High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Parameters, Autumn, 2005 by Louis J. Nigro, Jr.

High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushehev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Max Frankel. New York: Ballantine, 2004. 206 pages. $23.95.

Max Frankel's monograph on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis adds another entry to a very long bibliography. Frankel is a distinguished American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who covered the missile crisis as a reporter for The New York Times in Washington. To that personal experience he has added a familiarity with the constantly expanding literature on the crisis, as well as what he describes as additional understanding of the political and diplomatic styles of the principal actors, derived from his reporting days in "Kennedy's Washington, Khrushchev's Moscow, and Castro's Havana."

Frankel's narrative tells the story of the 14-day crisis clearly and concisely, starting from the morning of 16 October 1962, when National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy brought to President John F. Kennedy's bedroom some photographs, taken by high-flying U-2 spy planes, that showed Soviet troops engaged in setting up nuclear-capable missile sites in Cuba. Frankel describes the crisis as rooted in the complementary miscalculations of Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The American President mistakenly believed that the USSR would never deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba; the Soviet leader believed that the Americans would acquiesce if they were deployed and presented as a fait accompli.

Frankel takes us briskly through the President's creation of the ExComm--short for the Executive Committee of the National Security Council--which quickly divided into "hawks," who favored early and robust military intervention to solve the problem of the missiles, and "doves," who favored reserving the full use of military force until other tools were applied to the situation. They first preferred a selective blockade of Cuba, called a "quarantine" to present it as something less than the act of war it in fact was, and a public demand that the Soviets withdraw the missiles. Frankel does a good job of setting the crisis within its broader diplomatic context, especially the ongoing dispute over the status of Berlin, exacerbated by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, as well as the deployment of US Jupiter missiles to Turkey, on the Soviet doorstep. Kennedy saw the introduction of missiles into Cuba as part of the larger, and more important, Soviet design on Germany. He wanted to avoid appearing weak in Cuba because that could embolden the Soviets on Berlin. Kennedy preferred to put the onus on Khrushchev in Cuba for starting a war that could escalate to the nuclear level. The President did not want to later face a similar situation over Berlin, in which the onus would be on the United States to begin hostilities in Europe involving nuclear weapons.

Frankel ably shows how Kennedy and Khrushchev both successfully maneuvered toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis, which in both cases involved overruling subordinates and calibrating bilateral moves carefully and judiciously. On the 26th and 27th of October, the crisis reached its tipping point. Khrushchev told Kennedy that he would remove Soviet missiles from Cuba if the United States promised not to invade Cuba, which Kennedy was prepared to do. Khrushchev then raised the stakes, however, demanding that the United States also remove the Jupiters from Turkey, which Kennedy's chief advisors opposed. They were concerned that any such action would have an effect on European allies who lived under proximate Soviet threat and who would see this as adding up to assuring US nuclear security at their expense.

Kennedy, relying on the expert advice of former Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson regarding Soviet expectations and negotiating techniques, and using his own brother Robert as unofficial envoy to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, arrived at an arrangement that satisfied both sides. The public deal was that the Soviets would take their missiles out of Cuba in exchange for a US promise not to invade the island. The private deal was that the United States would quietly remove the Jupiters from Turkey some months later. The Americans privately offered up the Jupiters because they were obsolete and already scheduled for removal. The Soviets accepted a private deal on the Jupiters because Khrushchev had in the meantime decided that the public deal was in itself sufficient, and because Soviet surface-to-air missiles had shot down an American U-2 plane and killed its pilot, bloodshed that Khrushchev feared might lead to an escalation he did not want.

Unfortunately, after giving us an able narrative of the affair, Frankel comes to the surprising and unorthodox conclusion that the crisis was never really all that close to resulting in nuclear war between the rival superpowers. Frankel believes that Kennedy and Khrushchev, both in firm charge of their respective governments and military establishments, were determined from the outset of the crisis to avoid war, especially nuclear war. "They understood," he writes, "that no issues of national survival were at stake, and they suspected, correctly, that powerful domestic pressures more than aggressive foreign ambition had led them into confrontation."