BY BARTON J. BERNSTEIN
THIRTY-FIVE years ago, in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the world came perilously close to a U.S.-Soviet war.
Too easily, despite the contrary wishes of both Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy, such a conflict, probably beginning with conventional weapons, might have escalated into nuclear war.
Even a small nuclear exchange could have killed many millions, and an all-out nuclear war could have slain most, if not all, Americans and Soviets, and perhaps even all of humankind.
The crisis had begun with the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, their discovery by U.S. intelligence on Oct. 14-15, a series of secret meetings within the U.S. government on how to respond, and then the president's Oct. 22 announcement of the presence of Soviet missiles in the island and of his establishing a naval quarantine around Cuba.
On Sunday, Oct. 28, after a harrowing Saturday, when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 over Cuba and the United States publicly rejected Khrushchev's offer to withdraw the Soviet weapons partly in return for a public U.S. pledge to remove its missiles from Turkey, the crisis ended.
Khrushchev seemed to settle for considerably less than he had publicly demanded, and the United States had apparently won a resounding victory.
After the crisis ended, Kennedy allegedly placed the likelihood of war as having been between one in two and one in three. So far as the record indicates, he never directly offered an estimate of the probability of nuclear war during the agonizing crisis through mistakes at operational levels, through the intentional choice of military leaders in either nation, or, least likely, through the intentional decisions of one or both the two top leaders.
After the missile crisis, the settlement was generally declared an unalloyed U.S. triumph. For most U.S. citizens and for most scholars it became Kennedy's finest hour; he had coolly stood up to the Soviets and made them remove their missiles, which had menaced the United States and this hemisphere. He had affirmed U.S. credibility, proved his calm toughness, and granted only a pledge not to invade Cuba.
Kennedy had stopped Khrushchev from tipping the nuclear balance and possibly also moving on Berlin. Opposing the presumably reckless Khrushchev, Kennedy had kept the peace and preserved the American alliance system.
For about two decades, Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis became the stellar case study of international crisis management. For many, the crisis seemed to prove that American-Soviet confrontations could be managed, that tough American tactics could succeed, that American skill and will could triumph, and that the ``nervous Nellies,'' to use Lyndon Johnson's demeaning phrase from another context, were simply wrong. Local conventional military superiority and nuclear deterrence could work—and well.
But over the years, important parts of that comforting set of interpretations have crumbled. The increasing availability of sources—the declassification of many American materials, the selective release of some Soviet documents, and the recent transcription of the tape recordings of many of President Kennedy's high-level sessions—has invited reinterpretations and reappraisals of the missile crisis. The new evidence topples many of the older views.
Whatever the hopes of top leaders in October 1962 and of the findings by many scholars in the next decade, many matters went dangerously out of control during the missile crisis. It was not a carefully managed crisis. On the U.S. side alone, a false alarm occurred at a Strategic Air Command base, nearly launching nuclear-armed American bombers against the Soviet Union; an American plane strayed into Soviet air space, nearly provoking a shootout; and the United States tested an ICBM at Vandenberg Air Force Base, perhaps portending a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union if the Soviets had learned of that launch.
A lesson of crisis
Such events led Robert McNamara, Kennedy's secretary of defense, to declare by the late 1980s that the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was not crisis management but, rather, that crises cannot be managed.
It also turns out that Kennedy made a secret deal to end the Cuban missile crisis. Contrary to JFK's and his associates' public statements during and well after the crisis, the president had secretly agreed to remove 15 Jupiters (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) from Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev's promise to remove 42 medium-range-ballistic missiles from Cuba. In the 1960s and well afterward, Kennedy aides simply denied that there had been such a formal quid pro quo. In denying that deal, they lied to Congress, to the American people, and even to Johnson, JFK's successor.
The Kennedy administration never pledged not to invade Cuba. That part of the U.S.-Soviet agreement had been contingent on, among other provisions, Cuba's allowing on-site inspection to establish that the Soviet weapons had been removed. When Castro refused to permit any inspections, and the United States and the Soviet Union had to work out an at-sea inspection of Soviet ships carrying the weapons back to the Soviet Union, Kennedy refused to grant the no-invasion pledge. That pledge was not given until the Nixon-Kissinger period.
Indeed, after the formal end of the October 1962 missile crisis, small-scale, U.S.-directed attacks continued against Cuba under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. These attacks, designed to destroy Cuban facilities and provoke opposition to Castro, were kept secret from the U.S. public and from most members of Congress. But, of course, Castro and the Cubans, as well as some American legislators, knew of these CIA-directed efforts.
Khrushchev's motives
Khrushchev's motives for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba remain in some dispute. But many scholars, as well as a number of former Kennedy associates, have concluded that the Soviet leader was acting primarily out of defensive, not offensive, purposes: to protect Cuba, which had been threatened by U.S. military actions, and to try to redress, or at least slow, the growing nuclear imbalance between the United States and the Soviets, who were perilously behind and risked falling further behind.
By summer 1962, before the Soviet emplacement of the 42 missiles in Cuba, the United States had more than a 12-to-1 superiority in deliverable, strategic nuclear weapons and about an 8-to-1 superiority in the number of nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach the heartland of the Soviet Union.
U.S. nuclear advantage
The United States had more than 160 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and the Soviets had only about 20. To an uneasy Soviet leader, those overwhelming American strategic numbers, especially when enhanced by the Kennedy administration's recent installation of 15 Jupiters in Turkey, could even betoken imminent U.S. nuclear blackmail.
Khrushchev's emplacement of 42 missiles in Cuba, or even his likely goal of possibly putting 80 there, would not have reversed the overall nuclear balance or the missile balance. The United States would still have been well ahead, with 45 missiles in Turkey and Italy aimed at the Soviet Union, more than 160 ICBMs in the United States, and about 100 missiles on submarines at sea at any given time.
Distressingly, the transcripts of Kennedy's meetings with his ExComm (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council), as well as other archival evidence, reveal that the president and his advisers never carefully considered the possibility that Khrushchev might be acting defensively—to protect Cuba, or to narrow the growing missile gap, or for both purposes. Generally, the ExComm and the president assumed Khrushchev was acting aggressively to challenge Kennedy and the United States.
So little thought
Indeed, what is surprising—and dismaying—is how little thought the president and his advisers gave to why Khrushchev had put missiles in Cuba. In the first few days, the issue came up from time to time, but it never evoked a sharply focused discussion. CIA director John McCone had suggested, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk reported, that Khrushchev might be retaliating for the United States half-ringing the Soviets with nuclear bases (including putting Jupiters in Turkey), and that Khrushchev wanted the United States to have to live closer to the nuclear peril.
Indirectly rejecting McCone's analysis, most of the president's advisers offered other reasons for Khrushchev's missile gambit: Berlin, Latin America and credibility. They feared that Khrushchev hoped to use the missiles as a political tool to force the West out of Berlin. Some also suggested that the missile emplacement was devised to win support for the Soviets in Latin America. Usually, when suggesting such Soviet motives, the ExComm members interpreted the Soviet missiles as Khrushchev's intended challenge to U.S. credibility—to America's ``courage and commitment.'' And they interpreted it as a challenge to U.S. credibility.
On scattered occasions, in ExComm meetings, Kennedy briefly did mull over other possibilities. But they were occasional thoughts—never sustained, never developed. They are interesting because they suggest his curious mind, his willingness to look at other possibilities, and also his resolute willingness to return to the ExComm's near-consensus, which he had helped formulate.
The president, pondering aloud during the first day of secret deliberations, did briefly suggest a dissenting interpretation. On that Tuesday, Oct. 16, he said to the ExComm: ``Must be some major reason for the Soviets to set this up. Must be they're not satisfied with their ICBMs.'' But he speedily forgot about that possibility.
Bay of Pigs theory
Later that day, he worried that the Soviet emplacement would make the Cubans seem ``co-equal with us.'' He also said, about a minute earlier, that the situation ``shows the Bay of Pigs was really right.'' By that, he meant he had been correct in April 1961 to try to overthrow Castro by supporting a 1,500-man, CIA-trained emigre force against Cuba.
Toward the end of the first day of secret deliberations, Kennedy told the ExComm: `Well, it's a goddamn mystery to me. I don't know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade (of 1948-49) where the Russians have given so clear a provocation, I don't know when it's been, because they've been awfully cautious, really.''
That day, though generally supporting vigorous military action against the missiles, and leaning toward an air attack and an invasion of Cuba, JFK did briefly seem to shift. For about a half-minute or less, he even said he wished that he had not earlier publicly warned against a Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba. Accepting Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's judgment that the Soviet missiles in Cuba did not overturn the strategic balance or appreciably add to U.S. peril, JFK seemed to wish that he could do nothing. He seemed to regret that, in his judgment, he had no choice but some form of military action. ``Last month,'' he told the ExComm, ``I should have said . . . that we don't care (about the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba.) But when we said we're not going to [accept it] and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing . . .''
RFK's role
That first day, his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, suggested finding a pretext for attacking Cuba. ``Sink the Maine or something,'' he said, referring to the destruction of the battleship in 1898 that supposedly triggered U.S. entry into what became the Spanish-American War.
In sharp contrast, Secretary of Defense McNamara briefly suggested that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were primarily a domestic political threat to the United States and President Kennedy. That was not a line of interpretation that interested other ExComm members, or the president, and McNamara soon changed his tune.
Because none of the ExComm members deeply probed why the Soviets had acted, and virtually every one of them almost automatically interpreted the Soviet action as an intended challenge to the United States, the dialogue in the ExComm and in other administration groups focused heavily on what vigorous action the president should take. All realized that any action—including a blockade, or what was soon called a quarantine—could be very dangerous. The Soviets might retaliate by squeezing Berlin with a blockade, or by attacking the Jupiters in Turkey, or by doing both. Under Kremlin orders, Soviet ships might not stop at the quarantine line around Cuba. The result would be a shoot-out at sea, and then possibly escalation elsewhere and with larger weapons. Where the crisis would end, and how, none in the ExComm could foretell with assurance.
In the ExComm discussions, while some members worried about these dangers and others pushed for military attacks on Cuba, no one ever stepped back and asked whether the United states had a moral right to embark on a course that all advisers seemed to understand might result in massive war—even nuclear war. They hoped for the best, assumed that the president had the moral right to decide matters for the United States and also for the world, and easily avoided deeper ethical questions.
Diplomatic solutions
They also rather easily gave up on the notion of first approaching the Soviets privately to try to negotiate the missiles out of Cuba. A few U.S. diplomats proposed that negotiations were the safest initial course and that the United States could always move later to a public confrontation—a quarantine or even an attack on Cuba—if private negotiations proved unsuccessful. But the alternative route of a quarantine first might prove far more dangerous, and bar a settlement, these diplomats contended. Such arguments for initial diplomacy failed in the ExComm, and with JFK.
Propelled by McNamara, Robert Kennedy—who had shifted to less bellicose tactics after proposing a military attack—and other advisers, the president seemed to decide at least tentatively by Friday, Oct. 19, not to invade or bomb Cuba. To Kennedy, such military action was too dangerous. Some of the missiles in Cuba probably were operational, and they might well be launched against the United States in reprisal for a U.S. attack. Furthermore, U.S. allies in Europe and in Latin America, according to Kennedy, might deem the United States reckless, and such U.S. military action might impair NATO and other U.S.-led alliances. Military attacks could destroy, not protect, U.S. credibility.
An unhappy meeting
On Friday, Oct. 19, Kennedy met with the Joint Chiefs to tell them that their advice—heavy bombing attacks and an invasion of Cuba—would not be followed. Dealing, as he knew, with hostile military men, with the exception of the chairman, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy tried valiantly to lecture and persuade the unhappy chiefs. He knew that they were virtually an independent political force and that they could undercut him at home, within the bureaucracy, with Congress and, ultimately, with voters. Because the chiefs were loyal to the Constitution, they unhappily abided by his decision, but it was a very unpleasant meeting.
The most obstreperous chief, predictably, was Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff. Baiting JFK, whose father in the 1930s had endorsed the so-called ``appeasement'' policy toward Hitler's Germany, LeMay sharply told the president that his policy was ``almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.''
JFK, remaining comparatively cool in the face of this provocation, continued to try to reason with his four enemies within the government. In that brave venture, he struggled articulately and completely failed to change their judgment.
JFK evoked their contempt. After Kennedy left this unhappy meeting, one of the chiefs, apparently congratulating LeMay, said, `You pulled the rug right out from under him.''
``Jesus Christ,'' said LeMay, perhaps gloating. A few then speedily condemned the absent Kennedy for being a gutless weakling.
Unmoved by the chiefs, JFK chose the quarantine route. On Monday night, Oct. 22, President Kennedy, in a nationwide address, informed the world of the emplacement of the Soviet missiles. He implied that they threatened to overturn the nuclear balance and add greatly to U.S. peril. He demanded the missiles' speedy withdrawal and announced that he would impose a quarantine starting Wednesday morning.
A fortunate result
Fortunately, for all, the Soviets decided to abide by the quarantine. They did not challenge it—except by their words in the United Nations and elsewhere. Contrary to the fears of some JFK advisers, there was no shoot-out at sea.
Publicly, the administration declared that the Soviet missile emplacement was immoral, unacceptable and dangerous. Very occasional questions from U.S. citizens and some Europeans suggesting that the U.S. emplacement of Jupiters in Turkey was quite similar to the Soviet installation of missiles in Cuba were met officially with contemptuous rebuttals.
The official American line was this: The United States had acted openly (which was less than true) and the Soviets secretly in sending missiles abroad, and the U.S. missiles were ``defensive'' and designed to protect Turkey and NATO, while the Soviet missiles were ``aggressive'' and designed to challenge the United States and the hemisphere.
That argument omitted, among other matters, the earlier U.S. support for the Bay of Pigs and later marauding assaults on Cuba.
Privately, at various times, ExComm members knew that this self-righteous argument was overdrawn—but their public argument generally won plaudits. Only years later, with the declassification of U.S. documents, would citizens learn that the president and some ExComm members worried that the analogy between the missiles in Turkey and those in Cuba was very troubling. During the Oct. 16-25 period, at least a handful of ExComm members—including JFK and McNamara—had stated at meetings that the crisis might end in a trade: the Jupiters in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
On Saturday, Oct. 27, Khrushchev publicly proposed a settlement: trading withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba and the U.S. missiles from Turkey, providing on-site inspection in Cuba, and gaining a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. During much of that Saturday, even after the Soviets shot down a U-2, most of the ExComm members opposed a public or private deal involving U.S. missiles in Turkey. Such action, they contended, would sell out Turkey and NATO. Who then, they argued, could trust U.S. credibility and will?
Repeatedly in the ExComm meetings in the morning and afternoon, Kennedy tried to persuade advisers that this was not a bad deal. He stated that war, which seemed very close, was far worse. But he gained few supporters at these two meetings, and some of his support, ironically, came not from his natural allies but from his political enemies on the ExComm—CIA director McCone, a Republican, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a longtime adversary.
Publicly, on Saturday, in an official statement, JFK rejected the Turkey-Cuba missile swap. But unknown to LBJ, to McCone, and to about half the ExComm members, Kennedy decided privately to offer the trade.
A secret meeting
With the knowledge of Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Defense McNamara, presidential counsel Theodore Sorensen, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, and a few others, Robert Kennedy was sent to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin early that evening to offer the secret trade. About 8 p.m., the attorney general made the offer, insisting on total secrecy, and then returned to the White House in time for the day's third ExComm meeting.
At the third ExComm meeting that night, nobody mentioned that the Kennedys had offered a secret deal. McCone, LBJ and about seven others were kept ignorant—as were the Joint Chiefs, including Taylor.
Khrushchev did not get the public deal he desired. But he settled for this secret swap, probably because he, too, feared that the missile crisis had become too dangerous and that war was dangerously close.
Undoubtedly, Khrushchev feared that Castro might act impulsively to provoke war, and he knew he could not control Castro. Khrushchev also knew that the Soviets had a number of small tactical nuclear weapons on the island, and that the local Soviet commander might well violate orders and use them against an American attack.
Such fears undoubtedly helped push Khrushchev to accept the private deal, even though, partly, to save face, he had wanted a public quid pro quo: missiles for missiles.
The crisis had ended with a secret deal. The resolution was certainly far more of a victory for JFK, but it was not the total defeat for Khrushchev that citizens and scholars long believed. But that information did not come out for more than a quarter-century.
After all
Now, 35 years later, everyone should be grateful that Kennedy and Khrushchev, in the last days of their confrontation, pulled back for secret negotiations and a partly secret settlement. Certainly, Khrushchev's emplacement of missiles was a dangerous gamble—probably even more than Kennedy's decision for a quarantine. Admittedly, JFK in the crisis was cool, and even courageous, to withstand the pressures by the Joint Chiefs for forceful military action rather than the quarantine. But his choice of the quarantine, while less dangerous than an invasion or bombing, was also full of risk.
In retrospect, should we not critically ask why and how the president and the ExComm generally failed to understand Khrushchev's likely defensive motives in putting missiles in Cuba? Should we not also step beyond admiring JFK's coolness to lament that he did not pursue his own very occasional thoughts that Khrushchev might be acting for defensive reasons? And should we not ask critically about an international system, and two national systems that allowed the two leaders to take the world so dangerously close to war?
To accede uncritically to such a system, to praise Kennedy and Khrushchev for ending the crisis, and to admire JFK's coolness, is to fail to examine deeper purposes and deeper problems. Had the crisis erupted into war—and that was a serious possibility at the time—what then should we say about the major two leaders, and the two powerful nation states, in October 1962? There was a serious chance in October 1962 that the crisis would become a war. Analyses that lose sight of such important ethical questions risk accepting the world uncritically and risk praising technique and style while often avoiding deeper substance. ·For Page 1P
Barton J. Bernstein is a professor of history at Stanford University. He wrote this article for Perspective.
Published Sunday, October 26, 1997, in the San Jose Mercury News