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The Changes. The "immorality" of the intervention found its most eloquent voice before the President during a meeting in the State Department on April 4, only 13 days before the date set for the invasion. The occasion was Bissell's final review of the operation, and practically everybody connected with high strategy was on hand—Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Dillon. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Lemnitzer. CIA Chief Allen Dulles, as well as McGeorge Bundy, Paul Nitze, then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs, Thomas Mann and three Kennedy specialists in Latin American matters —Adolf Berle, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin. There was also one outsider, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose support Kennedy wanted. After Bissell had completed his briefing and Dulles had summed up risks and prospects, Fulbright denounced the proposition out of hand: it was the wrong thing for the U.S. to get involved in.
Rusk said he was for it, in answer to the President's direct question, but as would presently be manifest, he privately had no heart for it. Two other men among the President's senior foreign policy advisers, not present at the meeting, shared Fulbright's feelings: Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles and Adlai Stevenson. In deference to these views, Kennedy made two separate rulings which were to contribute to the fatal dismemberment of the whole plan. First, U.S. air power would not be on call at any time. Second, the B-26s flown by "our" Cubans could be used in only two strikes before the invasion—first on D-minus-two-days and again on the morning of the landing.
Dawn of April 15, by the timetable, the B-26s, having flown undetected through the night from their Central American staging base, appeared over Cuba and bombed the three fields on which Castro's ready air was deployed. The attack was, on the whole, highly successful. Half of Castro's B-26s and Sea Furies and four of his T-33 jets were blown up or damaged.
Request for Boxer. Sunday evening, only some eight hours after Kennedy had given the final go-ahead, the expedition in the first dark was creeping toward the Cuban shore. In Bissel's office, there was a call on the White House line. It was Bundy, being even crisper than usual: The B-26s were to stand down, there was to be no air strike in the morning, this was a presidential order. Rusk was now acting for the President in the situation. Bissell was stunned. He and CIA Deputy Director General Charles Cabell, an experienced air man, went together to the State Department to urge Rusk to reconsider. Cabell was greatly worried about the vulnerability to air attack of the ships and then of the troops on the beach. Rusk was not impressed. The ships, he suggested, could unload and retire to the open sea before daylight; as for the troops ashore being unduly inconvenienced by Castro's air, it had been his experience as a colonel in the Burma theater that air attack could be more of a nuisance than a danger. One fact he made absolutely clear: military considerations had overruled the political when the D-minus-two strike had been laid on; now political considerations were taking over.