A thousand days: the presidency

Kennedy inherited a CIA plan to topple Fidel Castro with Cuban exiles and, in the Miller Center’s words, “altered dramatically” before approving it. On 17 April 1961 about 1,500 exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs; Castro’s forces quickly overwhelmed them, and the cover story that Washington was not involved collapsed at once. [1]

In November 1961 Allen Dulles, who had run the CIA since 1953, left the agency; John McCone was sworn in to replace him. [2] That same month Kennedy ordered a new covert program to overthrow Castro, Operation Mongoose, run by Air Force General Edward Lansdale with Robert Kennedy pushing hard. [3]

In March 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent the Secretary of Defense a set of proposals, now known as Operation Northwoods, for staged incidents that could be blamed on Cuba to justify an invasion. At a 16 March meeting Kennedy said he could not foresee circumstances that would justify American military force. Northwoods was not adopted. [4][5] Our Northwoods file covers it in full.

Mongoose ran sabotage and planning through 1962 and was wound down after the missile crisis, but CIA contacts with Cubans plotting against Castro continued into 1963. Those facts are why so many theories begin with Cuba. [1][3]

In October 1962 American spy planes found Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba able to reach most of the United States. After days of debate with his advisers, Kennedy chose a naval quarantine rather than an air strike. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles; Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and secretly promised to withdraw American missiles from Turkey. [1]

In June 1963, at American University, Kennedy asked Americans to reexamine their attitude toward the Soviet Union and the Cold War. That summer the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. [1]

After an 11 June 1963 confrontation with Alabama governor George Wallace over integrating the state university, and the murder of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers early the next morning, he sent Congress the civil rights bill that became law after his death. [2]

By the end of his presidency there were about 16,000 American military advisers in Vietnam. What he would have done next is covered in the Vietnam file. [1]

The “secret societies” clip is from an April 1961 speech to newspaper publishers. Read whole, the passage is about the Cold War: the threat he names is “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” that relies on “infiltration” and “subversion,” meaning international communism. He was asking the press to consider restraint on national-security stories, not warning about a secret cabal at home. [1]

The vow to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” traces to an unsigned 1966 New York Times article that quoted an unnamed official. No named person who heard Kennedy say it has ever come forward. He was angry at the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, and he did replace its leadership. [2]

Executive Order 11110 of 4 June 1963 delegated to the Treasury Secretary an existing power over silver certificates. It did not create a new currency or challenge the Federal Reserve; in fact silver certificates were being phased out. PolitiFact rated the claim that Kennedy was killed for trying to bypass the Fed false. [3][4]