The Bay of Pigs

The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 was a covert plot to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba using a ragtag band of American-trained Cuban defectors. It ended up becoming one of the most humiliating episodes in American history — and a black eye for the Kennedy administration just four months into JFK’s presidency. We’re joined by Dr. Stephen Wilkinson, Chairman of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at the University of Buckingham, to dive into how a plot dreamed up by the CIA and approved by two presidents failed so spectacularly, what it meant for JFK’s legacy, and how its impact reverberates in U.S.-Cuba relations to this day.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
I'm George Severis and I'm Julia Claire and this is
United States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination
with the Kennedy Dynasty. Every week we go into one
aspect of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking
about the Bay of Pigs.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
The nineteen sixty one debacle was one of the most
humiliating moments in jfkse presidency that took place just four
months after he took office.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Dreamed Up by the CIA and approved by two presidents,
the Bay of Pigs was a covert plot to remove
Fidel Castro from power in Cuba using a ragtag band
of American trained Cuban defectors.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
The Bay of Pigs was an abject two front military
and political failure. The military operation was botched from the start,
a consequence of bad intelligence, poor planning, and even poorer execution.
The political failure stemmed from the fact the the invasion
was sold to the world as a homegrown Cuban led
revolt against Castro. It was painfully obvious from the outset

(01:07):
that the American government was behind the whole endeavor.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Not only did America fail to achieve its goal of
toppling a Nasson communist regime, but it also openly lied
to the United Nations and then abandoned loyal Cuban allies
when the invasion started going awry.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
For President Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs was a major
black eye in the first months of his administration, just
when he was trying to prove himself to the American people,
and its effects reverberate to this day.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
To unpack all of this, today, we're joined by doctor
Stephen Wilkinson, chairman of the International Institute for the Study
of Cuba at the University of Buckingham. Steve, Welcome to
the United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
So we have a lot to get to, so let's
get right into it. I want to first situate our
listeners in space and time. Where we are in history
right now. The Bay of Pigs happened in nineteen sixty one,
approximately a year after Castrotrik power. So can you walk
us through what Cuba was like during this time?

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Okay, well, you've had the revolution. So January the first,
nineteen fifty nine, the Batistic dictatorship has completely collapsed. Battista
has fled the country, and the country's taken over by
this group of fighters that have been led by Fredo
Castro and a considerable number of others that were supporting them.

(02:28):
The country is in a state of rapid change and transformation.
Because of that fact, the government is carrying out a
series of reforms which it promised it would do, things
like the Agrarian Reform law, which was to distribute land
to landless farmers. It started an education reform, started a

(02:51):
literacy campaign where young people are being sent out into
the distant sort of reaches of Cuba where there are
no schools and there's very high high literacy rates, and
they're teaching people how to read and write. There's the
beginnings of a new cultural policy with the foundation of
the Institute for Cinematographic Arts e Kayak, which is a

(03:12):
very famous institution in Cuba. The establishment of the medical system,
a free universal healthcare system is beginning at this time.
Rent controls bringing down the rent on private landlords, how
much private landlords can charge for rent, and so on.
So all of these rapid social transformations are taking place.

(03:32):
So the country is in a state of flux, and
the upper classes and the middle classes have largely begun
to leave the island. Most of the very rich people,
the bourgeoisie of Cuba were basically living most of the
time outside of the country anyway. They all had property
and land already in places like Florida and the Bahamas

(03:54):
and so on. Increasingly larger numbers of wealthy Cubans and
the upper classes were leaving the country. At the same time,
you've had the United States government under Eisenhower taking a
decision in nineteen sixty to overthrow the government secretly, so

(04:17):
the Bey of Pigs plan was part of that plan.
But at the same time, what they're doing is bringing
in the first measures of sanctions, and the consequence of
that is that the country is moving further and further
into the sphere of the Soviet Union, which at the time,
of course the height of the Cold War. But because

(04:38):
the United States is beginning to restrict the amount of
sugar it will buy from Cuba, which before, of course
it brought most of the sugar that the island produced,
so the Soviet Union steps in and proposes to buy
the sugar themselves. So this begins this process of the
government moving closer to the Soviet Union, which of course

(05:00):
producers there are great alarm bells in the United States.
So what's happened in the most recent moment before this
invasion takes place is a complete sort of worsening of
the relationship between the United States government in Cuba because
the Soviet Union has decided that it will swap oil

(05:21):
for the sugar. So Cuba is beginning to receive Soviet
oil shipments. And the refineries in Cuba are owned by
American companies and the US government instructed them not to
refine the Soviet oil, and as a consequence of that,
Castro took the decision to nationalize the American companies, and

(05:43):
that is a cardinal sin to commit against the United States,
and that really sets the seal on the relationships. So secretly,
the CIA has been instructed to set up what is
essentially a couatin, which is the bay of pigs in
Asian plan. So it's quite a complicated plan which may

(06:04):
need to be explained to the listeners or viewers because
people have a vague idea about it, but the actual
sort of details are very important.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
So, Steve, you mentioned that this plan was set in
motion during the Eisenhower administration, and I was interested if
you could talk about Eisenhower's involvement, how that came about,
and why we don't hear as much about Eisenhower's involvement
in the popular history of Bay of Pigs.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, well, this is an interesting story because Fido Castro
was very popular in the United States during the revolutionary
period between nineteen fifty six and nineteen fifty nine in
terms of the position that he was taking against the dictatorship.
A lot of people in the United States, particularly the
ordinary citizenship, were really quite anti Battista. They saw him

(06:55):
as a dictator or anti democratic, and they thought it
was shameful that the United States would be supporting him.
So there was actually quite a large campaign, a popular
campaign in the United States, particularly amongst as you can imagine,
students and people broadly on the left side of politics,
but liberals and Democrats, you know, also were very sympathetic

(07:16):
towards Fredol Castro because he wasn't a communist, you see.
And the thing is that he was invited to come
to the United States after the victory, and he made
a visit to the United States very early in nineteen
fifty nine, and he actually did a college speaking tool
and he was very popular I'll give you an example
of the popularity. I mean, the popularity was fostered by

(07:38):
some very prominent people. Errol Flynn, for example. One of
the last things Errol Flynn did before he died, and
he was dying of cancer when he did it, he
went to the Sierra Meister and interviewed Fidel Castro and
produced a program for television and went on TV. I
think he went on The Morrow Show and talked about
what a wonderful guy Fredel Castro was. So Castro was

(07:59):
very popular. He goes to the United States in nineteen
fifty nine with a bunch of actually very rich Cuban
business people that were supporting him at the time on
a kind of trade delegation to try and develop a
relationship with the United States. And one of the things
he did was when he went to Washington and rocked

(08:19):
up at the White House to see Eisenhower. Well, the
truth of the thing is that he broke protocol because
he wasn't an official state visit, and as the head
of State, Eisenhower had no obligation diplomatically to meet him,
and he didn't. He went to play golf instead. The
person that interviewed him was none other than Richard Nixon,

(08:40):
the Vice president. Nixon, as you know, was a very
vehement anti communist and took the decision after meeting Castro
that Castro was a dangerous communist and had to be
gotten rid of. So the origin of the decision to
overthrow Castro comes really from this really rather unfortunate meeting

(09:01):
that Castro had with Nixon. So the administration takes the
decision to engineer and overthrow. Now they'd already done this
once before in Guatemala in nineteen fifty four. So the
CIA had planned the coup with some exiled officers from
the Guatemalan army and supported a coup attempt over the

(09:24):
democratically elected president of Guatemala, cooboar Events, and that was
very successful in nineteen fifty four in removing Bens. And
they decided that they would try something similar in Cuba,
and they instructed the CIA to do it. Interestingly enough,
they also instructed the CIA to deny that they had

(09:45):
been instructed by the president to do it. It was
based on this principle of plausible deniability, so they had
to devise a way of making it appear as though
the Cubans had overthrown their own government, and so the
plan was complet The secret had to be kept secret
and the CIA's involvement had to be kept secret. So

(10:05):
a great deal of attempts were made to do that,
which ultimately failed. They failed for a number of reasons
which I can explain later, and the fact that they
failed to keep it secret was one of the reasons
why it didn't work so well. The same team that
carried out the successful coup attempt in Guatemala in nineteen
fifty four were the people that were appointed to carry

(10:27):
out this attempt as well. The head of it was
a guy called Richard Bissel. This team was set up
to devise a way of overthrowing the government. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
So one of the things that keeps coming up is
the tension between Americans wanting credit and then also wanted
it to be a complete secret that they are involved
at all. One of the things I found interesting was
that when Nixon was running against Kennedy, he wasn't allowed
to talk about the plan in Cuba, so he actually
came off week with regards to communism and JFKK him

(11:00):
off stronger. But then when Kennedy was in office, this
plan was passed down to him, and he also had
to suddenly keep it a secret. I would love to
know what would have been the best case scenario for
both doing this covertly and also getting credit for it.
I mean, it would seem like the revolution was homegrown,
and then after the fact, the Americans would ally with

(11:20):
anti Castro forces.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
So I have to confess some limits to my knowledge
at this point. So some of the things I'm saying
there may be information that I'm not aware of that
would fill in the gaps. But there are some very
moot points still in this story as far as I know.
One of them is the extent to which the CIA
knew exactly what was happening in Cuba. Most people, I think,

(11:45):
are of the opinion that the CIA were very well
aware that Fido Castro was fucked by far and away,
a very very popular figure in Cuba amongst the Cuban people.
One of the things they tried to convince Kennedy of,
and would seemingly appear to have done, was to convince
him that he wasn't so popular and that when these

(12:07):
people landed in Cuba, the population in Cuba would rise
up in support of the invasion and oppose Castro, and
Castro would be toppled by a popular uprising behind the invaders. Now,
the original plan, it would appear, relied on that appenstance

(12:27):
considerably less, because the idea was that there was a
kind of government in exile waiting to be planted in Cuba.
So the original plan was to establish a bridgehead, in
other words, a territory that would be liberated vertic commerce
from the Castro government, and the government would be flown

(12:48):
in and would claim to be the legitimate government of Cuba.
And then the United States was going to recognize that
officially as the legitimate government of Cube and even propose
a resolution of the United Nations in support of this
new government of Cuba, and then it was going to

(13:10):
invade the island. So, in other words, these invaders were
never intended to actually take power themselves. They were just
merely to establish a bridgehead, which would then produce the
pretext for a full blown US military invasion of the island.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
The hope was that Cubans that were not in cahoots
with the US would just join in because the US
overestimated anti Castro sentiment.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
So the idea was that there would be a popular
uprising of sorts in behind this new government, and the
American troops would be arriving as kind of liberatus from
this dictatorship. So, in other words, the United States would
then appear to be freeing Cuba from this terrible government
that was oppressing its people. So that was the story,

(13:55):
and it was pretty theatrically designed because at the beginning
of the invasion they staged this bombing of the Cuban
airfields and then these planes landing in Miami and pilots
getting out and declaring that they were Cuban pilots who
had bombed their own airfields that morning and defected to

(14:19):
the United States, and that they were actually Cuban Air
Force officers that had attacked their own air bases. But
in fact that wasn't true. This was fake and it
was all faked up by the CIA to make it
appear as though there was this swelling up of anti
Castro feeling within the country. So that was the original plan,

(14:41):
but a number of things went seriously wrong with the plan.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
And we're back with more United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Two things I want to get to are Kennedy saying
the plan was too ambitious and wanting to tone it down,
which ultimately had detrimental effects on.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
The whole thing.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
And then I also want to talk about just the
very basic logistics of what the plan was.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Okay, Well, to go back to Kennedy, the point that
you made was absolutely right that Kennedy went into the
campaign trying to out anti communize Nixon, and he did.
He came over stronger against communism than Nixon did. And
one of the things that he picked up on was
the fact that apparently the United States was doing nothing
about this guy Castro in Cuba, where in fact they

(15:43):
secretly were, but they couldn't admit it, Okay, and that
did make Nixon look weak, and it was one of
the factors that possibly worked against him in the election. However,
you also have to remember that the United States had
gotten itself a really bad name in the neighborhood because
of what it had done previously. So this coup attempt
in Guatemala made the United States look like the bully

(16:08):
in the backyard, the imperialist colonizer of Central America. Because,
of course, one of the things about the Guatemala. Thing
was that our ben did which upset the United States
was nationalized land which belonged to a United Fruit company
and was giving it to peasants. And that was the
thing that they didn't like. They took against him for that.

(16:30):
So the thing was this made the United States look
really bad in the eyes of Latin America, and at
the same time they were facing an upswelling of support
for leftist governments, and in the context of the Cold War,
something serious had to be done about that. So one
of the key elements of the Kennedy approach to dealing

(16:50):
with communism in the Hemisphere was the Alliance for Progress,
and the Alliance for Progress was the kind of opposite
attempt to deal with the situation. The United States was
going to use aid established us AID as an institution
to alleviate the conditions of the poor in Latin America,

(17:15):
with the view that this would remove the popularity of
leftist ideas amongst the population. In other words, do something
about the wealth disparities in these countries which was leading
to the growth of left wing governments. So Kennedy wanted
to take a much more progressive and friendlier policy, very

(17:38):
much like the one that FDR brought in in nineteen
thirty three, which was called the Good Neighbor Policy. So
the Alliance for Progress was another attempt by the United
States government to recover some of the lost ground that
it had from acting in a very militaristic way in
the past. So Kennedy was bringing in a fresh race,

(17:59):
and he wanted to diss himself from the kinds of
activities that the eyes in our administration had gotten up to,
overthrowing governments with coups, like in Guatemara in fifty four.
So he inherits exactly the same kind of plan, and
he doesn't like it, and his advisors, particularly people like
Arthur Selezender Junior, the historian who was in the White House,

(18:20):
who was one of the chief proponents of the Alliance
for Progress, was saying to him, don't touch this plan
with a barge pole. You know, this is the exact
opposite of what we want to do. You're going to
wreck all of the good work that you're trying to
do with the Alliance for Progress. You can't do both things.
He can't be trying to be kind and at the
same time do something like this. So you've got to

(18:42):
distance yourself from this, which gave the CIA a big
problem because the US government support and the US Air
Force's support and the Marines in the end were going
to have to go in and win this. So they
blied to Kennedy. You see, they told Kennedy that, oh,
this thing will be okay, this will be fine. These

(19:04):
people will land, and the Cubans hate feed or Castro
and they're going to rise up and overthrow him, and
so on and so on and so on, and Kennedy
Boss and the more or less told the well, if
that's the case, go ahead, but it's you guys that
are going to have to do it. Don't expect support
from us. He didn't want to have anything to do
with it. And that's one of the key reasons why

(19:25):
it failed, because it didn't have the support of the
White House. So the change in the presidency did change
the outcomes of foreign policy planning. Because this was a
plan that was hatched by one administration inherited by another.
You have to take into account the fact that Nixon
expected to win. That was another thing. It was a
shock victory. Kennedy was in the White House against all

(19:48):
of the odds.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
So was there just a complete lack of agreement on
what the plan was. It seems like either they should
have committed to the super robust CIA plan and just
really gotten in and done exactly what America always does
when they invade other countries, or they should have given
up and actually tried a friendlier, less aggressive plan. But

(20:10):
it seems like what happened was the CIA was proposing
something really robust to Kennedy. He was getting cold feet
about it. He was saying, no, this is too spectacular.
He doesn't like the shock and aw language. But rather
than him calling it off or trying to figure it out,
he'll say, what if we send half of the number
of airplanes, or what if we try to make it
more covert. So he's in a very clear way setting

(20:32):
himself up for failure.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
So yeah, I mean, the plan was well in progress
when he inherited it, and it took place in April
of sixty one, and he only got into the White
House in January, so you're talking about a few weeks
and this is landing on his desk as a new president,
and it's like, wow, you know this is important. And
of course what they've done is they've taken fifteen hundred guys.

(20:55):
These guys are Cuban exiles, they've left Cuba, and they
are some of the richie people in Cuba. So you
look at the breakdown of the people that have been
recruited into this brigade that is going to invade Cuba.
They are the sons of owners and owners sometimes of
the biggest ranchers and farms and businesses, and shareholders of
banks and all kinds of people, and also people that

(21:18):
were very high in the military during the Batista junter
and very very prominent people. And they're in this brigade
and they've been in Guatenala, training in the jungle there
for months, and they've been fully expecting to go ahead.
And this plan is already heavily invested and it's too
late to pull out. So the thing is Kennedy is

(21:38):
in between a rock and a hard place. So he
has to make a judgment, and it seems that he
makes the judgment that I'm not going to support this.
Let it happen. If it works, great, If it doesn't,
I won't but dirty my hands with it. But because
he couldn't actually escape that in the end either, he
had to take responsibility for it and it be smirched
his character and his presidency, and of course it had

(22:01):
a knock on effect because it made him look rather
stupid and weak. And then when the missile crisis comes
around a year later, he's got to look tough because
he's already been burned by Cuba once. So the Bay
of Pigs is quite an important event because it actually
has a bearing on what happens just a few months

(22:22):
later with the missile crisis. But to come back to
the plan itself, the CIA lied to Kennedy. I mean,
Kennedy realized that afterwards because he had a report written
into the failure, and this report is pretty damning of
the CIA and the way they operated. And famously, Kennedy
is said to have angrily told people that he was

(22:44):
going to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces when
he got a second term. So he was pretty much
hoodwinked by the CIA because they didn't give him the
full picture. Now, to go back to the plan, you
wanted to go through the plan a little bit, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
I think that's the next thing that we would love
to ask you about is the nuts and bolts of
the plan and how it actually unfolded.

Speaker 3 (23:06):
Right, So, The idea is that they train up this
force and secretly pretend that they have trained themselves. They've
got themselves together, and they have planned to invade Cuba.
The plan is to establish a bridgehead and a free
territory of Cuba and plant a government that they've got

(23:29):
in exile waiting to land in Cuba and declare itself
to be the legitimate Cuban government, which then would be
recognized by the United States, and that would serve as
a pretext for invasion.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Classic US regime change.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Yeah, and basic regime change plan. Now, the original plan
was to land not at the Bay of Peaks, but
in Trinidad. So Trinidad is a sizeable city on the
southern coast of Cuba, further down the coast from the
Bay of Peaks. But the advantage of Trinidad it was twofold.

(24:02):
First of all, it was a sizeable town, so there
would be a population there that would declare itself free.
And it was a town that was not particularly revolutionary.
In fact, it had been rather counter revolutionary and was
not a big supporter of fid or Castro. Now, the
reason for that is historical and geographical. Trinidad is a

(24:24):
town which is more or less separated from the island
by a mountain range, the Escambre Mountains, which means it's
very difficult for people to get to it. You have
to go through road paths from the other side of
the mountains, and it means that historically this population was
cut off from the rest of the island, which means
that it's really rather You know, every country has jokes

(24:46):
about people who are living in isolated communities as being
in bred. Well, the Cubans make jokes about Trinidadians in
the way that you would make jokes about people from
the Kentucky or somewhere. I don't you know what I'm saying.
It's kind of like a city that is separated geographically
and historically socially from the rest of the island. So

(25:07):
it's a place which is not particularly revolutionist, very very
devoutly Catholic, and so therefore the CIA knew that they
would have support there. Now. The thing was, the other
advantage for the CIA was that there was a rebel group,
a breakaway group from Castro's Gorilla Column that had gone
up into the Escambray Mountains on the outskirts of Trinidad

(25:31):
and was carrying out a kind of guerrilla war against
Freidel Castro, and the CIA were supplying this group. It
was led by a man called Alloy gutierism Annoya, quite
a famous character who crops up later in the history.
But Gutieri's Manoya was a Democrat who was upset by
Castro when he didn't declare elections immediately and set about

(25:51):
opposing Castro. And he was a leader of a gorilla
group and they went up into the Escambray Mountains and
they were carrying out raids against Castro, and the CIA
was supplying him with weapons and food, dropping it into
the Escambray Mountains. So the CIA anticipated that this group
would be able to also be appearing to be on

(26:14):
the side of the invaders. Now, Castro was astute enough
to deal with this, so he sent in a militia
in early nineteen sixty into the Escambray Mountains. He sent
twenty thousand men into the Escambray Mountains and they captured
Routiera's Menoia, which removed him from the scene. The militia

(26:35):
were then sent to occupy Trinidad. So suddenly Trinidad became
completely impossible because there were twenty thousand Cuban militia men
sitting in Trinidad, so they switched to the Bay of Pigs. Now,
the Baypigs is not the best place to land. It
has the advantage of being cut off from the rest
of Cuba because there's a swamp that separates the area

(26:59):
by the coat from the rest of the country, and
that's one is pretty impassable, and the community there is
cut off from the rest of the island. But it's
a very small community and it's a very rural community.
And the problem they have there is and this is
something that apparently the CIA were not paying particular attention to,

(27:22):
I think, was that this particular community was the poorest
community in Cuba. You're talking about people that had a
life expectancy of something like thirty five. They lived a
completely subsistence kind of lifestyle. They eked out in existence
in the swamp, and if you've ever been to that swamp,

(27:44):
the mosquitoes are like hornets. It's like the last place
on earth you would want to live. They made a
living from charcoal burnie and there was a guy that
had a train that was passable. When the swamp filled
up with water, the railway was submerged, so there was
one time of the year when it was the dry season,
the guy would drive his train down into the swamp
and swap for the charcoal for stuff with the people.

(28:08):
Of course, he was ripping them off massively. They had
no schooling, no sanitation, lived in huts with thatcheris earth floors.
They were the most pitiful people in Cuba. And Celia Sanchez,
who was Fido Castro's secretary, was aware of the terrible
conditions in which these people lived, and very shortly after

(28:31):
the revolution, she insisted on taking Fidel Castro down there
to show him, and when he saw the conditions in
which these people live, he said, we've got to do
something for these people. And the first thing they did
was build a road. So they built a road down
to the Bay of Pigs, and they decided to build
a holiday camping center and a hotel so that it

(28:55):
would become a tourist place. And the idea was that
local tourism Cubans would take their holidays there and it
would provide a better employment for the people that lived
down there. And the very first people that were sent
out on the literacy campaign were sent to that place.
So these people had benefited immediately from the change in government,

(29:16):
and rather than being a gainst Castro, they were at
one hundred percent behind it, and they had formed a
militia to defend the country, so part of the civil
defense that had been set up. Now I'm getting ahead
of myself a little bit, because one of the crucial
aspects of this is the impossibility that the CIA had
of keeping the plan secret. The reason for that was

(29:40):
that although relations between the United States and Cuba had
gotten worse, they hadn't become completely destroyed. So there were
still airplane flights between Cuba and the United States. There
was still a postal service and telephone service. People had
left the island, but of course there were still members
of their family living on the island. Not everybody in

(30:01):
the family had gone, so there were relatives on the
island with whom they were communicating. People were telling their
family on the island that you know, Pepe, Uncle Pepe
has gone down to Guatemala and he's being trained by
the CIA to invade Cuba. Well, of course, people in
Cuba talk to one another and they tell each other
what's going on, and then would get to the leadership

(30:24):
that they're planning to invade Cuba. So they knew that
this plan was in motion, but they didn't know when
it was going to take place.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
So we've switched the plan from Trinidad, where there was
a community that would be potentially more hospitable to American
led anti Castro forces, to the Bay of Pigs, which
is a uniquely bad place in terms of the community
there because they are not highly educated community that had
directly recently benefited from Castro policies and community work exactly.

(30:55):
And on top of all of that, information is flowing
into Cuba and people know the attack is about to
take place. But correct me if I'm wrong. It wasn't
just that people were talking to their own families. Journalistic
outlets in America were reporting that the CIA slash the
White House was in the process of planning these things.
So can you talk a little bit about what the

(31:16):
media and information ecosystem was like, I mean, it was
like the worst kept secret in the history of foreign policy.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
Well, yeah, Kennedy actually said, Kastra doesn't need any spies
when he's got the New York Times. The New York
Times splashed on it, but they got the news the
same way as the Cubans did. People were talking about it.
It was the worst kept secret. You can't train one
thy five hundred Cubans secretly because they're going to communicate
with their family, and their families are going to talk
to other people. Incidentally, this inability to keep a secret

(31:45):
was a problem in the lead up to the missile
crisis because the Soviets tried to keep it secret and couldn't.
And of course, if you asked the right questions in
the right places, you get the answers you want. So
pretty much people knew that this plan was being ached,
but they didn't know when it was going to take place.
So they knew it was going to be an amphibious landing,

(32:07):
and they worked out where all the best beaches to
land the force on around the island, and they put
a militia control twenty four to seven along those beaches
so that if they ever appeared on the shoreline on
the horizon, they would get an immediate alert. So they

(32:29):
were watching all of the likely beaches, and of course
that's precisely what happened. There was a guy patrolling the
beach and he saw them coming, raised the alarm, and
a guy ran all the way to the nearest telephone,
which is twenty five kilometers away or whatever, and they
call Avanna and tell Fredel they're landing at the Bay
of Pigs. So they got the word out straight away

(32:50):
because there was this preparation.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
We're going to take a short break, stay with.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
As you mentioned, the New York Times published an article
just days before the invasion that the US was planning
a covert attack on Cuba. How did the Kennedy administration
respond to that and why did they end up going
through with it? Everyone was leaking like a sieve. It
seemed like in Cuba they were more than prepared for it.
The CIA clearly had a lot of bad intelligence. Why

(33:32):
did they end up going through with it?

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Well, no, you see, the thing is they softened Cuba
up pretty much. I mean, they had a massive campaign
of terrorist attacks in the run up. So at the
same time as this you got this increasing aggression. So
there were bombings in department stores in Havana, burning of
cane fields, and famously the explosion of an ammunition ship

(33:59):
which you know was carrying weapons. So they tried to
strong arm the British government into stopping supplying spare paths
for the planes that they had. Another irony of this
story is that, under pressure popular pressure from the American population,
eisen Arad stopped selling weapons to Batista in nineteen fifty eight,

(34:22):
and the Brits stepped in and sold him some decommissioned
Sea Fury airplanes from World War II stock and under
the deal were supplying ammunition, spare parts, and servicing for
these planes, and Castro inherited the deal. So the Brits
had this living deal supplying support for the air force

(34:45):
in Cuba, and the Americans tried to stop macmillan, the
British Prime Minister, from delivering spare parts and weapons. Interestingly enough,
he agreed to do that, but he refused to do
anything else. They wanted him to join in the trade embargo,
and he refused. He did stop sending weapons and spare
paths with these planes, and one of those planes was

(35:07):
still serviceable and was instrumental in the defeat of the landing,
So they softened Cuba up a lot. They probably had
a strong feeling that they would be able to establish
this bridgehead long enough for it to be recognized Once
it was recognized they would be able to bounce Kennedy

(35:27):
into committing American troops to supporting it. All they needed
to do was establish the bridgehead for a reasonable length
of time a week or so. The fact was it
was defeated so quickly that they didn't have time to
do that. That was the reason why it failed. I mean,
they did land and they lasted seventy two hours. If

(35:48):
they'd lasted a week or two weeks, things might have
been completely different, and there probably was a good chance
of that actually working as far as the CIA were
concerned in the runner, because they'd and Cuba enough and
they had infiltrated Cuba and had agents working in Cuba.
But the problem there was again Fido Castro's amazing acuity

(36:11):
as a leader. So there was this terrorist campaign which
was obviously being carried out by agents that had been
infiltrated into the island. So there were people within Cuban
society that were working against the revolution, planting bombs and
so on. So he set up the Committees for the
Defense of the Revolution. These are neighborhood committees where citizens

(36:33):
who are in favor of the revolution are encouraged to
form a neighborhood committee, and they would patrol the streets
at night and keep a watch out for any suspicious activity.
And they were also instructed to keep surveillance of the
people in their neighborhood who might be suspected of being

(36:53):
an agent for the United States. In other words, anybody
who didn't express support for the government or seemed to
be not so keen on doing things. They had a
record of suspects. Okay, Now, what happened was when the
invasion started. It started with a bombing raid. So that

(37:14):
was the announcement that the invasion was imminent. Was when
suddenly the Cuban airfields were bombed. That was on April
the fifteenth, And on that morning Castro ordered the Committees
for the Defense of the Revolution to make citizens arrests
of every single person they suspected might be supportive of

(37:35):
the Americans. So they arrested tens of thousands of people,
and they basically locked them into cinemas and theaters and
played Charlie Chaplin movies to them for the whole period.
So essentially what happened was everybody in Avana, for example,
who might possibly have gone out on the street with

(37:57):
a placard in support of the invasion was locked in
a cinema.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
So it wasn't just that they underestimated the level of
support they would have had. And then on top of that,
relatively few people that would have joined in were then
locked up.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, so there was a plan to have demonstrations in
support of the invasion, but none of that materialized because
it was preempted by this mass arrest of these people. Incidentally,
they were all released afterwards, right, it was just for
the period of the invasion that they would.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Kept right to recap. I mean, it's like one of
those things where there's nothing that went right. Every single
thing on all levels were wrong. So they are invading
the wrong place. The intelligence is flowing freely in and
out of Cuba. Everyone knows the invasion is coming. They
underestimated the number of people that would join in. Even
of those people, the ones that would have joined in

(38:49):
that they planned were locked up.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Okay, this is important, and this is how certain conjunctions
in history changed things. The Ambassador to the United Nations
for the United States, Adaly Stevenson, I'd like Stevenson. There's
your man, So I'd like Stevenson. If you remember was
the guy that was beaten in the primaries by Kennedy
to be presidential candidate. He's given the job of ambassador

(39:14):
to the UN. Now, I'd like, Stephenson is that rare
specimen in America, the very very honorable man in politics.
He is super honorable guy. He's the guy that he
is given the job of going to the UN on
the morning of the air raid with a photograph of
this guy claiming to be a Cuban pilot who has

(39:36):
defected and bombed his own airfield. And he goes to
the United Nations and remonstrates with the Cubans and so
on about this and look, and the Cubans basically blow
him out of the water because they point out to
him that that aeroplane is not one that the Cuban
Air Force has. So Cilia has painted up at B

(39:58):
fifty two to make it look like Cuban plane, but
the Cubans don't have any of them, so it's obviously
a fake. And I'd like Stevenson is shown up and
he phones Kennedy and tells him, if you think I'm
gonna be put in that position again, you're joking. That's it.
I'm done with this. You just made me look a fool.
You know you can forget it, and that prompts Kennedy

(40:21):
to instruct the CIA that there's gonna be no more
air rates. And the thing was, the first air raid
didn't knock out all of the planes, so the second
air raid didn't happen, so Cuba still had two planes
that worked, and those two planes were decisive in being
able to stray the beach, and one of them sank
one of the ships. The guys that landed blame Kennedy

(40:45):
for it because they didn't get the second air strike.
If they didn't have those planes attacking them, they would
have been able to establish the bridgehead and things would
have been different. Castro had control of the air.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
The air strikes were incredibly important from the beginning because
it was a non negotiable in the SAA plan that
the Cuban air force needed to be taken out first
so that the landing could be successful. If there were
planes that were able to counterattack, then it would never work.
And somehow one of Kennedy's non committal decisions is rather

(41:20):
than either committing to it or calling it off, he
basically did half of the areas that the planned initially
called for, which is why they were left completely vulnerable
to the Cuban air force.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
Well, something else that is quite important. So I've got
here if you can see this, it's the International Herald Tribune,
which is the American paper that's published in.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
Paris, Anti Castro Cubans invaded by Darren.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
See And there's Adlai Stevenson holding up the photograph. But
what's really interesting about this is this is published in
Paris on the morning of the invasion. So what you've
got at the bottom here is a map showing where
the Cubans have landed, and there are three sites, not one.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
And according to the new story that's published in the
Herald Tribune, the Cubans are already sixty kilometers from Havana.
So this story is completely fabricated and planted in the
Eryl Tribune by the CIA in advance of the invasion
taking place. And what it shows you is the two
other sites which are in the eastern part of the
island where there were supposed to be decoy landings. So

(42:30):
there was three landings planned. Two of them were fake
ones that were to distract the Cuban government. They didn't
happen because they were small groups and there were these
militias on the beach and they started firing at them.
So these guys just turned around and didn't land. But
in the Herald Tribune they did.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Wow, we're kind of setting the scene for mister Magoo
style CIA debacle. And that's just like an incredible background
to be going into the invasion. Walk us through. I
know you said it was seventy two hours. Walk us
through the actual execution and the three days of the invasion.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Well, the first thing is that Cuba had been making
these reforms, which are socialist policies, right. They produced free healthcare, education,
rent controls, all of this stuff. They're socialist policies, but
the government is denying that it is a communist government.
When the bombing happened on April the fifteenth, Castro declared

(43:32):
the revolution to be Marxist Leninist, so he used the
invasion as a way of selling Marxist Leninism to the population.
They had a slogan prepared, see fidel is communista upon
me and Lallista. If fidel is a communist, put me
on the list. So basically the CIA handed Castro on

(43:53):
a play a fantastic opportunity to radicalize the population, and
he called on the population in public display in the
street to take up arms and help defeat this invasion,
and distributed weapons in the street in Havana right to
people who just turned up and said yes, I'll go.

(44:15):
So he mobilized the population and a force of like
sixty thousand Cubans went down to the Bay of Pigs,
and of course they built a road so they could
get down there. The sea didn't seem to anticipate either,
that the communication to the landing zone was much better
than they thought, and there was a way through the

(44:37):
swamp and they could send trucks and artillery down it.
So they were able to move very quickly and get
down there fast enough to be able to engage with
these guys pretty much immediately. And so that was one
of the reasons why they were defeated so quickly, because

(44:58):
the attack was met with an overwhelming response from the
Cuban population behind Castro. And some of the veterans of
this thing are like kids, I mean, fourteen fifteen year
old guys picked up rifles and went down in Fort Down. Now,
the occasion of the bombing also provided a very very

(45:20):
emotive image that was used very effectively as propaganda for
the government. A very young, i think fifteen sixteen year
old boy was working as an apprentice in the Air
force in the airfield was killed by shrapnel in the bombing,
but he died from his wounds very slowly, and as

(45:41):
he died, he used his own blood to daub the
name of Fidel on the wall next to him, and
a photograph was taken of this lad and published in
the newspapers, and it was at the funeral the day
after that Fidel made this impassioned speech about how the
revolution was going to be a socialist revolution and so on.

(46:04):
This event galvanized the population behind the revolution in a
way that was probably unforeseen. As well. There was a
parachute landing further up, an amphibious landing on the beach
further down, at ply a Lager. The Bay of Pigs
is a kind of narrow inlet, and they landed at
the head of the bay, and at the mouth of

(46:27):
the bay. The paratroopers were there to create a kind
of defensive wall so that the landing could take place
and they could establish this bridgehead. But they met with
force immediately from this local militia. They were strafed by planes.
Their ammunition was cut off because the ammunition ship was
hit and sunk, so they only had the amount of

(46:50):
the bullets they could carrying on their backs, so they
were cut off from their own supplies. Then this force
came down and arrived within a day and engaged them.
So in the end they suffered a very very quick
defeat and they surrendered. About two hundred or so were killed,
I'm not sure what the exact figures were, and the

(47:11):
rest surrendered and there was something like twelve thirteen hundred
prisoners taken.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Yeah, the twelve hundred prisoners, they were taken, and they
were eventually returned in exchange for supplies and food and stuff.

Speaker 3 (47:26):
Yeah, they negotiated. In the end, they had to negotiate
their return and Castro asked for the payment in baby food.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with more United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
So just to list off a series of other failures.
When the first ships landed, one of the things that
see hadn't understood is that there was a really sharp
coral reef right on the beach, so they thought it
was seaweed or something, and it was a very sharp
coral reef, so immediately they had to get off the
vessels earlier than they normally would and walk in the

(48:15):
water and carry whatever they could on their back. Finally,
Kennedy did send an air strike, but the timing was
somehow off. He allowed the air strike to happen during
a one hour period, but either they didn't fully take
into account the time difference, or there was some sort
of miscommunication and the air strike happened an hour early. Eventually,

(48:35):
around twelve hundred men were rounded up by Castro's troops
and were unable to escape through the surrounding swamp lands.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
It was also the fact that the Cubans were aware
that there was going to be an attack, so they
prepared their airfields very well, so there were decoy planes
on the airfields. They had set up the airfield so
that they would fool anybody who bombed them into thinking
they were planes on the ground when they weren't, so
there were these fake planes since they bombed from the

(49:03):
real planes were hidden away and escaped the bombing. Tia
was far better prepared for the eventuality than the Cia anticipated,
and I think your historian Theodore Draper said it, you know,
very famously. It was that rare thing in history, the
perfect failure, this kind of oxymeronic expression. I mean, yeah,
what could go wrong? Seemed to go wrong, partly through

(49:28):
bad luck, mismanagement. Hubris one would say, you know, that
classic Greek tragedy of thinking that it's going to work
just because we're doing it. The guys had been successful
in Guatemala, they felt that they were clever enough to
do it again. So eu bris must have played a
big part in it. But the change of presidency sure

(49:49):
as hell. If Nixon had been president, I'm sure things
would have been different. You know, the reaction of the
United States would have been much more bellicost they would
have gone in. The air strikes definitely would have happened.
They would have expressed full support and maybe been much
more forthright and anti communist. In tucsont Clauw. Kennedy was

(50:13):
trying to put up a much more friendlier face to
the Latin Americans, and he didn't want his hands dirted
by this plan. That's the real kind of croaks of it, really.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
I think you've spent many decades traveling back and forth
between Cuba, and I was just wondering if you have
a sense of how Bay of Pigs is remembered among
Cuban nationals, and if that differs at all from how
it's remembered among Cuban Americans.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Oh my god, I mean that's it. I mean that
there you have a kind of microcosm of the problem, right,
because in Cuba, this is the first victory of Yankee
imperialism in the Western hemisphere, right, that's what it is
remembered as. If you go to the site today, there's
a museum and there's a huge billboard which used to

(51:07):
be an advertising billboard, but now it's got this huge thing.
It's a picture of Fedale on the tank. There's a
very famous iconic photograph of Field castro leaping off a tank.
It is that that photograph, the image, and across it
says the first They call it player here on, not
Bay of Pigs. Play it here on the first defeat
of Yankee imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. And they're very

(51:28):
proud of the fact that they did this, right. And
of course it's, like I said, it's a seminal moment
because it's the moment when the revolution is declared to
be socialist for the first time. I mean they'd not
done that, they'd not said that until that moment, and
so it marked a transformative moment in the history of
the revolution. So for the Communist Party in Cuba and

(51:50):
then the supporters of the revolution, this is a very
very proud moment in their history. And of course the
veterans of it are remembered. There's an association veterans of
the Bay of Pigs, and now very old men and women,
but they are honored as great heroes. And of course
the people that died. There was about one hundred and
seventy five Cubans that were killed. The place is where

(52:12):
they fell is marked by a monument. Each place where
a body was found of a Cuban that died is
now marked by a monument. There is a great deal
of respects given to the memory of these people who
are now heroes of the revolution Stone whereas, of course,
in Miami, this is remembered as a betrayal of great

(52:37):
magnitude by the American government. Kennedy, of course, very famously
made this wonderful speech. He was a wonderful speech maker.
Wasn't he he made this wonderful speech where he said,
they say that victory as a thousand fathers, but defeat
is an orphan. And he took the personal responsibility for
the defeat, and he took the flag of the skies,

(52:58):
and he promised that they would remember their sacrifice. So
these guys are remembered as dying as martyrs to the
anti communist course. And of course this is another legacy
which is very very important. The guys. A lot of
the guys that were in this group were later recruited

(53:19):
by the CIA and became CIA operatives. So of Cuban
American veteran of the Bay of Pigs. Was the guy
that was with the Bolivian army in Bolivia in nineteen
sixty seven and was directing the troops and captured Chae
Gavara and was responsible for his execution. Was a veteran

(53:40):
of the Bay of Pigs. The guys that broke into
the Watergate building, Frank Sturgis and his gang, the burglars
in the Watergate building were veterans of the Bay of Pigs,
the guy that blew up the airplane, but they were
not part of the Cuban sort of There were Cubans. Oh,
they were Cubans.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Because there are the people that somehow made at home,
and then there are the people that were taken prisoner
and then released later when we talk about veterans, it's
the people that were taken prisoner and Cuban and released.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
They're the Cubans that were captured and then released them
back to the States. Many of them were recruited into
the CIA, and these people were kind of doing the
dirty work of the CIA in lots of different places.
Nixon on the tapes at one point says, for God's sake,
keep a lid on all this because if it gets out,
it'll bring up the Bay of Pigs and the Cuba

(54:30):
thing all again. Because these guys that were doing the
burglary were people that had been recruited by the CIA
to be part of this brigade. There was a famous
bombing of an airliner in nineteen seventy six which was
flying out of Barbados and he blew up in Cuban airliner.
It was blew up in the sky. The bomb was planted.

(54:50):
The guy that was behind the plot was a guy
called Luis Posada Carrillis. He was a veteran of the
Bay of Pigs. He was a guy that was recruited
by the CIA and continued working for the CIA afterwards,
and then later on went rogue himself and carried out
terrorist to tax against Cuba. But he was formerly part

(55:10):
of the same brigade. So this is like, these people's
animosity towards the Cuban Revolution was not diminished either, it
was cemented and became stronger. And so this event spawned
a whole series of things afterwards and continues to do

(55:30):
so today because quite honestly, this breakdown of the relationship
between the United States and Cuba, this is a very
very important event in creating that division. If the United
States had not taken the decision to try and overthrow
Feedol Castro and tried to adopt a more constructive engagement

(55:55):
with the Cuban government, the whole history might be completely different.
There were attempts made at different times to find a
approach one and in fact, towards the end of his presidence,
see Kennedy himself was trying to do just that other
people did as well. Nixon tried, Carter tried. It's not

(56:17):
that the United States has been consistently trying to destroy
the cashtro government they have at at different times, and
there were attempts made early on, but the animosity of
certain individuals at certain times prevented these from coming to fruition.

(56:37):
And this event was one which made the gap that
much wider to bridge, okay, because it created this bad
blood and it is almost a personal thing, you know.
And of course this hatred of Kennedy amongst the Cuban
Americans blaming Kennedy of course comes up again in the

(56:59):
conspiracy theories because there is this feeling amongst some conspiracy
theorists and or to call them that, I mean, I
think the conspiracy theorist would rather wish to call themselves
historians of a very polemical event rather than be conspiracy theorists.
But there is a very strong collection of, let's say,

(57:20):
corroborative evidence that points in this direction. Even though there
is no kind of real smoking gun yet or no
confession by anybody that was participated in it. It could
be that all of those that did participate in it
are dead. But the feeling is that the Cuban Americans
and elements of the CIA were sufficiently angered and fearful

(57:45):
of Kennedy that they removed him. That's one of the arguments,
and it's because he said I would smash the Cio
into a thousand pieces, because he tried to make some
kind of reprochement that they didn't want to happen. And
for the Cuban Americans, it's property. It's about the property

(58:07):
their descendants of people who owned very large holdings in
Cuba which were nationalized by the government, and they basically
have never stopped wanting it back. And that's why they
were happily in the Brigade two five oh six, as
it was called, the attacked the Bay of Pigs. They
were happily in it because they thought they were going

(58:28):
to get their property back.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
That actually brings me to another question perfectly, because in
the decades since the invasion, many of the veterans of
Brigade twenty five oh six have blamed the CIA, not Kennedy,
for this whole debacle, and obviously this is a Kennedy podcast.
How did they have pigs come to be seen as

(58:51):
primarily Kennedy's fault. Was it just a failure to provide
air support or was there something else?

Speaker 3 (58:58):
So I think he took it on his own shoulders.
He probably was trying to be, I guess, the bigger
man at that point. I mean, at that point, of course,
he did appear as though they had been badly let down,
and of course it was their homecoming. He negotiated their release.
They came back, there was this big gathering in the
stadium in Miami, and he made this speech. He took
the flag from them, and he kind of pledged to

(59:20):
their cause. And so therefore he kind of made a
promise to them that he was going to do the job,
and so he kind of took it on himself. So
he must have felt some responsibility because he could have
inherited the plan and he allowed it to go ahead.
He must have felt, you know, like he could have
handled it better himself, I guess. But of course he

(59:40):
had the investigation and he found out that the CIA
had more or less lied to him. He made decisions
based upon information that was basically false, which the CIA
had given him, and therefore he was very, very angry.
And of course then the blame to the CIA, because

(01:00:02):
all of these shortcomings and mistakes of the CIA made
come out, and of course what you get is Mission creep.
The people that were making the plan couldn't see beyond
their own closed mindset, so they didn't see outside the box.
That's kind of group think and mission creep. It had

(01:00:22):
gone so far they couldn't pull back. Better to let
it try and fail than to not try, because trying
to stop it would create bigger problems. What are we
going to do with these fifteen hundred guys? How are
they going to feel about it? If we pull the
plug on it? What does that say about us? I mean,
there's an awful lot of you know, reputation stuck into

(01:00:43):
this thing. It gets too far, what do you do
with it? It also must be taken into account.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
I think, Well, if you want to say they were
trying to oust Castro since Aisenhower, he ended up surviving
ten US presidents. So this really is one of the
least successful to ask the government in American history.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
But that's the fascinating thing, isn't it. He didn't only
survive it, but the thing that he created has survived.
I mean, it's kind of creaking right now, and it's
under an enormous amount of pressure.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
But you know, Americans are still not allowed to travel
to Cuba. I mean, the general valance of US Cuba
relations is still incredibly strained.

Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
Yeah, and somebody once said, I think they call them
the best of enemies. You know, it's like they're so close.
I mean, you wouldn't believe it. You saw what happened
when Obama went down there, and that Cubans loved him.
And they love baseball. I mean, how american is that
they love jazz music, jazz? You know, in fact, Bebop

(01:01:45):
was a fusion of Cuban jazz and New Orleans jazz.
Does he Gillespie met with Cuban musicians and they created Bebop.
I mean, the Cubbans love cake. They make birthday cakes.
They don't make tortoise like the Spanish do. They make
these big, sweet American style cakes. Cubas love American culture,
Hollywood movies. They watch them all the time. Cuba is

(01:02:09):
culturally very very close to the United States and still
is despite the political differences. That's one of the remarkable
things that Americans go to Cuba and the Cubans welcome
them with open arms, and they find so many things
they have in common. And you have to remember the
national drink of Cuba is called a Cuba libre, and

(01:02:31):
it's a mixture of rum and Coca cola. For God's sake,
you know what more do you need to find a
kind of sad schizophrenia? Whatever it is, it's some kind
of psychological problem you've got. It's not just a political one.
I think they call it. I don't know, projection transference.
I don't know, but it's sort.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Of like we've got to get a Fredian. We've got
to get a Fredia Anna to discuss.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
I don't know, I mean, definitely, definitely there is a
psychological aspect to this.

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
All right, this was incredibly educational. I have to say,
thank you so much for walking us through it all.
We really really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
That's it for this week's episode, So subscribe and follow
The United States of Kennedy for all things Kennedy every week.
United States of Kennedy is hosted by Me, Julia Clair
and George Severes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Original music by Joshua Topolski, editing by Graham Gibson, Mixing
and mastering by Doug Bame.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Research by Dave Bruce and Austin Thompson.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
Our producer is Carmen Laurent.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Our executive producer is Jenna

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
Cagele United States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart podcasts.