Cuban Missile Crisis Quotes

I have never been a believer that serious government problems are solved by reorganization or shifting around bureaucracy.

Our Cuba policy didn't make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.

Eisenhower was quite supportive of Kennedy and Johnson in terms of foreign policy.

History will absolve me.

I think a policy of isolationism toward Cuba is misplaced and hasn't worked.

Now the Americans will realize what we in England have lived through these many years.

In 1962, President Kennedy expanded an earlier trade embargo put in place by a predecessor, President Eisenhower, to a total economic blockade, which pushed the Cubans further in Moscow's direction.

The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

We must not force an adversary into a choice between humiliating defeat and nuclear war.

I go back and think of President Kennedy, who had a military service background, but he comes into the presidency, and he's faced with a decision on the Bay of Pigs, with the C.I.A. and the military giving him data, and it turns out very badly.

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

For more than fifty years, the United States pursued a policy of isolating and pressuring Cuba. While the policy was rooted in the context of the Cold War, our efforts continued long after the rest of the world had changed.

You [President Kennedy] have made some pretty strong statements about their being defensive and that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this [the Cuban missile crisis]. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time.

Che came in 1963, shortly after I had come to power.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

President Kennedy was the greatest man I ever met, and the best friend I ever had.

Ten Presidents have tried to do something about Cuba and the statis is quo.

The presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass-destruction—constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas...

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Cuba does not have nuclear rockets but it does have moral rockets.

We took care of Kennedy

When President Kennedy took office, I was in the midst of my education.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.