Richard Nixon

Goodwin recalls, “That President Kennedy had handled the Cuban Missile Crisis with assurance, wisdom, and skill remained the prevailing opinion of the conferees four decades later. By choosing a quarantine of Soviet ships instead of air strikes to be followed by an invasion, Kennedy had bought time to cut a deal with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, averting a potential nuclear war. The Soviets would remove the missiles which had been installed in the Cuban countryside within striking distance of Florida; the United States would pledge that there would be no invasion of Cuba. If all these conditions were met, Kennedy gave his word that the US would remove nuclear missiles from Turkey, which stood within striking distance of Russia.”
The danger of a nuclear war was very real. In 2022, we learned that a Soviet submarine was compelled to surface during the crisis. She had been unable to communicate with Moscow while underwater, and two out of the three officers on board agreed to fire their nuclear weapons in response to practice depth charges being detonated, which they thought were real. But the third refused to unlock the button, and the submarine surfaced, and peacefully withdrew from Cuba. […]