Thirteen Days Quotes

“Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“In the nuclear age, superpowers make war like porcupines make love—carefully.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“It was not only for Americans that he was concerned, or primarily the older generation of any land. The thought that disturbed him the most, and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies. Our generation had. But the great tragedy was that, if we erred, we erred not only for ourselves, our futures, our hopes, and our country, but for the lives, futures, hopes, and countries of those who had never been given an opportunity to play a role, to vote aye or nay, to make themselves felt.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“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.”8”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Recent scholarship confirms the portrait of John F. Kennedy sketched by his brother in Thirteen Days: a remarkably cool, thoughtful, nonhysterical, self-possessed leader, aware of the weight of decision, incisive in his questions, firm in his judgment, always in charge, steering his advisers perseveringly in the direction he wanted to go. “We are only now coming to understand the role he played in it,” writes John Lewis Gaddis, the premier historian of the Cold War.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Exasperation over our struggle in Vietnam should not close our eyes to the fact that we could have other missile crises in the future—different kinds, no doubt, and under different circumstances. But if we are to be successful then, if we are going to preserve our own national security, we will need friends, we will need supporters, we will need countries that believe and respect us and will follow our leadership.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’”6”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“the President was deciding, for the U.S., the Soviet Union, Turkey, NATO, and really for all mankind….”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Kennedy was not impressed by military objections. The Bay of Pigs had taught the President to distrust the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “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.”4 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.”5”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Our goal is not the victory of might but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this Hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Instead, so long as Kennedy lived and Khrushchev stayed in power, there was steady movement toward the relaxation of tension—the American University speech, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the establishment of the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“decision-making. Far from placing the nation and the world at risk to protect his own reputation for toughness, he probably would have backed down, in public if necessary, whatever the domestic political damage might have been. There may be, in short, room here for a new profile in courage—but it would be courage of a different kind from what many people presumed that term to mean throughout much of the Cold War.7”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“That was the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis—a confrontation between the two giant atomic nations, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which brought the world to the abyss of nuclear destruction and the end of mankind. From”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“during the afternoon and evening of that first day, Tuesday, that we began to discuss the idea of a quarantine or blockade.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“And so we argued, and so we disagreed - all dedicated, intelligent men, disagreeing and fighting about the future of their country, and of mankind”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“And so we argued, and so we disagree - all dedicated, intelligent men, disagreeing and fighting about the future of their country, and of mankind”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“important it was to be respected around the world, how vital it was to have allies and friends. Now, five years later, I discern a feeling of isolationism in Congress and through the country, a feeling that we are too involved with other nations, a resentment of the fact that we do not have greater support in Vietnam, an impression that our AID program is useless and our alliances dangerous. I think it would be well to think back to those days in October 1962.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Opinion, even fact itself, can best be judged by conflict, by debate. There is an important element missing when there is unanimity of viewpoint. Yet that not only can happen; it frequently does when the recommendations are being given to the President of the United States. His office creates such respect and awe that it has almost a cowering effect on men. Frequently I saw advisers adapt their opinions to what they believed President Kennedy and, later, President Johnson wished to hear.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“He talked about the miscalculations that lead to war. War is rarely intentional. The Russians don’t wish to fight any more than we do. They do not want to war with us nor we with them. And yet if events continue as they have in the last several days, that struggle—which no one wishes, which will accomplish nothing—will engulf and destroy all mankind.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Missile crews were placed on maximum alert. Troops were moved into Florida and the southeastern part of the United States. Late Saturday night, the First Armored Division began to move out of Texas into Georgia, and five more divisions were placed on alert. The base at Guantanamo Bay was strengthened. The Navy deployed one hundred eighty ships into the Caribbean. The Strategic Air Command was dispersed to civilian landing fields around the country, to lessen its vulnerability in case of attack. The B-52 bomber force was ordered into the air fully loaded with atomic weapons. As one came down to land, another immediately took its place in the air.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“what, if any, circumstance or justification gives this government or any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Late Saturday night, the First Armored Division began to move out of Texas into Georgia, and five more divisions were placed on alert. The base at Guantanamo Bay was strengthened. The Navy deployed one hundred eighty ships into the Caribbean. The Strategic Air Command was dispersed to civilian landing fields around the country, to lessen its vulnerability in case of attack. The B-52 bomber force was ordered into the air fully loaded with atomic weapons. As one came down to land, another immediately took its place in the air.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis