10/28/13 – Michael Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Our guest is Michael Swanson.
He is the author of The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and The Power Elite, 1945-1963, so in other words, part one.
Welcome back to the show.
Mike, how are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me again.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Good book.
I've been reading it.
I kind of like doing this thing where I interview you kind of segment by segment through the whole book sort of thing because that way I'm taking my time reading it and getting other things read too.
Anyway, so I really like it.
It's good stuff.
Now, the problem, if you could say that there's a problem, the problem is the way that I ended the last interview with my wacky conspiracy theory about the shoot down of Gary Power's U-2 jet over the Soviet Union in a way that it scuttled the deal.
In fact, they even made an episode of Quantum Leap about this where Sam Beckett was going to have a chance.
I forget whether it worked out or not.
I guess not.
He was going to have a chance to figure out a way to stop the flight and so that it wouldn't scuttle the talks and then Ike and Khrushchev were going to make friends and that would be the end of the Cold War way back in the 1950s instead of at the end of the 1980s.
But anyway, and then the music started playing and I kicked you right off the air and that was the end of that.
So let's start the show with that today.
Tell me all you know about that U-2 flight and what you make of it.
Well, the flight occurred right before Khrushchev and Eisenhower are going to have this summit meeting and both of them are trying to make some sort of deal.
They had no plan or anything, but Eisenhower definitely was hoping to take control of the arms race and Khrushchev was desperate to do it.
And the United States was flying and the CIA were flying these U-2 flights over the Soviet Union and taking pictures and Eisenhower needed this information because it was going to show him how many nuclear missiles the Soviets had and he was under criticism by people claiming that he was allowing the Russians to build missiles and there's this missile gap and none of that was true.
So these U-2s were flying and taking pictures and they couldn't find any missiles and then there was one final spot that they had never taken any pictures of, which happened to be where their rocket facility was, they just for some reason the CIA decided we'll just leave the most important place to last.
But they were having this summit and Eisenhower said, well let's cancel these flights, I don't want anything to happen, there's a risk every time that one could get shot down.
And the guy running the flight, a fellow named Richard Bissell, he talked him out of it, that's according to declassified CIA history, that he contacted Eisenhower and said, well let's just do this one flight and that flight ends up getting shot down over the Soviet Union.
Now what's thrown a lot of confusion into all this, though, is that there's all these contradictory statements from Eisenhower.
Right after he gets shot down, he hopes that if he just doesn't say anything maybe the Russians won't say anything either and the summit can just happen.
But Khrushchev, he comes under pressure from hardliners in the Soviet Union to respond so he makes a propaganda thing out of it, reveals that the Chukchi planes were shot down and then Eisenhower says, well I didn't know anything about it, I didn't approve these flights and I just had nothing to do with it.
He realizes pretty quickly that causes a big problem, that makes it sound like he's not in control of the government, so then he backtracks and says, oh yeah, I did approve this one flight.
So Eisenhower got caught basically telling a lie as a result of this.
It may be the first time a president has ever been caught like that, blatantly lying to the whole world.
Well, but why aren't you convinced, though, or why are you convinced that it's not the case that he meant what he said when he said it the first time and then he realized, yeah, I mean that sounds bad, like he's not really in control of the government, but maybe he really wasn't.
Maybe the CIA had screwed him on it.
I mean, that would be the theory, and I know it's not original, right, that right-wing forces or whatever kind of forces inside the CIA and the military wanted to keep the thing going forever and so they didn't want any kind of peace summit at all, and screw Ike if that's what he wants.
Well, the thing is, that's actually what Khrushchev believed and the evidence for that is in records that have come out over the past ten years of transcripts of Paul Bureau minutes, which were published in a book, and I use it as a source in here, and when they interrogated Gary Powers, they asked him, the KGB kept asking him, you know, is this a setup, you know, what happened, was this done on purpose to sabotage a summit, and he denied that and said no, no, no, no, you know, you shot it down, and I think it's actually, in the end, it sort of is a murky incident.
There's no real evidence to point to either way, but what makes me think that it probably wasn't, you know, something overly sinister is that the CIA history got declassified in the past couple of years, and it was an internal history, and it doesn't have anything like that in it, and you can say, well, how can you rely on a CIA history and just believe it?
The thing is, the government histories that are released, they don't want to put something that's blatantly not true in them, because that would cause a huge problem with the history of academia, and you just don't want to do that, so they're more likely to just dribble out small bits of information and just blatantly release something that's a total lie.
Well, and that story has been a controversy this whole time, right?
I don't know when the controversy initially started, but yeah, I mean, a lot of people believe it was intentionally sabotaged.
I think that the real important thing from it, though, is, the interesting thing to me isn't so much whether it was sabotaged or not, but how did the Russians interpret dealing with the United States and dealing with Eisenhower, and how did they fit this into what they were trying to do?
And sabotaged or not, what's interesting is Khrushchev's view of Eisenhower, and he met him before this happened.
He came to the United States, and the two met, I think it was in the White House, and the Russians had a positive view of Eisenhower.
They thought, you know, they dealt with him during World War II, they thought he was a man of peace, but Khrushchev thought also that he wasn't in full control of the presidency, and that he was surrounded by, the word he used was militaristic forces, and he's probably thinking of John Foster Dulles in particular.
He was Eisenhower's Secretary of State, and his brother, of course, was the C.A. Director, but John Foster Dulles, during the Jin Bin Pugh incident, or battle in Vietnam, he advocated intervening over there, and even potentially using atomic weapons.
So, it'd be easy for someone like Khrushchev to see him and think, my God, this is what the United States is about, and here's Eisenhower trying to make peace, he's surrounded by these people who are very extreme, and here's this mysterious incident.
Well, it seems like if Khrushchev and the KGB were so suspicious that Ike was being set up, it seems like, I guess it just makes it even more too bad that they didn't ignore and proceed and go ahead and deal with him and try to push back.
Well, the real problem with the theory that it's sabotaged is that the Russians, if that's true, okay, if they're really convinced of it, maybe they were, if they're convinced it was sabotaged, they claim they shot it down.
So, they're claiming it's sabotaged, and then they're claiming they also shot it down.
So, if it was exploded in the air, they should have said that.
They never made that claim.
So, the Russians...
Well, I mean, you know, Bush Jr.'s plan was just fly a U-2 low enough that Saddam could get at it deliberately.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not hard to imagine.
In fact, Bush was probably thinking, or somebody was thinking of Powers as the example.
I bet at least the accusation over Powers for that one.
Remember Option B, the rolling start in the Downing Street memo?
Yeah, what was that?
Oh, yeah, in the Downing Street memo, there's Option 1 is the giant buildup in Kuwait and then invade like they did in March 2003, but then there's Option B, rolling start.
Let's paint up an American U-2 spy plane in UN colors, and we'll get it, even though he hasn't been able to shoot down a single plane in a dozen years over his own country in the no-fly zones, we'll deliberately get this shot down, and we'll use that as the cost of spelling.
We'll go ahead and start the invasion early, and then just get the rest of the army there when we can.
And somehow cooler heads prevailed over that plan, but that was, and Bush had proposed that, personally had proposed that to Blair in front of Dearlove, the head of MI6 at the time, and then it was Dearlove Smithers who took the notes.
Good grief, well, I mean, you totally matched, you gave Bush that idea.
Yeah, somebody told him that, but, you know, anyway.
And I guess, you know, here's the thing about the U-2 for me, and I'm sorry, because we got to move on from here, there's a lot more important stuff to talk about too, but I think I learned about this from my dad when I was a little kid, that there was a discrepancy even that he remembered from way back then, which was, and maybe this isn't even a real thing or not, maybe this has been, you know, debunked as a thing since then, but I just, it was brought up to me as a little kid that if it was really supposed to be that top secret of a CIA deniable op, he wasn't supposed to have a parachute, and the deal was if his plane got shot down, tough, and that he knew that going in, because he was that deep of an undercover sort of a dude or whatever, and that the fact that he had a parachute meant that, or seemed to indicate that it was, you know, meant to be a publicity stunt that would undermine the talk, something like that.
I don't, I don't know, I do know that the, he had poison capsules with him, and he was, all these U2 pilots were told if you're shot down, you're supposed to sewage the side yourself, so you'd think they wouldn't give him parachutes to make sure it happened.
Yeah, and how deniable is it supposed to be?
I don't know, but anyway.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, so now, tell me again what year Stalin died.
Uh, 54, 55, I believe it was.
All right, and then, so I believe I read in your book that there were some men in D.C. who thought, hey, let's go ahead and take this opportunity to put some of this brinksmanship to bed and see if we can move on in our relationship from here, and there was, there was a possibility of that for a while.
What happened to that?
Was that this?
Yeah, well, when Khrushchev, I mean, when Stalin died, the guy that first took over, his name was Malenkov, but then there's the intergal struggle, and Khrushchev beat him out, but the key thing, the important thing, though, is that as soon as Stalin died, the Russians released statements to the fact that they wanted a cooling off period in the Cold War, and then, you know, Eisenhower sort of tried to reciprocate by making a famous speech, it's titled Atoms for Peace, in which he talks about using secure technology for more peaceful things and controlling the arms race and so forth.
So they made an olive branch to each other, but it basically, you know, got scuttled by this U-2 incident, and the Russians were desperate to want to make some sort of deal.
They were falling behind in the arms race, but just as important, you know, they had turmoil in Eastern Europe, you know, Czechoslovakia, they had to intervene there and put down a revolt, and Germany was a big problem.
There was no Berlin Wall, and East and West Berlin were divided.
The U.S. had, you know, West Berlin was an allied city, East Berlin was part of East Germany, but there was no wall, so what was happening was people were going to West Berlin from the Soviet territories and just leaving, you know, and they were draining away their wealth and people, and, you know, they wanted some way to fix this, but they ended up putting the wall later on, but they kept Khrushchev made a bluff to Eisenhower, threatened war, unless we settle some deal over Berlin, and this props up again and again the Kennedy presidency, where Berlin becomes this big issue between the two sides, and the Soviets essentially keep trying to run, you know, bluff themselves into forcing the United States into some sort of negotiation, because they're in a position of weakness in the U.S., basically.
Besides Eisenhower and Kennedy later on, they view the United States as being sort of controlled, or that's not the exact way out here.
I'll give you the exact phrase Khrushchev uses here.
He makes this statement to the Politburo that when he looks at the United States, what he sees is strange events that occur by coincidence, almost can't be explained, and then forces that are willing to go to war, even if it's against our own, the United States' interest in the country, that he says there, the quote, the word he uses is irrational, and I think if you look at all, you know, American history since World War II, you can see examples of that over and over again.
I mean, just about every single war we've been involved in, you can find, you know, some weird start of it.
You know, the Vietnam War, we have the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Panama War, we invaded Panama, there's a story in the L.A. Times, the reason given was that some Americans were being mistreated, they went to a border check and were arrested and mishandled and beaten, I think the story was, and then the story comes out in the L.A. Times that those details, you know, that other things led up to that, that we were arresting them, in fact, and then he gave this example of Bush's crazy plan and so forth, but there's also forces willing to go to war, and history of the presidency of Kennedy shows that the generals there wanted to go to war over and over again, they requested them to send troops to Vietnam, and then, of course, the missile crisis that we have, the Vietnam War itself, and a lot of this history is kind of, if you really, you know, dig into it, really dig into it, a lot of it is sort of, I don't know if the word's mysterious, but maybe disputed, if you look at the Vietnam War, there's arguments over why did Johnson really escalate the war, and, you know, was it all about him, was he worried about people saying he's a wimp, essentially, is one argument, or, you know, was it military pressure, which I think is best summed up in Gareth Porter's book about that, but so anyway, that's, it's just, and then you wonder, like, even today, what is really, who's in charge and what's really going on?
I mean, if you look at this serious situation, I don't know what really was going on there.
Apparently Obama decides at the last second to go get a vote after telling the National Security Council he's ready to do these bombing strikes, and he's going to go all of a sudden to Congress, and then he doesn't get it.
What does that mean?
Does that mean that, you know, he's trying to get out of it by knowing he's going to get rejected, or does that mean he just don't know what he's doing, and he's incompetent?
I don't know.
I think, I think that, yeah, well, that was what Gareth said, that, you know, if he goes to Congress, that means he's begging for a way out, and, of course, Eric Margulies says, you know, he had sources that told him it's a fact that it was the Russians' idea in the first place about having the Syrians give up the chemicals as the compromise, and then so they staged that whole flub where Kerry accidentally comes up with that idea at a press conference and all this thing, which, you know, I'll take it, but you're right that, I mean, that sure is kind of a crazy thing if that's the only thing a president can do to get out of a war is to stage that sort of a spectacular failure of his own plan, you know what I mean?
I don't know.
He's a horrible president.
Let's just put it that way, but anyway, so I want to go back a minute to, about war being unthinkable or not, because, look, killing Vietnamese all day is plenty thinkable.
Nobody cares about that at all.
You know, how many people, how many people died in Vietnam?
58,000.
Everybody knows that.
Nobody cares about the Vietnamese, or the Koreans, or the Iraqis, or anything like that, not the Americans.
They don't care, but so nuclear war, though, is different.
If you have a war with China, or if you have a war with America, or, I mean, with the Russians, and that means you're giving up every major city in America, right?
And so, and the politicians even giving up their own lives and having nothing but a wasteland.
This is why Truman fired MacArthur, because MacArthur was willing to go ahead and expand the war into China, and Truman thought, if you do that, you're going to bring in the Soviets, and we're going to have a nuclear war, and it ain't worth it.
So we'll just draw a line at the parallel, and call it a day.
Well, we'll wait for Eisenhower to do it, but anyway, fire MacArthur over it, want to expand the war, because nuclear war is unthinkable, because that means we could die in the thing.
And that's what has prevented major power war this whole time, is the fact that it would have to be nuclear, and I think you're certainly right, that we've only been saved from it by the skin of our teeth, you know, quite a few times, where it really could have happened anyway, and that's the thing that I really want to get to, is, you know, the consensus, I think, for a long time was really, and still is, I guess, I don't really care about war against helpless countries, as long as they can't fight back, we're for it, but you talk about, and you were just mentioning, and you talk about in your book, these people really are not just MacArthur, there are a lot of people in the government, especially in the 50s and 60s, who are perfectly willing to have a nuclear war, and so, okay, yeah, so we got to trade New York, and Denver, and Miami, and Los Angeles, and Dallas, but you know, anyway, it'll be all right, though, we'll still win, or whatever, they don't care, they're willing to have a nuclear holocaust, these guys, the U.S. military.
Well, that's the most shocking thing to me, what I did the research for this book, you know, and I think defines the whole era of the time period that this book is talking about, and the thing is, when I, you know, I got a master's degree in history, and back then, I was reading all these Cold War history books as a graduate student, one of the professors I had at the time, he's on the Council for Foreign Relations, and he wrote, back then, a revisionist, I don't know if the word is revisionist, but one of the most important histories of the Cold War, it still is, and the thing is that I didn't know what you just said until, you know, just through the last year, and that wasn't in the history 25 years ago, and interpretations of the Cold War, so, you know, the first revisionist history stuff would basically say, well, who was responsible?
The U.S. was responsible, some people would say, and then you get a wave of revisionism that said, no, not really, both sides were responsible, and I kind of talk about that in the book, too, I kind of take that argument also, but the thing is that another argument that sort of appeared in the past 10 years, which is the newest revisionist argument in academia, is that, well, we've always had a great advantage over the Soviet Union, just as, you know, I'm pointing that out in the book, but they'll say that all the Vietnam War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, all this stuff is really partisan politics, and or, you know, just people trying to make money off of all this stuff, and the two kind of go together.
Well, I don't really think that, in the end, that's the real explanation for a lot of this stuff.
Ideology's a big part of it, obviously.
Yeah, sure.
Well, the arms race, I think, is really the critical factor for the time of Eisenhower and Kennedy, because what ended up happening was, we had such a gigantic advantage over the Soviet Union.
You know, we had, there's always these predictions in the 50s, oh, they're going to build nuclear missiles, and Khrushchev talked about, oh, I can come building missiles like sausages, and all this kind of stuff, but none of this stuff was true.
And so by the time Kennedy was president, they only had four, the Russians only had four nuclear missiles that could reach the United States, and their bombers couldn't fly here and go back, and they only had something like a dozen or two dozen of them, while we had about a hundred nuclear missiles, and we're building more and more and more.
So in 1961, there's a crisis over Berlin again, where after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy and Khrushchev has this famous summit, and Khrushchev gives him an ultimatum, you know, if we don't settle Berlin, there could be a war, and Kennedy leaves, saying, well, it's going to be a cold winter then.
So that summer, there's this crisis over, are we going to war or not?
And it's even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, in some cases.
So Kennedy comes under pressure to, how do we respond to this, you know, and Dean Ashton, who wrote that NSC 68 we talked about last time, he says, gives him advice, well, look, declare a state of emergency, and increase defense spending, and send a bunch of people over to Europe, and we can, you know, jump up the defense spending again, just like we did under Truman.
And Kennedy calls Eisenhower up, and Eisenhower tells him, that'd be the dumbest thing you can do, because you look like you're in a panic, and you're going to thank the country, that's just stupid.
So he ends up compromising, and just, you know, makes a bellicose speech, and then announces a small increase in defense spending.
But along with that, he announces a program to build fallout shelters in government buildings across the country.
So I don't know, have you ever seen one of these, some of them, there's still one in the town I live in, have you ever seen one of these fallout shelters anywhere?
You know, I don't know if I've ever actually seen one in real life, not that I can think of.
I certainly remember Duck and Cover, the cartoon, and all of that.
Well, sometimes, I mean, I don't think they're not active anymore, but sometimes you'll see a sign for them, like on a good old courthouse building, or something that, you know, was built back then.
Well, what's crazy is that those fallout shelters weren't designed to protect people from nuclear explosions.
The idea was, oh, we're going to bring the air raid siren, you're going to run in here and protect yourself from bombs.
They were to protect you from fallout floating from Russia over into the United States.
So the idea, what it was, was a first strike plan to hit Russians, and then we would just sit in these fallout shelters for a week or two, and then come out and, you know, everything would be hunky-dory.
It's just like with the missile defense, so-called missile defense systems now, it's not really a defensive thing.
It's just extra armor for bringing to your aggression.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But the thing is, they presented Kennedy with a plan in the summer of 1961.
They said, here's our nuclear strike plan, and it was a first strike plan.
They just flat out told them, look, we got so many more missiles that there's a good chance we can shoot these missiles off and totally obliterate them, and they wouldn't even be able to harm us at all.
And their estimate was, well, even if they do get some sort of response off, it would kill 10 to 20 million American people at most.
So that was an acceptable risk to some people, apparently.
But they also told them that at the rate that we're building missiles, actually the optimal time to launch an attack like this would be towards the end of 1963 or sometime in 1964.
Towards the end of this meeting, Kennedy got angry and left the room and said, you know, we're not going to do anything like this, essentially.
And that was that.
But it just shows you the mentality that people had.
And the thing is, during these years, China didn't have a nuclear bomb, either, until 1965.
So they wouldn't be able to respond either.
So there's some logic to MacArthur's desire to expand his war in Korea into China.
And there is a logic, too, behind launching a nuclear war or something before 1965.
And I think there's actually a good—well, there is evidence that this is part of the reason the Vietnam War occurred.
There's Pentagon histories that are declassified that show that in 1964, they presented—Joint Chiefs of Staff presented—Lyndon Johnson with a series of scenarios and plans to go to war in Vietnam, not just to defend South Vietnam, but they wanted to attack North Vietnam.
And they claimed—the phrase that they used is that they had a nuclear umbrella that would be able to protect our invasion force.
You know, and in Vietnam, of course, Johnson didn't do that.
And we didn't really escalate Vietnam until 1965.
By the way, for people who might have missed it, I believe, Michael, what you're saying, that's newspeak for, we're going to do this, and the Russians better not intervene at all, or we'll nuke Moscow.
That's what they mean by we have a nuclear umbrella.
Yeah, yeah, or China.
I mean, it's just amazing stuff, you know, this history.
They have a phrase that I never heard before until just until right before I put this book out, and that is a coercive nuclear strike.
The theory behind that is you nuke Russia, and then you just tell them to surrender, and then they'll have to.
It's just amazing.
So I think all this is an explanation for—when I talk about the Joint Chiefs of Staff, too, I don't want to say all of them thought this at all, but some of them certainly did, especially the ones in the Air Force.
But there's plenty of evidence that a few of them were skeptical of this sort of intervening or warmongering, whatever you want to call it.
But there was certainly, you know, it's frightening stuff, you know, when you read this.
It's just amazing.
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, for people who are too lazy to do the reading, if you ever see that movie, 13 Days, I'm sure it's all chock full of inaccuracies.
But part of it that is certainly right is that there are men who are willing to go ahead and have a nuclear war, even at the expense of American cities.
I mean, obviously, they were far ahead in their capabilities beyond the USSR, as you say, but they were willing to go ahead and do it for whatever consequences.
And by the way, I didn't actually get as far as the Cuban Missile Crisis in your book, so I don't want to go that far, but I would like to hear for at least a little while your telling of the Bay of Pigs disaster here, because well, it's just been an interest of mine since I was really young for some reason.
And I talked with the great Howard Jones wrote a great book on the Bay of Pigs a couple of years back who I got a good interview out of him about that.
Anyway, just something that's interesting to me and interested for people who they've heard of that the Bay of Pigs, the Bay of Pigs, but they don't know what it is.
You do a really great job of retelling the story here.
So why don't you fill us in?
Because it really is something else.
Well, the Bay of Pigs happened in a month or two, it was April of 1961.
Just months after Kennedy got in office, he tried to, well, he launched an invasion of Cuba with a thousand Cuban exiles.
Castro took power in the 50s, and the CIA was training these Cuban exiles, and they're in Nicaragua, put them on a couple boats and sent them to Cuba, about a thousand men, and they were supposed to land there and start a spontaneous revolt and just take over the whole island.
That was the plan presented to Kennedy.
And if it failed, they told him, well, they can just go into the mountains of Cuba and they'll be able to turn into a guerrilla army and eventually they'll win.
And of course, what ends up happening is he launches this invasion, it's part of the invasion force.
There's a couple bombers that are supposed to go over Cuba and bomb out Castro's air force and support the invasion fleet.
Well, they end up blowing up only half the airplanes, so their mission fails.
And then this is all supposed to be operation not involved in the United States, which of course it is.
And not everyone in the government is told about it ahead of time.
So the ambassador to the United Nations for the U.S. is told that we have nothing to do with it, you know, we have nothing to do with these bombers, and they're just actually Castro people defecting.
And this guy, Adlai Stevenson, he tells him to end this, and then he finds out, well, the CIA lied to him, and with this cover story he's telling the world.
Now he gets mad, you know, because he looks like a fool, and then he complains to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security advisor.
He cancels the airstrike as a result, and the whole invasion, of course, collapses, and the men surrender, and Castro eventually allows them to come back to the United States under a ransom payment that Kennedy pays.
It's 30 to 50 million dollars.
And the thing about it is, why has this whole stupid operation even happened in the first place?
And that's one of the things that Khrushchev tells the Politburo.
He basically says, what is this?
You know, I can't understand why would the president of the United States launch a stupid invasion like this and let it fail?
What in the world, you know, what does this mean?
Does this mean Kennedy's incompetent, or does it mean that this is some sort of trick that Alan Dulles, the CIA, has played on him, that discredited him, or something?
Khrushchev just makes no sense out of it.
It's one of these, you know, strange events that we were talking about before, but thankfully, you know, there's been plenty of great histories written about it, plenty of records about it, and everything.
So, you know, I don't really think it is a mystery today, although it certainly would be if you were alive then watching this on television and these conferences and stuff.
Yeah, well, it's a mess.
And, you know, it's funny, the fact that the thing went on, it's just, you know, separate from all the rest of the politics and whatever.
It's a curiosity to me, just, I think even that book, The Perils of Groupthink, was written about the planning for it, where they changed every part of the plan in an ad hoc way at the last minute, and then they still went with it.
And everybody knew, at some point, they had an objection.
Now, they didn't all object to the same thing, but they all objected, and they all still went along anyway, and they all still did it anyway, and there wasn't no way in the world, and I mean, you quote them in there saying, oh, that's no coral reef, that's a cloud.
Well, in other words, it's been decided above my pay grade, and so, you know, I don't have the authority here, basically, to expand on this or change any of this.
The bosses want to believe that it's not going to be a problem, and so my job is making sure they keep believing that, basically.
And there they all go, you know, the path to hell paved with good intentions, and of course, you know, I couldn't begin to catalog, I don't really understand it well enough to catalog through all the different consequences that came out of that operation, its attempt, and its failure, and the rest of it, you know?
But I'm sure there were plenty, if you had to go trace them back, you know?
Talk about that in a second, because that's really, really important.
But the thing is, the whole operation, to start with, originated not as an evasion of Cuba, but it was supposed to be a guerrilla operation where you drop these, you would train these exile people not to land on the beaches, but to parachute into Cuba and set up, you know, sabotage operations and guerrilla stuff, and that's what was intended at first.
That's what Eisenhower actually approved, and these operations kept failing.
So they would, you know, fly in a crate of guns, parachute the stuff down, and they just wouldn't get to nobody, because there was really no one there.
And this Richard Dissel guy, who happened to be the same dude that was in charge of the U-2 operation, he was in charge of this too, and he was being groomed to become the CA director.
Alan Dulles was set to retire in a few years, and he was grooming this guy, so he wanted to succeed in Cuba so he could get promoted and be a big shot.
So between the presidency of Eisenhower and Kennedy, he just, on his own, decides, well, I'm going to change this from guerrilla operations that aren't working to, let's just do an invasion.
So no president approved of changing the operation.
He just did it, and then Kennedy gets in, they present him with the new plan that they've been now working on for three or four months, and Kennedy kind of doesn't want to do it, and he diddly-dallies around for a while, and then he finally does approve it, and Alan Dulles, who was the CA director, basically tells him, look, if you don't do this invasion, then what are we going to do with the people we've trained in Nicaragua?
They're going to go run around, talk, and they're going to get mad or whatever.
It's going to come out.
So he said to Kennedy, we have a disposal problem.
I don't think he wants these people to die, necessarily, but Dulles later argues that he thought if we invaded Cuba, and even if the invasion failed, that Kennedy would respond with the military and bring in the Marines.
And the whole thing, all the details of it, it's just this bureaucratic nightmare.
Because here's a military operation, and an invasion, it's like D-Day or something, not that big, but it's a pretty complicated thing, and Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military, they just keep their arms away from it.
They don't really want to get involved in the planning.
It's like the only reason it happens is because these two guys, Dulles and Bissell, wanted to look good or something, and everyone just went along with it.
And there's an incredible, like, one of the things that really, after I read the research and stuff, is they have this final meeting where Kennedy is going to decide whether to approve the invasion or not, and he doesn't really ask for a debate or anything.
He invites one of the senators, Wilbur Fulbright, to come in there, and he speaks out against it, and then everyone just announces Fulbright.
And Dean Ross, the Secretary of State, he supports it.
Then later on, he writes in his memoirs that, I was just worried about my own position.
I thought it was a bad thing, but I didn't want to say anything.
Yeah, it's just pretty amazing.
And you know, the thing is, I can totally relate to that, just from having regular day jobs or whatever, where the boss is wrong about something, and yet everybody just goes, well, whatever, okay, and they all look at each other and roll their eyes, and they let it continue on.
Only in this case, it's important stuff that's worth sticking your neck out for.
But apparently, nobody's any more likely to go ahead and stick their neck out.
Well, you're talking about 100 people, you know, died.
You know, 100 of these Cuban exiles died.
I'm sure a few people in Cuba died, too, and 1,000 of them, or 900 of them left, became captured.
Well, and it could have become one of these Guns of August kinds of things, too.
I mean, they weren't just messing around with nothing here.
They were messing around with the relationship between America and the USSR.
Not just Cuba, you know?
No, it's completely crazy.
So the biggest problem, and one of Kennedy's advisors who was against it wrote a memo saying this, the problem isn't if it fails, but if it succeeds.
Because what'll end up happening is you have 1,000 people over there, and now you're going to have a civil war in Cuba, and then we'll have to intervene in that, and now we're bogged down in something, and it's just, you know, a disaster.
But the thing is, the long-term consequences of what occurred are very important to the institution of the CIA and the presidency itself, because first of all, Kennedy launches sort of like a fact-finding investigation into the causes of the failure.
He brings in Maxwell Taylor, who is a general that was working under Eisenhower to personally advise him and sort of like fix the situation and so forth, and they end up, two things end up happening.
First of all, they take away the ability to do paramilitary operations out of the hands of the CIA.
You know, if you see movies and talk, you know, you see this quote, and I've never seen it anywhere, so I don't think it's real, that Kennedy wanted to destroy the CIA into 1,000 pieces and so forth.
I don't think that's really true, but what ends up happening is he prevents, he just takes the control of doing anything of this magnitude out of the hands of the CIA and puts it into Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So from then on, in Cuba, a new operation called Mongoose is created to run sabotage missions and try to assassinate Castro and so forth, and that's actually in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It's got CIA people working for it, but, you know, Bissell and Dulles, they're fired, and the people that take their place are not really under direct control anymore, and the CIA, it just becomes so politically discredited from this Bay of Pigs thing that it just essentially loses its power, and it's, I think, as the decades have gone on, it's just become more and more politically discredited.
It's almost, I think, like almost a whipping boy nowadays, but the other thing that happens is that Kennedy himself, you know, he realizes, I've got to have some sort of control over what's going on.
I've messed up, I've proved something, I look like a fool, and how does the president rule over what has now become a gigantic national security bureaucracy of CIA, Pentagon.
Today, you know, there's like 17 intelligence agencies.
How can the president manage any of this stuff?
And it wasn't a situation a president faced before World War II, you know, when he could, with basically a handful of advisors, do everything that had to be done.
Now, the whole government is this giant mushroom, and it's a big question, because what Eisenhower did, and why, one reason I don't think he, no president can probably be in full control over everything, but what Eisenhower would do is hold these National Security Council meetings quite frequently, and there make the decision.
And what would happen is people would come to these meetings and basically present him with information they wanted to give him to lead him where they wanted him to go.
So that's basically what Alan Dulles would do, is tell him all this stuff, hey, you know, we got communists in Guatemala or Iran or this and that place, and he would just approve whatever he said, and then he'd get information from someone disgruntled saying, look, this Alan Dulles guy, he's snowballing you sometimes.
So that's how I think Eisenhower basically gave the CA a blank check in all these covert operations.
And then on the hands-on stuff, he worked on the military budget and trying to control arms race, and took a real personal involvement in that.
So after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy decides, well, I'm not going to operate with these big meetings and people just presenting me stuff to approve.
He tries to work sort of behind the scenes by having, like, a person in each place he can trust and talk to and try to get information from them and try to work around the bureaucracy to do certain decisions.
But then the problem with that is the president can only do so much and put his hand on one thing at a time.
And he spends a lot of time focusing on the Soviet Union and diplomacy with Russia.
Him and Robert Kennedy form a back-channel network, a communication line to relatives of Khrushchev to communicate with and try to negotiate a deal with and so forth.
And that actually, the relationship helps them resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis when that breaks open.
But one thing that ends up happening is when it comes to the Vietnam situation, Kennedy kind of, you know, sort of ignores it almost for most of the presidency and the situation deteriorates.
It isn't until the very end where he really starts to say, well, I better start to get more involved in this.
Right.
Now, it's funny, you know, when you talk about the power of the bureaucracy and all that, the only people, we spoke a little bit about this before, about how it took, you know, Nixon at his drunken rages to be able to take control of the thing.
It seems like the only other person I can think of, I guess you're saying Kennedy, you know, to some degree pushed back.
But the only person who was really successful that I know of really controlling the bureaucracy, it seems like, I mean, from what I know anyway, they say he's a legend because he was able to do it.
And that's Dick Cheney.
He had so many people.
He had Washington so wired.
He knew who everybody was and what all their connections to each other were and exactly which strings to pull and where to apply pressure.
And he had, you know, staffers in the Senate and he had people in the Pentagon and he had, you know, everywhere he needed him.
He could control the entire state as a unitary executive in a way that I don't know if anybody was ever that successful.
I mean, think about their complaints, right?
The CIA and the State Department and all the generals that resigned.
They realized, like, wow, this guy's got total power over us.
We can't stop him.
So we quit.
Yeah, I think you're right in the way.
The reason he was able to do that is because he goes back in government to the force.
He was even worse than them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Personifies evil.
Oh, sorry.
But he also had an ally in Donald Rumsfeld, too, and they were good buddies back in the Ford administration, which was Rumsfeld was secretary of state back then and Cheney was chief of staff, I think it was.
And so, I mean, you've got two men that had built up networks for 30 years before they got into the White House or into the Pentagon.
So they had all this experience.
They had all these contacts and in a huge drive to do all this stuff.
And you look at Bush, you think he was just over his head.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, we're out of time basically for today's show.
I think we certainly have at least one more interview, maybe two more interviews worth in this thing to go over.
Probably one more.
But so I'm certainly looking forward to that.
Before we stop to just tell everybody how to buy the book and all that, which they need to know, talk about the ones that you're working on and how close they are, because this is just the first of two or three.
Well, I'm working on the second one about the Vietnam War.
And the idea is the time period is 45 to 1968.
And I've written up to the Kennedy administration.
So I'm hoping to have that all completed by next year and probably released sometime in 2015.
But I'm real excited about that one, because this book here, you know, the writing style for this War State book, you know, even though I do think it's written really well, it really starts to come in, you know, once you get past the first chapter and a half in this new book I'm working on.
It just really, it's well written throughout.
And it's even better than this one.
It's got crazy information about the harm's race and the reasons why we escalated in Vietnam.
And I'm not sure what direction I'll go in after that.
I've considered, you know, writing one about the new conservative movement in the 70s and 80s.
Well, you know, I almost went off on a tangent about that, about how Wollstetter, who was Paul Wolfowitz's inspiration, you know, gained all his power and influence as a nuclear warfare theorist.
And, you know, how might we be able to actually go ahead and use these things?
Like, Mr. Burns complains on The Simpsons, these do-nothing nuclear weapons that just sit around all day.
We need to figure out how we can use them and live to use them again sometime, some other time.
So anyway, yeah, I would very much like to read your treatment of that, who those kooks are, where they come from, and why they hate America so much.
Anyway, we gotta go.
We're all out of time.
But I hope next Monday, same time?
Yeah, sure.
That'd be great.
Okay, great.
That's Michael Swanson, everybody, author of The War State.
Go out and get it, or sit right where you are right now and Google it and get it.
It's at Amazon.
You can click the link from my website.
Thanks, Mike.
See you all tomorrow.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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As you may already be aware, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman, and James Bovard are awesome.
They're also in every issue of the Future Freedom and they're joined by others of the best of the libertarian movement.
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Hey, Al Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire, and the permanent military economy, and all from a free market libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome and that Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers state that people agree on one thing.
It's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society.
Empire.
The permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at amazon.com, or just click on the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
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