But while President Kennedy deserves considerable credit for walking away from the precipice of thermonuclear conflict, he can also be blamed for helping to cause the crisis in the first place by trying to topple Castro. Castro later said, “Six months before these missiles were installed in Cuba, we had received an accumulation of information that a new invasion was being prepared under the sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency.”96 “It was clear to me,” Khrushchev said, “that we might very well lose Cuba if we didn’t take some decisive steps in her defense.”97 Although Mongoose helped
...more
