It was a scarey time.
Prime time address...Mom and Dad somber. I knew just enough to be scared.
We almost died. Everyone.
It was always a mystery to me why we had to put up with a puny commie country 90 miles off Florida. My history teacher 4 years after the missile crisis said that we didn’t get a deal with Khrushchev. We had to give up Jupiter C missile bases in Turkey as well.
Not to mention the Bay of Pigs invasion, when Cuban Patriots were betrayed by the Kennedy administration who allowed a gleeful (and grateful ) Castro to round them up and have many of them promptly shot.
If Kennedy had given them the proper backup, Castro could have been history there and then.
I was born November 1962 (yes my birthday is coming up) so my mom was pregnant with me when this missile crisis was going on and we lived in the worlds #1 target New York city, so before I was even born Democrats were trying to end me lol lol. Actually it was more the NY Times that alerted Castro to the Bay of pigs invasion.
bmp
“Although officials 25 years ago denied there was any such arrangement, it has long been known that such a secret deal was struck as part of the solution to the crisis.”
And there's a fun fact that I learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis just recently.When this was occurring "Che" was a top adviser to Castro...and he was urging Castro to fire the missiles at the US. The very same guy whose image adorns the t-shirts of so many college kids from Scarsdale,Palo Alto,Madison,Cambridge,the Philadelphia Main Line....
Despite the false “Camelot” myth spun up about him after his death, John F. Kennedy was a mediocre president in some ways and a terrible president in other ways. By today’s standards, he might be considered a fiscal conservative, but JFK was no conservative. Whatever the male version of whore is, JFK was it.
Bump
Afterwards, one publication announced a "crisis contest," offering to award a prize to whomever could correctly predict what sort of crisis JFK would gin up before the 1964 election.
I remember those days. We were on edge all that fall expecting nuclear war to break out at any moment! Then it all blew over, but we were still on edge.
Then on Dec 24, came an interruption on TV! News casters reported that the DEW Line in Canada had detected an incoming flying object of unknown origin! Was it a missile? Was it Russian nukes? Was this our last day on Earth? The pucker factor kicked in real quick!
Then they showed a cheap picture of Santa Claus and his sleigh with cotton ball clouds floating overhead.
I didn’t know whether to be PO’d for the scare or relieved as that was all it was.
I’ve never looked at Dec 24 in the same manner since.
JFK said, We’ve got trouble in “Que-burr!”
There was still one last way to victory: Repudiate the agreement and send the marines to overthrow Castro in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet government with which that agreement had been made. Or do it today in retaliation for Crimea.
Wish I were President. Maybe Trump if he is reelected.