Historians/History

When John Kennedy Stood Alone and Saved Us from Catastrophe

by Sheldon M. Stern

Mr. Stern, historian at the Kennedy Library from 1977 to 1999, is the author of Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings, recently published in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.

It is remarkable to see how documentary films about President Kennedy have changed over the last four decades. In 1966, the United States Information Agency released "John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums," which presented the stirring and emotional images of a courageous and brilliant young president, also a devoted husband and father, cut off in his prime. By 1992, when the Public Broadcasting Service released "The Kennedys," the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme. This four-hour saga of an Irish-American family's drive for success and power transformed JFK into little more than an extension of his father's political ambition. The program raced through the Kennedy presidency, highlighting JFK's womanizing and the role of his father's money in his rise to power, and all but ignoring his impact on the presidency and the American people. This week, the History Channel's "JFK: A Presidency Revealed," provided a more balanced account of a man deeply flawed in his personal behavior but also capable of extraordinary leadership. He was slow, for example, to embrace civil rights, but eventually became the first president to publicly declare racial equality in America a moral issue. He was a seasoned Cold Warrior who approved plans to undermine communism in Cuba and eliminate Fidel Castro. But, when the ultimate crisis erupted between the nuclear superpowers in October 1962, he used his formidable political and intellectual skills to avert nuclear war, which he called, with stark eloquence, "the final failure."

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 (though they are difficult to decipher).*

As an historian trained in the turbulent 1960s and influenced by New Left historiography, I took for granted before hearing the tapes of the that Kennedy had been a tough and relentless Cold Warrior. JFK and his administration clearly bear significant responsibility for precipitating the missile crisis in the first place--because of the Bay of Pigs invasion, covert operations against Cuba and Castro, and "contingency" plans to reinvade Cuba. As a result, when I first listened to the recordings in the early 1980s JFK's prudence was a considerable surprise. The president consistently dug in his heels in the face of pressure to bomb the missile sites or invade Cuba. He also repeatedly acted to prevent, postpone, or at least question the advisability of potentially provocative measures. For example, he rejected the following: mining international waters around Cuba; extending the quarantine to Soviet aircraft flying to Cuba; resisting Russian efforts to inspect U.S. truck convoys entering Berlin; using needlessly belligerent language in an official proclamation; using the word "miscalculate" in a presidential letter because Khrushchev had misinterpreted this concept when translated into Russian at the Vienna summit; seizing a Soviet ship that had reversed course and was moving away from Cuba; risking an armed clash if the crew of a disabled ship resisted boarding; enforcing the quarantine by attacking a Soviet submarine; arming U.S. reconnaissance planes and returning Cuban ground fire; initiating night surveillance using flares; or immediately attacking the surface-to-air missile sites if a U-2 was shot down. JFK repeatedly tried to rise above the Cold War rhetoric he had exploited from the 1960 campaign through his October 22 speech announcing the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. And, as these recordings conclusively prove, he succeeded to a remarkable degree--although not without some "help" from Khrushchev and some genuine luck.

Top officials in the Kennedy administration clearly regarded the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba as a clear justification for invading the island. Defense secretary Robert McNamara declared on October 16 that the U.S. must be prepared to bomb the missile bases and follow up with a full air and sea invasion within a week. Robert Kennedy agreed, declaring that the U.S. had to accept Khrushchev's challenge by invading: "we should just get into it, and get it over with and take our losses." McNamara eventually endorsed the position of the Joint Chiefs: since all the missiles could not be destroyed in air attacks, "we consider nothing short of a full invasion as practicable military action." President Kennedy replied that, on the contrary, an invasion would put extreme military pressure on the U.S.S.R. and undermine the NATO alliance. The European allies, he admitted, regard Cuba "as a fixation of the United States and not a serious military threat. … they think that we're slightly demented on this subject. … a lot of people would regard this [invasion] as a mad act by the United States."

When the president met with the Joint Chiefs on October 19, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay ridiculed the blockade as "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich" and called for "direct military intervention, right now!" Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup agreed, "you'll have to invade the place [and] we must go in with plenty of insurance of a decisive success and as quick as possible." JFK held his ground, "Well, the logical argument is that we don't really have to invade Cuba. That's just one of the difficulties that we live with in life, like you live with the Soviet Union and China." He reminded the Chiefs that the U.S.S.R. could launch a devastating strike against American cities resulting in 80 to 100 million casualties, "you're talkin' about the destruction of a country!"

At the meeting with the leaders of Congress on October 22, Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, angrily called for an invasion: "You have told 'em not to do this thing. They've done it. And I think that you should assemble as speedily as possible an adequate force and clean out that situation." President Kennedy resisted, "If we go into Cuba, we have to all realize that we are taking a chance that these missiles, which are ready to fire, won't be fired… Is that really a gamble we should take?" J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, backed Russell: "I'm in favor on the basis of this information, of an invasion, and an all-out one, and as quickly as possible." The president explained to the former Rhodes Scholar that thousands of Russians would be killed in an invasion and the missiles might still be fired at the U.S.: "We are gonna have to shoot them up. And I think that it would be foolish to expect that the Russians would not regard that as a far more direct thrust . . . When you start talking about the invasion, it's infinitely more offensive." "I'll say this to Senator Fulbright," Kennedy finally concluded, "we don't know where we're gonna end up on this matter." He explained that former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Llewellyn Thompson, "felt very strongly" that Khrushchev would regard an attack on these missile bases "with the killing of four or five thousand Russians as a greater provocation than the stopping of their ships. Now, who knows that? ... We just tried to make good judgments about a matter on which everyone's uncertain."

In fact, mindful of the dismal failure of a much more limited operation at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in 1961, Kennedy had already decided against an invasion: "nobody knows what kind of a success we're gonna have with this invasion. Invasions are tough, hazardous. … thousands of Americans get killed in Cuba and I think you're in much more of a mess." In the end, convinced that an invasion "would be very, very difficult and very bloody," he rebuffed the essentially unanimous advice of the ExComm and decided on October 27 that Khrushchev's public offer to trade U.S. missiles in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba could not be rejected: "I'm just thinking about what we're gonna have to do in a day or so, which is … an invasion, all because we wouldn't take missiles out of Turkey." Perhaps calling to mind his own experience in World War II, JFK continued, "And we all know how quickly everybody's courage goes when the blood starts to flow and that's what's gonna happen in NATO." After the U.S. attacks Cuba and the Soviets grab Berlin as a reprisal, "everybody's gonna say, 'Well, that [offer to trade the missiles in Turkey and Cuba] was a pretty good proposition.' Let's not kid ourselves. … Today it sounds great to reject it, but it's not going to after we do something [in Cuba]!"

Historical evidence does not have to fit together tidily or logically. History defines its own parameters and historical figures often defy our assumptions and expectations. Contradictions and inconsistencies, in short, are the rule rather than the exception in human affairs. The evidence from the missile crisis tapes is anomalous and even surprising, but no less true: John Kennedy often stood virtually alone against warlike counsel from ExComm, the Joint Chiefs and Congress during those historic thirteen days. Nonetheless, he never really abandoned efforts, even after the Cuban missile crisis, to undermine the Cuban regime and get rid of Fidel Castro.

*Readers may also be interested in my articles identifying serious errors in the 1997 and 2001 published missile crisis transcripts (Atlantic Monthly, May 2000; Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2000; Reviews in American History, December 2002).