Foreword

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“The first advice I’m going to give my successor,” he once said to his journalist friend Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.” During the missile crisis Kennedy courteously and consistently rejected the Joint Chiefs’ bellicose recommendations. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” he said. “If we… do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

“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.”

In November 1962, while the thirteen days were still fresh in his mind, Robert Kennedy dictated a memorandum to himself. “The 10 or 12 people who had participated in all these discussions,” he said, “were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst the most able in the country and if any one of half a dozen of them were President the world would have been very likely plunged into catastrophic war.”