National Public Radio is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In 1971, it began at the height of "anti-war" fervor against the U.S. government and its immoral war-mongering. That flavor remains at NPR to this day. Last Sunday, NPR anchor Noah Adams reminded listeners of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and naturally, the theme was anti-communist paranoia:
NOAH ADAMS: Today, April 17th, marks exactly 50 years since one of the biggest disasters in American foreign policy: the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961.
JIM RASENBERGER (Author, "The Brilliant Disaster"): You know, I think the thing that you have to keep in mind when you ask yourself how did this ever happen is the extraordinary fear of communism in the United States in the late '50s and early '60s.
ADAMS: Historian Jim Rasenberger has written a book about that time.
Unidentified Man #1: Under communism, virtually everything belongs to the state.
ADAMS: And he says it all started when the American government began to think Fidel Castro, leader of the revolution in Cuba, was looking more and more like the communists of the Soviet Union.
RASENBERGER: It wasn't just a fear that communism was spreading, but that communists had nuclear weapons.
Adams devoted an entire second segment to promoting Rasenberger's theories of incompetent warmongering. We apparently still belong in an era of "troubled interventions" -- which implied there shouldn't be any American interventions. The Cold War isn't somehow won, but it remains a chilling episode of "inordinate fear of communism," immoral militarism, and patriotic hubris:
ADAMS: At the top of this hour, we heard from Jim Rasenberger, who's written a new book about the Bay of Pigs. It's called "The Brilliant Disaster." It's an hour-by-hour account of the invasion and the events that led up to it. He says even today, the Bay of Pigs remains one of the most important events in American history.
RASENBERGER: Well, it really was the beginning of an era that we still live in today of troubled interventions. You know, before the Bay of Pigs, it would have been a fairly skeptical or cynical American who doubted that he lived in a country that was run by competent men engaged in worthwhile enterprises. But the Bay of Pigs changed that.
Not only did it appear immoral to many people, but it also was incompetent. I sort of see it as the beginning of the Vietnam era even before the Vietnam War really took off. The aspect of questioning authority that would go on through the Vietnam era really began with the Bay of Pigs.
ADAMS: A lot of the conventional thinking, when you look back on it, about the Bay of Pigs, puts the CIA up as the aggressors who push Kennedy, the new president, to move forward with the invasion. You say that's not really quite how it happened.
RASENBERGER: No, it's more complicated than that. It is true that the CIA pushed the operation. The part that I take issue with is that they somehow tricked or fooled the president.
My take on it is that John Kennedy went forward with the Bay of Pigs largely because he could see no way not to go forward with it. He had run against Richard Nixon beating the Eisenhower administration over the head with Castro.
And when he came into office and then was handed this plan, it would have been very difficult for him to say, you know, I don't think I'm going to do this. He had a lot of doubts about it, a lot of concerns about it, but he never could figure out a way not to do it.
ADAMS: To speak to what went wrong, Fidel Castro had airplanes the CIA didn't know about, air cover wasn't there, there was a second airstrike that people thought was going to happen. And what was the tipping point in this disaster?
RASENBERGER: In most people's minds, it was the cancellation by John Kennedy of the second airstrike. Now, I have to go back and explain. On April 15th, eight Cuban exile B-26s took off from Nicaragua and flew to Cuba and bombed Cuban airfields trying to destroy Castro's air force. It was always understood that Castro had to have no airplanes for this to work.
Those airstrikes knocked out a number of planes, but they left about half a dozen, maybe seven, planes. There were supposed to be follow-up airstrikes on the morning of April 17th as the invasion was beginning. But John Kennedy at the last moment, on the evening of April 16th, canceled these. And this essentially left the brigade marooned on this beach that they had just taken. Once those second airstrikes were canceled, and Castro was left with his airplanes, the game was basically over. The brigade was doomed at that point.
Oddly, NPR's Adams encouraged Rasenberger to insist that this failed invasion was a military loss, but a political victory. JFK somehow deserved credit for rattling half a saber and losing:
ADAMS: You raise a very intriguing prospect here that Kennedy may have thought it was going to be a bad idea, wanted to do it anyway, it would give him a great deal of power. He didn't really want to occupy Cuba, which you would have to do if you won, with American troops.
Mr. RASENBERGER: He was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, as I said, he had to go forward. On the other hand, he was very concerned about lighting a match that would spark a great conflagration with the Soviet Union, start a nuclear war.
And he knew that if the American hand showed in this, Khrushchev would then be forced for his own reasons to retaliate, and then he would have to retaliate in kind, and onward it might go.
So as some people said afterwards, he got the best-case scenario. He went forward with it, so he looked like he was strong on communism, and yet it failed, so he didn't have to deal with some terrible consequences that might have followed had it succeeded.
ADAMS: There have been comparisons about what's going on in Libya today to the Bay of Pigs. A headline in The New York Times this past week read: U.S. groups helped nurture Arab opposition. Are there lessons from the Bay of Pigs that you can truly apply to what's going on in the Middle East?
Mr. RASENBERGER: One lesson would be - certainly would apply to Iraq would be: Don't assume when we go into another country that immediately, the locals will all come and gather behind our cause.
We also have to remember, and I think this may apply to Libya, we don't know: The cure may be worse than the disease. And indeed, it was. Castro became far more powerful after the invasion. He became more closely tied to the Soviet Union after the invasion.
Those are two big lessons. You know, in the Kennedy administration, these were people famously known as the best and the brightest. They were all supremely confident, supremely successful people. One of the lessons I take from it is maybe it would be wise for presidents to have a few people in their administrations who weren't supreme successes, just people maybe more acquainted with, you know, the possibilities of things not going well.
ADAMS: Jim Rasenberger, his new book is "The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs." Thank you, sir.
