In April 1961, fifty of the most experienced foreign policy minds in America sat in a room and agreed to invade Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was over in three days. Afterward, President Kennedy asked the question that still haunts every organization that gets it wrong: "How could we have been so stupid?"

Thirteen months later, the same president, in the same office, with many of the same advisors, faced Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. He got it right the second time. The difference was the structure of the room.

This episode traces what went wrong in the Bay of Pigs decision. The self-censorship, the mindguards, the assumed consensus. And why a Yale psychologist coined the term "groupthink" specifically to describe it. It traces what Kennedy changed for the Cuban Missile Crisis: removing himself from meetings so his advisors could think without deferring. Turning a mindguard into a devil's advocate. Splitting the group into subgroups. Inviting outside challengers. Building a moot court to stress-test every option.

Same man. Same office. Same advisors. Different structure. Different outcome.

The episode also examines why the groupthink diagnosis may be partly wrong, and why the prescription works regardless.

Episode 6 of The Tenth Man. New episodes weekly.

Show Notes:

This episode covers the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), Irving Janis's groupthink theory, and Roderick Kramer's revisionist "politicothink" critique. It traces the structural changes President Kennedy made between the two crises and maps them to the failure modes documented in the first five episodes of the series.

Sources Referenced:

-Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton Mifflin, 1972; revised edition, Groupthink, 1982)
-Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965)
-Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W.W. Norton, 1969)
-Roderick M. Kramer, "Revisiting the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam Decisions 25 Years Later: How Well Has the Groupthink Hypothesis Stood the Test of Time?" Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 236–271
-Joshua H. Sandman, "Analyzing Foreign Policy Crisis Situations: The Bay of Pigs," Presidential Studies Quarterly 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 310–316
Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books, 1995) — for the April 4 meeting account
-Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Belknap Press, 1997) — for ExComm meeting transcripts
-Martin J. Sherwin, "The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: In Search of Historical Perspective," Prologue Magazine (National Archives, Fall 2012)
-JFK Presidential Library — "The Bay of Pigs," "Cuban Missile Crisis," and "The JFK White House Tape Recordings"
-British Psychological Society — "Groupthink: A Monument to Truthiness?" (2024)

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