Every decision the president made was aimed at not humiliating or dishonoring the Soviet Union or his own president, so that things would not escalate into war. It was because President Kennedy put himself, so to speak, in the shoes of the Soviets that he was reluctant to attack the missile site, to board Russian ships, to choose quarantine and blockade rather than military attacks . John Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union wanted war as much as America did. When Russia agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, it did not claim any sort of victory for itself and even blocked its aides from taking interviews that would claim that America had achieved victory over Russia (Kennedy , 98), because his goal was never to humiliate, in order to finally reach a peaceful agreement, that he and the Russian president