviet willingness to believe the Ambassador’s account, which had Bobby saying, “If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American Army could get out of control.” One of the most flagrantly illegitimate of governments is that created by coup d’état. This is so true in the context of the United States that it is generally dismissed as impossible in such a democratic a country. Nevertheless, debate over whether Bobby delivered an ultimatum or a statement of fact (the threat of military overthrow) to the Soviet ambassador centers on the differentiation. Transcripts reveal that the real ultimatum had been issued earlier that day to the President by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Maxwell Taylor delivered the military’s demand to the president that the air strike and invasion had to begin “no later than Monday morning, the 29th, unless there is irrefutable evidence in the meantime that offensive weapons are being dismantled and rendered inoperable.” JFK would have had a far more difficult time garnering public support had he overreached, pursuing the removal of Castro or of Soviet influence from Cuba rather than remaining focused on the removal of the missiles. Limiting the objective to removal of the missiles gave greater legitimacy to Kennedy’s policy than would have been the case had he embraced either of the two more ambitious goals. Alexander George notes, "Kennedy’s advantage over Khrushchev with respect to the legitimacy of their competing claims was invaluable, in turn, allowing for Kennedy to gain the support of the OAS and that of much of the international community. . . . Limiting the U.S. objective to removal of the missiles also exacerbated Khrushchev’s problem of reconciling the secrecy and deception with which he had carried out the missile deployment with his claim that the deployment constituted a legitimate contribution to the security of his Cuban ally. " Some of the greatest myth-making about the Cuban Missile Crisis centered on the process of its resolution. The earliest versions held that Khrushchev fell back on his public reason for deploying the missiles, the defense of Cuba, and agreed to settle the dispute in exchange for a no-invasion pledge from Kennedy. When Soviet hard-liners added the deal-busting condition of withdrawal of the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey in a letter sent only a few hours after Khrushchev’s, resolution of the impasse seemed as remote as ever. It was at this point, so the myth went, that Bobby Kennedy came up with the clever idea of ignoring the existence of the second letter and agreeing to the terms of the earlier, more favorable letter. When the Soviets acquiesced to these terms, the resolution became known as the “Trollope Ploy,” named for the nineteenth century British romance novelist who described a girl taking a suitor’s remark as a proposal of marriage. We have since learned not only that the Trollope Ploy was not by any means the whole explanation for the settlement; we have learned that it was McGeorge Bundy’s idea, and not Bobby’s. Moreover, the letter ploy was only a cover-up of the secret deal that could not be revealed publicly, not even to the ExComm. For years, analysts and participants alike, including Fidel Castro, were puzzled over Khrushchev’s seeming surrender. Richard Nixon, after losing the race for governor of California and blaming the distraction of the events in Cuba for his defeat, publicly speculated that there may have been a “secret deal” to settle the Crisis. When it was first revealed that there had, in fact, been a secret deal to resolve the Crisis, it was over-looked for a number of years because the disclosure was contained in a book written by an overt Kennedy apologist, Arthur Schlesinger. Noting Schlesinger’s “privileged access” to documents that would have revealed the secret agreement to remove the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey, Barton Bernstein has complained that his own “efforts to gain access to the major segments on the Missile Crisis have been unsuccessful despite various requests from 1979-1991.” Finally revealing the degree to which Kennedy insiders had controlled the history of the Crisis, in 1989 Ted Sorensen offered what he called a “confession” about the secret deal: that before Bobby Kennedy’s posthumous book was published, he had taken it upon himself to “edit that out of his diaries.” In this, the flagrancy of the Kennedy history-making influence is shown to have reigned supreme for many years. Now we know that, as Garry Wills charged, Kennedy “wanted to remove the [Jupiter] missiles provided he did not appear forced to bargain with the Soviets to accomplish this.” This observation recognizes the influence of the Munich Syndrome, which held appeasement up to high scorn in memory of British efforts to avoid a war with Hitler. It was ironic that President Kennedy’s college thesis, later published as Why England Slept, was concerned with this very same episode. The lesson learned and now being applied was vintage JFK: no president can be seen to be capitulating to, or appeasing, a blackmail-type demand, regardless of the context or legitimacy. But what if Khrushchev had refused to settle for a private assurance that the Turkish Jupiters would be dismantled? Was Kennedy willing to risk nuclear holocaust rather than admit, as Wills suggests, “that a trade of useless missiles near each other’s countries was eminently fair?” It was a quarter century before historians learned that Kennedy had prepared a fall-back contingency that would provide for an internationalist solution doing precisely that, thereby avoiding personal political damage and promoting an alternative legitimacy; if all else failed, he had arranged for a Turkey-for-Cuba missile swap to be proposed in the U.N. Khrushchev’s willingness to engage in a secret deal to settle the crisis demonstrated his emphasis on substance in contrast to Kennedy’s prioritization of style and the importance of appearances, even when they are misleading or false. Khrushchev gained all his objectives yet appeared to lose, Kennedy gave away the store, but appeared to win. Thus, Kennedy trumped Khrushchev in the eyes of the world and history. By a standard that measures legitimation according to which government is best able to construct a palatable explanation, Kennedy’s deceptive performance was legitimate and Khrushchev’s was not. The revelation of the secret solution takes us back to the fallacy of the Soviets’ public reasons for the deployment in the first place. While analysts continue to advance the defense of Cuba perspective, Fidel Castro’s analysis is more sophisticated. As recently as 1993, he asserted that his country being used as a bargaining chip, “ran counter to the theory that the missiles had been sent to defend Cuba. You do not defend Cuba by withdrawing missiles from Turkey. That was very clear. That was elementary logic. Defending Cuba would have been accomplished by insisting that the United States withdraw from the base at Guantánamo, stop the pirate attacks, and end the blockade. But withdrawing missiles from Turkey completely contradicted the theory that the main objective of the deployment had been defending Cuba.” In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, admiration and criticism of the handling of the affair came from both sides of the political spectrum. From the Right, Barry Goldwater declared that the no-invasion pledge had “locked Castro and communism into Latin America and thrown away the key to their removal.” Richard Nixon wrote that the White House had “enabled the United States to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory.” From the Left came cries that the President had recklessly and needlessly endangered mankind. I. F. Stone asked: “Mr. Kennedy’s gamble paid off. But what if it had failed?” According to Garry Wills, “Having fooled the people in order to lead them, Kennedy was forced to serve the folly he had induced.” While such diverse opinions are not unusual in politics, it is remarkable how long the narrative of the Crisis has developed without any historical consensus developing regarding even the most basic facts. Originally, many of the misconceptions were fostered by the Kennedy public relations apparatus. Con-cerning JFK’s secretiveness and penchant for history-making, Michael Beschloss notes that “the President wished his communications with Khrushchev . . . to be classified into eternity.” They didn’t make it quite that long, so these communications, along with other recently declassified pieces of evidence, have already refuted several mythical versions of the Crisis, and they serve to refute anyone who considers remembering to be a relatively straight-forward process. Of course, it comes as no surprise that steps would be taken to color history a certain way; that this would be done is precisely the probability that should be assumed by analysts.

Through 1959 and 1960, Castro could do no wrong in the eyes of the vast majority of Cubans. A sample survey conducted by Lloyd Free during the spring of 1960 found that “86 percent of the combined urban and semi-urban populations supported the regime.” The survey classified approximately one-half of these as “fervent supporters.” This popular support contradicted the legitimacy of the simultaneous initiation of planning for the military overthrow of Cuba’s government. It also calls into question how American leaders could fall for the notion, presented by the CIA and Miami Cubans, that an invasion attempt would set off a popular uprising. Perhaps a belief that Castro was unpopular was a self-validating and self-legitimating interpretation that allowed the planners to feel that their activities could be justified and even successful. On a bureaucratically mundane level, the decisionmakers could believe it because the CIA said it was so. However, more than any other single event, the Bay of Pigs would put the lie to the belief that the CIA could be trusted by leaders who relied on it. Almost immediately, 1961 became the year for confrontation between the U.S. and Cuba. On January 3rd, the Cuban Charge de Affairs issued a directive that the number of U.S. diplomatic personnel stationed in Cuba should not exceed eleven. That same day, at a meeting involving the President and his highest foreign policy officials and advisors, it was decided that the U.S. should break off diplomatic relations with Cuba. Many books have noted that the Cuban exile force in training to seize power from Castro mysteriously grew during the presidential transition period from a small, elite guerrilla force to the 1500 it was later to become. This implies that the CIA exploited a window of opportunity between the controls of the two presidents. However, newly released State Department documents reveal that the change was overtly authorized by the Eisenhower administration at the same January 3rd meeting. Notes on the meeting record that “it was agreed that the number of Cuban exiles being trained for the invasion should be increased, possibly up to 1,500.” These changes, coming a little over two weeks before Eisenhower left office, represent a last-minute construction that would entrench the planning and force Kennedy’s hand during the beginning of his administration. A little known international incident had occurred after the 1960 presidential election which, according to Piero Gleijeses, “had thrown the CIA into confusion and crippled the growth of the exile force (creating more breathing space for Kennedy, had he seized it).” In Guatemala, where the Cuban exiles were being trained, a group of young officers had revolted; one of their major grievances was the presence of the Cuban Expeditionary Force in their country, which was by then an open secret. The revolt threatened to topple the government of President Ydigoras, who turned at once to the United States for help. He requested that the CIA make an airborne landing, which, fearing they might lose their base, they did. Richard Bissell has admitted, “I remember being called one night by our base commander in Guatemala. They wanted authorization to use the Brigade against the rebels. As it happened, they only had to use some of them. . . . A few brigade planes strafed the rebels.” E. Howard Hunt reports somewhat differently that “several companies of the Brigade, disobeying their Cuban and American officers, had made an effective show of force at a rebel strongpoint and helped stifle the uprising.” As Kennedy prepared to assume the reigns of power, transition meetings between him and Eisenhower were conducted. There is a problem with such transitions in that a new administration can inherit programs from which it cannot extricate itself. Such was the case with the Cuba policy bequeathed by the old to the new. The transition problems were further exacerbated by Kennedy’s unwillingness to become involved in the planning prior to taking office. In Allen Dulles' words, “There was a period of two months before President Kennedy took office. During this time neither he nor his advisers contacted us for further information.” Thomas Mann, then the newly appointed Ambassador to Mexico who was known to have remarked that “I know my Latinos. They understand only two things—a buck in the pocket and a kick in the ass,” later mused: “This was a major mistake. . . . It was stupid - like it would go away if they didn't look at it. Kennedy tried to ignore its existence when he had all those months to think about what he wanted to do.” These remarks ignore the predicament of an incoming administration that is constitutionally prevented from a premature assumption of power. To form an entire government in two and a half months is onerous enough a burden without having to immediately, upon election, take over the kind of shady business to which Eisenhower had lent his presidency. The impetus to assassinate foreign leaders was accelerated to the very end of his term; Patrice Lumumba was murdered on Eisenhower’s last full day in office. Similar plotting to do away with Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic would not reach fruition until a few months after Kennedy was in the Oval Office. The historical record available at this time reveals that the new administration had terminated approval for the hit, but the operation itself had acquired a life of its own among the already armed rebels in the Dominican Republic. That the outgoing president continued to make such binding decisions right up to the transfer of power is significant evidence of the true transitional circumstance that impacted the incoming administration. So the Supreme Commander of the World War II landing at Normandy had made the decision to shift the Cuban exile operation from a guerrilla infiltration to a D-Day-type amphibious assault after he was already officially a lame duck, thereby forcing his successor’s hand and leaving him to hold the bag. Eisenhower lobbied Kennedy by telling him that if Cuba were to become a Sino-Soviet bloc missile base, “close to our own coastline,” the threat would be more than just the danger represented by the short-range and intermediate-range missiles themselves, that the threat would also draw the United States, both “politically and diplomatically” into a “difficult bargaining position” with the Soviets. The old general had an acute understanding of the hypocrisy that was taken for granted by U.S. leaders: at the time that he was lobbied to authorize the U-2 flight that wrecked a summit meeting between himself and Khrushchev, Eisenhower had remarked that nothing would send him to Congress to declare war “more quickly than violation of our airspace by Soviet aircraft.” Yet he had gone ahead. Similarly, Eisenhower knew that his support for certain policies involving the deployment of U.S. missiles provided clear provocation for logical counter-moves that would not be politically acceptable. He knew that his policies left the U.S. with an impossible “bargaining position.” Yet he had gone ahead, leaving his successor to deal with the consequences. The day before the Inauguration, Eisenhower told Kennedy that the CIA’s Cuban project was going well and that it was the new President’s responsibility to do “whatever is necessary” to ensure its success. This demand was a bit unreasonable on the part of Eisenhower, given that on his own watch he had failed to manage the CIA’s preparations, the timetable for the operation, or even the size of the landing force. His most effective role was in poisoning the atmosphere as completely as possible before leaving office. But given his immense popularity and the public’s confidence that the Supreme Commander of World War II would always protect the nation’s military interests, Eisenhower left a legacy that would leave his successor little choice but to err on the side of being too tough rather than being perceived as too soft. Bobby Kennedy, the newly appointed Attorney General, noted his brother’s predicament: “If he hadn't gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed that he had no courage. Eisenhower trained these people, it was Eisenhower's plan; Eisenhower's people all said it would succeed - and we turned it down.” As McGeorge Bundy has pointed out, if the new administration turned it down, the Republicans would have said, “We were all set to beat Castro,” and that the new guys were “chicken” and an “antsy-pantsy bunch of liberals.” Bundy considered the political risk in saying no to be that it “would have brought all the hawks out of the woodwork.” In all of the planning and preparations to take Cuba back, the missing link was the assassination of Castro. Senator George Smathers has related that President Kennedy had been “given to believe” by the CIA that by the time the invasion force landed, Castro would be dead. Smathers said, “Someone was supposed to have knocked him off and there was supposed to be absolute pandemonium.” The Bay of Pigs planning also included manipulating the politics of the Cuban exiles in the aftermath of what was hoped to be a successful takeover. Even many of the Cuban exiles would have been shocked at how far some in the United States were willing to go in this regard. The President’s directive that the exile leadership include more people from the left-of-center orientation to counter charges that the exiles were nothing more than Batisteros in disguise caused some dissension in the CIA’s ranks. E. Howard Hunt’s resentment of the change led him to “resign” or be “fired” from his job as Political Action Officer for the invasion, depending on who’s version one believes. He thought these changes amounted to a policy of Fidelismo sin Fidel, Fidelism without Fidel. Hunt’s political orientation, which was distinctly right wing, was far more amenable to Batistism sin Batista. One of the moderate Cuban leaders, stung by Hunt’s charge, stated: “I don’t know what it means to be a leftist. If it means to be in favor of all the people and for the welfare of the masses, then I am.” Hunt retorted: “Fidel Castro could not have phrased it better.” His ideology was reflected in a quote he was fond of citing: “The liberal’s arm cannot strike with firmness against communism . . . because the liberal dimly feels that in doing so he would be somehow wounding himself.” The right wing Cubans and those in the CIA like Hunt who were most sympathetic to counter-revolutionary politics did make contingency plans for the exiles’ leadership after the landing. “Operation 40 [a high level, government-connected Cuban exile group] called for assassinating the moderates after their return to the island following an invasion.” The U.S. supported the creation of a moderate provisional government during the planning, while its own agents were plotting to install a more right-wing one later. The moderates were intended to legitimize the efforts of the exile force while at the same time becoming targets themselves for some later murderous manipulation. During his first days in office, at the same time that he was going along with the CIA’s plan for military intervention, the new President initiated the Alliance for Progress. The appearance of the Allianza was to be as a progressive helping hand for Latin American nations, providing butter rather than guns. It was intended to portend a new era in U.S.-Latin relations. More skeptical persons, however, saw it as a public relations ploy designed to co-opt opposition to right wing dictators friendly to American interests and to bolster U.S. influence in the region. The whole notion miscalculated the strength of the Latin American middle class, and soon degenerated into counterinsurgency and the same old bolstering of authoritarian regimes. Intended to encourage democratic elections, the Allianza failed to influence dictators who knew that if Washington was given a choice between risking a Communist overthrow and backing a tyrant, the decision would always be made in favor of anti-communism. A more direct diplomatic result that emanated from the money flowing through the Alliance for Progress was a vote in the Organization of American States expelling Cuba and imposing an economic embargo. In the battle of words, Ché Guevara described the OAS’ craven approval of the Allianza as “an alliance of one millionaire and twenty beggars.” Michael Beschloss has written that despite all the pressures and the legacy of his predecessor, the new president was hesitant to authorize an operation that would show the world “an invasion force sent by the Yankees.” Kennedy said he could not approve a plan that would “put us in so openly, in view of the world situation.” Senator William Fulbright encouraged the president’s doubts with an insightful memo, which read in part: "To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world—nor on our consciences for that matter. We would have undone the work of thirty years in trying to live down earlier interventions. " Despite the overwhelming support for the scheme, Kennedy repeatedly expressed reservations about the visibility of the operation, ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to examine the plan’s feasibility, asking the CIA to broaden the political representation of the exile leaders who were to comprise the provisional government, and demanding that the landing site be switched to a more obscure location. Hoping to avoid the political consequences of canceling the Eisenhower-approved project and be labeled soft on communism, Kennedy attempted to scale the invasion down sufficiently that it might “pass relatively unnoticed.” He was more disturbed by the prospect of a noisy success than he was by the possibility of a quiet failure. What he failed to see was that “failure itself is the noisiest thing of all.” Kennedy later noted having learned “from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision.” But he was no match for the resilience of the CIA. A new plan was quickly formulated. The president’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge (Mac) Bundy wrote Kennedy that 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.” The CIA also pressured the president that if he didn’t approve the operation there would be a “disposal problem,” that even if the Cuban exiles didn’t resist being disarmed, they would spread the word, possibly inspiring other Latin America coups and leaving Kennedy to be vilified by the American Right. Despite all of this, it appears that the CIA’s final persuasion of the president was very effective: while on a golf course in Palm Beach during the Easter holidays, agents interrupted the President’s game in emergency fashion to inform him that pro-Castro Cubans were reported to be planning to kidnap his daughter or commit some other mayhem against his family. We don’t know whether or not this was a bureaucratic invention intended to generate a personal, emotional commitment to support the invasion, but many people close to the President did notice the change that had come over him when he returned to the White House. One aide observed that the President seemed “more militant than when he left.” Kennedy never gave up on his prohibition of American military forces. The president was therefore strongly influenced by a telegram he received from Col. Jack Hawkins, who, after inspecting the Cuban exile force, wrote that they “do not expect help from the U.S. armed forces.” Ken O’Donnell, the president’s Chief of Staff, recalled that the colonel’s report “glowed with approval, and that Kennedy told him it was “this impressive message . . . that finally prompted him to give the go-ahead.” Interestingly, Hawkins himself now records that after 35 years of silence, with the recent declassification of his information, he has quite a different story to tell. He claims that he and the Chief of the Cuba Project went to the CIA’s Richard Bissell, “to attempt to dissuade him from continuing with the operation.” He claims their motive was that they “did not want to be parties to the disaster [they] believed lay ahead.” Hawkins’ appraisal was that “it had become obvious that the military requirements for a successful operation and the President’s insistence on plausible deniability were in irreconcilable conflict.” Nowhere in his recent article does Col. Hawkins seek to address the discrepancy between the glowing telegram to the president and his warning to the Deputy Director for Plans of the CIA. The contradictory versions of people such as Hawkins, who were responsible for the information upon which Kennedy had to rely, are indicative of the kind of reality in which decision-makers find themselves when trying to sift through the morass of constructions within constructions. On the weekend before the commencement of the invasion, two B-26 air-planes landed in Miami and Key West carrying Cuban air force markings, purporting to be carrying defectors who had conducted the bombing of a Cuban airport earlier that day. Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. actually held up a picture of the plane before the Security Council to demonstrate that the Cuban conflict was indigenous and not of U.S. making. As the weekend progressed and the American sponsorship became increasingly apparent, there were rumblings coming out of New York that the ambassador might make a public spectacle of resigning in the face of an exposed U.S. role in the forthcoming invasion attempt. While having very little personal regard for Stevenson, his integrity, or prestige, Kennedy was leery of incurring such wrath from the twice Democratically-nominated presidential candidate. Consequently, the President decided at the last minute to cut back the planned air strikes intended to eliminate Castro’s air force before it could play a part in the Bay of Pigs landing. Thirty minutes after the invasion began, at 5:15 a.m., Secretary of State Rusk called the president. “Already, Rusk said, the CIA wanted to call in American planes to cover the men hitting the beach” Calls for more radical action were immediately heard within the highest circles. The Cubans were strafing the beaches and the supply ships with their remaining T-33 jet trainers which, unbeknownst to the CIA leaders, were mounted with heavy cannons. Of these ships, which “included boats from the United Fruit Company,” one containing all the communication equipment was sunk. Bissell called it a “moment of desperation” and insisted that the operation could still be saved if the U.S. Navy could send in jet planes from the aircraft carrier Essex. The President refused, reminding the group that he had warned them “over and over again” that he would not commit U.S. forces. When he again said the U.S. must not become involved in response to an admiral’s request for authorization for a destroyer to support the men on the beaches, the admiral desperately argued: “Hell, Mr. President, but we are involved!” The invasion force that landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs was too large to be concealed and too small to accomplish its intended mission. Castro’s remaining fighter planes destroyed the anti-Castro B-26s which were needed to clear the roads of Cuban tanks and artillery. The Brigade was under constant assault from the air, leaving it unable to resupply. On February 21, 1998, a highly critical internal report was released by the CIA entitled, “The Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation.” The inquiry had noted that “the fundamental cause of the disaster was the CIA’s incompetence, rather than President Kennedy’s failure to follow through with the air raids in support of the commandos.” The report states that the Agency misled the President by failing to inform him “that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore canceled.” The real story of the Bay of Pigs is not the planning or the operation, it is the deception and construction of operational legitimacy within the U.S. government. Ken O’Donnell noted that despite the President’s “strict ruling against American military participation in the assault,” the CIA had assured the Cuban exiles that “U.S. Marines and Navy jets would be available when needed.” The deception by the CIA of both himself and the exiles led the President to a “bitter conclusion.” O’Donnell observed: ". . . the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA must have been assuming all along that the President would become so worried at the last minute about the loss of his own prestige that he would drop his restriction against the use of U.S. forces and send the Marines and the Navy jets into the action." The President’s sense of betrayal was so great that “as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, [Kennedy] said to one of the highest officials in his Administration that he wanted to ‘splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.’” Just two weeks after the invasion attempt, Castro addressed himself to the issue of legitimacy, expressing the meaning of the events in clearly ideological terms, with the United States characterized as the primary representative of exploitative capitalism and imperialism, and Cuba being representative of the desire of all nations to be independent and autonomous. In his first public characterization of his movement as “socialist,” Castro claimed, “The United States sponsored the attack because it cannot forgive us for achieving a socialist revolution under their noses.” In a reference to the transparent illegitimacy of the failed invasion attempt, Castro concluded, “Even Hollywood would not try to film such a story.” Decades later, noting the irreversible momentum of such constructions, Castro stated, “. . . I do not blame Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs; actually, Kennedy inherited this from the previous administration.” Coming during the President’s first hundred days in office, the fiasco had a huge impact on what was to follow. Kennedy’s personal friend, Chuck Spalding, recalled: “Before the Bay of Pigs, everything was a glorious adventure, onward and upward. Afterward, it was a series of ups and downs, with terrible pitfalls, suspicious [sic] everywhere, cautious of everything, questioning always.” Kennedy asked his special counsel, Ted Sorensen: “How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?” The President was not alone in being vulnerable to seductive constructions of legitimacy. Although the failed invasion attempt was a diplomatic and military disaster, the public relations value was not inconsiderable. A Gallup Poll taken immediately afterward showed the President with an 83 percent approval rate, with only 5 percent disapproving. Kennedy remarked, “Jesus, it’s just like Ike; the worse you do, the better they like you.” But the Bay of Pigs had changed things for Kennedy. No longer was the anti-Castro effort an inheritance from Ike; the enemy had become truly his own. According to Thomas G. Smith, The Kennedy administration lost a chance to hold fruitful dialogues with Cuba when it rejected Castro’s demand for 500 American-made heavy tractors in exchange for the release of 1,214 anti-Castro commandos who were imprisoned during the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt. Initially, President Kennedy asked prominent citizens such as Eleanor Roosevelt to form a committee to raise the necessary funds from private citizens for the purchase of the tractors, but criticism by the media and the opposition forced him to withdraw his support for Castro’s proposal. The ideological conflict between Kennedy and Castro, as well as political necessity, prevented the settlement of an issue that would soon bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. As with the Contras that came later in Nicaragua, the anti-Castro guerrillas lacked the internal political legitimacy necessary to build genuine support among the Cuban people and internationally. Also, like the Contras, they were unreliable and ineffective as a fighting force. They were essentially mercenaries, the most illegitimate of soldiers. Richard Reeves notes that “many were the pampered children of the island’s old [and white] first families. ‘The Yacht Club Boys’ they were called.” It appeared that many had thought the invasion to be a game: “U.S. Marines would do the fighting and they would get the girls in Havana.”

Tosh: The most current and particular issue I would like to ask you about is the Barry and the Boys photo, especially since our new Director of the CIA, Porter Goss, is purported to be seated with other members of Operation 40. I would appreciate your sharing all details of the photo of which you are aware, date, place, identities, as well as any information about Operation 40. If you believe the subject deserves its own thread I would welcome that. Tim

I would add for consideration: Pride of the Yankees (story of Lou Gehrig, with Babe Ruth playing himself) Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday Rudy - Notre Dame football - youthful hopes and dreams

The highest level at which the actual conspiracy could ever be shown would be Lansdale, then Morales/Shackley/Phillips/Hunt, then a notch down would be anti-Castro/CIA/Mafioso Johnny Roselli (Roselli conveniently tracks back to everyone). But if we're talking about who really did the deed, and not just about approval or quiescence, then the most intriguing is Howard Hughes, through Maheu, then to Roselli. . . . This is Big Oil/Military Industrial Complex/Mafia/POWER. And then of course, there is the fact that Hughes was mad as a hatter. I believe that Angleton and Hoover had serious institutional reasons for covering-up after-the-fact, Oswald having been one of Angleton's in Russia, and then one of Hoover's in Dallas. Tim

Mr. Gaal: What would the result be of a "good cop - bad cop" approach with "RFK working with anti-Castro Cubans" who went off their reservation and assassinated the president? Wouldn't it be just what happened, especially regarding Bobby's quiescence? I hate to think it's true because I really love Bobby. I originally didn't believe David Heyman's claim that Kenny O'Donnell said Bobby had been talking about bringing down a civilian airliner and blaming it on Castro. But when you read the Operations Northwoods plans and then hear the tape recordings of the first day of the Missile Crisis, when Bobby literally quotes the Northwoods playbook when he talks about creating a "Sink the Maine" pretext to invade, it is clear that Bobby had gotten a bit nuts about Castro. Following incidents in March of 1963 when powerboats manned by anti-Castro exiles roared into Cuban harbors shooting up two Soviet freighters, President Kennedy began to take official steps to terminate U.S. support for groups like Alpha 66 that had become out of control. When Bobby Kennedy wrote his brother a memo concerning new efforts to “cultivate” an “internal breakup in Cuba,” the President uncharacteristically did not respond. Apparently the brothers held a private discussion which led to an immediate turn-around, reflected in a presentation to the National Security Council in which Bobby dutifully played his prescribed role of informing the President that “a decision had been made to formulate a plan to shut down the hit-and-run attacks from Florida locales.” The following day, the President publicly declared that he would “take every step necessary” to terminate the exile raids against Cuba. Shortly thereafter, mirroring the Kennedys’ earlier turn against the Mafia, the Justice Department began prosecuting exile leaders, such as Frank Sturgis, for “violating U.S. neutrality laws.” At the same time, the CIA was ordered to cut off funding for the groups, leaving them to fend for themselves or draw on other sources. Bobby Kennedy held a meeting to formulate plans to implement the new policy. It included two FBI agents, officials of the CIA, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Navy, Coast Guard, Customs Service, the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department, and the State Department. He explained that the President “wanted to put a halt to the exile raids” and that “sixteen of the officials present” were to leave immediately for Miami “to decide what measures could be taken.” Among the steps later taken were serving restriction notices on certain exile leaders to prevent them from leaving the United States, refusing reentry to the United States to any exile who went beyond the 3-mile limit offshore, increased surveillance by the Coast Guard of the Florida coastline, and intensified FBI intelligence coverage of Cuban exile groups to ascertain and abort plans for future raids. Following the Miami conference, the combined forces of the federal government clamped down on the same anti-Castro groups and activities that had previously been given such encouragement and support. Numerous raids were conducted in which agents of the FBI closed down exile training camps, seizing large amounts of weapons, ammunition, and explosives. While it is clear that the President was serious about doing nothing to disturb the fragile peace following the Missile Crisis, and had great reason to fear provoking disclosure of the Secret Deal by Khrushchev, it is not so clear that his brother was going along fully. Having little choice but to support the President’s policy publicly, there is ample evidence that in private he continued to support the proscribed activities. The no-invasion pledge and withdrawal of support for exile activities ushered in a particularly bitter season of discontent within the anti-Castro Cuban community. A flyer dated April 18, 1963, and decorated with a profile of the Alamo, was distributed to Cubans in Miami’s Little Havana. It stated: “Only through one development will you Cuban patriots ever live again in your homeland as freemen, responsible as must be the most capable for the guidance and welfare of the Cuban people.” Tim

Bush is so crooked he has to screw his pants on. He and the power elite he represents already stole the presidency as surely as those who killed JFK, and with very similar results. There is nothing Bush won't do. (I wanted to post a photo of Bush with a rectangular object showing on his back at the debate, but I don't see where to go to do attachments) Tim

Bill: It is your position that Gordon Arnold felt the shot come past his left ear and then dropped to the ground. But the shooter you place in that position would of course be Badgeman, who didn't fire for at least 4/18s after the headshot, given the timing and muzzle flash. Here is the quote of Arnold you posted earlier in this thread: "You’ll hear a noise following behind it, and to me, I knew I was dead because that was a bullet that just went over me. And it’s not a span of time that this occurred in. This happened, what I’m telling you, is all in one sequence because when the shot went past my ear, I was automatically falling. And when I was falling, I was still taking... The camera was still rolling. And I could see the president’s head go back. Now that’s the last that I remember being on the camera, but when I went down, I literally went down and when you’re… you’re taught to roll…” “…to get down as deep as you can and away from the line of fire. And I would say that another shot went over my… the position that I was in, but the… when that occurred, I was down. " It doesn't make sense that on one hand you portray Arnold as still standing and filming 4/18s after the headshot, and then quote him to the effect that he dropped at the first shot and was already on the ground when a shooter fired a shot so long after Zf-313. Arnold's histrionics are great: "And when I was falling, I was still taking... The camera was still rolling. And I could see the president’s head go back." Tim

The CIA Inspector General conducted an internal investigation which was forwarded to Lyndon Johnson, who told newsman Howard K. Smith: “I’ll tell you something that will rock you; Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first.” In March 1967, columnist Drew Pearson wrote, “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy (Dem. N.Y.) may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his brother.” The source for the Pearson article was the original mafioso hired by the CIA to kill Castro, Johnny Roselli, through his attorney, Edward Morgan. The spin being placed on this new round of stories was, like the Oswald promotion, aimed at leading the public to believe that Castro was behind the conspiracy in Dallas. Roselli had revealed to Pearson that, “One of our assassination teams was captured and tortured until they told all they knew about our operation which they said was ordered by the White House.” Roselli asserted that “the team was turned around, you know, brainwashed, and sent back into our country to kill Kennedy.” All good lies contain a measure of truth, and such may be the case with Roselli’s attempt at history-making. Although this colorful rendition is compelling, given the source, it should be recognized that contained in this version is the admission that it was an anti-Castro hit team that had killed Kennedy. But the “team” would hardly have required anything so exotic as brainwashing to retarget its skills against the President. By November of 1963, Kennedy was clearly a foe to the extreme anti-Castro elements; he had betrayed the cause so fundamentally at the Bay of Pigs, then compounded that betrayal by giving the no-invasion pledge, and finally sealed the antipathy by shutting down the exile camps and beginning negotiations directed toward the normalization of relations with Cuba. When Roselli’s well-connected lawyer asked how he had contained such explosive information, Roselli noted that “all phases of this operation were approved by Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower.” He questioned why neither Dulles, who was a member of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, nor Eisenhower, who had full knowledge of the plots, ever came forward. “So what was I supposed to think?” He inferred that the President “wanted to keep the lid on.” Roselli speculated that perhaps Johnson “thought it’d be bad for the country to know about this operation—you know, the government of the United States involved with the so-called Mafia to kill the leader of a foreign country and then it boomerangs.” A possibility that may never be resolved is Johnson’s notion that some action taken by Bobby Kennedy “backfired against his brother.” There is ample evidence of Bobby's continued encouragement of anti-Castro efforts during a period of time when his brother, the President of the United States, was pursuing a very contrary policy. Because of the closeness of the brothers it is generally assumed that Bobby was fulfilling one aspect of a multi-track approach on the part of the President. While it is understandable that some token support for the exiles might be considered prudent as a way of co-opting more radical elements, the extent to which one approach represented the direct undermining of the other presents a historical conundrum regarding the brothers’ coordination of authority. The possibility must be considered that Bobby crossed the line of plausible deniability into a realm in which he was acting in his own highly unofficial capacity apart from any expressed interest of the President’s. Was he like King Henry II’s henchmen, acting on his own to eliminate his brother’s Becket? John - I believe Pearson could have obtained all of the information he utilized from Edward Morgan, Roselli's attorney. We know that William Harvey and Johnny Roselli were very close, and held a public farewell lunch in D.C. before Harvey's departure for Rome in 1963. In 1967, it was Roselli who was needing to gain leverage because of his legal problems. Tim

I obtained my Masters Degree in Political Science a few years ago at the age of 45. I delivered a presentation to the Popular Culture Association entitled "The Cuban Missile Crisis: Representations and Misrepresentations." I did influence a professor so much regarding JFK's complexity that he dedicated a book to me: "What If They Gave A Crisis And Nobody Came." His former book had ignored the Secret Deal to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to flawed conclusions. I am well-versed in all post WWII history. I'm especially fascinated by the almost evolutionary progression toward a "final solution" by Western militarists through a first strike pre-emption of the Soviet Union. The preparations were complete in 1961 with the launching of the Corona satellite. After that, JFK was scrambling within his own government to avoid his anointed role as instigator of the apocalypse.

I sadly agree with Ron that the document is probably not real. If but it were! Aside from the confirmation of Oswald's ONI training and agent status in Russia, I found the reference to him serving under "SAIC Bannister" to be remarkable. I know that Bannister was SAIC in Chicago before he totally went off the alcoholic deep-end. But I have never seen any evidence that he had any governmentally sanctioned status in New Orleans. Tim