Word: bays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Down in the Mekong Delta, South Vietnamese infantrymen flushed another hidden hard-core Viet Cong unit into fierce fighting scarcely 40 miles southwest of Saigon. The Communists blasted back with machine guns and 57-mm recoilless rifles. Saigon soon concluded that it had a veteran Viet Cong battalion at bay, ordered in the largest number of Vietnamese troops to be used in a single battle in the long war to try to encircle and crush the Reds...
Here is the Cuban invasion force setting sail for the Bay of Pigs, with the boats "tinted by the red light of the dying sun." Here is Kennedy in Vienna, annoyed by Nikita Khrushchev's description of the Soviet Union as a young nation and the U.S. as an old one, and replying, "If you'll look across the table, you'll see that we're not so old." Here, in a less weighty moment, is Kennedy at his children's bedtime, inventing stories about "Caroline hunting with the Orange County hounds and winning...
...later to do with Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy frankly hoped to be his own biographer. Once, so the story goes, Kennedy caught Schlesinger pounding at his typewriter, and quipped: "Now Arthur, cut it out. When the time comes, I'll write The Age of Kennedy." But after the Bay of Pigs he changed his mind. "I hope you kept a full account of that," he said to Schlesinger after a meeting. Schlesinger reminded the President that he had been told not to keep such records. "No, go ahead," Kennedy insisted. "You can be damn sure that...
...Together and singly, they filled in gaps in his information, read his proofs, corrected errors, suggested changes. Almost undoubtedly it was Jackie who told Schlesinger about how her husband "put his head into his hands and almost sobbed," then took her in his arms after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. When the anecdote appeared in LIFE, it was criticized as being tasteless, and Schlesinger later cut it out of the final version. "It didn't come off," he explains. "It sounded sob-sisterish...
...During strategy sessions before the Bay of Pigs, for example, the CIA assured everybody that the invasion force could "melt away" into the mountains if it were beaten on the beaches. But nobody bothered to check on just where the mountains were. "I don't think we fully realized," Schlesinger writes airily, "that the Escambray Mountains lay 80 miles from the Bay of Pigs, across a hopeless tangle of swamps and jungles." Surely somebody deserves censure for failing to consult...