Military failures that presidents survived—and some they didn't
Biden can take comfort in predecessors who rebounded after failures
Read the full article at The Hill
President John Kennedy declared about April 1961’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” Just a few days after Fidel Castro thwarted 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban freedom fighters who invaded their homeland to overthrow the Marxist dictator, JFK told the press, “I am the responsible officer of this government.” Despite a devastating defeat at the hands of the communist regime just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Kennedy’s approval rating soared to 83 percent.
The 35th president, who suffered another Cold War catastrophe when the Soviets and their East German allies erected the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1961, would use that symbol of communist tyranny in the most evocative speech of his brief presidency. On the western side of the wall in June 1963, he proclaimed, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words‚ Ich bin ein Berliner [I am a Berliner].” The crowd of more than 400,000, separated from family and friends by a menacing concrete barrier, roared their approval. Kennedy managed the messages around his military debacles and maintained presidential strength despite them.
