Essays on Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 presents an integrated, comprehensive record of U.S. decisionmaking during the most dangerous U.S.-Soviet confrontation in the nuclear era. Some 3,400 unique records relevant to the crisis, totalling approximately 17,500 pages, are reproduced in the microfiche. Much of the documentation focuses on U.S. decisionmaking during what Robert Kennedy called the “Thirteen…

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1987 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He joined the navy after his graduating from Harvard in 1940. During World War II, he showed remarkable bravery when Japanese destroyers rammed the USS PT-109. Despite his own considerable injuries, he led several survivors in   to safety. He represented Massachusetts, first in…

The Realist Perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis In October of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union reached a near-nuclear experience when in a short fourteen days; Russia was caught building nuclear missile bases in Cuba. With the Second World War just barely in the past, the United States was still on their…

INTRODUCTION      From Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba on New Year’s Day of 1959 until the mid-1960s, the U.S. government resorted to economic and political destabilization, propaganda, manipulation, sabotage, and assassination plots to remove him. It was one of the most extensive, sustained, and ultimately futile covert action programs by one country against…