JFK felt that his own demise was increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers. He then proceeded to do exactly that. After vetoing the introduction of U.S. troops at the Bay of Pigs, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ even more intense pressures to bomb and invade Cuba in the October 1962 missile crisis. Then he simply ignored his military and CIA advisers by turning sharply toward peace in his American University address, his Partial Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and his quest for a dialogue with Fidel Castro. His October 1963 decision to withdraw from Vietnam once
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