Kennedy’s White House tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, studied and restudied endlessly since, for very good reasons. Before the missile crisis, American foreign policy officials, with the almost-unique exception of Republican CIA director John McCone, made a serious error in assuming that the Russians would never put long-range missiles into Cuba.

In recent years, meetings between surviving officials from both sides in the missile crisis have revealed that Soviet generals in Cuba in 1962 possessed short-range nuclear weapons, and at least for a time had authority from Moscow to use them if faced with an American invasion. During the crisis, a number of Washington decision-makers, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were convinced that if we invaded, the Soviet response would at the very most be restricted to the level of conventional weapons.

Kennedy, like other men with very direct military and war experience, was consistently cautious about using force. In the end, he and his advisers were able to finesse the missiles out of Cuba through the pressure of a naval blockade, avoiding a military invasion. That perspective and outlook contrasts markedly with today’s comfortable neoconservatives, anxious to use force in Iraq and elsewhere, while utterly lacking in any direct military experience.

The two domestic issues always on the front burner during the Kennedy administration were civil rights and organized crime, the former pressing in from the turbulence of American society, the latter the focus of driven Attorney-General Robert Kennedy. JFK was careful on race relations, addressing the subject decisively only when pressed to do so by a massive public march on Washington.

RFK was relentless in pursuit of the mafia, and a very large number of gangsters had been convicted and imprisoned at the time of the Dallas assassination. President Kennedy’s death abruptly ended this crusade, and nearly a decade passed before the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) legislation reignited the effort. Ironically, at several levels, President Richard M. Nixon’s war on organized crime provided effective policy implementation of Kennedy’s initiative.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 1000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos Respond to this email