17. Kennedy used Camp David to meet with Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs
The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, had been planned during the Eisenhower Administration, but executed in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. The failure led Kennedy to question his own initiatives, though his closest advisors counseled that Eisenhower’s policies regarding Cuba, indeed all of his foreign policies regarding the Soviet bloc, had been overly complacent. The Bay of Pigs failure and deteriorating relations with Castro’s Cuba encouraged Kennedy to discuss the situation with his predecessor. He invited Ike to join him at Camp David for face-to-face talks, largely with just the two of them present.
Eisenhower complied, traveling to Camp David from his nearby Gettysburg farm. Their conversations were mostly in private, and what guidance Ike offered to the young president is largely unknown, but Kennedy began initiating changes in the White House command structure in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. He also began to rely less on the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department when making decisions regarding foreign policy, instead heeding the counsel of the Secretary of Defense and his Attorney General, his younger brother Robert Kennedy. Ike’s brief visit in April 1961 was the first of a former president to the retreat at Camp David.
