Did a cosy group of advisers really cause the Bay of Pigs fiasco?

It is the popular explanation, and it is now an open question. Groupthink is the idea that a close-knit group can value agreement so much that it stops thinking critically. The psychologist Irving Janis defined it as the mode of thinking people engage in when seeking agreement becomes so dominant in a cohesive group that it overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives. The word itself was derived from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and popularised in Fortune magazine by William H. Whyte Jr. in 1952.

Janis's 1972 book used two case studies: the Pearl Harbor attack and the Bay of Pigs invasion, the failed American invasion of Cuba in 1961. At the Bay of Pigs, he argued, Kennedy's team uncritically accepted the CIA's plan. When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Senator J. William Fulbright raised objections, the team as a whole ignored them, and Schlesinger eventually minimised his own doubts, self-censoring. After the fiasco, Kennedy tried to avoid groupthink in the Cuban Missile Crisis: he invited outside experts to share their views, had the group question them carefully, and deliberately stayed out of the meetings so as not to press his own opinion.

The story is neat, but it has been challenged. Another scholar, Roderick Kramer, argued in 1998 that new evidence does not support groupthink as the main cause of the Bay of Pigs decision, because Kennedy and, later, Johnson sought advice from outside experts more than Janis suggested. And when researchers counted the empirical studies, the support for Janis's own predictions was only partial.