JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

[6]. As we saw from Kennedy’s secretly taped meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 19, 1962, the chiefs were pushing him to launch a preemptive strike on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. They also tried to create a pretext for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union by their independent, insubordinate orders. With both sides on hair-trigger alert, the U.S. Air Force sent its bombers beyond their customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union and test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, trying to provoke the Soviets to react in a way that would counter-provoke superior U.S. forces to blanket the USSR with an all-out nuclear attack. Richard