After U.S. president
Dwight D. Eisenhower made the formal decision to invade Cuba in March 1960,
there was no evidence of a major Soviet Communist threat yet. The island of
Cuba had been a place for American investments since the United States took
over in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. From 1902 to 1961, the United
States intervened in Cuba four times (the last one being the Bay of Pigs) to
protect its investments. In 1898, U.S. businesses had $50 million in
investments on the island and by 1920, they reached to half a billion dollars.
Among other resources, American investment claimed eighty percent of Cuban
utilities and 40 percent of its sugar. Also, the United States owned its
strategic location: Guantánamo Bay. The main export of Cuba was sugar, which
was controlled by Washington. To control Cuba’s sugar economy meant controlling
much of Cuban life. Cuba was the prized possession of the United States since
1898. Once the Kremlin got involved in Cuba at the height of the Cold War,
Washington had to respond.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only the most dangerous
moment in Cold War history, it was the most dangerous moment in human history,
stated historian Arthur Schlesinger during a three-day conference on the Cuban
Missile Crisis held in October 2002 in Havana, Cuba. To the shock of most of
the participants during the crisis was the revelation that the United States
and the Soviet Union were closer to nuclear war than previously believed. On 27
October 1962, just before Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pulled the Soviet
missiles out of Cuba, an American destroyer ordered to enforce the U.S.
quarantine was firing depth charges to a Soviet submarine armed with nuclear
weapons. The Americans in the destroyer did not know that the submarines
Khrushchev sent to the island to protect the Soviet ships were armed with
nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The Russian submarine commanders interpreted the
Americans' firing of depth charges as the beginning of World War III. One
senior Russian commander in the submarine, angered by American aggression,
ordered the firing of a nuclear-armed torpedo against the U.S. destroyer.
Fortunately, another Russian commander in the submarine, Vasili Arkhipov,
mollified the senior commander, intercepting the order. In that conference,
director of the National Security Archive, Thomas Blanton, declared Arkhipov as
"a guy...who saved the world."
The Cuban
Missile Crisis, in light of new discoveries, becomes a good case study of Cold
War management. It was here that President John F. Kennedy, more than any other
president in American history, had been tested on his decision making at the
height of the Cold War. When President Kennedy was shown aerial photographs of
Soviet SS-4 launching installations under construction in Cuba on the morning
of 16 October 1962, he called out his advisers – military and civilian – to
discuss what would then become the most intense time in American history during
the Cold War. Never had diplomacy and civilian control over the military been
so crucial in the United States government (and for the world) because of the
stakes involved. In the 2004 documentary, The
Fog of War, Robert S. McNamara, the Kennedy administration’s Secretary of
Defense, reminiscing about the crisis 40 years later says that there are no
lessons to be learned in nuclear war, “You make one mistake and you destroy
nations,” warns McNamara.
In 1962 the
Soviets had begun, in secret, constructing missile bases with a striking range
of two thousand miles capable of killing “ninety million Americans.” In 1992,
as McNamara later discovered, there were already “one hundred sixty-two nuclear
warheads” and ninety tactical nuclear missiles on the island at the “critical
moment of the crisis.” Six days after the CIA showed the aerial photos to
Kennedy on 16 October, he went on television to publicly address the crisis and
to announce that there was going to be a “quarantine” of Cuba to keep any more
Russian military supplies from getting to the island. On 25 October, Soviet
ships on their way to Cuba stopped at some distance to the one hundred eighty
U.S. Naval ships guarding the island.
At around this
time, the Kennedy administration received a letter from Moscow indicating they
would remove the missiles only if the United States promised not to invade
Cuba. This letter would later be termed the “soft message.” But before the
crisis managers in Washington could respond, they got another letter. This
second letter was to be termed the “hard message.” In addition to the U.S.
promise not to invade Cuba, it demanded that the United States pull out its
nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. Only in this context would the Soviets
agree to pull their missiles from the island. Sometime later, an American
reconnaissance plane was shot over Cuba (not under Khrushchev’s orders). On 28
October, Khrushchev, fearing nuclear war, finally removed the Soviet missiles
from Cuba settling on the first letter’s demand. Although further diplomatic
solutions between the two super powers were yet to be made days later, this
date finalized the intensity of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The one
constant in American politics after World War II was the maintenance of U.S.
credibility. Since 1945 the United States became the most powerful nation in
the world. Having an economy three times the size of the Soviet Union’s and
surpassing its nuclear armaments, it put major pressure on any subsequent
post-war president to maintain that supremacy. The crisis managers were fully
aware that there was no “missile gap” as Kennedy had spoken of before in his
political campaign. If there was a missile gap, recalls McNamara, it was to the
Soviet Union’s disadvantage.
Despite the
fact that the United States had superiority in nuclear arsenals than the Soviet
Union and the fact that the Russian missiles bases were under construction in
Cuba (so it was believed at the time), Kennedy still stated that the Russian
missiles must be removed - as that Soviet posturing was unacceptable to U.S.
credibility. According to historian Stephen Ambrose “The issue of Cuba was prestige.” American
democracy requires that its potential leaders advertise their strengths in high
competition against each other. At the start of his campaign for the
presidency, Kennedy boasted that if elected he would be an awesome Cold
Warrior. He promised in his campaign speeches that he would fight Communism one
step higher, go the extra mile than any other candidate. Whenever Nixon says, “
‘We never had it so good,’ ” Kennedy usually retorts, “ ‘I say we can do
better.’ ” In his book Rise To Globalism, Ambrose noted Theodore Sorensen, the
speechwriter for Kennedy, believed that the Russian missiles in Cuba alone were
not the issue but the mere appearance of Soviet superiority was the problem.
A document
that may give insight to the thoughts and motivations of Cold War politicians
in the United States is the National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68).
The former top-secret document of the Cold War, written in 1950 by Paul Nitze,
the assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs for the Kennedy
administration and Dean Acheson, a former Secretary of State, and in 1962, was
President Kennedy’s unofficial foreign policy adviser during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. This major Cold War document gives the background on Washington’s
attitude toward the Kremlin. NSC-68 also addresses the objectives and strategic
plans of the United States after WWII.
Reading NSC-68
is quite revealing; it can put the reader in the policymakers’ shoes. Reading such top-secret document, one may get
the experience of how policymakers in Washington really think in a candid
manner; that is, minus the filtering effects of the major media or journalists’
interpretations of top-level government officials’ policy motivations.
In the first
part of NSC-68, the authors provided background on the “present crisis” of the
time, which was Soviet military power and hegemony. The document boldly assumed
that, “the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony [France and
Britain], is animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and
seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The
document also explained that the “Fundamental design of the Kremlin” is to
“retain and solidify their absolute power” in the Soviet Union itself and in
the rest of the world. Not only does NSC-68 emphasize the imperial ambitions of
the Kremlin towards vast areas of the “non-Soviet world,” it also constantly
associated the Kremlin with the ideas of “slavery” and “oligarchy” in society,
while only associating the United States with the ideas of “freedom” and
“justice,” assertions that were without much evidence or support.
It is in this
context of NSC-68 that the Cuban Missile Crisis should be viewed. The document
provides the background in order to better understand the thinking and the
motivations of the crisis managers toward either military action or diplomacy. For
example, Washington believed that the Soviets’ motivation for putting nuclear
missiles in Cuba was to try to balance U.S. power posturing in the world by
deploying missiles in Turkey and Italy. As Khrushchev stated in his memoirs, as quoted by Raymond Garthoff:
The
Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with
nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy
missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little
of their own medicine.
Although true that this was a major reason for the
importation of Soviet missiles in Cuba, it was not the primary reason. The
number one reason for the deployment was the protection of Cuba from an
American invasion. According to Garthoff, Khrushchev and his advisers wanted to
spread Socialist revolution throughout Latin America. The motivation was to
protect Cuba, as Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet after the crisis in
December 1962.
McNamara
maintained that there was no official plan to invade Cuba again right after the
ill-fated Bay of Pigs. Nevertheless, the Cubans and the Russians had substantial
reasons to believe that the United States would invade again soon. In fact, in
1961 Kennedy adopted the Eisenhower plan to invade the island. Just as
Eisenhower was leaving office plans by the CIA were in the works for a coup to
topple Castro. Shortly after Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 toppling the
U.S. backed Fulgencio Batista, he was popular in the United States. A majority
of Americans believed that Castro’s democratic reforms were a substantial
improvement for the Cuban people who were suffering poverty and repression
under Batista.
Top officials
in Washington, such as CIA director Allen Dulles, were deeply suspicious of revolutionaries
such as Castro and his main comrade Che Guevara. They were leery of Communist
infiltration in the Western Hemisphere in general. Even though Castro himself
had made public statements that he was not a Communist, the United States still
branded him as so.
When Castro
instituted extensive land reform program and nationalized American property in
Cuba along with the circus trials and executions of Batista supporters by his
government, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Havana and boycotted
Cuba’s sugar. Since sugar was the staple of the Cuban economy, the Eisenhower
administration thought the boycott would weaken the Castro government and make
it easier to overthrow. The action had an adverse effect though: it made Castro
cozy up with the Soviets. To the delight of the new Cuban leadership, the Soviet
Union agreed to buy Cuban sugar. Thus came the biggest fear of Washington: the
Castro government allying with the Kremlin.
In April 1961,
under President Kennedy’s approval, 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and armed by the
CIA tried to invade Cuba. It ended in failure. The invasion was executed
covertly. American airplanes were covering the Cuban exiles carried in American
ships on their way to the Bay of Pigs. The idea was to mount up anti-Castro sentiment
among the Cuban people to help topple his government. Seeing disaster ahead,
Washington refused to provide any additional air support for the invasion, as
they feared that the illegal activity might hurt Kennedy’s administration
politically. The CIA plan was an ill-conceived one from the beginning, as
Castro was supported by ninety percent of the Cuban people, according to New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc. It
was a fiasco. Kennedy was embarrassed by the invasion’s failure and got so
angry that he ordered Castro assassinated. At this point Kennedy authorized the
CIA to set up plans to kill Castro with the provision that his administration
could deny leaks in the press if it turns out a failure.
Historians
Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley argued that President Kennedy “played a delicate
game” in the Bay of Pigs. It may be understandable, since Kennedy promised in
his campaign that he would be a fierce Cold Warrior, better than any other
leader. His campaign earlier criticized the Eisenhower administration for not
being tough enough against the Communists. The rhetoric of the Republicans
consisted of hostile attitudes against the Communists but the Democrats had to
be better, and through their actions, they wanted to show the American public
that they would fight Communism with “dynamic militancy.” President Kennedy had
to live up to that promise. Historian Alonzo Hamby describes the Bay of Pigs as
the “result of bad advice [by the ‘experts’] and the inexperience that any new
president brings to his job.” Another factor, according to Hamby, was that
Kennedy did not know how to deal with Castro in “a careful and moderate way,”
the way he had approached other problems. He described Kennedy as a “frustrated
idealist” attempting to “strike out at a hated enemy.” His extreme obsession
with putting up a strong front and his extreme stance against Communism seemed
to have been his weakness.
Kennedy became
depressed with the failure in the Bay of Pigs invasion. For a while, he was
blaming the CIA for the failed operation. Ambrose and Brinkley quotes Kennedy
as saying, “‘all my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How
could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’” Though the authors did not
buy Kennedy’s lament. They stated, “the explanation [of Kennedy] was patent
nonsense.” The plan was in complete accord with the president’s views and it
was as much his ill-conceived plan, as it was the CIA’s. The CIA plan sounded
good to Kennedy and he had advocated such a Machiavellian policy in his campaign
in 1960. The general belief of the president was that there could be a
“liberal” alternative to Castro. Although the dictator Batista had dismayed the
American administration in some ways, they thought it worse and completely
unacceptable that Castro “confiscated” American property in Cuba.
Admittedly,
Kennedy regarded the Bay of Pigs invasion “a misjudgment.” The fiasco is a good
case study of bad Cold War policy. His disastrous decision to invade Cuba in
the Bay of Pigs may have been due to his inexperience and to his obsession with
anti-Communism - a strong sentiment in both the Republican and Democratic
parties, but each side claimed to be better Cold Warriors than the other.
Although, the Bay of Pigs turned out to
be a disaster for the Kennedy administration in terms of Cold War policy, the
Missile Crisis proved to be managed well. No one could deny the intensity of
the Missile Crisis in 1962 when the two countries were extremely close to
nuclear war. In light of new discoveries about the Missile Crisis, President
Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense McNamara, among other doves, should be
admired for their cautious stance when major voices in the United States were
calling for an air strike followed by an invasion, which would have, in
McNamara’s words, ended up “in utter disaster.”
Bibliography
Ambrose, Stephen E. and Douglas
G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American
Foreign Policy
Since 1938, 4Th
ed. (New York: Penguin Books,
1997).
Chang, Laurence, and Peter
Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis,
1962
(New York: The
New Press, 1998).
Garthoff, Raymond L. Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington
D.C.:
The Brookings Institution, 1989).
Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From FDR to
Bush, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford
University Press, 1992).
Lloyd, Marion, “Caution called
the Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Boston
Globe (12 October 2002,
sec.
National/Foreign, final edition).
“The Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Fog of War prod. Errol Morris, 107
mins.
Sony Pictures
Classics, 2004.
May, Ernest R. and Philip
Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the
White House During the
Cuban Missile Crisis (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
U.S. Department of State. NSC 68: United States Objectives and Program
for National Security
(Naval War
College Review, Vol. XXVII May-June 51-108. Taken from
<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-2.htm>
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