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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIf Kennedy had not been shot, would you in 1964 have voted for the guy who had invaded Cuba? (nt)
leftofcool
(19,460 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)I'd wonder why he had done something so undemocratic, overthrowing a sovereign country. Turns out CIA director Allen Dulles said it'd be a slam-dunk, without help from US armed forces. He lied, Big Time. In fact, his "mistake" in retrospect looks like treason.
Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 29, 2000; A04
Shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a top CIA official told an investigative commission that the Soviet Union had
somehow learned the exact date of the amphibious landing in advance, according to a newly declassified version of the commission's final report.
Moreover, the CIA apparently had known of the leak to the Soviets--and went ahead with the invasion anyway.
In an effort to oust Fidel Castro, the CIA organized and trained a force of about 1,400 Cuban exiles and launched the invasion on April 17, 1961.
Castro's soldiers easily repelled the landing force in less than 72 hours, killing 200 rebels and capturing 1,197 others in what became one of the worst foreign policy blunders of the Cold War.
The investigative commission, chaired by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, was established almost immediately and held a series of secret hearings at the Pentagon before sending a sharply critical report to President Kennedy in June 1961.
CONTINUED
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/bay-of-pigs/soviets.htm
A year later, the Missile Crisis erupts, giving him another opportunity. Again, he said, "No." In neither situation did JFK order an all-out attack, which is what those at CIA and the Pentagon wanted.
CIA director Allen Dulles and Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer (before they got canned over the Bay of Pigs) had recommended to JFK that the best thing for him to do as President was to launch an all-out sneak attack on the Soviet Union. This pre-emptive war would not be over Cuba, but rather because the USSR posed an existential threat to the USA and, thus, should be attacked when our nuclear superiority was at a maximum, "some time in Fall 1963."
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994
During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
CONTINUED...
http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963
Glad JFK said, "No."
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)Plus ca change......
Octafish
(55,745 posts)And they said nothing to him about having contracted the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro in 1960. For some reason, the CIA continues to maintain the fiction that he had ordered that assassination program.
Funny how they still to this very day try to make out that it was JFK's idea.
AUG 1960: Richard Bissell meets with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, and discusses with him ways to eliminate or assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards proposes that the job be done by assassins hand-picked by the American underworld, specifically syndicate interests who have been driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro regime. Bissell gives Edwards the go-ahead to proceed. Between August 1960, and April 1961, the CIA with the help of the Mafia pursues a series of plots to poison or shot Castro. The CIAs own internal report on these efforts states that these plots "were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs." (CIA, Inspector General's Report on Efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, p. 3, 14)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html
Details on the actual sit-down, which to an amateur democratic detective interested in justice would seem like a lead worth pursuing:
Ever wonder about the sanity of America's leaders? Take a close look at perhaps the most bizarre plot in U.S. intelligence history
By Bryan Smith
Chicago Magazine
November 2007
(page 4 of 6)
EXCERPT...
By September 1960, the project was proceeding apace. Roselli would report directly to Maheu. The first step was a meeting in New York. There, at the Plaza Hotel, Maheu introduced Roselli to O'Connell. The agent wanted to cover up the participation of the CIA, so he pretended to be a man named Jim Olds who represented a group of wealthy industrialists eager to get rid of Castro so they could get back in business.
"We may know some people," Roselli said. Several weeks later, they all met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. For years, the luxurious facility had served as the unofficial headquarters for Mafioso leaders seeking a base close to their gambling interests in Cuba. Now, it would be the staging area for the assassination plots.
At a meeting in one of the suites, Roselli introduced Maheu to two men: Sam Gold and a man Roselli referred to as Joe, who could serve as a courier to Cuba. By this time, Roselli was on to O'Connell. "I'm not kidding," Roselli told the agent one day. "I know who you work for. But I'm not going to ask you to confirm it."
Roselli may have figured out that he was dealing with the CIA, but neither Maheu nor O'Connell realized the rank of mobsters with whom they were dealing. That changed when Maheu picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, which carried an article laying out the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. Leading the list was Sam Giancana, a.k.a. "Mooney," a.k.a. "Momo," a.k.a. "Sam the Cigar," a Chicago godfather who was one of the most feared dons in the countryand the man who called himself Sam Gold. "Joe" was also on the list. His real name, however, was Santos Trafficantethe outfit's Florida and Cuba chieftain.
Maheu alerted O'Connell. "My God, look what we're involved with," Maheu said. O'Connell told his superiors. Questioned later before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (later nicknamed the Church Committee after its chairman, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho), O'Connell was asked whether there had ever been any discussion about asking two men on the FBI's most wanted list to carry out a hit on a foreign leader.
"Not with me there wasn't," O'Connell answered.
"And obviously no one said stopand you went ahead."
"Yes."
"Did it bother you at all?"
"No," O'Connell answered, "it didn't."
CONTINUED...
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2007/How-the-CIA-Enlisted-the-Chicago-Mob-to-Put-a-Hit-on-Castro/index.php?cparticle=4&siarticle=3
Yet, for some reason, the CIA continues to the present day to imply that it was Kennedy who did that.
Spies: Ex-CIA Agent In Raleigh Says Castro Knew About JFK Assassination Ahead Of Time
Former CIA agent and author Brian Latell in Raleigh
By The Raleigh Telegram
RALEIGH A noted former Central Intelligence Agency officer, author, and scholar who is intimately knowledgeable about Cuba and Fidel Castro, says he believes there is evidence that Castros government knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ahead of time.
SNIP...
Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General of the United States, was in charge of the operation, said Latell. Despite the United States best efforts, the operation was nonetheless penetrated by Cuban intelligence agents, said Latell.
Latell said there were two serious assassination attempts by the United States against Castro that even used members of the mafia to help, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful.
He also said that there was a plot by the United States to have Castro jabbed with a pen containing a syringe filled with a very effective poison. Latell said that he believes the experienced assassin who worked for Castro who originally agreed to the plan may have been a double agent. After meeting with a personal representative of Robert Kennedy in Paris, the man knew that the plan to assassinate Castro came from the highest levels of the government, including John F. and Robert Kennedy.
The plan was never carried out, as the man later defected to the United States, but with so many double agents working for Castro also pledging allegiance to the CIA, Latell said it was likely that the information got back to Havana that the Kennedy brothers endorsed that plot with the pen.
CONTINUED...
http://raleightelegram.com/201209123311
Yet, the Mighty Wurlitzer cough Shenon plays the false tune that Kennedy was the guy who wanted Castro dead.
What the Warren Commission Didnt Know
A member of the panel that investigated JFKs death now worries he was a victim of a massive cover-up.
By PHILIP SHENON
February 02, 2015
EXCERPT...
Slawson feels betrayed by several senior government officials, especially at the CIA, whom he says he trusted in 1964 to tell the truth. He is most angry with one manthen-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who assured the commission during the investigation that he knew of no evidence of a conspiracy in his brothers death. It is now clear, as I and others have reported, that Robert Kennedy withheld vital information from the investigation: While he publicly supported the commissions findings, Kennedys family and friends have confirmed in recent years that he was in fact harshly critical of the commission and believed that the investigation had missed evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy.
What a bastard, Slawson says today of Robert Kennedy. This is a man I once had admiration for.
Slawson theorizes that that attorney general and the CIA worked together to hide information about Oswalds Mexico trip from the commission because they feared that the investigation might stumble onto the fact that JFKs administration had been trying, for years, sometimes with the help of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro. Mexico had been a staging area for the Castro plots. Public disclosure of the plots, Slawson says, could have derailed, if not destroyed, Robert Kennedys political career; he had led his brothers secret war against Castro and, as declassified documents would later show, was well aware of the Mafias involvement in the CIAs often harebrained schemes to murder the Cuban dictator. You cant distinguish between Bobby and the CIA on this, Slawson says. They were working hand in glove to hide information from us.
Although there is nothing in the public record to show that Robert Kennedy had specific evidence of a foreign conspiracy in his brothers death, I agree with Slawson that RFK and senior CIA officials threw the commission off the trail of witnesses and evidence that might have pointed to a conspiracy, especially in Mexico. Slawson also now suspectsbut admits again that he cannot provethat Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the commission that bore his name, was an unwitting participant in the cover-up, agreeing with the CIA or RFK to make sure that the commission did not pursue certain evidence. Warren, he suspects, was given few details about why the commissions investigation had to be limited. He was probably just told that vital national interests were at stakethat certain lines of investigation in Mexico had to be curtained because they might inadvertently reveal sensitive U.S. spy operations.
That might explain what Slawson saw as Warrens most baffling decision during the investigationhis refusal to allow Slawson to interview a young Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate in Mexico and who dealt face-to-face with Oswald on his visa application; declassified CIA records would later suggest that Oswald had a brief affair with the woman, who was herself a committed Socialist, and that she had introduced him to a network of other Castro supporters in Mexico. It was a different time, Slawson says. We were more naïve. Warren would have believed what he was told.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/warren-commission-jfk-investigators-114812_Page2.html#.VN982vnF-UV
Why would CIA not want the Warren Commission, and the American public to which it reported, know the truth about its illegal assassination program?
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)former9thward
(32,121 posts)Top picture is where the assault forces landed. Bottom picture is the sugar cane factory where Castro made his headquarters when the invasion happened. I took these pictures in 1995.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Great photographs that make me feel like we are standing there. Cuba is a beautiful place, one I hope to visit. Were you there as an academic or on a cultural exchange?
For some reason, my goverment dorsn't want me tio know socialism works. Anyway, some more secret government for a stronger democracy:
CIA SUCCESSFULLY CONCEALS BAY OF PIGS HISTORY
D.C. CIRCUIT SPLIT DECISION RULES CIA DRAFT HISTORY CAN BE KEPT SECRET INDEFINITELY
NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE FOIA LAWSUIT EXPOSES GAP BETWEEN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION'S "TRANSPARENCY" POLICIES AND ACTUAL BUREAUCRATIC (AND JUDICIAL) BEHAVIOR
Posted May 21, 2014
For more information contact:
202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, May 21, 2014 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA's cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA's draft "official history" could be withheld from the public under the "deliberative process" privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.
"The D.C. Circuit's decision throws a burqa over the bureaucracy," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), the plaintiff in the case. "Presidents only get 12 years after they leave office to withhold their deliberations," commented Blanton, "and the Federal Reserve Board releases its verbatim transcripts after five years. But here the D.C. Circuit has given the CIA's historical office immortality for its drafts, because, as the CIA argues, those drafts might 'confuse the public.'"
"Applied to the contents of the National Archives of the United States, this decision would withdraw from the shelves more than half of what's there," Blanton concluded.
The 2-1 decision, authored by Judge Brett Kavanaugh (a George W. Bush appointee and co-author of the Kenneth Starr report that published extensive details of the Monica Lewinsky affair), agreed with Justice Department and CIA lawyers that because the history volume was a "pre-decisional and deliberative" draft, its release would "expose an agency's decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency's ability to perform its functions."
SNIP...
Prior to yesterday's decision, the Obama administration had bragged that reducing the government's invocation of the b-5 exemption was proof of the impact of the President's Day One commitment to a "presumption of disclosure." Instead, the bureaucracy has actually increased in the last two years its use of the b-5 exemption, which current White House counselor John Podesta once characterized as the "withhold if you want to" exemption.
CONTINUED...
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20140521/
Gosh. What does Volume V contain that is so sensitive?
former9thward
(32,121 posts)I was there by myself and they let me go anyplace on the island I wanted to go. One such place was the Bay of Pigs where non-Cubans normally don't go. I had heard they had a good museum there about the event.
This is a photo of the Museum of the Bay of Pigs. Very interesting place with a lot of information about the invasion and a bunch of artifacts from the event.
Speaking of Cuba, yes it is a very beautiful place to visit. I visited a tobacco field and everyone rushed out of the field when they saw me with a camera. No one had ever taken their picture before.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)The Yellow Card Man would lose track of the strings and mayhem would ensue. Jimla unleashed. End of the world and of worlds.
wyldwolf
(43,870 posts)Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)As good as anything King has ever written. My only complaint was that at some point the guy should have said "hey, this is kind of like Back to the Future 2!"
pipi_k
(21,020 posts)very thought provoking!
wyldwolf
(43,870 posts)The tax cutter? The strong anti-communist? The guy who aggressively increased military spending 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than todays levels) ?
The guy who said "I'm not a liberal at all. I'm not comfortable with those people"?
Yup, I would have voted for him.
NV Whino
(20,886 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)You poor poster. Good luck!
bigwillq
(72,790 posts)Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)I was only 20 that fall & the voting age was 21. Also, I hadn't awoken from my proto-libertarian stupor by that point in my life.
HuckleB
(35,773 posts)That should be a no brainer.
Hekate
(90,978 posts)Absolutely -- except I was only 16 when he was assassinated the previous year.
I believe he deserved a second term and I didn't even know he was going to pull us out of Vietnam.
H2O Man
(73,668 posts)hifiguy
(33,688 posts)and military chieftains that there was "no way to stop" the Bay of Pigs invasion. That has been chronicled in more history books than I can count, but I read it most recently in "The Brothers" by Stephen Kinzer. The brass and the CIA lied their asses off to JFK.
MrMickeysMom
(20,453 posts)What are you inferring about Kennedy's decision during the Bay of Pigs?
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)I was in the marines in '64 and I thought the invasion of Cuba was, at best, downright stupid and colonialism. And, I thought the Cuban Missile crisis was an even dumber risk to take.
RebelOne
(30,947 posts)and I would have voted for him again if he had lived to run for re-election.
Response to RebelOne (Reply #20)
Name removed Message auto-removed
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)Probably not...
Spirochete
(5,264 posts)I was only 10 years old...
Omaha Steve
(99,833 posts)He didn't invade. And it was an Eisenhower administration plan anyway.
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)And bigger point that you are making, no real person can pass muster with these folks.
Historic NY
(37,458 posts)El Supremo
(20,365 posts)LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)Jesus, the demographics on this website are something else.
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)whoops, lost my train of thought there. Time for my nap I think.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Of course we'd all have had to vote for JFK. There wasn't any other option at the time. Refusing to would have meant letting the civil rights movement get crushed.
You can't compare that situation to the present. There are no stakes remotely similar to that now.
HRC's Iraq War support and her openness to bombing Iran in 2008 still morally disqualify her from the nomination now. She shouldn't even run.
CanadaexPat
(496 posts)HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)I also came to understand Keynesian economics at that point and how the JFK administration based economic policy on that.
I'm still deeply committed to it's rationality as a way for government to manage the economy. Laissez faire and truly Free-Markets hurt people.
I also thought the space program was AWSOME.
With respect to military, I wouldn't vote for the guy who ok'd the phoney insurrection in Cuba. But I WOULD vote for the guy that dealt with The Missles of October. Kennedy was living the cold war, in a nation where Big Money greatly feared nationalization of overseas assets and the rise of command economies. The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam both emerged out of those sentiments.
roamer65
(36,748 posts)I think of it as the 1963 Coup d'Etat. If Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt, I strongly believe there would have been a overt military coup in the United States.
brooklynite
(94,911 posts)KinMd
(966 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)EXCERPT...
What did the United States government think of Seven Days in May? It was released in February, 1964, just three months after John F. Kennedys assassination. Predictably, the military hated it, and had wanted Frankenheimer to submit a script for Pentagon approval. Frankenheimer refused. Kennedy himself, however, had read the novel and strongly encouraged the movie to be made. When Kennedy ran into Kirk Douglas at a party before filming began, he asked Douglas if he planned to make the movie. When Douglas replied yes, the President proceeded to tell him why and how it would make an excellent movie. (Burt Lancaster: An American Life, by Kate Buford, p. 230) For the opening scene of the movie, Frankenheimer wanted to film a mock protest outside of the White House between pro and anti-disarmament treaty protestors. Kennedy arranged his schedule so that he and the First Family would be in Hyannisport for a weekend, thus giving Frankenheimer the opportunity to capture the scene.
http://mark-markmywords.blogspot.com/2011/12/jfk-and-seven-days-in-may-starring-burt.html
roamer65
(36,748 posts)Just a simple tenet of any coup d'état is that you have a backup up plan in case your target survives.