Posted on 10/23/2021 3:55:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal President Kennedy cut with Khrushchev regarding the missiles.
Aaw come on, Humberto!' Some amigos retort. 'Gen. LeMay was a serious war-monger and NUTCASE!—the model for Gen. Ripper in Dr Strangelove! Are you saying we shoulda started a worldwide nuclear war with tens of millions incinerated to liberate a two-bit Caribbean island of barely 7 million people?!'
Nothing of the sort. In fact, the choice at the time was never between nuclear war and surrendering Cuba along with U.S. national security. This was amply recognized by some of LeMay’s fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, by a diverse array of Republican Party leaders of the time, and even by a few cold-warrior Democrats—though you’d never guess it from the 60 year Democrat-Media-Hollywood juggernaut of pro-Kennedy propaganda.
Let’s do this. Let’s bypass LeMay, “circle-back,” and look at what many of his “less Gen. Ripper-like” colleagues and contemporaries were saying at the time about Kennedy’s “resolution” to the Cuban Missile Crisis:
Joint Chiefs of Staff Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor (a Kennedy favorite) represented opposite poles of the military establishment of the time. Well:
"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of Kennedy’s deal.
"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.
Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, represented different poles of the Republican Party. Yet both agreed:
"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,” wrote Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviet squatters rights in our backyard."
"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Defense establishment stalwart Gen. Alexander Haig, who served as Asst. National Security Advisor to Kissinger during Nixon’s term and as Sec. of Defense under Reagan. "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 Americas."
Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in 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, according to Khrushchev’s own son Sergei, his father 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? That we launch missiles from Cuba?”
“Apparently.”
“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack…..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 during the Cuban missile crisis. Apparently, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach.
In his diaries, Khrushchev snickers further: "It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 8,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable." So much for the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers.
Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy.
What the situation called for was some mature and low-key “Brinksmanship,” of the type President Eisenhower used to end the Korean War and keep us out of any more during his terms. And (as President in 1962) his top understudy (former Vice President Nixon) would have been just the man to employ it against Khrushchev.
Of course, had Nixon been president since 1960, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962—in fact, there’d been no Castro regime since April of 1961.)
In any case, the genuine threat in Oct. 1962 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.”
"Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said," snickered Fidel Castro as late as 1968. "Perhaps one day they'll be made public."
"We can't say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us." That's Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.
Castro's regime was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Here’s the exact wording from Khrushchev when gleefully agreeing to Kennedy’s terms:
“You (JFK) in your turn gave (to Khrushchev) the assurances that the so-called “quarantine” would be promptly removed and that no invasion of Cuba would be made, not only by the U.S. but by other countries of the Western hemisphere either.”
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. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country!
It's a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for over half a century the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still had Castro, "defying ten U.S. Presidents!"
Nothing of the sort. Instead he’d been protected by them.
The constant fade from color to B&W to color to B&W in “Thirteen Days” was very annoying.
Kevin Costner must have been out of his mind to do that.
I did like the actor who played the F-8 recon lead pilot in that part. Seemed a natural.
He said he was sure we were going to get in a shooting war, {as were most Navy enlisted men floating around that island}.
Tensions were sky high, and no peons knew the truth about the real terms of the deal.
JFK and his baby brothers created and protected communism in South America.
It's only fitting that a demonRAT judge just released lil bobby kennedy's killer a few weeks ago.
In a just state, he'd have been cooked decades ago, but in kalifornikator...
And don't tell me it was a federal crime, he could have been prosecuted for first degree murder at the state level, but back even then...the golden state...
Bump for later comment.
It might have been a bad deal, but still a whole lot better than nuclear war.
The lionization of Kennedy by his hagiographers is one of the great academic crimes of the 20th Century.
JFK violated the Monroe Doctrine and in doing so paved the way for the communist turmoil in Latin and South America.
We paid a heavy price by allowing Castro to stay. Part of the strategy should have been Castro goes and the missiles in Italy and Turkey stay.
Well-said
I was in the fifth grade in GITMO. We were bussed home and then immediately transported with our mother to a US Destroyer that was to evacuate us to Norfolk. Everyone on base was required to maintain an evacuation bag at all times.
Our ship was laden with old munitions that were being taken to be dumped at sea when they got orders to evacuate us. The ship couldn’t keep up with the convoy, so we were on our own.
The crew slept on deck, and civilians took shifts sleeping in the bunks. The mess hall had to run 24 hours to feed everyone.
A Russian submarine tracked us the entire trip. Many on board feared they were going to attack. We found out after the fall of USSR they had orders to torpedo us if hostilities broke out between the US & USSR.
When we finally made it to Norfolk, it was bitter cold. We didn’t own any cold weather attire: only shorts & tee shirts.
We spent the winter in The States, with no communications with Dad. He did manage to talk with Mom once via shortwave radio after the hostilities eased.
I was just your average E-4 draftee over the Berlin Crisis, when Cuba came into the picture. I predicted that it wasn’t going to be a Global war over Cuba. In conversation with the guys who were with me, I told them that the Russians are big bluffers and they were in no position to support another war after all they had gone through in less than a generation ago. Everything about JFK was hyped, the media loved him just like any Democrat today. All show, not much go, and the beat goes on just like today.
Someone is re-writing history here. The Cuban missile crisis was about the Soviets putting nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. Kennedy demanded they be removed and the Soviets backed down. That was a considered a huge win.
I appreciate Fontova. But the fact is we damn near incinerated the world. About 20 years ago news surfaced that one of our destroyers was dropping “test depth charges” that had minimal killing power. They got one close to a Soviet sub, which had orders that if it came under attack to respond with its nuke-armed weapons.
Those took the asset of all three top Soviet sub officers to launch. Two agreed. Only one did not.
There is no question in my mind that had that sub launched a nuke, all sides would have released everything they had. You and I wouldn’t be here today, and neither would Fontova.
Khrushchev was being pushed very hard by the Kremlin to stand tough, and it was only a clever maneuver by JFK-—to agree to the first Khrushchev note that offered a removal of the missiles in return for a promise not to invade-—even after he got the second, harder-line message that also required we remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey-—that saved the world. We later learned that JFK promised secretly to also remove the Jupiters-—which the US was already planning to do-—but that Khrushchev could not mention it publicly-—which he did not.
So it’s nice to think that JFK could have gotten Fidel removed, but not at all what was happening historically. We were very, very lucky then.
My father-in-law was a chief warrant officer on B-52s at WPAFB at that time and he told me they were locked & loaded with nukes and airborne in rotations at all time.
Yep. This is insanity and Fontova, who is usually good, always gets carried away with his hatred for Castro.
1) We had already, before the crisis, decided to pull the Jupiters.
2) In 1960-61, half the CIA thought Castro was a good guy. On the one hand, JFK got railroaded by the CIA into an invasion that Ike had strongly stipulated that US forces would not be involved no matter what; then JFK indicated he would support the invasion; then he changed his mind after the attempt to assassinate Castro failed.
The time to get rid of Castro was immediately after he took power, but no one could get a consensus then that he was a bad guy. Nothing short of a full US invasion after that would have worked, and Kennedy (rightly) was concerned that a US invasion there would have resulted in the Soviets taking W. Berlin. That was absolutely correct, and we couldn’t have done a thing about it. So the tradeoff was Cuba for Berlin, which in the long run worked much more to our advantage.
We just missed all being incinerated. The Navy was dropping “test depth charges,” not realizing they were over a Russkie sub. It was armed with nukes, and was ordered to respond with nukes if attacked. Fortunately, it required all three of the top officers to agree, and only two did so.
One Russkie sub officer probably saved the world from nuke war.
And I don't agree with the notion the trade of a permanent communist base 90 miles off our coast was a good one.
That allowed the USSR a base to infiltrate Latin and South America with communist ideology. Could they have done so without it...yes but at a greater cost and effort.
Communism in Eastern Europe collapsed as did the USSR so Berlin came back into the Western world.
However, communism is still in Cuba along with all the problems it presents. Time will tell if it collapses.
Ha! Don’t forget, it was a real relief for Nikita.
He finally had a way out of the situation with Fidel... loaded Russian ships going TO Cuba ... then, ‘dead-heading’ BACK to the USSR.
The system was so ‘unsustainable’ (tr. costly) that Nikita must have welcomed a reasonable way-out, but quick! 🤗
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.