So When did the Cuban Missile Crisis become Kennedy’s “Victory?”

23 And then he destroyed the country with the Immigration Bill, it just took a bit longer.

1965 - The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS, Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89–236) abolished the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the U.S. since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. It was proposed by U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY: His paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother were German Jews. This was the culminating moment in Celler's 41-year fight to overcome restriction on immigration to the U.S. based on national origin.), co-sponsored by U.S. Senator Philip Hart (D-MI) and heavily supported by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). The Hart-Celler Act replaced the EQA with a preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. It marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. The law as it stood then excluded Asians and Africans and preferred northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern ones. At the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s the law was seen as an embarrassment by, among others, POTUS #35 JFK, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". Some historians thought that JFK saw a chance for retaliation in response to the anti-Irish Catholic bigotry by WASPs he encountered as a younger man. After Kennedy's assassination, POTUS #36 LBJ signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as a symbolic gesture. In order to convince the American populace - the majority of who were opposed to the act - of the legislation's merits, its liberal proponents assured that passage would not influence America's culture significantly. POTUS #36 LBJ called the bill "not revolutionary", SoS Dean Rusk estimated only a few thousand Indian immigrants over the next 5 years, and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, hastened to reassure the populace that the demographic mix would not be affected; these assertions would later prove wildly inaccurate.

Thanks SeekAndFind, but this is revisionist nonsense.

"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.

Uh, no.

"Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament" published posthumously in 1974, touched only briefly on the Robert Kennedy-Dobrynin meeting, but included the flat statement (on p. 512) that "President Kennedy said that in exchange for the withdrawl of our missiles, he would remove American missiles from Turkey and Italy," although he described this "pledge" as "symbolic" since the rockets "were already obsolete." [The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: Anatomy of a Controversy, "Anatoly F. Dobrynin's Meeting With Robert F. Kennedy, Saturday, 27 October 1962", by Jim Hershberg]

Khrushchev lost his job as a consequence of his disastrous handling of the Missile Crisis, but that led to even more confronational leadership in Breschnev, which was the main downside of the affair. During the height of the crisis, Castro ordered the use of a Soviet guided missile to shoot down a U2 spy plane during overflight of Cuba, destroying the plane and killing the pilot. That was an escalation that brought the two main powers to the brink of war, and motivated, ultimately, their agreement for the removal of the missiles.

JFK had already rolled over and gellied up his cheeks during the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs debacle, and then settled on projects like the Moon race (announced September 12th, 1962; "Tractors for Peace" to get the Brigade released didn't bear fruit until Christmas of that year) to compete in the court of public opinion. But the Soviet nukes left Cuba, and we've never shed our dearest blood invading the sugar cane 'paradise' of Cuba so that some mobsters could resume control over gambling and prostitution there.

I found one ridiculous source online that said that Nixon led the opposition in Congress to "Tractors for Peace", which is an interesting claim, considering Nixon wasn't *in* Congress after Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. I wonder what their FR nick is?

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