Forty-eight years ago today, 1,500 Cuban exiles landed on the beach of a desolate area of Cuba's southern shore known to the locals as Bahia de Cochinos -- the Bay of Pigs. Authorized by a young and inexperienced President John Kennedy -- who had been in office fewer than two months when he green-lighted the plan -- the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited and trained the exiles in the hopes that their landing would spark a nation-wide uprising. But Kennedy's insistence on reducing the U.S. military role in the invasion, in the hope of maintaining plausible deniability, doomed to failure...