John F. Kennedy

person · earth

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.

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