THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, 1962 term paper

In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war. The problem began with Soviet attempts to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev made the decision to place the missiles in Cuba. He acted in part to defend the Cuban Revolution. Although President Fidel Castro successfully defeated the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles in 1961, Khrushchev considered direct American intervention a possibility. He also hoped to reduce the overwhelming American strategic nuclear balance.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco (the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles with CIA support), the disappointing Vienna Summit (at which Khrushchev thought he saw in President John F. Kennedy a weak man), and the decision not to challenge the construction of the Berlin Wall, President Kennedy was under considerable political pressure from Republican critics. The discovery of missile launch sites under construction in Cuba was a challenge he and the government had to meet.

Kennedy met with the Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council after the discovery of the launch sites. This group included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, among others. An initial consensus called for an air strike to take out the missile sites, airfields, and aircraft. It was also suggested that an invasion of the island would be necessary. Kennedy worried that the Soviet response might lead to nuclear war. Military leaders favored the air strike–invasion combination, and sooner rather than later. Kennedy, in consultation with his brother Robert, favored the idea of blockade (quarantine) plus surveillance and diplomacy. He announced this in a speech televised nationally on 22 October 1962. Khrushchev sent two letters in response to the American announcement of quarantine. The first, probably a personal reply, was emotional and conciliatory. The second, possibly a joint production of the Soviet leadership, took a tougher line. The United States chose to respond to the first and ignore the second. The world waited tensely to see what would happen when Soviet ships reached the American quarantine line. Before this happened, however, they were ordered to return to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its missiles, planes, and most of the troops sent to Cuba in return for a guarantee by the United States that it would not invade the island. The United States secretly indicated that it would remove missiles, which were in any case obsolete, from Turkey. The United States and the Soviet Union realized how close they had come to nuclear conflict, and each side made efforts to manage the Cold War better in the future. Nonetheless, the Cold War did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. The origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis go back to 1961 and earlier. Investigate relations between the United States and Cuba before October 1962.
2. Follow the views and activities of one or more of the members of ExComm, President Kennedy’s advisors during the crisis, and try to determine reasons for their views and activities.
3. Investigate Khrushchev’s decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and to do this secretly.
4. By reviewing newspapers and newsmagazines from the period, trace the development of public opinion about the crisis in the period between President Kennedy’s speech on 22 October and Khrushchev’s message on 28 October effectively ending the crisis. Or conduct interviews and write an oral history of people’s memories of the period. 5. The Cuban role in the Cuban Missile Crisis is generally overlooked. Write about the crisis from the Cuban point of view to the extent permitted by the sources available.
6. The Cuban Missile Crisis did not end neatly with Khrushchev’s message of 28 October. Examine the negotiations and discussions that took place in November as the two countries tried to agree on terms and also tried to get Cuba to conform to those terms.

Research Suggestions

In addition to boldfaced items, look under the entries for “The Guatemalan Coup, 1954” (#50), “Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, 1959” (#57), and “The Berlin Wall, 1961” (#59). Search under Operation Mongoose, Andrei A. Gromyko, John A. McCone, John A. Scali, Theodore C. Sorensen, Adlai E. Stevenson, and General Maxwell D. Taylor.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Chang, Laurence, and Peter Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader. New York: The New Press, 1992. An excellent selection of documents together with an extensive chronology and other helpful material.

Kennedy, Robert. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis.New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. An influential portrait of the crisis by one of the most important participants.

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds.The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. A fascinating look at the crisis as it appeared to those at the very highest levels of government.

Secondary Sources

Beschloss, Michael R. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963. New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991. A highly readable, solid study of the period.

Blight, James G., Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch. Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Crisis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Blight organized a number of scholarly conferences that produced new evidence on the crisis. This book covers material from the Havana conference, the last in the series. Blight, James G., and David A. Welch. On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis . New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. The first of several books presenting new evidence on the crisis drawn from scholarly conferences.

Divine, Robert A. “Alive and Well: The Continuing Cuban Missile Crisis Controversy.” Diplomatic History 18 (Fall 1994), 551–560. Excellent survey of the historiography of the crisis by one of the leading historians of American diplomacy.

Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro, 1958–1964. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Based to a large extent on Soviet archival sources. One of the best books on the Soviet side of the crisis.

Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Chapter 9 offers a thoughtful review of scholarship on several major issues connected with the crisis.

Garthoff, Raymond L. Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1989. An important book by a participant who is also a leading scholar of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Lebow, Richard Ned, and Janice Gross Stein. We All Lost the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of two case studies in an extended discussion of the realities of crisis management in international affairs.

Moser, Don. “The Time of the Angel: The U-2, Cuba, and the CIA.” American Heritage, 28 (October 1977), 4–15. A useful introduction.

World Wide Web

“Cold War International History Project.” http://cwihp.si.edu/default.htm. This Web site provides documents and excellent scholarship on the Cold War.

“Cuba, 1959–1962.” http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/10. Based on CNN’s Cold War documentary series, the Web site includes background, documents, a transcript of the program, and other features.

“The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962.” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cub_mis_cri/cub_mis_cri.html. This site, part of the large National Security Archive Web site, provides an introduction, chronology, glossary, and photographs on the Cuban Missile Crisis.