never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired
Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles
Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).
During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of
the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general,
including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside,
expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in
chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas
MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors
an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran
general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US
government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were
seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur's warned that the
forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial
community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.
It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part
of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore
Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and
you happen to have just moved into the chicken house." 10 At the same meeting,
according to Sorenson, MacArthur "warned [Kennedy] against the committment
of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot
this advice." 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a
Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that
"MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American
ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should have his head examined." 12
MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the
General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.
Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional military opinion highly, and used it to
keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos,
Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land
forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could
convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the
group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of
President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones
overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William
Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of
counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was
calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to "muster the
courage" to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-
Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley's
many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of
Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II.
During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as