JFK's Spine

I've said many times that if man ever erected a "Museum of the Over-Rated," that visitors would be greeted in the vestibule by a large bust of President John F Kennedy.

In response to a new book coming out soon by Teddy Kennedy (Noooo... of course he didn't write it), Humberto Fontova, writing for NewsMax, describes the day JKF and America deserted Cuban Freedom Fighters at the Bay of Pigs as they tried to free that poor country from Castro.

"Where are the PLANES?" kept crackling over the invasion ships' radios. That was their commander, Pepe San Roman, roaring into his radio from the beachhead between artillery concussions. Soviet howitzers were pounding 2,000 rounds into the desperately embattled men (and boys). "Send planes or we CAN'T LAST!" San Roman yelled while watching the Russian tanks close in, his ammo deplete and his casualties pile up.

The U.S. carrier Essex was stationed 30 miles off the Cuban coast, dozens of deadly Skyhawk jets on deck and primed for action. Their pilots were frantic, banging their fists, kicking bulkheads and screaming in tears of desperate rage against the sellout of their freedom-fighting brothers on that heroic beachhead.

"Can't continue," crackled the final message from San Roman a few hours later. For three days his force of mostly volunteer civilians with one day's ammo had battled savagely against a Soviet-trained and -led force 10 times its size, inflicting casualties of 30 to 1.

To this day their feat of arms amazes professional military men. Morale will do that to a fighting force. And there's no morale booster like having watched Castroism ravage your homeland and families.

Eisenhower described JFK's role during the Bay of Pigs as "a profile in indecision and timidity." And warned that it would embolden the Soviets. Like clockwork, four months later the Berlin Wall went up. And a year later the Soviets began arming Castro with nuclear missiles.

But JFK saved us in the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? Well...

Here's Nikita Khrushchev himself regarding the deal he'd cut with JFK ... "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along. Security for Fidel Castro's regime and American missiles removed from Turkey."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/4/17/133115.shtml

So what in the world transformed such an insipid failure into an American icon...?
...Two rounds fired by one L. H. Oswald.