THE NATION 1962: Foreign Relations: The Backdown Cuba Missile Crisis

The Backdown

There was danger in standing still or moving forward. I thought it was the wisest policy to risk that which was incident to the latter course.

—James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson (1822)

Last week that perilous choice confronted another, younger President of the U.S. Generations to come may well count John Kennedy's resolve as one of the decisive moments of the 20th century. For Kennedy determined to move forward at whatever risk. And when faced by that determination, the bellicose Premier of the Soviet Union first wavered, then weaseled and finally backed down.

To Kennedy, the time of truth arrived when he received sheaves of photographs taken during the preceding few days by U.S. reconnaissance planes over Cuba. They furnished staggering proof of a massive, breakneck buildup of Soviet missile power on Castro's island. Already poised were missiles capable of hurling a megaton each—or roughly 50 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb—at the U.S. Under construction were sites for launching five-megaton missiles.

Into early October, the Soviets proceeded covertly, masking their operations with lies and claims that they were sending only "defensive" weapons to Cuba. Then they threw off stealth, lunging ahead in a frantic, scarcely concealed push to get offensive missiles up and ready to fire. Their aim was devastatingly obvious: they meant to present the U.S. with the accomplished fact of a deadly missile arsenal on Cuba.

If the plan had worked—and it came fearfully close—Nikita Khrushchev would in one mighty stroke have changed the power balance of the cold war. Once again a foreign dictator had seemingly misread the character of the U.S. and of a U.S. President. At Vienna and later, Khrushchev had sized up Kennedy as a weakling, given to strong talk and timorous action. The U.S. itself, he told Poet

Robert Frost, was "too liberal to fight." Now, in the Caribbean, he intended to prove his point. And Berlin would surely come next.

Kennedy shattered those illusions. He did it with a series of dramatic decisions that swiftly brought the U.S. to a showdown not with Fidel Castro but with Khrushchev's own Soviet Union. Basic to those decisions were two propositions:

¶ It would not be enough for the Russians to halt missile shipments to Cuba. Instead, all missiles in Cuba must be dismantled and removed. If necessary, the U.S. would remove them by invasion.

¶ Any aggressive act from Cuba would be treated by the U.S. as an attack by the Soviet Union itself. And the U.S. would retaliate against Russia with the sudden and full force of its thermonuclear might.

As a first step, and only as a first step, Kennedy decided to impose a partial blockade, or quarantine, on Cuba, stopping all shipments of offensive weapons—missiles, warheads, missile launching equipment, bombers and bombs.

Kennedy announced his decisions on television to a somber nation and found that nation overwhelmingly behind him. Perhaps David Heffernan, a Chicago school official who listened to the speech in a crowded hotel lobby, best expressed the American mood: "When it was over, you could feel the lifting of a great national frustration. Suddenly you could hold your head up."