JFK’s Sorensen Could Tell Pelosi a Thing or Two About the CIA
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
Nancy Pelosi and Ted Sorensen should have lunch next week and trade stories about the CIA.
Sorensen, of course, is the best known presidential speechwriter of the 20th century, if only on the strength of “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
But I was reminded by reading Sorensen’s engaging new autobiography this week that the speechwriter also became one of President John F. Kennedy’s closest national security advisers in the wake of the CIA’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.
“Long after the operation’s failure,” Sorensen writes, “secret minutes emerged of a November 15, 1960, CIA meeting — prior to briefing the new president-elect — in which the CIA’s own reviewers concluded that the invasion was ‘unachievable — {with no} internal unrest earlier believed possible — nor will {Castro’s} defense permit the type {of} strike planned,’ the minutes said.”
Of course, CIA bosses were telling Kennedy the invasion was a slam-dunk.
“To me,” Sorensen writes, “that fiasco earned for the CIA the motto frequently ascribed to it: ‘Often wrong, but never in doubt.’”more...
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000003113975
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