The New York Times obituary today about Fidel Castro not only praised the brutal Cuban dictator as “a towering international figure,” it stepped into the dogged media myth about its own coverage of the run-up to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

The obituary said that the Times, “at the request of the Kennedy administration, withheld some” details of  it was planning to report about invasion plans, “including information that an attack was imminent.”

Not quite.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong — a second edition of which was published recently — the notion that the administration of President John F. Kennedy “asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its reports about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion is utter fancy.

“There is no evidence that Kennedy or his administration knew in advance about the Times report of April 7, 1961, a front-page article [see nearby] that lies at the heart of this media myth.”

The article was written by Tad Szulc, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Times, and filed from Miami on the afternoon of April 6, 1961 — 11 days before the CIA-backed assault on Cuba’s southern coast.

Kennedy, I point out, essentially had no opportunity to speak with Times officials between the time when Szulc’s story was received at the Times building in midtown Manhattan and when it was set in type.

That’s because the president “spent the last half of the afternoon of April 6, 1961, playing host to Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, on a lengthy cruise down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon,” I note in Getting It Wrong. “They traveled aboard the Honey Fitz, a ninety-two-foot presidential yacht. The round trip from Washington on that chilled and windy afternoon lasted two hours and forty minutes.

“It was 6:25 p.m. when the yacht returned to an Army Engineers dock in Washington, at the end of the outing. Kennedy and Macmillan rode together to the White House, arriving at 6:28 p.m. … leaving only a very small window for Kennedy to have been in touch with Times executives before the first edition of the newspaper hit the streets.”

I further note that the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston has said that “White House telephone logs reveal no calls that were placed to senior Times officials on April 6, 1961.”

Had the writer of the Times obituary consulted Without Fear or Favor, an insider’s account by Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Times assistant managing editor, he would have found an unequivocal assertion that Kennedy was unaware of Szulc’s dispatch before it was published.

Salisbury wrote:

“The government in April 1961 did not … know that The Times was going to publish the Szulc story although it was aware that The Times and other newsmen were probing in Miami. Nor did President Kennedy telephone [top Times officials] about the story…. The action which The Times took [in editing Szulc’s report] was on its own responsibility,” the result of internal discussions and deliberations.

Those discussions included Szulc’s characterization of the invasion as imminent. The reference was removed from the article — an entirely justifiable decision, especially, as it turned out, the invasion was not imminent.

“Most important,” Salisbury added, “The Times had not killed Szulc’s story. … The Times believed it was more important to publish than to withhold. Publish it did.”

In addition, I write in Getting It Wrong, the suppression myth myth about the Times and the Bay of Pigs “fails to recognize or acknowledge that the Times coverage was not confined to Szulc’s article” published 10 days before the invasion.

“It ignores that several follow-up stories and commentaries appeared in the Times during the run-up to the invasion. The Times did not abandon the Cuba-invasion story after April 7, 1961,” I note. “Far from it.

“Subsequent reporting in the Times, by Szulc and others, kept expanding the realm of what was publicly known about a coming assault against Castro.”

On April 8, 1961, the Times published a front-page article about the Cuban exiles and their eagerness to topple Castro. The article appeared beneath the headline “Castro Foe Says Uprising Is Near” and quoted the president of the U.S.-based umbrella group of exiles, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, as saying that a revolt against the Castro regime was “imminent.”

On April 9, 1961, the Times published another front-page article by Szulc that report how Cuban exile leaders were attempting to paper over rivalries and divisions in advance of what Szulc described as the coming “thrust against Premier Fidel Castro.” The “first assumption” of the leaders’ plans, Szulc wrote, “is that an invasion by a ‘liberation army,’ now in the final stages of training … will succeed with the aid of an internal uprising in Cuba. It is also assumed that a provisional ‘government in arms’ will be established promptly on the island.”

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, Szulc in those sentences effectively summarized the strategic objectives for what soon became the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Two days later, on April 11, James Reston, the Washington bureau chief, reported on the Times’s front page that Kennedy administration officials were divided “about how far to go in helping the Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro Government.” Reston recounted in detail how Kennedy had been receiving conflicting counsel from advisers in the White House, the CIA, and the State and Defense departments. Reston also identified the time pressures facing Kennedy, writing:

“It is feared that unless something is done fairly soon nothing short of direct military intervention by United States forces will be enough to shake the Castro Government’s hold over the Cuban people.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the Times “continued to cover and comment on invasion preparations until the Cuban exiles hit the beaches at the Bay of Pigs.” Not all preinvasion reports were spot-on accurate. But the newspaper’s coverage of the run-up to the Bay of Pigs debacle was fairly extensive.

“Not only does the suppression myth ignore this,” I write, “it also fails to recognize that coverage of invasion preparations appeared in newspapers other than the New York Times.

“Indeed, the coverage reached a point where Kennedy, a week before the invasion, told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger: ‘I can’t believe what I’m reading! Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers. It’s all laid out for him.'”

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

• It’s like 1948 all over again for American media
• A fiasco for the press, too:  Error, hype marked Bay of Pigs reporting
• Two myths and today’s New York Times
• Puncturing the Times-suppression myth
• NYTimes ‘suppression myth’ makes appearance in ‘Freedom of Speech’
• Bay of Pigs suppression myth too rich and delicious to die away
• Fact-checking Keller on NYT-Bay of Pigs suppression myth
• Halberstam the ‘unimpeachable’? Try myth-promoter
• Media myths, the junk food of journalism
• Memorable late October: A new edition of ‘Getting It Wrong,’ and more
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