Kennedy talked tough on Cuba and Castro. He had been briefed on Nixon's CIA invasion; the new kid on the block could talk the talk.
But Adlai Stevenson fumed that he'd been humiliated at the UN by exposure of U.S. Fingerprints on the “Cuban” B-26's—and the final raid was disallowed.
Nixon would later use Howard Hunt, to his undoing. Give Us This Day (1973) would explain the rage. McClintock would've said, “You made some people angry; might've got some people killed. Somebody ought to blow your head clean off. But I won't.”
Nixon's refusal to pursue election irregularities in 1960 would be repeated in his refusal to pursue Jane Fonda (Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, 2002).
Kennedy's NSAM 263 ordered U.S. advisors out at 1,000 per month, complete by January, 1965. He would have dropped LBJ, leaving that piece of work to the woodchipper of the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals.
He would have dropped the waiver of Hoover's mandatory retirement. Detente with Khruschev; demarche with Castro. Test bans, and missiles in Cuba, and out of Turkey. Generals enraged.
The day after the riderless horse was displayed on tens of millions of televisions, Johnson signed NSAM 273.
The next year the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
The following year, November, 1965, Johnson cursed and threw out the Joint Chiefs from their fifteen-minute allotted plea for permission to bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong. The Day It Became the Longest War
We got a six-trillion-dollar War on Poverty, Medicare, and a war micromanaged and constrained to the point wherein 58,000 gave their lives, the commander in chief took Walter Cronkite's word for it that Tet was a victory for the Communists.
Johnson in March of 1968 gave the enemy the strength to persist; Kerry and Ted Kennedy would insure they would win.
I was at the Nixon Library in 1998. There was a section of the Berlin Wall there.
It went up in. . . .let's see. . . .it went up in. . . .uh. . . .
Just past midnight on the night of August 12-13, 1961