At this time the CIA received authorization for 13 major operations in Cuba, including attacks on an electric power plant, an oil refinery, and a sugar mill.[6] Rabe has observed that the "Kennedy administration... showed no interest in Castro's repeated request that the United States cease its campaign of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba. Kennedy did not pursue a dual-track policy toward Cuba.... The United States would entertain only proposals of surrender." Rabe further documents how "Exile groups, such as Alpha 66 and the Second Front of Escambray, staged hit-and-run raids on the island... on ships transporting goods...purchased arms in the United States and launched...attacks from the Bahamas."[6]

It's been the Kennedy bashers, often from the far right and far left, rather who have insisted on cherry-picking the evidence to find fault and distort his actual record.

I don't have to cherry-pick, the record sans assassination attempts is bad enough.

Last post in this thread for me -- time to move on.

Legacy

The Cuban Project, as with the earlier Bay of Pigs invasion, is widely acknowledged as an American policy failure against Cuba.

Even JFK's national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, didn't learn of Kennedy's actual VN policy of withdrawal by '65 until many years later in the mid-90s, just before his death as he was able to get ahold of recently released docs (the time period is just after Wofford had published, in fact).

(re Bowles, JFK was probably more upset with him about what he considered an act of disloyalty; Arthur Schlesinger also opposed the plan, but he wasn't criticized or re-assigned/fired because he didn't squeal to the press later, at the president's expense, about his wise counsel on the matter)

Dispensing with Wofford, now let's move to the Douglass quote.  Do you have a page cite for that?  B/c I couldn't find it in my copy of the book, and the thrust of the statement goes squarely against the author's own very favorable view of the president in that post-Missile Crisis period, when Kennedy and Khru were working quietly behind the scenes, then in open with the Test Ban Treaty, to put finis to the Cold War.

It would seem odd -- unless in some extraordinary circumstances absolutely unavoidable as Kennedy saw it --that on the other hand he would have green lighted the CIA as your quote suggests and thereby put in jeopardy his hard work with the Soviet premier.

"Cold warrior" Kennedy, post-Missile Crisis, gave his famous Peace Speech at American Univ, the one Khrushchev considered the best speech by a US prez since FDR, then got the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets a few months later, then, according to Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), the Soviet premier in Kennedy's final days in office supposedly agreed to a joint US-USSR mission to the Moon.  

"Cold warrior" Kennedy also planned a visit to the Soviet Union in his 2d term, after a second major arms control agreement with the USSR, according to Douglass who says JFK told two close intimates (British amb to the US David Ormsby-Gore and JFK friend William Walton) in his final days of such a plan:

President Kennedy knew the political impact his visiting the Soviet Union would have on the Cold War. It would end it. Jacqueline Kennedy would have accompanied her husband on such a journey of reconciliation.  The Kennedys would have been greeted by Nikita Khrushchev and the Russian people with the kind of welcome that would have ended the Cold War resoundingly ....  Soon after Kennedy's murder, a man Press Secretary Pierre Salinger described as "a high official of the Soviet Embassy in Washington" told Salinger over a private lunch how Khrushchev had reacted to the assassination.  He had first wept, then withdrew into a shell.  "He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze," the Soviet official said.

(Douglass, p. 379)