Seymour Hersh offers an explanation of why the Bay of Pigs attack was curtailed

According
to Seymour Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot, the Bay of Pigs attack of April 1961 was supposed to be
preceded, the day before, by the assassination of Fidel Castro. "The assumption
that Castro would be dead when the first Cuban exiles went ashore, and the fact
that he was not, may explain Kennedy's decision to cut his losses. The Mafia
had failed [to kill the Cuban leader] and a very much alive Castro was rallying
his troops." So, Hersh says, Kennedy cancelled the second planned airstrike by
B-26 bombers.

Hersh
also says that after the blunders of the Bay of the Pigs and then the Vienna
summit, at which JFK was verbally slapped around by Khrushchev, Kennedy decided
that he needed to escalate in the Vietnam War to show that he was indeed a
tough guy.