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The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence of his eagerness to end America's military role in that country's civil war.

Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal.

The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.

Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.

You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam.

Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?

The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.'

The Bay of Pigs is one of America's most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.

Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.