Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [30]
This “strategic triad,” too, now became enshrined as an essential component of U.S. policy. The net effect was to render permanent the oversized, multidimensional nuclear strike force that the Kennedy administration had declared an urgent necessity. Even today, nearly fifty years after its creation, twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the triad, although modified and updated many times, survives. Here lies McNamara’s most enduring contribution to nuclear policy.
McNamara’s search for options and flexibility, not to mention his attempt to inject moral considerations into nuclear war planning, produced negligible results. No matter how hard McNamara tried to rationalize nuclear strategy, it remained stubbornly irrational. As in the 1950s, so too in the 1960s, nuclear war meant nuclear holocaust. The real winner of the contest was the Washington consensus, which emerged from this supposed battle of the titans reaffirmed and stronger than ever.
When the dust of McNamara’s strategic reassessment had settled, the outcome did not especially discomfit senior military officers like LeMay, defense contractors, or their congressional supporters. They got most of what they wanted and could live comfortably with the results. For their part, the Soviets must have wondered what all the fuss was about. The label attached to U.S. strategy might have changed, but as one historian has aptly observed, “assured destruction was surely massive retaliation by another name.”19
DUMB AND DUMBER
Meanwhile, a covert operation gone badly awry provided Kennedy with a tutorial regarding the risks involved in allowing agencies other than the White House to determine the course of national security policy.
Eisenhower was hardly the first and would not be the last president to bequeath his successor a poison pill. In Kennedy’s case, the inheritance bore the label Operation Zapata, a scheme concocted by the CIA, albeit with Eisenhower’s assent, that aimed to repeat in Cuba the successes the Agency had ostensibly achieved in Iran and Guatemala. Just as the CIA had overthrown Mossadegh and Árbenz, it now set out to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, raising a small force of 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland with expectations of triggering a popular uprising.
The ensuing failure is too well known to require a detailed accounting here. Suffice it to say that Kennedy, sensing the enterprise was a dubious one, stalled for time, sent subordinates back to take a second look, and tinkered with operational details before reluctantly allowing it to proceed. When giving the final go-ahead, the president insisted that the operation succeed or fail on its own: Under no circumstances was he going to send in U.S. forces if the CIA-trained proxies got into more trouble than they could handle.20
Even before the first Cuban exile hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, everything had begun to go wrong. With disaster looming, the CIA made an eleventh-hour appeal, entreating Kennedy (through Secretary of State Dean Rusk) to order direct military intervention. The president denied that request. When the operation soon thereafter collapsed, leakers wasted no time in blaming the White House: Kennedy’s timidity in refusing to commit American muscle, they claimed, had doomed the enterprise.
For our purposes, the real significance of the Bay of Pigs lies in what next ensued. Kennedy’s response to his first foreign policy crisis produced results—almost all of them negative—that went far beyond what the president himself could possibly have envisioned. In that sense, the Bay of Pigs stands in relation to the Kennedy presidency as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident would to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson or the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to the presidency