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Cuban Missile Crisis

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• Originally published 02/24/2015

  Ukraine: The Cuban Missile Crisis in Reverse

  How the process of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and what we face today over the Ukraine compare.  It's not reassuring. But there's a way out. 

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• Originally published 12/17/2014

  Was Our Policy toward Cuba a Disaster?

  What historians have concluded about our long stormy history with Castro's Cuba. 

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• Originally published 11/05/2014

  How One Soviet Submarine Commander Averted World War III

  For the torpedo to be launched, the submarine’s top three commanders had to agree, and one refused.

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• Originally published 11/27/2013

  What Would JFK Have Done About Iran?

  JFK would have approved of Obama's negotiation.

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• Originally published 10/04/2013

  The Untold Origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis

  Aggressive U.S. moves against Cuba loomed large in Khrushchev’s decision to send in the missiles.

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• Originally published 11/11/2012

  The Ultimate What-If of the Cuban Missile Crisis: What If There Had Been a Nuclear War?

  Five decades ago, at the height of the Cold War, the world survived the most dangerous moment in human history. During the course of thirteen days, the Soviets and Americans confronted each other, but sanity won out and a deal was negotiated to end the crisis.

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• Originally published 10/18/2012

  Noam Chomsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis

  President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in an ExComm meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. Credit: White House.Noam Chomsky’s October 15 TomDispatch article (cross-posted on HNN) on the Cuban missile crisis quotes extensively from my work. Unfortunately, he also distorts the historical record and decontextualizes my conclusions. His insistence that the crisis was actually about U.S. “ownership of the world” tell us little or nothing about how real people behaved in real circumstances in October 1962.Several of Chomsky’s key contentions require additional discussion:

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• Originally published 10/14/2012

  The Cuban Missile Crisis ExComm Meetings: Getting it Right After 50 Years

  It is just over thirty years since, as historian at the JFK Library, I listened for the first time to the then classified recordings of the Cuban missile crisis White House meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm).

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• Originally published 10/10/2012

  What If Nixon Had Been President During the Cuban Missile Crisis?

  Credit: Flickr/Wikimedia Commons/HNN.Fifty years ago this month, the world got lucky. With a show of force and a secret trade, President John F. Kennedy persuaded Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to dismantle a clandestine nuclear missile base the U.S. had discovered in Cuba without a single shot -- or missile -- being fired.Ever since, scholars, statesmen and academics have plumbed the Cuban Missile Crisis for lessons about leadership, nuclear weapons and international relations, focusing on the possible miscalculations or accidents that could have sparked World War III during those tense thirteen days in 1962.But these what-if scenarios leave out the most revealing counterfactual of all: Would there have been war without Kennedy as president?

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• Originally published 08/07/2012

  HNN Hot Topics: Cuban Missile Crisis

  HNN Special: The Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty

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• Originally published 06/13/2012

  Robert Caro and the Mythical Cuban Missile Crisis

  The editor-in-chief of HNN, Rick Shenkman, asked me recently if I would write a critique of the account of the Cuban missile crisis in Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, Volume 4 of his authoritative biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Shenkman felt that Caro had utilized “myths that you debunked years ago on HNN” -- and, unfortunately, he was right.

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• Originally published 07/27/2008

  The Reflections of JFK’s Closest Advisor, Ted Sorensen (Interview)

  For the past four decades, Ted Sorensen has led a distinguished career in international law.  Despite his many achievements as an attorney, however, he is best known as the closest advisor to Pres. John F. Kennedy—and is seen by many commentators as the greatest American presidential speechwriter. 

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• Originally published 10/24/2004

  The Cuban Missile Crisis Myth You Probably Believe

  Debunking the Trollope Ploy narrative propagated by RFK.

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• Originally published 11/22/2003

  When John Kennedy Stood Alone and Saved Us from Catastrophe

  The declassified tapes of the secret Cuban missile crisis meetings now make it possible for any historian, teacher or interested person to listen to these unique discussions.

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• Originally published 11/05/2002

  Cuban Missile Crisis: Kennedy's Mistakes

  Forty years ago, President John F. Kennedy was locked in a test of wills with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba.