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on with the plans. These were no longer guerrilla infiltrations that Dulles was proposing to the new president, however, but a major amphibious invasion seeking to establish an impregnable enclave that would set off an uprising across Cuba, or at least be a symbol of resistance that would grow until finally the whole island was rid of Castro and his Marxist regime. The Republican president had never authorized an invasion that might involve American troops. Kennedy was being asked to authorize a far more dangerous venture than the one that Eisenhower had signed on to, and far beyond anything the Republican president had authorized the CIA to attempt during his two terms in the White House. The CIA was hoping that its paramilitary force and its agents on the island would foment a “continuing civil war,” setting brother against brother in the streets and fields of Cuba, a struggle in which the United States or its Latin surrogates could then intervene and play savior.

On January 4, 1961, before Kennedy was inaugurated, Colonel Jack Hawkins, the head of the CIA’s paramilitary staff, prepared a crucial memo outlining what the United States would have to do for the operation to be successful. Hawkins was a poster-handsome marine officer who had fought on Iwo Jima and at the Yalu River in the Korean War and was on the fast track to become a general. Hawkins knew little about Cuba or intelligence and was depending on what the agency told him about Cuban realities. “My belief from the intelligence provided by the CIA was that the place was ripe for revolt,” said Colonel Hawkins. “As it turned out, the CIA intelligence was hugely wrong, based largely on Cuban émigrés in Miami saying things that would promote their cause.”

Hawkins’s CIA plan called for the brigade to liberate a small area, then to dig in, waiting for “a general uprising against the Castro regime or overt military intervention by United States forces.” If the Cubans did not rise up against Castro, a provisional government would be established on the small territory and “the way [would] then be paved for United States military intervention aimed at pacification of Cuba.”

At the first Special Group meeting on Cuba, held Sunday morning, January 22, two days after the inauguration, Dulles told a number of Kennedy men, including the attorney general, that he thought “our presently planned Cuban force could probably hold a beachhead long enough for us to recognize a provisional government and aid that government openly.” A few days later, at another meeting on Cuba, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he felt that the envisioned force of six hundred to eight hundred was inadequate, and he anticipated that “final planning will have to include agreed plans for providing additional support for the Cuban force—presumably such support to be the U.S.”

As Kennedy listened to the arguments and perused the memos that passed across his desk, trying to decide what to do, he was so new in the Oval Office that he told Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador, “You don’t even know which of your team you can really trust from the point of view of their judgment.” He knew this was an important decision, but neither he nor anyone else had any idea that his actions here would be one of the defining moments of his administration. His decisions would lead him up the pathway to nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. His judgments would dramatically affect administration polices from Bolivia to Vietnam and help create fiercely held attitudes that would determine American policy toward Cuba until the end of the century and beyond. His decisions in early 1961 may even have inspired an assassin who would be waiting to meet the president on the saddest of November days.

What Kennedy could not have known as he attempted to make the first crucial decision in his administration was that so much that mattered was not only left unsaid but also probably unthought, unfelt, and unseen. Spanish was hardly an esoteric language, but crucial CIA officials in