Thoughts on the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis/ Forbes

Forbes/

Come October 15 it will be 50 years since the start of the Cuban missile crisis, when the U.S. and the Soviets were on the brink of nuclear annihilation for 13 days as a result of the Soviets trying to build missile bases on the island of Cuba.

JFK and McNamara [Photo credit: Wikipedia]

The standoff ended when the two countries agreed that the Soviets would not install missile bases and the U.S. would not invade Cuba, thus avoiding catastrophe. (Two years later, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, came out in movie theaters, giving viewers a hilarious vision of nuclear holocaust. Peter Sellers starred in the title role, as well as playing the somewhat vague U.S. President. George C. Scott is priceless as General Buck Turgidson. The movie never gets old. I recommend watching it with a six-pack in your fallout shelter sometime between Oct. 15 and 28.)

President John F. Kennedy summed up his and America’s resolve in an address to the nation on Oct. 22, 1962, when he announced a blockade of Cuba:

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.”

Fidel Castro, on the other side of the nuclear chessboard from Kennedy, gave a revealing look many years later about what had happened:

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for us to build those emplacements under the guise of something totally different and they would have never been discovered. The amazing thing was that they weren’t discovered earlier. It was a question of carelessness, lack of foresight.”

  

One wonders what would have happened if the Soviets and Cuba had been better at camouflaging the bases. Castro’s benefactor at that time, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, had this to say about those dramatic 13 days:

The two most powerful nations of the world had been squared off against each other, each with its finger on the button. You’d have thought that war was inevitable. But both sides showed that if the desire to avoid war is strong enough, even the most pressing dispute can be solved by compromise. And a compromise over Cuba was indeed found.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who served under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, appraised the situation succinctly:

We were eyeball-to-eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.”

Another former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had this to add:

President Kennedy didn’t negotiate out of the Cuban missile crisis simply because he and Khrushchev got along well. Khrushchev didn’t have the cards.”

Roger Hilsman, director of the U.S. Dept. of State bureau of intelligence and research (how’s that for a long title?) under Kennedy, had this to say about the U.S.’s  successful use of aerial reconnaissance:

Presidential assistant McGeorge Bundy, appearing on ABC-TV’s Issues and Answers on Sunday, October 14 [1962], denied that the Soviets had any offensive weapons in Cuba just as a U-2 was taking the first pictures of them.”

Ray Cline, who served under Kennedy as CIA deputy director for intelligence, was perhaps tooting the firm’s horn a bit in giving this historic appraisal of the intelligence gathering during the crisis:

After the Cuban missile crisis I asked both McGeorge Bundy and Robert Kennedy if they would tell me how much that single evaluated piece of photographic evidence was worth, and they each said it fully justified all that the CIA had cost the country in all its preceding years.”

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