by Tony Judt
On October 22, then, having first informed senior congressmen, leading NATO allies, and the Soviet leadership of his intentions, Kennedy announced to the world the presence of offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. response—a limited naval quarantine (civilian necessities would be allowed through) until the offending weaponry had been removed. To justify his actions, Kennedy emphasized the threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere and the U.S. commitment to defending the West, as well as the danger now faced by Americans living under the shadow of nuclear missiles.
How would Khrushchev respond to the quarantine and the accompanying demands? Thanks to his memoirs and to the Soviet archival material presented by Fursenko and Naftali in One Hell of a Gamble, we know that Khrushchev was thoroughly chastened and confused by the course of events.17 The men sitting in the White House did not know this, however, and even those who suspected it could not be sure. When the quarantine went into effect at 10:00 a.m. on October 24, the crisis seemed to be approaching its climax. That day Khrushchev sent Kennedy a cable insisting that Soviet weaponry in Cuba was purely defensive and threatening to ignore the quarantine—“We confirm that armaments now on Cuba, regardless of classification to which they belong, are destined exclusively for defensive purposes, in order to save Cuban Republic from attack of aggressor.” What, then, would happen if a U.S. destroyer hailed a Soviet vessel and it refused to stop? Kennedy himself was not optimistic. Far from expecting Khrushchev to accede to his demands, he feared a speed-up in the missile-site construction, a formal threat of Soviet nuclear retaliation if the U.S. were to attack Cuba—and possibly a move to take advantage of the crisis to squeeze the West out of Berlin.
In fact, the whole matter passed off peacefully. Kennedy and his colleagues took special care to seek out a harmless (Panamanian-owned) freighter to intercept and allow through, thus making their point without running undue risks. On the advice of his friend David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador to the U.S., Kennedy also reduced the quarantine zone from eight hundred miles, as initially announced, to five hundred miles, giving the Soviets more time to reflect and to call back their ships. Khrushchev, in turn, did not wish to have the U.S. discover and inspect his most advanced weaponry, and so, as Kennedy had anticipated and hoped, he ordered missile-carrying ships to stop and turn back, which they did on Thursday, October 25. The quarantine had not led to a shooting war. But the U.S. administration still had no solution to its primary concern, Soviet nuclear missiles already in Cuba. Plans for an air strike and even an invasion continued.
Then, on Friday the 26th, Khrushchev sent a long and rather rambling private communication to Kennedy in which he deplored the drift toward war: “If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and I know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” Instead, he proposed a solution: “If assurances were given by the President and the government of the United States that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from actions of this sort, if you would recall your fleet, this would immediately change everything . . . . Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear . . . . Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knots of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter this knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”
Khrushchev’s letter, born of a growing fear in the Kremlin that Kennedy was about to attack Cuba and force a confrontation, might have defused the crisis there and then.4 But the next day, Saturday the 27th, it was followed by a public and more formal letter, which made any settlement contingent on a quid pro quo: withdrawal of the offensive missiles in Cuba in return for the removal of NATO’s nuclear missiles in Turkey. The Soviet proposal put Kennedy in a difficult position—as he commented to George Ball that Saturday morning, “Well, this is unsettling now, George, because he’s got us in a pretty good spot here. Because most people would regard this as not an unreasonable proposal.”
The complications of such an exchange (to be discussed below), together with the shooting down of a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba that same day, seemed to leave the crisis unresolved and the clock ticking. Kennedy’s military advisers insisted that delaying an air strike beyond Monday, October 29, was imprudent; but the president himself was more concerned than ever about the acknowledged impossibility of destroying all the missiles in one strike. As he remarked on Friday, “It still comes down to a question of whether they’re going to fire the missiles.” In the end it was decided to reply to Khrushchev’s first letter and, in essence, accept it. Meanwhile Robert Kennedy was dispatched to meet privately with Ambassador Dobrynin that Saturday evening and impress upon him the urgency of an agreement, and the possibility of coming to a confidential understanding on the “missile swap.”
Dobrynin’s report of this meeting—that the Americans were serious and that President Kennedy was under irresistible military pressure to commit the irreversible—may have exaggerated Robert Kennedy’s message, but it had the desired result. On Sunday, October 28, Radio Moscow broadcast Khrushchev’s formal acceptance of the official U.S. terms for an end to the crisis—“The Soviet Government . . . has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union”—and work on dismantling the missiles began directly.5 Much remained to be worked out—the exact list of matériel to be removed from Cuba, the conditions of observation and on-site supervision, which Castro (furious at the outcome) vehemently rejected, and the secret understanding to remove missiles in Turkey.
The U.S. imprudently pressed its public advantage to insist that the IL-28 light bombers be removed as well, even though Kennedy himself had privately recognized that they posed little threat. But Khrushchev conceded these terms, on November 20 the quarantine was lifted, and on December 6 the last bomber was shipped out.6 The NATO missiles were removed from Turkey by April 1963, as unofficially promised.
Why did Khrushchev do it? It made no sense to install some of the Soviet Union’s most advanced (and vulnerable) military hardware seven thousand miles away on an undefendable island, in the hope that the U.S. would not notice what was happening until it was too late. During the crisis Kennedy and his advisers came up with four possible explanations for this aberrant behavior: (i) Cuba was to be a “lever” for Soviet ambitions in Berlin: “Let go in Berlin or else”; (ii) the move was part of internal Kremlin power struggles; (iii) Khrushchev was trying to compensate for Soviet strategic inferiority; (iv) Khrushchev seriously feared a coming U.S. invasion of Cuba and was seeking ways to avert it.
Of these, only (iii) and (iv) were true, in some degree—and it is symptomatic of the near-tragedy of errors in October 1962 that most of the men in the White House were much more disposed to believe and act on the assumption of (i) or (ii). Khrushchev was certainly frustrated with his inability to shift the Western allies from Berlin, despite his threats and bluffs of the past five years; what he calls in his memoirs the “anomalous” outcome of the 1945 Potsdam accords was a source of irritation to the Soviet Union throughout the first decades of the cold war.7 But a change in the Berlin situation would at most have been a side benefit of a Soviet nuclear presence in Cuba; it was not its main purpose.
Khrushchev’s main purpose was to compensate, rather desperately, for Soviet military shortcomings. Until 1961 the USSR had seemed quite well placed. The outcome of the Suez crisis of 1956 had misled Khrushchev into thinking that his threat at the time to fire off rockets if the Anglo-French expedition didn’t withdraw had played a crucial part in the
denouement (it didn’t). The successful launching of Sputnik in 1957 and Khrushchev’s own exaggerated boasting had aroused American fears of a “missile gap”—fears that Kennedy successfully exploited in his 1960 election campaign. But high-level reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union had convinced the Americans that Soviet intercontinental ballistic capacity had been vastly overstated, and in October 1961 Roswell Gilpatric, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense, had publicly revealed U.S. knowledge of Soviet strategic inferiority. A year later, by the time of the Cuban crisis, the Soviet Union was at a seventeen-to-one disadvantage in intercontinental missiles.8
Khrushchev knew this, and he knew that the Americans knew it. In John Gaddis’s words, he “understood more clearly than Kennedy that the West was winning the cold war.”9 The Soviet resumption of atmospheric testing in August 1961—followed by the U.S. decision to follow suit in April 1962—did nothing to allay Khrushchev’s sense of military inferiority (to which should be added his domestic agricultural failures and the chorus of Chinese attacks on Soviet “revisionism”). The temptation to place medium-range missiles (with which the Soviet Union was well supplied) just off the Florida coast seemed irresistible. After all, the U.S. had bases all around the frontiers of the USSR. As Khrushchev complained to U.S. Ambassador Thompson in April 1961, “The USA . . . believes that it has the right to put military bases along the borders of the USSR”—and a few Soviet missiles up against America’s borders would serve it right. “The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you.”10
IN ADDITION TO the psychic reward of jolting the Americans—“throwing a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants,” as Khrushchev put it to his colleagues in April 1962—Khrushchev had another motive. American experts had not fully appreciated the depth of Khrushchev’s fears for Cuban security. But these were real, and by no means irrational. With some help from Castro himself, the U.S. had made of Cuba a pariah state; it had actively supported one abortive invasion and was known to be devising all manner of schemes to undermine and overthrow the local regime, including the elimination of Castro himself. The Cubans themselves had the Guatemalan coup of 1954 firmly in memory, and they never tired of warning Moscow of impending attacks and possible invasions, not all of them the product of Castro’s overheated imagination.
If the Soviet Union could not protect its new (and only) friend in the Western Hemisphere against U.S. attack, how credible was it as the main-spring of progress and revolution? A year after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Khrushchev was obsessed by the fear that the U.S. might invade Cuba: “While I was on an official visit to Bulgaria [in April 1962] . . . one thought kept hammering away at my brain: what will happen if we lose Cuba?”11 But the only protection Moscow could realistically offer Castro was a threat sufficiently terrible, immediate, and local to deter the Americans from any future aggression. Hence the decision to introduce the missiles.
Khrushchev was not just whistling in the dark when, in The Glasnost Tapes, he claimed to have gained something from his maneuver: “Our aim was to preserve Cuba. Today, Cuba exists.” In retrospect, even some of the American participants in the missile crisis conceded the reasonable basis of Soviet fears—“After all, there was the Bay of Pigs and afterward a series of pointless ‘dirty tricks’ pulled on Castro by the Central Intelligence Agency and Cuban exiles.”12 But the American leadership at the time had obsessions of its own, which obscured Soviet objectives from view. To begin with, the members of ExComm were old enough to remember, and invoke, the events of the thirties and forties. The errors of appeasement, the success of the Berlin airlift of 1948-49, the lessons of the Korean War, were uppermost in their thinking. After his criticisms of Eisenhower, his failure at the Bay of Pigs, and his poor showing at the 1961 Vienna summit, Kennedy was ultrasensitive to any hint of indecision or weakness. On October 19, the third day of the crisis, General Curtis LeMay, the head of the air force, pressed him to take decisive military action: “I see no other solution. This blockade and political action, I see leading into war. . . . It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”13
There were more recent analogies, too. American pressure on the British and French to withdraw from Suez in November 1956 had led to fears among the NATO countries that when it came to a war, the U.S. might retreat to its hemisphere, abandoning the vulnerable and exposed European allies. Hence the perceived need in Washington to “stand firm.” Conversely, the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs had taught Kennedy and his advisers the wisdom of observing at least the forms of legality. Hence the decision—urged upon Kennedy by Dean Rusk in particular—that there should be no unannounced actions, and that any actions taken should be both prudent and legal, so as not to shake further the allies’ confidence.
These foreign policy concerns made Kennedy simultaneously resolute and cautious. Domestic politics, however, all pointed toward a need to appear uncompromising, at least in public. Republican congressmen, notably Senator Kenneth Keating, had for some time been warning of the growing threat from Soviet missiles in Cuba; the administration’s belated public acknowledgment of the extent of the danger gave its opponents a leverage over the handling of the crisis that Kennedy felt had to be offset by an appearance of granite resolve. Most of his nonmilitary advisers, with McNamara in the lead, were convinced that the missile emplacements had no impact on the United States’ overall strategic superiority and thus in no way increased U.S. vulnerability. As McGeorge Bundy later observed, it was not U.S. missile superiority but the mere risk of nuclear war that kept Khrushchev from ever pushing too near the brink.14 But President Kennedy, who was not much liked by his senior officers and who faced a midterm election the following month, could hardly say this in public. Robert Kennedy reported himself as having said to his older brother at the height of the crisis, “If you hadn’t acted you would have been impeached”—a remark to which the president apparently nodded agreement. This is characteristic hyperbole from the excitable younger Kennedy, but it certainly must have been a factor in the president’s decisions at the time.15
THESE BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS had a major part in determining the U.S. response to the Cuban missile crisis—indeed, they helped define for the U.S. leadership just what sort of a crisis it actually was. Thus Kennedy and his advisers were reluctant to play down the Soviet threat, or trade missiles in Turkey, or do anything else that might “let down our friends” and make them lose faith in American determination to preserve the free world. In fact the danger of allied disenchantment was vastly exaggerated—as the British ambassador to Washington reported himself saying to Kennedy at the height of the crisis, “Very few people outside the United States would consider the provocation offered by the Cubans serious enough to merit an American air attack.”16
Nevertheless, when ExComm discussed the possibility of a missile swap as proposed in the second Soviet letter of October 27, which would mean depriving the Turks of their recently installed NATO missiles, McGeorge Bundy summed up the common view: “In our own terms it would already be clear that we were trying to sell our allies for our interests. That would be the view in all of NATO. Now, it’s irrational and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”
The missiles in question were the “Jupiters” of Philip Nash’s new book.18 They are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the crisis plot, and their story is told here in full for the first time. In December 1957 NATO decided to install these intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Turkey and in Italy. Their presence fulfilled U.S. promises to provide its allies with credible defenses against the Soviet nuclear threat, plugged the apparent “missile gap” in the aftermath of Sputnik, and provided a use for an early generation of vulnerable, ground-based, liquid-fueled American missiles that were obsolete long before the last of them was deployed, after numerous delays, in March 1962. The Turks alone wanted them, and more for domesti
c political reasons than anything else. About the only military value of the Jupiters lay in increasing the number of targets the USSR would have to attack in the event of war.
Few had any illusions about these weapons, which were provocative to the Soviets and of no help to the West. Even Eisenhower, the president who approved their installation, thought them militarily insignificant, according to Nash. Kennedy’s advisers would later try to outdo one anotherin dismissing them: “worse than useless” (Bundy), “we joked about which way those missiles would go if they were fired” (Rusk), “a pile of junk” (McNamara—whose first defense review unsuccessfully recommended cancellation of the Jupiters’ deployment).17 When the crisis began, some officials, Rusk and McNamara especially, were initially keen to put the Jupiters on the table as a negotiating chip, and were restrained only by the collective belief that the Turks, and other NATO allies, would be disheartened by such cynical lack of attention to their feelings and needs.18 Later, some of the ExComm members calculated that even if an air strike on Cuba brought retaliation against the Jupiters, this would be a reasonable and tolerable risk.
Khrushchev, meanwhile, was equally aware of the Jupiters’ negligible military significance, and he paid them little attention. But when, on October 27, he and his colleagues thought they detected the chance of a negotiated compromise—perhaps overinterpreting as a direct hint some casual remarks in a newspaper article by Walter Lippmann—they decided to invoke the Jupiters as a way of getting something more out of the unpromising situation in which they now found themselves.