President John F. Kennedy with his principal internal antagonist during the Cuban Missile Crisis, General Curtis LeMay. The Air Force Chief of Staff and founder of the Strategic Air Command stridently urged the bombing of Soviet forces and invasion of Cuba, charging that Kennedy, a World War II Navy hero as a young officer in the Pacific, was weak and cowardly. LeMay’s strategy would likely have triggered the use of nuclear weapons.
This is the 55th anniversary of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The 13-day exercise, the first several days of which took place in secret after a misfiring intelligence community too geared to covert ops in the Eisenhower administration belatedly informed President John F. Kennedy of the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S., put America through an existential wringer. The world has never been closer to nuclear war. (Mad Men's Season 2 finale does an excellent job of portraying the sense of dread, hysteria, fatalism, and relief around the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
Today America is in the midst of another existential crisis full of dread and hysteria, this time largely generated by internal dynamics. But external nuclear-oriented crises, exacerbated by our own devolutionary politics, impinge on our national psychodrama, a psychodrama likely only to deepen further with Trump/Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the verge of announcing at least one indictment.
Before that happens, let's look at lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis and how they apply to our burgeoning Korean missile crisis and nascent Iranian missile crisis.
Though the Cuban Missile Crisis took place when I was a little boy, not that I don't have my own distinct memories, I had the great fortune to come to know one of the major players in it when Ted Sorensen served as national co-chairman of Senator Gary Hart's presidential campaign.
Sorensen was one of a dozen members of ExComm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, which essentially ran the country during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Congressional leaders? They were consulted, but they simply didn't know enough to take more than a tangential role at the moment of gravest national crisis. And their ideas might well have led to global thermonuclear war.
At 34, Sorensen, who passed away in 2010, was the youngest ExComm member; Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and de facto deputy president who ran his brother’s presidential campaign, was next youngest at 36. As the president's special counsel and "chief writing partner," as he described his famed wordsmith role to me, Sorensen was what JFK described as his "intellectual blood bank."
My own lifelong study of the Cold War, along with my war college correspondence coursework in preparation for an intended role in a Hart Presidency and the perspectives shared by Sorensen have suggested some important lessons to be drawn from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But first, a very brief rundown of the Cuban Missile Crisis (details are available on Wikipedia).
The Soviet Union, far behind the U.S. in the nuclear arms race, despite years of propaganda to the contrary, upset by American moves to upend the new Castro regime in Cuba, secretly began moving nuclear missiles onto the Caribbean island nation just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
The top U.S. military leadership wanted to respond by launching massive air strikes and a full U.S. invasion of Cuba.
JFK had listened to the Pentagon in 1961 when the new president reluctantly approved a semi-covert U.S.-backed Cuban exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA-dominated operation, conceived and moved forward under the Eisenhower administration, was a fairly predictable debacle. With JFK refusing to commit overt U.S. forces to bail out the Cuban exiles, which was probably the true intent of the Bay of Pigs plotters all along.
This time round, 18 months after publicly taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs operation he had not conceived himself, Kennedy took the Cuba invasion scenario off the initial game board very early on. Debate then centered on air strikes vs. naval blockade vs. doing nothing, the latter because the U.S. had an over 16 to 1 advantage over Soviet Russian forces in nuclear warheads.
Doing nothing held little appeal given the sensational placement of the Soviet nuclear missiles, cutting warning time for a potential Soviet first strike down to a matter of minutes. The military brass and most veteran Cold Warriors very strongly favored air strikes.
Sorensen was one of the few from the beginning who favored a "quarantine," i.e., a naval blockade of Cuba limited to nuclear missile tech. Tellingly, Robert Kennedy disliked the air strike scenario.
President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy confer during a break in sessions of ExComm, the JFK-appointed Executive Committee of the National Security Council, which was for all practical purposes the government of the United States during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis.
After much dramatic posturing on both sides, with the United Nations largely siding with the U.S., ongoing talks produced a solution after the Navy was fully deployed. For Moscow blinked. Oncoming Soviet ships carrying the weapons were turned back and Soviet nuclear missiles on the island were then removed.
In exchange, the U.S. agreed not to pursue regime change in Cuba. Privately, the U.S. also agreed to remove obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy.
Central to the peaceful resolution of the crisis was Kennedy's decision to respond to a more peaceful message from harried Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had his own hawks to deal with, rather than a more bellicose message in the same time period.
Afterward, the U.S. and Soviet Union established a permanent Hot Line between the two governments and agreed to a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as beginning moves toward an early detente. Then Kennedy was assassinated.
Later it was learned that Soviet commanders in the field had authorization to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of the massive U.S. air strikes and invasion, the first option pushed hard by the Pentagon and argued till the very end and beyond by ultra-hawk General Curtis LeMay, who accused Kennedy of cowardice. The strategy of LeMay, who in 1968 ran as a neo-fascist vice presidential running mate to segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, would have led to disaster.
There are good lessons to be drawn from the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was viewed around the world as a triumph for JFK and America.
President Kennedy, in the center of the frame writing on a legal pad, presides over an ExComm meeting in the Cabinet Room. To his left is Defense Secretary Robert McNamara; Robert F. Kennedy is slumped in his seat on the far left. With his back to camera wearing glasses is White House Special Counsel and ExComm member Ted Sorensen, later national co-chairman of Gary Hart for President and elder statesman advisor to Barack Obama.
1. Stay resolute yet flexible.
2. Keep talking to the adversary.
3. Listen to the adversary.
4. Be aware of what you don't know.
5. Be prepared to do battle at a moment's notice, but don't force the adversary to fight.
6. Brandish military power in a measured fashion.
7. If necessary, employ military power in a measured fashion.
As you can see, Trump has violated most, if not all, of these lessons in the Korean missile crisis and is in the process of doing the same with Iran.
And his false declaration that Iran is not complying with the nuclear deal that the other five parties to the accord -- Britain, Germany, France, Russia, and China -- all say is being complied with tells North Korea that Trump's America is a very unreliable party to any diplomatic agreement.
But of course we already know that this is a Joker Presidency. And that Trump is the world's principal "agent of chaos."
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