The perfect failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs [Unknown Binding]

Trumbull Higgins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1987

Higgins, a specialist in studying military disasters, gives the first fully documented account of the plans, mistakes and compromises that led to the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

On April 16, 1961, an understrength, weakly supported force of Cuban exiles attempted to seize a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs to establish an anti-Castro government. Within three days the invaders had been killed or captured, and the U.S. had suffered a humiliating foreign-policy setback. "Not only were our facts in error," admitted President Kennedy, "but our policy was wrong because the premises on which it was built were wrong." Higgins (Korea and the Fall of MacArthur) traces the development of those premises leading to the policymany of them legacies from the Eisenhower administrationthen describes the military fiasco itself and its immediate aftermath. The "in error" facts were largely supplied by the CIA in what Higgins calls "the successful deception of the Kennedy administration" by that agency. Kennedy himself comes off poorly here as a president who "had the courage neither to carry the operation through nor to cancel it outright."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 224 pages
• Publisher: Norton; 1st edition (1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0039024733
• ISBN-13: 978-0039024734
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,902,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book review, October 3, 2005

By 

T. bailey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The perfect failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs

Under Cover, or Out of Control? The New York Times November 29, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition (Review of 2 books, including, Covert Action: The CIA and the Limits of American Intervention in the Postwar World, only this book review included here)

The torrent of revelations about the Iran-contra affair during the summer's televised hearings, and in the recently released report of the Congressional committees that conducted the hearings, has made Americans aware both of the importance of covert action in the foreign policy of their country and of its risks and costs. These two books do nothing to rehabilitate its reputation or to improve its image...

...Mr. Higgins, whose style is anything but graceful, uses strong primary colors to paint the ''perfect failure'' of the Bay of Pigs. He makes no new revelations, but his solid research -in memoirs, declassified documents and interviews -leads to stark and damning conclusions. A reluctant President Kennedy inherited a half-baked plan for the invasion of Cuba prepared by the C.I.A. under President Eisenhower. Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, mistook for an approval the Joint Chiefs of Staff's mere acquiescence to a plan that the military, deep down, deemed insufficient.

Even so, Kennedy's desire to make the American role in the operation as invisible as possible forced the organizers to move the site of the landing from the town of Trinidad (on Cuba's south coast, near mountains into which the invaders could have retreated) to the swamp of the Bay of Pigs, 80 miles from the nearest mountains, and led them to dilute and delay the air strikes that were supposed to cover the operation. Even if the original plan for these strikes had been followed, Mr. Higgins believes - rightly, in my opinion -that Mr. Castro would have won, given his will to fight. The military requirement for success was a large American participation in the invasion. The political necessity of presenting the affair as an attempt by Cubans to liberate their island, and of avoiding a wave of anti-Americanism in Latin America, excluded such participation - and doomed the undertaking.

MR. HIGGINS praises Kennedy for having resisted strong pressures toward a more open and considerable American military intervention, and he suggests that the C.I.A. planners, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, had allowed a timid plan to go into effect because they gambled that its very flaws would force the President's hand. But the author also shows how shoddy the decision-making process within the Administration had been; such dissenters as Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles and Senator J. William Fulbright were not taken seriously. Kennedy was the victim of his own lack of experience, of his anti-Communism (or liberal imperialism), of his need to show toughness (especially as he was resisting pressure to intervene in Laos) and of a time bomb inherited from his predecessor: the Cuban exiles who were being trained in Guatemala were increasingly unwelcome there, and as Mr. Treverton puts it, ''There seemed only one place to put [them] - Cuba.''

After the fiasco, an investigation within the C.I.A. concluded that the operation had been ''too big to be a raid and too small to be an invasion.'' When one looks at President Reagan's far more overt action against Nicaragua, one realizes that his Administration is determined not only to do away with the so-called Vietnam syndrome but to ignore the lessons of the Bay of Pigs as well.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's credibility tarnished, July 30, 2009

By 

Andrew J. Rodriguez (Golden, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perfect Failure (Paperback)

The Bay of Pigs betrayal shattered not only America's John Wayne image among the Cuban people but it marked the beginning of a credibility crisis my adopted country has been suffering ever since.

During the last century, the United States participated in over 28 armed conflicts worldwide. The Bay of Pigs fiasco became the Achilles heel of America's dependability and courage to fight for a good cause.

"The Perfect Failure" expounds the irreparable damage ignorant politicians and bureaucrats can inflict to their nations' integrity. I highly recommend the book.

Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author: "Adios, Havana," a Memoir.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Perfect Book, December 17, 2001

By 

Selkie (Oyster Bay, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Perfect Failure (Paperback)

A masterpiece of history! Exciting and informative! 5 Stars!