
After
the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed within 72 hours in April 1961 —
humiliating the United States globally and costing the lives of dozens
of CIA-trained Cuban exiles — President Kennedy was privately and
publicly furious.
He had inherited the plan from the Eisenhower
administration. He had been pressured by CIA leadership to authorize it.
He had refused to provide American air support at the last minute. The
invasion failed. He accepted public responsibility. Then he fired CIA
Director Allen Dulles — one of the most powerful intelligence officials
in American history — publicly and in a manner that Dulles's colleagues
later described as deeply humiliating to a man who had served at the
CIA's highest level since its founding.
Kennedy reportedly told
aides in private that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand
pieces and scatter it to the winds."
Two years and seven months later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
The
Warren Commission was formed to investigate his murder. President
Lyndon Johnson personally selected its members. One of those members —
the man who historians who have studied the Commission's internal
working documents consistently describe as the most active, most
influential, and most agenda-shaping participant in the entire process —
was Allen Dulles. The man Kennedy had just fired. The man with the most
documented personal and institutional motivation to ensure the
investigation concluded in a specific direction.
Dulles shaped
which witnesses were called. He shaped which evidence was pursued. He
shaped the questions that were asked and, more importantly, the ones
that were not. He shaped the conclusion.
The man fired by the
murdered president was then appointed by the next president to run the
investigation into the murder. And at the time, no one found this
arrangement worth publicly objecting to.
If that happened today, we would call it a conflict of interest. In 1963, we called it the Warren Commission.








