The Cuban Missile Crisis: Once More Unto the Breach

The Cuban missile crisis continues to inspire books and attract readers both because it was the most terrifying face-off of the Cold War and because the release of new evidence has repeatedly compelled historians to reassess those harrowing thirteen days. Into the 1980s, most of the evidence on the crisis came from U.S. sources, but scholars were nonetheless unable to nail down specifics about the secret discussions in the White House and knew even less about events in the Kremlin and Havana. However, three new mines of evidence have since been opened: the tape recordings of the ExComm meetings, publications from a series of international conferences of missile crisis participants and scholars, and archival materials from the former Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who covered the collapse of the USSR and is fluent in Russian, found that many key Soviet archives remain closed. He also discovered that the records of the Strategic Air Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are still "severely restricted." Cuban archives, of course, are completely inaccessible. "I was able to overcome these obstacles," he maintains, "by triangulating information from very disparate sources, in English, Russian, and Spanish" (p. 355). He also studied many previously overlooked photos and records and "interviewed more than a hundred missile crisis veterans in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Cuba" (p. 357).

Most of the book deals with one day—"Black Saturday," October 27, 1962—without doubt the most perilous day of the Cold War if not in all of human history. Dobbs takes the reader directly into the thoughts and actions of American, Soviet, and Cuban leaders—and especially into the gut-wrenching fear and confusion experienced by Soviet combat and technical support forces in Cuba. His most important conclusion, that humankind was fortunate to have restrained and rational leaders like Kennedy and Khrushchev in charge at this potentially apocalyptic moment, is certainly not new. But, nonetheless, Dobbs explores many examples which confirm that events could easily have spiraled out of control despite the shared Kennedy/Khrushchev commitment (largely unknown to each other at the time) to keeping the Pandora's Box of military escalation securely closed.

Dobbs relentlessly and rightly stresses the theme of historical contingency. Kennedy and Khrushchev were often making decisions based on what we now know was inaccurate, misleading, or dead wrong information. They could not communicate directly and securely (the hotline was not installed until 1963) and their exchange of letters and cables was agonizingly slow and unreliable. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, for example, has recalled watching in disbelief as a Western Union courier on a bicycle, carrying a vital message for Khrushchev, stopped down the street from the Soviet Embassy to flirt with a girl. Inevitably, both leaders made erroneous assumptions about the intentions of "the other side."

Kennedy and Khrushchev also shared eerily parallel experiences with their top-ranking military advisers. On October 19, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay told the president that the decision to blockade Cuba was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich" and demanded "direct military intervention, right now." LeMay's Joint Chiefs colleagues agreed, but Kennedy countered that if the Soviets struck U.S. cities with nuclear weapons (launched from Cuba or from the USSR itself) there would be 80 to 100 million casualties: "you're talkin' about the destruction of a country!" Three days later, Dobbs reveals, Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky likewise urged Khrushchev to authorize his forces in Cuba to use "all available means," including their medium-range nuclear missiles, to protect the island. Khrushchev was stunned, "It would be the start of a thermonuclear war. How can we imagine such a thing?" (p. 33). Not surprisingly, JFK "never felt closer to Khrushchev than when he imagined him having to cope with a Curtis LeMay of his own."¹

Military plans and preparations continued, nonetheless, to move forward...