The Joint Chiefs of Staff Pushed Kennedy to Nuclear First Strike

[Greg Burnham]

As a whole, this is a relatively interesting and accurate piece. However, the Bay of Pigs section is not accurate. The author very likely did not know the facts. The cause of the failure was NOT due to the mis-timing of the landing party's arrival. It was due to McGeorge Bundy's having deliberately cancelled the pre-dawn airstrikes just prior to the B-26's departure from the CIA's Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua base. These cancellations have been alternately referred to as non-existent, an innocuous failure to coordinate their proverbial "time-pieces", or an even more prevalent "fairytale" that has been hatched since the declassification of key documents is the so-called "postponement" of the SCHEDULED PRE-DAWN airstrikes. Truth be told the "postponement" was tantamount to a CANCELLATION because after the "window of opportunity" had closed a late arrival was equal to NO arrival at all.

I wrote a brief commentary on this subject below the article found here: [URL="http://blogs.archives.gov/prologue/?p=4901"]http://blogs.archives.gov/prologue/?p=4901

T[/URL]he original article also makes inaccurate observations regarding the Bay of Pigs, which prompted me to write the correction.