Christopher Manion earned a Ph.D. in government from Notre Dame. For many years he was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, chaired by the late Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.
Two weeks ago, commenting on the war in Ukraine, Joe Biden said “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
And this week is the sixtieth anniversary of that crisis.
JFK’s confrontation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 arose from the discovery in July that Russia had placed ballistic missiles in Cuba. It was resolved just days before the 1962 midterm election, when Kennedy successfully persuaded Khrushchev to remove them.
My focus here is on the political impact of that confrontation.
A Deal That Saved the Democrats’ Mid-Term Fortunes …
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