Inside the Oval Office: Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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President Kennedy with aides during the Cuban missile crisis.

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The 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis couldn't have landed at a more appropriate moment—the final days of a race for the presidency of the United States. That crisis now seems part of the distant past, but it takes only a recapitulation of the facts—the photographs, the tape recordings, also the books and documentaries—to drive home, again, how close we came, at the time, to destruction in a nuclear war.

"We were very lucky," a commentator in "Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis" says. And that luck, the film makes clear, had to do with the character of the man Americans had chosen for their president—a view not unique to the filmmakers. It's one shared by most historians of the crisis.

A chapter in the Military Channel's miniseries "Commander in Chief: Inside the Oval Office," the documentary makes potent use of the declassified audiotapes Kennedy had secretly made. Only the president's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, knew about the device set up to record the meetings with his inner circle and the military brass as they, and he, contemplated the grim choices before them. (For a priceless compendium of the transcripts, along with commentary, see "The Kennedy Tapes," edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.)

The drama had begun well before the famous 13 days in October 1962. In the summer of that year, the CIA had taken note of a suspicious number of Soviet merchant ships headed to Cuba, where, intelligence flights revealed, missile sites had been set up—all only for defensive purposes, the Kremlin claimed. By the fall of 1962, Kennedy and his national-security advisers knew that the Soviets had, in Cuba, an arsenal of missiles capable of reaching and destroying every sector of the nation except possibly the far Northwest.

How had it all begun? The film provides an intriguing fragment of a home movie and related commentary by Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who offers an answer. He had, at age 27, filmed his father, who had brought his top advisers to a vacation hideaway near the Black Sea to plan the missile system to be set up in Cuba. It was his father's belief, Sergei Khrushchev says, that Cuba was to the Soviets exactly what West Berlin was to the Americans—"a small useless piece of land, but if you do not defend it you will lose face." The missiles had been designed as a message to the U.S.—do not invade Cuba.

The message the Americans took from those missiles, of course, was that they should prepare themselves for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviets. There is nothing in the audiotapes quite so chilling as the comments from the president's advisers, military and civilian, as they contemplate—with as much professional poise as they can muster—the outcome of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. There is certain to be chaos on the East Coast, says one. Another, in whom the possibilities have begun to work their effect, is devoid of hope. Estimating what would would happen to New York, he tells the assemblage, "You'd never be able to put it back together again."  More >>