Fifty years ago tonight, President John Kennedy took to the airwaves to tell the American people that the Soviets had based nuclear missiles in Cuba, and that in response, he would impose a naval blockade of the island nation. The 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world has yet come to nuclear war.
From Cuba, the Russian missiles could hit New York or DC in 10 minutes. It was a supreme test of US resolve — and of Kennedy, whose passivity and hesitation had invited the challenge.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had watched Kennedy fumble the Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Fidel Castro; do nothing when Khrushchev split Berlin with a concrete wall; and then visibly wilt under Khrushchev’s bullying in a face-to-face meeting in Vienna.
Khrushchev had sized up Kennedy as an ineffectual leader who could be intimidated — and Kennedy sensed it. “Probably thinks I’m stupid,” Kennedy grumbled after the disastrous Vienna meeting, “Maybe, most important, he thinks I had no guts.”
So when a high-flying CIA spy plane photographed Russian missile sites on Cuba on Oct. 14, 1962, Kennedy set out to prove Khrushchev wrong.
The president’s military advisers, senior members of Congress and even his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, urged him him to use immediate airstrikes to knock the missile sites out. But JFK demurred, concerned that any rash action could provoke an equally rash Soviet response, including in Berlin, where American and Soviet tanks were separated by only a few yards.
Yet the president was also disinclined to heed doves like UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who believed diplomacy and concessions, perhaps even surrendering our naval base at Guantanamo, could get Khrushchev to see reason.
So on that fateful night Kennedy announced to the nation a middle course: a naval blockade to stop any more missiles or warheads from being shipped to Cuba — even if it meant firing on Soviet ships.
Here, Kennedy was able to play his trump card: a US Navy with more than 900 active vessels, including 26 aircraft carriers and 118 submarines, 14 of them armed with the latest nuclear-tipped Polaris missiles. The Soviet navy was hardly more than a coastal defense force with outdated submarines and sub-launched nukes with a range of just 300 miles, versus 1,500 miles for the Polaris.
America and the world held their collective breath. As the US armada blanketed the Caribbean and Navy planes dominated the skies over and around Cuba, B-52s circled the North Pole on DefCon 2 high alert and 170 US ICBMs were readied on launch pads.
America had the far stronger hand, and Khruschev knew it. Though Kennedy had won the 1960 election in part by denouncing a “missile gap” to the supposed US disadvantage, the Strategic Air Command had a nuclear arsenal eight times bigger than Russia’s. Against those 170 US intercontinental missiles, for example, Khrushchev had barely a couple of dozen.
So when the height of the crisis came, on Oct. 24, as US Navy ships confronted Soviet freighters and three subs off Cuba’s coast, Khrushchev had already told them to turn tail if challenged — such was his fear that his bluff would start a war he would certainly lose.
On the 28th, Kennedy quietly offered to withdraw some obsolete US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet ruler would pull all his forces out of Cuba; Khrushchev took the deal with relief.
Never again would the United States enjoy such an overwhelming advantage over its Cold War rival, and Kennedy’s triumph in Cuba would soon be followed by his mistakes over Vietnam.
Fifty years ago, we had a Navy of 900 ships; today, it’s barely 285, and set to shrink with President Obama’s promise of deeper defense cuts. Yet the more troubling issue is the passivity and hesitation Obama has shown in dealing with Iran, China and the growing crisis in the Middle East.
For the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that — and who won’t leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn’t.
Arthur Herman’s latest book is “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.”