(1) Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1998)
Kennedy had many doubts about the feasibility of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Schlesinger noted. But he was also concerned - as was Dulles - about the "disposal problem" if the operation was called off before it began and the Cuban exiles went back, unbloodied, to Florida, where they would surely tell their story of frustration and disappointment to every journalist they could find. Schlesinger quoted Kennedy as saying of the Cuban exile brigade, "If we have to get rid of these ... men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go." It was a rare glimpse into Kennedy's instinct for self-preservation. He understood that the political price of canceling the invasion would be great, far greater than if it were to go forward and collapse in failure. By canceling, he would appear weak and indecisive, and give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse him of being soft on communism. But Schlesinger's account depicted Kennedy's dilemma in far loftier terms. If the president canceled, he "would forever be haunted by the feeling that his scruples had preserved Castro in power." In going forward, the historian added, Kennedy was motivated "by the commitment of the Cuban patriots" and "saw no obligation to protect the Castro regime from democratic Cubans."
Sorensen and Schlesinger apparently did not know the critical truths about Cuba. They did not know that candidate Kennedy had been privately informed by CIA officials and some participants before the election that the island would soon be invaded by the secret exile army -information he used to great effect against Richard Nixon. And they were not privy to one of the major reasons for President Kennedy's last-minute ambivalence about the Bay of Pigs operation: Sam Giancana's henchmen inside Cuba had been unable to murder Castro in the days immediately before the invasion.
(2) James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK (1968)
One of his closest advisers, historian Arthur Schlesinger, wrote :" All across Latin America the ancient oligarchies - landholders, Church and Army - are losing their grip. There is a groundswell of inarticulate mass dissatisfaction on the part of peons, Indians, miners, plantation workers, factory hands, classes held down past all endurance and now approaching a state of revolt. "
Near Recife, Schlesinger had seen poverty-stricken villages full of starving children covered with scabs. He recalled that before Castro came to power Havana had been nothing but a giant casino and brothel for American businessmen over for a big weekend. " My fellow countrymen reeled through the streets, picking up fourteen-year-old Cuban girls and tossing coins to make men scramble in the gutter", he wrote.
The policies of the President and his advisers were certain to have economic repercussions. In April, 1962, a year after the inauguration of the Alliance for Progress, Latin America, in the eyes of the conservatives, appeared headed for chaos. In Argentina, President Frondizi had just been overthrown by a military coup, and rioting had broken out in Guatemala and Ecuador. There was no country to the South that could be considered politically and economically stable. Capital flowed back into the United States, frightened by the spectre of Castroist revolution.
But the effect on the American economy threatened to be even worse. The businessmen could not accept concepts like those of Schlesinger, who declared that the essential thing was not, as Nixon had suggested, to stimulate the cosmetics industry, but to build hospitals and to invest in sectors that affected the strength of the nation and the welfare of the people.
(3) Arthur Schlesinger was interviewed by Anthony Summers in 1978 for his book Conspiracy: Who Killed President Kennedy (1980)
The CIA was reviving the assassination plots at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba - an extraordinary action. If it was not total incompetence - which in the case of the CIA cannot be excluded - it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy.... I think the CIA must have known about this initiative. They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the U.N. were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes…They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations….Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts, that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.
(4) Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (1991)
Kennedy insisted during October 1963 that one thousand U.S. troops in Vietnam, euphemistically referred to as advisers, be recalled at that time. Kenneth O'Donnell has stated that Kennedy planned to withdraw all Americans from Vietnam after the 1964 elections (O'Donnell and Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has also stated that Kennedy was to end the United States adventure in Vietnam: "He was a prudent executive, not inclined to heavy investments in lost causes. His whole presidency was marked precisely by his capacity to refuse escalation-as in Laos, the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis."
Although Schlesinger has a reputation as a respected historian and O'Donnell as a reliable political figure, both men were advisers to Kennedy. Consequently, their retrospective analysis of how the president they admired might have acted, in view of the more recent conventional wisdom that establishes the adventure in Vietnam as a major disaster, should be examined closely and accepted with a degree of caution The evidence, I believe, supports their evaluation. Colonel Prouty reported that Kennedy had decided to withdraw all personnel from Vietnam. "IFK was going to make the question of peace a major campaign issue in the 1964 elections," he told me. According to Prouty, Kennedy told Major General Victor H. Krulak to go to Vietnam, "get up to date," and determine "who we turn it over to when we leave." Krulak's response, following his investigation, was that General Duong Van Minh, known popularly as Big Minh, was the answer.
Available from Amazon Books (order below)
