What did John F. Kennedy consider his greatest blunder in office?
The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba is most likely President Kennedy’s biggest blunder. The invasion occurred in the early 1960’s. It was a feeble attempt to overthrow the Castro government. The invasion was poorly executed and a big part of that is because Kennedy would not give proper air coverage for the attack. This is all I can remember about this event.
First, the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had reservations about the operation from the time he took office. But he inherited it from Eisenhower, and assumed the people he was hearing from knew what they were talking about, so he decided to let it go ahead. He was a novice President and that was probably a wrong decision. However, having decided to let it go ahead, he probably shouldn’t have hamstrung the operation the way he did. I guess you could call that either mistake 2 or 1A. I would have said that not pulling our troops out of Viet Nam was a mistake, but he was heading toward that decision before he was killed. One could also say that not making sure the Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey as he had ordered was a mistake that complicated the Cuban Missile Crisis. But even had those missiles been removed, the Russians would probably still have done what they did. Sources: My opinion, just like you asked for.
I’m not sure how JFK himself felt about it, but most people credit the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion as his biggest blunder. Although the planning for the invasion began before he took office, the responsibility for it was on his head. Without the close air support the exiles had been promised, Castro’s forces easily repelled the invasion force, and the repercussions of this continue to affect regional and U.S. politics to this day. The Cuban community in Miami has never forgiven Kennedy for it, and have been staunch supporters of the Republican Party since then.
