Crisis Management at the Dead Center: The 1960-1961 Presidential Transition and the Bay of Pigs Fiasco

It was D-Day, April 16, 1961: the landing of Brigade 2506 was hours away, and their ships were in sight of the Cuban shore. At his weekend retreat in Virginia, President Kennedy was under pressure to call off the invasion. The day before, eight B-26 bombers had attacked the main air base of the Cuban Air Force. Though implausibly staged as the action of a single Cuban defector, the cover story quickly collapsed, and the world press screamed of an American-backed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba. In New York, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, was furious: the previous day he had been duped into assuring the General Assembly that the United States had nothing to do with the rogue Cuban pilot who had landed in Florida. At 9:30 P.M., the president's assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, called General Charles Cabell, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to inform him that the air strikes scheduled for the next day would be postponed until Brigade 2506 had landed and secured an airstrip at the Bay of Pigs, from where planes could launch and provide air support (Bissell, Lewis, and Pudlo 1996, 184). CIA appeals for more air support, directed through Secretary of State Dean Rusk, were denied by President Kennedy. Within four days, 89 members of the Brigade were killed and 1,197 taken prisoner. President Kennedy's decision to cancel the second air strike against Castro's air force was likely the mistake that doomed the invasion. However, while the proximate cause of the operation's failure was military, the more telling explanation lies with the decision-making process that led up to the operation. Scholars, historians, and participants agree that the Kennedy administration's greatest mistake lay in its inadequate examination of the assumptions undergirding the operation, though disagreement remains over the cause of this failure. (1) The most common explanations fall roughly into four groups: unfamiliarity, secrecy, decision-making structures, and perverse bureaucratic dynamics. First, unfamiliarity: several participants viewed the lack of familiarity among Kennedy and his advisors-primarily manifest in overdeference to the president and the president's uncertainty about how to evaluate different advisors' opinions--as a strong contributor to his poor decision making (Schlesinger 1965, 258-59, 297; Sorensen 1965, 304, 307). Second, secrecy: many studies of the Bay of Pigs emphasize the deleterious effect of extreme covertness, as the CIA, concerned with preserving secrecy, shielded operational plans from scrutiny by relevant experts (Neustadt 1980, 222-23; Sorensen 1965, 304; Wilensky 1967, 66-67). (2) Third, faulty decision-making structures: when Kennedy dismantled President Dwight D. Eisenhower's national security decision-making structures, a disorganized and collegial system remained; this prevented policy from the rigorous analysis institutionalized by Eisenhower's procedures (Bissell, Lewis, and Pudlo 1996, 197-98; Bose 1998, 100; Bowie and Immerman 1998, 6; Rothkopf 2005, 84-86). (3) Fourth, perverse bureaucratic dynamics: Janis presents this argument most convincingly in his analysis of the Bay of Pigs episode in Groupthink, where he argues that Kennedy's team was blinded by five common illusions that elevated unanimity over truth-seeking (1972, 14-49). While each of these explanations acknowledges the early days of the Kennedy presidency as context, they neglect the transition itself as an explanatory variable. Although scholars of presidential transitions have noted the Bay of Pigs invasion as a cautionary tale, none have adequately examined the causal relationship between transition dynamics and President Kennedy's decision making. Historians, for their part, have examined the Bay of Pigs without the analytical framework necessary for transition studies. This article suggests the best lens of analysis for the Bay of Pigs invasion is the 1960-1961 presidential transition. …