Those thirteen days are the only -and sufficient- testimony of a great statesman left by John F. Kennedy in just two years of management (1961-63) and 45 years old. He bursts into the White House at the head of a group of young Harvard technocrats, to the enormous noise of the military “dinosaurs” and surviving Truman and Eisenhower officials, who in turn despised them as “scented.” That biunivocal contempt nearly ended the world. In Cuba, some irresponsible adventurers enthroned in power, cause a miscalculation of the KGV and Nikita Khrushchev about the young president and his team, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Robert Kennedy, Kenny Odonnell, Ted Sorensen. Khrushchev also despised them as “intellectuals”, fledglings, elites, little busy. That mistake led the Soviets to install several dozen medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba with which in five minutes they could destroy Washington, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, among others, with a potential death toll of eighty million.
The CIA discovers them in photographs taken by a U2, the situation explodes in the cabinetand immediately crystallize the same groupings since the a wise man and their silly cousins, the neardenthales appear over the earth: hawks and pigeons, rational and radical, politicians and morons. the hyper realistic movie Thirteen days of Donaldson and the great Strangelove of Kubrick, recount the warmongering madness of the military and other hawks. Worth a curious note. Kubrick titles the work with an allusion to McNamara’s middle name Strange (his name was Robert Strange McNamara), Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, a brilliant young civilian whose role in the crisis is to keep the radicals in line, thus that this is an obvious injustice of Kubrick. After ordering a general exalted by the war and other patriotic passions to shut up, Kennedy comments “what irritates me the most is that if these are imposed, no one will be left alive to confront him with his mistake” (this is not the case in normal politics, in which idiots tend to maintain the initiative for a long time while they disappear).
While Kennedy’s enlightened entourage seeks a rational way not to destroy the human race, the others filled their mouths with gargles of principles, as the gafocracias do. The President demonstrates at every step that he has what it takes, that intelligence is not cowardice or bad character, and if he had not possessed so much courage, cold blood and brains, perhaps we would not be here. Unlike in the war of 2022, after entering the slide of death, Kennedy and Khrushchev knew they had to get out, but they were caught in a complex web and any slip would end in an atomic gale. For some reason, history does not make it clear that the military staged a quasi-coup on Kennedy, explicitly going against his instructions to Defcon 3 (Defense Condition) to Defcon 2one step away from the fatal Defcon 1.
Another extreme situation was when an American ship fired a volley of will-o’-the-wisps at another Russian, a provocation that blew up McNamara, singled out by Kennedy in none other than the fanatic den, the Pentagon. Confused by the flare attack, he yelled at the admiral in charge: “Thank goodness no Russian officer was confused like me!” In the end, there was a negotiation between the Americans and the Soviets, with the explicit exclusion of Castro, whose megalomania, madness and narcissism were too serious problems. Americans and Russians, then also the Chinese, decided to lock him up, isolate it in a strict sense so that from now on it could only cause limited damage. Today it is evident that with a psychopath of such dimensions, the best thing for the “international class struggle” was to keep him on his island-mousetrap and that he could not advance from there. Had he not been such a sick personality, he would have been able to transcend his influence, which was limited to the Latin American radical left. It could have been Stalin or Mao with serious problems for the world.
@CarlosRaulHer