President Jimmy Carter's remarks to members of the U.S. Olympic teams, March 21, 1980:

First of all, it's a real honor for me to be here with all you famous people. I have a great admiration for you and a deep feeling for you in this time of challenge and disappointment.

This is a sad time for all those in our country who are involved in amateur athletics.

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The journalist Richard Rovere believed that Truman’s limited understanding of executive leadership was a serious problem for the new president and the country. But most of all, Rovere considered it “a cruel time to put inexperience in power.”

Truman’s difficulties over demobilization of America’s armed forces were a case in point. As the war came to an end in September 1945, Truman came under intense pressure to “bring the boys home.”

Where he saw a need to “adjust the rate of the demobilization of our forces so we would be able to meet our new obligations in the world,” the public, led by the twelve million men in the armed forces and their families, insisted on the fastest possible release from service.

Because of serious doubts about the country’s capability to establish effective occupations of Germany and Japan with diminished forces and its capacity to absorb so many men quickly into the economy, Truman was reluctant to give in to what he privately called the “disintegration of our armed forces.”

Truman encouraged Congress to “take the heat” from a public insisting on rapid demobilization, which he privately told congressional leaders could jeopardize global stability.

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The first major foreign policy decision in which Bundy participated became the signature failure of the entire Kennedy administration.

The new administration inherited a covert plan to topple the Cuban leader Fidel Castro with an invasion force of 1,300 exiles being trained in Guatemala.

It was a CIA plot actively incubated under the Eisenhower administration—which had recently broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba—and then presented to the new president for execution within the first months of his administration.

The code name for the invasion was “Operation Zapata.”

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