Its fashionable for Liberals to blame Ike and the Cuban Exiles for bad advice.
But JFK had the conn, and plenty of time to study the problem and make a decision. He gets the blame or the credit, it was all on his watch. He could have stopped it from happening in the first place, he could have canceled it at the last minute, or he could have backed it up with air support and boots. He did neither. He lied to those men and he abandoned them to die. It was shameful.
I will grant you, the Cuban Missile Crisis was handled well. Very well. It was a triumph. But by then he had learned something.