In A television interview not long after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy observed that both the United States and the Soviet Union had made serious miscalculations in the Cuban affair. “I don't think we expected that he [Khrushchev] would put the missiles in Cuba,” he said, “because it would have seemed such an imprudent action for him to take He obviously thought he could do it in secret and that the United States would accept it.”