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Article: What Reagan Should Have Learned From Kennedy's Bay of Pigs
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- April 9, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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President Reagan's Iran initiative was hardly America's first
foreign policy failure. Although Iranscam is compared with
Watergate, a more revealing precedent is the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
President Kennedy escaped the political hurricane that has
engulfed Reagan only partly because the Kennedy administration was in
its honeymoon period and Congress was controlled by Kennedy's party.
There are valuable lessons in statesmanship to learn by comparing
these two policy failures.
U.S. forces trained and equipped about 1,300 Cuban exiles and,
in April 1961, landed them at the Bay of Pigs. American B-26 air
strikes against Cuban air bases preceded the landing. The invaders
soon ran out of ...