LOS ANGELES — Admirers of Barack Obama who glibly and favorably compare the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency to John F. Kennedy always assume that they are doing the former a favor. But there's another way to look at it — and it's less pretty.
Consider the spring of 1961. JFK had been in the White House for only a few months when suddenly the Joint Chiefs of Staff dropped a major decision on his office desk: whether to give a green light to the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, originally ginned up during the Eisenhower administration and designed to topple the then-young communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.
As a former junior senator from Massachusetts — only 44 years old — JFK was of course eager to prove his chops in a world still divided by communism. So the president (then the youngest in American history) made the wrong decision and gave a "go" sign to what became the well-known Bay of Pigs mess — the darkest hour for the otherwise legendary Kennedy.