As I posted above JFK secretly agreed to remove missiles from Turkey as part of the solution to the Cuban missile crises. So JFK did not triumph there. The Soviets retained a client state in violation of the Monroe Doctrine and we got a fig leaf.
Thus, I posit that JFK would have similarly caved to Iran.
Who were "fiddle " and “Faddle”? they seemed to be prostitutes, employed at the White House. According to Seymour Hersh (“The Dark Side of Camelot”), they serviced JFK in the White House swimming pool. Does anybody know what their job titles were? And were they Federal employees, or just free lancers?
N.B.: The Monroe Doctrine was never international law or U.S. law, it was only a stated foreign policy of one administration, and binding on no later administration.
Wait… if Kennedy knew that Khrushchev wasn’t going to launch, and Khrushchev knew that Kennedy wasn’t going to launch, then what exactly was the crisis?
I think the crisis was mainly to force negotiations and agreements over some contentious issues(missiles in Turkey, Soviet support for Cuba, possible US invasion of Cuba) that wouldn’t have been settled any other way.
This is what gets me-Eisenhower knew that the USSR was bankrupt and could not afford a space race or and arms race (food riots actually broke out in Russia, in the early 1960s). Russian agriculture was such a mess , that they had to use their gold reserves to buy food from Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium! yet JFK and his propaganda masters portrayed the USSR as some kind of super strong evil menacing power…this allowed the defense business to get massive appropriations…and the “Moon Race”. Really, so much of the JFK image was built on smoke and mirrors.
Reagan didn’t have shit to do with it. If Putin had been in charge rather than Gorbachev, the USSR and Berlin Wall would still be around.
We’ll never know how JFK would be remembered if he hadn’t been murdered. I think it might be as the last intellectual president until Obama came along. I think his greatest achievement was not listening to the military advice during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They wanted him to go ahead and launch a preemptive strike on the USSR. If he had done so, none of us would be around today to talk about it. One shudders to think what would have happened if it happened during the Bush-Cheney years. We don’t know if he could have gotten the Civil Rights Act passed. Certainly LBJ would have been enlisted to twist arms and maybe they could have done so. I suspect it would have been more difficult if not impossible.
He cares now. It’s true that the Cold War wouldn’t have ended when it did if Putin was in power, although it’s probably better to speculate Andropov remaining alive through the 90s since he was also a KGB head.
So what would have happened is economic collapse, and violent breakup instead of peaceful breakup. We still win the Cold War, but there’s a greater chance of a catastrophe as a nuclear armed Russia fights to maintain control over an empire they can’t afford to feed and can’t afford enough bullets to crush revolts.
Given the Soviets’ situation in 1985, it’s hard to see them going with anyone BUT Gorby. His rise to power wasn’t the product of luck, it was the Soviets’ last attempt to survive. It was a weak attempt to emulate what China had done. But there was no other viable course open to them by 1985. They had to change, or die. They died, thankfully peacefully.
Don’t want to hijack the thread any further, so assuming the USSR was heading toward economic collapse and violent breakup, it still had squat to do with Reagan.
What does that have to do with Reagan? Soviet military spending was already on a relentless upward trajectory before he took office. In fact, during Reagan’s presidency it plateaued for the first time since the 1960s.
I am rather puzzled by the description of Kennedy as an “intellectual president.” He was not a person of unusually noteworthy intellectual powers as compared to other Presidents.