Quite a set-to has erupted over the reference to the Cuban missile crisis in President Bush’s speech last week at Cincinnati. Underscoring his case for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Mr. Bush cited a passage from a speech given by President Kennedy 40 years earlier. Said Mr. Bush: “As President Kennedy said in October of 1962: ‘Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a small world,’ he said, ‘where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril.'”

The words were barely out of Mr. Bush’s mouth than President Kennedy’s brother and some of JFK’s former aides, who now occupy less hawkish territory than the man who secured their fame, rushed to decry what they characterize as a misappropriation of JFK’s words. Senator Kennedy, who has been feuding with his older brother on policy for most of his life, claimed that the president had carefully avoided a preemptive strike against Cuba during the crisis. “America cannot write its own rules for the modern world,” the senator said. “To attempt to do so would be unilateralism run amok.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian and erstwhile adviser to JFK, was quoted as saying of Mr. Bush: “I would flunk him in history.” The Washington Post quoted Theodore Sorensen, who wrote the Kennedy speech, as saying of Mr. Bush’s citation: “It’s taken totally out of context.”

All these acolytes of JFK are against the war on Iraq, however. The fact is that Mr. Bush was being more than generous to memory of JFK, whose aides have, for years, been nursing the notion that America emerged victorious from the Cuban crisis. In truth, the incident was a strategic loss for America. The goals of the Soviet party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, in moving missiles to Cuba were primarily to preserve the communist dictatorship on the island and also to force America to withdraw its missiles from Turkey. Khrushchev won on both points, backing down only after Kennedy secretly pledged not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey.

If Kennedy had done more than his naval blockade and had launched an invasion, as many in the military were counseling, the Soviet regime would have lost the missiles as well as the communist dictatorship 90 miles off America’s coast. “The 1930’s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war,” the 35th president had said. In the same speech, he vowed, “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be like ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” Given the real story of the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Bush has done honor to JFK’s memory by citing his words as inspiration for a strong, pre-emptive approach to the threat from a new dictator in a new time.