Mary Lou Forbes passed away June 27.

She was my very first newspaper commentary editor.

She had taken over the Commentary section of The Washington Times in 1982, and she was kind enough to begin running pieces under my byline in 1986, courtesy of the op-ed marketing team at The Heritage Foundation.

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 what had been a risky proposition from the start.