Our fathers crushed fascism in four years and outlasted for half a century the evil empires of Stalin and Mao that had murdered millions. And we should be fearful of an ayatollah?
U.S. newspapers this fall will devote countless column inches and network TV will set aside endless hours to revisiting the most perilous month in the history of the republic, if not of the world.
Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to secretly install nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba began to form in his mind sometime earlier, perhaps in April of 1961.
Then it was that the new young U.S. President John F. Kennedy put a brigade of Cubans ashore to become the vanguard of a guerrilla army to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime.
The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.
Khrushchev had ordered an army of tanks into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and watched, astonished, as a U.S. president recoiled at using his power to expunge a Soviet base camp 90 miles from America’s shores.
In June, Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna and was orally mauled. In August, Khrushchev tested Kennedy again, building a wall to sever East Berlin and seal off the Soviet sector. Berliners seeking to escape were shot.
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