How would Alternate 60's Presidents have dealt with Cuba?

Say Jack Kennedy does not become President in 1961, but the divergence is after Castro's 1959 takeover of Cuba, how would other men have dealt with the Castro problem? I know I am being vague here on who the President is, and I am being so deliberately, as I am interested in a variety of different scenarios covering at least a few of the men who could conceivably have been in the White House in Kennedy's place. So how would the policy pursued by President (Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey, etc.) differ from Kennedy's?
 
I remember from Robert Caro's The Passage of Power that RFK was horrified at how out of it Johnson was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but an older, more confident President like Johnson or Stevenson might have stood up to the generals on the Bay of Pigs. Nixon would have probably provided more direct American support to the invasion.
 
Reading Caro, it seems clear that Johnson's obsession with avoiding humiliation could prove problematic in a Cuban Missile Crisis. That same humiliation might move him to intervene more directly during something like the Bay of Pigs than Kennedy did, Johnson might send in the marines. At the same time he was not a big supporter of the Kennedy administration's covert efforts against Castro. Under Johnson, my suspicion is that we are more likely to see an outright invasion, and less likely to see the CIA attempt to assassinate Castro.
 
In Plain Speaking, Truman bluntly criticizes Eisenhower for his handling of Cuba, saying that he should have invited Castro up to the White House and given him foreign aid, instead of turning cold and pushing him into Krushchev's arms.

All Along the Watchtower has Nixon ordering an invasion of Cuba. I agree with the premise there that an insurgency would be harmed by lack of a supply chain to the communists, and would peter out sometime between 1962 and 1965.
 
How would a Goldwater presidency handle Cuba or would it be more or less interested in Indochina?
 
Jeff Greenfield's book Then Everything Changed presents an interesting scenario of a President Lyndon Johnson handling the missile crisis. It turns out to be a lot more scary than in real life.
 
Jeff Greenfield's book Then Everything Changed presents an interesting scenario of a President Lyndon Johnson handling the missile crisis. It turns out to be a lot more scary than in real life.

Was about to mention this. This was easily the most well-written story of the three given in the book (its premise is that JFK is assassinated in late 1960 by Richard Pavlick, an anti-Catholic, and that the ensuing constitutional crisis is resolved with vice president-elect LBJ rising to the White House).

It really focused on Lyndon Johnson's individual worldview and personality, how different they were from JFK's, and how it led him to interpret the Bay of Pigs, Castro, Khruschev, and the Missile Crisis differently. For example, whereas in OTL, Kennedy interpreted the Bay of Pigs disaster as a lesson in the importance of questioning the optimistic estimates of those in either the CIA or the Pentagon, LBJ interprets it as a sign that high-faluting bureaucrats like those in the CIA don't know what they're doing, and that nothing can beat the old-fashioned knowledge and experience of senior military leaders.

And Johnson's lack of internationalism and political career based on wheeling-and-dealing in the Senate cause him to interpret negotations with Cuba and the USSR through the same lens that got him through his domestic dealings with American Congressmen: that both parties in a negotiation were acting in rational, down-to-earth self-interest, which meant that a solution could be reached through just the right quid pro quo and compromise once people could agree on what they'd be willing to sacrifice. He doesn't understand that Castro and Khruschev were being motivated by different influences, such as ideology (believing fervently in a cause to the extent that they'd be willing to make great sacrifices to see their vision come true) and pride (not wanting to come across as weak and wilting in a confrontation with the U.S.).
 
Any president with half a brain would have invaded the island ASAP before Castro could get friendly with the Reds, installed some friendly ruler, then Marshall planned it up into a shining beacon of capitalism - by 1970 it should have been voting for US statehood.

Hindsight is 20:20, but not taking every single chance you at maximum strength get to topple what was obviously going to become a Soviet satellite 90 miles of your coast is madness (and almost, very predictably, caused WWIII).

Kennedy handled the Cuban missile Crisis well, but up until that point he'd been making weak and foolish decisions.

Trump up some propaganda (this wouldn't be difficult, both Castro and Ernesto were both pretty terrible people), send in the marines, army, airforce and whatever else and let LeMay do as he likes short of the bomb (restricted to military targets o'course).
 
Was about to mention this. This was easily the most well-written story of the three given in the book (its premise is that JFK is assassinated in late 1960 by Richard Pavlick, an anti-Catholic, and that the ensuing constitutional crisis is resolved with vice president-elect LBJ rising to the White House).

It really focused on Lyndon Johnson's individual worldview and personality, how different they were from JFK's, and how it led him to interpret the Bay of Pigs, Castro, Khruschev, and the Missile Crisis differently. For example, whereas in OTL, Kennedy interpreted the Bay of Pigs disaster as a lesson in the importance of questioning the optimistic estimates of those in either the CIA or the Pentagon, LBJ interprets it as a sign that high-faluting bureaucrats like those in the CIA don't know what they're doing, and that nothing can beat the old-fashioned knowledge and experience of senior military leaders.

And Johnson's lack of internationalism and political career based on wheeling-and-dealing in the Senate cause him to interpret negotations with Cuba and the USSR through the same lens that got him through his domestic dealings with American Congressmen: that both parties in a negotiation were acting in rational, down-to-earth self-interest, which meant that a solution could be reached through just the right quid pro quo and compromise once people could agree on what they'd be willing to sacrifice. He doesn't understand that Castro and Khruschev were being motivated by different influences, such as ideology (believing fervently in a cause to the extent that they'd be willing to make great sacrifices to see their vision come true) and pride (not wanting to come across as weak and wilting in a confrontation with the U.S.).


However, the same factors that make a Cuban Missile Crisis so dangerous if Johnson was in the White House, might well preclude it from happening in the first place. President Johnson might authorize an invasion before the missiles ever get there, or slightly more morbidly, WWIII over Berlin in 1961 might happen before the missile crisis. Again the idea here is that Johnson, or whoever, becomes President in January 1961. There is a fair amount of time between then and the earliest beginnings of the crisis, and a fair amount can happen in that time.
 
I suppose you could also preclude a CMC by having Johnson appear a lot more forthright than Kennedy at Vienna, or a similarly arranged summit with Khrushchev.

Yes, with the caveat that Kruschev's decision to send missile's to Cuba was not entirely based upon his perception of Kennedy, at least according to what I remember reading. The other two factors were Kruschev's desire to prevent an American invasion of Cuba, as well as his desire to even out what he saw as the asymmetrical danger that American missiles in Turkey represented to the USSR. No matter how forthright Johnson is, those remain a factor in whether or not the Soviets send missiles to Cuba. Granted, despite his fear of humiliation, Johnson may not be as obsessed with Castro as Kennedy was, and he's less likely to run "Goddamn Murder Inc in the Caribbean" if his reaction to Cuba remains the same as it was when he was in the Vice Presidency. It is for this reason that I consider Johnson more likely to take overt reaction to Cuba, rather than going the Kennedy covert route. Therefore, by the time the Soviets sent the missiles historically, I would expect the Johnson administration either to have invaded, or to have taken some other route to isolating Castro, and therefore there would be a smaller perceived risk of an American invasion from the Soviet perspective by that point, which might in and of itself mean no missile crisis.

Honestly, as I've said, my reading of Johnson suggests he would have stage some sort of invasion, and indeed, as I've said, I wouldn't be surprised if President Johnson sent in the Army/Marines to avoid "humiliation" during the Bay of Pigs Crisis. Relations with Latin America be damned.
 
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