When John F. Kennedy Saved the World

“Kennedy proved his mettle in response to a Soviet breach of the Monroe Doctrine, defusing a crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.”

“Since a prince, then, is required to know how to assume a beastlike nature, he must adopt that of the fox and that of the lion; for a lion is defenseless against snares, and a fox is defenseless against wolves. Hence a prince ought to be a fox in recognizing snares and a lion in driving off wolves.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Part 1

In October of 1962, the world almost came to an end. At least, that is how many saw it at the time. Like 2020, it felt like an apocalyptic moment in history. In 1962, however, the fate of the world hinged on the decisions of a president who, unlike the irascible, impulsive, and ad hoc former President Donald Trump, proved to be even-tempered, steady, deliberative, and, though not without a penchant for vacillation leading up to the crisis, decisive. President John F. Kennedy saved the world.

The Cuban missile crisis crystallized a variety of geopolitical entanglements which threatened peace as two superpowers locked horns in a precarious nuclear age. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union stepped onto the world stage with two antithetical ideologies to propagate to the world. The icon of liberal capitalism found itself in perennial conflict with a totalitarian, communist regime. Their rivalry extended to a high-stakes competition to acquire state-of-the-art weapons technologies, especially in the wake of the atom and hydrogen bombs.