Ronald Hilton

He passed away this week, too. He was the Stanford scholar who told Carey McWilliams in 1960 that the CIA was training a guerrilla force in Guatemala to invade Cuba. (The story had appeared in La Hora at the time.) McWilliams wrote an editorial for The Nation calling for more reporting on the matter. The New York Times confirmed the existence of the base, but Kennedy went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion anyway. Afterwards, Kennedy blamed the Times (not La Hora or The Nation) for spilling the beans on the invasion. He then admitted that more reporting by the Times might have prevented a colossal mistake.