Jack Engelhard
Jack EngelhardJack Engelhard

All eyes on Ukraine… and there is something too familiar about it all.

We’re not there yet, but gradually, perhaps inexorably, we seem headed back to 1962 when the world teetered on the brink of global nuclear war, the stage set via the stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States over Soviet missiles deployed in Castro’s Communist Cuba…90 miles off the Florida coast.

The United States insisted that the missiles must be removed…or else. The Soviets refused…even denied the presence of any such missiles.

At the UN, in his iconic, blistering “hell freezes over” speech, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson dramatically offered the proof with photos taken from a US spy plane.

The 13-Day stare-down, October to November, had people rushing to bomb shelters. Churches and synagogues offered round-the-clock prayer services.

For homeland America, it was the worst of times.

Children were being trained to hide under their school desks.

The smell of Armageddon was in the air.

Finally, both sides blinked.

Then, it was Nikita Khrushchev versus John F. Kennedy. Today it’s Vladimir Putin against Joe Biden, over Ukraine.

Yes, Ukraine, led by its courageous Jewish leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky…a true Maccabee.

If his chances of victory are slim, there is one plus in his favor. His side has the home team advantage.

Then too, the soldiers Putin sent in have no incentive, excepting Putin’s personal glory. Not like the old days when they were drunk on Communism.

But it still and always comes down to a duel between the two nuclear super-powers, us and them, and it is still mano-a-mano.

Putin would have us believe that, for the sake of democracy, he needed his duma to give him permission to invade Ukraine.

That’s an insult to our intelligence. Putin alone is Russia’s democracy.

So as JFK got schooled by Khrushchev, so Biden is learning that Putin is another Russian leader who, on his own, is prepared to go to the edge…whatever that edge may be.

We should not be surprised if Putin moves into Poland, triggering a NATO response.

They play for keeps, these Russian leaders.

Putin was reluctant to make his moves while Trump was in office. He respected Trump. He feared Trump.

As he was all-Russian, so Trump was all-American. A terrible clash was inevitable; which Putin preferred to avoid. He considered Trump’s grit. He knew he’d lose.

Then came the election that seated Biden in the White House and for Putin, this was an answer to godless prayer.

That American voters would choose as their leader a man so lacking, was just the stroke of luck he needed.

Now he could go forward with his plans, his dreams, to “reunite” his Soviet empire. Plus, he needed a war to show off his toys. Regard my shiny tanks and planes.

We are, then, facing an historical déjà vu, going back to when Soviet communism was trampling across the world, with only, or mostly, the United States blocking its progress.

Young JFK, 44, only a few months in office, was no match for Khrushchev, the wily, blustering Soviet leader, 61, when the two met in Vienna early 1961 to calm the nuclear arms race.

Bloated by Soviet advances throughout Europe, and stockpiles of weapons equal in number to those in the United States, Khrushchev was ready to concede nothing.

JFK returned from the summit distraught, shaken, aged.

Not at this time the epitome of youth, the picture of vigah…as Americans had come to know JFK.

Not this time even an echo of his lofty Jan. 20, 1961 Inaugural Address…

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

(HERE, from “The Days of the Bitter End,” the full story of that turbulent era.

Instead, JFK took to the airwaves, humbled, worst of all, frightened, to announce that communism presents a serious and immediate threat to Western Civilization.

Americans must be prepared for a long fight.

He’d met a man…Khrushchev…who earlier, even under the far more seasoned Eisenhower, had addressed the Western World with the taunt, “We will bury you.”

This time, meeting with JFK in Vienna, Khrushchev was cavalier about the loss of life that could result from an exchange of missiles between the two powers.

When JFK brought up the subject, estimating that 70 million people would be killed in the first 10 minutes of such an exchange, Khrushchev just shrugged as if to say, “So what?”

“Worst thing in my life,” JFK told a New York Times reporter. “He savaged me.”

JFK admitted that he had met the moment, “Unprepared.”

Has anything changed?

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com

Engelhard books
Engelhard booksJ.Engelhard