Richard M Pious. Political Science Quarterly. Volume 116, Issue 1, Spring 2001.
Nowhere do the constitutional prerogatives of the president seem greater than in the midst of national security crises; nowhere do we invest in the president greater resources of command. Although in the past half century presidents have surrounded themselves with a vast national security apparatus, consisting of intelligence agencies and the National Security Council, it is not at all clear that presidents have been effective as crisis managers. They often lack crucial information, use incomplete or misleading analogies to understand crisis situations, find it difficult to micromanage events, and are unable to project force effectively. Even when they are successful, it is often in spite of, rather than because of, the resources of the institutionalized presidency at their disposal.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 provides a case study of how John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev almost blundered into a nuclear war through the crisis management approaches of their advisory systems, but then managed to extricate themselves using personal diplomacy and old-fashioned political horsetrading. They did so without revealing to the world how they had defused the crisis, a decision to maintain confidentiality with far reaching consequences for subsequent presidential crisis decision making. The illusion that presidential crisis management can compel an adversary to submit and that a nuclear crisis can be successfully managed left Kennedy’s successors with impossible burdens of public expectations.
The United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war between 22 October, the evening that President Kennedy announced a “quarantine” on Soviet ships carrying weapons heading for Cuba, and 28 October, when the Soviet Union announced that it would remove ballistic missiles it had placed in Cuba in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade the island or undermine its communist regime. The resolution of the crisis was trumpeted in the United States as a great victory—”Reds Back Down” and “Retreat to Moscow” blared headlines in U.S. newspapers—and scholars of international relations and of the presidency attempted to learn lessons about crisis management. Roger Hilsman, a leading scholar of foreign policy making and at the time the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence, proclaimed that “President Kennedy had achieved a foreign policy victory of historical proportions.” Kennedy’s speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote that “Kennedy was well satisfied by the performance of his government. The Executive Committee had proved a brilliant instrument of consideration and coordination. … As a whole, the government could hardly have performed better.” Schlesinger was most impressed with Kennedy’s personal performance: “he coolly and exactly measured the level of force necessary to deal with the level of threat. Defining a clear and limited objective, he moved with mathematical precision to accomplish it,” and “by his own composure, clarity and control, he held the country behind him.” Many other scholars drew the same conclusion. As James Blight summarizes, the Cuban Missile Crisis is “typically described by specialists in crisis management as the calmest, coolest, most measured and laudable example of exerting rational control over a complex and dangerous international situation.”
At the time, these assessments seemed accurate enough, and as we will see, there is a sense in which this assessment still holds up, particularly if a loose definition of crisis management is used to define any successful negotiation between the superpowers. But given the access scholars now have to Cuban, Soviet, and American documents and to the recollections of many of the participants (recorded at a series of international conferences beginning in 1987), it is worth a second look at how these events were managed and what the historical record tells us about the limitations of the crisis management approach more narrowly defined: the tactical manipulation of military and diplomatic assets to compel an adversary to withdraw from its position. In that narrower sense, the Cuban Missile Crisis was an unsuccessful case study of presidential decision making.
His Finest Hour?
According to the conventional accounts, the Soviets backed down because Kennedy understood their psychology, and his national security advisers had correctly understood how to “handle” the Soviets. The experts wanted Kennedy to hang tough and make few if any concessions. Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, intervened at various points in ExComm (Executive Committee) meetings to take a hard line. He thought any deal with the Soviets would be a defeat: “I think they’ll change their minds when we take a continued, forceful action, stopping their ship or—or taking out a SAM-site. That kills some Russians….” He told Kennedy that the Soviets would not insist on a Jupiter trade. “[W]e’re going to have to take our weapons out of Turkey,” Kennedy began at one point, and turning to Lewellyn, continued “Tommy, he’s not going to take them out of Cuba if we …” But Thompson interjected, “I don’t agree Mr. President. I think there’s still a chance that we can get this line going.” “He’ll back down?” Kennedy responded. Lewellyn proposed the Trollope ploy, so that Kennedy would ignore a message in which Khrushchev had proposed a trade and instead accept an earlier message in which no trade was demanded: “Well, because he’s already got this other proposal which he put forward….” The crisis managers, according to these accounts, had stayed the course against the ExComm hawks, who otherwise would have led the nation into a nuclear war, and also against the doves such as Adlai Stevenson, who wanted to negotiate with, rather than confront, the Soviets. Kennedy had given the Soviets room to retreat, had not rubbed salt in their wounds, and had allowed them to back away from confrontation. According to this version of events, Khrushchev had been emotional and frightened, while Kennedy had been cool and collected. The Soviets had not understood Kennedy at all, thinking him weak and irresolute; but Kennedy had understood the Soviets and knew how to manipulate them in the desired direction. The lesson here: do as Kennedy had done to ensure that adversaries’ perceptions of U.S. strength come to correspond to the reality of U.S. power and willingness to employ it.
U.S. local and strategic military superiority was a decisive factor in ending the crisis without accepting Soviet terms, especially not the proposed trade of missiles, according to subsequent Department of Defense (DOD) analysts. The DOD opinion was shared by the first published studies of the crisis: “The President had no intention of destroying the alliance by backing down,” Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen wrote. Secretary of State Dean Rusk denied that Kennedy had made a deal involving a trade of missiles when Senator Bourke Hickenlooper asked him to affirm during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a trade had in “no way, shape or form, directly or indirectly been connected with the settlement.” National security managers and military planners, in surveying the results of the missile crisis, concluded that the United States had come out of it with its power and prestige enhanced, and its alliances strengthened. It was Kennedy’s finest hour.
Power Stakes
This take on the crisis is incomplete and misleading. It gives us a distorted view of presidential capabilities in crisis decision making. It fails to answer the most important questions: Why did the Soviets and the Americans agree on a resolution of the crisis? How was the knot of nuclear war untied? An adequate understanding of the resolution of the crisis must begin with the fact that for the U.S. side it was not primarily a question of the military balance between the two superpowers. In large measure, Kennedy’s response was shaped by domestic and international politics. Put another way, the crisis was as much about presidential power stakes, prestige, and reputation as it was about a balance of nuclear terror.
What evidence do we have for this assertion? Consider the exchange between Robert Kennedy and his brother. As Bobby Kennedy recalled it, he was talking to the president about whether or not making an issue out of the missiles was justified: “I just don’t think there was any choice,” I said, “and not only that, if you hadn’t acted, you would have been impeached.” The president thought for a moment and said, “that’s what I think—I would have been impeached.” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara spoke about the political significance of the missiles in the ExComm meetings: “I don’t think there is a military problem here [in Cuba], this is a domestic, political problem…. It’s primarily a… domestic political problem.” Kennedy himself at the first ExComm meeting also was sensitive to domestic and international political considerations. “What difference does it make?” he exclaimed about the placement of missiles in Cuba, when “they have enough to blow us up now anyway.” He concluded that, “After all, this is a political struggle as much as military.” Republicans had claimed that the Soviets had put offensive missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had gone out on a limb saying they had not. Khrushchev had sawed off the limb, embarrassing the president. “He can’t do this to me,” Kennedy had exclaimed at his first briefing, upon learning of the results of the U-2 surveillance. Had Kennedy not acted, Republicans would have exploited his lack of foresight, his intelligence lapses, and his irresolution in the forthcoming elections, much as they had attempted to do between August and mid-October before Kennedy had challenged the Soviets. Kennedy did not manufacture the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he certainly did not attempt to gain partisan political advantage from it during the tense days of the standoff. But he, his brother, and McNamara all felt that the United States was required to confront the Soviets publicly out of political rather than military necessity.
Kennedy had drawn a line publicly, and the Soviets had stepped over it in a deceptive and disrespectful manner. Where the law was drawn in terms of a nuclear balance of power had been less important than the fact that a line had been drawn in the Western Hemisphere, and the Soviets had pretended to respect it and then had deceived the president, leaving him politically vulnerable. Had the Soviets publicly announced that they were placing forty missiles in Cuba, according to Sorensen, the United States likely would have accepted the deployment, then minimized the military importance of that number, “and said with great fanfare that we would absolutely not tolerate the presence of more than 100 missiles in Cuba.”
Kennedy thought the secret deployment indicated that Khrushchev had no respect for him. In ExComm meetings Kennedy was clear on this point: it was time for a showdown, time to get Khrushchev to pull back, to end his constant probing of U.S. positions, his constant escalation of demands. Kennedy thought Khrushchev had miscalculated his resolve and strength. But Kennedy had gotten it all wrong: he failed to understand the Soviet motives for putting missiles in Cuba. Consider the decision to deploy from Khrushchev’s point of view. He deployed, not because he thought Kennedy was weak or irresolute, but be cause he knew that the United States had strategic nuclear superiority and was beginning to act accordingly. The United States had just begun its satellite reconnaissance of the USSR in the summer of 1961, and with its new Corona satellites it had learned that it had four times the number of land based ICBMs as the Soviets. Consequently it revised down the numbers on the Russian side from 140-200 to a more realistic 10-25. In October 1961, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric in a public speech indicated that the United States now knew that the missile gap existed in the American favor. The Soviet missile sites were soft and vulnerable to an American first strike. Once the United States knew that it had the numerical advantage and that the Soviets were vulnerable, the Soviets were at a strategic disadvantage. In their analysis, Gilpatric’s speech involved a U.S. move to exploit Soviet vulnerability by making the claim of nuclear superiority. Presumably the United States would soon act to exploit its proclaimed advantage.
Sending missiles to Cuba was a temporary stop-gap measure to counter this perceived American threat. The Soviets had a large supply of 1,000-mile-range MRBMs (SS-4s) and of 2,000-mile-range IRBMs, sufficient to cover most of the United States if launched from Cuba. Even with the Soviet deployment, by the end of October 1962 the United States had 172 ICBMs operational and on alert and 144 Polaris missiles at sea on station. It had 1,450 bombers on alert status with 2,952 weapons. The Soviets may have had 24 ICBMs operational, and the 24 SS-4s in Cuba doubled their total of missiles capable of hitting U.S. targets. The United States was adding to its arsenal faster than the Soviets. There was a missile gap, and the Soviets were on the wrong side of it, with or without the Cuba deployment.
The Soviets were worried about an American first-strike capability. Kennedy in their view seemed unwilling to compromise on cold war issues: he had deployed Jupiter missiles in Turkey, had moved the missile gap in his favor, had engaged in a conventional arms buildup, had been unwilling to compromise on Cuba and Berlin, had sponsored an invasion of Cuba, and had approved new efforts to destabilize it. From the Soviet point of view, Kennedy’s strength and firmness-not his weakness-were the problem that the deployment of missiles was intended to address.
Khrushchev in his memoirs claimed that his principal motivation had been to forestall new U.S. attacks on Cuba. Had that been true, he would have had no objection to making the deployment public, as the Cubans wished. His primary motivation was to change the balance of power. In a letter he sent to Fidel Castro during the crisis, he recalled that he was on vacation in Varna, Bulgaria on the Black Sea, walking on the beach with Soviet Minster of Defense Roman Malinovskii, who told him the United States had bases on the far shore in Turkey that could wipe out Soviet cities. Khrushchev asked Malinovskii if missiles in Cuba could do the same to the United States and was assured they could. “The primary objective was to achieve a balance of power vis-a-vis the US,” concluded Fedor Burlatsky, speechwriter and adviser to Khrushchev.
The Jupiters in Turkey became operational in April 1962, the same month Khrushchev decided to put missiles in Cuba. This was not the first time the question of Jupiters had preoccupied Khrushchev. On 4 June 1961, at the summit meeting in Vienna, Khrushchev described Turkey as a U.S. puppet, equipped with U.S. bases and rockets; and he equated Soviet interests in Cuba with the U.S. presence in Turkey. After the summit, the State and Defense Departments agreed that the missile deployment in Turkey should not be can celed, because it would send the wrong message to the Soviets. In May 1962, Kennedy told Dean Rusk to raise the issue with the Turks, who responded that before the missiles were removed, the new Polaris submarines should be de ployed in the Mediterranean. In August, Kennedy again told his diplomats to persuade the Turks to allow the missiles to be removed.
Crisis Resolution: The Real Deal
The missile crisis was not settled with a Soviet capitulation, but rather through political horsetrading. McNamara raised the possibility of a trade of missiles as early as 19 October. According to the minutes of the ExComm meeting that began at 11 A.M.: “More than once during the afternoon Secretary McNamara voiced the opinion that the United States would have to pay a price to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. He thought we would at least have to give up our missile bases in Italy and Turkey and would probably have to pay more be sides.” At one point McNamara went through his scenario involving a potential Soviet response to U.S. airstrikes and invasion of Cuba. He then recom mended that Turkey be notified to dismantle the missiles so that they would not be subject to a Soviet preemptive strike. Vice President Lyndon Johnson interjected: “Bob, if you’re willing to give up your missiles in Turkey, you think you ought to … why don’t you say that to him [Khrushchev] and say we’re cutting a trade—make the trade there? Save all the invasion, lives….”
President Kennedy himself kept coming back to the logic of Johnson’s question. On 25 October he broached the possibility of a trade of Turkish and Cuban missiles to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The following day at an Ex Comm meeting, “The President said we will get Soviet strategic missiles out of Cuba only by invading Cuba or by trading. He doubted that the quarantine alone would produce a withdrawal of the weapons.” The State Department, based on an analysis by the U.S. ambassador in Ankara, opposed a trade, believing that it would weaken the alliance. Turkey issued a statement on 27 October rejecting the proposed trade. Nevertheless, the president kept coming back to it. At the ExComm meeting on the 27th, Kennedy observed that “to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man it will look like a very fair trade.” Later he contradicted McGeorge Bundy and George Ball, who were opposed to concessions, observing testily that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal.” Near the end of the meeting he considered the consequences if he didn’t make the trade: “What we’re going to be faced with is-because we wouldn’t take the missiles out of Turkey, then maybe we’ll have to invade or make a massive strike on Cuba which may lose Berlin. That’s what concerns me.” Later, near the end of the meeting, he dryly concluded, “We can’t very well invade Cuba with all its toil, and as long as it’s going to be, when we could have gotten them out by making a deal on the same missiles in Turkey. If that’s part of the record I don’t see how we’ll have a very good war.” Clearly Kennedy was upset with the inability of his national security managers to see the political logic of domestic coalition-building and international alliance-building which impelled him to consider the trade.
In Robert Kennedy’s account of the crisis taken from his diaries and published posthumously in 1969, he related that in talking to Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin at 7:45 PM (before Kennedy’s acceptance of terms had been sent to Khrushchev), he had told the ambassador that, “President Kennedy had been anxious to remove those missiles from Turkey and Italy for a long period of time. He had ordered their removal some time ago, and it was our judgment that, within a short time after this crisis was over, those missiles would be gone.” According to Robert Kennedy’s published version, Khrushchev accepted this informal assurance, and at 5 P.M. (Moscow time) on Sunday evening, 28 October, Radio Moscow announced it would accept an arrangement “to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.” If not an actual trade, it was a reassurance and an under standing that came close to the same thing; Soviet acceptance defused the crisis. Yet there was more to the reassurances. The account offered by Robert Kennedy in his posthumous memoirs of his meeting with Dobrynin was incomplete and misleading; there was more to it than Kennedy or his literary executors had let on. To begin with, Kennedy had made up his own mind to make an explicit trade at any point that the crisis threatened to spin out of control. We know this, because late in the evening of the 27th, as the crisis reached its peak (Robert Kennedy had made the offer to Dobrynin but no response had yet been received), he ordered Secretary of State Dean Rusk to get in touch with Columbia University Professor Andrew Cordier and had Cordier draft a statement that UN Secretary General U Thant could issue, proposing the removal of the Jupiters in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. The statement would be given to Thant on a signal from President Kennedy, with assurances that if Thant called for the trade, the United States would immediately announce its acceptance. Rusk was sure Kennedy would trip the circuit breaker rather than take the country to war. Although the signal was never sent, and the statement never delivered to U Thant, the “Cordier Channel” is proof that Kennedy was ready for a public trade of missiles if he could not get a private trade: he had created his own emergency shutdown valve, which he could activate at any time. In doing so, Kennedy had bypassed the ExComm, which was unaware of the Cordier channel; Kennedy was acting with his own prerogative powers. In working out ways to end the crisis, he didn’t try to forge a consensus among his advisers, most of whom were strongly against making a trade.
To resolve the missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev relied on their own prerogative powers. They used Channels of Trust (doveritel’nyye kanali). The most important “backchannel” involved KGB officer Georgii Bolshakov, Am bassador Dobrynin, and Attorney General Kennedy. President Kennedy could bypass the ExComm, and Khrushchev could bypass the Presidium as they worked out a deal to trade the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba. After the early evening ExComm meeting of the 27th, at which the Trollope ploy suggested by Tommy Thompson (and seconded by Robert Kennedy) had been approved, President Kennedy convened a meeting in the Oval Office with Robert Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Theodore Sorensen, George Ball, Tommy Thompson, and Roswell Gilpatric. Its purpose was to set the terms of reference for the meeting that evening between Robert Kennedy and Dobrynin. Participants agreed to a suggestion by Dean Rusk that Robert Kennedy would assure Dobrynin that the missiles in Turkey would eventually be removed. As McGeorge Bundy later recalled: “Concerned as we all were by the cost of a public bargain struck under pressure at the apparent expense of the Turks, and aware as we were from the day’s discussion that for some, even in our closest councils, even this unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally, we agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be informed of this additional message.” Robert Kennedy’s memoirs (based on his memorandum to Dean Rusk after meeting with Dobrynin) somewhat muddies over the question of whether Kennedy offered Dobrynin “assurances” or a “deal”: “He then asked me about Khrushchev’s other proposal dealing with the removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo-no deal of this kind could be made.” He then reiterated the “assurance” that if this were the only thing holding up a deal, within four to five months (per Rusk’s proposal), “these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.”
At this point we are in semantic swamps with several possibilities. Kennedy probably had gone beyond the terms of reference and offered an explicit deal. He may then have provided a paper trail for Rusk that could be used to deny such a deal. Alternatively, he may have offered assurances based on Rusk’s “no quid pro quo” limitations, but couched in language that Dobrynin took as an explicit deal. The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that at the very least the Soviets assumed they had a real deal. Kennedy insisted that the trade be kept secret. Dobrynin in his memoirs later quoted Kennedy as saying “there is nothing the president could say publicly about Turkey in this context.” Kennedy told Dobrynin that only a few people beside the president were aware of the offer, which would have to be agreed to by the Soviets within twenty-four hours. In a confidential cable message transmitted through Dobrynin to Robert Kennedy on Sunday, 28 October 1962, Khrushchev agreed that “the issue of dismantling missile bases in Cuba under international control, raises no objections.” The following day, acting on Kremlin instructions, Dobrynin was able to reassure Kennedy that the Soviets agreed to the U.S. insistence that the dismantling in Turkey would not occur immediately; instead, it would take place four to five months after the crisis was resolved. Khrushchev noted that “it is somewhat difficult for you at the present time to publicly discuss the question of eliminating the U.S. missile bases in Turkey,” and he agreed that the terms for ending the crisis should be considered confidential. He emphasized that “all the proposals I presented in that message [his public radio address ending the crisis on 28 October] took into account the fact that you had agreed to resolve the matter of your missile bases in Turkey.” The documentary record indicates that, far more than a single “reassurance” delivered orally by the attorney general, there were explicit exchanges that followed, setting out the modalities of the missile exchange-specifically the timetable for removal and the need for secrecy. The Soviet version of what was agreed to was not denied by the administration. Robert Kennedy summoned Dobrynin the following day for yet another conversation and told him that President Kennedy reaffirmed the accord but could not formalize it in any letters. He insisted that Dobrynin take back the letter from Khrushchev, so there would be no evidence of the ex change in the files of the U.S. government. Subsequently, exchanges between Fidel Castro and Khrushchev involved heated discussions of the missile trade, with Castro accusing Khrushchev heatedly of betraying Cuban interests. Even a hunting trip in Russia arranged to mollify Castro did little to soothe the Cuban leader’s anger.
Robert Kennedy’s posthumous recollections did not include the specifics of the deal. “I was the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book,” speechwriter Theodore Sorensen later explained. “It was a diary of those thirteen days. And his diary was very explicit that this was part of the deal; but at that time it was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that [Oval Office] meeting. So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries….” McGeorge Bundy recalled, “As far as I know, none of the nine of us told anyone else what had happened. We denied in every forum that there was any deal.” Both men are explicit in their use of the term “deal,” rather than “reassurance.” On 25 April 1963, almost six months to the date the arrangement was reached, the last missile was taken down in Turkey.
In the ExComm transcripts there is no mention of any deal negotiated by the president as of the 27th, though Kennedy had on numerous occasions talked about the probability that a deal would be the only way to end the crisis. In the discussions that occurred within the ExComm after Robert Kennedy returned from meeting with Dobrynin, it still seemed as if there were no explicit arrangement. Why did Kennedy not reveal his trade? It may be that Turkish intransigence about removal of the missiles and the difficulty of getting a NATO Council meeting organized within two days to take the heat for such a proposal had led Kennedy to bypass the ExComm, the Turks, the NATO allies, and everyone else that a consultative process would have required. Instead, Kennedy employed his own diplomatic prerogative powers, using his brother as a confidential intermediary. Just as Kennedy bypassed a slow and cumber some State Department bureaucracy for routine business, in this situation he used a variant of the “invisible presidency” to settle the issue just as the crisis was spinning out of control. Having gotten the Russians to agree to secret diplomacy, what would be the point of opening up an ExComm discussion and increasing his risks that the trade would wind up on the front pages?
Crisis Management?
Whatever else the Cuban missile crisis might have been, it was certainly not an example of successful crisis management. The term itself makes no sense in this context, because no crisis can be managed until one or both parties redefine the issue to the point at which it no longer remains a crisis and gamesmanship can be supplanted by traditional diplomacy and political deal making. In nuclear crisis management, the nuclear confrontation is treated by participants as a game in which pieces or territory can be won or lost, and a strategic balance can improve or deteriorate. A success in the game is supposed to establish an equilibrium of power based on the existing balance, and it is up to the president to manage the U.S. side of the game to the nation’s best advantage.
A game has rules that are understood, even if broken by one or the other side. It has pieces on the board that can be directed centrally according to “plays.” It involves patterned interactions with predictable consequences. A game with an equilibrium point has predetermined outcomes, or scores, with values known to the participants. But a nuclear crisis only superficially resembles a game. There are no predictable rules. The missile crisis itself was precipitated when the Soviets broke the rules (according to the United States) by placing missiles in Cuba. The Soviet response is that the United States broke the rules with an illegal blockade. Not all players can be directed from a central location. The interactions between players on the two sides are unpredictable and not fully controllable. There may be no equilibrium points, no preferred solutions once a game is underway-at least none that make sense when some outcomes involve a strategic or tactical nuclear exchange. The game is open-ended in the sense that it is somewhat chaotic and contingent: new possibilities, undreamt by any of the participants, open up constantly. There is no single game: there are multiple arenas in which organizations and individuals act, and the crisis can jump from one game to another, from military posturing to diplomatic exchanges to secret backchannel negotiations.
Crisis management requires reasonably high capabilities to acquire, man age, and process data rationally in accordance with effective theories about how the world works. Neither government demonstrated such capabilities. The United States was surprised that the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba. Its theories about Soviet capabilities and intentions were wrong, and its data about the missiles came in late—almost too late. The Soviets were stunned at the U.S. response, clearly expecting that at worst it would lead to a protest and negotiations, and at best to acquiescence to a fait accompli. The Soviets did not expect a quarantine. The United States expected and was surprised at the absence of a countermeasure from the Soviets. At each of the stages of the game, into the final two days, the players seem not to have understood the intentions of the other side nor its capabilities—particularly the nuclear capabilities of the Soviets, which the United States was to underestimate throughout.
Crisis management and game playing require effective control over the pieces on the board. Yet consider the number of near misses in the crisis involving these pieces, any one of which might have caused a cascading set of events to result in a nuclear holocaust. An American U-2 strayed 100 miles into Soviet territory. When Soviet MIGS went to intercept it, fighter aircraft from Galena Air Force base in Alaska went to its rescue. The U.S. planes were armed with nuclear weapons that could be fired on the pilot’s own authority. An Atlas missile was test launched from Vandenberg Air Force base in California on 26 October. It was launched from a site next to other missiles that had already been mated with nuclear weapons and were on full alert. Had the Soviets monitored the launch (with the kind of reconnaissance they were to have only a few years later), they might have thought a preemptive strike was beginning and reacted accordingly with a strike of their own. A Soviet submarine was disabled by a low-level depth charge and forced to the surface; had it been sunk, naval hostilities might have ensued. The Soviet submarine had nuclear armed torpedoes and was authorized to fire them if attacked. The Navy sent its ships far out to sea to establish its interception line to enforce the blockade. President Kennedy ordered the line moved further in, to give Khrushchev more time to decide to comply. Many scholars have described the confrontation between Secretary of Defense McNamara and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson in the naval operations room, at which time McNamara ordered Anderson to move the line back. But according to Roger Hilsman, the Navy did not draw back, but kept its line well out to sea. U.S.-sponsored agents infiltrated into Cuba committed acts of sabotage. Had they killed Soviet military officers, the Soviets might have begun shooting down U.S. low-flying aircraft. By 27 October, all of the medium-range ballistic missiles were launch-ready, and within a day could have been mated to the nuclear warheads that had been stockpiled for them.
Any military incident in Cuba might quickly have escalated into a nuclear confrontation on the island. Although U.S. intelligence at the time had no knowledge of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, reconnaissance photographs taken by the Navy over the intermediate-range missile sites revealed the presence of Soviet ground forces. The photos also showed six launchers for FROG battlefield nuclear missiles, and subsequent flights showed a total of fourteen missiles. Several Soviet officers in charge of planning later stated that they had twelve nuclear warheads for six FROG-7 tactical launchers, eighty warheads for tactical cruise missiles, and several nuclear naval mines. They also claimed to have had several nuclear bombs for their Iluyshin bombers. While Khrushchev gave initial authority for their use to General Issa Pliyev, commander-in-chief of Soviet forces in Cuba, there is some evidence that he centralized the command decision when the crisis broke out on the 22nd. Nevertheless, in a U.S. invasion, local Soviet commanders might have disregarded command and control procedures and initiated a nuclear exchange. They had already shot down a U-2 at the height of the crisis on their own authority, in spite of orders from Moscow that they were not to do so. On the 26th, Pliyev ordered nuclear warheads moved from their storage areas closer to the MRBM missiles, as a prelude to possibly “mating” them.
The United States, for its part, also had plans for use of tactical nuclear weapons. An invasion contingency plan, CINCLANT OPLAN 316, developed by the military commanders readying for an invasion, proposed among other things to have tactical nuclear weapons available to the invasion force. These would be used without further authorization only in retaliation if Soviets used FROG missiles with nuclear weapons against U.S. forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) approved a plan for nuclear capable mortars and howitzers and Honest John rockets, but with nuclear shells and warheads being used by the force only with the JCS approval. Top-level officials such as McGeorge Bundy were unaware at the time that the military had included such weapons in its planning. The civilian authority did not authorize the use of nuclear warheads on the Honest John rockets, but did plan on using tactical nuclear weapons delivered by airplanes. Kennedy would not have authorized first use of such weapons, but no doubt would have sanctioned retaliatory strikes had the Russians used their tactical nuclear weapons first.
Nonstandard Operating Procedures
At every stage of the crisis, organizations acted (or tried to act) on their own. They were not following standard operating procedures. On the contrary, they were in a state of hair-trigger readiness, which distorted standard procedures. They wanted to get in on the action: intelligence agencies ordered flights over Cuban and Soviet territory; the FBI moved up the arrest of a Soviet agent; the Navy pushed for aggressive antisubmarine tactics and forced Soviet submarines to the surface to recharge their batteries; the Air Force tested an ICBM missile; the special operations forces infiltrated agents into Cuba; the Air Force chief of staff ordered his planes to make ready for a reprisal attack on SAM sites. On the Soviet and Cuban side, the same phenomena occurred: Castro ordered his anti-aircraft artillery units to protect the Soviet missile sites, and local Soviet commanders then ordered the shooting down of a U-2 as a show of fraternal solidarity with their Cuban compatriots. Thereafter the Cubans used their anti aircraft weapons against U.S. planes engaged in low-level reconnaissance. On the 27th, in the midst of the crisis, the ExComm found out that on the 26th the Soviets had launched an intermediate range ballistic missile armed with a 200 kiloton nuclear warhead; the warhead exploded as planned, while two other missiles went through the blast, in a “test” of missile capabilities. Cuban saboteurs blew up oil refineries in Venezuela, crippling one-quarter of oil production in the Caribbean.
It is difficult to offer a rational explanation for organizational behavior that seems so counterproductive and irrational, but one might go along the following lines: the crisis did not freeze the U.S., Soviet, and Cuban bureaucracies and military forces into static positions, or into standard operating procedures, or into a mode in which orders from the top would be awaited and then acted upon. Rather, the crisis freed these organizations from the ordinary constraints, because a crisis by definition meant that they were acting in an uncertain environment. Each organization had to get information, test its own capabilities, and determine the capabilities and (to the extent possible) the intentions of the other side. In crisis management, these functions are supposed to be coordinated through a central decision-making mechanism (the ExComm and the Presidium). In practice, each organization acted autonomously, increasing the level of risk.
Political Leadership
The Cuban missile crisis was not resolved by presidential consensus building within the advisory systems of the United States (the ExComm) or the Soviet Union (the Politburo). Each leader relied on his own decisional prerogatives, which overturned or subverted the consensus position within their advisory systems. These decisions transcended the bureaucratic interests of the participants in the advisory groups and also transcended (or ignored) the chains of reasoning used by the advisers in recommending courses of action. The complex and chaotic real world environment in which the missile crisis was played out had more to do with the separate decisions made by Kennedy and Khrushchev to seek an end to the confrontation than any factor in the small-group advisory environment. Ultimately, it was the danger posed by the Soviet tactical nuclear capability in Cuba, combined with Cuban activities in the midst of the crisis, that convinced Khrushchev and Kennedy that the time had come to strike a deal.
Consider the events unfolding on the 27th. Khrushchev sent Kennedy a letter raising the issue of IRBM Jupiter missiles in Turkey. He proposed that “the United States, bearing in mind the anxiety and concern of the Soviet State, will evacuate its analogous weapons from Turkey.” The Soviets were hardening their terms. In Washington, the FBI reported that the Soviet embassy was pre paring to burn its papers, often a signal that war is imminent. Things went from bad to worse as the day went on. Aerial reconnaissance showed the Soviet Beagle IL-28 bombers continued to be assembled at the San Julian airfield. A U-2 flight on a routine air sampling mission from Alaska strayed into Soviet territory over the Chukhotsk peninsula in Siberia and was chased back by Soviet fighters, who nearly got into a dogfight with U.S. planes that had scrambled to protect the U-2. Soviet merchant ships were moving once again toward the blockade line. Cuban air defense troops, acting under Castro’s orders, broke away from Soviet command and control and began shooting at low-flying U.S. aircraft entering Cuban airspace. At 10:21 A.M. the news came in to the president that a high-flying U-2 had been shot down over Cuba by a surface-to-air missile launched from a SAM site at Banes, near the eastern tip of the island. No one knew at the time if the Russians had fired or the Cubans. Years later, it was learned that the plane had been shot down by the Russians under direct command of Major Georgy Voronkov pursuant to an order issued by General Stepan Naumovich Grechko, the deputy commander of Soviet Forces in Cuba. There had been no orders from Moscow, and the shooting had been on initiative of the local commanders; but the American side couldn’t know that at the time. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, following standing orders, directed his command to launch a massive reprisal strike against Cuba. The White House reached LeMay before the planes had been launched, and presidential aides insisted that LeMay wait for direct authorization from the president. “He chickened out again,” LeMay told his staffers after getting off the phone. Kennedy decided to postpone for one or two days the retaliatory strike that had been decided upon if a U-2 were shot down. He wanted to send a message to Khrushchev and obtain a reply. Attorney General Robert Kennedy caught the mood at the White House when he later wrote, “there was the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”
It seemed on the 27th that the blockade had not gotten the Soviets to yield. If another SAM in Cuba had shot down another U-2, some military retaliation would have been inevitable. Presidential advisers calling for such action were in three camps. Some believed that a limited retaliation, tit for tat, would convince the Soviets to back off. Others thought a “surgical” strike could take out the Soviet strategic missiles, thus ending the crisis. Still others, including the Air Force commanders, did not believe a limited surgical strike could work. Their plans called for a massive attack, with 500 sorties against the missiles, preceded by 1,190 strikes on other targets, such as anti-aircraft weapons. The Joint Chiefs planned for another six days of strikes, then advised an invasion.
The danger, as all Kennedy’s advisers were aware, was that the Soviets would respond somewhere else in the world. Would it be an attack on facilities in Turkey? Would they blockade Berlin? Secretary McNamara developed the scenario for Kennedy and his advisers to demonstrate that under certain circumstances a general nuclear war might occur. Unknown to the United States at the time, the alert status of Soviet ICBMs and bombers was increased to intermediate level, then to combat readiness. The evening of the 27th, with the crisis not yet resolved, and new U.S. aerial surveillance set for the next day, McNamara proposed an executive order calling up the twenty-four air reserve squadrons and 300 troop carrier transports required for an invasion. President Kennedy concurred. A U-2 would fly over Cuba on the 28th. If it were shot down, the plans for some military action would then go forward.
The Soviets had been under no illusion that the crisis could be managed as a war game. From the start, they were more interested in political negotiation, which they hoped would offset their weak military position. By 26 October, from the Soviet perspective, it must have seemed as if the American “hawks” and the Cuban “hotheads” (led by Fidel Castro himself) might take things into their own hands and escalate into all-out war. Castro reinforced Khrushchev’s misgivings. He communicated to Khrushchev on the 26th in a “document” dictated to a bilingual Soviet officer, who relayed Castro’s words to Moscow. Castro warned that the Americans were about to invade. He counseled Khrushchev not to be caught by surprise. The Russians must use their nuclear weapons, Castro advised, and prevent “imperialists” from having “the opportunity to launch the first attack in a nuclear war.” Castro also wanted local Soviet troops to use nuclear weapons against any U.S. invasion force. He later was to defend his position: “Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons. Because, in any case, we took it for granted that it would become a nuclear war anyway, and that we were going to disappear.” Had the Soviets used tactical nuclear weapons, the United States would have responded in kind. “No one should believe that had U.S. troops been attacked with tactical nuclear warheads, the United States would have refrained from responding with nuclear warheads,” McNamara was to put it later. “And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.”
Castro, pressing Khrushchev in his dictated communication, was under a colossal misimpression. He thought the Soviets had a thousand or so ICBMs and dozens of tactical nuclear weapons on the island. He was unaware of the real balance of strategic power. Khrushchev, under no illusions as to the real “correlation of forces” between the superpowers, already knew that an American U-2 had been shot down. But he did not know that the Soviet air command in Cuba had authorized the shooting on its own initiative, without waiting for its request to fire to clear in Moscow. Krushchev believed that Castro himself had ordered the shooting down of the plane. Khrushchev understood that he no longer had full command of the military aspects of the confrontation. If any more planes were shot down, the United States would attack the missile sites, and there was no guarantee that it might not launch a retaliatory attack in the next day or two for the prior incident. Would the United States also invade, as Castro thought?
Late in the day on the 27th, Khrushchev wanted an end to the crisis before events in Cuba got out of hand. He settled for private deal, even though a public deal would have been much better for him, in order to avoid any further delay. As his aide Oleg Troyanovsky saw it at the time, the Soviets were convinced after Kennedy’s evening meeting with Dobrynin on 27 October that the United States was about to invade Cuba and would do so if the Soviets turned down Kennedy’s offer. Khrushchev was convinced that the hawks in Washington were winning over the president. Troyanovsky observed, “This, of course, created a state of alarm during the [Presidium] session….” Then they heard from their diplomats in the United States that Kennedy was going to make another speech to the American people within the day. They thought it would be the announcement of an invasion. “We had the feeling then that there was very little time to unravel what was taking place,” Troyanovsky concluded.
So Khrushchev made the deal because he was afraid the United States was about to go over the nuclear brink. He assumed that forces within the Kennedy administration in favor of an invasion would get the upper hand. Yet on the 27th he also believed that Kennedy did not want to invade Cuba (otherwise he already would have clone so), and he believed that Kennedy would be amenable to a trade. In making his assessment, Khrushchev went against the consensus position in the Presidium. In defending his decision to deal before the Presidium, he called his removal of the missiles his “Brest-Litovsk”—meaning a forced concession to the overwhelming military strength of the imperialists. Even so, dealing from a weak hand, Khrushchev had won two concessions from Kennedy—a trade of missiles and a no-invasion pledge. He was ahead of the game compared to his strategic position before introducing missiles, but could lose everything if the game continued. Khrushchev had misplayed the final hand. Absent more attacks on U.S. planes, Kennedy was not about to invade Cuba, according to McNamara. Had the Soviets stood firm on the 27th, the United States would have tightened the embargo and then repackaged the missile deal, presumably using the Cordier Channel, which allowed U Thant to go public with an offer to trade. Then the United States could have accepted the U Thant proposal unilaterally in an effort to end the crisis.
Both Kennedy and Khrushchev misplayed their hands, but eventually they made a deal because by the final two days of the crisis they were frantically trying to keep the danger of nuclear confrontation contained. Khrushchev at this point ordered Pliyev not to use nuclear weapons and also ordered him to send twenty-four warheads stored on board the Aleksandrovsk back to Moscow. Neither leader was worried any longer that the other would prevail in a strategic game of one-upmanship or nuclear brinkmanship; neither was concerned that the other would gain a tactical advantage in the Western hemisphere, or a strategic advantage in the cold war. Each was far more concerned about blundering into a miscalculation. Each, in Theodore Sorensen’s phrase, looked down “the gun barrel of nuclear war,” and each was driven to end the crisis before events got completely out of hand.
The Balance of Power
Khrushchev failed to improve his strategic position when he put missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy failed to improve his when he got the Soviets to remove them. Soviet strategic rocket forces were inferior before the crisis, and inferior thereafter. The Soviets did not intend their missiles in Cuba to change the military balance, though Khrushchev clearly intended their placement to redress the imbalance favoring the Americans until his own ICBMs could be deployed in sufficient numbers. Khrushchev gave strict orders to the military commanders in Cuba not to prepare these strategic missiles for firing, nor to “mate” them with nuclear warheads under any circumstances. The warhead storage facilities for the intermediate range missiles were 300 or so kilometers from the launch sites. The operational orders indicate that these missiles were not intended to alter the balance of strategic power in such a way as to ensure their continued placement. They were at all times the object of the crisis, but not an independent factor helping to determine its resolution.
Balance of power was itself a somewhat suspect formulation. McNamara and Kennedy assumed that the Soviets had fifty to seventy-five strategic missiles, not the twenty or so they actually possessed. They did not think that the United States could launch a first strike and destroy enough of them, or the 200 or so strategic bombers armed with nuclear weapons, to prevent a Soviet retaliatory strike. Without realizing it, the Soviets already had a deterrent against a U.S. first strike, without having to place missiles in Cuba and without having to deploy missiles on their own territory. Only they didn’t know it, because they couldn’t read their adversaries’ minds.
Khrushchev and Castro failed to win iron-clad security guarantees for Cuba. “We feel that the aggressor came out the loser,” Khrushchev wrote to Castro on 30 October. “He made preparations to attack Cuba but we stopped him and forced him to recognize before world opinion that he won’t do it at the current stage. We view this as a great victory.” But the United States had not given the guarantees the Soviets had sought. To understand why, it is necessary to review some of the efforts the United States had made to destabilize the Castro regime.
The United States had already attempted to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs operation. Subsequently, President Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose, a covert operation to overthrow Castro run by a Special Group (rather than by the CIA) which reported to Robert Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor. Its chief of operations was an old hand at guerrilla warfare, Brig. Gen. Ed ward Lansdale, who proposed to assist a Cuban revolution against Castro, in the latter stages of which the United States would use “military force, as necessary.” Agents would engage in covert action, and by September 1962, paramilitary units would be infiltrated into bases in the hills with “freedom fighters” from Latin America and elsewhere joining them. “It aims for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962,” Lansdale reported to the Kennedys. President Kennedy instead authorized only the infiltration of agents to gather intelligence and low-level sabotage operations that would not spark open resistance to the regime. In early October 1961, McNamara had authorized new planning for an invasion by as early as 20 October 1962, but these were contingency plans, not likely to be approved. Early in 1962, planning began on plots to assassinate Castro. Cubans were soon aware of Operation Mongoose and naturally assumed the worst about U.S. intentions. On 4 October 1962, Edwin Lansdale got presidential approval to step up sabotage efforts against Cuban shipping. On 16 October a further step-up in Mongoose activities was authorized by Robert Kennedy.
The United States also had taken other actions against Cuba. A full economic embargo was imposed on 3 February 1962. Throughout the year, the United States had conducted military exercises simulating an invasion of Cuba, including Lantphibex 1-62, simulating the overthrow of a dictator named “Ortsac” (Castro spelled backwards); Operation Quick Kick, involving landings of 40,000 troops in a simulated invasion of Cuba; and Swift Strike II, involving 70,000 troops. Another Marine amphibious exercise, Phibreglix, was planned for mid-October. Most of these activities (other than the plotting for assassinations) were known to the Cubans and Soviets, who could easily believe that U.S. intentions were to go well beyond intelligence collection and into a fullscale destabilization campaign, though that was not what the United States intended at the time. In fact, three new Mongoose operations in Cuba continued into November, even after Robert Kennedy ordered the enterprise suspended on 30 October, no doubt giving Castro even more reason to believe that the United States would continue efforts to overthrow him.
Khrushchev failed to get full assurances about Cuba, because Kennedy was determined not to give them. At the ExComm meetings there had been some discussion about how to avoid such a pledge, with the president taking the lead in revising draft language to make sure no such guarantee would be given. On 6 November, Kennedy sent a letter to Khrushchev in which he emphasized that his guarantees against invading Cuba were predicated on “the verified removal of the missile and bomber systems, together with real safeguards against their reintroduction.” On 14 December, well after Castro had rejected UN inspections, Kennedy reiterated his formula, and added the requirement “that Cuba itself commits no aggressive acts against any of the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Kennedy had given himself considerable flexibility. The United States could define a large number of actions by Castro as aggressive. Clearly Kennedy still hoped to retain some freedom of action with regard to Cuba. Although in early 1963 Mongoose was terminated, that summer new destabilization attempts, including efforts to assassinate Castro, resumed.
The resolution of the crisis caused a breech between Khrushchev and Castro. In his response to Khrushchev’s letters, Castro wrote of Cubans experiencing “unspeakable bitterness and sadness” at the Soviet lack of resolve. He was bitter about his “betrayal” by Russians, who had not told him of the missile gap favoring the Americans, had not consulted him fully during the crisis, and had not informed him of the offer to permit UN inspection in Cuba.
Kennedy succeeded in defusing the Cuban missile crisis. But as a diplomatic negotiator, he might have gotten a more advantageous deal had he actually tried the Trollope ploy. Is it true that Khrushchev had panicked on the evening of the 26th, believing that a U.S. invasion of Cuba was imminent? If he was willing to take any way out, a speedy reply to the offer of the 26th could have ended the crisis without a trade of missiles. But it would have required a pledge not to invade Cuba, probably without any qualifications. That Kennedy was unwilling to give, though clearly Khrushchev mischaracterized the “no invasion” pledge to the Politburo and to Castro. It is hard to fault Kennedy for making the trade the following day, after the shooting down of the U-2 had demon strated to both leaders that the crisis might soon get out of hand. One can hardly blame Kennedy for seeking a speedy resolution on terms he had felt comfortable with from the beginning.
Kennedy can be faulted for his unwillingness to trade publicly. By seeking to portray the resolution of the crisis as an American victory, Kennedy left him self vulnerable in the future to Soviet blackmail. At any time after the with drawal of missiles from Turkey, Khrushchev could have revealed the trade, which would have seemed plausible to much of the world, even if Kennedy later denied it. Of course, the Kennedys’ insistence on no documents changing hands was designed to prevent that possibility. That Khrushchev did not do so even after Kennedy’s death probably had to do with the Soviet hope that the United States would honor what the Soviets still insisted was a noninvasion pledge. Both Kennedys believed that public disclosure of a trade would, in Bobby’s words to Dobrynin, “tear apart NATO.” Had the Soviets gone public, the United States could have indicated its reservations on the noninvasion pledge, a revelation that would have caused problems for the Soviets with their Cuban allies. Each side had more to lose than to gain by revealing the terms it had accepted.
The crisis did not usher in an era of detente, contrary to the claims of national security managers on both sides. The United States had “learned” the lessons of crisis management and nuclear superiority, and it was determined to continue an arms buildup that would keep its edge. It also continued its escalation of commitments in Southeast Asia, another arena in which attempts at gamesmanship and compellence superseded efforts at a diplomatic resolution of issues in the region. By 1964, Khrushchev was out of power, in part due to the simmering resentment in the Presidium over his Brest-Litovsk. The lessons the Soviets also had learned was that military superiority—or at least perceived parity—would be needed to avoid a new defeat. So they continued their arms buildup. There were some efforts at detente, including the test-ban treaty and the hot-line set up between Washington and Moscow. But until the end of the 1980s, the cold war was marked by rivalries and localized military conflicts far more than by detente. What one can say, however, is that never again would either superpower play fast and loose with strategic missiles or threaten nuclear exchanges.
Truth Or Dare
Why was Kennedy unwilling to make his terms public? What was so terribly wrong about a diplomatic negotiation with the Soviets to resolve a nuclear crisis? His own discussion in the ExComm and those of his colleagues indicate his belief in the rationality of a diplomatic solution. From our post-cold war vantage point, the possibility that the world might have had to suffer a superpower nuclear exchange for want of a trade of missiles seems to be the ultimate folly—a point Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both made, with some exasperation during the ExComm deliberations. Why would Kennedy wish to conceal his diplomatic efforts, rather than boast of them?
Perhaps our own expectations about national power and the presidency are the explanation. We simply expected that the U.S. president, as leader of the free world, as the head of the most powerful nation on earth, could prevail in superpower confrontations. The political dangers of seeming willing to compromise with the enemy had to be managed through the fiction that no compromise had occurred. Kennedy was vulnerable politically, and he was prepared to preserve an illusion rather than pay political costs at home. Yet Kennedy himself was aware of the issue that the fictionalized version would open. He told Arthur Schlesinger the day after the crisis ended that people might draw the wrong conclusions, and that they would assume that the Russians would cave in if you pressured them.
“I claim not to have controlled events,” Abraham Lincoln confessed in 1864 to a reporter, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Kennedy might well have made the opposite claim: in the end he managed to control events, much more than even his national security advisers had known. Kennedy was willing to seek a political solution to a political crisis, and when his ExComm proved unsympathetic, he turned to his inner circle of advisers and finally to a secret diplomatic channel. And yet Kennedy’s unwillingness to admit how the crisis had been resolved left an unfortunate legacy for his successors. He raised the bar for future presidents. His successors would be expected to manage crises: if Kennedy had stared down the communists in Cuba, should not Johnson and Nixon be able to do the same with North Vietnam?
Kennedy contributed to our ignorance about crisis resolution. What should have been learned was the need to negotiate in such a crisis and the meaning lessness of the nuclear balance of power. The lesson should have been that crisis management often does not work, that the experts are often wrong, that the military forces on both sides cannot be managed to prevent incidents. The lesson should have been that political horsetrading is often a more effective way to resolve a crisis than situation room attempts at micromanagement.
“On that night of the 26th, we saw no possible solution,” Fidel Castro re called. “We couldn’t see a way out.” There was a way out, but it did not involve superiority in nuclear weaponry or gamesmanship. As Lyndon Johnson observed in the midst of a discussion in the crisis over intimidating the Cubans with nighttime overflights: “Well, hell, it’s like the fellow telling me in Congress: ‘Go on and put the monkey on his back.’ Every time I tried to put a monkey on somebody else’s back, I got one.” Both McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara later pointed out that it was mutual vulnerability and the fear of a nuclear holocaust that induced the leaders to settle. When Soviet ships turned back from the blockade line, Dean Rusk boasted in an ExComm meeting that “we were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow blinked.” But in fact, everyone blinked.
Kennedy’s failure in the Cuban Missile Crisis involved his abdication of the moral responsibility to educate the American people and rid them of their delusions of how the world works. He was not willing to make the terms public, for fear that negotiation would be taken for appeasement, that reasonableness would be taken for weakness. He was willing, for political advantage, to leave the American people with the most dangerous illusion of all: the White House could “manage” a superpower nuclear crisis and with sufficient military force could resolve it on terms favorable to the United States. The folly of such an assumption was laid to rest many years later by Robert McNamara himself. “It is impossible to predict with a high degree of confidence what the effects of the use of military force will be because of accident, miscalculation, misperception, and inadvertence,” McNamara observed at a conference on the Cuban missile crisis held in Havana. “You can’t manage crises; it’s a dangerous metaphor, because it’s misleading.” At the point at which Kennedy abandoned gamesmanship, crisis management, and his advisory system, he validated Schlesinger’s subsequent assessment about his judgment and performance, because thereafter he was able to use the craft of politics to turn away from the brink. If we can learn anything useful from Kennedy’s performance, it is that the art and science of politics and diplomacy, not gamesmanship and the methods of crisis management, are the keys to successful resolution of nuclear crises.