John F. Kennedy:] Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring down an adversary to the choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.

No blare of trumpets announces a modern crisis. In these matter-of-fact times, a telephone call will do.

A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.

John F. Kennedy:] Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring down an adversary to the choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.

Unlike the American President's chronic problem of finding ways to give away the country's permanent economic surplus, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's was the problem of rationing permanent scarcity.