Kennedy Nixon 1960

departue

Gone Fishin'
IT may of never happend since Nixon may of had airstrikes on Cuba during bay of pigs invasion. it maY of also butterflyed away that 1990 Billy joel song we nnever statred the fire. Nixon _1960 probably no Cuban missile crisis.
 
The problem with the Bay of Pigs (which wouldn't be so named in a Nixon administration; different landing zone) is that a direct US involved operation where there was no plausible deniability meant we would totally alienate our allies throughout Central America, as well as likely our European allies, and position the US as a violator of international sovereignty. There is no threat to the United States, nor a casus belli, nor any declaration of war. It is simply that the US did not like that a nation, or rather the political apparatus in that nation, existed. The United States would look very bad, and undermine it's trust building throughout the developing world, and likely embolden Communist movements in the third world. It would totally undermine any nation building or political development in Latin America for the foreseeable future, ruining what began with Roosevelt in terms of the Good Neighbor policy. The Latin Americans would see the US as trying for new Banana Wars.
 
Last edited:
Norton, I do disagree. It we had actually pulled off Operation Trinidad even with Marines, US Army, US Navy support and air power that would not have alienated Latin America...I think they thought we were fools for not going all out. We all must face that there was no way to deny we armed and trained the Cubans and the only wasy to actually win would include American contractors doing a lot of the flying. However, as always (say Iraq 2004) if we let the post war turn into us occupying Cuba then we would begin to get the blow back you are referring to. Many would say that the occupation scenario would be unavoidable. Part of the problem with what became the Bay of Pigs was also the timing. I needed to be a few weeks before as Russian hardware began to arrive in March...originally the plan was for 9 or 10 March. Kennedy didn't make time to get the full plan briefed until that time and then as is well documented he reduced it to a plan that could not succeed without the outright aid that he was unwilling to give. It would have been better for him and the future Missiles Crisis if he had just decided against it if his heart was not in it. However, politically he had painted himself into a corner.
 
IT may of never happend since Nixon may of had airstrikes on Cuba during bay of pigs invasion. it maY of also butterflyed away that 1990 Billy joel song we nnever statred the fire. Nixon _1960 probably no Cuban missile crisis.

To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

IMO rather too much attention has been given to the air support question--
at least in terms of its military effects. [1] I agree with Jeffrey
Record, *The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam* (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval
Institute Press, 1998), p. 171:

"It was clear at the time that the invasion could not possibly have
succeeded without American air support. But it was no less clear to many
at the time, as has been the judgment of almost every retrospective
analysis, that the invasion would have failed even with that support. The
argument over Kennedy's decision is irrelevant because the premises and
planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion were so faulty that no amount of air
support would have made a decisive difference. Aside from the invasion's
fatal lack of secrecy and violation of every principle of amphibious
assault, it was ludicrous to expect a force of fourteen hundred to hold its
own against the twenty thousand Cuban army regulars and local militia that
Castro could--and did--assemble to lock the invaders down on their
beachhead. But an invasion of ten times as many exiles would also have
been doomed from the start because of the CIA's disastrous assumption
that Operation Zapata would spark a mass popular uprising against the
Castro government; the CIA apparently assumed that Castro was as unpopular
at home as he was in the Cuban exile community in the United States. In
fact, in 1961 the Cuban Revolution and Castro were still immensely popular
on the island. Cuban communism's appeal...rested first and foremost on its
nationalist credentials, and Castro was swift to exploit the Bay of Pigs as
yet another Yankee bid to reenslave Cuba to American capitalism. In the
final analysis, it made no difference in April 1961 what the USS *Essex*
did not do off Cuba's shores."

http://books.google.com/books?id=VRekjjSA5uIC&pg=PA171

(Even if one thinks that Record is exaggerating Castro's support in Cuba in
1961 and instead attributes the lack of a popular rebellion to the
efficiency of Castro's security police, the result is the same.)

[1] That it had important political effects, especially in engendering a
feeling of betrayal in the Cuban exile community in the United States
against JFK (and against his party for decades after his death) is
undoubtedly true.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/nNeii4vsNAk/7yeNVG78pUQJ


***

In another post, I wrote:

Actually, the author of the article http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/148754 *does* assume a more successful
invasion under Nixon than under JFK:

"Both Nixon and Kennedy wanted desperately to get rid of Castro. The
culmination of Kennedy’s efforts to topple Castro came when he approved an
invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, who came ashore in Cuba at the Bay of
Pigs in April 1961. The plan had been hatched in the Eisenhower
administration and Vice President Nixon had been the White House point
person for the operation.

"The Bay of Pigs was a spectacular failure for Kennedy. It taught him to be
wary of the military’s advice -- a lesson that served him well in resisting
the Joint Chiefs when they called for military action during the Missile
Crisis. Nixon would have had fewer qualms about maintaining the pretense
that the U.S. had nothing to do with the 1961 invasion and, for this
reason, would not have vetoed the CIA’s original, more suitable landing
site, as Kennedy did. Instead, we would know of the Cuba operation as the
Trinidad Invasion.

"The invading exiles would likely have had more success landing at Trinidad
-- it had a more suitable terrain and perhaps a more anti-Castro population
-- and forming a guerilla army in the Escambray Mountains to harass
Castro."

But note that "more successful" here does not mean that the invasion
actually topples Castro. He is still around (though harrassed by
guerillas). So as in OTL there is still a Communist Cuba, and the
opportunity for Khrushchev to put missiles there (either to deter an all-
out US attack or to get leverage for concessions in Berlin or with regard
to US missiles in Turkey, etc.).

It is of course conceivable that Nixon might actually oust Castro in 1961.
This IMO would require a massive commitment of US troops. (And if you're
going to make such a commitment it's hard to see the point in starting out
with an invasion by exiles in the first place. It would be like starting
Operation Iraqi Freedom with a token invasion by Iraqi exiles.) It's very
unlikely that Khrushchev would go to war as a result but it is likely that
he would feel a need to do *something.* I once proposed a scenario in
which his response is to do what in OTL he did a few months later anyway--
build the Berlin Wall--and I noted that then people would be speculating in
this newsgroup "What if the US had never invaded Cuba? Would the Berlin
Wall have been built?"

One may doubt, incidentally, that a "totally successful" invasion (in the
sense of one which would actually overthrow Castro) would be a good idea
from the viewpoint of *Realpolitik*, even if there is no serious reaction
from Khrushchev. It would entangle the US in an extremely messy Cuban
political situation: (1) The anti-Castro factions would be struggling
against each other for power, and the US would have a hard time being
neutral; (2) the new regime would be seen as a puppet regime even by many
Cubans who were not Castroites; and (3 ) there would likely be guerilla
warfare and terrorism by Castroites. Moreover, such an invasion would be
extremely unpopular in Latin America, and anti-Yanqui feeling could grow
tremendously, so that the US in destroying one Castro might create several
new ones.

No doubt Clayton Fritchey, then an aide to Adlai Stevenson, had some of
these things in mind when he told JFK, "Mr. President, it could have been
worse." "How?," JFK asked. Fritchey replied, "It might have succeeded."
(Jim Rasenberger, *The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's
Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs,* p. 395.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0Ex08ZkkXEkC&pg=PA395 )

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/DQFyp4RcAUQ/ErKyse2Ms3MJ
 

jahenders

Banned
Possible changes to Bay of Pigs aside, with Nixon in 1960 the Cuban Missile Crisis almost certainly doesn't arise the way it did. Nixon might have more aggressively fielded US missiles (Turkey, etc) so they were more established sooner, might have made it clear that any hint of Russian missiles in Cuba would be met with Force, and likely wouldn't have negotiated away the missiles in Turkey to prevent Russian fielding in Cuba. It's important that the US 'paid' to get Russia to back down on Cuba, by agreeing to remove missiles we were fielding in Turkey -- it wasn't a one-sided win.
 
It's important that the US 'paid' to get Russia to back down on Cuba, by agreeing to remove missiles we were fielding in Turkey -- it wasn't a one-sided win.

The Polaris had made the Jupiters obsolete, so that wasn't much of a price. What *would* have been paying a price would be agreeing *publicly* to removal of the Jupiters as a quid pro quo, in order to allow Khrushchev to save face. There is some evidence that if necessary JFK might have agreed even to this--see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/S8rmeFzdpUI/9oyyWkPsysQJ for my discussion of the "Cordier option"--but in any event he did not have to. IMO JFK's real mistake was installing the Jupiters in the first place, though Ike certainly shares some of the blame for this, for ignoring his own premonitions about the dangers, as I note at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/S8rmeFzdpUI/xrPrxLssz9oJ
 
Interesting posts but i was thinking had Nixon found himself in Kennedy's position in Oct 1962 did he have the strength of will or character to stand up to the Hawks who wanted airstrikes, would he have ben more likely to have blundered into nuclear war than Kennedy. And did he have anybody that would have been an ally in the way his bother Bobby was.
 
The 1961 Cuban coup operation would've failed regardless of who was President as the CIA made several glaring errors in the planning, most notably massively underestimating the extent to which the Cuban people were primed to revolt. So, even if the Cuban air force had been taken out by more airstrikes, it'd still have been unlikely to succeed given the pliance of the Cubans under Castro. Real question is whether Nixon would follow up with US ground troops.
 
Top