Groupthink
The Bay of Pigs invasion has to rank pretty high on the list of American foreign policy fiascos. The ill-fated 1961 plan was a CIA-sponsored military operation in which a force of Cuban exiles, trained and equipped by the United States, would land at the Bay of Pigs and attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's communist government.
The data and assumptions driving the plan were both faulty and divorced from reality. The plan assumed that a small force of Cuban exiles, trained and equipped by the United States, could land at the Bay of Pigs and spark a widespread uprising against Castro.
The planners believed they could maintain secrecy about U.S. involvement despite early leaks. They were convinced that obsolete B-26 bombers could neutralize Castro's air force in a surprise attack. Perhaps most egregiously, they grossly underestimated the strength of Castro's military and his popular support.
The invasion was a debacle, with the vast majority of the landing force quickly captured or killed.
Organizations have terrible ideas every day, but they're usually not calamitous until they're acted upon.
In the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, groupthink is the mechanism by which a terrible idea transformed from idle musings into a foreign policy fiasco.
Coined by psychologist Irving Janis, groupthink is a phenomenon whereby the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. In his groundbreaking 1971 "Groupthink" article, he introduced the concept using the Bay of Pigs invasion as a prime example of how cohesive groups can make disastrous decisions due to their tendency to prioritize consensus over critical evaluation.
When the CIA presented their plan to the President, not all of Kennedy's close advisors were fans. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a respected historian and Kennedy adviser, had serious misgivings about the invasion. But in the heat of high-pressure meetings, he didn't strongly voice his objections.
In his memoir, Schlesinger wrote, "In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room." He added, "I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion."
This self-censorship wasn't a case of Schlesinger freezing up in a big meeting; there were much deeper dysfunctions in the group. For example, there was a false perception that everyone was in agreement.
As Schlesinger observed, "Our meetings took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus." This imagined consensus served to further stifle dissent, creating a feedback loop of acquiescence.
There was also an active discouragement of dissent.
At a social event, Robert F. Kennedy, the President's brother and Attorney General, took Schlesinger aside and bluntly told him, "You may be right or not, but the President has made up his mind. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can." And Secretary of State Dean Rusk ensured that the objections of several other key officials failed to reach the President.
These "mindguards" (another wonderful Janis coinage) serve to reinforce and exacerbate the groupthink.
With enough assumed consensus and suppression of dissent, the group takes on an illusion of invulnerability, believing their success is inevitable. This just furthers the groupthink cycle, making dissent even more likely to be ignored.
When Senator J. William Fulbright was invited to present his objections to the plan, Janis notes that as soon as he finished speaking, "the President moved on to other agenda items without asking for reactions of the group".
The result of this groupthink was, as Janis put it, a "deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment." The proof is in the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
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