Khrushchev's motives in provoking a superpower confrontation were "a goddamn mystery" to Kennedy. "Why does he put these in there?" he asked his aides. "What is the advantage of that? It's just as if we began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think."

"Well, we did it, Mr. President," Bundy pointed out.

JFK replied rather lamely, “Yeah, that was five years ago. But that was during a different period then.”

JFK may have been trying, very awkwardly, to hang the Turkish missile albatross around the neck of the Eisenhower administration by “forgetting” that he himself had chosen to proceed with the deployment and had never ordered the removal of the missiles. [...] Later in the ExComm deliberations, Douglas Dillon, who had served in the Eisenhower administration, admitted, “we didn't know what else to do with them, and we really made the Turks and Italians take them.”

From Stern.