Many politicians and military men saw the resolution of the crisis as a defeat for the United States. "We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," said Barry Goldwater about Kennedy's Missile Crisis "solution." "Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory," complained Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard." Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment. "The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal. "We missed the big boat," complained General Maxwell Taylor after learning of same. "We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Admiral Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba. "It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Alexander Haig. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

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