My comment was more to address what happened to bring us to that point. Kennedy planned an uprising in the Bay of Pigs, and then backed out of providing air cover, leading to the massacre of thousands of Cubans by Fidel's communist army. That signaled U.S. weakness to Nikita Kruschev, and to show the U.S.A. that the U.S.S.R. meant business, they sent nukes for Castro to shoot at the United States if we attemped another invasion.
Tensions between The United States and Cuba had increased steadily since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had judged that Castro's policies including the expropriation of US assets on the island and Cuba's increasing ties with the Soviet Union could not be tolerated.
On March 17, 1960 the Eisenhower administration agreed to a recommendation from the CIA to equip and drill Cuban exiles for action against the new Castro government. Eisenhower stated that it was the policy of the U.S. government to aid anti-Castro guerilla forces. The CIA began to recruit and train anti-Castro forces in the Sierra Madre mountains on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Vice President Richard Nixon, not Eisenhower, reportedly pushed the plan forward.
The CIA was initially confident that it was capable of overthrowing Castro, having experience assisting in the overthrow of other foreign governments such as Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Richard Mervin Bissell Jr., one of Allen Dulles three aides, was made director of "Operation Zapata." (There is no direct evidence tying this to Zapata Corporation.)
The original plan had called for landing the exile brigade in the vicinity of the old colonial city of Trinidad, Cuba, located in the central province of Sancti Spiritus approximately 400 km southeast of Havana at the foothills of the Escambray mountains. The selection of the Trinidad site provided a number of options that the exile brigade could exploit to their advantage during the invasion. The population of Trinidad was generally opposed to Castro and the rugged mountains outside the city provided an area of operations to which the invasion force could retreat and establish a guerrilla campaign were the landing to falter. Throughout 1960, the growing ranks of Brigade 2506 trained at locations throughout southern Florida and in Guatemala for the beach landing and possible mountain retreat.
On February 17, 1961, Kennedy asked his advisors whether the toppling of Castro might be related to weapon shipments and if it was possible to claim the real targets were modern fighter aircraft and rockets which endangered America's security. At the time, Cuba's army possessed Soviet tanks, artillery and small arms, and its air force consisted of B-26 medium bombers, Hawker Sea Furies (a fast and effective, though obsolete, propeller driven fighter-bomber), and T-33 jets left over from the Batista Air Force.
As Washington's plans evolved, critical details were changed that were to hamper chances of a successful mission without US help. These revised details included changing the landing area for Brigade 2506 to two points in Matanzas Province, 202 km southeast of Havana on the eastern edge of the Zapata peninsula at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). The landings would take place on the Girón and Playa Larga beaches. This change effectively cut off contact with the rebels in the Escambray "War Against the Bandits". The Castro government had been warned by senior KGB agents Osvaldo Sánchez Cabrera and "Aragon", who respectively died violently before and after the invasion. The US government was aware that a high casualty rate was possible.
Although Cuban forces at the actual site surrendered, it soon became evident after contact with Cuban reinforcements that the exiles were not going to receive effective support at the site of the invasion and were likely to lose. Reports from both sides describe tank battles involving heavy USSR equipment. Kennedy decided against giving the faltering invasion US air support (though four US pilots were killed in Cuba during the invasion) because of his opposition to overt intervention. Kennedy also canceled several sorties of bombings (only two took place) on the grounded Cuban Airforce, which might have crippled the Cuban Airforce and given air superiority to the invaders. U.S. Marines were not sent in, even though there were support ships off the coast ready to land at a moment's notice.
MC, Those were tough decisions for anybody to make, but it looks much uglier with 20/20 hindesite, because we attached Camelot to the Kennedy family when all this was happening.
I'm not excusing what Kennedy failed to do, but it makes one wonder with his brains how he could have failed so miserably.
I'm not sure I follow the point about our removal of the "obsolete" Jupiter missiles from Turkey in 1963/4.
There is no doubt this was a reciprocal deal for the removal of the somewhat more modern and capable missiles Kruschev had installed in Cuba. However a brief glimpse at a map will reveal that these 1000NM missiles gave ours in Turkey about the same access to the USSR's key industrial and military targets as did those in Cuba have for ours.
Discussions about what Kennedy might have done with more time are a bit pointless, given that the problem was so complex and his ongoing actions so contradictory. There is no doubt Kennedy started and did not waiver from the intent to directly combat the Soviet proclaimed "Wars of national Liberation" and to build up the military capability to do so.
But to halt the spread of these terrible weapons, to halt the contamination of the air, to halt the spiraling nuclear arms race, we remain ready to seek new avenues of agreement, our new Disarmament Program thus includes the following proposals:
First, signing the test-ban treaty by all nations. This can be done now. Test ban negotiations need not and should not await general disarmament. Second, stopping the production of fissionable materials for use in weapons, and preventing their transfer to any nation now lacking in nuclear weapons. Third, prohibiting the transfer of control over nuclear weapons to states that do not own them. Fourth, keeping nuclear weapons from seeding new battlegrounds in outer space. Fifth, gradually destroying existing nuclear weapons and converting their materials to peaceful uses; and Finally, halting the unlimited testing and production of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and gradually destroying them as well." Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations, New York City, September 25, 1961
World order will be secured only when the whole world has laid down these weapons which seem to offer us present security but threaten the future survival of the human race. That armistice day seems very far away. The vast resources on this planet are being devoted more and more to the means of destroying, instead of enriching human life but the world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.
Vietnam was merely the most prominent example. Despite the revisionist suggestions that kennedy was backing away from the commitment to the struggle in Vietnam the fact is our forces there were growing and our mission for them was expanding right up until the day of his death. Indeed he bequeather Johnson plans for a major escalation of the war which in fact LBJ carried out, in part because he didn't want to appear any less "tough" than the supposed 'best and brightest' of Camelot..
I believe Bernard Lewis is largely correct in his views on the dangers of fanatic Islamists and, more significantly, the several changes mainstream Islam will have to make to adapt to the modern world. That, however is most certainly not a justification for the injustices Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian victims of its prolonged occupation. Nor does it justify the adoption by Israel of some of the same retrograde tribal and religious preferences in its civil code of which Lewis so accurately criticizes the Moslem world. Moslem backwardness is no excuse for an Israeli version of the same thing.
John F Kennedy, 1958 (from wikipedia)
"Our Nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap." The problem with the term is shown in the dictionary's next quote, merely four years later, from the Listener, 19 April 1962: "The passages on the 'missile gap' are a little dated, since Mr Kennedy has now told us that it scarcely ever existed."
Kennedy was particularly connected to the phrase as he used it frequently during the 1960 American presidential election campaign to attack the Republicans for their supposed complacency on the subject of Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Both countries had been developing missile technologies since World War II often with the assistance of German scientists gained as a result of initiatives such as Operation Paperclip. The Russian launch of Sputnik 1 was simply the most obvious use of the missile technology compared to the stocks of military missiles both sides already had. The Russians also had concentrated mainly on larger, long distance ICBMs more suited for deployment to space whereas the Americans possessed many more smaller, short-range IRBMs. These were often deployed in Europe closer to Russia than the Russians could manage to get to the continental United States.
Beginning with the collection of photo-intelligence by U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union in 1956, the Eisenhower administration had increasing hard evidence that claims of a missile gap favoring the Soviet Union were false. However, fearing that public disclosure of this evidence would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights, Eisenhower elected not to directly refute the missile gap claims by opponents, including Kennedy during the 1960 campaign, by publicly citing the evidence from the U-2 overflights.
Moreover, Eisenhower was concerned that any direct public proof that the United States held vast superiority in numbers of missiles over the Soviets would publicly humiliate the Soviets by emphasizing their weakness and thus provoke them to behave more aggressively. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the Soviet Union in number of missiles. But knowing the truth that America was substantially ahead in missiles, and confident that Americans would not believe that a professional soldier like him would ever leave America vulnerable to an enemy, Eisenhower chose not to publicly refute Kennedy.
Later evidence has emerged that one consequence of Kennedy pushing the false idea that America was behind the Soviets in a missile gap was that Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev and senior Soviet military figures began to believe that Kennedy was a dangerous extremist who, with the American military, was seeking to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. This belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and led to the Soviets placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.
Ah, with the presence of spy planes overhead during Eisenhower's Administration flying i.e. the shooting down of the U2 Krushchev may have been egged into putting missiles in Cuba.
Four days after Powers disappeared, NASA issued a very detailed press release noting that an aircraft had "gone missing" north of Turkey.[2] The press release speculated that the pilot might have fallen unconscious while the autopilot was still engaged, even claiming that "the pilot reported over the emergency frequency that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties." To bolster this, a U-2 plane was quickly painted in NASA colors and shown to the media. (see photo).
After hearing this, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet (and hence the world) that a "spyplane" had been shot down, whereupon the U.S. issued a statement claiming that it was a "weather research aircraft" which strayed into Soviet airspace after the pilot had "difficulties with his oxygen equipment" while flying over Turkey. The White House, presuming Powers was dead, gracefully acknowledged that this might be the same plane, but still proclaimed "there was absolutely no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace and never has been", and attempted to continue the facade by grounding all U-2 aircraft to check for "oxygen problems".
On May 7, Khrushchev dropped the bombshell:
"I must tell you a secret. When I made my first report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well... and now just look how many silly things [the Americans] have said." [1]
Not only was Powers still alive, though, but his plane was also essentially intact. The Soviets managed to recover the surveillance camera and even developed the photographs. Powers' survival pack, including 7500 rubles and jewelry for women, was also recovered. Today a large part of the wreck as well as many items from the survival pack are on display at the Central Museum of Armed Forces in Moscow.
Aftermath
The Paris Summit between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev collapsed, in large part because Eisenhower refused to make apologies over the incident, demanded by Khrushchev. Khrushchev left the talks on May 16.
Powers pleaded guilty and was convicted of espionage on August 19 and sentenced to 3 years' imprisonment and 7 years of hard labor. He served one and three-quarter years of the sentence before being exchanged for Rudolf Abel on February 10, 1962. The exchange occurred on the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam, Germany.
Another result of the crisis was that the US Corona spy satellite project was accelerated.
In this chicken vs. the egg discussion, where anti-Israeli opinion advances this notion that occupation precedes terrorism, the basic charters of Hamas and Hezbollah reveal the pervasive truth; they do not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a state. On the other hand, no such basic tenet is contained in Hebrew or Zionist philosophy, that the Arabs do not have a right to statehood and their own land.
The joint Arab invasion of Israel occurred the eve before the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947. Many of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany fled to Israel and thus the United States does have an interest that goes beyond merely choosing which Sfardic tribe the U.S. wishes to rally behind.
