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One of the central dramas of the brief Kennedy Administration was his passage from a sometimes indiscriminate anti-Communist hard line to a deepening awareness of the real dangers of nuclear war. It did not help Kennedy in this passage that he assembled a staff of war-hawk anti-Communist intellectuals (McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara, for example) who were brilliantly nimble and self-confident and often disastrously wrong about what counted most. They could be overbearing men, and curiously disconnected from the realities of American life. Once, after Vice President Johnson talked wonderingly of all the brilliant characters Kennedy had brought into the White House, House Speaker Sam Rayburn remarked to him, "Well, Lyndon, they may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff."
Kennedy's team of White House men, according to Historian Joan Hoff-Wilson, began the pattern in which Congress and the federal bureaucracies became adversaries of the White House rather than partners. "That kind of privatization and centralization of power in and around the White House clearly begins with Kennedy," says Hoff-Wilson. For men who put such a premium on brains and information, the elite around Kennedy sometimes seemed either exceptionally naive (about the Bay of Pigs, for example) or ignorant (about Vietnamese history and culture). Some of the same men stayed on with Johnson, and presided over the escalation of what became in some ways the nation's hardest war.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco, however, came early. Kennedy had inherited the plan from the Eisenhower Administration, which, according to Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, had already sunk $40 million into the training of a band of Cuban exiles who were supposed to sweep ashore in Cuba, join forces with the grateful, disenchanted islanders and dislodge Fidel Castro. Kennedy was skeptical of the idea, but allowed himself to be talked into it by men who seemed so sure of what they were doing. The mission, of course, was an utter disaster, and it taught Kennedy several important lessons. One was that truculently self-confident experts, such as generals and CIA men, can be ludicrously wrong. After the Bay of Pigs, according to his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy came to mistrust military solutions.
The botched invasion also revealed an attractive trait in Kennedy: an openness and candor, and a freedom from that neurotic, squirming evasiveness, the deflected gaze or outright mendacity, that one came to expect from one or two subsequent occupants of the White House. Kennedy made no effort to escape blame for the folly, to cover it up or excuse it. We made a terrible mistake, he said. Let's go on from here.
As an administrator, Kennedy was intense, but also casual about the forms—improvisational, never rigid. Eisenhower favored a formal chain of command, with orderly, predictable