Confined by agreement to issues of foreign policy, the debate was an unrecognized milestone of American politics in that it featured the clandestine preoccupations that had been growing within the U.S. government since World War II. Kennedy, who later maintained that his CIA briefings had not covered the subject, criticized the Republicans for not doing precisely what they were doing: helping Cuban exiles prepare to overthrow Castro by covert warfare. Nixon, who already had helped launch this plan, decided he must protect the operation’s secrecy by opposing his own policies. He criticized
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