Quotes & Sayings About Cuban Missile Crisis

I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. The songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - which is one of his best early albums - they grow out of some of his difficulties with Suze Rotolo, and "Hard Rain," people say it had to do with the Cuban missile crisis - probably not. He denied it. I believe him, but it certainly had to do with the time. — Cass Sunstein

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. — Kitty Kelley

The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle. — Eric Schlosser

Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic program, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected. — Ken Follett

The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that - and who won't leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn't. — Arthur L. Herman

President Kennedy didn't negotiate out of the Cuban missile crisis simply because he and Khrushchev got along well. Khrushchev didn't have the cards. — Colin Powell

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war. — Ronald Kessler

Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis. — Louie Gohmert

The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis
especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate
and foreboding
horizon. — Stephen King

If you read British Foreign Office records from the 1940s, it's clear they recognised that their day in the sun was over and that Britain would have to be the "junior partner" of the United States, and sometimes treated in a humiliating way. A striking example of this was in 1962, the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy planners were making some very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The US wouldn't, because Russia's missiles couldn't reach there, but Britain would be wiped out. — Noam Chomsky

The Cuban Missile Crisis. It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure. — Dana Perino

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. — Curtis LeMay

Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war? — Bianca Jagger

We're eyeball to eyeball ... and I think the other fellow just blinked. — Dean Rusk

That was the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis - a confrontation between the two giant atomic nations, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which brought the world to the abyss of nuclear destruction and the end of mankind. From — Robert F. Kennedy

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble. — Joseph Rotblat

Regan blamed President Kennedy for not saving Cuba when he had the chance: 'We have seen an American President walk all the way to the barricade in the Cuban Missile Crisis and lack the will to take the final step to make it successful.' Presumably, the 'final step' would have been an invasion to remove Fidel Castro. — Robert Pastor

in business doing nothing is often the hardest thing. (And not just in business. Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the Cuban missile crisis, mused then 'on the frightful desire to do something, with the knowledge that not to do anything was prob. the right answer'.) — Simon Kuper

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis. — David Maraniss

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places. — David Kay

In constructing the Coast Guard, Hamilton insisted on rigorous professionalism and irreproachable conduct. He knew that if revenue-cutter captains searched vessels in an overbearing fashion, this high-handed behavior might sap public support, so he urged firmness tempered with restraint. He reminded skippers to "always keep in mind that their countrymen are free men and as such are impatient of everything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit. [You] will therefore refrain . . . from whatever has the semblance of haughtiness, rudeness, or insult." 34 So masterly was Hamilton's directive about boarding foreign vessels that it was still being applied during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Hamilton — Ron Chernow

If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign. — Graham Nelson