What a truly bizarre interpretation! You place the primary blame on Kennedy for installing those essentially obsolete Jupiter missiles a few miles from Soviet territory? You actually imagine it really was Kennedy who chose to deploy or keep those missiles in Turkey!?!
Yet Kennedy did not become President until January 20, 1961! I can see no intellectually honest way at all to claim, as you did, that “… he [Kennedy] was the one that precipitated the crisis…”
It was the Pentagon who installed the missiles in Turkey; otherwise, they would be violating a vital treaty between Turkey’s government and the Eisenhower administration! And that took place more than a year before JFK became President, and so it was Khrushchev, the Politburo, and to a lesser extent Castro who were the proximate as well as the primary causes of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Unless, of course, you can prove that Kennedy traveled backwards in time?
The link is a very long but quite interesting page containing all of the correspondence between Kruschev and JFK. The above quote is from** Letter 66**.
Or were you referring to a more secret letter?
Seriously, thank you for your fine detective work. The letter I was referring to was considered very odd and rambling by the Kennedy Cabinet for the leader of the Soviet Union. They didn’t know what to make of it; they feared that Khrushchev might be suffering from serious mental problems resulting from all the [del]END OF THE WORLD![/del] … er…, stress of the situation.
But thanks to your link, I was able to read several other of the many Khrushchev letters there. One contained some specific sentences that I’d heard the actor Howard Da Silva – who played Khrushchev in the very good teleplay: The Missiles of October (choosing Da Silva, one of my favorite character actors ever, to play Nikita Khrushchev is drenched with irony and humor, since Da Silva was a victim of despicable Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC witch hunt who then blacklisted the actor for his “communist sympathies”!) – read aloud in a voice-over while Kennedy read the letter in the White House. I’d heard it decades ago, but it was so stirring and vivid that I recognized it immediately when I read it at the site you linked to. Those words were:
That occurs in Letter 65. on the page to which you linked (you got amazingly close!) Since there are no anchors on that page for the letter in question, here’s a direct link to Letter 65.: Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, Moscow, October 26, 1962, 7 p.m.
acetylene, I can’t thank you enough for your excellent detective work and perspicacity in pointing out the path to that amazing historical document!
I am here to supplement my original post and nomination for those who figured out how to take nitrogen from the air and get it into fertilizer (“fixing” it).
Without the solution, billions would starve. Stop with the talk of millions.
The Bible is loaded with examples of how the world was destroyed and then saved. In looking for the scripture to best fit this I have to post this, 1st Corinthians chapter 3 verse 19. (Fits this secular site)
If we’re allowed to use fiction then Im voting Captain America or perhaps Superman. If the Cap didnt defeat Red Skull then we’d all be speaking German right now!
Nah, I don’t think that would cut it. No specific, irreplaceable individual(s) were necessary for humanity to discover, invent or implement that or any number of billions of other ideas, knowledge, solutions, technology, etc. No matter what, all that and most everything else would have been accomplished before too long by some person or group. Often, the time just becomes ripe for a vital discovery. Consider relativity or evolution by natural selection, for example: both Einstein and Darwin were very nearly scooped (if not *actually *scooped, especially in the case of relativity).
Whereas the Kennedy brothers and Khrushchev (and arguably also McNamara) were utterly and completely ***irreplaceable ***in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. And thereby saved the world, not just humanity.
And even though we now know that the “Nuclear Winter” scenario wasn’t nearly as plausibly severe as we once thought, I suspect *trillions *of humans, other animals, and plants combined would likely have perished if a full nuclear WW III broke out.
I wonder if this can really be called lives saved though, since had the Haber Bosch process never been developed, many people simply would not have been born.
Someone gave a speech about this at my high school. The presenter used a visual (or more accurately auditory) aid likening nuclear bombs to pins, which she dropped into an empty bowl. She said that the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during WWII would have sounded like this, and proceeded to drop two pins, making a soft plinking sound. Then she said that if the person manning the station in the USSR at the time hadn’t recognized the warning as a mistake, the nuclear missles launched at America would have sounded like this, and here she picked up another bowl full of pins and poured it into the empty bowl.
For an alternative view of McNamara’s role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see: http://hnn.us/articles/97687.html
Based on tapes made in the Kennedy White House, this author asserts that:
“Unfortunately, as Fred Kaplan has observed, ‘McNamara’s recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a self-serving travesty.’ McNamara told [filmmaker Errol] Morris that he was JFK’s principal ally in ‘trying to keep us out of war.’ In fact, after the first two days of ExComm meetings, McNamara ‘became an increasingly firm advocate of bombing the Soviet missile sites … and of then invading the island of Cuba itself—even if doing so risked sparking a larger war with the USSR.’”
And, after an American U2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a surface to air missile, McNamara urged: “We oughta go in at dawn and take out that SAM site… And we oughta send a surveillance aircraft in tomorrow in the regular flights early in the morning, and we oughta be prepared to take out more SAM sites and knock out the… aircraft.”
Perhaps, McNamara was not such a world-saver in this instance…
I repeat: What a truly bizarre interpretation! You place the primary blame on the Kennedy Administration for installing those essentially obsolete Jupiter missiles a few miles from Soviet territory? You actually imagine it really was the Kennedy Administration who chose to deploy or keep those missiles in Turkey!?!
Yet Kennedy did not become President until January 20, 1961! I can see no intellectually honest way at all to claim, as you did, that they “… [created] a situation that risks the whole world and then figuring a way out of it?”
It was the Pentagon who installed the missiles in Turkey; otherwise, they would be violating a vital treaty between Turkey’s government and the Eisenhower administration! And that took place more than a year before JFK became President!
Unless, of course, you can prove that they traveled backwards in time?
Get over yourself. You assume way too much. Team Kennedy flat-out stopped the destruction of billions of people? Really? We assume the Soviet Union wanted to provoke us into MAD?
This thread might have to wind up in Great Debates, and die there.
Team Kennedy: good for them! I love when Dems balls up and act like Republicans. Doesn’t mean billions would have died without them.
