And after we’ve struck Cuba?

Thomas Powers

The Kennedy tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow
Harvard, 728 pp, £23.50, October 1997, ISBN 0 674 17926 9
‘One Hell of a Gamble’: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali
Murray, 420 pp, £25.00, September 1997, ISBN 0 7195 5518 3

October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. But two new books about the Cuban missile crisis show how, in a pinch, Kennedy managed to keep a serious argument from slipping out of control.

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Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997 » Thomas Powers » And after we’ve struck Cuba? (print version)
pages 18-20 | 4279 words

Letters

From Inigo Thomas

Thomas Powers is wrong when he says that the Cuban missile crisis ‘ended halfway into the second day – Wednesday 24 October’ (LRB, 13 November). He must mean the second week. When Khrushchev learned that JFK was to give a major speech on Monday 22 October, he realised the game was up. The premise of Khrushchev’s missile strategy had been to surprise the Americans with a fully-functional nuclear weapons system based on Cuba: thanks to the U2, and to CIA Director John McCone’s hunch, it was the Americans who managed to surprise the Russians, and the first to go public – JFK – was the winner. Thereafter, Khrushchev more or less acquiesced – even removing the dangerous tactical cruise missiles, which no one in America knew about until 1990. Had Khrushchev taken away the intermediate and short-range ballistic missiles but left the cruise missiles, JFK would, I imagine, have found it quite hard to challenge the presence of these purely defensive missiles on Cuba. Yet for reasons unknown, Khrushchev shipped even these back to the motherland.

Finally, neither Powers, nor the editors of The Kennedy Tapes, nor the authors of ‘One Hell of a Gamble’ give George Ball much credit for his role in the missile crisis. Which is strange since (a) he was the first to suggest trading the Cuban missiles against the somewhat out-of-date Jupiters in Turkey, and (b) he seems to have been the calming influence on RFK, who in turn was the restraining factor on JFK. Hence the significance of Ball’s Pearl Harbor analogy (which Powers mentions) – a point that made a significant enough impression for the idea of an invasion of Castro’s Cuba to be abandoned.

Inigo Thomas
New York