On the Brink: 50 Year Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Kennedy soon came into receipt of two missives from Khrushchev. The first, on October 26, was personal and earnest and indicated a desire to strike a deal to defuse the crisis: Khrushchev proposed removal of the missiles from Cuba in return for a public American pledge never to invade Cuba. The second, on October 27, was impersonal and rigid — and suspected of being a Politburo production, not Khrushchev’s — and more belligerent, insisting also on the removal of the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
To make matters worse, the same day, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, killed. A second U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace and nearly shared the same fate. It has been said that neither side would have permitted war on such chance missteps, but that remains unclear: ExComm had previously decided that a downed U-2 called for eliminating the offending SAM anti-aircraft missile site. ExComm had further determined that all SAM sites in Cuba were to be destroyed if a second U-2 was downed. Matters could have swiftly degenerated into war. Kennedy wisely chose not to order retaliation for the first U-2 and to remain silent about the second. He also ordered U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey defused so they could not be fired without his authorization.
Even without these possible triggers, the risk of war was high. On October 22, the U.S. moved to Defcon-2, the highest state of alert reached at any time in the Cold War. All U.S. missile crews were placed on maximum alert, over 1,400 bombers were armed and poised for immediate action, including 90 B-52s airborne carrying multi-megaton bombs, and over 160 nuclear warheads were made active. Whatever else might be said about the crisis, it cannot be claimed that the two superpowers were not poised near the brink.
Through back channels, agreement was reached along the lines of Khrushchev’s second letter, though the removal of the Jupiter missiles was a secret component of the deal, never avowed in public. On October 28, the deal was concluded and the world — for once not a hyperbolic image — breathed a sigh of relief. Kennedy basked in the glow of victory. A nuclear exchange had been averted and the Democrats picked up four Senate seats in the midterm elections that followed.
In short, Kennedy’s wretched judgment on the Bay of Pigs had spurred the Soviets to shore up their Cuban ally to the point of installing nuclear missiles. Yet with the stakes so high, Soviet determination untested, and the room for maneuver small, Kennedy carefully extricated the U.S. from the ignominious prospect of Soviet missiles positioned permanently ninety miles from mainland United States. He thus extricated the world from a nuclear exchange precipitated by this development.
There remain critics. Some thought the deal weak, that a more seasoned, sure-footed president would have insisted on the restoration of the status quo ante and the complete demilitarization of Cuba. “So long as we had the thumbscrew on Khrushchev, we should have given it a turn every day,” had been the judgement of Dean Acheson, former secretary of State under Harry S. Truman, whom Kennedy had called in to advise during the crisis. Should Kennedy have demanded demilitarization? Would the Soviets, being able to achieve the securing of Cuba from American invasion and the removal of the Jupiter missiles besides, have balked at withdrawing their advisers from Havana? The answer may never be known. Given the stakes, one is inclined to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt for not attempting to find out.
Yet no accounting of the deal can omit its costs. The 42,000 Soviet advisers in Cuba remained, training Castro’s forces to develop what was to become the leading communist mercenary army, which would assist subversion in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for the next two decades. Cuban exiles had to forfeit any hope of dismantling communism in their homeland until at least after the Cold War and, indeed, up to the present day. They paid the heaviest price for sparing the world the horrors that might have been unleashed half a century ago.
“The answer is a mixed one. Inasmuch as the placement of Soviet missiles developed out of the disastrous, Kennedy-authorized Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban dissidents the previous year, assisted covertly — but so clumsily as to fool no-one — by U.S. forces, the “victory” consisted of extricating Kennedy from a self-induced crisis.”
That pretty well sums it up. There never would have been a crisis if Kennedy and his cohorts hadn’t launched a sneak against Cuba (in flagrant violation of the U.N. treaty the liberal Democrats had just signed us onto a few years before, btw).
I remember it well, and I also remember how bad a president Kennedy was…much worse than Obama. The only reason Kennedy doesn’t rank amongst the worst presidents of all time is because he got capped after only three years in office. If he’d been around for two terms he probably would have been as disastrous as Roosevelt.
Not surprisingly, he attained near demi-God status in the more idiotic portions of the American population (e.g. the media loved him even more than they love the New Messiah)
Preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion began during the Eisenhower administration. (You don’t think the whole preparation took place in the 3 months JFK had been in office, do you?)
This would have been a bipartisan policy; had Nixon defeated JFK in 1960, he would have authorized the invasion as well.
Preparations to fight the British Empire began in the 1920s with an operational plan called War Plan Red. Luckily, no one was stupid enough to actually implement that plan.
And, then along came Jack Kennedy, one of the biggest morons ever to unfortunately occupy the White House…and incredibly stupid acts become the order of the day.
Not only did they almost put us into WWIII by launching a sneak attack against the Cubans, and then throwing a little hissy fit when the Cubans, not surprisingly, took measures to defend their country against further sneak attacks, but they gave us an unwinnable war against the commies in Vietnam as a little side present, a present that ended up getting around 60,000 Americans killed for nothing.
Obama has been a bad president…Jack Kennedy was a much worse president.
While planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion did indeed start under the Eisenhower administration, far larger invasions were planned and conducted in far shorter time. A couple of quick examples:
1. Operation Market-Garden in WWII involved 3 airborne divisions, several ground divisions, thousands of airplanes, etc. It was planned and implemented in a couple weeks.
2. Inchon invasion in Korea was planned and conducted in a very short time (days to weeks).
The nationalization of American’s property by Castro was the first act-of-war committed by either side. If we’d gone in and filed fidel full of holes one day one, none of this would’ve been necessary. The lesson, which has been offered again and again (but still nobody learns) is that you take out enemies at the first chance. Castro’s still backing Leftist regimes in latin America 50 years after we let him off the first time. Iran, ditto. Rule: the right thing to do is always simple, and hard; the wrong thing is complicated, and easy. BTW, this is why Leftists always accuse Rightists of being simple-minded (assuming this to be a bad thing, you’ll note), because we want to do the right (simple/hard) thing, and the Left, as always, is backing the wrong thing.
Bay of Pigs or not, Nikita would never have dared place missiles in Cuba while Ike was President. It was likely his poor impression of Kennedy in Vienna which emboldened him. And the deal which resolved the crisis was hardly status quo ante; the Soviets removed their missiles, but gained not only a guarantee of Cuban sovereignty but the removal of the Jupiters from Turkey.
Exact! this was the result of the Vienna meeting.The Russians saw Kennedy as a push over.
This otherwise decent summary of the Cuban Missile Crisis omits one element that I found very telling when I learned of it: the position of Castro throughout this affair.
While any decent leader would have a great deal of concern for the wellbeing of his people during a crisis, Castro apparently did not. In fact, he lobbied very hard for Krushchev to initiate a first strike on the USA. I read the correspondence (in English translation) at the Georgetown University archives online some years ago. Diplomatic language is, by long tradition, restrained so that the language does not sound foaming-at-the-mouth rabid but it is so strong that it says livid rage to anyone familiar with diplomacy as Krushchev clearly was. Castro clearly wanted the USA hurt and hurt badly for the things it had done to offend him.
Furthermore, he did his best to make that happen. In addition to strongly-worded diplomatic communications with Moscow, Castro took some very provocative steps on the ground. The missile sites in Cuba that were already operational – and there were several – were manned entirely by Soviet troops and were under Soviet control. Castro had his minions rally loyal troops to surround the missile control facilities and loudly demand that the missiles be fired at the USA. (Picture Soviet missile personnel surrounded by a ring of unfriendly Castro loyalists screaming at them to launch their missiles….). And this was in the days FOLLOWING the agreement reached between Kennedy and Krushchev.
Of course Castro has always denied this despite the diplomatic evidence. The man who swore he had no political ambitions and who promised free and fair democratic elections within 6 months when he toppled Batista in 1959 is still the General Secretary of its Communist Party and continues to dominate his crumbling nation.
Castro tried his best and was pushing Nikita.This is Castro who used to say that Nikita had no “cojones”.
As I was just 18 and a college freshman at the time. I recall vividly calling my folks to tell them I was going to drive home because if we were going to war, I didn’t want to be so far from home. Scarey times.
I was in the 6th or 7th Grade in a small town in Southeast Georgia at the time. The Interstates weren’t completed yet and my little town happened to be at the intersection of two of the old federal transcontinental highways, US 1, running from Maine to Key West, and US 80, running from San Diego to Savannah. For days civillian traffic was restricted to certain hours and the roads and even the ricketety old railroad were awash in OD. There was a SAC base nearby so B-52s and B-47s at 1000 feet were a common sight and they were still using the B-29-based KC-97 as a tanker, also impressive at low altitude. It was all exciting for a kid but parents were clearly worried about it all. People in my part of the Country weren’t real fond of Mr. Kennedy but seemed to approve of his handling of it all. ‘Course, in those days we only knew what we read in the papers, and that Huntley-Brinkley fifteen minutes in the evening was a new-fangled thing.
There may have been flaws in the lead up to and resolution to the crises. But compared to Obama, who has givenbthe Caribbean away on a silver platter, the Cuban crises was handled quite well. Great article.
In “On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace”, Donald Kagan describes in detail the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His analysis points the finger quite starkly at JFK’s role in causing the Soviets to overestimate themselves. In short, they were no match for US power at that time. However, JFK’s weakness caused them to reach for the brass ring, and almost precipitated World War III.
I have read several pertinent “facts” which are offered with a request for rebuttal(s), as needed.
In the their meeting in Vienna, Kennedy was suffering from his chronic episodal back pain, due to a tree planting ceremony earlier. Kennedy was high on drugs and Khrushchev sized him up as a drunk playboy; it led to higher risk taking by the Bear.
The Bay of Pigs was a set up by the bureaucracy on a brand new President who could be rolled. The invasion force was marginal for the job, and the trump card was a US Commander-in-Chief’s decision to commit US military forces. But nobody would tell the boss, until the hook was set, our guys were getting slaughtered on the beach. To everyone’s mutual hatred, he said no. He wrote off the men on the beach. Thereafter, Bobby’s job was to ride herd on the cowboys.
And McNamara, a generation later, learned to his horror, that the authority to launch had been delegated to Castro. The US would never do this, but the “Use them or lose them” argument won in the politburo. The trigger would be the first US boot on Cuban soil. McNamara judged we had gotten within minutes of WWIII, the evaporation of Washington D. C. and everything south of it.
Since I was living in D.C. at the time, how close did I come to becoming a plasma?
What was the Berlin Wall timeframe in this sequence?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the result of faulty American diplomacy. Successful diplomacy averts crises; it does not create them. Kennedy’s “successful” handling of the crisis honors his legacy but ignores the fact that it should not have occurred in the first place. It would not have occurred under an Eisenhower/Dulles administration. Avoiding crises, not solving them, is the hallmark of a successful foreign policy. The Soviets made a mistake in underestimating Kennedy’s possible response. They never would have underestimated Eisenhower’s.
Skipping over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy’s role in involving the U.S. in the ill-fated Vietnam War again demonstrates his faulty and amateurish approach to foreign policy. His acquiescence in the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the the Vietnamese prime minister, who was negotiating with North Vietnam for a peaceful settlement, was the catalyst for the ensuing disaster.
There is much substance here. Kennedy won the election by whipping up a fear of a missile gap, that Eisenhower had allowed our nation to fall behind the USSR in missile technology. Eisenhower, the conqueror of Europe, scoffed at this charge, but the herd listened. A few weeks after the election, President Kennedy announced that a special commission had concluded that the missile gap had been closed, did not exist.
There was and is, a powerful cabal who raised Kennedy onto a pedestal, the American demigod. But many thought he was a light weight talent. He led us into “Nam, by listening to his advisers, e.g. McNamara. Eisenhower had been faced with the same decision years before, by a unanimous military command, but said no. When asked for his reason, he said, “I know war”, then went and played golf.
Americans, who do not study history and listen to pundits, vote lousy people into office. The result is pain and death.
Vote wisely.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, as Viewed From a Soviet Launch Facility
It’s basic human nature to idealize the past. But those were definitely SCARY times, 50 years ago. On balance times are better today, in that the Warsaw Pact/Soviet Union and the threat of wholesale nuclear annihilation are no more. We did, after all, win the Cold War.
They may not have been what I would have preferred as elected officials, but Jack Kennedy, Harry S. Truman and Hubert Humphrey were real Democrats. They really cared about the country, and are nothing like the kooks/weirdos that control the Democrat party today.