Cool Crisis Management? It's a Myth. Ask JFK.

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The Cuban Missile Crisis: Fact and Fiction

Revisiting the 13 terrifying days in October, 1962, when the world stood at the nuclear precipice.

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2. Some body always screws up. When Kennedy learned that Maultsby's spy plane had gone missing over the Soviet Union on Black Saturday, his reaction was laconic: "There's always some sonofabitch who doesn't get the word."

Which, of course, makes precisely calibrated "crisis management" impossible. Kennedy understood that the chances of dangerous, unpredictable events occurring skyrocket once you set the machinery of war in motion. He knew that history is determined not just by the "rational actors" but also by the irrational ones -- the blinkered generals, the excitable ideologues, the prophets living in caves.

The president understood, better than any of his advisers, that events were spiraling out of control by Black Saturday. That's why he moved to bring the crisis to an end by sending his brother, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, to meet with the Soviet ambassador to Washington and offer to dismantle U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey if the Soviets would withdraw their missiles from Cuba. That little detail remained a secret for nearly three decades, even as historians and journalists churned out books celebrating Kennedy's concession-free victory in his game of brinkmanship with Khrushchev.

3. Personality matters. The White House tapes from October 1962 demonstrate conclusively that Kennedy was the most dovish member of the 13-man Executive Committee of the National Security Council, known as the ExComm, that he set up to handle the crisis. On Black Saturday, most of the ExComm was unwilling to swap the obsolete Jupiters in Turkey for the Soviet missiles on Cuba. Kennedy "seems to be the only one in favor of it," Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor reported to his fellow generals. "He has a feeling that time is running out." So it was: Later that afternoon, the Joint Chiefs recommended a massive U.S. air attack on Cuba, to be followed by an invasion within seven days -- which we now know could have resulted in tens of thousands of U.S., Soviet and Cuban casualties, the nuking of the Guantanamo naval base and, quite possibly, full-scale nuclear war. We can only be grateful for JFK's restraint.

Kennedy derived his capacity for independent judgment from his own prior experience, both in and out of the White House. As the commander of PT-109, a patrol boat in the Pacific during World War II, he had learned to be mistrustful of abstract military theorizing. The Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961 had taught him to be skeptical of the assurances of the spymasters and the military brass.

Kennedy viewed history not as a propaganda argument to justify his decisions but as a cautionary tale. Earlier in 1962, he had read "The Guns of August," Barbara Tuchman's now-classic history of the way Europe blundered into World War I. He was so taken by the book that he asked all his aides to read it and had it distributed to every U.S. military base worldwide. The passage that impressed him most was a scene in which a German statesman asks why the war broke out and receives the reply, "If only one knew." Kennedy was determined that no survivor of a nuclear war would ever ask another, "How did it all happen?" only to be told, "If only one knew."

Had someone else been president in October 1962, the outcome might have been very different. We can only hope that the two men now vying for Kennedy's old job have absorbed the most important lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the choice between war and peace sometimes comes down to the decisions and judgment of a single, very lonely individual.

dobbsm@washpost.com

Michael Dobbs is the author of "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War." He writes the "Fact Checker" column for The Washington Post.