PRESIDENT KENNEDY

President Kennedy

John F Kennedy and his Diplomatic Doctrine

Introduction

The short administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1961-63) was characterized by numerous controversies involving the use of intelligence agencies and specific operations. Some of those controversies surfaced during his administration while others have simmered in the historical and memoir literature produced in the decades since his assassination. Kennedy received conflicting advice from hawks and doves within his administration, and at times, seemed paralyzed between alternative options, often resulting in abortive operations. Much objective historical analysis of the intelligence operations during the 32 months of his administration tends to contradict the impression conveyed in more popular media of a simple, straightforward, successful, and courageous employment of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

Diplomatic Doctrine Followed by President John F. Kennedy during Various Crises

Some of the intelligence issues surrounding Kennedy even precede his election. When Kennedy ran against Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1960, Kennedy claimed that the United States suffered from a “missile gap.” That is he played on the obvious fear that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the production and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In fact, Nixon was aware of CIA assessments, derived from the U-2 surveillance flights of Gary Powers and others, that the Soviet ICBM program did not represent a serious threat to U.S. security. In later memoirs, Nixon complained that he was unable to use such intelligence information in the 1960 campaign without revealing sources and methods that Kennedy's criticism represented the unfair advantage that a challenger has over a representative of an incumbent administration (Meiertons, 2010).

With the successful deployment of the secret Corona satellites during the Kennedy administration, a much clearer picture of the Soviet capability emerged, showing that the United States had a strong lead. This intelligence, coupled with information derived from the defection-in-place of Oleg Penkovsky, tended to embolden Kennedy in some of his confrontations with the Soviet Union.

The most noteworthy of many intelligence operations during Kennedy's administration were the following: Operation PLUTO (the Bay of Pigs affair); Operation MONGOOSE (efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro); the Berlin Crisis; the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the assassination of Ngo Diem a few days before the assassination of Kennedy himself. In Operation MOCKINGBIRD, telephone taps on journalists represented a case of the misuse of intelligence in putting civil liberties at risk (Daville, 1966).

Critics and commentators on the use of intelligence during the Kennedy administration are ...