Page 139 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

you’re talking to the president for a reason. If he didn’t want your thoughts,
you wouldn’t be there, so you might as well take a deep breath, make every
sentence count, and walk away without any regrets.”
During his Fellowship year, Mark Vlasic learned firsthand the value of
stepping up and asking the tough questions when it matters most. Luckily
for him, he learned this lesson early in his career and will have the rest of
his life to put it into practice. In contrast, history is rife with examples in
which people in leadership positions did not speak up, and the results were
disastrous. Case in point: the Bay of Pigs invasion.
It was 1961, and President Kennedy, the CIA, military leaders, and a
brave group of Cuban exiles decided to take bold steps to overthrow Fidel
Castro’s Cuba and quash the spread of communism in the Western Hemi-
sphere. The Kennedy administration—particularly President Kennedy, Sec-
retary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, and foreign affairs advisor McGeorge Bundy—hatched a plan
for 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs. They
expected that the invasion would spark an uprising among Cubans that
would overrun what they considered a weak military and topple the Cas-
tro regime. They also believed that the CIA-trained rebel exiles would be
able to escape to the mountains to hook up with guerrilla operations
already established there in case something went wrong. Kennedy advisor
and White House historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was part of the group
planning the maneuver and had grave misgivings about it. He detailed his
concerns in a memorandum to President Kennedy, but Attorney General
Robert Kennedy privately warned him against challenging the president’s
plan. Schlesinger kept his thoughts to himself from then on and watched
in silence as the group agreed to carry out the invasion even when Presi-
dent Kennedy asked if everyone was in agreement with the operation.
The exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and within three days were over-
run by 200,000 rough and ready Cuban troops whose commanders had
been tipped off by newspaper articles predicting an invasion the week
before. Furthermore, critical air strikes against the Cuban Air Force were
canceled, and a series of other mistakes were made that led to 1,200 Cuban
exiles being captured and most of the others killed, unable to make their
planned escape to the mountains because strategists had overlooked the
fact that the mountains were over eighty miles away, on the far side of

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