Dana Perino is no U.S. history scholar
2007 December 10
Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary (yes, of the U.S.), didn’t even know about the Cuban missile crisis.
Sigh.
While she probably doesn’t know enough to pass our citizenship test she is more than qualified to distort and spin for the White House. At least she is the most attractive press secretary under Bush’s tenure. Ari Fleischer is a close second.
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I could tell the lady a few personal experiences about the Cuban Missile Crisis that involve Alabama, specifically a radar site where I was stationed at Thomasville. Apparently it was determined that the USA had only two land-based radar systems that were capable of scanning the air space immediately above the land mass of Cuba which could detect a missile almost immediately after one might be launched and provide the earliest possible warning. One of those was our radar at Thomasville.
What had been primarily a sleepy little radar training site suddenly became important and the site was inundated with high ranking brass from Air Defense Command headquarters in Colorado Springs and the Pentagon. I was one of a handful of cryptographers who had to encrypt and decrypt high priority messages with antiquated systems of WWII vintage, which was slow and tedious work we had to do under the pressure of time and being as accurate as possible under the circumstances.
I believe the crisis lasted only a couple of weeks, but we cryptographers had to go on shifts of 12 hours on duty and 12 off, seven days a week, for the duration of the crisis. It wasn’t easy or fun, but it was exciting to take a small part in an event of that magnitude.
My next assignment was in Tehran, Iran, where we had a facility to monitor nuclear tests as they were conducted in the old USSR. That was the best assignment of my career, but an entirely different story for another day.