Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [34]
That said, the response to the Bay of Pigs also testified to the authority of the reigning precepts of national security. Even in the wake of a humiliating setback, they remained sacrosanct. After all, since the onset of the Cold War, covert action had established itself as the preferred instrument of power projection. As the most readily available means of satisfying Washington’s appetite for global interventionism, it complemented a nuclear arsenal that was considered absolutely essential but difficult to use. The methods devised by Allen Dulles and the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create the aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco had seemingly called into question the efficacy of covert operations. This Kennedy and his lieutenants, devoted to enhancing the authority of the presidency, were not prepared to accept. After all, the agenda being marketed under the banner of flexible response aimed not to reduce the options for projecting power but to enrich them, while ensuring that the president alone call the shots. Operation Mongoose’s transformation from a program of subversion into a prelude to invasion hinted at where this search for more options pointed.
Not surprisingly, then, just as there was no serious effort to reevaluate the threat the Cuban Revolution posed to U.S. interests, so too there was no serious effort made to reassess the U.S. penchant for overthrowing governments not to its liking. To entertain either prospect would have required gifts of imagination (and, arguably, political courage) that neither Kennedy nor the other Cold Warriors of his inner circle possessed. The antidote to covert failure was—and this became a pattern in the future—to up the ante and devise overt alternatives.
Theodore Sorensen, special counsel to the president and a loyal chronicler of Camelot, found it heartening that Kennedy had taken from the Bay of Pigs episode “so many major lessons,” gained “at so relatively small and temporary a cost.”33 Soon thereafter, those lessons “helped save the world.”34 Arthur Schlesinger, the Democratic court historian then serving as one of the president’s special assistants, concurred. “[N]o one can doubt,” he wrote, “that failure in Cuba in 1961 contributed to success in Cuba in 1962.”35 To arrive at such exceedingly generous judgments, Sorensen and Schlesinger excluded from their accounts the post–Bay of Pigs vendetta against Castro that consumed the Kennedy brothers.
In fact, Kennedy and his advisers learned astonishingly little from the Bay of Pigs. In that action-oriented era, the tempo of CIA activity actually quickened. “Ike had undertaken 170 major covert CIA operations in eight years,” writes Tim Weiner in his history of the CIA. “The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.”36 In short, the only thing that mattered to the president and his brother was how to get Operation Zapata right the next time.
The president memorialized by Sorensen and Schlesinger was a singular figure, standing apart from the notably dull and pedestrian Eisenhower and from Kennedy’s own immediate successor, the boorish Lyndon Johnson. Keepers of the JFK legend could never bring themselves to acknowledge that Zapata and Mongoose situated their hero squarely within a dubious tradition that predated his presidency and survived his assassination. Peas need