John F. Kennedy

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963, and the decision-maker in the two Berlin confrontations of 1961 and in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. His significance for this Journey is procedural as much as political. During the thirteen days of October 1962 he convened an ad hoc group of advisers — later known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council — and had their deliberations recorded on a concealed taping system, with the result that the crisis is one of the very few episodes of high-level decision-making under extreme pressure for which a near-verbatim record exists. The tapes show him repeatedly resisting the majority preference for air strikes, pressing on what the other side would then have to do next, and choosing a naval quarantine partly because it left further steps available. They also show him accepting a private commitment to remove American missiles from Turkey that was concealed from the public and from most of his own advisers.
3. Knowledge
4. John F. Kennedy
5. The Cuban missile crisis
6. Connections
7. The Cuban missile crisis
8. The Cuban missile crisis
9. The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link
10. John F. Kennedy
11. Nikita Khrushchev
12. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
13. Cuba
14. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
15. John F. Kennedy
16. Nikita Khrushchev
17. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
18. The B-59 submarine incident
19. Evidence
20. Named as the source for the existence and character of a near-verbatim record of the ExComm deliberations, including Kennedy's resistance to the air-strike option and the concealed Turkish missile understanding. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; no recording or transcript was heard or read in this session and nothing is quoted from them.