Crisis

The Atlantic alliance hasn’t always been quite as special as politicians on both sides of the sea like to pretend. To take just the last sixty years: there were the differing views on Vietnam that led Lyndon Johnson to assess the British premier Harold Wilson as "a creep," while Richard Nixon privately considered Ted Heath "weak" and "as crooked as a corkscrew" (which was saying something coming from him). In October 1962, however, the principal Western leaders really did have something special. Between them, they probably helped save the world from nuclear annihilation. When on October 16, President John F.