by Tony Judt
THE WHOLE CRISIS, and the degree of risk it entailed, thus hinged on a paradox. If Kennedy and his colleagues had known what Khrushchev’s real purposes were, they might have been able to defuse the whole business quietly and privately (though Bundy and other commentators always insisted that Khrushchev’s bluff required a public response, lest he suppose that the U.S. wasn’t serious about resisting him). But had the Americans also known how many armed nuclear missiles the USSR had already installed in Cuba—and how reluctant Khrushchev was actually to fire them—the temptation to act first and talk afterward might have proven irresistible. So their partial ignorance both provoked the drama and prevented a tragic denouement.
Conversely, had the U.S. not uncovered Khrushchev’s plans to install missiles in Cuba before they were complete, Kennedy would certainly have been faced, in November 1962, with a huge political dilemma: accept the indefinite presence of Soviet ballistic missiles just off the U.S. coast, or else stage a crisis under much less favorable military and diplomatic conditions. This situation might have been made worse by Khrushchev, who, with his missiles securely in situ, could have been tempted to push his advantage well beyond what was prudent; at best he would then have suffered a reversal even more humiliating and public than the one he accepted on October 28.
Given Khrushchev’s decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba (a decision taken well before Kennedy’s public warnings of September 1962), an international crisis of some kind was thus unavoidable. If it took the unnecessarily terrifying form that it did, this was in large measure because of a simple American misunderstanding that can stand as a metaphor for much of the early cold war. The officials in Washington thought that their Soviet opponents were playing a complicated game of diplomatic chess, with the various pawns on the international board—Czechoslovakia, Korea, Germany, Egypt, Indochina, and now Cuba—being subtly moved around to the calculated advantage of the Moscow principals.
In fact, however, the Soviet leaders—first Stalin, now Khrushchev— were not playing chess. They were playing poker. They had a weak hand and they knew it—long before the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made the observation, Khrushchev and many of his senior colleagues understood intuitively that the empire they ruled over was basically “Upper Volta with missiles.” So they bluffed. The outcome of the Cuban crisis would not have been very different if the Americans had realized sooner which game they were in; but the risks encountered along the way would have been much reduced.
Poker and chess have this in common, however—that their outcome depends more on the nerve, character, and intuition of the players than on any formal disposition of resources or rules. And the more we learn of the Cuban missile crisis the more we must come to appreciate the two men who held our fate in their hands in those days. Mr. Khrushchev’s role is easier to grasp. Having made a major miscalculation, he resisted the temptation to raise the stakes. When Kennedy imposed a quarantine and demanded the removal of the missiles from Cuba, the Soviet leader could have responded by threatening nuclear retaliation if Soviet ships were intercepted or Cuban territory attacked. That, after all, was the logic of the missile emplacements in the first place—the threat of a nuclear response to deter the U.S. from aggressive moves in the Caribbean.
But Khrushchev never even considered such a challenge. As he explained on October 30 to a disappointed Castro, who would have preferred an armed (and if necessary nuclear) confrontation with the Americans, “There’s no doubt that the Cuban people would have fought courageously or that they would have died heroically. But we are not struggling against imperialism in order to die. . . .”31 Other Soviet leaders might well have behaved similarly—and Stalin, at least, would never have exposed himself as thoughtlessly as Khrushchev had done. All the same, it was Khrushchev whose decisions defused and resolved the Cuban crisis, and history owes him that much recognition.
JOHN F. KENNEDY’S POSITION is more troubling. His own posturing, no less than that of Khrushchev, got the U.S. into its Cuban imbroglio in the first place, and it was in large measure Kennedy’s need to seem strong, his concern for “credibility,” that fueled the rhetoric swirling around Washington in the autumn of 1962. He was a young president, under great pressure to do the “right” thing, possessing imperfect information about a possible threat to his country’s security, and advised by a mixed group of men (many of them older and more experienced) who had in common only their frequently reiterated awareness that this was a major crisis and that the fate of the world hung upon their decisions.
And yet The Kennedy Tapes reveal a remarkable coolness in John Kennedy, a willingness and a capacity to listen, question, absorb, weigh, and finally adjudicate in extraordinary circumstances. At each turn in the proceedings, Kennedy chose the most moderate available option, sometimes against the specialized advice pressing in upon him. Instead of an invasion he favored an air strike on missile bases; instead of a blanket air strike he favored selective strikes only; he insisted that no strikes, however selective, should happen until warning had been given. He opted for a naval blockade over immediate military action, and a partial naval quarantine over a blanket blockade on all shipping. 32
It was at Kennedy’s insistence that an innocuous ship of non-Soviet registry was targeted for a symbolic exercise of the quarantine, and he pressed his staff to obtain all possible legal and international support in advance of even that limited action. He ignored suggestions that the U.S. might take advantage of the quarantine to seize Soviet ships carrying missiles in order to learn more about the Soviet weapons program. He rebuffed all pressure to respond aggressively when Captain Rudolf Anderson’s U-2 was shot down over Cuba on October 27, and repeatedly postponed the confidential deadline after which the countdown to U.S. military intervention would begin. He welcomed the opportunity to use the Jupiter missiles in Turkey as a secret bargaining ploy and even authorizedhis secretary of state to have the United Nations urge him publicly to accept such a trade if all else failed. And just to be sure that there were no mistakes, on October 27 he instructed that those same Jupiter missiles be defused so that if he had to authorize air strikes on Cuba, and the Soviets responded by an attack on the Turkish missile sites, there would be minimal risk of further escalation.
Each of these decisions was taken in the face of criticism from some quarter among his advisers and generals—according to George Ball the defusing of the Jupiters was ordered “much to the disgust of those eager for dramatic action.”33 With hindsight we can see that Kennedy managed to obtain the best possible outcome in the circumstances. He was not just lucky, either, pace Acheson—he was consistent. In rejecting the advice he was offered in hundreds of hours of secret meetings, he ran serious risks, too; as he remarked to the assembled senior congressmen on the day of his press conference revealing the crisis, “The people who are the best off are the people whose advice is not taken because whatever we do is filled with hazards.”
Of course Kennedy’s motives were never unmixed, and, like any politician, he sought to turn his management of the affair into a political asset. He presented himself, and his colleagues and admirers presented him, as the man who “faced down” the Soviets, who drew a line in the sand, who won the first phase of the cold war; in Dean Rusk’s words, spoken on Thursday, October 25, when the Soviet ships turned back, “We [were] eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.”34
Just to make sure, Kennedy went to the trouble of slandering his old political opponent Adlai Stevenson, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson, it was hinted, had been “soft” during the crisis, favoring negotiations and a missile “trade,” in contrast to Kennedy’s own firm, virile position. The implication—that Stevenson had been unwilling to “stand up to” the Soviets and that Kennedy had been uncompromising and unyielding—was doubly misleading; but after Charles Bartlett and Joseph Alsop published it in their “inside” account of the crisis in the December 8, 1962, issue of the Saturday Evening Post (with John Kennedy’
s prior knowledge and approval), the damage was done. The irony is that Kennedy himself was no less a victim of these domestic “dirty tricks” than Stevenson: The qualities that the president did display during the crisis—patience, moderation, a capacity for independent judgment, and a steady preference for negotiation over confrontation— were kept hidden from view.
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce also politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues. Yet there are advantages to a life spent in democratic politics: What these books show is how vulnerable Khrushchev was for lack of anyone to question his more impetuous moves, and how McGeorge Bundy’s logic, Dean Acheson’s diplomatic experience, and even Robert McNamara’s years at the head of the Ford Motor Company had furnished none of them with that “seat of the pants” instinct that John Kennedy (like Lyndon Johnson) brought to the ExComm discussions. In any case, how many recent U.S. presidents would have fared better than Kennedy, or even half as well? It is a grimly sobering exercise to insert into The Kennedy Tapes some of JFK’s recent successors and guess at their likely conduct under such pressure. One of the side benefits of the Cuban crisis is that none of them has ever had to face similarly trying circumstances. Meanwhile, the editors of The Kennedy Tapes are, I think, convincing when they write, “It seems fortunate that, given the circumstances that he had helped create, Kennedy was the president charged with managing the crisis.”
This extended review essay—occasioned by a flurry of publications and documents concerning the Cuba crisis of October 1962—first appeared in the New York Review of Books in January 1998.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIX
1 For the pertinent excerpts from Kennedy’s statement of September 4 and his press conference on September 13, see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 393. Under international law and the Rio de Janeiro Treaty of 1947, Cuba, like other states, had a right to obtain and install defensive weaponry so long as it did not threaten peace in the region.
2 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence (New York: Times Books, 1995), 69; George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: Norton, 1982), 286.
3 Bundy, Danger and Survival, 413-414.
4 According to Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev alone of the Kremlin’s senior leadership never really believed that Kennedy would attack Cuba—and thus forbore to make plans for such an eventuality (“One Hell of a Gamble,” 273). He was perhaps wrong—but his error was crucial in sparing Kennedy that decision.
5 General Pliyev, the senior Soviet officer in Cuba, actually began dismantling his missiles at 8 a.m. EST, even before Khrushchev’s letter was broadcast.
6 Kennedy’s last-minute insistence upon the removal of the planes, after the initial terms had been agreed, was resented by Khrushchev. But he nonetheless instructed the Soviet Presidium to approve their removal, which it did on November 16, despite Mr. Mikoyan’s prior assurance to Castro that the Soviet Union would not concede on this point.
7 Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 454.
8 Robert McNamara, in Blundering into Disaster (New York: Pantheon, 1986), claims that he and President Kennedy took little notice of this disparity at the time. The fact that enough Soviet missiles would survive a U.S. attack to kill millions of Americans was sufficient to deter anyone from starting a nuclear war—“No responsible political leader would expose his nation to such a catastrophe.” See pp. 44-45.
9 John Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press, 1997), 261. In Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), it is clear that Khrushchev was obsessed by Soviet strategic vulnerability; hence his refusal to accept any test ban agreement that required on-site inspection.
10 See “One Hell of a Gamble,” 90; Khrushchev Remembers, 494. The logic of Khrushchev’s thinking was not lost on some U.S. policymakers well before October 1962. After the Bay of Pigs, John J. McCloy remarked to Theodore Sorensen that “even if the Soviet Union had missile bases in Cuba—which it hasn’t—why would we have any more right to invade Cuba than Khrushchev has to invade Turkey?” Quoted in Nash, The Other Missiles of October, 95.
11 Khrushchev Remembers, 493.
12 Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 180; Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: Norton, 1990), 242.
13 John Kennedy’s father, Joseph, had been a notorious appeaser and supporter of the Munich accords. General LeMay surely knew this.
14 The following exchange at the first meeting of ExComm on October 16th is significant: “McGeorge Bundy: ‘The question I would like to ask is . . . What is the strategic impact on the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?’ Robert McNamara: ‘Mac, I asked the Chiefs that this afternoon, in effect. And they said: “Substantially.” My own personal view is: Not at all.’” (The Kennedy Tapes, 89).
15 See Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1969), quoted by Bundy in Danger and Survival, 394. What JFK himself did say, on October 16, was this: “Last month I said we weren’t going to [allow it]. Last month I should have said that we don’t care. But when we said we’re not going to, and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing, then I would think that our risks increase.” The Kennedy Tapes, 92.
16 David Ormsby-Gore, quoted in Harold Macmillan, At The End of the Day: 1961-1963 (London: Harper and Row, 1973), 192.
17 All quotes are from Nash, The Other Missiles, unless otherwise indicated. According to Bundy, “By the autumn of 1962 no senior official except General LeMay of the air force still believed that the Jupiters were good military weapons.” Bundy, Danger and Survival, 428.
18 President Kennedy himself did not disagree. On October 18 he commented that “the only offer we could make, it seems to me, that would have any sense, the point being to give him [Khrushchev] some out, would be giving him some of our Turkey missiles.” The Turks had no objection to exchanging Jupiters for submarine-based Polaris missiles, but since the latter would not be available until the following spring they were reluctant to agree to anything until then.
19 Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, 179.
20 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 90.
21 Many Kremlin specialists were firmly opposed to the siting of missiles in Cuba, seeing in the decision a strategic blunder and a failure to keep Soviet eyes on the main business of relations with the U.S. This was one of the most serious charges against Khrushchev when he was deposed in 1964.
22 See Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 186; Bundy, Danger and Survival, 369.
23 “Kennedy overestimated the readiness of Khrushchev and his allies to take decisive actions on Berlin, the most aggressive of which really was the erection of the Berlin Wall two months after the Vienna summit,” in August 1961. Dobrynin, In Confidence, 46. See also Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, 35.
24 “Those of us who feared reprisal in Berlin were taking too much counsel of our own long anxieties and too little note of demonstrated Soviet prudence.” “Throughout the missile crisis the perceived connection between Cuba and Berlin was much more important in Washington than in the Kremlin. Our fear was not his hope.” Bundy, Danger and Survival, 421-422, 449.
25 On October 28 the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor dissenting) informed Kennedy that “[we] interpret the Khrushchev statement, in conjunction with the [continuing] build-up, to be efforts to delay direct action by the United States while preparing the ground for diplomatic blackmail.”
26 The authors of “One Hell of a Gamble” make much play with the informal channels then used to convey hints and messages back and forth between Washington and Moscow, notably the role of one Georgi Bolshakov, whom Robert Kennedy met privately on dozens of occasions in the course of 1961 and 1962. But the editors
of The Kennedy Tapes, like Dobrynin in his memoirs, play down this cloak-and-dagger aspect of U.S.-Soviet relations and the purported role in the resolution of the Cuban crisis of privileged American journalists, Soviet secret agents, and Washington barmen. Khrushchev’s own secrecy, the fact that he had taken none of his own messengers into his confidence over the missile emplacements, undermined their credibility; the fact that Khrushchev had used confidential channels to lie to him was what most offended the president. In any case, the shock of coming so near to the brink radically altered the rules of the game thereafter. A hotline was set up, Ambassador Dobrynin became the main interlocutor, and confidential “feelers,” and “back channels,” real or imagined, lost their significance.
