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There were two big reports right after the Bay of Pigs looking into it one was the Taylor
commission which is appointed by John Kennedy now you would think that because John Kennedy
appointed the commission and because Bobby Kennedy was one of the four members of it
that it would be uh particularly forgiving of John Kennedy and it kind of was but it
was not very harsh on the CIA I was surprised to find that out when I read it because the
Kennedy administration publicly seemed to be trying to put all the you know even though
Kennedy came out and said I am you know I am the Commander in Chief and in the end it's
all my responsibility really everybody was leaking the story that the CIA had mislead
him uh but I'm amazed by by uh the fact that Kennedy uh well so the Taylor commission then
sort of gave the CIA a bit of a pass they said yes indeed CIA did mislead Kennedy but
they kind of put a little blame on Kennedy which was kind of extraordinary but the report
you're referring to uh was by that was Maxwell Taylor who later had been a general and then
later became uh uh the uh chief head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and a
big aficionado of going into Vietnam he was well that's a whole other story of how all
these people that got that were either got the United States into the Bay of Pigs or
then like Taylor investigated it afterwards were exactly the same folks that then rushed
into Vietnam yeah but that's a whole other that's an interesting story but this Kirkpatrick
Lyman Kirkpatrick who was the inspector general of the CIA did write his own report and it
was much harder on the CIA uh and it you know it criticized every aspect of the operation
I think you know when something fails it's very easy to go back and say every single
look at every single thing and say well everything the CIA did was wrong uh it seemed a little
unfair and many people in the CIA thought that this was Kirkpatrick uh sour grapes really
because his career had not advanced as far as he'd wanted it to that he was sort of getting
back at people like Richard Bissell uh and that was put in a drawer by John McCone who
replaced Allen Dulles as the head of the CIA and didn't come out till many years later
uh and it's very harsh on the CIA I don't think it's very fair I think it's because
I think it's so harsh that it almost misses the point I mean it's criticizing the training
facilities um the ships that they use every if the thing had worked in some way nobody
would it's kinda like you know if you watch a football game the commentators if the team
loses it's everything wrong they did and if they win it's everything right they did it's
not really like that there are wrong things and right things along the way.This excerpt
is brought to you by the Massachusetts School of Law