“One of the ironic things,” Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, “… is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. . . . The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Foreword, Thirteen days: A memoir of the cuban missile crisis, New York, 1999, pp. 7–15, p. 16