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The Atlantic published an interesting revisionist look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reason Magazine introduces the subject.
Benjamin Schwarz has written a long and interesting article for The Atlantic that draws on recent scholarship (and not-so-recent scholarship) to debunk the conventional wisdom about the Cuban missile crisis, arguing that the Kennedy administration “risked nuclear war over a negligible threat to national security.” The whole thing is worth a read, but this anecdote should be especially enjoyable for anyone who suspects that JFK was a playboy doofus in over his head:
On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though?…It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.”
If you prefer stories that make Bobby Kennedy look bad, you’ll enjoy the part where the president’s brother tries to conceal a document that “could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”
But Schwarz has a deeper point to make than The Kennedys were kind of awful. The myths of the Cuban missile crisis, he writes, have encouraged a lot of dangerous and inaccurate ideas about foreign policy: …
Here’s the article from The Atlantic.
“On october 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.”
Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.
Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.
Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.
In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. …
… The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president’s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.” Stern authoritatively concludes that “if RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.” He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys. …
After seeing how the media swallowed the Kennedy line, you can understand how obamalove exists. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the chattering classes to understand what a disaster this president is becoming. Michael Barone writes on the problem.
To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.
His point-blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad.
But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government’s debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures.
Working out what will be in those measures is a matter for negotiation between the legislative and executive branches. That’s because the Constitution gives Congress the power to incur debt and the president the power to veto.
Obama supporters like to portray Republican attempts to negotiate as hostage-taking or extortion. But those are violent crimes. Negotiations — discussions attempting to reach agreement among those who differ — are peaceful acts.
What we do know, from Bob Woodward’s “The Price of Politics,” is that Obama is not very good at negotiating. He apparently can’t stomach listening to views he does not share.
Perhaps that is to be expected of one who has chosen all his adult life to live in university communities and who made his way upward in the one-party politics of Chicago. Thus on the “fiscal cliff” he left the unpleasant business of listening to others’ views and reaching agreement to Joe Biden.
Obama has laid down another marker in his puzzling nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense.
As the Washington Post editorial writers pointed out, Hagel, though a nominal Republican, has stood way to the left of Obama on whether a military option to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program is feasible. …
Jennifer Rubin has more on the man/child president.
President Obama has always been prickly when it comes to receiving criticism and averse to glad-handing or even dealing with Congress, both Democrats and Republicans. LBJ he is not. However, his recent performances go beyond arrogance. And this time it is not only conservative critics who have noticed the obnoxious indifference to others’ views and role in the legislative process.
I don’t often agree with Maureen Dowd, but she pegs Obama’s last news conference as aptly as anyone on the right:
[T]he president always seems to be dancing alone. And that was the vibe of his swan-song press conference for Act One of his presidency.
His words were laced with an edge — churlish, chiding and self-pitying. He sardonically presented himself as Lonely Guy, shafted by the opposition, kicking around the White House on his own. Days before his second inauguration, he seemed to be intimating that the job he had fought so hard for and won against all odds was a bit of a chore, if not a bore.
Even mild-mannered lawmakers voice despair. In an interview Tuesday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) was both astounded and utterly frustrated with the president’s refusal to engage. “Did you see him?!” he asked rhetorically more than once in reference to the news conference. He worries that no deal will get done on anything.
The Post editorial board put it this way:
Can, or will, Mr. Obama do anything to help the cooler heads within the Republican Party prevail? Or does he regard the debt-ceiling threat as a no-lose proposition for him and his party: either a GOP bluff or a promise to commit political suicide? Certainly Mr. Obama’s refusal to negotiate — coupled with his appropriate refusal to raise the debt ceiling through executive action — suggests that he’s willing to ride with the GOP right up to the brink.
In fact, Republican leaders are conferring on how to delink the debt ceiling and their spending demands. It is President Obama who is spoiling for a fight for reasons that are not altogether clear. He won the election. What is the point?
Obama’s peevish approach to governance is evident even in his approach to gun violence, which reeks of manipulation and defiance.