The Cuban Missile Crisis, Reconsidered

The Weekly Standard ^ | 10/21/2002 | Peter Schweizer

[FlyVet]

#20: Thanks, very interesting stuff and must have been a scary time to have actually been there,thanks for your service. A long time ago, I was barely out of diapers at the time. I'm just old enough to remember sonic booms, but that's about it.

[saminfl]

The 1960 election was the first election I had been old enough to vote and I missed it because I moved from California to Arizona. I was a big supporter of JFK at the time, and had grown up in a family of democrats. When the Cuban missile crisis came, I remember seeing on TV and in the press, that JFK knew the missiles were in Cuba as far back as March. The accusation said that he only initiated the crisis in October because of the congressional elections. He had been making speeches about the congress before because they would not give hime the bills he wanted.

After that, I changed my registration to Republican and in the 1964 elections spent every spare minute I had volunteering in Barry Goldwater's Tucson headquarters. I was elected precienct committeeman twice after that.

[visitor]

1960 was my first election and because my family had alway been Republican I voted for Nixon and would do it again. I had just graduated from Sewanee and joined AOCS, received my Wings of Gold March 1962, attended nuclear weapons & airborne electronics training, did CAG in Key West and reported to my squadron, VS-27, mid-July. Shortly thereafter, we were told of the Missiles going to Cuba and as volunteers we were assigned to a Detachment based out of Key West beginning September'62 to conduct photo-recon of shipping and coastal surveillance, in Nov'62 we were transfered to GITMO.

I too campaigned for Goldwater, knowing that LBJ was lying about pulling us out of Vietnam, would not have voted for him anyway.

BTW, I retired from Honeywell Information Systems and spent a lot time in Phoenix, even visited Barry's home. Sure wish Arizona would re-call McCain or at least vote him out of office ...rto