Group Process

As a counterpoint to the complicated Groupthink hypothesis, historians Neustadt & May suggest in their book, Thinking in Time, that the Bay of Pigs debacle can be explained by a simple and common root cause: Kennedy and his advisers just did not devote enough time to decision-making and planning. After analyzing schedules of key administration executives, they found that key members of the decision making group "could never give [Bay of Pigs planning] sustained attention for more than forty-five minutes at a time. (N&M, 1986, pg. 1).