Excerpt from The Kennedy Men by Laurence Leamer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At the first Special Group meeting on Cuba, held Sunday morning, January 22, two days after the inauguration, Dulles told a number of Kennedy men, including the attorney general, that he thought "our presently planned Cuban force could probably hold a beachhead long enough for us to recognize a provisional government and aid that government openly." A few days later, at another meeting on Cuba, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he felt that the envisioned force of six hundred to eight hundred was inadequate, and he anticipated that "final planning will have to include agreed plans for providing additional support for the Cuban force -- presumably such support to be the U.S. "

As Kennedy listened to the arguments and perused the memos that passed across his desk, trying to decide what to do, he was so new in the Oval Office that he told Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador, "You don't even know which of your team you can really trust from the point of view of their judgment." He knew this was an important decision, but neither he nor anyone else had any idea that his actions here would be one of the defining moments of his administration. His decisions would lead him up the pathway to nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. His judgments would dramatically affect administration polices from Bolivia to Vietnam and help create fiercely held attitudes that would determine American policy toward Cuba until the end of the century and beyond. His decisions in early 1961 may even have inspired an assassin who would be waiting to meet the president on the saddest of November days.

From The Kennedy Men by Laurence Leamer. Copyright Laurence Leamer 2001. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, William Morrow.