Successors Quotes
He had tripled the size of Rus, pulling together the disparate areas which had been under the thrall of the Golden Horde. The custom was when the Grand Prince died he left parts of his dominion to each of his sons and grandsons. However. Ivan changed that pattern and wanted one son to be the ruler over all of what was becoming a large unified state. After that his pattern was followed by all the Czars until the Russian Communist Revolution in 1917." Ivan the Great
Gelb was referring to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963. The Russians had installed ICBMs in Cuba and more were coming by sea. WWIII could have started with a misstep by the United States or the Soviet Union. President rejected the advice of some hawks to attack and/or invade Cuba and be ready to attack Russia with nuclear weapons. Instead, he authorized a naval blockade of all ships and planes going in or out of Cuba. There were some negotiations with the Russians, and in a few days, the Russians dismantled and removed the missiles from Cuba and we lifted the naval blockade. The perception was that Kennedy faced down the Russians who capitulated when faced with firmness and force. Actually, Kennedy gave the Russians much more. He agreed to remove the American ICBM Jupiter missiles from Turkey. But if that were known in America, the right wing would criticize Kennedy mercilessly for appeasing and capitulation to the Russians. The Russians agreed to keep it secret, and the Executive Branch classified it top secret and kept the entire deal from the public. 50 years later, Gelb, one of the few people in the government then who knew the entire deal, wrote this article pointing out that there was a serious danger to what we did to make that deal a secret. Many hawks took the Cuban Missile Crisis as proof that the Russians would back down when faced with a fait accompli and would not retaliate. They then formulated much American foreign and military policy on the assumption that the Russians will capitulate when faced with our tough unilateral terms. The reality of course was just the opposite. The Russians would only agree to a peaceful solution if we withdrew all our missiles that were threatening them and end the naval blockade of Cuba. The Russians got us to remove our missiles for the relatively cheap price of removing from Cuba just a few missiles that they had just installed. Kennedy looked like the strong hero who stood up to the Russians while in reality, he and our military and state department lost a diplomatic contest of sorts. Kennedy apologists argue that because America had developed longer range ICBMs, the Jupiter Missiles in Turkey were not that important, and Kennedy really gave up nothing of value. The Kennedy team clearly didn’t want to argue that point in a public debate, and chose secrecy where the enemy clearly knew the whole story, but our allies, our civilians, our politicians and even most of our military were in the dark.
Things were looking bleak for the British & they were dependent on material help from the U.S. to give them a chance. The British navy was one of the largest and most powerful in the world & this cable was a veiled threat that if U.S. military aid did not come, England could not defend the country in the air, Churchill might be kicked out of office & his successors surrender to Germany turning over the British fleet to Hitler giving Germany control of the seas & with their ally Japan a naval force stronger than America’s. Anglophiles would not describe it as a threat, but merely a statement of the reality of the time. Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, a Nazi sympathizer & some American military officers were opposed to aid to Britain seeing it as a lost cause. Roosevelt, however, acting on his own marvelous instinct, his advice from Harry Hopkins, and his back-channel contacts in England, decided that if armed Britain could hold out. He turned out to be right.
