In the Right

What followed over the next 72 hours remains to this day one of the greatest debacles in American history -- a disaster of epic proportion on the military, diplomatic, ideological, and humanitarian fronts.

Within three days, 200 rebels were dead -- killed at the hands of Fidel Castro's forces -- and 1,197 were captured.

President Kennedy -- who had declared just days before the invasion that the United States had no plans to invade Cuba -- was proven a liar before the world.

The United States -- at the height of its Cold War struggle against Soviet communist imperialism -- was viewed throughout the Third World as an unreliable ally, and a feckless military power.

Castro had a massive propaganda triumph -- as he put it, "the first defeat for Yanqui imperialism."

CPSU General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev -- emboldened by Kennedy's failure -- stepped up Soviet support for anti-Western guerrilla movements throughout the Third World.

By some estimates, it was Kennedy's failure at the Bay of Pigs that led directly to Khrushchev's decision four months later to stop the flow of Germans from East to West by building a wall across Berlin.

And Kennedy himself believed his failure to back the exiles tempted Moscow to send nuclear missiles to Havana -- a decision that led to one of the most significant crises of the Cold War, and the risk of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. And the USSR.

We all know how the Cuban Missile Crisis turned out -- it was Kennedy's finest hour, a glorious triumph for the U.S., as Moscow withdrew its missiles for no other reason than that President Kennedy ordered them to.

It was only later that evidence emerged of the nature of the real deal struck between Moscow and Havana.

Deal or no, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a triumph for Kennedy. And Hollywood made sure we knew about it.

In fact, a visit to the Internet Movie Data Base yields 22 titles in response to the search term "Cuban Missile Crisis." That's a movie every other year, on average, since the crisis occurred.

And how many movies has Hollywood made about the Bay of Pigs?

According to the IMDB database ... precisely zero.

Cuban Missile Crisis = Kennedy triumph.

Bay of Pigs = Kennedy failure.

Could it really be just that simple?