On the Beach
I thought there was a particularly interesting piece in the Nation the other day on the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The writer was Jean Edward Smith, a former regular US Army officer, and author of The Defence of Berlin, reviewed in our pages a few weeks ago. Briefly, Smith's thesis is that after much deliberation President Ken- nedy cancelled the landing at the last minute on April 16, 1961, only to be told by the CIA that Brigade 2056 was already going ashore— where it was greeted by Castro's M1Gs and T-34s. What happened then, everybody knows. If Smith is correct, then Kennedy's subsequent and enigmatic remark that the landing had 'a 40 per cent' chance of success was not a lay- man's aside, but a wry reference to the fact that the remaining 60 per cent of the operation —prearranged sabotage, the larger air drops, tactical air support—had been cancelled. Not only does it explain Kennedy's assumption of total responsibility for the landing, but also
indicates why the President was so keen to bail out the 1,500 prisoners of the aborted in- vasion from Castro's prisoner cages. Is it pos- sible that failure was not a result of military incompetence but of political intervention due to the President's belated conclusion that the affair should be called off? Shortly after Castro's victory, General Maxwell Taylor headed an in- vestigating committee into the landing. Only if the Taylor report is released shall we know what happened during those crucial hours when Kennedy's nerve, for once, seemed to fail. What is much more likely is that we shall never really know.
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