President Kennedy learned this lesson from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. It largely explains his triumph in the Cuban missile crisis two years later. His ruthless insistence then on thinking through what boundary conditions the decision had to satisfy gave him the knowledge of what compromise to accept (namely, tacitly to abandon the U.S. demand for on-the-ground inspection after air reconnaissance had shown such inspection to be no longer necessary) and what to insist on (namely, the physical dismantling and return to Russia of the Soviet missiles themselves). For there are two different kinds of
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
