Free Republic

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty!” proclaimed Lynch and Hawkin’s Commander-in-Chief just three months earlier. “They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 53 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.” That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knew something about fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge,...

And the Cuban Missile Crisis, on some subsequent readings of history, was not a triumph of bold statesmanship as it was hailed at the time, but a piece of foolhardy grandstanding that unnecessarily humiliated the Soviets and precipitated the arms race that defined the Cold War. Even on civil rights – the subject of one of Kennedy's greatest speeches in June 1963, when he vowed that "Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as he would wish to have his children treated." – the reality never matched the myth. Kennedy...