After the failure of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba, senior officials from the Kennedy administration, including the president, devoted two days to off-the-record briefings for more than 200 journalists. Although President John F. Kennedy refused to assign blame, other officials were less circumspect, disagreeing about whether the Central Intelligence Agency or another part of the government was responsible for the failure. The most notable aspect of this episode is not that senior administration personnel discussed a covert action in the presence of journalists but that the briefings subsequently remained unknown. Some newspapers briefly mentioned them, but no book on the Bay of Pigs—from the 1960s through today—has mentioned that such briefings happened or described their content. Using primary-source materials (including fragments of the briefings’ transcript) plus some newspaper accounts, this article describes the conflicting opinions voiced at the briefings and explores why and how the Kennedy administration succeeded in keeping the encounters mostly unknown.

中文翻译：

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猪湾惨败和肯尼迪政府为记者准备的非正式简报

1961 年 4 月猪湾事件对古巴的干预失败后，肯尼迪政府的高级官员，包括总统在内，用两天时间为 200 多名记者进行了非正式简报。尽管约翰·肯尼迪总统拒绝指责，但其他官员不那么谨慎，他们不同意中央情报局或政府其他部门是否应对失败负责。这一集最引人注目的方面不是高级行政人员在记者在场的情况下讨论了一项秘密行动，而是随后的简报情况仍然未知。一些报纸简要提到了它们，但从 1960 年代到今天，没有关于猪湾的书提到发生过此类简报或描述其内容。