you with a plan to overthrow a hostile government that threatens American security. The plan

would solve a major problem if it worked, but you worry that it won’t. What do you

do?

I’m Jim Lindsay, and this is Lessons Learned. Our topic today is the Bay of Pigs invasion,

which began on April 17, 1961.

The road to the Bay of Pigs began two years earlier when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba’s

U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Relations between the two countries quickly

soured. Castro denounced decades of U.S. political and economic domination of Cuba. He called

for revolutions throughout Latin America and he seized properties that US firms owned in

Cuba.

What especially worried Washington, though, was Castro’s growing ties to Moscow. It

was the height of the Cold War and the Soviet Union looked to be on the march around the

globe. So President Dwight Eisenhower and his advisors looked at Castro and feared that

the Soviets would soon have a beachhead less than 100 miles off America’s shores.

By March 1960, Eisenhower had had enough. He authorized a CIA plan to train Cuban exiles

to overthrow Castro. The plan, eventually code named “Bumpy Road,” rested on the

premise that the attack by Cuban exiles would trigger a popular uprising in Cuba that would

overthrow Castro. Eisenhower had reason to be confident the plan would work. Six years

earlier the Central Intelligence Agency had engineered the ouster of a leftist government

in Guatemala.

Operation Bumpy Road could not be executed before Eisenhower left office. The decision

on whether to proceed was left to his successor, John F. Kennedy.

JFK had doubts about the wisdom of Operation Bumpy Road. He knew that a decision to intervene

overtly in Cuba would be criticized at home and especially abroad. But he also knew that

ousting Castro would fulfill his campaign promise of a tougher foreign policy and strengthen

his hand in dealing with the Soviets. And he saw real political costs to killing the

operation. Some of the hundreds of Cuban exiles, and probably a few U.S. government officials

as well, would complain to the press that he had walked away from the plan that would

have toppled Castro. That would have exposed JFK to damaging charges that he was soft on

communism.

So JFK gave a green light to Operation Bumpy Road. But in doing so he made two critical

decisions. First, because he wanted to minimize overt U.S. involvement, he severely limited

the U.S. air support for the mission. CIA and U.S. Air Force officials went along with

the restriction because they assumed he would change his mind if the operation ran into

trouble. Second, he chose a more remote landing site for the operation, the Bahía de Cochinos—the

Bay of Pigs. Unfortunately, it was a lousy spot for an amphibious landing.

The invasion force of 1,511 exiles, known as Brigade 2506, landed at the Bay of Pigs

on April 17, 1961. The operation was a disaster from the start. Castro’s army wasn’t surprised.

Ordinary Cubans did not rise in revolt. And JFK refused to send the U.S. military to save

the Cuban exiles pinned down on the beaches. On April 19, Brigade 2506 surrendered. The

three days of fighting had left 140 exiles dead and nearly 1,200 captured.

>> President John F. Kennedy: On that unhappy island, as in so many other arenas of the

contest for freedom, the news has grown worse instead of better. I have emphasized before

that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator. While we could not

be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces

of this country would not intervene in any way.

>> Jim Lindsay: The Bay of Pigs was is of the of the biggest U.S. foreign policy fiascoes

of the twentieth century. There were many reasons it failed besides JFK’s refusal

to authorize air support. The underlying premise that ordinary Cubans would come to the invasion’s

aid was flatly wrong. The invasion was poorly organized and managed. It also wasn’t much

of a secret, or a surprise to Castro. The New York Times ran two separate stories on

its front-page about the U.S. efforts to train a Cuban army in exile.

What is the lesson of the Bay of Pigs? Just this: Be prepared for failure and plan accordingly.

JFK had doubts about the wisdom of the CIA’s plan, and he knew that he would not order

a direct U.S. military intervention. So he put all of his eggs on hoping that Operation

Bumpy Road would work. It didn’t. Had JFK thought through the possibilities of failure

he might have canceled the operation or fundamentally reshaped it. As it was, he was left to lament:

“How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?”

Presidents don’t want to find themselves asking JFK’s question about their own decisions.

So recognizing the potential for failure—and taking steps to minimize it—is a fundamental

challenge for all types of foreign policymaking. But it is especially important when talking

about decisions to use military force.

To take just one example, it is fine to discuss how military strikes might blunt Iran’s

nuclear ambitions. But that analysis is incomplete unless it also grapples with how a military

strike might fail, or create an entirely new problems to handle.

So here’s a question to consider: What steps should presidents take to make sure that they

are thinking through how their policies might fail rather than simply engaging in wishful

thinking about how they will succeed?

I encourage you to weigh in with your answers on my blog, The Water’s Edge. You can find

it at CFR.org.

I’m Jim Lindsay. Thank you for watching this installment of Lessons Learned.