Breastfeeding: a cultural history | HistoryExtra - "‘It tells us about the imagined intimate connections between mother and child. For example in Egypt, wet nurses for Royal babies, their connection to royalty was such that the wet nurse's own biological children could call themselves the Milk Kin, of the king. That's also true in other sort of cultures as well where there's a kind of milky relationship between children who are genetically unrelated but who shared a wet nurse and so there'd be various kind of prohibitions against getting married and things like that. In some Buddhist cultures the wet nurse is a real symbol of generosity and they tend to have, they tend to be quite high status because of that. Elsewhere, for example in classical Antiquity, often wealthy families employed wet nurses and they were slaves they you know they weren't employed they were, they were enslaved. Throughout all of these examples though there is an idea that you have to be very careful when you're selecting a kind of woman to witness in terms of her physical attributes, her moral characteristics. There's usually a prohibition when you look at the contracts against the wetness having sexual relations, because it's believed that will sour the milk. Within Europe, wet nursing was popular amongst aristocratic families for numbers, a number of reasons. One of those is that lactation can impact your fertility, and so if you want to have lots of babies in quick succession and produce a lot of heirs, then you don't want to be lactating. You want to get back to your fertility. There was also, you know, it's also about maintaining an attractive figure and being sexually available for your husband. But the idea of wet nursing, even the idea of maintaining your attractive figure becomes reversed in Western Europe in the late, late 18th century and suddenly we have male physicians and and male writers talking about how the most attractive thing actually is to see a maternal woman. Your maternal wife blissfully breastfeeding... Jean-Jacques Rousseau… sees that biological mothers need to feed their own children, not just for the benefit of the child but also for the benefit of civilization, for the benefit of mankind. He says that when mothers nurse their own children there will be a reform in morals. Natural feeling will revive in every heart when women become good mothers, men will be good husbands and fathers… Rousseau did put his own babies into a foundling hospital, so his own babies were not fed by their own mother...
In Paris it is sort of the late 18th early 19th century, so many babies were being sent to be nursed in the countryside… only 1,000 babies were nursed by their own mothers in Paris that year. Whereas about 20,000 babies born in that same year were taken out to the countryside sent out to be wet nursed. And the reason for that is that parents wanted their children to be breastfed. You know they wanted their children to have the breast milk. But it wasn't economically viable for the women living in Paris with high rent you know working. It wasn't viable then for them to feed their own babies. It made more economic sense for them to pay somebody else to do it for them because women were increasingly working in the new factories, in the shops so on and so forth. So they had to outsource the feeding of their babies in rural communities. So as the fashion changed and upper-class women were starting to feed their own babies, working women, middle class women were having to use wet nurses’"
Weaponising food in the Third Reich | HistoryExtra - "'Nazis controlled food production by trying to make sure that every thing that people were eating was produced internally… try to discourage people from eating white bread, bleached flour which was actually very popular and to try to encourage whole grain bread. So there was a whole campaign about whole grain fog corn [sp?] brought whole grain bread. Huge campaign, um, so trying to encourage bakers to bake that way and trying to encourage the German population to eat this. First of all the regime argued because it was more healthy and they were very much concerned about the health of the nation and the health of the population, but also because, um of the production. That it was easier to produce. And there's sort of also an ideological thing there, that the white bread was associated a bit more with luxury, almost with French bread and and white rolls and that kind of thing and this was anathema to the regime too'...
'There's a very strong ideological slant to Nazi food policy so certainly very much the idea that actually the Germans should not be concerned with eating luxury goods even in the years before the outbreak of the war and really turning towards eating what was seasonally available so there's a lot of propaganda material, recipes produced by the Nazi women's magazine. Was all gearing women as consumers to be very conscious and very aware of the national economy... They would go as far as putting recommended recipes and eating in women's pay packets at the end of the week’"
Volcanoes & nuclear armageddon: humanity’s long relationship with nature | HistoryExtra - "‘The Santorini eruption. Most listeners if they think about Santorini will know this amazing island in the Aegean and we'll know that that had something to do with the collapse of the Minoan civilizations in Crete but what was more important was that, well you know sorry for anybody living in Crete at the time, what was probably more important was that that helped spark the introduction smallpox into the human environment. And smallpox cost hundreds of millions of death just in the last hundred years alone, last 200 years alone’...
‘The potato has a hugely significant role… the potato is a really important source of calories. It's much cheaper and much more climate resilient than other kinds of crops… the potato introduction, potato reduces conflict in Europe and above all in Asia, in China. The introduction of the potato means that you were able to feed yourself so there's less to fight about and so has a measurable impact on levels of confrontation’"
George VI’s Nazi dilemma | HistoryExtra - "‘What I'm fairly sure of is the most outrageous thing he ever did was to essentially give the Nazis quite specific information about the layout of Buckingham Palace. Because in September 1940 Buckingham Palace was bombed. And it was bombed in such a way that only somebody who really knew the intimate details of where the family quarters were and so on would have been able to target it. And the king and queen were incredibly lucky not to have been a hurt or killed because it was a very specifically planned raid.’"
Disciplining the “scum of the Earth” | HistoryExtra - "‘If you had the money, the world was your oyster. And this created this bizarre system where you had infant officers, literally babies six months old being bought a commission by their parents so that they could have those years of service. By the time they reach 18 and they're ready to actually go and join a regiment, they've already been in the Army for 18 years. So they've got those prerequisites in terms of length of service. And then they can just buy their way up super rapidly all the way to the rank of Colonel. And you have these bizarre anecdotes, there's one that always sticks in my mind of a schoolboy at Eaton, who turns around to his Schoolmaster and says, when he's about to be punished, well, you can't cane me. I hold the king's commission. It wouldn't be right and gentlemanly for you to cane an officer. And there's this big debate within the school about, actually this is a good point. Can we cane a gentleman who holds the king's Commission? In the end he gets off with a different punishment. But what you have is a situation where men in their early 20s are commanding regiments of anything up to a thousand men. It's not an egalitarian system... Britain has this massive antipathy for big standing armies and we can thank Cromwell for that. It goes all the way back to the English Civil War. So the Army is small and it's basically designed for Colonial operations. Small expeditions… when Napoleon comes on the scene a realization starts to set in that actually that's not going to be enough, and it takes a while for Britain to be able to develop a strategy to try and help counter in. Most of what the British government does during this time is pay other nations subsidies to fight Napoleon. And so the the bulk of what Britain does during this period is actually bankroll other armies... We have this unending argument about who won Waterloo. Because ultimately the answer is the Allies. And lots of folks like to pin it on a single nation which kind of misses the point of the whole Waterloo Campaign which is that it's the archetypal kind of 19th century NATO operation’"
Medieval peasants: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘In every village there would be a category of people who were free and the category of people who are unfree. Now that didn't necessarily coincide with their, hierarchy of wealth. Because you could be unfree, but you could hold 30 acres of land which is, you know, quite good. Um and then in fact quite a lot of serfs had 30 acres of land or something like that’"
Interwar Britain: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘I think it's no accident then that in many ways the most ubiquitous architectural legacy of the 1920s is the war memorial. Simple crosses or obelisks or plaques on street corners, on the walls of churches, in workplaces, on village greens and so on and so forth. These memorials are really a kind of materialization of the desperate struggle to come to terms with and to explain and justify crucially, the loss of so many men, of so many loved ones during the Great War’...
‘I think understanding what had happened, giving the loss of life an acceptable meaning and then finding ways to commemorate the dead and to move on. That's why the rhetoric of the war memorial is so important. It rings hollow to us today but when you read the inscriptions on war memorials, one of the most striking things is the way in which the war is presented as a victory, a victory in a war that was fought in defense of civilization and in which British men demonstrated the values of heroism, patriotism, Nation, sacrifice and so on and so forth. And we might from our position in the start of the 21st century be, be cynical about these sentiments, be cynical about the line about it's a sweet and seeming thing to die for one's country. But in the context of the early 1920s, this kind of language, these ideas are really important. Because they give loss, they give the experience of loss an acceptable meaning’"
Heliogabalus: Rome’s scandalous emperor | HistoryExtra - "‘How does his tyranny stand up to other infamous Roman emperors that people might be more familiar with like Nero or Caligula? Where would you rank him?’
‘Well it's a odd tendency amongst modern historians to rehabilitate all these people and go oh no no, they can't have been that bad because, uh it's merely our upper class sources from the ancient world who dislike them. And then you try and say oh well the lower classes must have loved them or it's merely propaganda from the next reign. Or some desperate arguments are, oh look there's lots of nice literature and art produced in the reign so he can't have been that bad at all. I think this is really foolish because it seems to be us knowing more than the ancient sources. Heliogabulus does a lot of the things that Caligula and Nero do but he actually does all of them. I mean they do quite a few bad things. He has the full suit of totally bad things and unlike them he does try and change the whole religion of the Roman Empire which is massively upsetting and shocking for contemporaries.’...
'If Heliogabalus is remembered at all in the modern world, it’salmost always for his sexuality. And certain elements of the lbgq+ community have elevated him into what is called a queer icon. Which is, you can see why. But it is kind of strange because to elevate him into any form of Icon or hero, you do have to totally concentrate on the stuff that fits your view of the world. And you have to totally ignore the fact that he was also massively incompetent, massively profligate with money. Uh, he was irresponsible, he killed lots of people. He kills his own tutor with his own hand. I mean he's a very nasty bit of work in almost every way’'...
‘No other Emperor is accused of exploring the possibility of a sex change which kind of suggests that perhaps this story might have been true? Because it wasn't used to discredit anyone else? Do you think that that’
‘I think it's a very good argument because bad Emperors tend to be accused of doing the same things. And some some sort of Scholars now go oh it's what they call the topos, literally cliche, so they can't have done it. Which kind of begs the question, couldn't bad Emperors have done the same things because that's why, what they like to do? Um once again going back to that modern scholars not getting their imagination and empathy with um ancient autocrats. Ancient autocrats have a very distressing habit of not behaving like Oxford dons. It's just a thing they do. All that killing people and deviant sex.’ I think it is quite a possibility, as you know we know that Nero is also said to have married a man taking the role of the Bride but he's never accused of attempting a physical, asking about a physical sex change’...
'Cassius Dio also claimed that Heliogabulus left the palace wearing a wig to frequent brothels and that he even took the place of sex workers himself'"
The queer movement is so keen on justifying themselves that they idolise monsters
The cult of Freud: science, sex & psychoanalysis | HistoryExtra - "‘The big mistake Freud made was that he claimed to the day of his death that it was a science. Which is bizarre, because he was not without scientific training, he had worked with the great neurophysiologist Breuer. He knew about science, he had published scientific papers. He understood the scientific process, he understood data collection, all of that kind of thing and I think if he had instead framed it in, in different terms, it might have been better for psychoanalysis. But the very fact that he kept using the word science in relation to psychoanalysis I feel discredited both him and the entire project’...
‘Psychoanalysis was to Cambridge in the 1920s what Communism was to Cambridge in the 1930s’...
'Psychoanalysis became a home for rich directionless strays who analyzed other rich directionless strays. Because quite a lot of them actually went and got analyzed and then once they'd done, they became analysts themselves and started actually practicing it'...
‘Psychoanalysis backfired in many cases and I think the most egregious example was that of the Birmingham children… Anna viewed analysis of children as not only a psychological therapy but also a form of co-parenting, that it was this incredibly involved total therapy which involved education, psychoanalysis, parenting. And this led to Bob and Maddie becoming first of all incredibly dependent on Anna. Their father then committed suicide as a result of both his bipolar disorder and because of his separation from his children so when Bob and Maddie grew into adulthood they had major problems. Bob became alcoholic, died at the age of 50 having led a very troubled existence. Similarly with Maddie… Bob Jr inherited his father's bipolar disorder and this bipolar disorder might have been stabilized if he'd been put on lithium, which was available, when he became ill. And Anna Freud opposed this. So she opposed the very treatment that might have saved this man. And then what makes the story even worse is that going on to the 1970s Anna Freud became incredibly influential in American courts in divorce custody battles with regards to parental custody and she consistently argued that post-divorce contact between children and fathers if the fathers were not granted custody was not a good idea and this was almost entirely based on her own bizarre interaction with the Burlingame family. So it's all very well to say oh you know psychoanalysis was harmless. It was just you know the metropolitan sort of intellectual talking about themselves on a couch for hours on end. Yeah that's true to a certain extent but it also it was also actively harmful in in particularly in those cases…
It didn't work for anything probably more than minor neuroses, that it was incredibly time consuming and expensive. That it was useless for the major psychiatric diseases, particularly psychosis. That it had no evidential base. It lost its perch within psychiatry. Psychiatry and medicine obviously but psychoanalysis remains strong in the academy. Because particularly in France it became intertwined with kind of structuralism and post-modernism and literary theory. So it's incredibly influential to this day within the Academy. It's incredibly strong, not incredibly strong but. Psychoanalysis as a clinical practice remains strong in London, Paris, New York. Because it appeals to what the great American historian Christopher Lash called the hydra-headed narcissism of the affluent bourgeoisie. So it will always keep going, but it is now a much smaller endeavor than it was, let's say in the mid 20th century'"
The mindset behind the Holocaust | HistoryExtra - "‘We have Adolf Hitler at the center of all of this. For him and the top Nazi brass are we able to unpick how much they truly invested in this anti-Semitic worldview? They they really believed in the fantasy. It would be tempting to interpret this as something that they saw as a means of a power play and a means of mobilizing people, that was about a power grab rather than about ideology’
‘It's the except opposite. Anti-Semitism per se was not popular. I know what you're driving at, this is, this is red meat for the base, we don't believe it but it's really useful and there's collateral gains to be made if we impoverish Jews, that's good too. But it isn't like that, it really isn't like that. And I think there is a savage faction all through the the Nazi State who really really really do believe it. Um are they numerically in the absolute majority? It sort of doesn't matter because with any social attitude it's about concentric rings. So you have a hot core and each ring out are people who are committed to some of it but not all of it... They were at great pains to rationalize why and also great pains to say this isn't just emotional, this is rational. And it is backed up by the science by which they meant anthropology’"
Trust the Science!
Grisly killings & mysterious motives: murder in early modern Britain | HistoryExtra - "‘You're a police officer. So how does that shape your approach to the history of crime?’...
‘It gives me I think an insight into what people would have been seeing and thinking and feeling perhaps because a lot of the things I'm reading about when I'm going through the historical record are things that I myself have experienced. So I've, um, I've been to postmortems. I've investigated crimes. I've often been the first person at the scene of um a sudden or violent death. Um I've spoken with witnesses and victims. I've interviewed suspects. So as I'm going through and exploring the way that crimes are investigated in the early modern period it's very similar to a lot of the things that I myself did in my own job. Obviously not exactly the same but yeah as it just gives me I think a little bit of insight… one of the cases I look at in my book is a murder that has been dressed up to look like a suicide and the coroner and his jury have been called to examine this hanging corpse and they have to decide what's going on here and the jury, as they're examining this corpse, they're not trained medical professionals. They're everyday people. But because they live in the early modern period, they have been to hangings. They, they know what a hanged corpse looks like. And in my own experience in the police I too have been to hangings. I know what a hanged corpse looks like but I'm not a trained Medical Professional... How women were treated uh if they were delivered of a miscarriage or stillborn child. They were automatically presumed to have been criminal. To have murdered that child. The guilt was presumed before innocence and the way that those women were treated were as suspects from the get-go. The burden of proof was on them. And the attitudes and the way that these women were written about was incredibly cruel and adversarial and they were definitely treated like the enemy’...
‘If you were to read just early modern True Crime Publications you'd get the impression that women were killing machines and are responsible for the majority of homicides in the early modern period… in truth if you look at the uh, the historical statistics women committed very few homicides. The majority were committed by men but the anxiety and the obsession with the early modern audiences, what they wanted to read about was murderous women because it was something that they were frightened of. You know, they were frightened of women that were breaking the boundaries of societal expectations. Um women that were traitors to their sex, women that were not domestic or obedient’...
'What I meant was by murder being a broad category was it included suicide. So suicide was believed to be a species of self-murder. It was not called suicide in this period, it was called felo de se which is Latin for you commit a felony against yourself. You murder yourself. So people who committed suicide, um, that they were treated as murder suspects, they murdered themselves and the scene of death for a suspected suicide was a crime scene to be investigated as a murder'"
The Cuban Missile Crisis: tensions mount | HistoryExtra - "Fido Castro was kind of coming up through this. So you know he was a young man from a pretty well-to-do middle class family um and I think it's really important we're trying to understand his character to understand that Fidel had a Jesuit education. Um I think this is important because it really forms his character much as later on of course he would profess to be some atheist because that's what you had to do to be a good Communist later on. He, actually his Jesuitical streak was extremely strong in terms of how he thought about the world morally um and you know ethically. Um and really growing up also he was not at all left-wing and you can see in the early movements such as Mark mentioned 1953, um the 26th of July attempt to seize the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba which was kind of an attempt to uh bring down Fulgencio Batista's government but really I mean absolutely foundered almost immediately. The ethos of that movement was not communist whatsoever. You know these were nationalist movements um really aimed at rejecting American control which was very much seen by, about you know being behind Batista and the organized crime and all of this stuff that Cubans felt was making their lives very miserable'...
‘He voluntarily submitted to three hours talking to the CIA for instance in hotel in New York and the CIA agent who interviewed him came away from that saying not only is Fidel Castro not a communist but in fact he's a really strong anti-communist writer. So they thought they could use him and we know that this must have at some level been for real rather than just some kind of show as everyone later tried to present it was because when Fidel was on this tour he went down to Texas and actually Raul Castro was so worried about what was happening that he flew from Havana to Texas and the two of them had a massive stand-up fight in their hotel room. Um because Raul thought Fidel was getting too close to American power’...
'I think he absolutely was extremely ideologically driven, you know as opposed to various other dictators in Latin America, indeed around the world. Um he never really engaged in things like Cults of Personality, he was really quite shy. I mean if you went to Cuba um during the Fidel years as I did a few times, um you would not walk around to see his face everywhere… he never really promoted himself, it was about the Revolution. And of course after Che Guevara died Che became this very useful um symbol. Uh during Che's life he was far too dangerous for Fidel to allow him anything like that prominence'...
'[Kennedy] was a philanderer of spectacular proportions and that wasn't affected by his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 and that he he got this code of behavior from his father who was just the same. Uh and encouraged his sons, uh to behave that way and to sleep around, he actively advised them to do that. Um, seems extraordinary but it was the case so. And the public were unaware of all of that, I mean today it would be a huge scandal but that goes on whilst he's president. So he's got, he has, you know the public side to him. Where he comes across very smoothly, very willingly and then he has this extraordinary private life where it's like looking at an early Roman Emperor. What he’s brilliant at and this thing seems like uh maybe a hyperbolic statement but I I can't think of any other leader in a Western Democratic context. Uh even right up to today who was as good as he was in terms of crafting image. His his father had actually been a Hollywood producer in the 1920s making pretty awful, you know, in an aesthetic artistic sense, awful movies but they made money. But the Kennedys were always very very immersed in the world of Hollywood. And there's the story of JFK visiting a friend of his uh during the early 1940s, the early days of World War II and his friend recalls how JFK would just, would actually sort of study Hollywood stars. So what is it about Gary Cooper, when he enters a room? What is it about him exactly? The way he looks, what he's wearing, the way he moves, the way he talks, that grabs people's attention. And so he studied that sort of thing assiduously. He knew a lot about fashion. You know if you're uh, if you're a guy and you're wearing a suit, how wide should your lapel be? Should you have two buttons? Should you have three buttons?...
I think the biggest myth about Kennedy as a as a leader and this myth is created after his assassination is that he's a sort of liberal hero president in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, um Progressive. That's not how he viewed himself for most of his life and career and he actually viewed himself as a moderate sort of Centrist Democrat, a bit like Bill Clinton in the 90s but not on the liberal wing of the party. So not close to people like Adlai Stevenson or Eleanor Roosevelt. He's quoted as saying in the 1950s, I'm not a liberal, I never have been. He he basically viewed liberals as being kind of sanctimonious, excessively moralizing, uh impractical and also he's affected by Adlai Stevenson's defeats in the presidential election in 52-56. He's the Democratic candidate in 52-56. Uh he's a liberal and he's trounced by Eisenhower and so I think just Kennedy just viewed liberals as politically naive. You can't win elections from the left, you have to be in the center and I think maybe during the final year of his life that does change and he does shift to a more Progressive politics, a stronger stand on civil rights, interested in reducing Cold War tensions um but that only that that only comes later and you know in terms of foreign policy in terms of somebody brings to the presidency he's pretty hard line'"
The Cuban Missile Crisis: broken ties & a secret pact | HistoryExtra - "'By 1961, there were American nuclear warheads within range of Moscow'...
'It was seen to represent such a clear basically hypocritical double standard. To take the position that the Soviets can't put missiles in Cuba 90 miles from our coast but we can put missiles, we have put missiles essentially on the Soviet border . And the Soviets were very aware of this and what the Kennedy administration thought, however, not just JFK but his advisors, was that there was a difference. And the difference was the US had publicly announced that it was putting missiles in Turkey. The Soviets had not done that with the missiles in Cuba. It had not been publicly announced. They had been installed in a surreptitious, clandestine fashion. Kennedy Administration officials, when they find out about this... it suggested to them that there are sinister motives behind the deployment, otherwise why not announce it publicly?'...
A third motive which I heard the Russians give insistently on many occasions afterwards was they put the missiles in Cuba to deter a second invasion of Cuba. Which is a very interesting notion because if these missiles were intermediate and medium range and capable of striking Washington, you have to ask yourself what would be the logic? How could that deter an invasion of Cuba? Did they really think that if the U.S invaded Cuba that they would give the order to fire these missiles in Cuba and obliterate Washington? That doesn't seem likely, but as I came to understand it, that was Khrushchev's way of thinking. He didn't think these missiles would be used, he thought they would frighten the United States and in frightening them deter them from invading Cuba... In Khrushchev's eyes this, the Cuban missiles were a Cuban cure-all for all of these problems but I also say it was a cure-all that ended up curing nothing'...
'Fidel Castro was incredibly worried about this. He wasn't keen to have missiles in Cuba in this secret operation. Um he was very concerned about it, they they had a lot of discussions within the Cuban government about accepting. When they decided that they must accept them um the missiles because in the cause of you know International Brotherhood with these other um Socialist Nations, they must accept them but they were very unhappy about it and you can see. So twice Fidel sent his most important emissaries to Khrushchev to discuss whether these missiles should be kept secret so he sent Raul Castro to Moscow first of all to try and persuade Khrushchev to make the deal public because he said look you know if we're not doing anything illegal, if it's what the US have done in Turkey then why can we not be public about this? And so he sent Raul to Moscow for two weeks and Raul did not manage to persuade Khrushchev to make it public. He then sent Che Guevara to Yalta in the Black Sea to talk to Khrushchev again...
Behind the scenes the Soviets tell Kennedy Administration officials that we're not going to do anything dramatic in Cuba, certainly not before the Congressional elections. So they just assume nothing like that will happen. It would just seem so dangerous and so provocative'"
The Cuban Missile Crisis: dangerous days | HistoryExtra - "‘There are about 43,000 Soviet troops on Cuba at this point, the CIA were estimating it as 10,000 again a huge underestimate, much bigger numbers. And some of them arriving in quite kind of farcical fashions so you know 2,000 tourists supposedly getting off a military ship in Havana. It’s very quickly noticed that all these tourists were you know between certain ages, young men and they were all wearing two variants on exactly the same kind of khaki shirts and trousers um. So you know very peculiar sort of tourists, very clearly. And I mean this kind of thing was just overwhelmingly reported to the CIA’...
'The Cubans got on very well with the Russians… these new young Cubans who seemed much more macho [than Soviet leaders], you know much more vital with their big beards and their Army fatigues and all this kind of stuff had really emerged. These kind of great heroes. In a lot of the Communist worlds you know they've been built up as these much more glamorous visual representations of what communism could be, so you know a lot of those young Soviet troops really kind of hero worshiped people like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara um and so on and you know when they were arriving there there was a great camaraderie actually between those troops and the Cubans. And in a sense this setup potentially an even more dangerous situation because some of those Soviet commanders there could act without uh calling back to Moscow and when they were forming these very close relationships with people like Raul Castro who they got very on very well with now of course there's a huge danger there of miscalculation. Effectively of them taking action without even asking Khrushchev'...
'The Kennedys come about the idea that a blockade is better than an airstrike because one it means that the US won't be compared to Japan in this attack on Pearl Harbor, it will stop the Soviets sending in more missiles to blockade, it will give a window of opportunity for the, for the, for a negotiated settlement'"
The Cuban Missile Crisis: the road to resolution | HistoryExtra - "‘He says to his advisors you know what Khruschev was saying about the missiles in in Turkey will seem err very reasonable to a lot of people and he said are we really gonna possibly start world war three over nuclear missiles in Turkey that were basically technologically junk? They were antiquated already and so he he's he really leads that discussion in XCOM and it's very impressive and then in the end he makes that decision to respond to Khruschev’s letter by saying we accept the terms of settlement that you've offered in your letter of the 26th of October which is we will promise not to invite you but you will remove the missiles but he does one other thing that's very important he sends Robert Kennedy to speak to Anatoly Dobrynin the Soviet Ambassador in Washington that evening on the 27th and Bobby Kennedy privately off the record tells Dobrynin: just to let you know in terms of the second concession you demanded we will in due course remove within a few months remove U.S missiles from Turkey. This has to be a private, secret part of the settlement. If you tell the world that we're going to move the missiles from Turkey, the deal is off and we're not going to do it. I think what he’s, JFK is concerned about is that it might look like appeasement. That it might look like he's giving away you know vital U.S national security interests, that he’s selling out a NATO Ally Turkey that is doing Khruschev’s bidding on this and so it's it's I think he's concerned about his political image and how that will look, how that might be criticized by political opponents, Republicans in Congress and so on'...
'[On the withdrawal of missiles] Khruschev hadn't even told Fidel Castro this was happening, he just announced it. So both Fidel and Che went into a big swearing fit. Uh Fidel wheeled round and kicked this huge mirror on the wall which smashed everywhere. And you know. Really both of them were absolutely furious but I think Fidel in particular was just absolutely um emotionally devastated by this. He had prepared himself for this sort of glorious martyrdom and all of a sudden this decision had been taken completely out of his hands. Um these missiles were gone, he was reduced to this rather small figure in this, this historical footnote in this particular event and I think he took that incredibly badly. Um and it's rather sort of psychologically fascinating but he must have really geared himself up for martyrdom um in this very kind of macho way and then just had it taken away from him. He continued to be furious for a very very long time after this, he did not calm down and you know he had sort of, he wrote some anguish letters to Khrushchev. He was utterly furious about it. You know even much later you know many many years later he was still ranting and raving about it. In Cuba uh generally they started to have little kind of uh chants against Fidel Castro. So school children would sing *something* which means Nikita you little fairy, what you give you can't take back'...
'They had these kind of bonding activities with him and Khrushchev. they went fishing and hunting and hiking, cross-country skiing, they went to arms factories, I mean these are the kind of things that communist leaders do to bond with each other and Khruschev was really playing nice. If Fidel ever said oh I like that weapon in an arms factory Khruschev would be like you will have it as a gift, we'll give you those and afterwards Cuba ended up with this rather odd collection of odds and ends of Soviet Weaponry, none of which worked together but you know it was all very flattering... even many years later Castro could still be roused into great fury by mention of the missile crisis, he didn't stop really being angry about it. He just understood I think the political necessity for him of rebuilding that relationship at the moment'...
'Khrushchev had not only sent intermediate range missiles capable of destroying Washington, Atlanta. You know, a circle come in the United States. But he had also sent tactical, short-range tactical nuclear weapons which could have destroyed an American Invasion Force if we had actually gone so far as to invade. We did not know that until many years later, and this was a devastating thing to realize. Because, if they had those missiles and if they had used them to destroy the American Landing Force then we would have been on our way to a nuclear war. Certainly taken the first steps. So this was a horrifying thing to learn. We learned that in the beginning, the Soviet generals had permission to use these, in the event of an attack on their own troops. We learned that that permission was then removed. But there was no physical constraint. If the Americans had landed on Cuba in a massive invasion, and the Soviet generals had decided to defend their troops with these tactical nuclear weapons, there was no way Moscow could have stopped them. Even though it had ordered them not to use these weapons. And we learned one other thing a little bit later. That one of the Soviet submarines which was approaching the quarantine blockade line which Kennedy had established had a nuclear torpedo ready to use. And at, at one point the American ships on the surface or planes too, began dropping small depth charges to force that submarine to the surface and the Soviet commander decided for a moment to use the nuclear torpedo. Only to change his mind. And not do it... For many years in the west this crisis was viewed as an occasion for exemplary crisis management. It was viewed as a model, almost as an ideal. This is the way you handle a crisis and if you could do it this way so successfully it meant you could be a little more relaxed about other crises because this kind of crisis management could get you through. Well I think what we finally learned was that this crisis management was not enough and it took a hell of a lot of luck and this crisis management might have still produced a nuclear war which could have destroyed half the world'"
