Cuban Crises and Kennedy's Advisors

The purpose of this paper is to look at presidential advising in John F. Kennedy’s administration, with regards to how the president’s actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis were in response to his failure at the Bay of Pigs. First, I plan to give a little background on the White House Office and presidential advisers. Then I will describe and try to explain the events that took place in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I plan to show what President Kennedy did differently in the two situations, and how one endeavor succeeded while the other failed. Finally, I will show why it is important for the president to use different kinds of advisers and apply that to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Being the president is hard work. Ever since George Washington first took office in 1789, the office of the presidency has grown tremendously in power and responsibility.[1] The president has to make important decisions each day, decisions that affect an entire nation. As the nation grew and problems mounted, it became abundantly clear that the president was unable to do everything required of him without the aid of others. Before Franklin Roosevelt, presidents were able to find very limited help from other federal offices, and most of the help was clerical. In 1936, Roosevelt commissioned a group of professors, headed by Louis Brownlow, to explore the managerial needs of the president. The Brownlow Commission declared, “The President needs help.” Three years later, Congress approved the modern structure of the Executive Office of the President, making way for staff units like the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and, perhaps most importantly, the White House Office.[2]

The Executive Branch of the United States government is a complex, layered structure with the president at the center. The White House Office consists of the people closest to the president, and those people are always nearby. The main purpose of the White House Office is to take care of the tasks the president does not have time for. It gives the president extra sets of eyes, ears, and hands, but, more importantly, it gives the president a team of advisers.

The president needs people to dispense advice. He needs people whose judgment he values and whom he trusts. He also needs people who are not afraid to tell him that something is a bad idea. The worst kind of person to advise the president is someone who either is intimidated by the president and tells him what he wants to hear, or who thinks exactly like the president and agrees with everything he says. If the president surrounds himself with yes-men, the results can be disastrous.

1. Expert Advisers – Expert advisers are advisers who are experts in a certain field. They tend to have very focused views due to their concentrated backgrounds. While experts are generally unable to see the bigger picture, they are indispensable when the president needs to know the specifics of any kind of operation. The president generally finds the need to consult multiple experts to gain a deeper appreciation for the situation and to find several ways to manage or solve problems. The president needs to realize, however, that an expert adviser is there to advise, not to recommend policies, a task for which some advisers feel qualified.

2. Cabinet Advisers – The Cabinet is also a useful group of advisers whose expertise is different from expert advisers in that they are politicians, so they have a better understanding of the inner workings of policy-making. Cabinet advisers tend to see things from a broader perspective than expert advisers. They are concerned with what is best for their individual departments. A major advantage to using advisers from the Cabinet is that it brings together various opposing opinions and solutions to problems. The president can then evaluate the different solutions and choose or construct one that he feels is best.

3. White House Office Advisers – The White House Office is full of people the president trusts. These advisers tend to see problems from a much broader perspective. They work very closely with the president and understand him better than anyone. Advisers from the White House Office act as an extra set of hands, eyes, and brains. They are also the most familiar with the president, and they know how he thinks and understand his priorities. As a result, White House Office advisers are very skilled at deciding what the president wants and expressing the president’s opinion to others. They are also the people most comfortable saying no to the president, criticizing his ideas, and pointing out potential flaws in his plans.

4. Outside Advisors – Sometimes the president needs to consult someone from outside the Executive Branch, whether it is a member of Congress, an old mentor, or a person whose views are not influenced by politics or a desire for power. The advantage of consulting an outside adviser is that they tend to be more objective, and they are closer to the people who may be affected by the president’s decisions. Outside advisers are an indispensable asset to the president.[3]

The Bay of Pigs invasion was a complete failure. Shortly before leaving the White House, Dwight Eisenhower and his staff put together a plan to liberate Cuba from Fidel Castro’s regime. They would send a group of anti-Castro Cuban nationalists to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. There, the Cubans would declare themselves the new Cuban government and petition the United States for help. The United States military would promptly arrive and wipe out Castro.

Eisenhower thought the plan to liberate Cuba was really good. His military advisers agreed. Before Eisenhower could put the plan into action, however, his term as president ended, and John Kennedy came in to take over. When Kennedy heard about the plan, he told his advisers, and they thought it was a great idea. He gave it to Congress, and they passed it. It was time to put the plan into action, and there was really no way it could fail. A former five-star general and his team of advisers put it together. The president, his advisers, and Congress all approved it. There was only one thing the president and his advisers did not count on – the competency of Cuban military intelligence.

When the anti-Castro nationalists’ boats arrived at the Bay of Pigs, they were confronted and easily defeated by the Cuban military. Kennedy called off the attack, and the boats that had not yet landed turned around. Any nationalists left in Cuba were to retreat to the mountains, where, it turned out, more of Castro’s soldiers were waiting. It was not long before the world figured out that the United States was behind the whole invasion. Kennedy took full responsibility for the fiasco.

The problem with the Bay of Pigs invasion was not its execution, but its planning. Kennedy only listened to his military advisers, and they opted for a scenario with far too many baseless assumptions and biased predictions. Ultimately, their plan resembled an intricate strategy in a game of chess, in which the opposing player, rather than mounting a defense, stood idly by and watched.[4] Ultimately, such a strategy can never succeed, and Kennedy realized that far too late in the game. The reason such a terrible plan was given the go-ahead was the overall agreement that it would work, but agreement is not necessarily validity.[5] In the case of the Bay of Pigs, the president likely saw his advisers as a sort of democracy, in which the idea that most people agree on is the one that should be implemented. Since he only listened to his expert military advisers, there was almost no dissent. Had he listened to generalists like Fulbright and Schlesinger, whose specialties lay not in military strategy, but in broad judgment and overall views, the Bay of Pigs would likely never have happened.

Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 16^th, 1962, a U-2 spy plane took pictures of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed in Cuba, a mere 90 miles away from US soil. President Kennedy’s expert military advisers demanded an immediate air strike on the missile sites. Other advisers suggested that the United States do nothing and let the Cubans do as they please. Rather than give the military the go-ahead, President Kennedy assembled a group of his most trusted advisers, including

Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John McCone, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen, Undersecretary of State George Ball, Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor.[6]

Most of the advisers (later named the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom[7]) used in the Cuban Missile Crisis came from Kennedy’s Cabinet and his White House Office. ExCom was designed specifically to bring opposing views together so they could argue things out and come up with the best plan possible. They were instructed to meet in secret and without the president, so as not to alarm the public, who, at the time, still had no knowledge of the missiles in Cuba.

ExCom came up with six different solutions for the crisis. They could do nothing, which would put the United States in grave danger of nuclear annihilation and make the president look incredibly weak. They could appeal to the United Nations or Khrushchev, neither of which would guarantee results, especially since the chairman of the U.N. Security Council was Ambassador Zorin of the Soviet Union. Their third option was to secretly approach Castro and give him an ultimatum. The drawback with that plan was that the weapons belonged to the Soviets, not Castro. He had very little say as to what happened with the missiles. The next possible solution was an invasion of Cuba. In the event of an invasion, however, the Soviet Union would inevitably move against Berlin, and it was very probable that nuclear war would then break out. The fifth proposal was to perform a surgical air strike to knock out all the missile sites. This plan had two major drawbacks. First, Soviet retaliation would be inescapable, and it could signal the beginning of World War III. Second, there was no guarantee that they would be able to hit all the missile sites, since they had no way of knowing if all the missiles had been discovered.[8] Furthermore, if a surgical air strike were implemented, the Soviets may have started launching missiles before they were destroyed.[9]

As ExCom dissected their alternatives, it became more and more clear that a blockade of Cuba was their best resort. Imposing a blockade on Cuba was risky. A blockade is considered by the U.N. to be an act of war and could also push the Soviet Union into Berlin. Furthermore, should the United States be forced to fire on Soviet vessels for not stopping, it could incite a third World War.

While the risks involved in a blockade were great, it did have its advantages. First, it was aggressive enough in its communication with the rest of the world that the United States was a strong military force, but it was also restrained enough to say that the U.S. was willing to find a peaceful solution. The second advantage was that the blockade essentially put the ball in Khrushchev’s court. It made him have to decide the next move, and it gave him the opportunity to pull his missiles out of Cuba without fear of looking bad.[10]

Kennedy brought the idea of a quarantine before Congress. He used the word quarantine because a blockade is an act of war, and war was the last thing the president wanted. Many Congressional leaders felt the quarantine was too weak, and the president should take military action. Congress decided, almost unanimously, that an air strike or invasion was the best possible solution.[11] When Kennedy went on television and addressed the American people, he made it very clear that the quarantine would be the nation’s first step.[12]

Once the quarantine had been implemented, American vessels were informed that they were to do nothing more than sit in the water and look threatening. Upon seeing the American ships, many of the Soviet ships stopped or turned around and went home. Naturally, Khrushchev was opposed to the blockade of Cuba. Many other countries agreed that the blockade was an unnecessary act. They had not been given proof that the Soviets were installing weapons. The United States looked like a bully, especially in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs.

At a nationally televised meeting of the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson openly confronted Soviet Ambassador V.A. Zorin about the missiles in Cuba and the American blockade. Zorin refused to confirm or deny the existence of nuclear missiles, merely pointing out that there was no proof of them, insisting that his answer would come “in due course.” Stevenson then unveiled the aerial photographs of the missile sites.[13]

Attorney General Robert Kennedy later met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and discussed the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Dobrynin initially said there was no way Khrushchev would agree to the terms set forth by the United States. Eventually, after much arguing, a deal was struck. The Soviet Union would remove all their missiles from Cuba if the United States promised never to try to remove Castro from power. There was another stipulation the Soviets wanted, the removal of American missiles from Turkey, but Kennedy refused to accept that arrangement. He informed Ambassador Dobrynin, however, that the United States was planning to remove those missiles, anyway, but they had not gotten around to it yet.

The Importance of Dissent

In the movie, 12 Angry Men, a jury is convinced of a man’s guilt in a murder trial, with the exception of one. The single dissenting man argued that they should at least discuss the case for an hour or two before everyone votes guilty. Through discussion, the jury was eventually swayed to vote not guilty, because further examination of all the evidence showed that the man was, in fact, not guilty.[14]

In a jury, all members must agree on the guilt or innocence of a defendant. When it comes to presidential advisers, the president can choose to whom he listens. Thus, not all available advisers necessarily have a voice. As such, dissenting advisers can be ignored or worse, not even consulted. That is why the Bay of Pigs failed. Kennedy consulted only experts, who have a very limited view, and he did not allow for any dissenting ideas. Anyone who might have said, “Mr. President, this is a bad idea, and here’s why,” was turned away before getting a chance to speak. After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy brought his brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen into every decision-making process dealing with national security.[15]

When the Soviets started installing missiles in Cuba, Kennedy reacted well. Having learned the lesson of relying heavily on experts and people who agreed with them, the president intentionally recruited people who had different perspectives and who would argue about them. The immediate reaction to the news of the missiles was an air strike. Most military advisers believed that to be the most prudent choice. Chances are if all the advisers Kennedy used in the Cuban Missile Crisis were military experts, there may very well have been an attack on Cuba. Instead, Kennedy chose men from the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[16] This way, he was able to find a solution to the Crisis that did not spark another World War.

[1] Milkis, 67

[2] Pika, 144 - 145

[3] Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House, 64 - 74

[4] Sorensen, The Kennedy Legacy, 181 - 182

[5] Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House, 61

[6] Allison, 57

[7] Allison, 57

[8] Allison. 58 - 60

[9] Allison, 126

[10] Allison, 60 - 61

[11] Allison, 195

[12] Kennedy, 55

[13] Kennedy, 75-76

[14] Lumet, 12 Angry Men

[15] Allison, 187

[16] Allison, 57