We’re coming up to the 60th anniversary of a double-whammy crisis that easily could have blown us all up.  
A “Cuba missiles crisis” in spades.
 
We forget, because it’s like trying to keep track of a three-card monte con game.
 
Briefly, late October 1956, in Hungary students, intellectuals and workers rose in revolt against Soviet domination
and the Russians responded with blood and fire by invading the country and massacring its citizens. 
Roughly at the same time 1300 miles away Israeli, British and French troops conspired to invade Egypt
to seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal.  Hoping to divert attention from crushing the Hungarians,
the Kremlin threatened to attack London and Paris with nuclear bombs.  World War 3 lurched.
 
Hopalong Cassidy came to our rescue in the odd form of a U.S. president so fond of golf he installed a
putting green outside the Oval Office.  Gung-ho Democrats mocked President Eisenhower’s easygoing temperament. 
But as Allied supreme commander he’d seen war at first hand.  He stopped the Suez invasion by putting Britain
into a financial squeeze.  And, despite previous promises to “liberate” the enslaved masses of Eastern Europe,
a promise daily pumped into Hungary by the Voice of America, Ike did…exactly nothing.
 
Ike, for whom I voted twice, was an old style balance-the-budget conservative Republican with a “No Drama Obama”
temperament.  He had the guts to back away from the brink.
 
A friendly tip to President Hillary Clinton: taunting the Russian bear for short term political gain is a very dangerous game. 
Doing nothing can be better than doing something.
 
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