Quotes About Bay of Pigs

In his 1972 classic, Victims of Groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis—one of my PhD advisers at Yale long ago—explored the decision making that went into both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

Where the 'Bay of Pigs' invasion failed, undoubtedly the tourist invasion will succeed in forever changing the landscape of island. What comes next in Cuba? The answer is that many Cubans aren't waiting around to find out.

Mine is, after all, the generation that had come to maturity drinking in the forebodings of the Silones, Koestlers, and Richard Wrights. It had left us ill-prepared for decisions that had to be made in our own time about Algeria, Birmingham, or the Bay of Pigs.

I've been very fortunate to be able to jump around. I just did this really wonderful film called Map of the World. That was a real, amazing, dramatic story. Then I did a movie called Company Men, a little comedy about the Bay of Pigs.

The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.

With heightened tensions at home and abroad, he had a weak track record on both fronts. Soaring rhetoric was one thing, but when it came to policy, he had floundered. From the Bay of Pigs fiasco to his window dressing on civil rights, his presidency lacked any significant accomplishment.

So the reason that the Bay of Pigs failed was that the original promise made by Eisenhower was not kept by the subsequent Administration. It allowed hostile air to wipe out the approaching invasion force.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.

Although not noted in this samizdat document, Theodore Shackley (linked to drug trafficking in Southeast Asia) was the head of the CIA's Far East Division during the time that Bush was the American ambassador to China. When Bush became CIA director in 1976 he made Shackley Associate Deputy Director of Operations, the third most important position in the CIA. One anti-Castro group in Miami at the time of the Bay of Pigs was called the White Rose.

Hunt had helped set up the Bay of Pigs, was one of the Watergate "plumbers," and was alleged by one Lee Harvey Oswald familiar to have involved him in a mind-control operation.25

I go back and think of President Kennedy, who had a military service background, but he comes into the presidency, and he's faced with a decision on the Bay of Pigs, with the C.I.A. and the military giving him data, and it turns out very badly.

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy's doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

The myth about the CIA dated back to the Bay of Pigs: that all its successes were secret, that only its failures were trumpeted. The truth was that the CIA could not succeed without recruiting and sustaining skilled and daring officers and foreign agents. The agency failed daily at that mission, and to pretend otherwise was a delusion.

The Bay of Pigs is one of America's most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.

The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal.