It was determined that Kennedy would ignore the second Khrushchev message and respond to the first one. That night, Kennedy set forth in his message to the Soviet leader proposed steps for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba under supervision of the United Nations, and a guarantee that the United States would not attack Cuba. It was a risky move to ignore the second Khrushchev message. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then met secretly with Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and indicated that the United States was planning to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey anyway, and that it would do so soon, but this could not be part of any public resolution of the missile crisis.
The next morning, October 28, Khrushchev issued a public statement that Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed from Cuba. The crisis was over but the naval quarantine continued until the Soviets agreed to remove their IL—28 bombers from Cuba and, on November 20, , the United States ended its quarantine. Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in April It also may have helped mitigate negative world opinion regarding the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Two other important results of the crisis came in unique forms. Menu Menu. Milestones: — For more information, please see the full notice. Aerial view of missile launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba. John F. While deciding how to respond to the Soviet deception, the committee had one great advantage: neither Khrushchev nor Castro knew that their missile sites had been discovered.
During that first covert week of the crisis preceding the President's speech—October 16—22—the ExComm members debated whether to bomb the missile sites, invade Cuba, surreptitiously approach Khrushchev with an ultimatum, or begin the effort to force the removal of the missiles with a blockade. Despite McNamara's view contested by the Joint Chiefs that the Soviet missiles did " not at all " alter the "strategic balance," the option of accepting their deployment as a fait accompli was rejected out of hand.
Even if they did not pose a serious military risk, their presence was deemed politically unacceptable. Several months earlier, Kennedy had directed the Secret Service to install recording systems in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, the location of the majority of the ExComm's meetings. In , transcripts and tape recordings of those meetings started to surface, and based on this new information, historians began to backfill, revise, and reinterpret critical aspects of the crisis.
Writing about the decision-making process from the perspective of "a fly on the wall" was irresistible, and the new information revealed who said what, to whom, when, and how. It made Robert Kennedy's special status clear. It lay bare the dynamics between senior advisers and contradicted many of their recollections.
It exposed their confused views of Soviet objectives, revealed their analytical instincts and lack thereof , and exposed whether they had what can only be referred to as good sense. And it raised deeply troubling questions about the judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The transcripts also indicated that the committee members were divided, inconsistent, often confused, and appropriately frightened.
The seriousness of the encounter they were embarked upon, and their lack of confidence that any proposed strategy would accomplish their goal, led most of them—along with the Joint Chiefs—to initially favor some form of military action—to strike, as it were, like cornered animals. The list of incorrect assumptions, false information, and bad judgments that ran through the committee's discussions is alarming. When trying to discern Khrushchev's motives and intentions, the State Department's leading Soviet experts, former ambassadors to Moscow Charles E.
Another member of the ExComm, seemingly on the edge of hysteria, wrote to the President "that the survival of our nation demands the prompt elimination of the offensive weapons now in Cuba.
Former Secretary of State Acheson, perhaps the nation's most experienced Cold War diplomat, gave equally dangerous advice. Invited to the October 18 meeting at the President's request, he merely repeated the old canard that military force was the only way to deal with the Soviets and urged an immediate surprise assault to destroy the missiles.
When his recommendation was challenged, he declined to attend further meetings. The intelligence the CIA provided was flawed and inadequate.
Not only had the agency missed the deployment of the medium- and intermediate-range missiles until it was almost too late to respond, but it was also unaware that the Soviets had on hand 35 LUNA battlefield nuclear weapons that would have devastated any American landing force. The CIA's best estimate of the number of Soviet ground forces in Cuba was 10,—12,; in fact, more than 40, battle ready Soviet combat troops were prepared to confront a U.
If the President had approved an attack on Cuba, Guantanamo Bay's reinforced garrison was primed to participate. But the Soviets had moved a battlefield nuclear weapon into range of the base with the intention of destroying it before a single marine could pass through the gate.
Other near disasters, oversights, and accidents added to the chaos within the crisis. Several anti-Castro groups, operating under a CIA program code-named Mongoose directed by Robert Kennedy, went about their sabotage activities because no one had thought to cancel their mission, which could have been mistaken for assault preparations.
They test-fired a missile without first contacting the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, no one dealing with the crisis appeared to be aware of the scheduled test to assess whether the Soviets might misinterpret the launch as a hostile action.
And, most extraordinarily, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Thomas Powers, on his own authority, without informing the President or any national security staff member, raised the Defense Condition DefCon level to 2—one level short of war—and broadcast his order "in the clear" uncoded.
Obviously trying to intimidate the Soviets, his behavior was confirmation of Gen. Curtis LeMay's troubling assessment that Powers was mentally "not stable. Also on Saturday morning, October 27, the tensest day of the crisis, a U-2 pilot was killed when his plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air SAM missile.
All of the ExComm's members assumed that the order to fire had been issued by Moscow; in fact, the decision was unauthorized and had been taken by the local commander. The response of the Joint Chiefs was to pressure the President to bomb the offending SAM site, but he had the good sense and will to reject their insistent requests. And, as if following an improbable Hollywood script, that very afternoon, a U-2 flying on an air-sampling mission to the Arctic circle—which also should have been scrubbed—accidentally overflew Soviet territory when the pilot made a navigation error.
The Soviets could have interpreted that reconnaissance flight as anticipating an attack. But the most dangerous moment of the crisis occurred late on Saturday afternoon, and the United States did not learn about it until almost 40 years later. Four Soviet submarines were being tracked in the area of the blockade line, but no American knew that each had a kiloton nuclear torpedo aboard that their captains were authorized to use.
At about 5 o'clock, the commander of submarine B, Capt. Savitskii, convinced that he was being attacked by the practice depth charges and grenades that U. Navy anti-submarine warfare ASW forces were dropping to force him to surface, loaded his nuclear torpedo and came within seconds of launching it at his antagonists.
Had he fired that weapon, there is no doubt about the devastating consequences that would have followed. All of these incidents and mistakes, as well as the misunderstandings documented in the verbatim ExComm records, makes it clear that crisis management is a myth. The fundamental flaw in the concept is that accurate information, the most important element in coping with any serious crisis, is invariably unavailable.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis, good luck substituted for good information and good judgment, hardly a model of policymaking to celebrate or recommend. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the crisis, the ExComm's discussions became the central focus of historians' efforts to understand the process that led to its peaceful resolution.
The members of the committee, as well as the President, promoted that idea, touting its work as a classic example of the administration's ability to skillfully manage international challenges. A collection of early histories that relied on interviews with participants supported the view that the ExComm had been composed of "wise men" who had diligently worked through the most sensible policy options to reach the most appropriate decisions.
And in , Robert Kennedy published posthumously a memoir of the crisis, Thirteen Days, that continues to reinforce that view. This attention to the words of "the wise men" led to many misconceptions, but initially, and in particular, to two historical distortions.
The first was the in correct impression that ExComm decisions had dictated the President's policies. The second was to isolate the crisis from its broader historical Cold War milieu. Dangerously incorrect lessons are drawn when the ExComm is credited with successfully managing the Cuban Missile Crisis.
War was prevented for two reasons, and the ExComm's members were responsible for neither. The first, and most important, is that Khrushchev did not want a war.
His objective was to protect Castro's government by deterring, not fighting, the United States. The second reason that war was avoided is that the President, not the members of the ExComm and certainly not the Joint Chiefs, who unanimously and persistently recommended attacking Cuba , insisted on providing Khrushchev with a politically acceptable exit from his failed gamble.
The challenge was to find a resolution that gave the Soviet leader options other than capitulate or fight. To do so, it was necessary for the President to empathize with his adversary, to see the crisis from Khrushchev's perspective.
He was encouraged in this by two unsung, consistently level-headed advisers. The ExComm recordings, for all the detailed, fascinating information they reveal, do not tell us nearly enough about the views of the most important member of the administration, John Kennedy.
Inclined toward military action early in the crisis, the President quickly grew increasingly wary of its unpredictable consequences. Forced to maintain his schedule, so as not to raise suspicions that something untoward was occurring, he missed many of the meetings during the week preceding his speech. But within 48 hours of being briefed by Bundy, he privately told his brother to back away from the military option and bring the committee members around to support a blockade.
It is clear that Khrushchev's crude deception had, at least initially, trumped any inclination the President had to seek a diplomatic exit from the crisis. But what restored his commitment to diplomacy is less clear, although circumstantial evidence suggests that the cogent arguments presented to him by Under Secretary of State George Ball and Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson contributed to turning him against a military assault.
A surprise attack [on Cuba], "far from establishing our moral strength. Expanding on McNamara's view that the missiles were not strategically significant, Ball condemned the idea of igniting a war on their behalf. His alternative was to begin the process of eliminating the missiles with a blockade.
Stevenson's contribution to reason was more detailed and direct. Having fortuitously arrived in Washington on October 16 to attend a White House luncheon, the President briefed him after lunch about the missiles and the conclusions of that morning's ExComm meeting. Stevenson strongly demurred.
Stevenson pointed out that while the United States had superior force in the Caribbean, any military action against Cuba could be countered by the Soviets in Berlin or Turkey, and that process would most likely escalate rapidly out of control.
The problem with this interpretation is that Kennedy intensely disliked Stevenson, for both political and personal reasons. His enmity went so deep as to lead him to plant false stories after the crisis portraying his ambassador as having advocated "another Munich. But, in fact, Stevenson had been heroic in his dissent and, during those first confused days, had provided the clearest analysis of the dangers the crisis raised and the range of possible peaceful solutions.
It is our right [to do so]. Ironically, if the Cubans were a little more pliant, and a little less independent, if they were more willing to be Soviet pawns, they would have kept the tactical nuclear weapons on the island.
But they showed themselves to be much more than just a parking lot for the Soviet missiles. Cuba was a major independent variable of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Mikoyan treated his Cuban hosts with great empathy and respect, while being highly critical of his own political and military leadership. He admired the genuine character of the Cuban revolution, he saw its appeal for Latin America. But he also saw the danger of the situation spiraling out of control probably better than other leaders in this tense triangle, and thus brought about the final resolution of the crisis. The following transcript was prepared by a Soviet note-taker, with the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, Alexandr Alexeyev, translating for Mikoyan.
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