The fate of the Americas: the Cuban Missile Crisis and the hemispheric Cold War

1. The Cuban missile crisis: what can we know, why did it start, how did it end? Robert Jervis 2. Examining The Fourteenth Day: studying the neglected aftermath period of the October Cuban missile crisis, and underscoring missed analytical opportunities Barton Bernstein 3. Prime Minister and President: Harold Macmillan's accounts of the Cuban missile crisis, Peter Catterall 4. Reform or revolution? Scott Sagan's Limits of Safety and its contemporary implications Campbell Craig 5. The 'Best and the Brightest': the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration and the lessons of history R. Gerald Hughes 6. The three puzzles: Essence of Decision and the missile crisis Don Munton 7. We all lost the 'Cuban missile crisis': revisiting Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein's landmark analysis in We All Lost the Cold War Benoit Pelopidas 8. On hedgehogs and passions: history, hearsay, and hotchpotch in the writing of the Cuban missile crisis Sergey Radchenko 9. Beyond the smoke and mirrors: the real JFK White House Cuban missile crisis, Sheldon M. Stern 10. 'The only thing to look forward to's the past': reflection, revision and reinterpreting reinterpretation Len Scott

Reviewed by: Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, and: Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba, and: Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001 Michael Erisman James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 352 pp. Juan J. López . Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 232 pp. Morris Morley and Chris McGillion. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989–2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 253 pp. According to Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary, "asymmetry" is best defined as "the want of proportion between the parts of a thing." In a political sense, however, the term is commonly used to refer to a relationship wherein there are major inequities (e.g., in power) between the parties involved, and it is this concept that provides the common thread linking the three books under consideration here. In other words, the three studies exhibit a thematic convergence in the sense that all of them, despite differences in their analytical emphases and priorities, are examining the dynamics of the asymmetries in the Cuban Revolution's foreign relations. As might be expected, there are significant variations in their attitudes toward these asymmetries; both the Blight-Brenner and the Morley-McGillion volumes are basically sympathetic with regard to the difficulties that Havana has confronted while López is quite forthright in his desire to see Washington take full advantage of the situation to destroy Castro's government. Undoubtedly the Blight-Brenner effort is the most conceptually ambitious and analytically elegant of the three books. Its main thrust focuses on Cuba's perceptions of and reactions to its asymmetrical association with the USSR and the implications thereof with respect to current U.S.-Cuban relations. Within this context the authors emphasize the 1962 Missile Crisis as an extremely traumatic primal event that triggered well-established and deeply rooted Cuban fears about the dangers inherent in any asymmetrical relationship. It is, they stress, very important to understand that there inevitably were tensions between Moscow and Havana—the Missile Crisis did not create them, but rather they were inherent in the relationship because of its asymmetrical nature and would have had a negative impact in any case. What the crisis did was to function as a catalyst that brought these preexisting strains to the surface and severely exacerbated them. Among the Soviet actions during the crisis that infuriated the Cubans were such moves as reaching an agreement with the United States to end the crisis without ever consulting Havana about the terms of the settlement or even informing the Cubans that a deal had been made. Likewise Moscow's decision, in response to pressure from Washington, to withdraw bombers and troops from Cuba was seen in Havana "as tantamount to inviting a U.S. invasion, because it demonstrated to the United States that the Soviet Union would not stand with Cuba in the face of U.S. threats" (31). These developments generated, say Blight and Brenner, a poisoned climate wherein Havana would never again really trust Moscow. In other words, the relationship would never escape the pall cast over it by the Cubans' conviction that they had been betrayed by the USSR at the height of the Missile Crisis. Indeed the basic lesson that the authors believe the Cubans took away from the Missile Crisis was that they could not trust and had to protect themselves against both of the superpowers, and that henceforth their cold war foreign policy became characterized by an [End Page 143] effort to maximize the political maneuvering space available to them within the context of these two asymmetrical relationships. This analysis of the Missile Crisis's legacy works very well when dealing with the cold war period. The epilogue then tries to incorporate the contemporary U.S.-Cuban relationship into this framework, arguing that the essential nature of the cold war Cuban-Soviet relationship that flowed from the crisis (i.e., serious tensions rooted in a mutual lack of empathy) is...

Playa Girón: Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the AmericasThe Missile Crisis in Cuba

The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1–3, The Great Crises. Edited by Phillip D. Zelikow, Timothy Naftali, and Ernest R. May. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001; pp xxiv + 691 (vol. 1), pp xxiv + 642 (vol. 2), pp xxiv + 549 (vol. 3). $165.00 cloth. Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings. By Sheldon M. Stern. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003; pp xxx + 459. $35.00 cloth. Awaiting Armageddon: How America Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Alice L. George. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp xxiii + 238. $29.95 cloth. October Fury. By Peter A. Huchthausen. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2002; pp v + 281. $17.47 cloth. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis. By James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Lanham, Md.: Bowman and Littlefield, 2002; pp xxvii + 324. $29.95 cloth. The fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis has produced a wealth of thought-provoking works that examine "the event that might have triggered WWIII." In October 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane recorded photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Ongoing tension between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev concerning both Berlin and the placement of Soviet weapons in Cuba motivated the president to act. He selected a group of seasoned advisors, referred to as the Executive [End Page 133] Committee (ExComm). ExComm, with the participation and leadership of President Kennedy, created the strategies and tactics of diplomacy that averted potential nuclear catastrophe. This review essay offers a collection of variegated viewpoints. First, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1–3, The Great Crises, edited by Philip D. Zelikow, Timothy Naftali, and Ernest R. May, noted scholars and professors of public affairs and history, includes declassified presidential transcripts from July 30 through October 28, 1962. A CD with audio recordings of meetings accompanies the publication. Volume 3 covers transcripts of President Kennedy and the ExComm. The transcripts capture decision makers navigating their way through the quicksands of international diplomacy, escalating tension, and the management of public information. Examples of problem definition, reframing, and consensus building provide rich resources for rhetoricians, public policy analysts, and graduate students. This three-volume collection provides a captivating and comprehensive sense of the presidency as an institution. Civil rights, South American regime changes, currency fluctuations, along with lesser ceremonial responsibilities, convey the multifaceted tasks the chief executive faces daily. Next, Sheldon M. Stern's Averting 'The Final Failure,': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings provides a narrative approach to the ExComm transcripts. Stern, as an historian, chief librarian of the Kennedy Library for over two decades, and a compelling storyteller, captures personality and contextual nuances, adding rich dimensions to the collective wisdom on this topic. The author, having studied the Kennedy tapes for decades, conscientiously retranscribes and reinterprets a number of the transactions presented in The Presidential Recordings. In Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, historian Alice L. George details a social history of Middle America's world during the Cold War. As a unique contribution to the available literature, she provides a diorama of children's lives as they experience the attempts of government, schools, and the media to manage and communicate the threat of nuclear war. Then, retired navy captain Peter A. Huchthausen's October Fury breaks new ground by dramatically recounting moment-by-moment decision making and lifestyles of both the Russian and American naval crews aboard submarines and ships participating in maneuvers during the crisis. The author effectively builds the case that a combination of exceptional political and naval leadership, plus superior American naval power, determined the outcome of events. Finally, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis, authored by international...

No other book offers this inside look at the strategies of the Soviet leadership. John F. Kennedy did not live to write his memoirs; Fidel Castro will not reveal what he knows; and the records of the Soviet Union have long been sealed from public view: Of the most frightening episode of the Cold War--the Cuban Missile Crisis--we have had an incomplete picture. When did Castro embrace the Soviet Union? What proposals were put before the Kremlin through Kennedy's back-channel diplomacy? How close did we come to nuclear war? These questions have now been answered for the first time. This important and controversial book draws the missing half of the story from secret Soviet archives revealed exclusively by the authors, including the files of Nikita Khrushchev and his leadership circle. Contained in these remarkable documents are the details of over forty secret meetings between Robert Kennedy and his Soviet contact, records of Castro's first solicitation of Soviet favor, and the plans, suspicions, and strategies of Khrushchev. This unique research opportunity has allowed the authors to tell the complete, fascinating, and terrifying story of the most dangerous days of the last half-century.

This article reviews major issues in the historiography of the Russian/Soviet side of the Cuban missile crisis, as it has developed since the early 1990s. Focusing on key works, including Fursenko and Naftali’s One Hell of a Gamble and Mikoyan’s Anatomi’ia Karibskogo Krizisa, the article explores three issues: why Nikita Khrushchev decided to send missiles to Cuba, why he resolved to withdraw them, and how close the world came to ‘the brink’. The author contends that in our understanding of the Kremlin’s motivations in the Cuban missile crisis, we have come to over-rely on disparate pieces of ‘evidence’, which, at closer investigation, turn out to be one-sided, undocumented, or demonstrably false. The author therefore urges caution in drawing far-reaching conclusions from the crisis, especially in projecting its uncertain lessons onto the broader scholarship on the Soviet decision making during the Cold War.

Drawing on revealing new research, this richly informative volume is the definitive concise introduction to the crisis that took the world to the brink of nuclear war. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Essential Reference Guide captures the historical context, the minute-by-minute drama, and the profound repercussions of the “Missiles of October” confrontation that brought the very real threat of nuclear attack to the United States’ doorstep. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the crisis, it takes full advantage of recently opened Soviet archives as well as interviews with key Russian, Cuban, and U.S. officials to explore the event as it played out in Moscow, Havana, Washington, and other locations around the world. Cuban Missile Crisis contains an introductory essay by the author and alphabetically organized reference entries contributed by leading Cold War researchers. The book also includes an exceptionally comprehensive bibliography. Together, these resources give readers everything they need to understand the escalating tensions that led to the crisis as well as the intense diplomacy that resolved it, including new information about the back-channel negotiations between Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Books reviewed in this article: Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 The Cuban missile crisis generated acrimony and tension not only among the policymakers in Washington, Moscow, and Havana who handled the October 1962 confrontation, but also among future generations of historians and political scientists. As the apogee of the Cold War contest, the closest the world has been to the nuclear brink, the missile crisis has not surprisingly served as a magnet for scholarly attention. In the first decade after the crisis, Elie Abel and Graham Allison produced the most important works. In The Missile Crisis, Abel used interviews with numerous participants to craft the first richly detailed narrative of the crisis. For his part, Allison examined the crisis in order to develop various models for understanding the process of policy formulation. His Essence of Decision remains a classic of missile crisis historiography. Soon a vast article literature was also being generated, including Barton Bernstein's examination of the issue of the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, a cluster of historians, such as Thomas Paterson, James Hershberg, and Michael Beschloss, produced significant work on the missile crisis and its origins. Raymond Garthoff's Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis has been among the most important of these. For the detail it furnished on the Soviet side of the story, it was path breaking.1

By the Bomb’s Early Noir Michael S. Mayer (bio) Margot A. Henriksen. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxvi + 450 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Long ignored by historians, the impact of the cold war and nuclear weapons on American culture has become a burgeoning area of scholarly inquiry in the last decade. 1 Margot A. Henriksen makes a contribution to this body of scholarship with Dr. Strangelove’s America. Henriksen begins with the premise that “given a conjunction between revolutionary technological change and revolutionary cultural change, it seems only reasonable to expect that an invention as revolutionary as the atomic bomb wrought an accompanying cultural revolution” (p. xv). She maintains that previous scholars have contended that, until the 1980s, “no such revolutionary change engulfed American culture” (p. xvi). These scholars, argues Henriksen, have ignored important connections between the bomb and American culture in the postwar decades. While positing the development of an “atomic consensus” that formed around the “cold war imperative” and regarded the bomb as a symbol of security, she argues at the same time for “the bomb’s central role in fomenting the kind of countercultural rebelliousness that characterized America throughout the 1960s” (p. xix). Henriksen holds that, in spite of the dominance of the atomic consensus in the 1940s and 1950s, “many dark visions of atomic age life” (p. xxii) emerged during those years. By necessity, however, these visions were largely allusive and metaphorical. She suggests that film noir, “with its disturbing themes and distorted view of American life” (p. xxii), exemplified this sort of indirect dissent. Through its presentation of blurred lines between good and evil, film noir reflected an American society corrupted by the knowledge of atomic destruction, in which “everyone seemed guilty and no one seemed innocent” (p. 61). Similar themes dominated the fiction of Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, and Harry Whittington. By the 1960s, the author contends, the atomic consensus began to break down, and the black humor of Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle (1963), exemplified a new openness in [End Page 778] cultural dissent. Central to this process was “Kennedy’s public brandishing of America’s atomic arsenal,” which “shattered the cold war silence of the later Eisenhower years and shook Americans out of a long sleep of avoidance” (p. 187). In particular, the debate over the morality of bomb shelters, generated by the Berlin crisis and the Kennedy administration’s civil defense program, marked an important cultural shift away from acceptance of America’s nuclear policy. By late 1962, opinion had shifted so far that not even the Cuban missile crisis could spark a renewal of interest in bomb shelters. Henriksen sees the reaction against bomb shelters as a significant antecedent to the dissent of the later 1960s. Though the Cuban missile crisis did not revive enthusiasm for bomb shelters, it did reinforce dissenting views concerned about imminent nuclear destruction. Such dissenting views would expand to question the cold war and American values. “Black humor, which combined the ‘darkness’ associated with the film noir sensibility of the earlier years of dissent with the rambunctious and iconoclastic laughter associated with the fearless rebelliousness of sixties protests” (p. xxiii), signified the corresponding cultural shift. The buoyancy and the disdain of this cultural mirth in the early sixties broke the constraints of fear and intimidation that had curtailed free expression in the late forties and fifties and loosed the spirit of iconoclasm that complemented the dominant mood of the rebellious sixties. . . . Black humor matched both the explosive power and the deadly nihilism of the atomic bomb, and it announced the dawn of the cultural revolution that also finally matched the transforming power of the bomb. (p. 245) To demonstrate the conflict between the dominant culture of consensus and the oppositional culture of dissent in the immediate postwar era, the author juxtaposes Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) with the film noir classic, White Heat (1949). Capra’s film celebrates traditional American values and the American way of life, characterized by life in a small town, a...

(2005). High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khruschev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 138-138.

Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022 William L. McBride I have been fortunate enough to be able to reflect in print at least twice, in recent years, on works by Simone de Beauvoir that, written around or shortly past the middle of the last century, reference what was then the future in interesting ways—and it should be recalled that an orientation toward the future is of central importance to the ambiguous ethic that Beauvoir developed in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, as it is in the Sartrean ontology which places so much emphasis on “the project.” A chapter of mine in an anthology dealing with philosophical aspects of Beauvoir’s novel, The Mandarins, concluded by speculating what those Mandarins would find surprising and what they would not if they were suddenly to reawaken in the early twenty-first century (McBride, “Conflict”). And in a more recent chapter of a volume co-edited by Nancy Bauer, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, in which I discuss and compare Beauvoir’s travelogues on America and China, I concluded with an implicit lament for those two worlds that she had explored so well when they were younger (McBride, “Postwar World”). Of course, the background reality to these works, as well as to many of the essays that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote during the same postwar period, was the Cold War. Especially in The Mandarins there is a strong streak of pessimism, which is to some extent in contradiction with Beauvoir’s assertion at the beginning of Pour une morale and Sartre’s in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme that, contrary to the claims of its critics on the Catholic Right, existentialism is a philosophy of hope. (It is not, I think, by chance that Beauvoir gave the name L’Espoir to the journal edited by her protagonist in The Mandarins, Henri, which [End Page 884] folded toward the end of the novel.) There was good reason to be depressed about the world scene during the late 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, with the real threat of nuclear war looming large. Indeed, who of those who lived through an episode of the mid-Cold War period, the Cuban Missile Crisis—the postmortem analysis of which by Robert McNamara and other major actors confirmed my own feeling at the time, scoffed at by some—can forget that it was a near thing? By now, the Cold War in its old form is a thing of the past. So why are so many of us still not feeling very good about the world scene? If resurrection were a real possibility, what might Beauvoir and Sartre say if they were to be brought back to the world stage? And what is it that existentialism more generally, however difficult it is to define, can contribute to illuminating our situation? These are the questions I shall attempt to answer in the next few pages. This essay is a small part of what I wrote about the imaginary resurrected Mandarins reawakened in today’s Paris. True, they would be surprised by some obvious things, notably the elimination of the Soviet Bloc. Nevertheless, I wrote, “they would feel very much at home. They would hear everyone talking about American imperialism; they would hear references to the announced prospect of an endless war; and if they were to read newspaper articles about the United States they would see that creeping fascism in the form of increased police state tactics (suppression of rights, vast augmentation of surveillance procedures, a ‘criminal justice’ system that houses one-quarter of the world’s prisoners drawn from less than 5% of its population, etc.), effective control of major media outlets by right-wing forces, strong encouragement of ‘patriotic’ nationalism, and so on, were the order of the day in that country” (McBride, “Conflict” 44). So, presumably, they would still regard existentialism and “résistentialisme,” as Beau-voir’s character Anne puts it, to be appropriate, humanistic attitudes to adopt in face of the diverse threats to humanity posed by a sizable segment of humanity itself. Before proceeding further with this nostalgic exercise of my imagination, I should say something about what the two...

Oleg Penkovsky spied for SIS and the CIA during a crucial phase of the Cold War. Acclaimed as one of the most important spies of the century, his role in the Cuban missile crisis has been portrayed as of pre‐eminent importance to the outcome. Other historians have challenged this interpretation, while some believe that far from working for the West, Penkovsky was an instrument of Soviet strategic deception. This article draws upon CIA records and recent scholarship on the missile crisis to adjudicate on these various claims, and to show where, how and why much of the literature exaggerates and distorts Penkovsky's influence and importance. Avenues for further research are also identified.

Though virtually ignored in the historiography, Brazil played an intriguing role in the politics and diplomacy of the Cuban missile crisis and in U.S. Cuban relations during the Kennedy administration. In the years after Fidel Castro took power, successive Brazilian governments tried secretly to mediate between the United States and Cuba as the two countries' mutual confrontation intensified. Newly available U.S., Brazilian, Cuban, and other sources reveal that this role climaxed during the missile crisis, as John F. Kennedy clandestinely sought to employ Brazil to transmit a message to Castro. In turn, Brazil, which was also promoting a Latin American denuclearization scheme at the United Nations as a possible method to resolve the crisis, sought to broker a formula for U.S. Cuban reconciliation that would heighten the prestige of its own “independent” policy in the Cold War. Ultimately, these efforts failed, but they shed light on previously hidden aspects of both the missile crisis and the triangular U.S. Cuban—Brazilian relationship. Thefirst part of this two—part article sets the scene for an in—depth look at the Cuban missile crisis, which will be covered in Part 2 of the article in the next issue of the journal.

This article analyses hundreds of letters that US women wrote to Nikita Khrushchev and Nina Khrushcheva during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The sense of imminent nuclear threat prompted many women to engage with Cold War politics and directly address world leaders. Drawing on their traditional gender roles as mothers and wives, letter-writers were emboldened to confront political leaders about matters of war and peace, advocate for cross-border dialogue and stress Americans’ and Soviets’ shared humanity. Through the prism of letters, the article explores the impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis on US society, the importance of letter-writing in female political activity and women’s understanding of the Cold War.

The article examines whether the US threat perceptions defined in terms of federal government national defense outlays in billions of constant (FY 2000) dollars change along with periodical changes in international politics between 1945 and 2007. Three different models affecting direction of the US defense expenditures are developed. The first model are estimated by using five link functions even though results of only two of them, complementary log–log and cauchit, are presented. As complementary log–log produced the best results, others models are predicted by using only this function. The parameter estimates of complementary log–log function for the first model indicate that four of these variables (Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr.) out of eleven are significant in the category of presidents. “Truman Docrtrine/Cominform”, “Korean War”, “Vietnam War”, and “Invasion of Iraq” also seem to be the important independent variables on empirical grounds for the first model. While “Party”, “Invasion of Iraq”, “Vietnam War”, “Korean War”, and “Cuban Missile Crisis” constitute the important independent variables on empirical grounds for the second model, “Korean War”, “Vietnam War”, “Invasion of Iraq”, “Truman Docrtrine/Cominform”, “The Cold War and New World Order”, and “Cuban Missile Crisis” are important independent variables on empirical grounds for the third model. Estimations based on these three models therefore suggest that aforementioned independent variables do indeed have effect on the US defense expenditures.