Was in Key West at the time, dad was temporarily stationed there.

That was too close.

I was in the upper Midwest.

Even at my very young age I could feel the collective tension in the community, it was as thick as the humidity. Some of my lasting memories are the smell of mildewed concrete and carpet, insane humidity and ocean water was warm, unlike northern New England where I was from. And people talked funny.

I remember sitting in a high school class wondering if the Russians were going to nuke us at any minute. Years later we found out that it was an even closer call than we knew at the time.

We waited in our HS basement cafeteria.
I was concerned that I may die a virgin....

About being bombed, invaded and killed. I can’t imagine how the Cuban kids felt being there and facing all kinds of challenges. It’s was a scary time but so was the 60’s in general. Assassinations, War rumors and then Viet Nam became a reality for my high school days.

At a critical point, the USSR sent a conciliatory cable. Those in the US War Room were relieved. Not long thereafter, a belligerent cable was received from the USSR. Many of those gathered in the War Room were stunned, thinking that an escalation was inevitable. RFK suggested that the US respond to the first cable and ignore the second cable. That strategy worked, and the USSR moderated its position.

The whole movie was very well done, on this subject
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146309/

Get me Bruce Greenwood, dammit!

No really. Bruce Greenwood probably has more experience from playing presidents than Stinky McFartmaker has from being one.

in National Treasure: Book of Secrets and
Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Even though we knew how it ended, so tense watching it.

... it couldn't result in a nuclear exchange.

Later I learned that GHWB was involved in it

Bush Sr. Protecting his oil wells.

It was really hairy.

Last edited Wed Jan 7, 2026, 12:41 AM - Edit history (4)

Living in NYC... I was 9.
target #2 after DC?
Yikes!

I was thinking of The NY Times front page and photos...But it wouldn't have been in my classroom yet unlike a few grades later...so maybe my dad brought it home.

ETA Just looked at the NYT front pages. 🤔 Maaaaybe one or two look familiar. But maybe not! No biggie

Small town 50 miles from a large Air Force Base was home.
My brother 3 years older told me that if I saw a bright light or big cloud in the direction of the Air base, then we were done. It was a bit of a stretch, but scary.

but I have studied it later as a student of history,
and read Robert Kennedy's book about it, 'Thirteen Days', among other things later

which left out the secret negotiating point that the U.S. agreed to withdraw
medium range missiles from Turkey,
(which we considered obsolete at the time, and had already planned
to de-commision), in return for the withdrawl of Russian missiles from Cuba.


(Later on, my right-wing raised best friend brought this point up
as a supposed support for the position that
President Kennedy had actually 'buckled under' to Russia)....

Yes, still glad that we had some 'smart people'
in control of the executive branch at that time,
so that I could later be born!


((and shuddering now with Drowsy-Diaper-Don
with his finger on the 'nuclear trigger'
who seems to hate ALL of us, even his own supporters!))

were military dependents. We wondered every day if our fathers would be coming home that night. Living at a ground zero makes one pay VERY close attention to the scary news.

I remember duck and cover drills.

K&R!

OS

Lives 15 miles from an Orlando area SAC base. We practiced duck and cover daily.
Peace ☮️

My grandmother had the TV on always during the day and the networks would have reports. I remember the adults were all very spooked. Especially on the last day of it. The anxiety was that there was going to be a nuclear war with Russia at any moment. I was told to stay around the house. My uncle would come in from barn chores and milking and quietly ask his mother whether there was any news. They would speak quietly to each other and then my grandmother would just stand still and quiet for a few moments and look at me.

Were you in Florida ?

Thankfully still mostly oblivious if you ask my wife.

My father was a career Marine. He had been a fighter pilot in the South Pacific in WWII, so I remember him at the time preparing to fly a plane to the US, as they thought the East Coast would be nuked, and the American military outside the country would need to be the ones to defend the country. My husband's father was career Air Force stationed at the Pentagon at the time. My husband remembers practicing nuclear bomb drills. I didn't have that worry in North Africa, but I remember being scared that I would not see my father again.

Somewhere back in my childhood I spoke to a mother of one of my friends who lived on Guantanamo at the time. She told me that in an attack, they were to move forward in their attempt to escape (ships/planes, I am not quite sure now). If their kids were behind them on the base, then they had to hope that someone would grab their kids to escape and keep moving forward to be rescued. In return, she was to grab kids nearby and keep moving to safety. How scary it must have been for military families stationed there at the time.

Makes it real.

I was eleven in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missiles_of_October

I was 11 years old

My mom was out of town, visiting her sister. We practiced "duck and cover." It was all very scary but I had no idea how scary it really was until much later.

Lots of people worried that D.C. would be the first target.

the news together on TV. My parents and grandma were so serious and somber, it scared us. We had been having those nuclear drills at school where we had to get down under our desks and the teachers closed the drapes and turned off the lights (good lord ). I remember all the information floating around about bomb shelters.

The black circle w the three yellow triangles inside it?

of the post office by the basement stairs. With your reminder of those signs, those images popped right back up in my memory. Guess our lives continue to have all kinds of uncertainty swirling around us.

When the news was broken to us, so you better believe I remember it to this day. We were told that we could be reassigned to unknown locations, but for now, our transfers to our next duty station were still operative. But if reassignment orders were issued, we would be given a 48-hour leave to go home and put our affairs in order.. That got our attention in a hurry.

Scary times.

I was in 7th grade (junior high school at the time, middle school now). I remember sitting in an assembly, listening to the news and wondering if WW3 was about to break out. It was riveting.

My dad was in Korea as a forward observer and went to the DMZ and they set explosives to blow bridges behind his unit’s position. My uncle was in the navy and ships were blockading Cuba with landing craft waiting to leave FL. Tanks and APCs took their positions In Germany and border with Czech republic and saw the Soviet tanks on the other side. Any wrong move could have started it.

I was 11 years old and afraid I'd never get out of the 6th Grade.

If he's willing to launch an all-out invasion of Venezuela to shift attention away from his failing domestic policies and problems with his Epstein affairs, there should be no failure of imagination for all to realize he is quite capable of starting WWIII for him to willingly go out in a blaze of nihilistic glory as he comes closer to his final curtain call in his demented reality TV show. His lunatic antics were on full display as he addressed a Republican audience at his newly named Trump/Kennedy center. I am constantly reminded of my childhood "duck and cover" drills. How can anyone continue to allow him to control nuclear weapons?

I was 19 years old and 2 months into my freshman year of college.

I checked out the basement of our house to see if it was good enough for my family to survive a nuclear war. In those days, some wealthy people had fallout shelters. Not my family. I was very scared.

if that was a major provocation for Communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald. It was 6 months before Oswald tried to assassinate a fierce anti-Communist in Dallas, former general Edwin Walker, and 13 months before the JFK assassination.

Those things happened back when Communism was spreading which isn't so much of an issue now.

So I was on a bus going southward on Broadway but in the ?150s or 140s (streets) in Manhattan. I happened to glance out the window.

Now it was a newish sportsbar named; referencing I think the Football game play- ? "2 Minute Warning". (Or 3? )

Well! The fear, and physical sensation that shot through me for a second!!
Of course, then, l realized ...but Woah!

We never did the duck and cover. We were marched into our gymnasium. Go figure!

In NYC we had them ? once a month for 2+ decades ! Although maaaybe they lessened the amount per year bc I don't remember hearing them at work, or previously even at College early mid '70s.
OK, gotta look that up.

These things would be howling away!!! Jesus Effin' .....
In a big city sooo loud, so pervasive! Terrifying!

Somewhere in the 1980's they stopped! Reagan's time.
I didn't even realize it at first. Then it was like wait a minute.... 🤔

AI sez they ended in ? 62 in NYC bc people said they spooked people more. (i admit I could be wrong) I'd almost swear they went on way longer. Well may be not! What could I have been remembering. There's nothing to compare them to, and I'm a pretty cognizant person.

Until last year they were tested every Monday at noon. For some reason they switched to Tuesday at noon.
Older people refer to them at Air Raid Sirens. The younger folks call them Tornado Warning Sirens.

and the teacher prepared us for nuclear war. Some in the class would be instructed to walk down a hill to buses to get home. The rest were told they would walk to their homes.

We knew this was not another under the desk drill but the real thing. We were a few miles from the Boeing plant so we already knew we were a target. Whew!

I had "end of the world" dreams for years.

I was about 9 and we had regular bombing drills and Scurrying down to the school basement .

The nightly news grim. Even being so young I knew this was serious . My parents discussed politics at the dinner table so I understood what was going on.

practically a declaration of war." I focused. I remember.

I guess us kids were kept in the dark.
Probably for the best.
My dad had been a B29 pilot in Korea. I don't know what he was flying back then. He went to Vietnam several times when we lived in Japan and always brought home cheap junk. He would be gone for several weeks. That stuff ended up being my parent's home decor.


But no, I didn't know anything about the Cuba missile crisis. But we sure knew about John Glenn Naively, I went outside to "see his rocket". John Glenn circling the globe was a big deal in our house. So, I wasn't kept in the dark about everything.

We had Japanese TV in Japan, so when the TV was on, it was always in Japanese. If the TV was on, we were usually watching Japanese dubbed cartoons or Lassie. (Lassie may have been in English. I learned to sing the Mickey Mouse song in Japanese) Any news would have been in Japanese and my parents didn't watch Japanese news.

I didn't know anything about Cuba (that it was a communist country etc) until I was much older. In 7th grade, my parents forced me to take Spanish, when I wanted to take French. Spanish became the most popular language offered in schools because of Cuba. However, even when I was in 7th and taking Spanish, I didn't know why. It was during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, so I thought that was why I was forced to take it. Since Mexico was a rapidly growing neighboring country that could host the Olympics, we should learn that language, as opposed to French, which was across the ocean. We watched parts of the Olympics in Spanish at school.

It wasn't until, I was in HS, in the 1970s, that I learned about communism in Latin America and that was why everyone was taking Spanish. We were told that Latin America was one the largest threats to the US and schools were encouraging everyone to take Spanish and familiarize themselves with the countries. Jobs were opening up for people who spoke Spanish etc.

I was 7 in 1962 and don't remember the Missile crisis either. I DID remember November 1964 though . Dad was stationed at Yokota, but had also been in the Marines in Korea (switched from Marines to AF). I also remember the TV shows all in Japanese, there was nudity too.

wanted to flee to a safer place.

And just wrapping up basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, MO and there was no lockdown. We were simply told that for now our reassignments were still in place but to understand that our status could change rapidly. If that happened, we would be given a 48 hour leave to go home and put our affairs in order.

as our band practiced a halftime show. It was scary because Tampa was publicized as a certain nuclear target if a war started. McDill AFB was headquarters for the U.S. Strategic Air Command.

I was in elementary school though, and didn't really pay much attention. I do remember the tension, even though I didn't fully comprehend it.

My Mom had to explain it to me because I didn't get why all the adults were so scared.

After it was over, I guess several years later, we realized that it was all a bluff. Khrushchev and the Russians were bluffing I mean. They never had the firepower to bomb us with nukes. Maybe they had one or 2 bombs, that was it. We had way more firepower to bomb the USSR if it came down to it, but they had almost nothing. The only thing they could have accomplished was to get Cuba smashed to smithereens.

I believe our President at the time bears some responsibility for causing the crisis, owing to his very poor performance at the Vienna summit, which inspired Khrushchev to regard him as an unprepared lightweight who could easily be pushed around.

JFK was better than Nixon of course, but JFK is in my opinion the second worst Democratic President of the 20th century after Woodrow Wilson. He almost stumbled into nuclear war. That he didn't do so was lucky, but he motivated an arms race that might not have taken place with a more responsible leader.

Nobody can approve of the Kennedy assassination but Lyndon Johnson was a vastly superior President to his predecessor.

Kennedy really didn't know that the Soviets were bluffing. They didn't have the nuke firepower that they pretended to have.

...perhaps as that of the United States at the time, but certainly enough to have caused an unimaginable tragedy.

It wasn't playtime. It was a very serious event.

I credit Kennedy for restraining Curtis Lemay but it was a damned near thing. It should haven't been so. It should not have happened in the first place.

If someone causes a fire and then puts it out, they are not heroic.

He stood pretty much alone in that work. Here's a 2012 post detailing the generals "uncensored" thoughts during the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Generals mocking JFK behind his back during Cuban Missile Crisis caught on tape...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10021414805#post46

...that his son was no liberal, something about which I actually agree.

JFK was an unrepentant cold warrior who campaigned during the 1960 campaign on a nonexistent "missile gap."

The greatest Democrat of the 20th century, in my opinion, Eleanor Roosevelt, referred to him as "that boy" and if one travels to Valkill, her home, the guides may tell one, as they did to me about him sitting at her table begging her not to oppose him and pleaded for her endorsement. She very reluctantly gave it to him.

She died while organizing opposition to his weak efforts on civil rights. (She died before he did.)

This is a guy who was just down the block from the spot where Martin Luther King was giving the "I have a dream," speech on television muttering about his worries that it could cost him reelection. Presidents Truman, Carter, and Clinton might well have been on the dias. given speeches of their own. Lyndon Johnson didn't need to give a speech. He pushed the Civil Rights bill through Congress. He didn't talk (or hide sulking in the Oval Office.) He acted.

He almost stumbled into a nuclear war, an event I hold for the arms race and the demonization in my rather benighted generation of wanton consumers of nuclear energy, particularly of the reason the planet is burning.

The Ford executive he put into the role of Secretary of Defense, McNamara, who used deferments in World War 2 to stay out of tge army, finally signing up as a stateside officer with no knowledge of war, was an albatross around LBJ's neck who stumbled into Vietnam. (LBJ should have fired that bastard.)

It's a fucking lie that Kennedy would have avoided Vietnam (there are musings on the subject on tape.) It was part of his "bear any burden" "missile gap" cold warrior bullshit. The murder of Diem just before his own assassination was a moral disgrace grounded in imperialism.

“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”

From World War II though JFK, "The Devil's Chessboard" explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites

LIAM O'DONOGHUE
Salon.com, Oct. 15, 2015

This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze (former CIA director) Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”

Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.

Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”

By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable. “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”

CONTINUED...

https://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/every_president_has_been_manipulated_national_security_officials_david_talbot_investigates_americas_deep_state/

...better served by reading something useful.

My contempt for the Kennedy family, based on my admiration for Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, originates with my contempt for the family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, an antisemite who had a certain alleged admiration for Hitler, who was ambassador to Britain during the blitz advised the Government to not aid Britain. (Roosevelt sent Kennedy to Britain to get him out of the country for his third term run, fearful he would endorse Wendell Wilkie and thus cause problems with his the Irish vote. He opened indirect channels to Churchill via Harry Hopkins.)

The big lie that's been flying around among conspiracy theorists is that JFK was assassinated because he was a liberal. He may have paid lip service to that label, but he was, again, a cold warrior of the worst sort. At the time the country may have wanted a cold warrior but nonetheless it was a very dangerous and stupid game.

I note that the man JFK put in the role of Attorney General, his less than qualified brother Bobby, father of the brain worm infected loon killing people with paranoid antiscience rhetoric, served as council to witch hunter Joesph McCarthy during those outrageous hearings. He served with Roy Cohn in that role, Cohn having been a mentor to the orange Pedophile now destroying our country. The only Democratic Senator to not vote to censure McCarthy, a close family friend of the Kennedys, was JFK, who doged the vote by getting himself admitted to a hospital for back pain. McCarthy was godfather to one of Bobby Kennedy's daughters and in fact dated one of Bobby Kennedy's sisters.

JFK was no liberal, just as his father claimed. He is vastly overrated and was actually not qualified to shine LBJs shoes. LBJ was a flawed man, no doubt, but he, not Kennedy, was truly liberal in many ways, at considerable political risk, coming from the South, but unfortunately he was stuck with the Kennedy team as President.

Had he come to office by a better route, with a better team, he would have done a better job.

CIA SUCCESSFULLY CONCEALS BAY OF PIGS HISTORY

D.C. CIRCUIT SPLIT DECISION RULES CIA DRAFT HISTORY CAN BE KEPT SECRET INDEFINITELY

NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE FOIA LAWSUIT EXPOSES GAP BETWEEN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION'S "TRANSPARENCY" POLICIES AND ACTUAL BUREAUCRATIC (AND JUDICIAL) BEHAVIOR

Posted May 21, 2014
For more information contact:
202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

Washington, DC, May 21, 2014 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA's cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA's draft "official history" could be withheld from the public under the "deliberative process" privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.

"The D.C. Circuit's decision throws a burqa over the bureaucracy," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), the plaintiff in the case. "Presidents only get 12 years after they leave office to withhold their deliberations," commented Blanton, "and the Federal Reserve Board releases its verbatim transcripts after five years. But here the D.C. Circuit has given the CIA's historical office immortality for its drafts, because, as the CIA argues, those drafts might 'confuse the public.'"

"Applied to the contents of the National Archives of the United States, this decision would withdraw from the shelves more than half of what's there," Blanton concluded.

The 2-1 decision, authored by Judge Brett Kavanaugh (a George W. Bush appointee and co-author of the Kenneth Starr report that published extensive details of the Monica Lewinsky affair), agreed with Justice Department and CIA lawyers that because the history volume was a "pre-decisional and deliberative" draft, its release would "expose an agency's decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency's ability to perform its functions."

SNIP...

Prior to yesterday's decision, the Obama administration had bragged that reducing the government's invocation of the b-5 exemption was proof of the impact of the President's Day One commitment to a "presumption of disclosure." Instead, the bureaucracy has actually increased in the last two years its use of the b-5 exemption, which current White House counselor John Podesta once characterized as the "withhold if you want to" exemption.

CONTINUED...

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20140521/

To the present day.

...and scared to death.

Given birth to my daughter and my husband was in the Army Reserves. Terrifying times

I remember the grown ups talking about it; what I remember most os the practice drills in the hallway at school with our coats covering our heads
And praying the rosary. Catholic school

I lived in a rural community that was located approximately 50 miles from downtown DC. Both parents worked. I was always afraid I'd be home alone when the missiles hit. After school, I would practice setting up a bomb shelter in our basement in under 30 minutes. I dragged bedding, food, and clothing to the basement. Filled up buckets of water. Last phase was getting the dog and cat down to the basement and under the basement stairs with me. The pets were not a fan and as soon as they saw me gather up my gear they would take off into the corn fields. I'd be running through the corn fields yelling, "Come back! You're going to be "annicinerated". Never occurred to me to put them in the basement first. My mother found this behavior concerning. My father felt it was a rational response for 9-year-old girl trying to deal with the unspeakable. Once the crisis passed I went back to riding my bike and building forts in the woods.

And a practical head on your shoulders.

Everyone was freaking out.

My mom said “we have a smart president, he’ll do fine just be glad that idiot Nixon wasn’t elected”

And I quit worrying. Sure do miss her.