JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963

[Jim DiEugenio]

210. Jim Replies

Let us take the Bay of Pigs first.

After investigating the operation and receiving two reports on it, one from Max Taylor and one from Lyman Kirkpatrick, Kennedy fired the top three officers in the CIA. Something which had never been done before or since, correct?

Why did he do that? As he commented later, he was deceived on multiple grounds, one of them being there would be an indigenous uprising. There was none. Dulles and Bissell lied to Kennedy right down the line. Because they knew that he would never have approved the plan if they revealed their real agenda which was this: the operation had no real chance of success. And they thought he would order Arleigh Burke's navy which was right down there in to save him the humiliation. Which is what Nixon told him he would have done.

Obviously, if there had been no lies, there would have been no Bay of Pigs.

Missile Crisis: When one reads the transcripts, its obvious that almost everyone wanted a military response. It was Kennedy who then asked Max Taylor how many civilians would be killed in a bombing run, worst case scenario. The reply was in the thousands. Kennedy said that was too many. He went with the lowest level response, the blockade.

During the blockade, the Cubans killed a U2 pilot, Rudolf Anderson needlessly. It was clearly wrong and the Russians went nuts in Moscow. It was the only fatality of the whole 13 days. There was a contingency plan in place to bomb the rocket sites of anti aircraft cannon. The advisors brought it up. Kennedy ignored it.

Near the end, when JFK and RFK were near an agreement, LBJ was asked his advice, he said Kennedy had not done enough to show the public who was boss.

As per Vietnam, as John Newman notes in his masterly book, one has to differentiate between what Kennedy said in public and what he was doing in private. In May of 1963, Kennedy sent McNamara to the Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii to monitor the withdrawal plan. It is clear from those declassified documents, that McNamara was not satisfied with the pace of the withdrawal, also there was no contingency for reversing it. He wanted it sped up. This is significant since it PREDATES NSAM 263 BY FIVE MONTHS!

Should JFK have said in Dallas, on a campaign trip a year before election in a state he barely won, "Hey you yokels, we are out of there after I am reelected even if it does go Red." That would be like LBJ saying in 1964, "I will send half a million men to fight in the jungles of Vietnam and we will win even if we take 300, 000 casualties and ruin the economy."

Yeah sure.