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CHAPTER 5 General Taylor's Retrospective Views I am afraid that I could not be of real assistance to you in providing qualified answers. While I worked very intensively on the broad aspects of this affair in 1961, I have forgotten many of the details which were available to our committee. I would only say that I felt at the time that the committee had access to all the facts necessary to allow us to form a qualified judgement [sic] as to the major causes of the failure of this undertaking. Albert C. Persons, Bay of Pigs (Birmingham, AL: Kingston Press, 1968), p. 77. However poor his memory may have been in response to questions posed by Mr. Persons, one of the US pilots who had been directly involved in air transport operations related to the Bay of Pigs, General Taylor's recall had improved greatly by 1972. In his book, Swords and Plowshares, the general repeated practically all of the findings of the four Taylor Committee memoranda; and he showed little or no evidence of any second thoughts in the interval since the committee had done its work. If anything, his views on the correctness of the findings seem to have hardened. This was particularly true of the emphasis which he placed on the inadequacy of the planning for air operations and on the evaluation of the chances for success of the operation. 222 /