I was only 14 years old that the time. Last year of Junior high before graduating to high school. Today all people remember is what they watched on TV from the Happy days town with the Fonzie.
The crisis ran for 16 October to 20 November 1962. Pretty scary time for a teenager who would in 6yrs be in the Jungles of Vietnam getting a college education in the school of jungle warfare. The photo that started the crisis from life magazine.
The background:
On October 28, 1962—that dramatic day exactly 60 years ago when Nikita Khrushchev publicly ordered the removal of nuclear ballistic missiles his forces had just installed on the island of Cuba—the Soviet premier sent a private letter to President John F. Kennedy regarding the resolution of the most dangerous superpower confrontation in modern history. Officially, the USSR withdrew the missiles in return for a vague US non-invasion-of-Cuba guarantee. Secretly, however, the crisis was resolved when President Kennedy dispatched his brother Robert to meet with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on the evening of October 27 and agree to a top-secret deal: US missiles in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba.
“I feel I must state to you that I do understand the delicacy involved for you in an open consideration of the issue of eliminating the US missile bases in Turkey,” Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy in his private note, seeking to confirm the arrangement in writing. “I take into account the complexity of this issue and I believe you are right about not wishing to publicly discuss it.”
Dobrynin gave the confidential letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy on October 29. But instead of passing it on to the president, the next day Kennedy returned the letter to the Soviet ambassador. The United States would “live up to our promise, even if it is given in this oral form,” Kennedy told him, but there would be no written record. “I myself, for example, do not want to risk getting involved in the transmission of this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published,” Dobrynin’s detailed report to the Kremlin quoted Kennedy as saying. “The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back.”
So began the epic cover-up of how the crisis actually ended and nuclear war was averted. President Kennedy was determined to keep the missile swap secret—to safeguard US leadership of the NATO alliance of which Turkey was a member, as well as to protect his political reputation, which, like his brother’s, would suffer if it became known that he had actually negotiated with the USSR in order save the world from self-destruction. To hide the quid pro quo, the president took a number of active measures: among them lying to his White House predecessors, misleading the media, and orchestrating a political hatchet job on his own UN Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson—the first, and virtually the only, adviser to urge Kennedy to consider a missile exchange to resolve the crisis diplomatically, without the use of force. After JFK’s assassination, a handful of his former White House aides sustained the cover-up. They would maintain a wall of silence that endured for more than 25 years, obfuscating the true history, and real lessons, of the Cold War crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
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