QUOTES: JFK

 

AFTER THE MEETING, the President recounted the conversation to his aide Dave Powers and said:

 

“Can you imagine LeMay* saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.” (Douglass, JFK)

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 * OCTOBER 19, 1963, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Curtis LeMay, Chief of the U.S. Air Force, during a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Kennedy, lobbied hard to launch immediate air attacks into Cuba to destroy Russian ballistic missile emplacements that were being installed. The other military chiefs (Marines, Army, Navy) also were keen for an immediate military response. Kennedy, more cautious and skeptical of military involvement in the Caribbean nation following the Bay of Pigs fiasco the year before, debated with his military chiefs over the best course of action to take in addressing this provocative action on the part of the then-Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, was responding, in tit-for-tat fashion, to the earlier deployment by the U.S. of nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles in Turkey aimed at the USSR (United Soviet Socialists Republic). Save for Kennedy’s measured response in not attacking the Cuban missile sites, and also because of his back-channel private communiques with his Russian counterpart, WWIII was averted.

 

IN SECRET DOCUMENTS released decades later in the 1990s, it was learned that dozens of siloed missiles in Cuba that fall were armed with nuclear warheads. American Intelligence reports at the time incorrectly assessed that none of the missiles had their nuclear payloads installed. Had Kennedy caved to his military advisors and launched air raids into Cuba, the principle of “Use Them or Lose Them” may have been invoked, with Soviet ICBMs launched to strike the eastern seaboard of the U.S., triggering a retaliatory launch of American nuclear missiles and bombers against the Russian homeland (and China, BTW), along with a final Soviet launch into the rest of the U.S., Western Europe and other nations hosting American ballistic missiles in a civilization-ending nuclear smash. Thousands of rockets, hundreds of millions dead. And with what we now know about the probability of such a conflict creating a nuclear winter that would shroud the globe in cloud, blocking sunlight for months or years. Hundreds of millions more¹ would die from starvation as global agriculture collapsed. What a dreadful choice.

 

—Douglass, James W., JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters. Orbis Books, Maryknoll N.Y., 2008, p.25.

 

1. The world’s population in 1963 was approaching 3.2 billion.