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RFK Reviews 1962 Cuban Crisis

Oct. 13, 1964 - Robert F. Kennedy (pictured in 1962) said today that President Kennedy rejected a proposal to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis of October 1962 because his military intelligence advisers told him that 25,000 Cuban civilians would be killed.

“There were people who probably weren’t Communists,” Mr. Kennedy said, “and weren’t involved in bringing the missiles into Cuba.”

Bombing the sites would have been the “safer way,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We would have gone in and knocked out all their bases — there wasn’t any question about it — and then started bargaining,” he said.

But he characterized this proposal as a “Pearl Harbor in reverse.”

He said that President Kennedy had chosen the blockade because “of his education, because of his moral training, and because of his belief in what is right and what is wrong.”

“If President Kennedy’s life stood for anything,” he continued, “it was the idea that one person can make a difference.”

Mr. Kennedy, who is seeking a New York Senate seat, made these remarks in an unusual setting. He was speaking to about 1,000 nuns at a meeting of parochial schoolteachers from the Rockville Centre Diocese. It was his only public appearance of the day. He received so enthusiastic a reception from the nuns that the Right Rev. Msgr. Edgar P. McCarren, who introduced him, quoted an American politician who once said that “all bishops and monsignors are Republicans, and all nuns are Democrats.” The politician in question was President Kennedy speaking to a Catholic Youth Organization one week before he was murdered.

When Robert Kennedy began his speech, he recalled campaigning with his brother in 1960. Every time the candidate passed a Catholic school, Mr. Kennedy said, “all the nuns would come out to the front of the yard to see us, and some of them would jump, and then always in the background, standing on the steps with his arms folded would be the monsignor.”

After he finished speaking, both the candidate and his wife were surrounded by waves of nuns seeking autographs. Mr. Kennedy broke away first and reached the car. He watched for a moment while his wife continued to sign pieces of paper.

“Ethel,” he finally said, “I’m the candidate.”



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