Cuba Missile Crisis

Over at Yahoo!Answers, I fielded the following question, "How did the Cuban Missile Crisis fit into the Cold War? How does it help one to understand the cold war?"

My answer: "The Kennedy administration found it necessary to make a concession but impossible to be SEEN making a concession. They publicly claimed they wouldn't offer any tit-for-tat regarding withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba, but privately through a back channel they DID offer a tit-for-tat in connection with missiles in Turkey. And that was accepted."

Added. They had to keep this back channel a secret so they could get headlines that said things like "Reds Back Down on Cuba." Returning to my yahoo answer....

"Robert Caro has a good account of this in his latest volume of his biography of LBJ, who was of course VP at the time.

"How it helps one understand the cold war is that it offers an example of a dangerous combination of power politics and juvenile posturing."

Here is the pertinent passage from the Caro book.

pp. 218 et seq

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