Posted on 10/25/2013 10:21:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
That Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.
"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”
"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard."
Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.
"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.
"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.
"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.
"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Alexander Haig. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the America's."
William Buckley's National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy's appeasement. The magazine's popular "The Third World War" column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy's Missile Crisis solution as "America's Defeat."
Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in the movie Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."
But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."
In fact Khrushchev prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? “But that is insane!...Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier.
So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat. In fact, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach.
Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy.
The genuine threat came --not from Moscow—but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)
“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”
Castro's regime's was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.
JFK's Missile Crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.
Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the mainstream media and all you'll learn about it from Kennedy’s court scribes, who scribbled Kennedy’s Missile-Crisis “victory.” To get an idea of the odds faced by those betrayed Cuban rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."
In hindsight, I was have just given the Russkies the whole country.
If it hadn’t been for JFK’s incompetence — there would have been a “Cuban Missile Crisis.”
And then he destroyed the country with the Immigration Bill, it just took a bit longer.
“The loss was before the Crisis, at the failure of the Administration to recognize that Castro et. al. were going to impose a Communist regime, instead of lapping up the propaganda about a “democracy” in Cuba.”
The “administration”? Are your referring to Eisenhower administration? You do know that Castro became the leader there in 1959, came up, visted DC, and went safely home, right?
By 1960 his thin veil was gone and he was in full pro-soviet mode. By the time JFK was elected in 1960, he had already nationalized US owned businesses in Cuba, and fully embraced the Soviets.
And please show us any instance of JFK lapping up propaganda that Castro was building a democracy in Cuba. Simply didn’t happen that way.
Dislike JFK for his moral failings, fair. But it’s retarded to pretend he was a Castro apologist.
My brother was marine on an aircraft carrier off of Cuba waiting for the order to deploy. What was found out later, the Soviets had nuclear tipped artillery with permission to fire if invaded.
“And then he destroyed the country with the Immigration Bill, it just took a bit longer.”
Very bright. That was Teddy Kennedy and the 1965 immigration bill. JFK had been dead a few years by then.
I think another concession to the Soviets was dismantling our Civil Defense programs. That started right about the time of the aftermath of the Crisis.
I read a book about the event, and the book said there were three main memos or documents spelling out who was to do what. Two had been declassified and was discussed in the book, but the third was still classified. The book was published, I think, in 198?
JFK stole the 1960 election, which led to the end of America, I’m just not a big fan of that personally.
Why didn’t Nixon go to court the way Al Gore did?
JFK’s immigration law was passed in his memory, JFK had been obsessed with bringing in replacements for the American voters, for some time.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Somebody made Nixon an offer he couldn't refuse.
This is the first you have heard of this?
The story line has been set and carved in stone: Young President faces down tough commie Premier while the whole shakes with fear. right, the stuff of books and PBS specials.
I was taught it was a brilliant victory, in 1982. The schools have been brainwashing for a long time.
“Why didn’t Nixon go to court the way Al Gore did?”
Nixon was a decent man and wouldn’t put the nation through that is why. Probably one of the most unfairly demonized men in US history.
And Kevin Costner movies.
He said a court ordered recount would be too damaging to the country. You have to remember, back then, people actually loved the country.
I think I read the same book. It was about the COG - Continuation of Government in the event of a nuclear war. The redacted part was the weapons effects results.
IMHO we should have let Lemay flatten Cuba, and flattened the USSR if they used nukes. The Mark 15 multi-megaton bombs we were deploying back then, combined with our huge advantage in delivery systems means we would have won.
The Russians were emboldened to place missiles in Cuba after JFK turned chicken sh!t at the Bay of Pigs. Once he demonstrated his cowardice the Russians made their move.
And we are in for a whole month of it.
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