WSJ: New Battle Over the Bay of Pigs Invasion

[Peace Patriot]

5. JFK FIRED CIA Director Allen Dulles over the 'Bay of Pigs.' Don't know where you get your info...

...but it is wrong. Dulles told JFK that the Cuban population would rise up and overthrow Castro when Dulles' anti-Castro cadre landed at the Bay of Pigs. He claimed to have intelligence to that effect. JFK permitted the clandestine operation ON THE CONDITION THAT NO U.S. TROOPS OR MILITARY FORCES could be involved. If the people of Cuba rose up, fine. But he was NOT going to invade Cuba. He was totally against committing U.S. military forces and endangering U.S. military lives for this purpose. No air support was promised; indeed it was specifically denied.

Dulles went ahead with the operation; no uprising whatever occurred, and, in the midst of the operation, Dulles tried to blackmail JFK into providing last minute air support for a failed operation. JFK refused to do so, and he then FIRED Dulles for LYING to him about the support of the Cuban people and subsequently vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces."

They were LYING to him. They were lying to him and defying his orders all over the world.

For those who want to understand this, the most important conflict of the 20th century and perhaps in the history of our democracy, I recommend "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass.

The question was, who was going to run this country, including the commitment of U.S. military forces: the elected president or the CIA/MIC? We only have to look around us today to know who won that contest. Douglass brilliantly lays out this conflict between elected and secret government, and brilliantly nails the CIA for JFK's assassination (up to Richard Helms, the director of operations, with intimate connections to the fascist forces in Miami whom Castro and the Cuban people had ousted from power in Cuba).

After the 'Bay of Pigs' came the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the entire Joint Chiefs Staff stood against JFK (who had only RFK on his side) demanding that JFK nuke Russia (and Cuba) in a pre-emptive strike. JFK refused and created backchannels to Krushchev (and Castro) to get around the CIA and to prevent a nuclear holocaust. He not only negotiated the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba, against the will of the CIA/MIC (who opposed his withdrawal of U.S. missiles pointed at Russia from Turkey), he then engineered the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (first effort to begin demobilization of nukes on both sides), the Russian Wheat Deal (when the Russian harvest failed), and other such peaceful measures, including signing presidential orders to start removing U.S. troops from Vietnam, and he intended to run for a second term on a platform of world peace, confident that the American people would support him.

He was right about that. When his successor, LBJ, ran on a peace platform in 1964, he won by a huge landslide. The trouble was that LBJ was lying. In the midst of that election, while he yammered about peace, LBJ was dramatically escalating the CIA-manufactured war in Vietnam. Indeed, three days after JFK was assassinated, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam.

I remember that election well. It was my first vote for president. I bought LBJ's bullshit and voted for peace--and got 2 million dead.

The hell of it is that JFK would not have been lying, had he lived to run for a second term. And that, basically, is WHY he died. He had refused to be controlled by the CIA, which was manufacturing wars for the MIC.

Until we understand this most basic fact about our history, there is no hope that we can reverse the Forever War into which we have been plunged, in which "enemies" are constantly created out of people who are NOT our "enemies"--people who are seeking self-determination, sovereignty and economic justice. If we supported self-determination, sovereignty and economic justice, we would have almost no enemies. The world would be with us, as it was just after WW II. Instead, we now have a war machine that has been hijacked by the corporate powers and is being used, a) for private profit, and b) to perpetuate itself. JFK's presidency was the last chance we had to curtail the overweening power of this war machine. He stood against its misuse and he died for it.

We now have to deal with the consequences, which are all around us--a very, very difficult set of problems, involving democracy itself and our identity as a people. We need to beware of murky history which deliberately or inadvertently buries these realities and we need to pay attention to clear-eyed writers like Douglass who understand both the details and the moral thrust of our history and "why it matters" NOW.