Among the President's advisors, groupthink took over as members of the in-group became cohesive and suppressed deviations from the prevailing belief of the team in the plan. The goal shifted from hammering out an effective plan to that of obtaining group consensus. When Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. expressed opposition to the plan to Robert Kennedy only days before the invasion, Bobby's response was that it was too late for opposition. There is a time to debate, a time to decide and a time to do. The questions then arise: when is it too late to oppose a faulty plan? When is it too late to correct a mistake? When is it better to go with a decision than to improve it or scrap it? Is it more important for people to be together than for them to know they are going down together?

To his credit, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles was one of the few members of the State Department who was critical of the invasion plan. It is a sad commentary on people and the political process that he was the first to be fired after the fiasco—that is, getting canned was his reward for being right when everyone else was wrong. On the other hand, Dean Rusk, who had suppressed Bowles' doubts, was retained as Secretary of State because he was so nice.

Although the Bay of Pigs invasion was as close to an ideal case of stupidity as we should ever hope to see, it hardly compares in size and scope to the debacle in Vietnam. American policies and actions there are now generally recognized as having been quite stupid, but the whos, hows and whys remain as debatable as ever and probably never will be completely clear. American involvement in Vietnam was a case of compound stupidity, with ignored warnings interlaced with wishful groupthink. The escalation of the mid-1960's was pursued in the face of strong warnings from practically everyone who was concerned and powerless, but naturally, these were totally lost on those in positions of irresponsibility. Again, we find conscientious statesmen ignoring both experts and everyone else voicing concern over the military, political and moral consequences of deliberately planned idiocy. Within the American political community, criticism could usually be stilled quite easily because no one wanted to be the one responsible for losing Vietnam to Communism. The fact that we never had it to lose was one of those relevancies lost on the mighty.

Nevertheless, in the cause of retaining what it never had, the American government was determined to be misled by misinterpreting events in Vietnam. The cause of the war was that Americans were thought they were fighting Communism while the Vietnamese were fighting colonialism. From 1945 onward,

stupidity.net