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Cuban Missile Crisis

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During early 1962, a majority of Americans admitted to the Gallup Poll that World War III was inevitable. Heavy casualties were to be expected, they said, but the American way of life would somehow prevail. If they had had any knowledge of U.S. top secret defense policy and the number of nuclear weapons involved, their latter conclusion might have been different. It took the events of October 1962 to change their minds.

While Americans expressed their World War III concerns to the Gallup Poll, the Soviets quietly began to supply the Castro regime with an astonishing number of offensive nuclear weapons. According to their original plan, the Soviets intended to give the Cuban government a total of 42 medium-range missiles by 1963. With a range of more than 1,100 miles, those missiles could easily reach America's heartland. An additional 24 intermediate-range missiles were offered but never arrived. Their range doubled that of the medium-range missiles. Forty-eight outdated Soviet bombers were also promised, and more than 40,000 Red Army advisers were assigned to Cuban duty. It was difficult for the Soviets to hide a military assistance program of this magnitude, and its discovery by the United States triggered the World War III-threatening Cuban Missile Crisis.

Thirteen Days In October

To the outside world, it was business as usual at the Kennedy White House in early October 1962. A visiting girls choir from Arkansas sang for the president on the White House back lawn. Kennedy joked with the press about his inability to carry a tune and offered wisecracks about certain personalities running in the upcoming congressional elections. No one knew that the president had already been informed by U.S. Air Force intelligence about the Soviet missile program in Cuba. Yet rumors of a strong Soviet military presence there had already made page one of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. These press accounts fueled attacks by Republicans against Kennedy's "weak hemispheric policy." In fact, shortly before Congress recessed for the 1962 congressional elections, Senate Democrats had countered Republican charges by writing and passing a resolution in favor of using "massive retaliation" against Cuba if the Soviets continued their military role there. The vote was 86-1, although no one in Congress knew about the Soviet buildup in Cuba.

The charge of being soft on communism, and in America's own backyard, continued to be politically devastating in fall 1962. Kennedy especially worried about the fate of his Alliance for Progress and whether Congress would continue to fund a program championed by an allegedly weak president. Up-and-running for more than a year, the alliance had already made significant contributions to infrastructure development in Latin America. But nobody seemed to notice. It was the continued existence of Castro's blatantly anti-American regime that dominated all hemispheric concerns.

Both Kennedy supporters and detractors did not need the knowledge of missiles in Cuba to demand a militant anti-Castro stance. Even New York's senator Jacob Javits, an avowed liberal Republican who had supported the Kennedy administration in most matters of legislation, announced that if there ever was a war-threatening crisis involving Castro he doubted that the White House had the "courage" to wage a limited nuclear war. Senator Homer Capehart, a proud Republican conservative from Indiana, insisted that the president must announce a 1963 timetable for a Cuban invasion, and popular columnist James Reston, a Kennedy supporter, urged the White House to demonstrate its leadership and expose Soviet-inspired tyranny in Cuba. The political pressure was intense, and, combined with Kennedy's own eloquent promises to defeat communism as soon as possible, the existence of the missiles in Cuba only hastened the march to war.

Kennedy answered his critics in public at the same time that his administration debated a response to the Soviet missile program in private. The president particularly disliked Newsweek's pun and accusation that he was a "Profile in Indecision" when it came to Cuba. Offering a vague response, Kennedy announced that his administration would do whatever must be done to protect U.S. security. Now, still in top secrecy, his administration began to debate just what that might entail.

For what is officially regarded as 13 days (often labeled from the late afternoon of October 14 to the early morning of October 28, 1962), the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Should the United States attack, the Defense Department estimate for Eastern European region casualty figures ranged from 70 million to 300 million dead depending upon the target priorities. After the crisis, and when further in-depth studies were accomplished, those estimates were found to be low ones.

In general terms, the joint Chiefs of Staff favored an immediate air strike against the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba. They could not guarantee 100 percent accuracy, and they admitted that as many as three or possibly more nuclear missiles might still be fired at the United States. In the meantime, if the Soviets retaliated against U.S. bases in Turkey, seized Berlin, or both, the most effective American response was the nuclear obliteration of most Soviet cities. Kennedy and his cabinet debated whether this threat of nuclear destruction should be announced to the American people. Brushing aside concerns from his closest aides that this announcement might cause a panic or stimulate reckless demands for an American first strike, on October 22, 1962, Kennedy went on television and explained the peril facing humankind.

To ordinary Americans, the announcement that their country might soon face a nuclear attack came as quite a shock. Although they had been voting against candidates who were "soft on communism" for years, it had been a political matter and nothing more. Suddenly, anticommunism meant a life-and-death struggle here at home, and the tension took its toll. Most Americans, the Kennedy White House soon discovered, wanted peace and security for their families.

Entire regions of the country now faced nuclear obliteration, and their residents prayed for peace. For Americans living in the northern sections of the country or in areas that Castro's missiles could never reach, their fear was focused on radiation sickness and not on obliteration. From Seattle to Boston, northerners flocked to the grocery stores, buying out every possible necessity to survive a long period of locked-up seclusion in their homes. Most civil defense authorities agreed that if the wind blew north from the nuclear-destroyed south, the radiation poisoning that came with it would remain intact for at least two months. The governors of northern states even stationed National Guardsmen at certain grocery stores in order to protect food supplies, prevent total buy-outs by only a handful of people, and provide a sense of order and discipline. America's churches were open on weeknights so that the concerned faithful could make their peace with God. The once vigilant anticommunist America had become America the scared.

This fear and nervousness took the political community by surprise. The U.S. electorate was supposed to consist of iron-willed anticommunists who were always ready to go the distance against tyranny and evil. Obviously, the anticommunist cause had its limits, and many Americans were now concerned about survival and not cold war victory. The Kennedy administration had to deal with this unexpected reaction. Their own belligerent speeches had played a role in the escalation of the cold war, and a basic question needed to be answered soon. Was American security truly at stake in the Cuban Missile Crisis or was it a matter of making good on campaign promises? If it was the latter, then there was no good reason for World War III. Over the 13-day period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration concluded that diplomacy and not war was the best solution. The trick was convincing the Soviets that peace was in their interest as well - without making Premier Khrushchev lose face in the eyes of his volatile generals should he agree to remove the missiles from Cuba.

As early as 1961, Khrushchev had concluded that Kennedy was young, inexperienced, and wobbly on important issues both at home and abroad. In the matter of Cuba, he had assured the Kremlin that Kennedy could be easily maneuvered. The nuclear missiles would be hated in Washington, but little would come of it. After all, he argued, the forced removal of the missiles would trigger World War III. Unless Kennedy went mad, Khrushchev said, the young president did not have the stamina for a horrible war. In the meantime, the Soviets would tip the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere, adding clout to the message that capitalism was waning and conununism was the future. According to his memoirs, Khrushchev was questioned by his own government for tempting world war over a propaganda stunt, but the Soviet dictator insisted that all would be well. He was mistaken.

Since the term blockade was unacceptable in international law, Kennedy imposed a "quarantine" against Soviet ships carrying military hardware to Cuba. In the 20th century, the term quarantine dated back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration's cautious response to the Japanese invasion of China. The term blockade was associated with an act of war. In the 1962 quarantine, the U.S. Navy was ordered to halt, board, and inspect, if necessary, suspected Soviet vessels. Any ship could be turned back into international waters or seized, but the Kennedy administration hoped the Soviets would never let the situation get that far. The decision for war would rest with the Soviet government and not Washington. That was the point. Ideally, the quarantine was supposed to convince Khrushchev that the best policy involved an end to supplying Castro and the beginning of negotiations with the White House.

At first, Khrushchev denounced the U.S. quarantine but also kept Soviet ships away from the U.S. Navy. This did not mean the tension was over. On October 26, the U.S. Navy stopped and boarded a Soviet-charted Panamanian vessel, Marcula, to verify it was not carrying nuclear weapons bound for Cuba. In response, Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy, noting that he was ready to remove the missiles if the U.S. military did not invade Cuba. The following morning the White House received another official letter from Khrushchev insisting that the missiles would be taken out of Cuba only if the United States did the same with its missiles in Turkey. Deciding that a power struggle must be going on in the Kremlin, the Kennedy cabinet wrestled over the meaning of these contradictory letters. The first letter, they concluded, sounded more like Khrushchev and the second more like his generals. Answering only the first, the White House accepted Khrushchev's proposal.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally conveyed the U.S. decision to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Dobrynin's colleague, V.I. Zorin, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, had already embarrassed his country by refusing to admit in public that there were missiles in Cuba. This was in the face of photographic evidence presented to the United Nations and the world by U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Urging Dobrynin to state the obvious and discuss the World War III threat, Stevenson exclaimed that he was prepared to wait "until hell freezes over" in the interest of keeping the peace. Stevenson's candor won international acclaim and also erased certain doubts in the White House that he was too much of the humanitarian to represent tough U.S. security interests.

On October 28, Khrushchev agreed that the missiles would be dismantled as long as Kennedy left Cuba alone. The tension and the threats subsided, and the 13-day threat of nuclear war was over. As the world breathed a sigh of relief, the Kennedy administration turned to verification matters during the next several weeks. They wanted United Nations inspection teams to verify the missile dismantling work, but Castro refused. The dismantling moved slowly. On November 20, 1962, Kennedy ended the U.S. Navy quarantine with his announcement that all known missile sites had been shut down. Finally, in January 1963 at the United Nations, both the U.S. and Soviet governments formally declared an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most Americans thought it had been over for weeks but welcomed the officially declared truce.

Timothy P. Maga. Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The 1960s (Eyewitness History Series) Facts on File. 2003.

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