"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
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Incurious George
Posted 9:30 a.m., April 21, 2004
Here's what for me is a mildly chilling exercise in "what if."
But let me set this up.
In October 1962, the Kennedy administration was confronted by the most dangerous 13 days in the history of mankind, the Cuban Missile Crisis. American spy planes had photographed suspicious military construction on the island, and analysts quickly determined that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles.
It was unclear what the Soviets or Cuban President Fidel Castro had in mind: threatening Latin America? intimidating the U.S.? But it was clear to American leaders that the missiles had to be removed immediately.
(It could logically be argued why that was not so important, considering that the Soviets had enough missiles already trained on the U.S. to turn us into dust, and we them. But we'll leave that to Michael Beschloss and his ilk. The reality is that Kennedy determined the missiles had to go.)
At the time, a number of responses were under consideration, among them a full-scale invasion of Cuba, an event that the most hawkish planners predicted would leave the Soviets stymied, unable to respond, as though they didn't have the same obligations to Cuba that we had at that point to West Germany--a pledge to defend a protectorate with an in-kind assault.
Meanwhile, all military considerations were predicated on a desperately false understanding of the situation. The Kennedy administration had miscalculated, believing it was in a race against time and had to act before the Soviets delivered nuclear warheads that could be launched against the United States. Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara revealed just how wrong those judgments were in the recent movie documentary, "The Fog of War."
"It wasn't until January 1992, in a meeting chaired by Castro in Havana, Cuba, that I learned 162 nuclear warheads, including 90 tactical warheads, were on the island at the time of this critical moment of the crisis," McNamara says. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and Castro got very angry with me because I said, 'Mr. President, let's stop this meeting. This is totally new to me, I'm not sure I got the translation right.'"
What factor prevented the U.S. from rushing in? According to Bobby Kennedy's book "13 Days," it was what the Bush administration today might consider an unimportant minor intangible.
It was the intellectual curiosity of the president.
Bobby Kennedy writes that JFK was haunted by doubts throughout the crisis response, during sessions often dominated by the military joint chiefs' insistence on an immediate, all-out assault on Cuba to, in effect, teach the Commies a lesson.
But Kennedy had only recently finished a book--a book one might plausibly say saved the world--"The Guns of August," by historian Barbara Tuchman. In it, Tuchman lampoons in bitter tones the idiocy that led to World War I, the lemming-like march to war that was based primarily on European military and political leadership's tendency to pin their decisions on the lessons of their last wars, without factoring in changing facts, changing times, changing technologies.
WWI wasn't the only instance of this sort of blunder. The Civil War was nearly over before generals began to move away from the shoulder-to-shoulder Napoleonic battlefield tactics that resulted in mass levels of unnecessary slaughter, on the outdated theory that soldiers must "mass their fire." Advances in weaponry simply weren't factored in. Today, soldiers are customarily ordered to "spread out."
"The great danger in all this," John Kennedy told his brother during the crisis, "is a miscalculation, a mistake in judgment."
As McNamara reveals, that mistake had already been made. Kennedy's saving grace, even lacking knowledge that the missiles were in place, was recognizing--and acknowledging--the possibility that such pivotal factors might be missing from the equation laid out before him.
But Tuchman's book had sunk deep into the president's thinking.
"I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, 'The Missiles of October,'" JFK told his Bobby Kenndy on Oct. 26, 1962. "If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary."
As a result, he opted to ease the U.S. out of the crisis on terms that permitted my birth, just over two years later.
That's a lot of set up for a little "what if" exercise. But here it is:
What if the notoriously incurious, poorly read, over-confidently full-speed-ahead, ask-no-questions president now occupying the Oval Office had instead been in charge of the United States in October 1962?
- For more background, see The Choices Program & Critical Oral History Project Web site.
- Alternately, read the story in Robert S. McNamara's own words.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
