It was Kennedy’s finest hour” (84). Given all of these qualities that Kennedy had, no other president would have had the mind set and patience to get through a crisis this large. He definitely kept the cold war from becoming a hot war and turning into an all out nuclear war.
Finally, the most important reason it was the key defining event of the cold war is it was on the brink of going from a cold war to a hot war. The minute the U-2 plane flew over and got photographs of nuclear facilities being built so close to the shores of the United States, war was on the border of nuclear war. According to Smith (2003), “[on] September 4, President Kennedy revealed the presence of ground-to-air antiaircraft missiles in Cuba and warned the Soviet Union not to install offensive weapons in Cuba,” in which the Soviets did not listen too (266). The Kennedy administration went into a state of crisis management that took them in many different directions. Most of the administration was torn between invading Cuba