Secrets in the Cuban Missile Crisis
– President John F. Kennedy
Hardly befitting its numbing nomenclature, the Cold War was on of the most trying and troublesome periods in world history. The antagonism between the NATO Alliance and the nations of the Warsaw Pact on more than one occasion forced the world to confront the possibility of nuclear annihilation. For the first time in the history of humanity, the apocalypse existed not as a theoretical possibility or rhetorical ploy but instead as a practical policy outcome and one to be vigorously avoided if at all possible. The fifty year ideological and military showdown saw its share of potential flash points, including crises in Berlin, Saigon and Kabul. However, at no other point did the nuclear outcome seem as likely as it did during what is widely considered to be the height of the Cold War, the thirteen days in 1962 known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Though it ranked among the most dramatic and memorable public events of the twentieth century, the early hours and days of the Cuban Missile Crisis were curiously characterized by the conspicuous absence of public statements, even as debate within the Kennedy Administration and the highest levels of the Pentagon intensified. When inevitably the events of those fateful days took a viselike hold in the public consciousness, the highly centralized decision making that emerged in light of the early secrecy remained, making 1600 Pennsylvanian Avenue the focal point of a crisis that originated in Havana and Moscow but which had truly global ramifications. As has often been the case with the most important matters of international affairs, public policy was crafted in a private, if not surreptitious setting. Far from an accident, the low profile maintained by administration officials along with the decision to withhold certain information, particularly the uncertain fate of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey after the crisis was announced reflected the varied and sometimes contradictory opinions circulated in Kennedy’s ExComm.
The Executive affinity for secrecy regarding Cuba began neither with the discovery of the Soviet missiles nor the inauguration of President Kennedy. From their predecessors in the Eisenhower Administration, Kennedy’s team inherited the disastrous, “ultrasensative” Bay of Pigs Operation to overthrow Castro’s regime and later the less ambitious, less embarrassing, but no less classified Operation Mongoose to dispatch of or discredit Fidel Castro in the eyes of the Cuban people and the world.1 It may well have been the fallout from The Bay of Pigs which impressed upon the callow Kennedy cadre the importance of discretion when it came to their ambitions for Cuba.2 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported to President Kennedy in a memo in the beginning of May 1961 that “For some months nearly everybody in Western Europe, and especially perhaps the democratic left, had been making heavy emotional and political investments in the new American administration… Now, in a single stroke, all this seemed wiped away. After [Bay of Pigs] Cuba, the American Government seemed as self-righteous, trigger-happy and incompetent as it had ever been in the heyday of John Foster Dulles. ‘Kennedy has lost his magic,’ one person said to me. ‘It will take years before we can accept the leadership of the Kennedy Administration again,’ said another.”3 Starting immediately thereafter with Mongoose, the need to eliminate Castro was only rivaled by the concern that such an event should not, regardless of its success or failure, imply United States involvement.4
Though a retelling of the events typically begins with the October 16 White House briefing to the President and other high level officials regarding the construction of missile bases in Cuba, various intelligence networks had, often at the President’s directive been monitoring the Soviet arms buildup in the Caribbean for months.5 At Kennedy’s request, there had even been a study conducted to determine viable U.S. options should the Soviets decide to abandon their promise of restricting the armaments in Cuba to those of a purely defensive nature. On September 13 Kennedy issued a statement at a press conference warning the Soviets not to offensively arm Cuba. “…If at any time the Communist buildup were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way… or if Cuba should ever attempt to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force against any nation in this hemisphere, or become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”6
Even so, the news delivered at that morning’s briefing was regarded unanimously as a shock. The secret now contained in the Kennedy White House had been kept by the U.S.S.R. in spite of several public disavowals by Soviet officials of any interest in positioning forward elements in Cuba. Robert Kennedy who technically served in his brother’s administration as the Attorney General, but who in practice behaved more like a vice president or presidential advisor, wrote of the deception, “… that morning, Tuesday, October 16, we realized that it had all been lies, one gigantic fabric of lies. The Russians were putting missiles in Cuba, and they had been shipping them there and beginning the construction of the sites at the same time those various private and public assurances were being forwarded by Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy.”7
The initial disbelief among ExComm members, which created the need for confirmation based on additional intelligence, was perhaps the first cause for secrecy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was recorded during the October 16 meeting as saying, “Mr. President, this is a, of course, a widely serious development. It’s one that we, all of us, had not really believed the Soviets could, uh, carry this far…”8 To falsely or prematurely accuse the Soviet Union of furtively furnishing Castro’s government with nuclear arms would have been a serious disgrace to the administration on an issue where that was exactly what they needed to avoid. Therefore Kennedy chose not to attend all of the meetings convened to address the issue and even continued with campaign work intended to bolster his democratic party in the upcoming midterm elections.9 Only eight days before Adlai Stevenson would square off with Soviet Ambassador V.A. Zorin in the most stirring confrontation ever to take place at the United Nations Security Council, it was business as usual for all be a few elite policy makers closest to Kennedy himself.10
Almost immediately, four distinction responses to facilitate the removal of the missiles were considered by Kennedy’s ExComm, “talk them out, squeeze them out, shoot them out or buy them out.”11 Though the military option was initially favored by the group, Kennedy reigned in their war drumming from the outset. Though the military option would persist and would at times enjoy the favor of some members of ExComm. Kennedy explained with regard to it later that “I don’t want to push him [Khrushchev] to a precipitous action – give him time to consider. I don’t want to put him in a corner from which he cannot escape.”12 This strong preference not to force the hand of the Soviet Premier was one reason Kennedy favored secrecy.
The other reason was that Kennedy’s own preferred move required that the secret be maintained until the proper moment when the Soviet malfeasance could be proven before an attentive world audience. In their afterward to RFK’s Thirteen Days, Richard Neustdt and Graham Allison suggest that, “Before announcing the first step in his response, Kennedy could not disclose to anyone who lacked a rigid ‘need to know’ what the U-2 had discovered. Had the discovery been widely known within the government, it would have leaked out. Had it leaked, the Administration’s diplomatic initiative, achieved by making a countermove when unmasking Soviet duplicity, would have been lost.”13 They go on to point out that in spite of his best efforts to prevent the media from getting word of the story, the New York Times found out and was preparing to print it. Only with a personal phone call from the President himself did they agree to postpone publication. As a staunch democrat, JFK must have loathed the prospect of anything resembling government censorship of information, even when the media agreed to do so voluntarily. This demonstrated his understanding of the Cuba situation’s vital importance to both the nation and his presidency.
Interestingly however, those who favored a military response, ranging from surgical strikes to an all out invasion of Cuba also favored secrecy, though for entirely different reasons. Much to the dismay of the Kennedy brothers who saw too many parallels to the odious sneak attack on Pearl Harbor launched by the Japanese, those in favor of a military move believed it imperative that Soviet and Cuban forces not be forewarned. If they were tipped off, they would likely scatter the primary US targets, the missiles and put all their SAM sites on high alert, simultaneously making the mission less likely to succeed and more costly in terms of American lives.14 The only way to counter that combination of moves on Moscow’s part would be to drastically increase both the scope of the targets to include more of the antiaircraft defenses and the number of sorties flown against those targets, thereby assuring safety for the U.S. pilots. That option, however, would have been more likely to provoke a nuclear counter response as it would seem like (and would likely be) the precursor to an immediate invasion of Cuba. That was, after all, the slightly misguided reason for placing missiles in Cuba in from the start. Should that all come to pass, NATO would instantly be involved and a retaliatory second strike would have to be ordered against the Soviet Union. Therefore, it was imperative that the United States act with the element of surprise if it was to take military action at all. Though their plans to remove the missiles had little else in common, both camps within ExComm agreed without much debate to keep the matter quiet until a single strategy was selected. Whichever option it was to be, at that point the secret would have to be revealed, in words or deeds.
There is another likely reason that the administration kept the crisis under wraps, but unlike those discussed so far, it has little if anything to do with the tactical menu that ExComm generated and eventually selected from, in their efforts to remove the missiles. The midterm elections were looming when the administration of was informed of the situation. Republicans in Congress were calling for more decisive action, perhaps including an invasion of Cuba already. To make the matter known to Congress would have ensured a partisan outcry against his decision regardless of its substance or justification. So, Kennedy played preemptive partisan politics, by keeping Congress in the dark until just two hours before he publicly announce the crisis, favored remedy, a quarantine of Cuba already in hand.15 This gambit paid off. When the legislature was finally informed, their invective against the President for withholding such urgent information on an issue of high national interest did not significantly alter public perception of the situation and Kennedy suffered no lasting backlash.16 This would not be his only effort to manipulate opinion through the control of information however.
When, after two frustrating hours with the assembled leadership of the Senate and House of Representatives, Kennedy turned to the people of the United States and the world in a televised, highly publicized address from the White House. Much as he had done with Congress, he presented the situation as it had developed over the previous days and weeks followed up by an outline of the military quarantine and diplomatic pressure his administration was now to pursue. In stating the case for that quarantine he asserted several very important but hardly justified claims. With the charisma that earned him eventual analogies to King Arthur, he said,
“For many both the Soviet Union and the United States, recognizing this fact [the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so great that even the threat of their use is a threat to peace] have deployed strategic nuclear weapons with great care, never upsetting the precarious status quo which insured that these weapons would not be used in the absence of some vital challenge. Our own strategic missiles have never been transferred to the territory of any other nation under the cloak of secrecy and deception; and our history, unlike that of the Soviets since the end of World War II, demonstrates that we have no desire to dominate or conquer any other nation or impose our system upon its people. Nevertheless, American citizens have become adjusted to living daily on the bull’s eye of Soviet missiles located inside the U.S.S.R. or in submarines.”17
There are several key discrepancies between what was presented above and the assumptions that were made during the closed-door ExComm proceedings. First, there had not for many years been anything like a “precious status quo” in terms of force parity between the NATO Alliance and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had first made allegations during his campaign that there was a missile gap between the U.S. missile program and the supposedly more robust Soviet one. He knew full well that the opposite was true and his claims about a status quo were just a more conservative incarnation of the same fiction.18 Had there been a careful balance, instead of outright U.S. superiority in the arena of missile technology and deployment, the decision to arm Cuba would not have significantly altered it. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera said in response to JFKs asking “How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” “not at all” which is clearly the answer Kennedy accepted by acknowledging later in the speech that United State citizens already lived under a Soviet bull’s eye.19
His argument that the missiles were transferred secretly did not have any bearing, as they would have eventually been revealed to U.S. officials after they became operations, since only then would they function as a deterrent. It is clear they were only in place to deter U.S. aggression because their placement did not reduce the survivability of U.S. nuclear forces enough through counter force targeting to prevent US deterent counter value targeting. Had bases in Cuba enabled the U.S.S.R. to counter force target more effectively, only then would there be a feasible Soviet first strike and thus some incentive not to reveal the missiles. The parties involved knew that this was not the case. The three-minute window that the medium and intermediate range missiles require to find their target would still have been ample time to give a theoretical second strike command and deterrence would be maintained.20 Also, while missiles in Cuba would make it more difficult for the United States to effectively employ counter force targeting, since Moscow had already deployed indefinately survivable nuclear capable submarines, the U.S. would not have been able to counter force regardless of the Cuba move. However the Soviets never explained that the secrecy involved on their part was insignificant and so they became guilty of that secrecy in Stevenson’s “court of world opnion.”21 Finally, had it been so clear before Kennedy’s speech that the United States had no aggressive designs on other nations, it would have been unlikely that Castro would have felt threatened enough to accept the nuclear weapons from the U.S.S.R.22
Perhaps the best example of the marked difference between public discourse and private deliberation during the crisis comes from among the most recently discovered differences, namely the fate of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. As ExComm considered their options, it became evident that they could not afford to conduct any kind of public trade of the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba. They did not technically have the authority to negotiate that kind of arrangement and it would appear to NATO that the United States was willing to sellout Europe to the Soviets when it was their national security at stake for a change, jeopardizing the conceptual underpinning of the whole alliance.23 On Saturday October 27, the Kremlin made a formal offer to exchange the missile in Cuba and a pledge to respect Turkish sovereignty for the missiles in Turkey and pledge to respect Cuban soveriegnty.24 Understanding that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were of no strategic significance because newer submarine launched Polaris missiles stationed on subs in the Mediterranean covered the same target range, the President authorized RFK to privately assure Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that the missiles would be removed from Turkey after the crisis, but that if the Soviets leaked the arrangement as a quid pro quo stipulation of the negotiations that resolved the crisis, the deal would be called off and denied by Washington.25 Dobrynin passed the message to Krushchev who approved and the final secret condition under which the Soviets were willing to withdraw the missiles had been satisfied.
While the kind of foreign policy engaged in by the Kennedy Administration was not the unapologetically deceptive conduct espoused by Machiavelli, there were discrepancies between what was said within the ExComm and ultimately to the Soviets and what was presented to the world through official statements as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The omissions, alterations and outright equivocations all reflected the administration’s desire to control down to minute details how the situation would be resolved. Given the astronomical impacts of the mistakes that were made in spite of the ExComm’s best efforts, their pragmatic, domineering attitude about how to manage the situation seems well justified.
To truly understand the crisis however, it is necessary not just to accept the version of it that they provided to the American people. Instead, one must return the documents, to the minutes of those ExComm meetings, learn what they knew that others did not, and see for oneself whether those decisions were appropriate, given the classified knowledge they had. Only then is it clear that foreign policy as it is presented to the public is not necessarily foreign policy at all and the decisions which affect the broadest segments of the world population often made by the smallest elite groups of politics and experts, particularly in the controversial and highly nuanced field of international relations.
NOTES:
1. Merrill, Dennis and Thomas G. Paterson. Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume II. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) pg. 428.
2. Merrill and Paterson, pg. 429.
3. United States Dept of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume X
Cuba, 1961-1962 #196. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Schlesinger) to President Kennedy, Washington, May 3, 1961. Internet, 24 Nov. 2003
4. United States Dept of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume X
Cuba, 1961-1962 #349. Memorandum Prepared in the Office of Current Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, July 3, 1962. Internet, 24 Nov. 2003
5. Ibid.
6. Hunt, Michael H. Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy – An International History Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) pg. 255.
7. Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days – A Memoir Of The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1971) pg. 22.
8. Hunt, pg. 256.
9. Kennedy, pg. 26.
10. Kennedy, pg. 58.
11. Paterson, Thomas G., et al. American Foreign Relations – A History âÂ?¢ Since 1895, Volume II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) pg. 337.
12. Kennedy, pg. 59.
13. Kennedy, pg. 134.
14. Kennedy, pg. 25.
15. Kennedy, pg. 112.
16. Ibid.
17. Hunt, pg. 269.
18. Paterson, Thomas G., et al., pg. 328.
19. Merrill and Paterson, pg. 432.
20. Brussel, Grabrielle S. The Cuban Missile Crisis: U.S. Deliberations and Negotiations at the Edge of the Precipice, Pew Case Studies in International Affairs (Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1988) pg. 6.
21. Kennedy, pg. 58.
22. Brussel, pg. 10.
23. Paterson, Thomas G., et al., pg. 338.
24. Kennedy, pg. 71.
25. Paterson, Thomas G., et al., pg. 338.
