11

Kennedy’s Contingencies

The record of General Eisenhower’s tenure as a US Cold War president was decidedly mixed. Backed up by his vast international experience, Eisenhower had avoided the sense of permanent crisis and frequent distress of his predecessor. He had extricated the United States from the Korean War and—equally importantly—avoided getting the country directly involved in new wars in Asia. But Eisenhower had also overseen a vast militarization of the Cold War, in which the US arsenal had expanded from 370 warheads in 1950 to more than 40,000 in 1960. He had alienated radical nationalists in the Middle East and Latin America through his covert interventions in Iran and Guatemala. And—mainly for domestic ideological reasons—he had failed to make use of the opportunities after Stalin’s death for a real relaxation of the conflict with the Soviets.

Much of Eisenhower’s more forward thinking seemed to come as an afterthought to the general. His attempts at reaching out to Third World leaders and arranging regular summits with the Soviets came right at the end of his presidency. Symbolically, his final meeting with Khrushchev had been cancelled because the USSR had shot down an American spy plane inside Soviet airspace. Having presided over the greatest buildup of military capacity in US history, Eisenhower in his farewell address went on to warn Americans that

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.¹

The legacy Eisenhower bequeathed to his successor was therefore a troubled one. The young president-elect, John F. Kennedy, struggled with contingencies left over from the last administration and those created by a rapidly changing world even before he took office in January 1961. He battled to understand, and then deal with, a crisis in Laos, where insurgents were threatening a US-supported government. He attempted to reach out to Congress to get its Democratic leaders to support a broader US involvement abroad, higher defense expenditures, and more aid to developing countries. And he tried to show a skeptical military and intelligence service that a young, Democratic, and Catholic president would not only be fully in charge but also better able to win the Cold War than his experienced predecessor. It was a frenetic first year in office, with promise and defeats in roughly equal measure.

John F. Kennedy was the first American president born in the twentieth century. He was also the youngest person ever elected president, a forty-three-year-old who took over from a man nearly thirty years his senior. As the first Catholic president, Kennedy’s election was a sign that the US political elite was gradually extending into new demographic territory. From a wealthy Bostonian family of Irish immigrants, Kennedy would still get to know the slings and arrows aimed at him for being nouveau riche in a city where old money was revered. But he made up for it through a buoyant personality and a combative political demeanor. JFK—like some American presidents, he was known by his initials—had been brought up to win, in life as in politics, and he had the intelligence and charm that often allowed him to do so.

There was enormous enthusiasm across the country on Kennedy’s election, even though it was a hard-fought contest against Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and a very narrow win. Still, Kennedy’s youth, his vigor, and his general attractiveness (not least alongside that of his wife, Jacqueline) enthused people, far beyond those who had supported him politically. His rhetoric was also scintillating. JFK spoke about the need for change and about America triumphant, always a winning combination in US politics (and a far cry from his predecessor’s measured style). In his inaugural, the new president alerted the Soviets that he was

unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.… In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.²

As he had done in his campaign, after his election Kennedy spoke about the possibility of the United States losing out to the Soviets. Stability was not enough, he claimed, in an indirect attack on his predecessor. JFK wanted the United States to win the Cold War, though it was always unclear to him what such a victory would consist of. During the campaign he had claimed, quite inaccurately, that there was a “missile gap” that separated increased Soviet capabilities from those of the United States in terms of nuclear weapons. In fact the situation was the reverse, and Kennedy probably knew that. But he used the fictitious “gap” to illustrate his willingness to get one over on the Soviets in a competition for global power. To JFK, the 1960s was a decade of enormous danger and enormous opportunity. The world was plastic, and it was up to the United States to mold it into a new shape.

Over time, Kennedy’s belligerent approach would be tempered by events. In a presidency tragically cut short, the defining moment was the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union and the United States got closer to nuclear war than at any other point during the Cold War. In the time that was left to him after that crisis in October 1962, Kennedy was more serious about seeking compromise and therefore a lasting peace. But he always remained strongly ideological. More of an intellectual than any other US Cold War president, Kennedy thrived on discussing ideas and trying to understand change. He believed in the Wilsonian creed, that it was only by making other countries more like the United States that his country could be secure and fulfill its historical mission. And the 1960s, more than any other decade, seemed to the young president to hold out the opportunities for doing so.

The first of the contingencies Kennedy had to deal with was the US relationship to countries in the Third World. As a senator, Kennedy had been an outspoken proponent of greater US engagement in the problems of newly independent states and in opposing colonialism, for instance with regard to Algeria. But his was not only an ideological and moral engagement. He also feared that the United States was missing a trick by not aligning more closely with the new states, and that the Soviets capitalized on US inaction. He had read The Stages of Economic Growth, by the MIT economic historian Walt Rostow, which argues that “traditional” societies are particularly susceptible to Communist infiltration at the very moment when they begin transitioning to modernity. He also read Khrushchev’s January 1961 speech, in which the Soviet leader had pledged support even for non-Communist countries and movements in the Third World, and commented on it extensively. Reflecting his foreign policy inexperience, Kennedy saw the speech almost as a declaration of war against the United States. He instructed his advisers to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” Khrushchev’s message. “You’ve got to understand it…,” the president kept repeating. “This is our clue to the Soviet Union.”³

Kennedy believed that in order to win the Cold War, the United States had to prevent the postcolonial states from falling into the lap of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had been too passive in that regard, the new president thought. His administration devised a policy that combined increased economic assistance with training US and local troops in anti-insurgency warfare. US development aid expenditure increased significantly, though only up to 0.6 percent of GDP.⁴ A couple of months into his presidency, Kennedy launched the US Peace Corps as part of a larger effort to assist global development. The plan was to recruit American youth to work as volunteers in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, where they would provide skills training for the local population. As much of what Kennedy proposed, the Peace Corps was a call to action, an attempt at winning the Cold War by setting things right: “Every young American who participates in the Peace Corps will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.”⁵ By 1966 fifteen thousand Americans were serving in countries as diverse as Chile, Nigeria, Iran, and Thailand.

In security terms, Kennedy’s initial focus was on southeast Asia, where rebellions against US-supported regimes had been brewing since the partition of Vietnam in 1954. The Laos crisis was to Kennedy a prime example of the kind of challenges the Cold War would lead to in the Third World. He viewed the Laotian Communists and their allies, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Soviets, as launching a direct provocation against him as a new president. It was a gauntlet thrown down that Kennedy was only too eager to pick up. He told his advisers he was “all for doing what we can in Laos,” but he was very cautious about introducing US ground troops, hoping to force the Communists into a political settlement by threatening a US intervention.⁶ As part of this strategy, the White House authorized a CIA covert operations program for Laos, which concentrated on the Chinese border areas. Kennedy also dispatched the US Seventh Fleet to the South China Sea and placed combat troops in Okinawa on alert. Later he sent US troops to Thailand. Kennedy saw himself as threatening war in order to achieve peace, a policy of brinkmanship that he would also use in more serious conflicts during his presidency.

In Laos, JFK’s carrot and stick approach worked, at least for a while. Khrushchev was in no mood for a battle over Laos, which he regarded—with some right—as the periphery’s periphery. The Chinese were weakened after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, and those temporarily in control in Beijing—Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai—wanted to use the Laos crisis to indicate a continued willingness to work with the Soviets in international affairs. The North Vietnamese, although eager to help the Laotian radicals, were in no position to act on their own. The result was a conference at Geneva, at the end of which all powers involved—and the Laotians themselves—agreed to a neutralization of Laos, and the establishment of a coalition government. Very few people in Washington or Hanoi—and nobody in Laos—thought this would be the end of the story, and Kennedy deepened his commitment to South Vietnam as a result of the crisis. But, for now, one ball in the Superpower contest had been put out of play.

Kennedy’s visions for Europe were much more limited than those for the Third World. He had no intention of attempting to change the balance of power there, and he suspected that Khrushchev was reasonably happy, at least for the time being, with current arrangements in Europe. The main outstanding issue was the control of the divided German capital Berlin, and Kennedy did not clearly understand how vexing this problem had become for his Soviet counterpart. Khrushchev viewed Berlin—the only part of Germany where people could still cross between East and West—as a wound to the heart of the German Democratic Republic, the eastern part of Germany, which was now a Communist state with 250,000 Red Army soldiers stationed within it. The problem was that East Germans, especially those with education or specialist training, continued to leave for the West in droves. In 1960 more than 190,000 had sought more freedom and better income in the western half of the city.

Both the East German leaders and members of his own leadership had been asking Khrushchev what he intended to do about the situation in Berlin. For the East German Communists, the situation was untenable: not only were a lot of talented people leaving, but their manner of leaving—in violation of controls and orders—derided the authority of Walter Ulbricht and the East Berlin government. But there was little they could do about it, as long as the subway, for instance, ran unimpeded throughout the whole city. As Ulbricht explained to Khrushchev in November 1960, “the situation in Berlin has become complicated, not in our favor. West Berlin has strengthened economically. This is seen in the fact that about 50,000 workers from East Berlin… go to work in West Berlin, since there are higher salaries there. Why don’t we raise our salaries?… First of all, we don’t have the means. Secondly, even if we raised their salary, we could not satisfy their purchasing power with the goods that we have, and they would buy things with that money in West Berlin.”⁷ Khrushchev met with Kennedy for the first time in a summit in Vienna in the summer of 1961. Kennedy had asked for the meeting. He told his advisers that he wanted to show the Soviet leader that “we can be just as tough as he is.”⁸ But their talks did not go well. Khrushchev was in an ebullient mood, with traces of distress. He was still upset over Lumumba’s murder and the loss of Soviet positions in Congo. But the Soviet Union had just put the first man into space, and the United States had had its setbacks over Cuba and in relations with its European allies. Unwisely, Khrushchev tried to bully the much younger US president into making concessions. The Berlin problem was foremost on his mind.

First Khrushchev treated Kennedy to a lesson in ideology. In accusing the Soviet Union of promoting world revolution, he said, “the President drew the wrong conclusion. He believes that when people rise against tyrants, that is a result of Moscow’s activities. This is not so. Failure by the US to understand this generates danger. The USSR does not foment revolution but the United States always looks for outside forces whenever certain upheavals occur.”⁹ Turning to Berlin, Khrushchev indicated that he was willing to negotiate, but at the end of the year “the USSR will sign a peace treaty unilaterally and all rights of access to Berlin will expire because the state of war will cease to exist.” Kennedy responded with equal bluntness: “The United States cannot accept an ultimatum. Our leaving West Berlin would result in the US becoming isolated.” “The USSR will sign a peace treaty,” Khrushchev said, “and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed. Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression against a peace-loving country, with all the consequences ensuing therefrom.… The USSR does not wish any change; it merely wants to formalize the situation which has resulted from World War II. The fact is that West Germany is in the Western group of nations and the USSR recognizes this. East Germany is an ally of the socialist countries and this should be recognized as a fait accompli.” President Kennedy “concluded the conversation by observing that it would be a cold winter.”¹⁰

“I never met a man like this,” Kennedy exclaimed wearily after his meeting with Khrushchev.¹¹ The president found the Soviet leader overbearing, aggressive, but also eager to avoid war and sensitive to matters of prestige. On returning to the United States, Kennedy asked Congress for $3.5 billion in extra military expenditure in order to set up six new divisions for the army and two for the marines. He also planned to triple the draft and to call up the reserves. Khrushchev was fuming. “We helped elected Kennedy last year,” he boasted to a group of scientists as he stated his intention to resume nuclear testing, which had been suspended by both countries since 1958. “Then we met with him in Vienna, a meeting that could have been a turning point. But what does he say? ‘Don’t ask me for too much. Don’t put me in a bind. If I make too many concessions, I’ll be turned out of office.’ Quite a guy! He comes to a meeting but can’t perform. What the hell do we need a guy like that for? Why waste time talking to him?”¹²

Khrushchev’s underestimation of Kennedy made him act on Berlin in ways almost as self-defeating as Stalin’s blockade in 1948. By the late summer of 1961 both leaders had been able to talk themselves into crisis mode over Germany. Neither side wanted military conflict, or even a standoff. But Khrushchev had to solve the East German emigration problem and Kennedy had to show his commitment to the West German government and the NATO alliance. Khrushchev acted first. He picked up on a proposal that Ulbricht had made earlier about building a wall in order to physically separate East Berlin from West Berlin. Before signing off on the project, the Soviet leader went on an incognito visit to the German capital, driving into West Berlin, looking around. “I never got out of the car,” he remembered later, “but I made a full tour and saw what the city was like.”¹³ On 13 August 1961, barbed wire started to go up along the dividing line separating the two parts of Berlin. The subway tunnels were quickly blocked off. The East German police shot at those who dared to cross. The city of Berlin had again become a victim of the Cold War. And this time its division seemed permanent.

But erecting the Berlin Wall signaled East Bloc weakness, not strength. The people of Berlin resisted as best they could. “There was this one street we used to go to,” one of them remembers, “which was split down the middle by the wall. The street was in the west but the houses were in the east. The soldiers bricked up the front doors but people jumped out of the windows. There was a group of us on the western side who used to all try to knock off the top level of the wall before the cement had time to dry. We were a bit of a mob; we would all surge together and smash it.”¹⁴ The mayor of West Berlin, the Social-Democrat Willy Brandt, called the Wall “a shocking injustice.” But in his radio address to all Berliners, Brandt also warned the East about the consequences:

They have drawn through the heart of Berlin not just a border, but a fence, as in a concentration camp. With the support of the East Bloc states, the Ulbricht-regime has exacerbated the situation in Berlin and again broken with legal agreements and humanitarian obligations. The Senate of Berlin brings to the whole world its accusations against the illegal and inhuman actions of those who divide Germany, oppress East Berlin, and threaten West Berlin.… They will not succeed. We will in the future bring even more people from all over the world to Berlin to show them the cold, naked, and brutal reality of a system that has promised people heaven on earth.¹⁵

Khrushchev, however, thought he had found a way of solving his Berlin problem without a direct confrontation with the United States. He told his eastern European colleagues: “We should not force the conclusion of a peace treaty with Germany, but continue to move forward.… We should keep applying pressure.… We should carry on salami tactics with regard to the rights of the Western countries.… We have to pick our way through, divide them, exploit all the possibilities.”¹⁶ Kennedy refused to let US forces leave Berlin and insisted on access to East Berlin for American officers. For several months the Americans, the Soviets, and the East Germans played cat and mouse all over Berlin. Thirteen people were killed trying to leave the East right after the Wall went up. One of them was the twenty-five-year-old Werner Probst, who tried to swim across the Spree River. The East German border guards shot him just as he grabbed hold of a ladder on the western side. Willy Brandt ordered loudspeakers set up along the Wall, which kept repeating that “anyone who shoots dead a person who wants to go from Germany to Germany has committed murder. No one should think that he can claim to have acted on orders when he is called to account one day. Murder is murder, even if it has been ordered.”¹⁷ The East responded by firing tear gas into the western sector.

For Kennedy and Khrushchev the situation remained tense for several months. On 27 October there was a twenty-four-hour standoff between Soviet and American tanks right at Checkpoint Charlie in Friedrichstrasse, in the center of Berlin. It gradually became clear to the White House that the Soviets would not attempt to force the Americans out of Berlin, even as they tightened their grip on the city. Kennedy immediately saw the immense propaganda value of the Wall, but did not think there was much the United States could do about the situation, except assuring Brandt, the West German government, and its NATO allies that the United States would defend West Berlin in case of an East Bloc attack. Privately, the president mused that “it’s not a very nice solution but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”¹⁸ Brandt was disgusted with what he saw as cowardice on the president’s part and feared for the future of his half-city. Other western European leaders, especially France’s de Gaulle, also saw Kennedy as weak. The German people, de Gaulle said, “would be left with a sense of betrayal.” He “would not be party to such an arrangement. The Germans would then in the future feel that at least they had one friend left in the West.”¹⁹

In spite of the criticism, it is hard to see what more Kennedy could have done over Berlin except threatening war. The president did not want to be pushed around by Khrushchev. But Kennedy’s view of what mattered in the Cold War was much more global than that of his predecessors, and his reading of the Vienna summit was that Khrushchev pushed on Berlin to solve East Germany’s problems, not because he planned to upset overall stability in Europe. Prestige mattered to Kennedy, and it was at least as vital for him as for de Gaulle to keep West Germany in NATO and forestall any temptation on the side of the aging German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to negotiate directly with the Soviets in order to achieve reunification in return for German Cold War neutrality. But the walling off of East Berlin did not upset the balance in Europe, Kennedy concluded, however shocking it was in terms of human rights.

As could be expected from his thinking when he came into the presidency, Kennedy’s level-headedness applied much more to Europe than to the Third World. His biggest challenge, by far, was to be the Cuban revolution, a regional problem Eisenhower had been eager to deal with but which had not been at the forefront of the general’s mind. Gradually, Cuba was to become a significant participant in the Cold War in its own right, as a major Third World power and as an ally of the Soviet Union. But, as Kennedy came into office, the question in Washington was how to handle the Cuban revolution itself, an insurrection that had created a radical and militant regime in the most populous country in the Caribbean, ninety miles from the Florida coast.

The Cuban revolution was the result of years of misrule by Fulgencio Batista, a populist president whose methods had become increasingly dictatorial. It also reflected widespread poverty and social injustice in the countryside, though not more than was found in other Latin American countries. From the beginning, nationalist opposition to US control played an important part in the revolution. Cuba had been occupied by the United States several times during its history, and some Cuban businesses, such the vital sugar industry, were dominated by US companies. During the latter part of his regime, Batista had drawn closer to the Americans, in part to offset his weaknesses at home. By the late 1950s Cuba seemed a country ripe for political change.

Those who came to fill this power gap were Fidel Castro and his group of exiled revolutionaries from Cuba and other Latin American countries. Castro was born in 1926, the son of a Spanish immigrant who had become a wealthy farmer in Cuba. As a very young man, Fidel Castro had become a radical student leader who opposed the government, campaigned for social justice and Latin American solidarity, and opposed US domination of Cuba. More of an insurrectionist than a Communist, the imperious youth commented to a friend that he would only become a Communist “if I could be Stalin.”²⁰ Castro’s activities forced him into exile in Mexico in 1955, from where he and a small band of revolutionaries attempted to return to Cuba clandestinely the following year. Arriving in December 1956 in a leaky yacht called Granma, bought from an American in Veracruz, only nineteen revolutionaries made it inland. The survivors settled in the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range in southeastern Cuba, where Castro, his brother Raúl, and the Argentinian Communist Ernesto “Che” Guevara proved themselves to be competent guerrilla leaders, skillfully setting up campaigns against Batista’s regime and recruiting adherents among local peasants, workers on sugarcane plantations, and urban youth who traveled to join them. In 1958, when the Batista regime started to get into real trouble because of its economic incompetence, its internal divisions, and clashes with the Eisenhower Administration, Castro’s forces began operating all over eastern Cuba. With his government collapsing around him, Batista left the country with as much of his vast fortune as he could grab. On 2 January 1959 the revolutionaries entered the capital, Havana, in triumph.

Their sudden victory came as much as a surprise to Castro as to everyone else. Spectacularly unprepared for government, the revolutionaries tried to draw on liberals and anti-Batista professionals to help run their regime. Having himself been drawn to Marxism, and influenced by his Communist brother Raúl, Castro also began working with members of the Cuban Communist Party. Che Guevara, who knew rather more about guerrilla tactics than economics, was made head of the Central Bank. But there was no doubt who was in charge, and who set the terms for the program of social change that was initiated by the new government. Fidel Castro wanted to cleanse Cuba of gambling, prostitution, and other ills that he saw as having been brought in by the Americans. He decreed radical land reform, rent reduction, and a minimum wage. He also set the new government to work on massive plans for expansion of education and health care. High-ranking members of the former regime were purged, and hundreds were executed by firing squad after brief “revolutionary” trials. Fidel’s regime was authoritarian and at times brutal. A number of former allies broke with him and went into exile. The Castro brothers and their adherents claimed that the revolution needed to defend itself against its enemies.

The Eisenhower Administration was concerned about the radical and authoritarian aspects of the new regime, and what they considered the influence of Communists within it. But they also at first hoped that it would be possible to stunt these trends over time. Featured on America’s most watched TV talk show right after the revolution, Castro, speaking in English, made much of his Catholic upbringing and his interest in baseball. In April 1959 he visited the United States and was feted as a pop star by the press and by large audiences wherever he went. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he encouraged US investment in Cuban industries and promised tax breaks for American companies. “He insists,” says one of the reports, “he’s a good friend of this country. He claims, in effect, he has only been pointing out past ‘mistakes’ in U.S. Policy toward Cuba.”²¹ But as Castro’s exiled adversaries began flying military missions into his country from Florida airports and US public criticism of his economic policies increased, the Cuban leader lost patience. In October 1959 he told a mass rally in Havana:

There are immigrants from everywhere in the United States.… And yet despite this Cuba is the only country which is being attacked by émigré planes. Why Cuba? If there is one country the United States should treat carefully, that country is Cuba. Cuba has just suffered a two-year war during which its cities and fields were bombed with American-made bombs, planes, and napalm. Thousands of citizens were killed by weapons which came from the United States. The least which we could expect after we destroyed the mercenary army, and after we freed our people from the tyranny, is that our people not continue to be bombed from bases on U.S. territory.²²

By 1960 the Cuban-US relationship was in free fall. Eisenhower wanted to get rid of Castro, and ordered the CIA’s agents to attempt to curtail his power on Cuba. When Cuba nationalized the landholdings of US-owned sugar cane companies, the United States responded by reducing the vital import quota of Cuban sugar. Castro turned to the Soviet Union. His increasing fondness for orthodox Marxism-Leninism would probably have led him there anyhow, but strained relations with Washington helped him on his way. In February 1960 Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, where he promised loans and signed an agreement in which the USSR would supply Cuba with cheap oil in return for Cuban exports of sugar. Mikoyan sent elated reports back to Moscow. “This is a real revolution,” he told the KGB man who accompanied him. “Just like ours. I feel as though I have returned to my youth!”²³ When the US-owned refineries on Cuba refused to process Soviet oil, Castro nationalized them. Eisenhower responded with an embargo on trade with Cuba in October 1960. Castro then nationalized all remaining US property on the island. In January 1961, just before leaving office, Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba.

When Kennedy came in, he discovered that Eisenhower had started an active covert operations program against Cuba in March 1960, right after Mikoyan’s visit. The CIA provided military training for Cuban exiles and used its agents to sabotage arms shipments and industry on the island. They also began plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro, either by disaffected Cubans or by the help of US gangsters, who had had their activities on the island scuttled by the revolution. Eisenhower had not yet decided to go ahead with a full-scale attempt at overthrowing Castro, though he was obviously tempted by an operation similar to that which had overthrown Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1953. Kennedy was presented with the plans to invade as if they were a fait accompli set up by the previous administration, making it harder for the new president to move in a different direction if he had so wanted.

In fact, there is almost no evidence that Kennedy wanted to act differently on Cuba than the plans his predecessor had drawn up. During the campaign, JFK had attacked Nixon (and implicitly Eisenhower) for failing Cuba, both by supporting Batista’s regime and by not “getting results” against the Communists. “We never were on the side of freedom; we never used our influence when we could have used it most effectively—and today Cuba is lost for freedom,” candidate Kennedy had said.²⁴ Both the military and the CIA recommended the invasion plan, and showed their willingness to amend it when President Kennedy indicated that he wanted there to be less visible evidence of a US involvement. Kennedy generally admired the intelligence community for its versatility and intellectual acumen, and had kept Eisenhower’s director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles, in place in the new administration. “If I need some material fast or an idea fast, CIA is the place I have to go. The State Department is four or five days to answer a simple yes or no,” Kennedy said.²⁵

The plan that was implemented on 17 April 1961 was a failure from the beginning. Caught between his eagerness to remove Castro and his desire for deniability of direct US participation, Kennedy helped send 1,400 US-trained counterrevolutionary Cuban fighters across to the island from Guatemala. But, with the exception of bombing raids by US aircraft piloted by Cuban exiles, the president did not authorize US air support. There was no Cuban political organization to take charge of the operation. The CIA had expected that Kennedy would approve direct US involvement if the landings went badly. But JFK did no such thing. Instead, the invaders at Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), 150 miles from Havana, were rounded up by Cuban troops, paraded on TV, and sent off to prison camps. Meeting with his new prisoners, Castro told them that “the people want the execution of all invaders.… It would be easy to execute you but it would only lessen our victory. The least guilty would pay for the most guilty.”²⁶

For the revolutionaries, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion opened up new opportunities. Meeting with US representatives that summer, Che Guevara said “that he wanted to thank us [the United States] very much for the invasion—that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate—and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal.”²⁷ Fidel Castro knew that the threat was not over. But he also knew that he could now be much more outspoken about his preferences and his international affiliations. “The danger of direct aggression could again gain momentum following this failure,” he told the Cubans in a radio address. “We have said that imperialism will disappear. We do not wish it to commit suicide; we want it to die a natural death.… But their system demands production for war, not peace. How different from the Soviet Union…”²⁸

While Castro used the Bay of Pigs to get closer to the Soviets, both in terms of industry and security, Kennedy had his own lessons. “Five minutes after it began to fall in, we all looked at each other and asked, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’” the president told a friend. “When we saw the wide range of the failures we asked ourselves why it had not been apparent to somebody from the start. I guess you get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much.”²⁹ Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, whom he had appointed attorney-general, pushed for further action to overthrow Castro. “Serious attention must be given to this problem immediately and not wait for the situation in Cuba to revert back to a time of relative peace and calm with the U.S. having been beaten off with her tail between her legs,” Bobby Kennedy exhorted his brother. “The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse. If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”³⁰

Besides the gradual slide into the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs invasion was the biggest mistake of JFK’s presidency. It solidified the Castro regime beyond anything Castro himself could have done, and was to lead to Kennedy’s most dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union. Part of Kennedy’s problem was in terms of priorities. He felt that there were many challenges left over from the previous administration, and that he would have to deal with a great number of them at the start of his presidency.

One key issue, which preoccupied the young president much, was the extraordinary growth in the nuclear weapons arsenals of both Superpowers. Not only had the number of US nuclear warheads increased more than ten-fold over ten years, but by 1962 the Soviets had their own intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), though considerably fewer than Kennedy had claimed they had during his presidential campaign. Khrushchev commanded about one hundred missiles that could possibly reach the continental United States. Of these around thirty were based on Soviet submarines. Given the overwhelming preponderance of US ICBMs, plus shorter-range nuclear missiles placed around the Soviet Union from Greenland via Germany and Turkey to South Korea, and an estimated 144 nuclear submarines, Kennedy may not have had that much to worry about. But his concerns were increasingly with US strategic planning, which assumed that any war with the USSR would necessarily escalate into a full-scale nuclear conflict.

Kennedy wanted to move away from Eisenhower’s reliance on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to deter the Soviets. He wanted a more flexible response, a strategy outlined by his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, as consisting of three parts, at least as far as Europe was concerned, in the event of war. First, an attempt to repulse Warsaw Pact forces by conventional (non-nuclear) means. If that failed, as McNamara assumed it would because of the Soviet conventional superiority in Europe, the United States would use smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Only as a last resort would the Americans respond with an all-out nuclear attack on Soviet cities and military bases. The Kennedy Administration developed the Single Integrated Operational Plan, known as SIOP, which assumed that mutually assured destruction was not the only possible outcome in case of war.

Khrushchev was well aware of US strategic superiority in nuclear terms. His response was to combine bluffing and a war of nerves. The Soviets consistently claimed to have a greater nuclear capability than they actually possessed, and attempted to make up for what they lacked in precision and ballistic expertise by developing ever bigger nuclear weapons. The AN602 hydrogen bomb—the so-called Tsar Bomba or Emperor of Bombs—which the Soviets tested in October 1961, is the largest nuclear weapon ever produced, with an explosive power of about 1,500 times the combined yield of the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or ten times the combined explosive power of all other weapons used during World War II. Khrushchev did not mind that Tsar Bomba was virtually undeployable for any practical military purpose. “I think the people with the strongest nerves will be the winners,” he said. “That is the most important consideration in the power struggle of our time. The people with weak nerves will go to the wall.”³¹

In April 1962 Khrushchev had an idea. Frustrated over events in Germany, angry with the Chinese who mocked him for his circumspection, and convinced that Kennedy was irresolute but also increasingly anti-Communist, Khrushchev wanted to act decisively to save the Cuban revolution. What if, he suggested to a somewhat incredulous Mikoyan, the Soviet Union were to deploy nuclear missiles on Cuba “very speedily”?³² The United States had placed its nukes in Turkey, close to the Soviet border. Why could his country not guarantee Castro’s survival by sending its own weapons to the island? There was, Khrushchev argued, no other way Havana could be protected—it was too close to the United States for the Soviets to be able to stave off an invasion by conventional means.

Having secured the Moscow leadership’s approval, Castro was consulted, though in a form that made Khrushchev’s plans almost into a done deal. Castro at first doubted the wisdom of provoking the Americans further, and worried about the reaction of other Latin American countries. But he was also pleased that the Soviets put such emphasis on Cuba and was ready to act “in solidarity” with his new comrades in Moscow. The plans went ahead. The first Soviet military personnel arrived, under great secrecy, in July 1962. Missiles began arriving in early September. At their peak more than forty thousand Soviets were building missile sites both for defensive and offensive purposes. The largest nuclear missiles that became functional on Cuba in October 1962 had a maximum radius of 1,200 miles, enough to reach cities in the southern and eastern United States from Houston to Baltimore.

Both the US military and the CIA had begun suspecting that the Soviets contemplated placing missiles on Cuba well before the summer of 1962. But when challenged on the issue, Soviet diplomats had been instructed to lie. In mid-October a US spy plane, a U-2, overflew the island and came back with clear evidence of missile sites under construction. The president, when alerted, wanted time to consider the US response. From the start of the crisis, Kennedy was certain that he had to get any Soviet missiles out of Cuba. The question was how to do that and avoid an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union. When Kennedy saw Soviet foreign minister Anatolii Gromyko in the White House for a prearranged meeting on 18 October, Gromyko again lied about the Soviet deployment. The USSR “pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defense capabilities of Cuba,” Gromyko said.³³

Gromyko’s bold-faced lie convinced Kennedy that he had to go public. In a radio and television speech to the American people on 22 October, Kennedy addressed what he saw as an immediate danger emanating from Cuba. “Within the past week,” the president said, “unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.… The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” His “unswerving objective,” Kennedy said, was to “prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.” With the crisis now out in the open, Kennedy had put his credibility on the line: “I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”³⁴

Behind closed doors, attitudes hardened. In his speech, Kennedy had announced what he called a “quarantine” on shipments of weapons to Cuba. He also announced increased surveillance of the island, indicating that any attempts to prevent US violations of Cuban airspace would be regarded as an act of war. Neither Kennedy nor anyone in the so-called Executive Committee (ExComm) of top advisers that he had set up to deal with the crisis understood the Soviet dedication to defend the Cuban revolution or, for that matter, Cuba’s need to defend its own sovereignty. The president and all of Washington viewed Soviet actions as preparations for an attack on the United States and a means through which (legitimate) US control of the Western Hemisphere could be thwarted. At the start of the crisis, they would rather risk war than accept compromise.

Kennedy’s main strength throughout the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was that, in spite of his hard line overall, he still gave diplomacy a chance. As the world held its breath on 23 October, waiting to see what would happen when Soviet ships bound for Cuba were intercepted by the US Navy, Kennedy secretly explored how the crisis could be resolved and nuclear war avoided. On the one hand, he needed to stave off hotheads on his own side who wanted to launch immediate airstrikes to disable the Soviet missiles on Cuba. Such an attack, Kennedy knew, would mean global nuclear war against the Soviet Union. On the other, he had to find a solution that removed the missiles and made the United States the winner. When Khrushchev, himself under pressure to avoid a confrontation, turned the Soviet ships back, the president thought he had made a breakthrough.

But Khrushchev had no intention of backing down. Like Kennedy, he needed breathing space, but he also sent a message to the president in which he rejected all of his demands and condemned the illegal US blockade of Cuba. Soviet and US military forces worldwide were put on full combat readiness. At the UN, US ambassador Adlai Stevenson confronted his Soviet counterpart, Valerii Zorin:

STEVENSON: All right sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don’t wait for the translation: Yes or no?

ZORIN: I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a prosecutor does. In due course, sir, you will have your reply.³⁵

Toward the end of the second week of the crisis, the buildup of US invasion forces against Cuba continued in Florida and along the Gulf coast. US overflights of Cuba intensified. Panic began to spread in US cities and elsewhere in the world, even in the Soviet Union, where the authorities tried to prevent news about the crisis getting to the population. Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman who reported on the crisis from minute to minute, began wondering what he would do in the TV studio when nuclear war broke out: “We have a utility room where the furnaces are, and we wondered whether we could make that into a bomb shelter of some form. We were learning for the first time the time that we would have after the explosion, before the fumes… [and the] heat would reach us.”³⁶

On 27 October an American U-2 overflying Cuba was shot down by a Soviet missile. Everyone involved thought war was getting very close. Castro wrote what sounded like a farewell letter to Khrushchev, where he urged him to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States after the Americans had begun invading Cuba. “I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba… then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”³⁷

But Kennedy was still playing for time. Contrary to orders issued earlier, he refused to permit the US Air Force to destroy the Soviet missile site that had shot down the U-2. Most of the ExComm members had not left the White House in a week. That evening Kennedy sent them home. McNamara remembered later: “It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president’s Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.”³⁸ Meanwhile, the same evening, Robert Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatolii Dobrynin. He offered a US pledge not to invade Cuba and an eventual removal of American missiles in Turkey in return for the Soviet withdrawal of all its missiles. Khrushchev, who knew the world was teetering on the brink of war, decided to accept. Conscious that time was running out, he had his acceptance read out on the open airwaves of Radio Moscow. He even had the broadcast repeated twice. On the morning of 28 October the immediate crisis was over.

The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War (though not the only one). Historians have been battling over who won and who lost. The real answer is, of course, that everyone won, since nuclear war was avoided. But it is also clear that, by being forced to take his missiles out of Cuba in such an open and visible fashion, Khrushchev lost the most. Why did he back down? He knew that the Soviet Union would suffer the most in case of a nuclear war, since its ability to inflict damage on the United States was far inferior to the reverse. He also feared for the survival of his regime in case of war. But the real reason was probably his Marxism. Khrushchev believed that Communism was on the up worldwide, and that his historic role was to steer the Soviet Union through a period in which, through the laws of history itself, the global balance of forces tipped in its direction. Nuclear war would destroy this historical achievement. Khrushchev wanted to celebrate the triumph of Communism, not eulogize at its funeral pyre.

Throughout the crisis, President Kennedy had proven himself to be a skillful leader and diplomat. He had taken great risks, and if Khrushchev had not backed down, it is likely that he would have taken his country into a nuclear war. But the risks he took were risks that most Americans seemed willing to take in order to preserve their increasingly global predominance. John Kennedy played the missile crisis well because he was broadly in line with the attitudes of those who had elected him, but also because he added to that the vital instruments of diplomacy, open and secret. It was through these instruments that a “solution”—fickle, incomplete, and tenuous—was in the end found.

According to his own testimony, Fidel Castro was furious. “We were irate. How did we learn about this? Through the radio, on the morning of the 28th. They broadcast that an agreement had been reached between the Soviet Union and the United States, that Kennedy was offering Khrushchev a guarantee. It really was a disgraceful agreement. It never crossed my mind they would do anything like this.”³⁹ For the Cuban leader, it would have been better to die with honor than to live with disgrace. His relationship with the Soviets would never be the same, even though the countries remained close allies for the rest of the Cold War.⁴⁰

John Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. He was forty-six years old. If he had lived and been reelected in 1964, could he have been the president who brought the Cold War to an end? There is very little evidence for that, even though it was a more concerned and careful Kennedy who returned to his foreign policy agenda after October 1962. Still, his aim was to win the Cold War, even if he had to do so while avoiding crises that could lead to an all-out conflict. Kennedy continued to believe that the Soviet Union constituted a global challenge to American interests, and that the United States had to push back when challenged. Reflecting on the missile crisis in a public speech a year later, the president said that he was “hoping for steady progress toward less critically dangerous relations with the Soviets, but never laboring under any illusions about Communist methods or Communist goals.”⁴¹

One key change revealed by the crisis was just how much two sides knew about each other, both through espionage and through open sources. Spying had always played a key role in the Cold War, but in the 1960s and ’70s it took on a new significance. In the immediate post-1945 era, the Soviets had had the main successes. Klaus Fuchs and other atomic spies had given Stalin what he needed to know about the US nuclear programs. Britain’s Foreign Office had been utterly compromised when it had become clear, in 1951, that the head of its American Department, Donald Maclean, was a Soviet spy. Maclean escaped to Moscow, as did other members of the Cambridge Five spy ring that he belonged to, including Kim Philby, who had been the main British intelligence liaison with the United States. It is hard to imagine a greater disaster in intelligence terms.

In the 1960s the balance of spying power started to change. One possible reason was that the Soviet Union, post-Hungary, had lost some of its attraction to educated people in the West, making it harder to recruit ideologically minded spies. At the same time both western Europe and the United States seemed to be better able to deal with issues of social inequity than before: people like Fuchs and Maclean had been recruited to serve the Soviets in the 1930s in part because of their distaste for exploitative capitalism. In the 1960s, however, the most important spies were Soviets fed up with their own society. Anatolii Golitsyn, Oleg Penkovskii, Dmitrii Poliakov, and other Soviet intelligence officers who gave crucial information to the West all explained that they wanted the West to win the Cold War. Penkovskii explained that he saw himself as a “warrior for the cause of truth, for the ideals of a truly free world and of democracy.… I wish to make my contribution, perhaps a modest one but in my view an important one, to our mutual cause.”⁴² Poliakov, who ended up as a GRU major general, was, according to his American handler, “our crown jewel,… the best source at least to my knowledge that American intelligence has ever had and, I would submit,… the best source that any intelligence service has ever had.”⁴³

In spite of the advantages he had gained on his opponents, JFK’s last year in office was taken by responding to domestic political crises, such as the growing African-American civil rights movement, by the widening war in Vietnam, and by attempts at finding some form of lasting stability in relations with the Soviet Union. He and Khrushchev agreed on a limited test ban treaty for nuclear weapons; a small step, granted, and one the Chinese felt was exclusively directed against them, since they were about to test their own first weapon. Even so, it was a sign that there were some matters on which the United States and the USSR could agree. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy regarded the Chinese Communists as being even more unreasonable than their Soviet brethren. In January 1963 he explained to the National Security Council that he thought the Chinese would be “our major antagonists of the late ’60s and beyond.”⁴⁴

Were the Berlin and Cuban crises Cold War watersheds? Some say they were: the former in the sense that the European Cold War had now visibly stabilized, and the latter because both Americans and Soviets saw the necessity of some form of detente, or at least the need to avoid extreme nuclear crises in the future. But it did not necessarily look that way in the early 1960s: the Cold War continued and new crises could occur at any moment, though it was becoming increasingly likely that they would take place in the Third World and not in Europe. During Kennedy’s time in office, the Cold War was becoming truly global, and the burdens it put on the material and mental resources of its main protagonists increased relentlessly.