Fifty years ago the world was on the brink of a catastrophe due to events set in motion over many years.
Fifty years ago cooler heads prevailed.
Fifty years ago the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.
What took place in 1962 was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the two major global super powers in the post-World War II era, the United States and the Soviet Union, were face-to-face in a nuclear stand-off.
I cannot imagine what the world would have looked like if the situation in Cuba had gone literally nuclear. What kind of existence would my parents have had in a United States decimated by a nuclear weapon? Or would they have even existed? My mom and dad were under the age of 1 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and living in the Dallas Area, which was within the range of one of the Soviet ICBMs.
I put this post under the tagline 2012 Politics because it does play into our politics today.
In the Presidential campaign of 1960, then-Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that then-Senator John F. Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to deal with the perceived Soviet aggression.
In 2008, a long standing member of the US Senate made that claim against a junior Senator regarding the complex issues facing this nation.
Both President Kennedy and Obama rose to the occasion.
Kennedy made the call to not invade Cuba despite his military advisors urging him to do so. In the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was scribbling on a notepad out the consequences of a US led invasion into Cuba to dismantle the missile sites. An invasion into Cuba had the potential of triggering a nuclear strike on the US and in return the US would obliterate the Soviet Union back to the Stone Age. The best case scenario would have been that the US would lose one-third of its population in a nuclear strike… and they would have emerged as the winner.
In Kennedy’s mind the question was, is that really a war you want to win? A nuclear war that not only would have decimated the United States and destroyed the Soviet Union, but also impacted the world due to nuclear fallout and the associated sudden winter that would have taken place.
Like Kennedy, this President understands the consequences of his decisions whether they are good, bad, or other. He has taken heat for the decisions his administration has made from all over the political spectrum. I wish that this President was more aggressive when it came to the Health Care Bill, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Repeal, and pushing for better Stimulus Bill that was focused on restoring and rebuilding our infrastructure but it got done.
Other people who identify with me politically on the Left wish that he was more definitive when it came to immigration policy, economics and taxation, and foreign policy. I think they wish for Superman. They forget that he is just one man and there are other factors in play such as the makeup of the House and Senate. If we want the things we want, we have to put the mechanisms in place, tell our elected officials what we want, and then actively campaign for them.
The Right… well, we don’t need to go into detail about their criticisms of this President. Most of them are baseless and devolve into conspiracy theory land. The best way to describe their criticisms is in one quote: “Our goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term President.”
The most difficult decision that this President made was sending Navy SEALs to neutralize Osama bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan. Like Kennedy’s decision in 1962, this President made the right call and even that had uncertainty surrounding it. It was a calculated risk that paid off with the death of the mastermind of the 9-11 Attacks.
Kennedy was right to not to invade Cuba and both sides acknowledged that nuclear brinksmanship was not a wise policy. Soviet Primer Nikita Khrushchev recognized that he had aligned his country with a mad man in Fidel Castro who was willing to let Cuba be wiped off as part of some larger goal.
Today we need to remember these lessons especially in this upcoming election. Mitt Romney is aligned with people whose goals are to obliterate the middle class for their own personal gain, pursue a foreign policy that drives us deeper in debt and places more of our service members in dire harm because “these people are bad and we don’t like what they do”, and destroys the progress that Women and LGBTs have made in the last 50 years. Whatever those goals are, Mr. Romney does not care if it hurts the most vulnerable of our citizens.
Cooler heads must prevail in this election. Similar as they did 50 years ago when the stakes were much higher.
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