The
American government had not expected to find ballistic missiles. This affected
the way the administration reacted. True enough though, they had been keeping
an eye on Soviet activity in Cuba. Earlier in September, President Kennedy had
created a strategy to deal with such a discovery. Under the code word Psalm,
those who needed to know about ‘offensive’ weapons in Cuba would be informed,
but no one else. Over the next week, this was to be crucial. An Executive
Committee (Excom) of the National Security Council was created to formulate America’s
response. This ad hoc body contained the President’s closest advisers and the
leading government officials. Its small size reflected Kennedy’s desire to get
away from the large and inflexible bodies that Eisenhower preferred.*
When Kennedy first heard about the missiles, ironically from McGeorge Bundy, he
was very angry and determined that he could not allow the missiles to remain.
It could be argued though, that this was an overreaction. America’s Western
allies in Europe could point out that they had had to live for years in
proximity to Soviet ballistic missiles. The Soviet Union was surrounded by
nuclear missiles on her borders, so one could argue that Khrushchev
*
Appendix 1
7
was
just redressing the balance.
The American reaction could be put down to mere surprise. Few in the
government, apart from McCone, could really believe that the Soviets would do
such a thing. Llewellyn Thompson and Charles Bohlen, Kennedy’s experts on
Soviet behaviour, had got it wrong. Now Kennedy was going to have to listen to
Thompson, of all people, to give him insights on Khrushchev’s thinking. Yet
Roger Hilsman facetiously suggests that the American estimators had got it
right all along, and it was the Soviets who were wrong (1). Besides, the Soviet
action was most unusual. They had not placed ballistic missiles in the Warsaw
Pact countries, but here was Khrushchev giving them to Cuba, which was not a
member of the Warsaw Pact. It was the opinion of Bohlen and
Thompson that the Chairman would never be as foolish as to do such a thing, for
he must have known that the United States would react with all its power. As
Kahan and Long write, ’What appears to have triggered the strong U.S.
response... was... the geographic and political uniqueness of Cuba’ (2). Anyone
well-versed in American history will know of evidence to support this
assertion. For decades, the United States had considered Cuba as being
virtually an extra state. Indeed, as McPherson notes, ‘the President reaffirmed
his recommendation for the purchase of Cuba, which would alleviate Southern
discontent by adding a new slave state for the Union’ (3). President
8
Buchanan
suggested this as a compromise to avoid the American Civil War. The island was
also the site of America’s eruption onto the world stage, when Theodore
Roosevelt and the Rough Riders fought the Spanish in 1898. The extent that this
had entered America’s consciousness, can only be shown by Robert Kennedy’s wild
suggestion that week that they should perhaps consider ‘sinking the Maine
again’ as a way of justifying their action against the missiles.
The fact that America and Cuba had had such close ties was due to the proximity
of the island to the mainland. The Western European allies did not have such
weapons of mass destruction on their borders. Kennedy also regarded this as a
personal challenge from Khrushchev, as Allison writes (4). It was known that
the Soviet chairman did not have a very high regard for the young president,
especially as he openly admitted his errors with regard to the Bay of Pigs at
the Vienna conference. Besides, the option of just doing nothing, although
suggested by some members of the Excom, was not open to him. As Roger Hilsman
writes,’the United States might not be in mortal danger but the administration
most certainly was’ (5). In Robert Kennedy’s account, the president, after the
event, spoke of his belief that he would have been impeached if he had done
nothing. To understand why he said this, one can only examine the
9
possible
results of such inactivity. If the Soviets were not forced to remove their
missiles from Cuba, then such incidents could have recurred in the future. From
one Caribbean island, Soviet Communism could spread to other parts of Latin
America. Within Excom, as Anderson notes, ’Opponents argued that a failure to
take strong action was inconsistent with a credible U.S. commitment to oppose
Communism’ (6).
Doing nothing also left Khrushchev with all the initiative. There was
nothing to stop him from making a surprise announcement to the world (except to
the White House), that he had placed missiles in Cuba, and that if America
wanted him to remove them, then America would have to give way elsewhere -
Berlin. An important part of Excom’s function at first was to discern the reason
for the nuclear deployment. It may have been that Khrushchev had considered the
missiles as bargaining chips all along, and there was no better place to put
them than a former gambling haven. There can be no doubt that such a surprise
disclosure of their existence would have damaged America’s standing
internationally.
Kahan and Long note Kennedy’s belief that the Soviets would never actually fire
the missiles. The important thing was that the missiles had changed the balance
of power; or at least, they had appeared to,’and appearances contribute to
reality’ (7). Khan, in his study of the legal Issues
10
surrounding
the imposition of a blockade, believes that it was a political argument such as
this that the Americans used to justify the second Cuban Crisis. The United
States had always tried to prevent the intervention of other nations in her
traditional sphere of influence. Adlai Stevenson emphasizes this: ’This was the
first time that the Latin Americans were also directly involved or threatened’
(8).
To a certain extent, Kennedy was also forced to act because of what he had said
on September 4 and 13 when he warned the Soviets of the consequences if they
placed ‘offensive’ weapons in Cuba. This was in reply to the attacks made by
Keating et al. Roger Hilsman writes that this forced the administration into a
‘semantic trap’ (9), whereby Kennedy defined what the government would not be
prepared to accept. According to Beschloss,
Kennedy
therefore issued a warning that was too late to stop Khrushchev’s Cuba
operation and so precise that it caused him to forfeit the option of anything
less than a full-fledged confrontation (10).
What
made Kennedy angry most of all was that the Soviets had been promising for many
months that they would do nothing contentious in the run-up to the 1962
Congressional elections. Giglio notes that it ‘made Kennedy appear naive for
having trusted the Russians’ (11).
This was galling for such an ambitious politician. He could not afford to have
another Cuban failure on his hands. It
11
could
be suggested that Kennedy was taking this personal challenge too far. However,
this does not really do justice to Kennedy’s actions at the time and the
decisions he made. The fact that he was still hoping to have a second term, and
the good favour of his party, could be regarded much more as restraints upon
his conduct. It may well have been a personal challenge to Kennedy, but since
his office symbolised the whole authority of the United States, it was
imperative that he rise up to it honourably.
It was odd then that his Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, should argue at
first that ‘a missile is a missile’. There was a necessity for someone in Excom
to argue on the first day the case for no response; the point being that if a
missile was going to kill you, then it really did not matter where it had come
from. Nobody took the idea very seriously, not even McNamara himself. He played
a crucial role. It was McNamara who first suggested a naval blockade on
Tuesday. He produced many valuable ideas during the crisis. Giglio writes that
others took a very different view: ‘Dillon, Nitze, and Acheson argued that the
Cuban missiles significantly altered the nuclear balance’ (12). Graham Allison
notes some of the factors which may have disturbed them:
U.S.
warning of an attack would be cut from fifteen to three minutes; much of the
American bomber force would become vulnerable; and the Soviet first-strike
capability would be doubled (13).
12
The
very fact that the missiles themselves were vulnerable suggested to some that
they would only be used as first-strike weapons. It is no wonder then that
initially, ‘the members of the Excom strongly favoured the air strike’ (14).
The use of force was the most contentious issue debated during the first week.
On October 16, George Ball said,’as far as the American people are concerned,
action means military action, period’ (15). Yet the very next day, so Abram
Chayes notes, it was Ball who first argued against the air strike, saying that
surprise attacks were definitely not part of U.S. tradition (16). This reflects
some of the efforts Kennedy made to avoid the problems which had beset the
administration during the earlier crisis. As Giglio writes,’unlike those at the
Bay of Pigs planning sessions, Excomm members did give attention to moral
considerations, thus weakening the air option’ (17). Robert Kennedy is widely
recognised as the man who really made this moral issue clear, comparing, as he
did, any surprise air strike against Cuba, with the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. The very fact that Robert Kennedy was present (along with Theodore
Sorensen), was another departure from the Bay of Pigs, as Hilsman notes. The
president, at the urging of his brother, often stayed away from the meetings.
Besides, Adlai Stevenson had persuaded him to continue with his
13
agenda,
to avoid causing alarm. Consequently, his brother emerged as the discussion
leader in the Excom.
So, the Excom divided into hawks and doves, terms invented by Stewart Alsop
(18). The main reason why the air strike advocates lost out was because the Air
Force could only guarantee a ninety per cent success rate on a ‘surgical’ raid.
Or so General Walter C. Sweeney, the Commander of the Tactical Air Command,
claimed. Dean Acheson, one of the leading hawks, complained that ‘the narrow
and specific proposal, pressed by some of us, constantly became obscured... by
trimmings added by the military’ (19). The Air Force believed that such a
mission would require five hundred sorties, and quite a lot of ‘collateral
damage’(20). It was that which played into the hands of the doves, with Robert
Kennedy arguing against the killing of civilians.
Right from the beginning, as Hilsman writes, the president wanted to
avoid the initiative being passed to Khrushchev, so absolute secrecy had to be
maintained (21). This also appears to be the reason why diplomatic measures
were not taken initially. Kennedy had an opportunity to confront Gromyko, the
Russian Foreign Minister, with the discovery, but he chose not to. Although the
Soviet must surely have wondered why Kennedy repeated his September warnings to
him. Charles Bohlen, before he left for Paris, advised that a personal message
should be sent to Khrushchev, ‘but no one
14
could
devise a message which would avoid diplomatic wrangling while the Soviets
completed their missile construction’ (22). When Stevenson urged various
diplomatic deals on Saturday, he was verbally abused by the hawks, including
McCone. Yet it may be that the president himself influenced decision making on
this issue, as Sorensen observed,’The President had rejected this course from
the outset’ (23). It would appear that some use of force was inevitable.
So, attention focused on McNamara’s suggestion of a naval blockade of Cuba. Yet
‘Vice-President Johnson had recently maintained that a blockade was “an act of
war”’ (24). He was not the only administration spokesman to said have this in
reply to the harangues of Keating et al; thus, what turned out to be the prime
weapon came close to being refuted before the crisis had even begun.
Technically, the blockade was an act of war. However, it could be made legal if
it were approved by the Organization of American States, as a regional
association under Chapter VIII of the United Nations (UN) Charter (25). The OAS
had the authority to punish a member state; this was the legal justification
used. This is quite ironic considering the fact that the Kennedys had done much
to exclude Cuba from that organization. The law was an important factor -
‘international law was not brought in as an afterthought to
15
justify
the blockade but played a role in evaluating alternative courses of action’
(26).
According to Khan, the ‘American action was in self-defence and, therefore,
legal’ (27). Yet Chayes observed that the self-defence argument ‘was repeatedly
and consciously rejected’ (28). This was even so when, as Khan points out, it
made either an air strike or an invasion legal as well (29). There were
possible faults with the imposition of a blockade too, for it acted against the
Soviet Union and other states (such as Britain), which were obviously not
members of the OAS and so had not assented to its authority. Britain was most
likely to argue for the ‘Freedom-of-the-seas’ principal. However, the only time
Kennedy visibly relaxed during the first week was when David Ormsby Gore, the
British ambassador, independently suggested a blockade. It is mainly Quincy
Wright who criticizes the blockade for legal reasons. Yet Chayes refutes his
argument by pointing out that the main threat was against Cuba if the Soviets
refused to comply, and since they had approved the OAS processes, this action
was legal (30). However, Wright concluded that the ‘episode has not improved
the reputation of the U.S. as a champion of international law and it may prove
an unfortunate precedent’ (31). This was the very reason why Excom did not
appeal to the self-defence justification. They had the foresight to think like
this,
16
for
they ‘were acutely conscious that this was the first nuclear crisis the world
had faced and that what they did to meet it would set precedents for future crises’
(32). This may have provided a much needed degree of caution in the
deliberations of Excom - at least for some of its members.
17
Footnotes
(1)
Hilsman, Roger, To Move a Nation, (New York, 1967) P. 189.
(2)
Kahan, Jerome H.; and Long, Anne K.,’The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Study of its
Strategic Context’, Political Science Quarterly, 87 (1972) p.572.
(3)
McPherson, James M., Ordeal by Fire, (1982) P.134.
(4)
Allison, Graham, Essence of Decision, (Boston, 1971) p.193.
(5)
Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p.197.
(6)
Anderson, Paul A., ‘Justifications and Precedents as Constraints in Foreign
Policy Decision-Making’, American Journal of Political Science, 25 (1981)
P.750.
(7)
Kahan, ‘Strategic Context’, p.571.
(8)
Abel, Elie, The Missile Crisis, (Philadelphia, 1966) p.59.
(9)
Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p.196.
(10)
Beschloss, Michael R., Kennedy V. Khrushchev: The Crisis Years, (Boston, 1991)
p.420.
(11)
Giglio, James N., The Presidency of John F.Kennedy, (Kansas, 1991) p.197.
(12)
Giglio, John F.Kennedy, p.196.
(13)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.200.
(14)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.124.
(15)
Brune, L.H., The Missile Crisis of October 1962,
(Claremont, 1985) p.47.
(16)
Chayes, Abram, The Cuban Missile Crisis, (Oxford, 1974) p.38.
(17)
Giglio, John F.Kennedy, p.198.
(18)
Brune, October 1962, p.48.
(19)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.205.
(20)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.125.
(21)
Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p.198.
(22)
Brune, October 1962, p.46.
(23)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.202.
(24)
Allison, Essence of Decision, p.60.
(25)
Chayes, Missile Crisis, p.54.
(26)
Anderson, ‘Justifications and Precedents’, p.752.
(27)
Khan, Anwan Naser, ‘The Cuban Crisis of 1962 and International Law’, Pakistan
Horizon, 29 (1976) p.77.
(28)
Chayes, Missile Crisis, p.63.
(29)
Khan, ‘International Law’, p.83.
(30)
Chayes, Missile Crisis, p.56.
(31)
Khan, ‘International Law’, p.84.
(32)
Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p.203.
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