Presidential Predicaments – II. JFK: Disaster
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In the National Security Act of 1947, Congress created a Central Intelligence Agency. The Act authorized the CIA not just to gather intelligence but to conduct covert actions. Covert actions are those that are hidden from us, or that we could deny we had conducted. At least the Act might have authorized such actions. There was some argument about that. What the Act literally authorized, besides gathering intelligence, was “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” Does that language seem to you to authorize covert actions?
President Eisenhower didn’t doubt it had.
When it came to a plan for nuclear war, President Eisenhower had been up front. Early in his administration, he had declared a “New Look” policy that said we would respond to any armed aggression by the Soviets against us or any of our allies by retaliating with everything we had.
He had also, however, developed a taste for covert actions, conducted not by our armed forces but by the Central Intelligence Agency. Our armed forces would be asked to help out sometimes.
Ike during his time in office authorized several covert actions—in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, for example. Both actions had succeeded in subverting democratically elected governments. Ike thought these actions had come out well. Not perfectly perhaps. Iran wasn’t a democracy any more. The person in charge there now was not an elected leader but a “shah,” a kind of monarch. During Ike’s last year in office a brutal civil war had started in Guatemala. But at least the covert actions had turned out better than wars would have, Ike believed. A war couldn’t have been covert, of course. For one thing, our Constitution says our wars have to be declared by Congress. Covert actions are also cheaper than wars.
When JFK was elected, the covert operations in Iran and Guatemala were still hidden from us U.S. citizens. They were not hidden by then from the Iranians and the Guatemaltecos. They knew what we’d done in their countries.
In his last term in office Ike planned another covert action. Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had thrown out Fulgencio Batista, the military dictator we had been sponsoring in Cuba, had later declared he was a Communist. In Eisenhower’s new covert action the plan was to train and equip refugees from Fidel Castro’s Cuba and have them invade Cuba from Guatemala to get rid of Fidel Castro as if they were doing it on their own.
By the time Ike left office, the covert action he was planning wasn’t quite ready to go. He left it for JFK to execute.
JFK wasn’t against covert action. What president could be against doing something you didn’t have to answer for? But when he learned about this particular plan for covert action, he wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. President Eisenhower, who everybody knew had been a great general, had thought this covert action would be a good idea. Our CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of our military forces, still thought it was a good idea. Castro was, though, a declared Communist. JFK, as a Democrat, had to be careful not to seem “soft on Communism,” which Republicans liked to accuse Democrats of being.
JFK didn’t have much of a choice, did he? In any case, he gave the go-ahead.
On April 17, 1961, three months after JFK was inaugurated, the counter-revolutionaries our CIA had equipped and trained in Guatemala invaded Cuba. Three days later, all of them had been killed or captured. Everybody knew now, if they hadn’t before, that the CIA had been behind this. It wasn’t a covert action anymore.
JFK was soon being criticized for not giving the invaders enough support. Some of JFK’s military advisers had thought he should drop the pretense that this was a covert action and just invade Cuba with our armed forces. Use nuclear weapons if necessary. Why not?
JFK decided not to do that. He wasn’t about to let Fidel Castro slide. He had decided against an open invasion or an attack with nuclear weapons. But maybe there was another kind of covert action that would work better than this one had.
He did decide he needed a new CIA Director. Allen Dulles, the man who had been Director during all of Eisenhower’s administration, was replaced in November by a man named John McCone.
In any case, this covert action was a terrible opening act for the new young President.