Sixty Years Since We Were On The Brink: The Cuban Missile Crisis

By Will Barber Taylor

It is inevitable that any political leader will, if they last long enough, face a test that will define their time in office for posterity. For some, that test is economic — how they deal with the threat of poverty to their people. For others that test is one of war. War and politics have gone hand in hand since Pericles declared to the Athenians assembled to bury their dead “we are contending for a higher prize” as a reason for his people’s war against the Spartans.

For some leaders, the conflict they face will etch a deep mark on history. The Second World War and Winston Churchill will be forever intertwined; so too will Pitt the Younger and his struggle against Napoleon. Other will be less fortunate. Their triumphs or failures will be forgotten by history and overlooked by the future.

Regardless of whether they will be remembered, the wars often defined the way their years in power were recorded. And no war or conflict better helps to define the character or abilities of a politician than the Cuban Missile Crisis does for John F Kennedy.

The scale of the conflict and the relative newness and youth of the man who faced it have helped to make the crisis legendary. If, as was styled after his death, Kennedy was the King Arthur of his own Camelot then the Cuban Missile Crisis was his Camlann though with a happier ending for all involved.

Kennedy’s relationship with Cuba throughout his Presidency would be a complex one, not least because of the era it happened in. By 1960 although the height of the ‘reds under the beds’ scare had ended, the threat of communism was ever present. Both Kennedy and his opponent then Vice President Richard Nixon spent a great deal of the campaign vying to prove that they were the true Cold War warrior. A significant moment in the televised debates and the campaign itself would prove to be when Kennedy made a crack at the Eisenhower administration for the missile gap between Russia and the USA. The gap itself would prove to be nothing for the American public to really worry about — yet this was a fact that wouldn’t emerge until much later.

Kennedy’s relationship with communism was not merely a matter of a distaste for the economic system but a wider hatred of the lack of freedom that those who lay under the orbit of the USSR felt. Throughout his career Kennedy saw himself as a champion of the independence of nations; one of his most famous speeches in the Senate called for Algeria to become independent whilst representatives from the French government were present on a visit to the Senate. Kennedy opened his speech with these memorable words:

“Mr. President, the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile — it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism — and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.

Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.”

For JFK, the need to stand against communism was not merely about protecting wealth or status, it was about defending the basic liberties of people, of ensuring that society did not become crushed by oppression. To defeat communism and, in particular, the communism of the USSR was to protect the rights enshrined by the American constitution.

Yet, the means of combating communism for Kennedy was more complex than it was for others. For many Americans the idea of fighting communists was putting troops on the ground, it was “protecting” East Asia from the menace of communism by effectively taking it over. Vietnam and the long, bloody campaigns of both the French and Americans demonstrated to many future policy makers and politicians, including both John Kerry and later for Kennedy’s brother Bobby, that intervention could not be hand fisted. The strong-armed imperialism of the past for many, though not all, Americans seemed a product of an age that was best not dwelled on.

Kennedy’s relationship with the military would be crucial to how the crisis was resolved. JFK’s character was formed by rebellion — unlike his elder brother Joe who for most of his life until his untimely death parroted the beliefs of their father Joe Kennedy Snr — Jack Kennedy thought for himself. His experiences at university and whilst journeying through Europe prior to the outbreak of the Second World War helped form his belief that some confrontation was inevitable. His father’s isolationist beliefs, borne out of fear for the devastation of war and partly out of self-interest, stood in contrast to Kennedy’s admiration for Winston Churchill. Despite never publicly decrying his father’s views and writing a bestselling book, Why England Slept, which gave a robust argument for why appeasement made sense for the British government, JFK was never convinced by his father’s views on the war. Kennedy would not only wish to serve as soon as possible in the military, even asking his father to effectively bribe his way into service after he repeatedly failed physical examinations, but also advised his father to make clear on his return to America from Britain that he despised Nazism and Hitler.

This rebellion would put him at odds with the strict, authoritarian nature of the US military. During his time serving in the Pacific, Kennedy would be deeply angered with the military’s cover up of its own incompetence over the sinking of the ship his captained, the PT-109. Kennedy would come out of the episode as a public hero for saving his men, but the failure of the navy to adequately inform him of nearby enemy ship movements and then blame the sinking of the vessel on Kennedy created a distaste for the military which would grow following the death of his brother Joe. This isn’t to say JFK was against the armed service — far from it, like all ex-soldiers turned politicians he used it to his advantage. However, it gave him a sense that to trust the military too much would cause undue harm to himself and others.

The distance between Kennedy and the military would increase as a result of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Initially sanctioned by Kennedy’s predecessor President Eisenhower, the plan was to use Cuban exiles to invade with limited support from the US military, overthrow Castro and bring Cuba back into the US’ orbit. Cuba had for years been effectively an American playground, run by the American supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista’s overthrow during the Cuban Revolution and the rise to power of Fidel Castro had been initially greeted warmly by the American public — Castro was welcomed to America and went on talk shows in the immediate aftermath of revolution.

Castro’s flirting with and eventual acceptance of communism was hardly surprising for the leader of a country that had gone through a revolution. For many nations across the world, communism did not represent the spectre of fear — it seemed initially inviting and distinctive from the association that was felt between capitalism and imperialism. That millions suffered under communism wasn’t taken into account, partly through suppression of knowledge and partly due to a desire for any other system.

Whilst Kennedy asked about the invasion, he was never given the full extent of information that would be expected about the readiness either of the Cuban ex pats ready to invade their homeland or that the CIA and the military were banking on a full scale invasion of Cuba sanctioned by the President if the incursion went awry.

It did, spectacularly with the Cuban guerrilla army easily picking off and capturing their fellow countrymen. That America was involved was obvious and Kennedy remarked at the time that, had he been a Prime Minister in a Parliamentary democracy he would have been forced to resign — no doubt thinking of the fate of Anthony Eden in the wake of Suez.

Kennedy, at least publicly, accepted full responsibility for the debacle whilst quietly fuming over having been misled. Kennedy sacked the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, for failing to inform him of the lack of preparation that the Cuban rebels had and for attempting to force Kennedy into deploying air strikes in order to help the invasion. As Kennedy said later to his friend and later the executive editor of the Washington Post Ben Bradlee:

“The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

His distaste for the lack of transparency from the military formed during his time in the army was cemented with the Bay of Pigs. It would prove crucial in how Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Having come from his conference with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 (of which you can read more in my article from last year), Kennedy was aware of the USSR’s determination to not back down — either over Berlin or over their alliances in Asia or Latin America.

Khrushchev, whose rambling unconstructed, antagonist arguments had blindsided Kennedy during their meetings because he believed the summit was to have some purpose other than grandstanding, was ready to prove his might against the man he called “little boy blue”.

Cuba would therefore prove to be the perfect test of how resolute the young President would be in his stance against communism. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs, giving Castro weapons, in particular nuclear weapons, Khrushchev saw he could further embarrass the US by forcing Kennedy into a corner.

The crisis began on the 16th of October 1962 when Kennedy was presented with evidence that Khrushchev had been providing Castro with medium range ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead. It was a shocking moment and one that no one present would ever forget.

The advice Kennedy received was broadly set into two camps — the hawks and the doves. The hawks, mainly represented by the American military establishment advised the President that the wisest course of action was to bomb Cuba and eventually invade. For them the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs was a turning point — Kennedy had to be forced by them into a military confrontation with Cuba to prove that America could still swat smaller nations aside.

The doves, mainly made up of Kennedy advisors and those closer to the President and his administration, urged the President caution. There had, they believed, to be an alternative.

Kennedy was not immediately swayed by either side. As Robert Dallek suggested in his masterful biography of JFK, had anyone but Kennedy been President during the thirteen days that followed America would almost certainly have been engaged in a catastrophic war. Kennedy’s ability, often derided by his Harvard lecturers, his superiors in the army and politics and sometimes his friends, to be a truly independent thinker allowed him to assess the situation calmly and coolly.

When Kennedy was angry or nervous, he became even calmer and the only real signs that something was amiss would be the tapping of his front teeth with his fingers or a certain extra vigour in how he rocked in the rocking chair he had installed in the White House to aid his back.

This calm and lack of innate anger allowed the President to, in the words of his brother Robert Kennedy, to tackle the crisis in such a way that “would have the support of a unified nation.” Indeed, it is worth noting Kennedy’s handling of the crisis and also how the crisis was delivered to the public. He made sure via his various friends in the press that when it came to his speech revealing to the nation the scale of the crisis that it was the only major story printed on the front pages. Similarly, the honesty and frankness with which Kennedy laid out the danger that the nation faced won him plaudits rather than causing a total meltdown amongst the public. In his speech given on the 22nd of October 1962, Kennedy said:

“Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right- not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this Hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world.”

This linked Kennedy’s current aims — to remove the missiles from Cuba — with his larger aim, one he had expressed most eloquently in 1957, to rid the world of the threat of perceived imperialist aggression. Indeed, Kennedy during the speech goes to great lengths to explain that the Cuban situation threatened not only Washington DC but also the “Panama Canal” and that it could have as much a devastating impact on Latin America as North America. Kennedy’s aim to build an alliance for progress with Latin American nations was one of the many unresolved dreams of his Presidency and his ability to conjure up that which threatened the safety of America and also the whole continent is important to understanding Kennedy’s Presidency and the way he approached the missile crisis.

For Kennedy, whilst his role was clearly to make the final decision as to how America should respond — whether it should blockade Cuba as it eventually would do; whether it should launch a series of air strikes to take out the missile sites or whether it should launch a full-scale invasion, he knew it was important that these measure were debated and discussed in depth. He wanted to explore all options because he wished to ensure that all options were open both to his team and to his opponents. Kennedy was open minded, both prior to the receiving of the two letters from Khrushchev the one contradicting the other about his intentions, to allow both sides to have wriggle room.

Whilst he had been forced into a corner he did not wish, unless he had to, to force the Russians into a confrontation until he had no other option. When the blockade became the option that could appear confrontational (and gave Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State the opportunity to utter the famous remark “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked”) whilst also allowing the Russians an opportunity to back down without losing too much face. It would prove a defining moment in how Kennedy would be perceived around the world and in the history books — he had remained cool, collected and avoided a devastating wall whilst also looking strong and decisive.

That there had been a trade off via a back channel between Robert Kennedy and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian Ambassador, has led some to revive the criticisms of Kennedy’s decision making being weak — that by removing Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of missiles from Cuba, Kennedy was in some way displaying signs of weakness. The removal of the Jupiter missiles was in fact a small price to pay given that they were outdated and unlikely to be effective against Russia; indeed, in Robert Kennedy’s account of the crisis he remarks that on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey Kennedy remarked:

“The President, although he rejected Stevenson’s [Adlai Stevenson, UN Ambassador] suggestion, pointed out that he had for a long period held reservations about the value of Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy and some time ago had asked the State Department to conduct negotiations for their removal.”

Kennedy’s decision to exchange old and frankly fairly useless missiles for the potentially devastating force that could have been launched from Cuba was sensible and brave; any sign of removing weapons could have been seen as a weakness rather than evidence of careful deliberation.

In assessing JFK’s conduct only seven years later, then former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked:

“Always ready to listen to advice, generous in giving due weight to opinions, however diverse, careful, and even cautious before reaching final conclusions on any problem, he had the supreme quality, shared by only very great men, of refusing to evade or cushion his final responsibility by an attempt to spread it upon the backs of his colleagues. He was ready to carry the burden of responsibility himself.

While boldly facing the ultimate resort to force, his tactics and sense of timing were perfect. He was at the same time ready to act and allow his adversary the opportunity to retreat. When we recall the many occasions in history where hesitation and self-deception has led to war, our admiration is correspondingly increased. For President Kennedy really did preserve both Peace and Honour.”

Macmillan is right — Kennedy did act in a way that other politicians, especially the current crop on both sides of the Atlantic, can learn from. We live in a world that sixty years on owes a debt to the courage of thought and action expressed by President Kennedy. Had he acted differently or had another person been President, I might not be here to write these words and you might not be here to read them.

If there is any addition that can be made to this piece, it is this — whatever other follies or mistakes he made, both personal and professional, he was unequalled in skill, independent thought and dedication to his country and to the freedom of the world. His loss is still felt around the world and his achievements still held as the standard to which other politicians should be measured.