Crisis, Caution, Conciliation – Diplomacy and Popular Memory

By Neil Earle

Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev with President John F. Kennedy.

On October 22, 2012 host Bob Scheiffer began the third televised Presidential debate of the 2012 election with a timely reference to the 50th anniversary of October 22, 1962. That was the night when President John F. Kennedy took to the television networks to inform Americans about the then Soviet Union’s build-up of offensive nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba and his government’s response.

The somber Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 has sometimes been accused of being over-reported and often draws yawns from younger students but it was, in actuality, a world-historic event from which significant happenings flowed. It has the emotive power in the popular memory to speak this present era of fears about what Kennedy called “the steady spread of the deadly atom.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 16-28 – sometimes called “the Gettysburg of the Cold War” – forms almost a case study in how principles of cautionary peace-making and reconciliation play out in the very public and often frightening arena of world politics. There are echoes of this crisis fraught with significance for us today, even if the full explication of 1962 requires fast-forwarding to other parallel events from popular diplomatic history.

The Highest Stakes

It is almost a proverb of diplomatic punditry that if President George W. Bush (2001-2009) wished for a clear military and diplomatic reason for not invading Iraq in March, 2004 he needed to look no further than his own father’s experience. President George H. W. Bush (Bush, Sr. or Bush 41, as he is often known) refused to move Allied forces onto Baghdad after successfully evicting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in early 1991. In All The Best, President Bush, Sr. writes of this seminal event: ‘I still do not regret my decision to end the war when I did (page 514).” His defense secretary at the time, Richard “Dick” Cheney, Bush, Jr.’s Vice President from 2001-2009, felt the same way. Cheney explained the “no move on Baghdad” decision in a candid question and answer at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington on August 14, 1992:

“If we had gone on to Baghdad …[we} would have moved from fighting in a desert environment where you had clear areas where you knew who the enemy was…If you go into the streets of Baghdad that changes dramatically…a lot of civilians are around, [plus] significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques [exist]...Once you had rounded him (Saddam) up and gotten rid of him then the question is, What do you put in its place” (Steven Hayes, Cheney: The Story of Americas Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, pages 250-251).

Both Bush, Sr. and Cheney knew that the “on to Baghdad” policy would mean “significant additional U.S. casualties,” as well as losing the support of the Arab coalition. Worst still would be setting off an internal tripartite battle inside Iraq, which of course did happen after 2004.

The anniversary of the Cuban crisis is instructive in that it is a reminder of precedents set by President Kennedy and Bush, Sr. in dealing with the most significant threat facing America since 1945 – the Cold War rivalry with the once-great Soviet Union. It takes some backtracking to see how cautious diplomacy can lead to strategic breakthroughs.

Arsenals of Folly

By the 1960s the United States and the then USSR were well on their way to building more than 20,000 nuclear weapons in each of their overflowing arsenals. Even by 1962, the time of the missile crisis, they had the capability to obliterate each other fifty times over. As one journalist quipped at the time: “Once would be quite enough."

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the foolhardy step of placing medium and intermediate range nuclear missile on the island of Cuba because arms races have consequences. The Soviet leader hoped to cut down the enormous American superiority in ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (See Richard Lebon and Janice Stein’s We All Lost The Cold War). The Soviet’s reckless act 90 miles off American shores forced President Kennedy’s hand. He had hard evidence of the missiles from U-2 spy plane flights over Communist Cuba on October 16, 1962. After intense closed-door deliberations over the best response, the President decided on caution. He rejected all calls for invasion and air strikes. He announced instead in that Monday, October 22, 1962 TV speech that the United States would impose a naval quarantine, a blockade of all Soviet ships bound for Cuba. Thus began the week when the world held its breath. Soviet ships trying to storm the blockade could provoke American retaliation and that could lead to…well, no-one wanted to think that far.

President Kennedy and his chief advisor and brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had vociferously opposed the “hawks” on the Executive Committee. Russian troops might be killed. Invasion would be a ”Pearl Harbor in reverse,” warned Robert Kennedy. It would “blacken the name of the United States in the pages of history” (Sorenson, Kennedy, page 684).

A Key Gambit

So blockade it was. As Soviet ships neared the US Navy “red line” that perilous week, the Soviets were given time to consider. A note arrived from Chairman Khrushchev on Friday night October 26 which offered a deal – Soviet missiles dismantled for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. This Friday night message raised hopes in the White House. But Saturday morning a much sterner note arrived from Moscow. This second letter threw White House planners into renewed consternation. What to do? Sagely, the President decided to answer the “good note” (William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, page 970). Yes, let’s make a deal – no U.S. invasion and Russia removes the missiles (Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, page 528).

Thus by October 28 Russian ships were turning away from Cuba. The crisis had ended for many reasons but one of them being the U.S. President’s application of fundamental principles of diplomacy: Don’t be hasty with provocative military action; don’t back your opponent into a corner. Don’t’ let him lose face. Give him time to consider his actions. Act in haste, repent at leisure.

Out of the successful resolution of the famous Cuban Missile Crisis came, eventually, the hotline installed between Moscow and Washington, a key backup in the ongoing Cold War (Beschloss, The Crisis Years, page 602). Also, after a year of protracted and tough negotiation, came the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, a signed agreement with inspections whereby the United States and the Soviet Union promised to end nuclear testing in the atmosphere, a health boon to the whole planet.

At the American University on June 10, 1963 President Kennedy was urging the Test Ban treaty, saying: “Some say that it useless to speak of world peace…until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes.”

Nuanced Attitudes

President Kennedy’s avowed intention not to humiliate the Soviets and to allow his Soviet opponent time to reconsider and “save face” was strangely predictive of Republican President George H. W. Bush’s reactions as the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe – and the Soviet Union itself – started unraveling in 1989. Both Kennedy and Bush were decorated veterans in World War Two in the Pacific war. Maybe that affected their bent for caution when it came to issues of war and peace.

By the crucial year 1989 the end of the Soviet-American standoff known as the Cold War is suddenly looming as an important possibility. From the oval office Bush, Sr. was watching events unfold in Eastern Europe. On November 9, 1989 came the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ugly symbol in concrete and barbed wire of the split between East and West running through Germany’s old capital. When the wall came down, Bush was urged by more vociferous Congressmen of both parties to stand up and “declare victory in the Cold War,” or at least send more overt military aid to those protestors in East Europe still agitating for freedom against their Communist overlords.

But Bush, Sr. kept cautious counsel. Superpowers should not rush in where wise diplomats might fear to tread. President Eisenhower had not done that during the Hungarian uprising against their Soviet overlords in 1956. Bush would not usurp the role of the key players in the then-divided East and West Germany. On October 23, 1989 the President wrote the West German government that he approved of their cautious approach. “We are trying to react very cautiously and carefully to change in East Germany,” he said to the German President. “We have great respect for the way West Germany has been handling this situation….We are getting criticism in the Congress that we ought to be doing more to foster change, but I am not going to go so far as to be reckless” (Newsweek, November 8, 1999, page 26).

President Bush remembered the way Czechoslovakia’s early reform movement had been crushed in August, 1968. He no doubt remembered the death of 40,000 Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956 in another temptation towards intervention (Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Volume Two, The President, page 371). George Bush, Sr. well knew the Soviet Union had hundreds of thousands of troops in Eastern Europe. He also knew how counterproductive it was to humiliate an adversary in decline. In his diary he repeated his earlier thinking:

“I keep hearing the critics saying we’re not doing enough…I think it’s crazy. And if we mishandle this and get way out in front looking like the rebellions are an American project – you would invite crackdown that could result in bloodshed. The longer I’m in the job, the more I think prudence is a value and experience matters…” (All My Best, pages 441-442).

Patience Pays Off

President Bush’s caution and temperance while the Soviet Union itself unraveled in those years has earned the respect of historians (James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: the United States from Watergate to Bush V. Gore, page 229). Once again the counsels of caution brought an enormous benefit to the world. The decision to not arm revolutionaries or to interfere in a nation’s internal tumult, this watchful waiting, helped set the stage for good relations between the superpowers. Result? START I, the biggest ever single reduction in nuclear forces in history. In July, 1991 President Bush and Soviet leader Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty limiting the US and USSR to 6,000 accountable strategic nuclear warheads and 1600 deliver vehicles on each side. This was down from 23,000 US and 22,000 USSR when the decade began. Even Richard Rhodes, an arms limitation specialist and arms race critic, wrote: “It was not nuclear abolition but it was a measurable stride down that road” (Arsenals of Folly, page 290).

These examples of watchful waiting while allowing events to unfold set by two very different American Presidents in two extremely tense crises, these precedents can speak to us today when shrill calls to “arm the rebels” or to back a sovereign nation into a corner are noised abroad. What President Kennedy called the nuclear Sword of Damocles is still around. Caution and restraint can work wonders when the stakes are so high. Fifty years after the Missile Crisis, it makes a timely reflection.