EXCOMM

The previous day, the Soviet Premier Khrushchev had sent a long conciliatory letter offering to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba.

But as President Kennedy's EXCOMM advisory committee were drafting their response to that letter, a second, much tougher letter arrived demanding the removal of US missiles from Turkey.

At the same time, news filtered through that a U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba killing the pilot.

A retaliatory strike on Cuba by the US could have been the trigger for nuclear war.

What followed is thirteen days that historians have studied from every angle for sixty years and still find new dimensions to.

Kennedy formed the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, the ExComm, which met in secret.

The options on the table ranged from airstrikes to a naval blockade, which they deliberately called a quarantine to sidestep the legal definition of blockade as an act of war.

Military commanders pushed for immediate strikes.

He became the only American combat fatality of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The only man who died in what was, for two weeks in October 1962, the most dangerous military confrontation in human history.

The Kennedy ExComm, already exhausted and stretched to its limit by thirteen days of impossible choices, had to absorb the fact that an American pilot was dead.

Military advisors were pressing for an immediate strike against the missile sites.

What message did that send to Berlin? And not just Berlin, to NATO, to Turkey, or to any other ally, depending on an American promise of protection.

So Kennedy then called together the small group of senior officials who would become known as EXCOMM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.

And for the next several days, they argued about...

What to do? The military advice was aggressive.

So there's three or four missteps along the way.

Actually, if Kennedy, as he said after, and I think the evidence is overwhelming, that if he had decided in the first day or two or three about what to do, he would have struck the missiles in Cuba, which was the near unanimous recommendation from his ExComm, from the people who, who were deliberating with him.

And the likely consequence of that would've been a Soviet response with these tactical nuclear weapons that we didn't even know were there against American, uh, ships and maybe even the ports in like Miami, where would have otherwise been a, an invasion to follow, would be bounding up.

Fortunately, we, we missed the bullet at that point.

Kennedy immediately calls a secret meeting with his closest advisors.

He forms the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, EXCOMM.

Importantly, his Joint Chiefs of Staff, so his senior military men, immediately, unanimously come out in favour of an immediate airstrike followed by an invasion of Cuba.

No messing around, go for it.

When Johnson assumes the presidency, for all that JFK has been doing around the world, Johnson has been privy to really none of these conversations.

He was, he was never part of the so-called ExComm that addressed the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He was never consulted about Berlin, much less about Vietnam.

But still, what, what, from what we understand, overall, Johnson supported JFK's approach to, to Vietnam.