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The Cuban Missile Crisis - 30 years onBy Brian Dooley [1] | Published in History Today [2] Volume: 42 Issue: 10 [3] 1992 [4]

[5] [6]Military [7] Political [8] Soviet Union [9] Cold War [10] 20th

Century [11] Cuba [12] USA [13]

Brian Dooley assesses the incident which brought the world perilously close to nuclear war.

No doubtthe Goebbels diaries will not be the last historical treasure plundered from the Kremlin vaults.There have already been revelations about the Soviet Union's old spy network, Second WorldWar prisoners of war, and the extent of U2 flights during the late 1950s. There is also likely to bemore information forthcoming on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a better idea of exactly how closewe came to war in the last week of October 1962. President Kennedy regarded the avoidance ofconflict over the missiles as his finest achievement. The Allied powers (and others) applauded hiscool efficiency in averting a nuclear disaster, in restoring stability to the balance of power, and formaking Soviet Premier Khrushchev blink.

The president's brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, was given much of the credit for theadministration's success. It was his insistence on a blockade of Cuba, rather than an airstrikeagainst the island, that ensured a peaceful outcome. 'The way Bobby and his brother played theirhand was absolutely masterly,' noted Harold Macmillan.

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Robert Kennedy is also credited with engineering the brilliant diplomatic response to two Kremlinletters warning the US not to intervene in Cuban affairs: the attorney-general advised thepresident simply to ignore the second, more hostile letter, and reply instead on the terms of thefirst, conciliatory message. This advice was followed with impressive results: Soviet ships turnedback from the their mission to support the Cuban military, and the world was saved.

What we have known for some time, of course, is that things did not work out quite that smoothly.The truth is that John and Robert Kennedy struck a secret deal with the Soviets, promising to

remove Jupiter missiles from Europe if Khrushchev withdrew his missiles from Cuba (in April1963 Jupiter missiles were removed from Britain, Italy and Turkey). The precise details of thedeal were kept secret from the US public, the US government and very possibly from everyone inthe Kennedy administration except the president and his brother.

It appears that members of ExComm (The Executive Committee of the National Security Councilwhich was handling the crisis from the White House) were not fully informed about the details ofthe offer Bobby Kennedy made to Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Secretary to theTreasury and senior Excomm member Douglas Dillon remembers:

I was there and I don't recall the ExComm telling Bobby Kennedy anything veryspecific about what he should say to Dobrynin. He got his last-minute and finalinstructions from the president and only from the president. There would be no writtenrecord of this...

Dillon also claims that ExComm was not even briefed about the encounter the next day.

In fact, the existence of the deal was first made in 13 Days, Robert Kennedy's account of thecrisis, which was published in 1969, when both John and Robert Kennedy were dead.

Recent evidence also questions the image of the Kennedys as cool and rational throughout the

fortnight. In the early accounts of the crisis, the Kennedys and especially Robert arepresented as voices of reason and moderation, persuading the more impetuous members of thecabinet that the military options of an invasion or an air-strike against Cuba were not the onlyalternatives. However, it would now appear that the president and attorney-general were far fromcalm and unemotional in their behaviour.

Of course, the episode put the administration under severe pressure and apart from the nuclearconsiderations, JFK could not afford the encounter to embarrass him politically he had alreadybeen humiliated about Cuba the year before at the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and the missilecrisis came only two weeks before important mid-term elections.

Nevertheless, the president and the attorney-general both appear to have responded to the crisiswith remarkable emotion and aggression. The CIA photo expert who first showed RobertKennedy the U2 pictures of the missile bases said the president's brother 'walked around theroom like a boxer between rounds, thumbing his nose and uttering epithets'. In a splendid studyof the first day of the crisis (Belligerent Beginnings, Journal of Strategic Studies, March 1992)Mark White traces the initial reactions of the president, the attorney-general and other membersof the cabinet from recently-declassified oral histories and tapes of the ExComm meetings.

The president, according to one observer, was 'tense and clipped' while Secretary of State DeanRusk remembered the attorney-general's mood as 'emotional'. The tape of the first ExComm

meeting reveal the president outlining four available courses of action all involve some kind ofair strike against Cuba. A fifth option invasion is suggested by Robert Kennedy.

'We're certainly going to do number one [bomb the missile sites]', said the president. By thesecond ExComm meeting, which took place later that day (October 16), Kennedy had reduced

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the options to three: a 'surgical' strike, a more general strike, and an invasion.

In fact, the tapes reveal it was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor,who first proposed the idea of a blockade around Cuba, if only as helpful to a general invasion.The Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, suggested that the blockade might be an option onits own, and two others joined with him in an effort to counter the president's military preference.

The attorney-general, meanwhile, was no less belligerent than his brother. At the very first

meeting, he pointed out that an invasion was an alternative, and asked General Taylor how longsuch an invasion would take. He also passed a note to the president: 'I now know how Tojo feltwhen he was planning Pearl Harbor'.

At the second, he proposed 'whether it wouldn't be, uh, the argument, if you're going to get into it[Cuba] at all, uh, whether we should just get into it and get it over with and say that, uh, take ourlosses'. He also suggested that a pretext might be found for such an invasion and wondered if'there is some other way we can get involved in this through, uh... Guantanamo Bay [the USnaval base in Cuba) or something... or whether there's some ship that, you know, sink the Maineagain [a US ship that exploded off Havana in 1898] or something'.

Of course, those advising the president all changed their preferences at least once throughoutthe crisis, and it would be wrong to read too much significance into Robert Kennedy's (or thepresident's) initial reactions to the missiles. The attorney-general went on to champion the idea ofa blockade in the following days, and the deal struck with Dobrynin served world peace very well.

Nevertheless, the notion that the Kennedy brothers held out against advisers counsellingconfrontation is only partly true: they were initially the most aggressive and emotional membersof the cabinet. The Soviet version of events has long supported this theory Dobrynin claimedthat the attorney-general was overcome with stress at their meeting, and broke down in tears:

Robert Kennedy looked exhausted. One could see from his eyes that he had not sleptfor days. He himself said he had not been home for six days and nights. 'Thepresident is in a grave situation' Robert Kennedy said, and he does not know how toget out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from ourmilitary to use force against Cuba...'

This account, of course, concurs with the idea that the Kennedy brothers were keen to avoid anymilitary involvement, but this meeting took place towards the end of the crisis when thepresident's advisers had guided him away from his initial preference for an immediate attack.

Whatever the real personal mood of the Kennedy brothers, the outcome was a huge politicalsuccess for the administration. The public was led to believe that no compromise had been madewith the Soviets, that their young president had stood up squarely to the Kremlin, and thatKhrushchev had blinked first. The president's Democrats did well in the mid-term elections, andthere was less pressure on the administration to stand tough against Communism elsewhere inthe world.

In the following years, much of Robert Kennedy's political reputation relied on his coolperformance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he had provided wise but firm counsel for hisbrother. Unlike other liberals who feared being labelled as soft on Communism RobertKennedy was free to criticise US involvement in Vietnam. Such criticisms were credible from the

man who, the public believed, had refused to compromise with the Soviets.

Perhaps the coming years will throw more light in the discussion which went on in Kremlinmeeting-rooms at the time, who made political gain out of the crisis in the Soviet Union, and justhow close the finger was to the button.

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The Havana government, meanwhile, stands defiant, if increasingly isolated in the New WorldOrder. Castro is now regarded in Washington as an eccentric neighbour, noisy but harmless. Theonly leader still blinking thirty years on, he owes his survival partly to Kennedy's pledge that theUS would never invade Cuba. The missiles which his brother Raul requested from Moscowsaved his regime and entrenched Communism in Latin America for a whole generation after theBay of Pigs. In the end, the victory went to neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy, but to Castro.

Brian Dooley is a journalist and former aide to Edward Kennedy.

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