Original subtitles

[crowd chattering]

I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, do solemnly swear--

That you will--

When Jack Kennedy became

president of the United States,

he inherited, in essence,

from the Eisenhower administration

this plan to invade Cuba with the Cuban exiles.

But what JFK didn't know is that the CIA

had also hired the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro.

In the CIA assassination plot,

using the Mafia is supposed

to facilitate the success of the invasion.

With the Mafia's involvement,

the CIA believes that Fidel will be dead

by the time the invasion takes place.

And so they are not paying close attention

to what could go wrong.

It is with great pleasure

that I announce the appointment

of Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general.

And from the moment Jack Kennedy appoints his brother,

Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general,

he is out after the mob with a vengeance.

There is organized crime in the city of Chicago.

It's growing greater and greater every year.

Giancana is saying, here, I'm trying to help

the United States kill Castro

and the heat is not only not off,

the heat is hotter than it ever was before.

What the fuck?

At the request of Bobby Kennedy,

Hoover, head of the FBI, started surveilling the mob.

Our nation's crime problem is growing

in both size and intensity.

During the past decade,

crime has nearly doubled

across the United States.

Hoover becomes zealous about it.

Now I'm going to break up the Mafia.

The CIA didn't realize that Giancana was very impulsive.

He had his emotions on his sleeve, kind of a wild card.

He was loud, brash, obnoxious, unstable.

[glass shatters]

This is going to be a big liability,

not only for the CIA, but also the mob.

The CIA can never let Hoover know

that they're working with the mob to try to kill Castro.

The consequences would be disastrous.

[exciting music]

♪ ♪

So while Johnny Roselli is working with the CIA

and trying to figure out ways to kill Castro,

Sam Giancana's attention is elsewhere.

He's not only preoccupied by the FBI

following him all around, his personal life is a mess.

He increasingly is becoming erratic, basically crazy.

It all started after the death of his wife.

[soft dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Giancana was a happily married man

out in the suburbs of Chicago with three daughters.

That was part of the reason why

he was entrusted with the Mafia.

They felt that he was a stable, steady guy.

My father loved my mother.

He had the softest heart for her.

He gave her whatever she needed or whatever she wanted.

He had her on such a sort of pedestal.

Comes out of Catholicism, a lot of this stuff--

conflate the wife with the Madonna.

It was driving them in such deep ways,

especially in Catholic guys.

You know, there really is this--

my wife is also my mother, my Madonna.

He would come to church with us every Sunday.

My father had tremendous religious beliefs.

Now, how can you have tremendous, wonderful beliefs

if you're doing what you're doing on a daily basis?

When she died, the loss just shattered him.

After that, what Giancana had was just a hole in the bucket.

He could never be filled.

After my mother died, he had a lot of women.

He took a liking to this one especially, Phyllis McGuire.

Phyllis McGuire was a member

of the singing McGuire Sisters of the 1940s and 1950s,

an extremely big act.

all: ♪ Oh darling, just ♪

♪ For old time's sake ♪

♪ Turn back-- ♪

I think their biggest hit was called "Sugartime."

♪ Sugar in the morning ♪

♪ Sugar in the evening ♪

all: ♪ Sugar at suppertime ♪

♪ Be my little sugar ♪

♪ And love me all the time ♪

And here, you have this clean, beautiful

California sorority girl,

the kind of wasp American characteristics

that people are supposed to prize.

And don't forget, in the days that

we're talking about,

Italians were not viewed as being white,

American.

For Giancana, she was a trophy.

[mellow music playing]

♪ ♪

Phyllis McGuire was gambling one night in a place in Vegas.

And she was well-known, so she didn't have

to buy her chips with cash.

So there was a marker.

Which is, in effect, a line of credit.

These lines of credit turn into collections at some point.

She'd lost a lot and run up a debt at the casino.

Giancana was around and just said, tear it up.

And Phyllis becomes Giancana's mistress.

[sultry music]

The cool guy met his match.

Phyllis McGuire said to me

that he was the love of her life, flat out.

Did she love him or did she love

the things she got from him?

I didn't like her.

He fell so hard for her.

Sam Giancana's Sinatra song was

"You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You."

This is just a source of fire...

[chuckles] And emotion.

And this is not the greatest thing

to have because he's a powder keg,

and you could push his buttons very easily about this.

♪ ♪

Sam is a very jealous man,

and this will lead to grave unintended consequences.

[foreboding music]

[boat whirring]

When they were down in Miami,

Johnny Roselli is working with the Cuban exiles

on the Castro assassination plot.

Johnny depended upon Sam

to make sure that Trafficante

was always there as the translator.

So it was very important for Sam to remain in Florida,

but Sam's preoccupied with something else.

During that time period, Sam gets wind of the fact

that Phyllis McGuire, in Las Vegas,

is somehow being courted by a comedian

by the name of Dan Rowan.

[soft dramatic music]

It doesn't end well for any person

who rouses the jealousy of Sam Giancana.

There's a moment with Sam Giancana.

He's going to fly back and see what he can do about it.

CIA says, hold on. Wait, Sam.

Don't worry about it.

They don't want him to leave Florida.

Bob Maheu and the CIA cut out,

hire somebody to illegally bug

Rowan's hotel room to find out

if he's having an affair with McGuire.

Sam stays in Florida.

But what happens in Las Vegas is that a hotel detective

comes by Dan Rowan's room.

Rowan was not stupid.

When he found out about it,

I think he realized, well, maybe you should

take your romantic interests elsewhere.

The hotel detective contacts the sheriff,

and the sheriff contacts the FBI.

It prompts the FBI investigation more and more

into what's going on, threatening to reveal

the CIA's Mafia plot.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Fidel Castro whips up a furor in Cuba,

charging the United States with arming

and training mercenary forces for an imminent invasion.

Castro's invasion scare also enlivens

the eve of a debate in the United Nations

on Cuban charges of aggression by the United States.

Before the United Nations Security Council in New York,

Ambassador Wadsworth replied--

American officials deny everything.

But of course, it's all true.

Jack Kennedy inherited this Bay of Pigs operation.

He didn't really have the greatest feeling about it.

He allowed the CIA to talk him into doing it.

Allen Dulles told him, we have hundreds of commandos

being trained in Guatemala and Fort Knox and New Orleans,

and that whatever doubts he might have,

there would be what he called a disposal problem

if the operation were canceled.

What he meant was, if you call off the operation,

they're all going to be back to Miami

and they're going to tell people

we were just about to overthrow Castro

but that wimp Kennedy called off the project.

The American male, fear of ridicule,

runs throughout so much of our foreign policy.

He was assured that it would work.

There was a lot of arrogance and hubris

that this would be a marvelous operation.

And in the first months of his presidency,

he would be rid of this headache.

Two individuals ran this operation together.

The military detailed a Marine Colonel named Jack Hawkins,

and Jacob Esterline was a veteran CIA

covert operations official.

He was picked by Richard Bissell.

When Kennedy was told that the CIA planned

to land in broad daylight and have the exile force

kind of clamor ashore in front of 100,000 people

in the city of Trinidad, he said,

how are we going to disassociate ourselves

from this if everybody sees it?

If the United States was seen around the world

to be boldly invading a smaller country,

the Soviets would claim the right to invade Berlin.

Then you'd have the circumstances

for World War III.

Kennedy said, can you figure out a way

to make this "less noisy"?

Can you have a night landing in an isolated place?

They had to find a place that also

had an airstrip so that they could land these planes.

They found the Bay of Pigs.

That didn't sound like a very good place to liberate Cuba.

And there was only one way out

and only one way in.

It was going to be very difficult

to get out of that area.

But in a rush, they picked that location.

The kind of screw-ups that marked the initial phases

of the operation would be multiplied

a hundred-fold when the invasion came in April 1961.

[upbeat music]

♪ ♪

Meanwhile, Johnny Roselli was trying

to juggle all of these different things at once.

He was trying to keep an eye on what

was going on in Hollywood.

He was running things in Las Vegas.

But he was also spending a lot of time down in Florida

with the Cuban exiles planning to kill Castro.

Back in Chicago, Sam is growing even more frustrated.

After he goes back to Chicago,

he's being followed by teams of FBI agents.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

One of the FBI agents following Giancana

was a guy named William Roemer.

He was a Notre Dame graduate, big burly guy,

trained as a lawyer, very aggressive.

Bill was a very serious forthright guy,

very sincere, a lion on the side of right and good.

Chicago would have been in a lot worse place

if it hadn't been for Bill and the other guys who worked

with them in the Chicago office on organized crime.

The FBI decided they needed to know more about

what Giancana was doing so they decide to put

a listening device in the Armory Lounge.

It was on the outskirts of town.

And that's where all the mob guys went to eat.

They came out in their big limousines and Mercedes,

and it was like home-cooked Italian food.

Giancana always sat with his back

to the wall and his henchmen around him.

Giancana conducted a lot of business at the Armory.

It was just a place where the boys would hang out

and they would talk freely.

[jazzy music]

♪ ♪

The FBI approached the janitor and said,

you know, we'd like you to come down to our office

and just make sure that you're not the guy

that we're looking for.

The janitor goes downtown.

They say, please empty your pockets.

And when he does, it includes the keys to the Armory Lounge.

So while the janitor is being questioned by the FBI,

other FBI agents are making copies of those keys.

The FBI uses those duplicate keys to open up

the Armory Lounge and put in the device

that they referred to as "Mo,"

that was referenced to "Mooney,"

which was the nickname of Giancana.

They drop it behind the wall.

No one had any idea it was there.

By the way, utterly illegal--

warrantless wiretaps and buggings.

They couldn't use it legally in court,

but they still wanted to know what was going on

with Sam and the mob.

[bar chatter]

The greatest tool for Hoover was the listening device.

And you know why that's such a great tool?

Because you'll hear the truth.

Hoover's great genius was to understand this.

So Hoover finds out that Giancana is saying,

hey, Castro is going to be gone soon.

Then in New York--

Sam Giancana was presiding over an elegant dinner

at La Scala which was the Italian restaurant

in New York, discussed a plot

to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Sam emphasizes that, in fact,

he's involved in the plot.

Phyllis's brother-in-law is so alarmed he informs the FBI.

Hoover begins to understand that Sam Giancana

is not merely running rackets and prostitution and narcotics.

He's trying to kill a foreign leader.

Hoover starts drilling in.

Not a sparrow will fall in Sam Giancana's world

without Hoover knowing about it.

[dramatic music]

Sam Giancana is a boss in the Chicago mob.

Tony Accardo was one of the most powerful dons in history.

Anybody who has a nickname Joe Batters

has got to be a dangerous person.

[birds chirping]

But if you would have met Accardo

when he was an older gentleman,

and not known who he was,

you would not immediately have suspected him

of secretly being a mob boss.

[pleasant music]

He lived in the suburbs

and didn't call attention to himself.

He was all about staying out of the limelight.

And that's something he learned

working for the first celebrity gangster.

The lesson Accardo drew from Capone

is celebrity gangsters don't end well...

That the first thing you need to do in this business

is not get any heat on you.

Al Capone was in trouble with the law a lot,

but he cultivated this everyman image.

You'd see him at baseball games talking to Babe Ruth.

He was opening up soup kitchens.

He was talking to the press, having press conferences.

He draws so much attention to himself

that he winds up going to jail on tax evasion charges.

His reign was only seven years,

whereas a lot of the more underground mobsters

maintain much longer positions of power

because they kept out of the limelight.

[birds chirping]

Tony Accardo is a perfect example.

So in the '50s, Accardo wanted to become

consigliere to the outfit.

Tony Accardo put in Sam Giancana

as the operating boss, which is essentially

the organized crime equivalent of a CEO in a corporation.

He runs it on a day to day basis.

He, of course, still answered to Accardo.

Accardo thought Sam Giancana would be just like him,

almost like suburban dads who just happened to be running

a Mafia outfit, and that he would not draw attention

to what they were doing or to himself.

Giancana's got this nice little bungalow house

out in the immediate suburb of Chicago.

And there, Giancana was known for shoveling the driveway

when it'd snow, for mowing his own lawn...

[chuckles] Almost like "Father Knows Best,"

Mafia style.

Whatever he's doing, we're not supposed to know about it.

It's a secret.

But when Giancana's wife died, all that changed.

[jazzy piano music]

♪ ♪

Phyllis McGuire plays in Vegas.

He drops everything in Chicago, goes out to Vegas.

She plays some high-end supper club or something

in Southern California,

he just leaves everything here, goes out there.

Also, it's becoming well-known that Giancana

is palling around with Frank Sinatra in Nevada.

Frank had an attraction to Giancana

and vice versa, kind of a showbiz attraction,

a power attraction.

By hanging out with the best-known singers

Frank Sinatra and Phyllis McGuire,

he drew a lot of attention.

I started to learn about my father

when I was in high school.

My father would get up early in the morning

and take out the articles that were in the newspaper

so I would not read them and I would not be hurt.

I had to sneak reading the newspapers,

and I saw the headlines,

you know, gangster this and mob that.

And I was quite surprised.

That's when all the publicity started.

And of course Giancana's on board this

Castro assassination plot, but the CIA didn't realize

Giancana was somebody who was way too visible.

It puts the plans to kill Castro at risk.

If this secret became public knowledge,

it would be a disaster for the country.

[bar chatter]

No matter where Sam went,

the government was behind him,

like sick little dogs running around,

trying to find out this thing or find out that thing.

They played golf, and the government was

always following behind them.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

There was always cars parked outside of the house.

One was a Bill Roemer,

on my father almost 24 hours a day.

My father used to give Bill Roemer a note--

going here, going here, going here,

making it easier for Bill to get to the place first.

The FBI pressure on Sam continues to increase.

So he's kind of being driven a little bit nuts by it.

It comes to a boil in Chicago.

Sam is with Phyllis as they come through the gate.

Who's waiting for them, but the FBI Agent Bill Roemer--

Sam Giancana!

Which really angered Sam.

Roemer starts provoking Sam.

If he can get him to be angry,

knowing that Phyllis McGuire is going to watch this,

that's totally castrating him.

Roemer makes a very public showing,

pointing him out as a hoodlum and scourge of Chicago.

Sam starts telling Roemer,

you're going to regret what you did here today.

I'm never going to forget this.

And Roemer asked, are you threatening a federal agent?

They just hated each other, and they went at it.

But Giancana took the bait.

[foreboding music]

♪ ♪

This constant tension between Roemer and Giancana

slowly but surely is undermining

Sam's authority in the Mafia.

But then he sees an opportunity to gain more power

when he meets Judy Campbell.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

Judy Campbell was a nice Catholic girl from California

who, like so many beautiful young women then and now,

still went to Hollywood to see what could happen.

Judy was always adorable and charming

and delightful, everybody liked her.

There was an infernal triangle

between Judy Campbell, Sam Giancana, and John Kennedy,

soon to be the president of the United States.

Where it all began was with Sinatra.

[jazzy music]

First, Frank meets Judy Campbell

at an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills, Puccini.

And they then become close.

Shortly after that,

Frank is in Las Vegas shooting "Ocean's 11."

You're no hoodlum.

You got no connection with the underworld.

Hoods are always mixed up with other hoods.

John Kennedy stops by Las Vegas.

He's campaigning for president.

And one night while they're shooting the movie,

Frank has a big party for Jack Kennedy.

Senator John Kennedy from the great state of Massachusetts.

Yeah, John.

[cheers and applause]

That is the night that Frank introduces the candidate

to Judy Campbell.

What Frank is essentially doing at this point

is pimping out Judy Campbell.

He is solidifying his hold on power,

his hold on Jack Kennedy,

by providing him with this glorious young woman.

A very dark strain of the worst kind

of toxic masculinity runs throughout this entire thing

and drives these people in a lot of ways.

It's at the root of so much of history.

It's right at the very center of history.

And this is especially true in the American government.

[dramatic brass music]

Hate to say it, but a lot of people that accomplished a lot

are horny. [laughs]

You know, they are driven.

They have a thing driving them.

[indistinct chatter]

[soft music]

So Judy Campbell and JFK become lovers.

When Jack Kennedy takes office in January of '61,

Judy Campbell begins making surreptitious visits

to the White House.

I knew she was having an affair with Jack Kennedy because

a friend of mine knew Judy very well.

And I remember being in Washington, D.C.

And I said, well, where's Judy?

Over at the White House, what, doing her laundry?

And he laughed.

[sly music]

So that is two legs of the triangle,

but the third leg doesn't happen

until Sinatra introduces Judy Campbell

to Sam Giancana.

This is right about the same time

that Giancana meets Phyllis McGuire,

but it was a very different relationship.

Because, with Judy Campbell, he's not in love.

He sees a gold mine.

He sees not only a beautiful young woman

whom he can utilize sexually,

but power-wise, blackmailing-wise,

because he knows that Judy Campbell

is sleeping with the president of the United States.

[woman moaning]

So an affair begins between

Sam Giancana and Judy Campbell.

And this unholy triangle begins...

at this extremely fraught moment in world history

when the Communist world is continuing

to threaten the Western world.

The communists built a wall along the Soviet sector.

And in violation of existing agreements,

split the city in two.

This is a matter of national security.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

The potential for blackmailing a president

by the mob, incalculable.

♪ ♪

It's Sam's jealousy... [glass shatters]

Over his other girlfriend Phyllis McGuire

that led to the bugging incident

with Rowan that eventually leads the FBI onto his trail.

The FBI starts asking questions

and it traces back to Maheu.

The FBI confronts Maheu.

Maheu says, I really don't want to tell you

what this is all about.

But eventually, because of the FBI pressure,

Maheu coughs up the CIA's mission

to kill Castro and also the involvement

of Giancana and Roselli.

Hoover had put all of the pieces together.

♪ ♪

The CIA Mafia plot

was a gift on a golden platter

to J. Edgar Hoover.

All his life, he had a bone to pick with the CIA.

Hoover was forever railing

that the CIA was a pathetic bunch

of pipe-smoking college professors,

maybe Communist sympathizers,

who couldn't find their ass with two hands and a roadmap.

[jazzy music]

♪ ♪

But the FBI wanted to know who is Johnny Roselli.

Hoover gives marching orders to find out more.

So while Johnny's overseeing things

for the outfit in Hollywood,

he realizes that he's becoming a target of the FBI as well

and that he's being followed.

It's a lot more fun for the FBI agents following Johnny.

[energetic swing music]

♪ ♪

Every time, it seemed that he had a new beautiful blonde

sitting right next to him.

He would go to Romanoff's, Cheney's.

He would stop at the Friars Club.

But also, Johnny and Judy Campbell

were good friends.

I think she probably was somewhat enamored

by the charisma of some of these guys.

And I think she got seduced into being a courier.

Judy knew that the FBI was trailing Sam and Johnny

and had bugged their phones.

So she'd pass messages to help them communicate.

But little did she know, the content of these messages,

at least part of the time,

dealt with the plot to kill Castro.

So Judy becomes part of the FBI's dragnet, too.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

The FBI actually sends two burglars

to Judy Campbell's apartment

to try and dig up evidence on these guys.

Judy Campbell goes back to her apartment

and these two guys flashed their badges.

She starts screaming,

get out, get out of my apartment.

♪ ♪

Judy goes back and tells Roselli.

Johnny says not to tell the FBI anything,

but she recklessly at times makes impulsive decisions.

In fact, she makes phone calls to her lover, John Kennedy,

from Johnny Roselli's apartment.

♪ ♪

[phones ringing]

Eventually, there are approximately

70 different phone calls that were made

between Judy Campbell and John F. Kennedy's office.

I mean, this was catnip for J. Edgar Hoover

to find out that Sam Giancana's girlfriend

is also the girlfriend

of the president of the United States.

Between the Kennedys and Hoover,

there's very little love lost.

Hoover had reason to be concerned

about his job security.

Hoover is looking for leverage with the president.

He has it.

And there would come a time when Hoover would use

the information he had gathered as a weapon.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

As January turned to February, and February turned to March,

the Mafia had not found a way to kill Fidel Castro.

And yet in the actual run-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion,

things started to steamroller and get out of control.

Richard Bissell, who oversaw

the Bay of Pigs invasion project,

had accommodated all of President Kennedy's doubts.

But what became the big sticking point

was whether the U.S. military would provide air cover.

Kennedy didn't want it to look like it was a joint endeavor

with the U.S. military.

Bissell assured them this wouldn't happen.

So Kennedy approved of the Bay of Pigs operation,

but there would be no U.S. fighter jets

helping the Cubans that the CIA had trained.

♪ ♪

Jacob Esterline and Jack Hawkins

who were involved in the planning

became so convinced that the operation

was going to fail because the president

wasn't authorizing air cover.

They went to Richard Bissell to announce,

we're resigning from the operation.

Bissell said, look, if you resign now,

we're not going to call this thing off

and it's far more likely to fail

without you than with you.

Bissell was able to persuade them.

They had to keep on.

Bissell says, you tell me what you need.

I'll go to the president.

So, tell them what they need.

Bissell doesn't go to the president,

but he goes to high officials around the president.

He misrepresents

how much he's able to get back to them to mollify them.

Bissell was lying up the chain of command,

and Bissell was lying down the chain of command,

and Bissell was lying to himself.

The CIA, probably Allen Dulles,

calculated once these people were pinned down on the beach

by a 30,000-person army-- and they will be pinned down--

this little president of ours, this newbie,

is going to go to their aid and we know he will.

The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.

Cuban Army pilots opened the first phase

of organized revolt with bombing raids

on three military bases.

[jets whooshing]

To prepare for this invasion,

preliminary airstrikes by Cuban exile pilots took place,

intended to take out all of Fidel's planes.

They failed to take out the Cuban Air Force.

[speaking Spanish]

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[speaking Spanish]

There's this huge fight that takes place.

Landings were affected by rebels at several places

on the Cuban Coast.

And the rebellion against the redskins dictator was on.

Castro's army repelled--

Sam and Johnny had hoped that an assassination attempt

on Fidel Castro would come through

before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But Johnny gets a message to call

James O'Connell at the CIA.

He gets bad news.

The operation is off.

[tense music]

Things are a mess.

All these Cuban exiles that have been trained

in Florida and other places,

they're losing their lives.

♪ ♪

[speaking Spanish]

Castro had majority popular support.

The CIA failed to understand this.

This was a very poor reading

of the state of mind of the Cuban people.

Without air cover, the Cuban exiles

are left to their own devices there on the Bay of Pigs.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

Richard Bissell believed Kennedy

would give him what he wanted when the emergency happened.

But every one of Kennedy's answers is a no.

Can I take in U.S. Air Force planes?

No.

Can I launch planes off of our aircraft carriers?

No. It's a no, no, no.

Jack Kennedy would say, no.

Right in the midst of the horror of everybody

getting killed on the beach, and he's just going to say,

I told you before, I'm not putting

the United States at war with Cuba.

I'm not doing it.

Bissell said, I never knew he was this tough.

It was a poor reading

of the state of mind of the U.S. President.

One book about the Bay of Pigs

is called "A Perfect Failure."

It's like every decision tree moment,

the wrong decision was made.

It was a complete disaster.

It showed how impotent

the CIA and the U.S. government was

when it came to dealing with a issue

90 miles off its shore.

[speaking Spanish]

More than 1,100 Cuban exiles

were eventually captured by Castro's forces.

One of the reasons that the invasion failed so miserably

is Castro had that exile community

completely penetrated.

[indistinct chatter]

Castro knew not only that the invasion was coming

but when it was coming, where the people were training.

Meanwhile, in Havana,

expecting crowds await the first appearance of Castro

since the invasion began.

He takes to the air for a 4 and 1/2 hour

vituperative attack on the United States.

[speaking Spanish]

The Bay of Pigs added to his charisma

as the savior of the Cuban nation.

It solidified support behind Castro like no other event.

[dramatic music]

With the Castro government completely victorious

over the invading rebels, there is despair and confusion

among the relatives of the insurgents.

Johnny was particularly upset

to find out that his friend Manuel Artime

was part of the invasion,

and he was also taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs.

With Castro claiming the capture of 500 invaders

and threatening them all with the firing squad,

these weeping women see no chance for their loved ones.

It looked clear that he would be lined up

at a firing squad and killed.

[gunshot]

Johnny's determined more than ever

to try to go after Castro.

The Bay of Pigs disaster

was a military and diplomatic defeat for the new president.

It was such a gigantic debacle

that it's hard to envision how a few fighter jets

would have made a difference.

A small group of exiles

just wasn't going to ever be able

to defeat the Cuban military.

The CIA had far exceeded its own capabilities

and had misled the president of the United States.

But the CIA had the perfect excuse.

This incredibly difficult choice,

and if it's an important issue, it's going to be in every case,

the president's choice.

The CIA said, you didn't give us what we needed.

If we had just had those fighter jets,

we would have won.

He stabbed this army in the back.

He didn't have the cojones

to do what was necessary to make this work.

There were Cubans that

thought that Jack Kennedy was a traitor.

They felt that the Bay of Pigs was an actual betrayal.

It was treason.

There were Cubans who talked in Miami

about the fact that he should be dead.

After that, everybody hated Kennedy.

They had emotions that they were going to go back to Cuba

and that was ripped out of them.

They were all Democrats and they all became Republicans.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the president of the United States.

Kennedy dramatically took responsibility

for the failure--

There's an old saying that

victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.

Basically saying I am the lone individual responsible

for whatever happened.

He refused to actually say what happened,

but took responsibility for it.

In view of the fact that we're taking a propaganda

lambasting around the world, why is it not useful, sir,

for us to explore with you the real facts behind this

or our motivations?

Well, I think an answer to your question that

we have to make a judgment as to, uh,

how much we can usefully say

that would aid the interest of the United States.

One of the problems of a free society,

problem not met by a dictatorship,

is this problem of information.

So often, the American tragedy

isn't about what happens,

but what you do to prevent the thing from happening.

You make this huge mistake.

This is what Vietnam was.

This is what Watergate was.

This is what the Iraq war was.

This is what the Bay of Pigs was.

[tense music]

Kennedy not only was angry at himself,

but he was angry at the CIA.

There were reports that he called them...

"Those CIA bastards."

The president, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs,

wanted to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces

and scatter it to the winds.

Jack Kennedy said, I will not be played with by the CIA.

And henceforth, what came later reflected that.

He fired the people responsible at the CIA.

Allen Dulles was given a mandate to retire.

Bissell was fired.

♪ ♪

And that's when Jack Kennedy started to basically

put Bobby in charge of the CIA.

The Kennedy brothers were furious.

They were used to winning, not losing.

They were very competitive individuals.

This little podunk country had dealt us embarrassing blow,

not just to the CIA, but to the new young

Kennedy administration in front of the entire world.

They really were, in some ways, out for revenge on Castro.

In May of 1961,

the White House commissioned a report,

and it makes a very direct statement.

There is no living with Castro.

There's no living with this guy.

Do you get it?

That's the message.

That's our policy.

That's where our administration stands.

There's no living with Castro.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪