The death of President Kennedy is the first 'public' fact of which I have some memory. I had just turned five at the time (a little more than a month before). I have some earlier personal memories, including a happy one of playing around on a dumpster outside our family home -- then an apartment building in East Hartford. The big green dumpster was a blast. My big brother and I crawled around on it like it was a jungle gym. But by 1963 we have moved into a nice ranch style house in Enfield, with an actual backyard, and our own trash cans. No shared dumpster. Dad was working second shift at the time. He could now afford to commute to and from work from a suburb a fair distance to the north of East Hartford (he had moved us to the apartment at a time when it was necessary for him to walk to and from work there.) To be precise, he could afford to become a member of a five-man car pool that did so. He thus used his own car only once a week, leaving it with Mom the other day...
Posts
JFK authorized the Attorney General, his brother, to cut the deal that the US for years thereafter would deny it had ever made, the deal agreeing that the US missiles in Turkey would be dismantled in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Robert Kennedy wrote the following of the moment of the crucial contact, with Dobrynin. "We have to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases [in Cuba] would be moved. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those basis, then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action, but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians. He then asked me about Khrushchev's other proposal dealing with removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo --- not deal of this kind could be made ... If some time elapsed --- and ... I me...
Today is the 53d anniversary of the day that President John Kennedy's advisors first informed him of the photographic evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. Thus, Oct. 16th might be considered the date of the start of the crisis that was resolved 12 days later, when Nikita Khrushchev publicly agreed to the dismantling or withdrawal of those missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis is important not only as one intense incident within the long Cold War, a stand-off stretching from 1945 to 1987. It is important as an example of game theory playing itself out in great power politics. The key was that the President had solid domestic political reasons not to be seen making concessions to the Soviet in return for the withdrawal of these missiles. Nonetheless, he also understood that he had to make some sort of concessions to NK in return for the withdrawal of these missiles. The key concession was successfully kept secret not only at that time, but for more than a decade thereafter: ...
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 juveni...
I have nothing to add to what has been said about the significance of this day, 50 years ago, in U.S. history. Yet on this day I can't imagine myself devoting my blog entry to some other subject, so let's see if I can scare up an unusual angle. Well ... there's a striking fact involving the National Football League. One of the weird facets of the weekend following the murder of President Kennedy was that the NFL proceeded with its full schedule of games. Nothing else went on as normal that weekend, but football did. Sports Illustrated magazine ran this on that subject on the 30th anniversary . Of course, there was nothing normal about that Sunday. Less than an hour before kickoff of the early games., Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. In Pittsburgh, the Bears and the Steelers played to a 17-17 tie. "Before the game you're usually talking about picking up blitzes," says former Pittsburgh running back Dick Hoak. "Instead, we were saying, 'Di...