Memorial Day for as Long as I Can Remember

[Octafish]

22. JFK worried about the generals. His own generals.

JFK Cuba crisis tapes released

By Jon Marcus
A ssociated Press

BOSTON (AP) -117 ‹ At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, one of President John F. Kennedy's top military commanders warned him that failing to invade the island would be like backing down to Hitler's initial demands in Europe.

"This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay told Kennedy on Oct. 19, 1962, according to newly declassified White House tape recordings released Thursday.

LeMay's comment "was an amazing thing to say to any president, but it was a particularly amazing thing to say to this president," said Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where the tape recordings were released. "It's a deep personal insult."

Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time of the 1938 Munich conference, where the British and French agreed to let Nazi Germany take land from Czechoslovakia in exch ange for a short-lived promise of peace. The elder Kennedy's support of appeasement later was strongly criticized and may have cost him any hope of running for national office.

LeMay, like other military leaders, advocated immediate military intervention to destroy the Soviet missiles and unfinished silos that had been detected by aerial reconnaissance in Cuba. He said blockading ships bound for Cuba, as other presidential advisers urged, would lead to war anyway.

President Kennedy, who privately called LeMay "field marshal," did not respond to the remark and the meeting went on to cover other military and diplomatic issues.

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http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1373492/tapes-from-cuban-missile-crisis-reveal-insult-by-k.html