The Cuban Crisis Revisited

The subject was how the U.S. should counter menacing Communist moves on a Caribbean island. The President's advisers were sorely perplexed: every idea they could think of posed the gravest dangers. But in the end they hit on a successful course of action, and a partial record of how it evolved came to light last week. Timed with inadvertent irony as American troops were invading Grenada, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released tapes and transcripts of two meetings between J.F.K. and his top aides at the start of the Cuban missile crisis 21 years ago.

That confrontation was immensely more ominous than the Grenada conflict. It raised the threat of nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the sometimes indistinct tapes and the voices of officials uh-ing and uhm-ing as they thought fast, on the spot, point a lesson for government planners facing any unexpected trouble. George Ball, who participated in the meetings as Under Secretary of State, spelled it out in a Washington Post article published just before the release of the tapes. "Had we fixed on a response within the first 48 hours," Ball wrote, "we would almost certainly have made the wrong decision." Crisis planners, he said, must "carefully examine all the consequences and look far beyond our initial action."

The tapes establish that J.F.K. and his advisers did exactly that. The heavily censored records cover a morning and an evening meeting in the White House on Oct. 16,1962, the day after U.S. photo reconnaissance proved that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Initially, the planners more or less assumed that the U.S. would have to take direct military action. President Kennedy at one point described an air strike, at least on the missiles, as something "we're certainly going to do." His prime question then was whether the action could be kept limited or would have to be expanded, possibly to include an eventual U.S. invasion of Cuba.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were dubious about the prospects for a "surgical" strike limited to the missiles. If the U.S. wanted to "knock out" all Soviet weapons capable of hitting American soil from Cuba, said McNamara, it would have to bomb "airfields, plus the aircraft... plus all potential nuclear [warhead] storage sites." The President's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, fretted that such extensive bombing would "kill an awful lot of people," in which case it would be "almost incumbent on the Russians" to threaten a strong counterblow, perhaps far from Cuba. Moreover, the secrecy necessary for successful military action would preclude consultation with allies, and that worried Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He warned that if the U.S. took "an action of this sort without letting our closer allies know of a matter which could subject them to very great danger ... we could find ourselves isolated and the [NATO] alliance crumbling ... at a moment of maximum peril.

Toward the close of the evening meeting, McNamara eloquently pleaded that the planners consider "what kind of world we live in after we've struck Cuba ... how do we stop at that point?" Instead of an air strike, McNamara began talking of a blockade, accompanied by "an ultimatum" to the Soviets, which he conceded would have dangers also. Said he: "This alternative doesn't seem to be a very acceptable one, but wait until you work on the others." That provoked grim laughter, but after many more meetings a blockade was decided on. It ultimately drew overwhelming support from world public opinion, and it induced the Soviets to pull their missiles out of Cuba without any necessity for the U.S. to fire a shot. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.