{"id":18526,"date":"2013-01-12T00:01:22","date_gmt":"2013-01-12T05:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18526"},"modified":"2022-09-05T17:58:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T21:58:03","slug":"the-cuban-missile-crisis-50-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/01\/12\/the-cuban-missile-crisis-50-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 years on"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic<\/em>, Benjamin Schwarz<\/a> looks at the myths and realities of the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over Cuba in 1962:<\/p>\n

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers \u2014 a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American \u201cquarantine\u201d of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow\u2019s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13\u2011day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration\u2019s placid resolve and prudent crisis management \u2014 thanks to what Kennedy\u2019s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president\u2019s \u201ccombination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world\u201d \u2014 the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory \u2014 as the pundits\u2019 commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.<\/p>\n

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the \u201cExComm\u201d). Sheldon M. Stern \u2014 who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes \u2014 is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there\u2019s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days<\/em>. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president\u2019s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as \u201cthe last chance we will have to destroy Castro.\u201d Stern authoritatively concludes that \u201cif RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.\u201d He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories \u201crepeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts\u201d and whose accounts \u2014 \u201cprofoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive\u201d \u2014 were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz looks at the myths and realities of the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over Cuba in 1962: On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,32,7,5,13],"tags":[277,108,510,1377,225,107,269,226,433],"class_list":["post-18526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-books","category-history","category-military","category-usa","tag-ballisticmissiles","tag-coldwar","tag-cuba","tag-cubanmissilecrisis","tag-jfk","tag-nukes","tag-propaganda","tag-rfk","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4OO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18526"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58118,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526\/revisions\/58118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}