President Kennedy knew of Eisenhower's plan before he took office. A Republican and the CIA dreamed it up, but it was Kennedy the implemented a plan that HE. as the new leader of the government, could have stopped if he so chose. He could have been the leader of "Change in our Government" and did not.

"The President said then that the plan was so advanced when he came into office in January that it seemed almost impossible to cancel it. The brigade of fourteen hundred anti-Castro Cubans had been in training under CIA officers on a plantation in Guatemala for several months; they were fully armed and eager and ready to go into action. 'If we decided now to call the whole thing off,' the President said, 'I don't know if we could go down there and take the guns away from them.' The President was also under pressure not to postpone the takeoff date of the invasion force any longer. The government of Guatemala was worried about the presence of one thousand four hundred armed foreigners in its country. The President of Guatemala had asked President Kennedy to get the Cubans out of his republic before the end of April, which was then less than two weeks away. Intelligence reports said that Castro was about to receive MIG jets from the Soviet Union, along with Cuban pilots trained in Czechoslovakia to fly those fighter planes. The rebels had to stage their attack before the Russian planes were available for duty in Cuba. The President said he had finally agreed with some reluctance to approve the plan and the date of the landings, Monday, April 17, after the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff accepted his strict stipulation that no American forces could take part in the invasion. He mentioned that Dean Rusk had showed a lack of enthusiasm for the project but was willing to go along with it, provided that the President's insistence on no American military participation was scrupulously observed."