Convinced that the United States could not survive with a communist outpost only 90 miles away from American shores, the military began pressing Kennedy to invade Cuba and forcibly remove the communist regime from power and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime. In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended that Kennedy adopt a plan entitled Operation Northwoods, which entailed terrorist attacks on American soil carried out by U.S. intelligence assets posing as Cuban communists. Kennedy could then tell the American people that Cuba had attacked the United States and that he had no choice but to retaliate with a regime-change invasion of the island.

Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods. Seven months later, U.S. officials discovered that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. One can imagine the Pentagon officials' reaction when they learned of those missiles. If Kennedy had adopted Operation Northwoods and had used it as a justification for invading Cuba, the Soviet missiles would never have been installed there in the first place. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the national-security establishment believed, was occurring because Kennedy had once again, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, shown weakness in the face of the communist threat in Cuba.