t were inspired instead by the evil Communist leaders of the Soviet Union. For a foreign policy to be sane, at the very least, and, at best, effective in achieving desired goals, that policy must be based on the latest accurate information and by an ability to objectively assess changing political realities. Presidents from Eisenhower through Nixon had to have deliberately ignored such information which made clear that revolutions in Third World nations were not inspired by Soviet intrigue but were expressions of indigenous rage at repression from within and without. The revolution of Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam were examples of such indigenous uprisings, which the U.S. failed to see or chose not to see, although the U.S. supported Castro briefly when it became clear that Batista would be overthrown.
What happened, according to Gaddis, is that the policy makers of the U.S. sank into a kind of groupthink in which the Soviet Union was seen as the embodiment of evil and U.S. policy became rooted not in reason and the latest information, but in the ignorance and fearful fervor of anti-communist, anti-Soviet ideology:
This preoccupation with ideology also led the [Eisenhower] administration to attribute to the Russians a clarity of strategic vision not possible in the western democracies. . . . Moscow had, Dulles insisted, a carefully prepared and superbly implemented program which . . . has brought a small Communist group into control over one-third of the world's population (Gaddis 140).
Kennedy certainly entered office under the pall of the same Cold War ideology and its containment policy, as evidenced by his "missile gap" rhetoric, his increase of advisors in Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It will never be known whether he would have averted a war in Vietnam, but his test-ban treaty with the Soviets, his denunciation of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and his plan to withdraw some troo...