The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

The Bay of Pigs was a 1961 failed military operation that attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba. The CIA recruited, funded, and trained a brigade of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. The exiles were severely outnumbered by Castro’s forces, and many were killed or captured. According to Stephanopoulos, “the operation was a fiasco from start to finish” and a “huge embarrassment for the fledgling Kennedy administration” (10). The Bay of Pigs plays an important role in the creation of the Situation Room, because only days before the invasion took place, President Kennedy received a recommendation for the creation of such a complex to combat the threat of communism. After the invasion turned into a disaster, Kennedy publicly took the blame, but privately he was furious that he did not have the information he needed to plan a better landing spot for the forces. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Kennedy ordered the construction of The Situation Room.

The Berlin Wall was a concrete barrier that separated West Germany from East Germany from 1961 until 1989. Originally constructed to prevent East German citizens from escaping to the West, the Berlin Wall came to symbolize the “Iron Curtain” that separated capitalist countries of the West from the communist Eastern Bloc of the USSR.