Did President Kennedy ever actually ever say, “Splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”?

The short answer is NO but maybe, but it is impossible to verify.

While the quote is famously attributed to John F. Kennedy, there is no public record, speech transcript, audio recording, or signed document of him ever saying or writing it.

The story of how this quote entered the public record reveals a fair amount of the historical game of telephone.

The Origin of the Quote

The phrase first appeared in print on April 25, 1966, in a New York Times article titled “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” This was nearly three years after Kennedy’s assassination.

The Times journalists wrote that in the bitter aftermath of the disastrous, CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Kennedy said to “one of the highest officials of his Administration” that he wanted to “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

The Times never named that high-level official, and no official ever came forward to publicly claim they heard Kennedy utter those exact words.

The Historical Context

While the exact wording is unverified, the sentiment behind it is entirely accurate. Kennedy was genuinely furious with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He felt misled by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director Richard Bissell.

Rather than a public outburst, Kennedy channeled this frustration into concrete administrative actions:

• The Taylor Commission: He immediately launched a deep-dive investigation into what went wrong.
• Secret Reorganization Memos: Declassified documents show Kennedy tasked White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with studying how the British intelligence system operated to see if the CIA’s covert operations should be stripped away and handed to the State Department.
• Personnel Cleansing: He forced out top CIA leadership, including Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.
• Shifting Power: He transferred the CIA’s command over large-scale foreign paramilitary operations to the Department of Defense.

A Borrowed Phrase?

The specific imagery of “splintering into a thousand pieces and scattering to the winds” was not a unique Kennedy invention. It was actually a common 19th-century rhetorical flourish found frequently in old Methodist sermons, letters from clergy, and early 20th-century literature.

It is possible Kennedy used a classic piece of dramatic hyperbole behind closed doors. Equally possible, the anonymous official who spoke to the New York Times in 1966 used their own colorful language to describe just how angry the President had been five years prior.

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