F-104C at Boca Chica NAS during inspection by President Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs on November 26, 1962 at the trip to Key West, Florida

The huge plane came in from the Northeast, a Boeing 707 bearing the words "United States of America" and the presidential seal.
Aboard Air Force One were President John F. Kennedy, his long-time secretary Evelyn Lincoln, Florida Governor Farris Bryant, two Florida congressmen
and the commanding officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines (the joint chiefs of staff).
The Cuban missile crisis had ended one month earlier, and the President and the military brass were visiting the Keys to inspect the military installations
hurriedly installed at the Boca Chica NAS and in Key West in response to the crisis. The President also came to thank personally the soldiers in the Keys
who had served through a crisis in which the world teetered on the brink of a nuclear exchange.
Two superpowers, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., had faced off over the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba. Historians cite Kennedy's negotiation of a
peaceful resolution to the missile crisis as his greatest accomplishment.
But several of the Joint Chiefs traveling on Air Force One with Kennedy to Key West that day had strenuously argued for a military invasion of Cuba.

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