maxwell taylor was chief of the joint chiefs of staff. curtis lame, the dr. strangelove of that wonderful movie was on x com. ted sorenson was there. he died last month and i think was the last surviving member of that group. and the group was divided into two. the immediate reaction when kennedy assembled them and said the soviets are putting missiles into cuba, curtis lame was immediately on his feet saying, let's bomb them. that was his immediate reaction to that and to another occasion where i won't -- which i will mention on later on. kennedy said wait a minute. wait a minute. and said what other options do we have? and through a discussion that went on intensivelily during the six days two options emerged. one was a surprise attack on the missiles and the bomb in cuba and the other was an attempt to set up a quarantine trying to stop additional soviet ships from coming to cuba while negotiations went on to get the missiles removed. there was heated debate and kennedy was careful to not show which way he was leaning until on the lay when a final decision

this is maxwell taylor. i might interject here that during the excomm discussions, i never heard an expression of fear of nuclear escalation on the part of any of my colleagues if at any time we were sitting on the edge of armageddon, as nonparticipants have some time pressure sometimes alleged we were too unobservant to notice it. kennedy had asked curtis lemay who had immediately recommended bombing what will the soviets do, and curtis lemay, based on what i do not know, said they will not retaliate. and that was his decision, and that apparently kept anybody else from even considering the fact that our attack might trigger a nuclear escalation. i think kennedy's ability to withstand that kind of advice, and eventually come to a good and successful decision is outstanding. and i think it means that only the president should be in charge of an issue like that because it's only the president who has to consider consequences of decisions made in meetings such as this. taylor goes on to draw lessons. he makes

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i was about 15 seconds into my presentation when i was skewered by maxwell taylor. ma'am, just hush up. he turned to the general of the what do i hear the set going to bomb and this guy says it is not going to work. that is what he thinks and he is from the cia. they said who the hell was this guy, but i somehow survived. we went ahead with bombing at the head of the red team played his cards very well. curtis lemay's scenario was once we started bombing north vietnam and, north vietnam would try to retaliate by bombing site of. that they did not have sufficient aircraft to do that well and they would call on their chinese our lives and the chinese would supply them pilots and aircraft to be used to bomb saigon. this would enable them to retaliate against china and take out the developing nuclear capacity. the war game was a disaster. the red team retaliated in a very astute way. it did not retaliate militarily. it retaliated psychologically. the impact of bombing not only worked mentally in terms of the military context but it worked badly and terms of world opinio