50 years ago today. President Kennedy tells the nation about the missiles in Cuba...

[Cooley Hurd]

[El Supremo]

1. Duck and cover!

Scared the living shit out of me.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. Every time someone talks about a high stress job I tell them of my mother....

She was a telephone operator at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The supervisor announced that they wouldn't tell them if the missiles were on their way because they didn't want them to leave their posts so these women were sitting next to each other pushing plugs into switchboards and connecting Generals and Colonels and VIP civilians with NORAD and Strategic Air Command and the Pentagon and the CIA in Langley and the White House and the whole time they knew they could be vaporized at any moment as the communication room was a prime target.

Wanna talk about stress because your inbox is full of files that need to be done by lunchtime?

[Rhiannon12866]

22. Me, too!

Seems they were constantly getting us to rehearse hiding under our desks and in kindergarten the whole class took shelter in the basement, just so we'd know what to do. In 1986, my grandmother invited me to come with her to the USSR as part of a peace group. I couldn't turn my grandmother down, but I was scared witless. I had a terrible panic attack on the flight, spent most of it sitting in a room with a curtain being calmed by a flight attendant. Turned out to be a wonderful trip, Russian folks couldn't be nicer, and having experienced war on their own land, they're terrified of war and were thrilled to meet Americans.

[Octafish]

2. Good thing JFK was president that day, otherwise none of us might be here.

Nixon would not have stopped the Hawks, IMO. That would have led to Armageddon.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

[berni_mccoy]

3. Romney would have gone the route of Nixon.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. After the Bay of Pigs this event made the Kennedy reelection a shoe in...

There are many who feel he was going to pull the "advisers" out of Vietnam and there was money to be made.

[hifiguy]

12. JFK was going to remove the advisers from Vietnam.

There are numerous books by reputable historians in which JFK was quoted as saying that after he was re-elected he would end US involvement in Vietnam.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

18. Meanwhile LBJ was tied to a tiny company in Texas that made helicopters....

And it ended up with a contract and the main image of the war is those same helicopters.

Just like the Bush family had ties to the company that made the Bradley and the main image of Iraq was badly armored hulking vehicles.

[Cooley Hurd]

23. 4 months late, but you are soooo right, Octafish!!

[hedgehog]

4. I have only vague memories of those years - but it seems to me that my

mom was always ironing with some serious announcement or event going on on our little B&W set. Am I remembering the 1963 March on Washington or the Cuban Missile Crisis or both?

I think it illustrates the time if my mother kept right on ironing - the world might be ending, but my dad needed his shirts ironed for work. That wasn't him - he would have worn anything - but the time required that he wear shirt and tie to work so she made sure he had freshly ironed shirts.

Apparently a fireworks factory blew up outside Akron and generated a mushroom cloud. It woke my parents up, but they went back to sleep. What were they supposed to do if a war had started?

[longship]

5. Hollywood version is pretty good.

Thirteen Days takes some liberties by compressing the actual dialog, making up some others, and including, IMHO, a lame back story. But the events are basically correct.

Even though we all know the result, the film is still gripping, thanks to the quickly moving events of the day.

Good performances by Bruce Greenwood (JFK), Stephen Culp (RFK), along with supporting cast. Kevin Conway is outstanding, and chilling, as Curtis LeMay.

Recommended.

I was a paper boy in Detroit at the time and I can tell you that it was very scary. Kennedy's speech on the first Monday chilled the country to the bone.

We sure were afraid for two weeks.

[Posteritatis]

21. Pulled that out again because of this post; that was two well-spent hours today. (nt)

[WCGreen]

6. I remember this distinctly...

It was on my 5th Birthday and the celebration got real cold as my folks watched the president. May Aunt and grandma were over to our house and everything suddenly got quite.

My grandmother started to say the rosary and my dad grabbed me and my brother and took us to the Nike sights that were scattered around the west side of the of Cleveland to show us that we would be protected.

I don't know if he made it worse for us or better, but that was one of my very first memories of things that happened outside my little world.

[Posteritatis]

7. The unabridged version of the statement for the curious with 18 free minutes:

[jehop61]

8. A suggestion

I just read Robt. Cato's book on LBJ. It has a gripping account of that time.

[Cooley Hurd]

9. On my reading list

Caro is my favorite author.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

10. There are right-wingers today who claim Kennedy was a "commie".

[hifiguy]

14. There were back then too.

This poster was widely circulated in Dallas before JFK's fatal visit:



The delusional rhetoric of the reich wing fringe has never changed, it has just been mainstreamed in the last ten years.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. I remember seeing that before and always get a chuckle they included "wheat deals" on their list.

[dawg]

13. Kennedy was considered a hero.

Today, Fox News would be ragging on him 24/7 for allowing the missiles to be snuck into Cuba in the first place.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

17. Not only that but they would be screaming that he's not listening to "generals on the ground".

[hifiguy]

19. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had to stand up to

their respective military hard-liners to keep the peace and not start WW III. Kennedy was killed by the Military-Intelligence Complex in 1963 and Khrushchev was deposed in 1964. These were not coincidences.

[nichomachus]

20. A 50-year-old myth

At the time they made the announcement and declared it an "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation, the boat carrying the missiles was 750 miles away from Cuba and headed back toward the Soviet Union. From Michael Dobbs:

While researching a 2008 book on the missile crisis, I plotted the positions of Soviet and American ships during this period, on the basis of United States intelligence records. I was stunned to discover that the lead Soviet ship, the Kimovsk, was actually 750 miles away from the blockade line, heading back toward the Soviet Union, at the time of the supposed “eyeball to eyeball” incident. Acting to avert a naval showdown, the Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had turned his missile-carrying freighters around some 30 hours earlier.

Kennedy was certainly bracing for an “eyeball to eyeball” moment, but it never happened. There is now plenty of evidence that Kennedy — like Khrushchev — was a lot less steely-eyed than depicted in the initial accounts of the crisis, which were virtually dictated by the White House. Tape-recorded transcripts of White House debates and notes from participants show that Kennedy was prepared to make significant concessions, including a public trade of Soviet missiles in Cuba for American missiles in Turkey and possibly the surrender of the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

While the risk of war in October 1962 was very high (Kennedy estimated it variously at between 1 in 5 and 1 in 2), it was not caused by a clash of wills. The real dangers arose from “the fog of war.” As the two superpowers geared up for a nuclear war, the chances of something going terribly wrong increased exponentially. To their credit, both Kennedy and Khrushchev understood this dynamic, which became particularly evident on the most nerve-racking day of all, “Black Saturday.”

By Saturday, Oct. 27, the two leaders were no longer in full control of their gigantic military machines, which were moving forward under their own momentum. Soviet troops on Cuba targeted Guantánamo with tactical nuclear weapons and shot down an American U-2 spy plane. Another U-2, on a “routine” air sampling mission to the North Pole, got lost over the Soviet Union. The Soviets sent MiG fighters into the air to try to shoot down the American intruder, and in response, Alaska Air Defense Command scrambled F-102 interceptors armed with tactical nuclear missiles. In the Caribbean, a frazzled Soviet submarine commander was dissuaded by his subordinates from using his nuclear torpedo against American destroyers that were trying to force him to the surface.

A 50-year-old myth

But it makes a great story.

I was in college at the time. ROTC was required of all undergraduates (it was an all-male school) and we had a large advanced ROTC corps.

Some joker got hold of the ROTC stationary and cut imaginary orders for each advanced ROTC student to report for immediate military service to prepare for an invasion of Cuba. Hilarity ensued.

One guy was ready to go, packed his uniform and his .22 rifle in a suitcase and was waiting for others to get ready. Another guy was on the phone to his lawyer. Other guys were walking around bumping into walls. They never found out who did it.