Cuban Missile Crisis Jfk Quotes

Antonio Veciana reveals to Schweiker Subcommittee investigator Fonzi that a CIA masterspy named Maurice Bishop was his secret control officer, initiated the founding of Alpha 66, instigated two Castro assassination plots, and planned anti-Castro raids during the Cuban missile crisis in an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy and provoke Cuban or Russian retaliation that would spark a major U.S. reaction. Veciana also reveals he saw Bishop with Lee Harvey Oswald. After years of sworn denials by the Agency, it is the first evidence that the CIA was directly involved with Oswald.

While on his multi-year, orgiastic bender of speed and steroids, JFK ran the country with appropriate amounts of paranoia, unpredictability, and raging aggression. It’s not a surprise that Kennedy’s two years as president were so stuffed full of crises and scandals. That roided-up speed freak was in a rush, baby! Kennedy invaded Cuba, played nuclear chicken with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, maniacally tried to cripple the power of the CIA and the FBI, cooked up a top-secret operation to kill Castro, belly flopped into Vietnam, tried to topple Hoffa and the Teamsters, and went on a rampage against the same gangsters that stole the presidency for him — all at the same time.

When people gather and discuss in a group, independence of thought and expression can be lost. Maybe one person is a loudmouth who dominates the discussion, or a bully, or a superficially impressive talker, or someone with credentials that cow others into line. In so many ways, a group can get people to abandon independent judgment and buy into errors. When that happens, the mistakes will pile up, not cancel out. This is the root of collective folly, whether it’s Dutch investors in the seventeenth century, who became collectively convinced that a tulip bulb was worth more than a laborer’s annual salary, or American home buyers in 2005, talking themselves into believing that real estate prices could only go up. But loss of independence isn’t inevitable in a group, as JFK’s team showed during the Cuban missile crisis. If forecasters can keep questioning themselves and their teammates, and welcome vigorous debate, the group can become more than the sum of its parts.

Rusk’s three children (particularly the two who were teenagers living in Washington with their parents in 1962) recall that their father was calm but somber and preoccupied during the crisis and that afterwards he immediately returned to his normal routine at the State Department; there was never a hint of any kind of physical or mental breakdown.7 If such a collapse had indeed occurred—and nothing of that kind remains secret very long in the sieve that is Washington, D.C.—it is inconceivable that JFK and later LBJ would have retained Rusk as secretary of state for eight years (the second-longest term in U.S. history).8 In short, there is not a shred of evidence from the tapes or any other official, public, or private source to substantiate this rather nasty piece of character assassination.

in an effort to sabotage President Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis deal with Khrushchev, Pawley provided the yacht for the Cuban raiding party that was going to bring back two Russian missile site technicians. (If the mission hadn’t failed, Luce was going to play the story big in Life in order to embarrass Kennedy.)

What would a war give you? ........ but if indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. Reply to JFK October 26 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis