Still, if you weren’t going to support the operation when the going got tough, why bother?
“Still, if you weren’t going to support the operation when the going got tough, why bother?”
Probably because Kennedy wasn’t nearly as courageous as he pretended to be.
As designed by Eisenhower the Bay of Pigs invasion had both air and sea support. Kennedy and McNamara pulled the air off on their own for purely political reasons- they didn’t want it to look like it was an American operation, as if that would fool anyone. The sea support that was there took off when they came under fire from Castro’s air force.
One of Kennedy’s earliest moves as President was to disband the two national security advisory boards that Ike had set up. By disbanding them JFK cut the service chiefs of staff out of his decision making process, so they weren’t able to warn him that removing the air support would doom the operation. Of course JFK and McNamara then blamed the JCS for their own stupidity and further cut the military out of the loop which had disastrous consequences in Vietnam.