The School as a Bureaucratic Organization

During the election campaign of 1960, a young and enthuastic John F.Kennedy promised the people of America that if he where elected president his first 100 days in office would be an uncompromising period of productive change.On April 20, 1961, the ninetieth day after his inauguration, President Kennedy sat in his office in utter despair. He had just presided over one of the worst political blunders ever commited by the United States government. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked himself as he considered the tragedy of the Bay of Pigs.
How did it happen? President Kennedy (not to mention the 1,400 members of the Cuban Brigade) was a victim of an organizational bureaucracy thad had bit by bit shaped his thinking, pulled him along as if by political suction, and finally made him a prisoner of events. While many intelligent men of googwill were involved, the structure of decisions that produced miscalculations, wrong assumptions, vested interests, and bad information.
Initial preparation for the Cuban Invasion began during the latter stages of the Eisenhower administration. Several hundred exlles had already been assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and were in training when President-elect Kennedy received his first briefing on the subject by then CIA Director Allen Dulles on November 29, 1960.
As events began to take shape, initial CIA planning was based on several assumption,
a)The involvement of the United States could be kept secret.
b)An uprising would take place in Cuba with armed civilians and soldiers defecting to join the invaders.
c)The Cuban Air Force was estimated to be disorganized, mostly obsolete, and not combat efficient. In any case, preemptive air strikes using B-26 bombers taking of from Nicaragua would destroy the Cuban planes on the ground.
d)If the invaders could not get inland, they could retreat to the mountais and carry out guerrilla activities.

At the time of the invasion, the Cuban Brigade members were still being told by CIA operatives that President Kennedy had strictly forbidden U.S. involvement beyont transposting troops and supplies.
Fearing a leak, Cuban symphatizers were not notified in advance of the invasion. The critical, promised uprising behind the lines thus had no change to develop. In addition, none of the Washington planners realized that their alternate plan, in case of failure, was unfeasible. The escape route to the Escambray Mountains lay across a hopeless jungle of swamps some 80 miles away. Besides, most of the brigade had not been trained in guerrilla warfare.