Course of History: Fidel Castro and John...

Course of History: Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy might have had a rapprochement if Kennedy not been assassinated, said a nephew of the former President. “Fidel felt that if President Kennedy had lived, or if Teddy (Sen. Edward Kennedy) had won in 1980, there would have been a rapprochement between our countries,” said Michael Kennedy of his midnight meeting with Castro in Cuba in January.

Wrong Rescue: Although U.S. soldiers choppered in to save the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait during the Gulf War, some bureaucrats wondered whether it was worth it. “The embassy is a piece of junk,” said Ivan Selin, a state department official. “It’s so bad that, when (an armed band) drove a truck into it in 1983, they blew up the wrong building. I mean, the chancery looked so shabby that they drove to (another building), which at least looked like a building. That is where the explosion was.”

Detour: Ned Graham said his road to the ministry took a rocky detour through drug abuse. “I was just infatuated with the drug subculture of the ‘60s,” said Graham, 33, youngest son of evangelist Billy Graham. “I used marijuana mainly. I smoked a lot of pot. I drank a lot. Did coke periodically. I was into hallucinogens a lot.” But “there was always unconditional love” at home, he said, and that “was irresistible.”

Task Masters: The only thing you had to do was toast bread. But this was no white-bread contest, and so the winning device took 39 convoluted steps. The winners were the Toast Masters, a group of students from Purdue University, competing in Saturday’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in West Lafayette, Ind. The winning machine included a toy train, a robot arm and a mousetrap.