I will go to my grave profoundly grateful that John Kennedy was President during the Cuban missile crisis.  I think that is a saving event of the highest magnitude.  Were Nixon, or Goldwater, or Reagan, or GWB, Cheney or a McCain type, in fact any Republican president we would have had a nuclear war with Russia.

The Russian troops in Cuba had nuclear weapons under local control with instructions to use them in the event of a US invasion.  Most of Kennedy’s advisors wanted an invasion.  (Interestingly, Kennedy surrounded himself with advisors of all persuasions, not the yes-men parrots every Republican president since Eisenhower except possibly for Ford has had around them.  Have to be ideologically  pure in their lock-step style, modeled on Hitler’s Nazis.)  You can imagine what Republicans would have wanted.

With an American invading force off-shore, a Russian officer would have ordered a nuke fired off.  The pressure to fire off a nuke at Russia would have been irresistable, and off we’d have gone.

I don’t think we give enough credit to Kennedy for his approach to that conflict.  That I am writing this is a credit to him personally.