https://archive2.jfklibrary.org/JFKOH/Bissell, Richard M/JFKOH-RMB-01/JFKOH-RMB-01-TR.pdf
Richard Bissell, Oral History Interview – JFK#1, 4/25/1967
... And I may
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say that as a civilian with no military experience, I was put in a very odd position to know
that at the level of the Chiefs themselves there was real question about the doctrine that the
colonel reporting to me regarded as so essential. ...
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Now this, as I feel with hindsight, was very definitely insufficient. We werecounting on our aircraft not only for the strategic role before the invasion to knock outCastro's aircraft on the ground, but we were also counting on it very heavily as, in effect,the artillery of the ground forces. No one ever thought that the Brigade [Cuban Brigade]could hold Castro's armies off unless you had favorable terrain, which we did, and unlessyou could call in very strong air support. It's been clear to me ever since that this was aserious miscalculation. And I think that I should have foreseen this, and I think othersshould have foreseen it. It is for this reason, among others, that I have always beenunwilling to say that if the President hadn't called off that air strike, the operation wouldsurely have been a success. I'm about 90 percent certain that the Joint Chiefs nevercommented on this
......
BISSELL: I don't believe it was relevant to the Bay of Pigs, no, because that received so much attention that the communications were really very good on that. I would like to make a comment on the general pointthough. I think one thing that happened during these first few months of the President'sterm, as others have remarked, is that he largely lost confidence in his senior professionalmilitary advisors. That was certainly due in part to the Bay of Pigs, and I've alwaysassumed, rather than actually learned from the President himself, that he felt the JointChiefs, in their capacity as his advisors, should have been more vigilant in pointing outshortcomings or causing shortcomings to be corrected, one of the two. However, I think it's a mistake to assign the major role to the Cuban experiencein explaining his at least temporarily reduced confidence in the Joint Chiefs because Ialso saw very intimately during these months what was going on in Laos and thedecisions that were being made there. One reason that the Bay of Pigs operation didn'thave much attention for the first few weeks after the Inauguration was that the Laotianwar was in a state of acute crisis as he assumed office.....
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What would happen at successive meetings was that the President would bebriefed either by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs personally or, as is more apt to be thehabit, a more junior officer would actually do the briefing of the whole group in thepresence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and with the Chairman's comments fromtime to time. I still remember very clearly the occasion when the long planned majoroffensive by the Royal Laotian Army against the Nationalists under Kong Le andcommunists in the Plaine des Jarres was outlined. Well, it was a nice piece of planning to have been carried out in a military collegeas an exercise in how you would dispose troops, given the terrain and the dispositions ofthe enemy. It predicted that the Plaine des Jarres would be seized on the tenth day of theoperation, or something of this kind by parachute troops. All of this, you understand, wasto be done by the Royal Laotian forces. I left this briefing with a sense of completeunreality. I had been close for a year and a half, I guess, to the goings on in Laos, and it just
never occurred to me that the Royal Laotian could, or would, carry out any such elegant.military operation of this sort, and of course they didn't. It really didn't occur to me until after that whole event that the President had takenthis plan seriously. And why shouldn't he? He assumed, correctly, I believe, that when hewas given a briefing by the Joint Chiefs on the plans of the Laotian Army, plans formulated with U.S. military advisors at every level, that the Joint Chiefs endorsed the plan and thought it would work. I'm sure that if he'd asked the Chairman, the Chairman would havesaid, “Yes, we think there's a pretty good chance this will work.”..