I am 67 years old and grew up during the cold war. I still remember the drills where we went to the basement of the school and put our heads between out legs. I think we all knew this was a useless exercise since my grade school and high school were less than a mile from what have been ground zero. I still remember the 22nd of November, 1963. I was a senior in high school and in math class when the message came over the school PA system that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and latter we found out he had been killed. It doesn’t really matter how you feel about JFK, yes he was a man with many flaws and you might not like his politics. But we all owe him a debt of gratitude – for those of us alive then we still are – for those who were not yet born you were.
In October of 1962 we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union was in the process of putting nuclear weapons in Cuba after the US had done the same in Turkey. The Pentagon wanted to attack but it was known that Soviet commanders had tactical nuclear weapons they could launch without authorization from Moscow. Kennedy ignored the Generals and was able to reach an agreement with Moscow and a nuclear war was averted. We owe our civilization and probably even our planet to JFK. Now I have no way of knowing what LBJ would have done but I think we are fortunate that it was JFK who was calling the shots at that point instead.