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However you phrase it, its the same agreement and effect and no amount of apple polishing and semantics by the incompetent McNamara, waterboy Sorenson and the other hagiographers from the presidential staff will make it other than what it was. It is well accepted that it was a one-for-one agreement: withdraw your missiles in Cuba and we'll withdraw ours from Turkey (this by the way, was a little detail that only appeared in the public domain months after the supposed "back-down" splashed all over the media in time for the 1962 congressional elections). I don't dispute the US 10-1 missile advantage, which with the promise on removing the Turkey missiles probably spurred Khrushchev to agree and would have made any war with Russia a bit one-sided; but then again, wasn't it JFK who campaigned in 1960 on the supposed "missile gap" caused by the Soviet numerical "advantage" over the US? I grant that the overall result could have been much, much worse but it was hardly the "winner take all staredown" that the press and the JFK legacy keepers like to project.