It’s not always easy deciding how to review a history book. You can’t give the author credit for creating a good story because they are simply telling us about something that already happened, presumably in the real world. You wouldn’t ordinarily compliment a history writer’s writing skills either; usually people who are creative with word-smithing pursue careers as authors of fiction or poetry. In fact history writers are often not very good at crafting language since what they say is supposed to be more important than how they say it. I guess you have to consider how well they bring history to life and demonstrate the importance and relevance of that history. Jim Rasenberger does just that in The Brilliant Disaster. He shows us how John F. Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion and the effects it had on his presidency and the reputation that America had in the world as time went on as a result.
In his writing, Rasenberger knows how to introduce important elements into the story he tells without going too deeply down side roads that are relevant only up to a certain point. His handling of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution is important to this history, but he doesn’t go into an overwhelming amount of detail regarding them. Castro himself is a fascinating enough figure and the story of the Revolution is well-worth reading about, but the author here introduces just enough information to suit the story. The same can be said about the 1960 Presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy. Rasenberger shows how Kennedy, by putting the problem of Castro and Cuba in front and center stage, dealt a master blow to Nixon, ensuring his victory at the polls. Kennedy’s campaign was a small work of genius for a number of reasons, but the author sticks to the important parts.
The remainder of the first half of this book is mostly relevant, but it has a tendency to drag at times, plus the things he did right that I mentioned in the previous paragraph turn into problems later in the narrative. Lots of detail is given regarding the committee set up to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion, although in this part the author goes a little too far. He writes as if the life stories of people like Allan Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Arthur Schlesinger are central to understanding what happened, and to a certain extent they are, but the over-abundance of detail about their pasts, their personalities, and their lifestyles makes for a few slow passages along the way.
Then there is the planning itself. High-ranking members of the CIA did a poor job of planning the invasion. Their intelligence gathering was haphazard, their strategy was not well-thought out, and their expectations were misguided. They really were a team of over-confident amateurs. While Kennedy met with them and advisers from his cabinet, most of which were not shy about drawing attention to the flaws in the plan, they hemmed and hawed about what to do then they hemmed and hawed some more. After that they hemmed and hawed about the hemming and hawing until the story becomes frustratingly dull and you just want the action to begin.
Then it does. An army of Cuban exiles were trained by the CIA in Guatemala then launched an attack on Cuba from an airbase in Nicaragua. They tried to establish three beachhead landings in southern Cuba’s Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. Murphy’s Law went into effect and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The Americans left the Cuban soldiers stranded while Castro’s superior forces proceeded to slaughter them. Meanwhile back in Washington, Kennedy and company did what they did best...hemming and hawing. Some of the soldiers were rescued, but a lot of them got caught and imprisoned by Castro’s military.
The details of the invasion are the strongest part of this book. Other books on the Cuban Revolution, Castro, Kennedy, and relations between America and the island nation to the south of Florida, tend to analyze the role that the Bay of Pigs played in other developments, but so far this is the most detailed account of the actual combat that happened at sea and on the ground that I have encountered so far.
The rest of the book explains how the failed invasion affected Kennedy’s self-confidence within the first year of his presidency. It also examines how the Bay of Pigs influenced American foreign policy in the years to come, especially regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and later Cold War politics. Most significantly, the last section tells the story of how the USA, after being humiliated by Castro and the Cubans, were able to negotiate with them to get the Cuban exiles returned to American soil.
Overall, this is a book about John F. Kennedy and the CIA. Without delving into any kind of political or ideological muckraking, Rasenberger explains how CIA incompetence condemned the Bay of Pigs invasion before it began. He lays most of the blame for the operation on them while reserving a proper amount of disdain for John F. Kennedy too. But his analysis of Kennedy’s thinking is nuanced. This isn’t a work of character assassination; he shows how some of the dilemmas posed by the Cuban Revolution put Kennedy between a rock and a hard place, but he also shows how Kennedy shot himself in the foot a few times by getting himself into such dangerously tight situations to begin with. Interestingly, Rasenberger comes to the enlightening conclusion that Kennedy’s legacy will always be tethered to Fidel Castro. You just can’t understand JFK if you can’t see how closely Castro and Cuba shaped almost everything he did during his term in office. Even his assassination was tied to Cuban politics because Lee Harvey Oswald believed himself to be acting on Castro’s behalf when he pulled the trigger. Finally, Rasenberger does a great job of demonstrating cause and effect in the chain of events. Early in the book, he shows how Kennedy’s dismissive attitude pushed Castro into the arms of Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, forgetting the dictum that you should keep your fiends close but keep your enemies closer. This is sad because Castro was open to the idea of maintaining peaceful relations with America after he seized power. He eventually embraced communism because the Americans didn’t take him seriously. Contemporary Cuba is just as much America’s tragedy as it is Castro’s. The author also makes a good case for saying that, while Kennedy has often been hailed as a hero for his management of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was also his disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis to begin with. This fact is something that Kennedy supporters are often unwilling to acknowledge.
So while The Brilliant Disaster has its setbacks, especially in reference to the painfully slow first half of the book, it succeeds in giving a uniquely vivid picture of this historical moment, analyzing the importance of the Bay of Pigs, and using a cause-and-effect methodology to demonstrate how the historic events unfolded. Now I think it would be interesting to read about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis from a Cuban point of view. In the end, I must say that the more I read about the Kennedy presidency, the less impressed I am by his political skills. For all the charm and intelligence he brought to the White House, there was something seriously lacking when it came to decision making. Maybe America’s first television president should have gone into acting instead. Maybe he could have even done our country a great favor by convincing Ronald Reagan to forget about politics and further his career in Hollywood instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment