OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Two ex-presidents could learn from Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs


You know I've really changed my viewpoint if I'm pointing people to a Peggy Noonan piece, but this is pretty interesting. Using the Republican reaction to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Noonan casts perspective on the public pronouncements of Messrs. Carter and Clinton. I'm not sure you can say that the parties themselves (either one) are so admirable nowadays, but the Presidents (ex and current) are behaving a bit differently than they used to.

Two of our former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, have been talking a lot about their views and feelings on Iraq. It would be nice if they took to speaking less and thinking more. They could start with an event in the latter years of Dwight David Eisenhower, a former president who knew how to do the job.


Forty-two years ago this spring, in April 1961, a young American president launched an amphibious invasion on a foreign shore. It was such a thorough failure that to this day the words "Bay of Pigs" are shorthand for "American military fiasco." The American-trained Cuban exiles who stormed the beaches of Cuba in hopes of liberating their homeland were, essentially, abandoned and left to die, denied the support they'd been promised by the U.S. government. Fidel Castro crushed them.


The Bay of Pigs invasion was badly planned, poorly executed and almost wildly unrealistic. (Months before it began former secretary of state Dean Acheson told JFK, in a private Rose Garden conversation, that you didn't need Price Waterhouse to figure out 1,500 guerillas aren't going to beat 25,000 Cuban regulars.) And yet after the invasion, when Kennedy both acknowledged the failure and took responsibility for it, he won the support of the American people. His approval rating jumped to 82%. He rallied. History, and his administration, went on.[...]