American History Hit - Cuban Missile Crisis

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

In October 1962, the United States confirmed that Soviet missiles were being deployed in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy had to contemplate the consequences of any US response, knowing an escalation of hostilities could end in all-out nuclear war. What followed was the period of greatest tension during the Cold War. When journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings started writing Abyss, his new book on the confrontation, he thought he was writing about the threat of nuclear war as history. But, as he tells Don in today’s episode, with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it has returned to present day.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hey there, it's Don, just jumping in to give you a quick heads up that this episode includes explicit language. It is October 18, 1962.

President John F. Kennedy is meeting with his advisors at the White House. They are discussing the possible consequences of a U.S. invasion of Cuba to remove the nuclear missiles they know are being deployed there by the Soviets. Would the USSR seize West Berlin in response? And if so, the president's brother, Bobby Kennedy asks, what do we do? Go to General War, answers the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor. Then the president asks the question, no U.S. president wants to ask. You mean nuclear exchange? Yes, you have to.

Comes the reply. It is one of many tense occasions during the famous 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Cold War came closest to full-scale nuclear conflict. It was described by one of JFK's aides as the most dangerous moment in human history. Greetings and welcome to American History Hit. Nice to have you. I'm Don Wildman. For me, the most rewarding and enriching aspect of studying history is the way that every major event can serve as a lens through which to understand the broader context of the era when that event occurred, the larger stage upon which the drama acted. Pick your metaphor. The big historical events

give us the opportunity to learn more than at first meets the eye. And this is certainly true about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Those dangerous, precipitous days when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over the threatening and provocative installation of nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba. Some 100 nautical miles from our shores.

It was 35 days or so that could have ended human civilization as we know it, truly a moment of extreme peril. And I'm speaking today with, well, accomplished is hardly the term, an author and journalist of such gigantic achievement as to make mortal men such as myself quiver in our boots. Welcome Sir Max Hastings to American History Hit.

It is his true honor. Well, it's great to be with you, Don, and I blush at your much-too-generous words. I'm holding a very, very comprehensive book about a subject that is extraordinary to me. Having been born in 1961, it is one of the bookends of my life and something that because I was a crib creature,

I know nothing or not enough about. I didn't experience it as folks like you or others did, such as my parents. The book I'm speaking of is recently released. It's entitled Abyss, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and covers this subject of such remarkable scope. It really is one of the great defining moments of modern history, covered by many before you, I must say.

But as you point out, we have sadly arrived at a moment when this nuclear threat spoken of so much about the Cuban Missile Crisis is now another contemporary subject for discussion. Well, when I started out on this book, I thought I was writing ancient history or relatively ancient history, and it has been incredibly spooky, how, as I started to write my last chapter, suddenly we find that the whole thing has a terrifying resonance. But once again, we have a terrifying nuclear gambler in the Kremlin who's taking risks such as seemed unimaginable a year or two ago. What I've tried to do in this book, of course you're right, there have been lots of books. about the missile crisis. Most of them major on the so-called 13 days in October 1962, between the moment on October the 16th when President Kennedy was told of U-2 photographs that

revealed the missiles in Cuba and October the 28th when the Kremlin totally unexpectedly backed down. But what I've tried to do is, first of all, to set this in the much wider context of the Cold War. so that anybody who reads the book will understand a good bit more about the Cold War as a whole. And secondly, to try to explain something about what sort of countries, the United States and the Soviet Union and Cuba were in those days. Because I think to understand the way their leaders behave, you have to understand where they were at. Now, one thing that absolutely fascinates me, the Moorite study is history, is all our nations spend billions on intelligence, on the gathering of intelligence. and yet in every crisis that comes our way, we find our leaders force to grope in almost total darkness as they try to figure out what the other side is doing. Now, in 1962, the group of men who sat with President Kennedy around the White House table were at every turn trying to think, what is Nikita Christchop, the Soviet leader think he doing by putting these missiles, watch his game.

And at almost every turn, they got it wrong. They completely misunderstood what was happening on the Soviet leader. other side. And we're seeing exactly the same today, that today with all the miracles of satellite photography, our intelligence organizations and our leaders know where Russian troops are going and what they're doing. But as to what's going on in the Kremlin, as to what Putin is thinking, what the real risk is, that he's going to let off a nuclear weapon, we just do not know. And this is the scary part that it's again this business of groping in the dark. Now, one big change, which if they give anything remotely good comes out of this horrible evil of the invasion of Ukraine, it's to force us to think once again, in a way we haven't thought since the end of the Cold War

about what nuclear weapons mean, that all my young days, as I was born in 1945, that we all grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, which almost every week there'd be some front-page headlines, whether in the Washington Post or in the London Times or anywhere at La Figuero in France, or anywhere else about new Berlin crisis, new Cuba crisis, new nuclear crisis, that the presence of nuclear weapons, the fear that the world was threatened with an end, was always with us. Now, when the Cold War ended, suddenly everybody says, well, right, that's lovely, that's over. And for the last 30 years, we've lived in this extraordinary, I won't say paradise, because it seemed very dangerous, but we've thought a great deal about terrorism, about conventional wars,

such as Iraq and Afghanistan, about climate change, but it's almost as if nuclear weapons has ceased to exist. We've just pretended they weren't there. And suddenly we have this man in the Kremlin, who is once again threatening us, as Nikita Christchot threatened, when he said, we will bury you to the West, that in the same way we've got this man threatening us,

and we have to get real again and start realizing what this nuclear-armed world means. And it's something some people find very difficult to get their minds around. The nukes never go away. They're always there. It's how people perceive them that changes. Their awareness of them, which is certainly the case in the 1960s, differently than now. I have vivid memories of grade school being taken to, you know, there were fire drills,

and there were nuclear war drills. There were atom bomb drills, we called them. And we would go down in the basement and pull a jacket over our heads and crouch down against the wall. That was going to protect us against nuclear Armageddon. But it was a constant awareness when we were young, and especially during this time period. This is the height of the Cold War, 1962. It eventually lasts all of 50 years, as you say. Very helpfully, in the beginning of your book, you have a chronology of events leading up to and after the crisis.

Well, right through from 1945 to 1990. Yeah, yeah. And when one considers the events that happened from the 40s into the 50s, it's just remarkable. I mean, what that generation went through and what was in. in the headlines for 10 years. You know, here in the United States, we have this enormous tendency towards nostalgia. In my childhood, there was a famous TV series

called Happy Days, and American graffiti came. My parents shook their heads in awe that we were, as a society, looking at that time period as this sort of glad, naive, great music and dancing period when it was such an intense political and militarily dangerous time that everyone was hyper aware of. absolutely right about the nostalgia, and I'm afraid we suffer from it too, that a very important

force in the missile crisis, one has to remember how brave, I think, how incredibly courageous President Kennedy was through the missile crisis, that when the news first broke, the overwhelming mood among his advisers, and especially among America's chiefs of staff, was to respond militarily by, first of all, bombing the shit, as they so courteously put it, out of the Russian missile sites on Cuba, and then launching a full-blown invasion. And it's terrifying how enthusiastic they were to do this. And at the almost the first meeting at the White House, and we have these wonderful tape recordings and transcripts, which I've listened to miserise, and of course have drawn on heavily for my book, at this almost first meeting when they agree at the White House

table that if America goes ahead with an invasion of Cuba, that it's highly likely that the Soviets will respond by seizing West Berlin, then a capitalist enclave up with British-American and French garrisons in the middle of communist East Germany. And Bobby Kennedy said, what do we do then? And General Maxwell Taylor, the wartime paratroop hero, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, America's most senior soldier, he says, guess we go to general war, if it's in the interests of ours. And Kennedy listens audibly disbelieving. He says you mean nuclear exchange, and Maxwell Taylor says, yes. And Kennedy says, that would be the ultimate failure. He said, everything we do here has got to be to work out how we avoid that scenario. And what's fantastic

is that in those first days and all the way through that you've got the president having to remind the others around the table of what the implications would be of some of the stuff they're suggesting. And after the missile crisis was over, Kennedy said to the great economist, Kenneth Galbraith, who was a friend of his as well as a colleague, and he said, Ken, you've no idea how much bad advice I received

in that first week. And what's amazing about Kennedy is the way that he displayed a wisdom which I've done a headcount of president since Kennedy, and I reckon that less than half of them could have been counted upon to make the same call that he did to hold off, to refrain from military action, even though, as you said at the outset, Cuba was barely less than 100 miles

from mainland America, and it was going to be easy-peasy, so the Chiefs of Staff taught to invade and occupy Cuba. And Kennedy realized the enormous, of this. And I feel one of the most important lessons of the missile crisis which we have to keep today is that although neither Kennedy nor Nikita Christchop are deficient in personal courage, both of them were prudently frightened stiff of thermonuclear war. And a great columnist, Walter Lippmann, he wrote at that time in his syndicated column, which was, and he was very

close to the administration. And Lippmann wrote, he said, I'm fed up with hearing people of American Conservative using the word appeasement and talking about 1938 in Munich. He said, it seems to me, he said, in the nuclear age, you can't use a word like appeasement, that he said, you have to realize that there've got to be deals, there've got to be trades and so on. And today, I mean, I've sometimes been accused of being an appeaser, because I've said in the context of Ukraine, that while there's no conceivable justification for what Putin has done, when I read people writing columns saying we've got to call Putin's bluff, we've got to achieve a generational victory over Russia, I don't buy into that at all. I just don't believe you can talk about appeasement when

you're dealing with a nuclear armed state, and when I also happen to think that Putin is a less stable personality than Christchop was in 1962. And Christchov, the remarkable thing about Christian, was that although in the eyes of the world, which his rhetoric was so terrifying, that he was such a dangerous figure, first of all, he was answerable to the Kremlin Presidium under the communist system. And although he was very much up the boss, that he did have to explain himself and justify himself to those men. And secondly, he never wavered in understanding that thermonuclear war was the ultimate catastrophe for the planet, which there could be no winners. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurs in October 1962. It's the second year of John F. Kennedy's presidency. He's been president for about 22 months or so. One of the major planks in his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon was a get tough policy with the Soviets. And specifically he meant to address what he called in the campaign a missile gap, a weakness in our nuclear readiness as compared to the Soviets. Can you explain the events behind that policy position? Were we in fact behind the Soviets at that point?

absolutely no way. And again, coming back this business, the weakness of intelligence, and also the sheer bellicosity, this is about nostalgia. One has to remember that all the leaders of America's armed forces were men formed by the experience of the Second World War, and above all by victory in 1945, by the fact that all of them had been closely involved in America's decisive victory over Germany and Japan. And they were always looking for victory. They were thinking in terms of victory. And they were incredibly unafraid of going head to head with the Soviets. And in 61, Joseph Alsop, very influential columnist, he wrote this series of columns, a lot of the briefing for which had come from General Thomas Power, the boss of SAC, a strategic air command,

about this so-called missile gap. And actually, it was all complete fiction. Well, it only became absolutely clear that it was fiction, although Kennedy and Robert McNamara had exploited it ruthlessly during the election campaign in 1960, when they get with British intelligence this amazing Soviet defector, or not defector, he was a double agent. He remained in place at the GRU. It was Soviet intelligence. And he gave the Americans and the British unbelievable detailed intelligence, including manuals on the Soviet missiles, which showed conclusively that the missile, there was indeed a missile gap, but it was hugely in America's favour, and that actually America had a superiority of 17 to 1 in nuclear warheads. Now, the Russians knew this, and all along

from the moment that Donny F. Kennedy broadcast to the American people, six days after he received intelligence about the missiles in Cuba, that the moment Christoph knew the missiles had been found, he knew privately he was going to have to back off because he knew he could not conceivably win in a nuclear exchange for the United States. But the degree of misinformation that was around and the fact that the American Chiefs of Star, I mean, I've read amazing transcripts from the United States Air Force oral history archive with all the men who were at the top of the United States Air Force in 62. And even after the missile crisis was over, and Christchoff had amazed everybody by backing off and removing his missiles, that these Air Force generals were,

expressing bitter regret. They were denouncing Kennedy and those around him for having denied America the opportunity of a historic victory. One of them, I remember in particular, he said, we could have gone in there to Cuba, we could have cleaned out that rat's nest, and we wouldn't have had any more trouble with the communist than Latin America for a decade or two. And this was after the missile crisis. They were still witty to this idea of victory. And this is, I think in the nuclear age, none of us, whether in the context of 1962 or the context of 2022, we can talk about victory that you just can't have absolute victories in the nuclear age. Well, the military, especially in the United States, had such power in those days, such a blank check. Yeah.

On behalf of both the government and the people. We were not far out from the victory of World War II, which was huge and profound, followed not long after, but. by the Korean War, less of a decisive victory, but nonetheless. What follows from that over the next few years in the 50s are incredible stories out of Eastern Europe, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Iron Curtain has been drawn. The word we are getting is that this is a lockdown state, a police state we're dealing with. This is the enemy in our sights at this point in time. All of this is the backdrop for what happens in Cuba in 1959, which is the rise of

Fidel Castro. Cuba had been more or less a playground of the United States in so many ways, both in business and pleasure. It was really a colony of the United States. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And for so long, I mean, we acquired Cuba in our minds as part of the Spanish-American War. That was not the case. But nonetheless, it was part of our imperial reach. Suddenly, in the 50s, things go haywire. Explain the rise of Fidel Castro in this time period. Well, it was an extraordinary business, because Fido Castro, in many ways, anywhere else but Cuba in the 50s and 60s, would have seemed a ridiculous figure. But he and his great honcho, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, one of the most overrated popular idols of modern times, that these two were in many ways

lousy guerrillas, but they were up against this fantastically unpopular regime of the Batista regime in Cuba. and the only people who kept supporting the Batista regime. And I've written about this at length, because you have to understand it to explain where things were there, was the American ambassador. He was the only ally that mattered for Batista. And there were Batista's death squads roaming the streets, killing anybody.

They identified as an enemy of the regime. And the Cuban people, they really got to hate Batista. And through that, they hated the United States for supporting Batista. The only people who didn't actually prefer, there was the Cuban economy was actually doing surprisingly well in the late 50s, and there was a rising Cuban middle class. And they weren't too worried, frankly, about how horrible the Batista regime was. They were perfectly happy to ride the boom. So by 1959, Batista had run out of road, and he's obliged to flee the country,

and New Year, 1959, Fidel Castro marches into Havana through cheering crowds. over the next year or two, first of all, most of the middle class simply quit Cuba in the face of wholesale nationalisation. And the Americans, Richard Nixon very interestingly, he had a long conversation with Fido Castro in Washington. And Nixon reported to President Eisenhower that he thought, whatever you thought of Castro, he was a seriously charismatic figure who was going to be very big in Latin America. and that the United States ought to try and do business with him. Eisenhower wouldn't go along with that at all. Eisenhower was convinced that Castro had got to be got rid of.

And this, of course, is where all the trouble started, but they set about, first the Eisenhower administration, and then the Kennedy administration took over, try everything under the sun, including ridiculous, poisoning attempts and assassinations employing the mafia to get rid of Castro. And I've argued in my book that if the United States had been, been a bit more patient, and if it hadn't displayed, if it hadn't got so accustomed to telling the Cubans which side of the bed to get out of, that just as Fidel Castro found that he needed the

Soviet Union and his friends, so to keep his regime going, he needed the United States as enemies. And it was extraordinary how even the Kennedy administration, these immensely intelligent, enlightened, educated men convinced themselves that they had the right to decide who ruled Cuba. and again, intelligence was so poor that they convinced themselves that any move to overthrow Castro was going to be greeted by cheering crowds in the street. And first of all, they got a terrible shock in April 61 when they sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to try and overthrow Castro. And the whole thing turned into a farce and the CIA had screwed up big time. And nobody was showing the slightest signs in Cuba of wanting to sign up with these exiles. Castro was still.

very popular. And the following year, during the missile crisis, again, these very intelligent guys around the White House table, they convinced themselves that if the United States forces invaded Cuba, that there would be immediate sort of thousands of people on the streets of Havana overthrowing People's Revolution to overthrow Castro, and they'd all be welcoming the Americans as liberators. And it wasn't like that. And there was a sort of black comic moment, one of many black comic moments during the missile crisis, when there were demonstrations all over Europe against the Americans, including some big ones in London, because a lot of American people were as frightened of an American overreach as they were of a Soviet one. And Dean Rusk, the Secretary of

State, said at the White House table, he said, you know those mobs that we were hoping we were going to turn up on the streets of Havana to throw out, feed our Castro, they turned up on the streets of London and are storming the American embassy. And, I mean, what? One of the things about the missile crisis and about this whole nuclear showdown business, there's so much black comedy. This is where Standing Kubrick's sensational, great classic film, Dr. Strangelove, was so near the reality. When you've got the day Jack Kennedy was about to broadcast the American people

to tell them this terrible news about the missiles in Cuba. And Jack Kennedy is standing on the balcony of the White House, looking at the draft script with two of his advisors, and he turns to them and he says, we are very close to war. And there isn't room in the White House shelter for all of us. It's very hard not to love and admire, a man who can produce that sort of droll joke

at a terrifying moment like that. I'll be back with more from Max Hastings in just a moment. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, you mentioned, happens in 1961. This is one of the big dominoes that falls towards the October crisis. that was already in the works when Kennedy came into power. It had been starting to be planned under the Eisenhower administration.

This was really a result of something even today. We hear about Cuban exiles in southern Florida. It's a major population down there, still opposed to Castro and still a major political force. Among those were recruited many, many people, hundreds of people to go to Central America and train as an army, in quotation marks. to actually attack the island of Cuba. This failed miserably. Why was that?

Well, it was a crazy idea at the CIA's, and I've always been, I'm afraid, when I was working as a correspondent in Vietnam, a few years later, one used to see quite a lot of the CIA, and I must say one was very often, they had some very good intelligence gatherers, excellent intelligence gatherers,

but at the same time, some of their Boy Scouts, who were running covered operations, I'm afraid one found it very difficult to respect or admire. And the fact that these guys convinced themselves that if they just got together a few Cuban exiles and landed in Cuba, that the Castro regime would just fall over, it was absolute madness.

And for instance, you take weapon them, you think how long it takes to train a soldier who is capable of doing much on the battlefield. Well, some of those Cuban exiles whom the CIA recruited and put on the ships to go and invade Cuba, they didn't get to handle weapons and live ammunition until they were on the ships bound for Cuba and to think that these people, you can't just, the tactical, the invasion. I mean, I don't personally think a lot of heroic narratives were constructed about the Bay of Pigs by both sides afterwards, and I don't think much military genius was displayed by other side on the beaches. They all fired off

a lot of ammunition at each other, but I don't think either Castro's people or the invaders were up to much, and the invaders had had all their ammunition blown to hell by an airstrike in the first few hours. But I'm afraid one of the nastiest aspects of the Bay of Pigs was that there's not much doubt. A lot of the people who went along with it. And remember that the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, they told the White House that they looked into this and they'd sent their people down to look at the exiles and they thought this was a goer and it would all be all right. And I'm afraid that in their minds they believe that what, Once an invasion force was ashore and shooting had started on a beach in Cuba, that they could

blackmail, and yes, it was blackmail. They could blackmail the president into sending American forces in to support them. And there were American warships and aircraft offshore, and they were all enraged. And again, in the oral history archives, the evidence from the senior officers of that period, but they were outraged when Kennedy refused to authorise air support for the invaders, when he refused to send in American warships in support and so on. And these guys, and there's not much doubt, they just thought if we can just get a shooting party going ashore on Cuba, then the White House will have no choice but to back it up and we can't, they couldn't possibly allow an American failure.

And actually, one of the smartest things that Kennedy did, yes, he freely admitted, it that he'd screwed up big time by authorizing the invasion in the first place. But he did at least know when to pull the plug and just refused to go in any deeper because it would have been such a mess. I mean, it would have been such a murderous, bloody business if American forces had gone into Cuba then. It was the prompt for Castro to reach out to the USSR, though, for help. This begins the chess game, am I right? Yes, it was sort of inevitable that once it became clear. I don't know whether it was ever realistically going to be possible for the United States and the Castro regime to go along, because successive American administrations for more than 60

years have grown accustomed to the idea that they had a divine right to tell Cuban governments how to run their affairs. And Castro and Che Guevara were never going to go along with that. And why should they have been? And it was left to the British Prime Minister, Harold McMillan, publicly during the missile crisis, he gave total support to the Americans. But privately, he was reminding Jack Kennedy, first of all, that the Europeans have been living under the threat of Soviet missiles for many years and had just had to learn to put up with it. And secondly, that legally and morally, the Cubans had just as much right as a sovereign state to invite the Soviets to install missiles on their soil as the British and the Turks and the Italians

had done in inviting United States to put its missiles on their soil. But of course, Americans didn't see it like that. An American historian I very much admire John Lewis Gaddis. He was one of those who pointed out that an important mistake about the missile crisis, it's often thought to have been strategic that suddenly there was this great new threat to the United States. It wasn't. It was a political crisis because what was absolutely obvious, it didn't actually make the citizens the United States more threatened. It didn't make a more dangerous. It didn't make a more dangerous world for Americans. But it was plain that the Soviets had done this with an aggressive intent to challenge the United States. And the people of the United States responded that this

was an insult they couldn't endure. But did it increase the threat to them? I mean, within a year or two of the missile crisis, you had submarines with ballistic missiles, both sides submarines with ballistic missiles roaming the oceans of the world, and especially off the coast of the United States and off the coast of the Soviet Union, with far more dangerous to Russians and Americans than the Cuban missiles. So the Cuban missile, it was a political crisis, but it was a seminal crisis because the fact I've always thought, even though the men in the White House and the Kremlin didn't want nuclear war,

if the United States had gone ahead with its invasion that came very close and they were giving the Russian troops of whom were far more on Cuba than the CIA or the US military understood. If they'd been giving them a pasting, which they would have been, I do not believe that the Russian commanders ashore would just have endured that sort of pasting, taken a defeat, suffered thousands of casualties, and not used at least some of the tactical nuclear weapons they had on the island. Again, another huge intelligence failure.

American intelligence had no idea that the Russians had these tactical nuclear weapons, several dozen of them, on Cuba. and there were no technological safeguards to prevent the local Russian commanders on Cuba from firing those things in the same way that it was a local commander, a Russian commander on Cuba, who gave the order to shoot down an American U2 killing its pilot, which also was another desperate moment of escalation. So all the way through, you've got these dreadful failures of communication, and all the way through the only man who kept his cool almost consistently was John F. Kennedy. And one thing he understood from the beginning, and this is terribly important, he saw all along, whereas many of his advisers, and certainly the chiefs were start, they thought the only rightful

response to the missiles was to bludgeon the Soviets into submission. And Kennedy saw that right from the beginning there was going to have to be some sort of deal. Now, he didn't want that deal to be known to the American people, because if it was, American conservatives would have given him a terrible hammering. So after it was all over, when President Eisenhower asked him directly if he'd made any concessions to the Soviets in order to get them to withdraw their missiles, Kennedy lied. He said only that he promised quite openly that the United States would never again intervene militarily in Cuba, which indeed a promise it's kept. He did not tell President Eisenhower, who had been appalled that he had privately given assurances through his brother Bobby that,

if the Russians got their missiles out of Cuba, the United States would, within a matter of months, remove their missiles, their Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which the United States did. So there was a dirty deal. And the Kennedy administration lied and lied. And I'm afraid again, I've been accused of being an appeaser by saying that I bet at some point the Ukraine crisis, if it doesn't end with some ghastly Holocaust, which we should never rule out the dreadful possibility. But more likely, think it will end in some sort of dirty deal. And I've been accused of being in a piece of a saying this, it'll end in another dirty deal because an awful lot of crises do end in dirty deals. And people hate to think of this, but I think part of John F. Kennedy's superb wisdom,

superb cool in the missile crisis, he knew the hat to be a dirty deal. Let's talk about those dealings. It's important to underscore the fact that the United States has already planted nuclear weapons in foreign locales, as we are present at the time so aghast at the fact that the Soviets are on their way to planting them off of our shores. Nuclear weapons are in Turkey. At this point, in the early 60s, are in Turkey, they are in Italy, and in England. France has turned them down. That's why they went elsewhere. But we have nuclear weapons, a whole set of them, pointed in the direction about a thousand miles away from Moscow, I would say. Nonetheless, even today, as I consider this as a, you know, person of 2022, my hackles go up to think of the, the audacity of coming to

Cuba and putting nuclear weapons right there. I mean, to this day, I would have the same reaction. And that was really at the core of this. There was no consideration of the double standard. There was no, it didn't need to be in the argument. We have the Monroe Doctrine. Nobody comes to our front door step and puts a nuclear missile. Of course, no one's even thinking about submarines and all the rest of the things that are going on at that time, but that's at the core of all of this, and that speaks to what you're saying about a political crisis. We're right at the midterms. You're absolutely right about this, and Kennedy was very mindful of the looming midterm elections, and the Europeans saw this very clearly. And opinion in Britain, for instance, although

Britain remained an absolutely resolute ally of the United States all the way. through the Cold War. In the missile crisis, opinion was very deeply divided, and even a lot of members of the Conservative government of Harold McMillan were very unhappy about the American position because they did see this huge hypocrisy in it. And I found it fascinating, studying the correspondence columns of the Times newspaper through the crisis. And the Times has never been exactly a liberal mouthpiece. And yet the overwhelming majority of the voices in the Times' letters column were hostile to the American position. One letter, I quoted quite a few of them in the book, but one of them in particular stuck in my mind. He said the United States has introduced a wonderful

clarity into foreign policy. If it installs missiles on somebody else's soil, these are defensive. And if somebody else installs missiles anywhere near the United States, these are offensive. And a lot of British people who were not communist sympathizers were resolutely hostile to the Soviet Union. and they didn't understand the American attitude at all. And there was also, of course, everybody knew that there were some pretty wild men at the head of America's armed forces, and some of them were shooting off their mouths in public.

And that's what made, I remember so well the impact that Dr. Strangelove, when it was released a year or two later, the movie, and me seeing it as a late teenager. And this seemed incredibly real to us, because we knew General Curtis LeMay, the head of the United States Air Force, the missile crisis, he was not far off, one of the wild men in Dr. Strange Love. He was completely unafraid of going head to head with the Soviets, and he thought, if the Soviets are stupid enough to start chucking nukes, we can beat them.

General Thomas Pair, the head of SAC, went public as saying, if there's a war, and at the end of it all, there are two Americans left and one Russian, we won. Can you imagine any military man of any nationality saying that today? And yet this was said by the head of the strategic air Come up. Yes, these are men who, in World War II, LeMay especially, who were responsible for enormous amounts of deaths. We were a blooded country at that point, at least within the military, coming out of those years. Let's get to the events of the crisis itself. When are the missiles first planted in Cuba? The missiles came in sort of successive waves through the summer of 1962. First up were anti-aircraft missiles because they started planting enormous numbers of

anti-aircraft missiles to defend the ballistic missile sites. And then you had these two types of ballistic missiles, which arrived in the months that followed. And what is amazing is that although US intelligence understood that the Soviets were up to something big, they couldn't figure out what. And again, the Kennedy administration afterwards lied about the fact that they were very unkeem, whereas the CIA was frequently demanding U-2 overflights of the whole island. to look for missile sites. And at that time, many members of the administration, especially, including Dean Rust, the Secretary of State, were very anxious. They were trying for de-escalation of the Cold War. They didn't want to escalate, and they were very wary about authorizing

U-2 overflights. And this, of course, afterwards by the Hawks after the event, was hailed as evidence of the Kennedy administration's feebleness. And certainly the head of the CIA was extremely savage about the fact that permission have been explicitly refused for U-2-over flights in the... It was quite some weeks before the crisis broke. What sets off the big alarms? When does Kennedy get the word that this is going on?

The big alarm was created after enormous pressure was brought to bear on the White House, especially by the head of the CIA, who said they got to have U-2-over flights. They got to see what Earth was going on in Cuba because they knew the Russians were up to something. He said repeatedly. said they're not putting all these anti-aircraft missiles there just to improve the view.

They're putting them there because they've got assets to defend. And he guessed that these were ballistic missiles. So eventually he gets the authority to launch U2 overflights. But the weather is lousy and U2, although did amazing things from 75,000 feet, it couldn't see through thick overcast. And not till October the 14th did U2 manage to get a clear sight and photograph these missile sites. And first thing on the morning of October the 16th,

that National Security Advisor at Mac Bundy goes into the White House mansion and into Jack Kennedy's bedroom where the children are watching television, Jack Kennedy is still in his pajamas, and he says, Mr. President, we have Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, and we have photographs to prove it.

And Kennedy's first remark was, we're going to have to bomb them. and then his brother was called in Bobby, and Bobby said his usual statesman-like restraint, shit, shit, shit, those son of bitch Russians. This begins the famous 13 days. I've always wondered why this became so public, so fast, to the point that it is so famous an event,

you would have thought this would be a cloak and dagger situation. It's hard to overstate. It was a cloak and doughty a situation for the first week, for the first six days. that all the discussions around the White House table, everything about the photographs was kept under wraps while they discussed around the White House table what they were going to do, whether they're going to bomb, whether they're going to invade, where they're going to blockade. And on the whole, a lot of the opinion favoured bombing and occupation.

And it was only after the photographs had come to Kennedy on the Monday, and it was only on the succeeding Saturday that he finally made the decision that they go for blockade. they would first blockade and that on the Monday he would tell the American people in the world about this. And then, I mean, the world was stunned by this broadcast, this amazing announcement, when Kennedy said there are Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba and they've got to be removed. And if they're not removed, we will remove them. And if any of these missiles are launched at the United States, we will undertake full nuclear retaliation at the Soviet Union. and this was an absolutely explicit direct threat

and the rest of the world was absolutely appalled and terrified and for the next six days until the Soviets backed off and it was only at the last minute that it was plain that they were backing on that the world was hanging onto its hand I mean it was it was the tension all the way through one night the British Prime Minister's secretary came home late one night from Downing Street and he went into the bedroom where his wife was still awake and he said, I'm terribly sorry to say this, but we may be at war in the morning. So even people who were in

the loop who were informed about what was going on really believed that war could come. A British Defence Minister, Peter Thornycroft, he recorded afterwards how on the last weekend the crisis, how on a beautiful sunny day he walked up a white hall that was completely empty it being a weekend. He went into the Ministry of Defence and he looked up at this beautiful sky and he just thought, is this really it? Is this the moment when we're about to go to war? And this is on the 12th day of the crisis. This is when the moment far from everybody thinking we're heading towards that people thought that high noon was still ahead. And there was astonishment, not least in the White House, when on the Sunday morning suddenly this dramatic

news that Moscow radio has broadcast an open letter to President Kennedy announcing that they're going to remove the missiles. And there were two reasons for this. And this is also very important in the context of Ukraine today. One of the reasons that Khrushchev backed off was because he realized that the Soviet Union could not possibly win a general war with the United States. But secondly, he believed that the United States had both the means and the will to take direct. military action if he did not pull the missiles out of Cuba. He was in no doubt in his mind. He believed that the Americans were going to invade Cuba within a matter of hours. Now, in fact, they weren't primed to invade. They were ready. Sure, the Marines were aboard the ships. The armored division was

moving towards the Florida coast and so on. So, but they weren't going to invade, but it was the threat of American force. So I've argued in the last pages of my book, I've said, in a crisis like this, what's the lesson you learn? And the lesson is you need. on the one hand to know how to show restraint, to be afraid of what these missiles mean. But you also need resolution and you need military capability. I invite anyone who is younger than the age 60, I guess, to listen to that Kennedy address on October 22nd. It's one of the most dramatic presidential moments that you can imagine, and it's delivered with this sense of pathos. It is clear that we are on the edge there.

The next day begins the blockade, October 23rd. What were they actually blockading? What was coming their way? They specifically said that they were going to block any sort of nuclear or even conventional arms shipments to Cuba. And over the days that followed, there was terrific towing and fraying about whether they should include oil tankers that were headed for Cuba. Kennedy specifically excluded anything involving food because you were anxious to be at pains to show the Cuban people that he wasn't waging war on the Cuban people. but the blockade in some ways was less dramatic than it appeared because the Russian ships that were carrying troops and missile parts turned around pretty smartly rather than cross the blockade line.

But not only was Curtis LeMay for the US Air Force very belligerent, so was Admiral George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations. And the US Navy played very rough with Soviet submarines right out in the open Atlantic, outside the blockade line, dropping dummy depth charges, which I can tell you, I've been in a submarine under the surface, and I've heard these practice depth charges explode and they're clanging against the hull, and it's pretty scary. And certainly the Soviet crews were pretty scared,

and in fact there's always been the story, although I'm a little bit unsure about it, that one Soviet captain threatened to fire his nuclear torpedo in the face of this sort of harassment. But what is for sure is that the US Navy was hustling these Soviet submarines in a way that very doubtful legality. It was just based on the fact that the US Navy, like the US Air Force, they felt they were more or less, they were near enough at war. And they were absolutely determined to seize the opportunity to show the Soviets where

they got off. And they played a pretty dangerous hand in those days. They got away with it, but there were some moments when it really got pretty scary. So in the end, Kennedy wins this game in the public arena. But in some regards, it's a bit of a draw, am I right? It's certainly true that the American Chiefs of Staff believe that they've been deprived of a real chance of an outright American victory. And there was a lot of anger that Kennedy had refused to go the distance with the Soviets. I think in awarding the palm to Kennedy, first of all, for his restraint for what he didn't do, but also for, yes, he got as near to victory as anybody could in the nuclear situation,

was that the Soviet Presidium, Khrushchev's colleagues were in absolutely no doubt who'd won, that they never forgave Khrushchev for the humiliation to which he'd caused their country to be subjected, forcing him to back off these missiles. And they were in no doubt two years later when Khrushchev was finally deposed by the Presidium and several Presidium members directly attacked him,

raising the issue of Kupa and saying, our country has never suffered such humiliation as you subjected to. So those Russians were in no doubt at all at who'd won the missile crisis. But yes, it's also true that American conservatives, Republicans, would have been outraged if they'd known that Kennedy had given away the missiles in Turkey in order to get the missiles out of Cuba. And yes, for those who like purity and truth, the Kennedy administration did tell plenty of lies about what had happened. You worked in the United States in the 60s as a journalist. Did you run into a few of these figures yourself? Did you have your own conversations with him? Oh, yeah. I've said in my introduction to this book, I'm not sure I

dared to write it if I hadn't been living in the States five years after the missile crisis. And I met as a reporter, because I reported the 68 election and on my travels, I met a lot of the players. I met Bobby Kennedy on his campaign plane, talked to him a bit, Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson, and a lot of the others. And I visited Sack headquarters in Omaha with this famous huge sign outside it. Peace is our profession, which of course Stanley Kubrick in his movie

had made famous or notorious. And the mood in those days, I remember still, a lot of Americans in those days, conservative Americans, was still very suspicious of me as a Brit because they regarded that the Brits was pretty soft on the commies.

And there was a phrase, among British nuclear disarmers better red than dead, which really enraged American conservatives because they felt that this was typical of how pathetic the British could be in the face of the red peril. So I had very vivid memories of what the United States was. And I mean, I've argued again in my book that you have to see a lot of those people who were the lead players in the missile crisis as not BC and AD, but BV and AV, before Vietnam and after Vietnam. And after Vietnam because of course Vietnam inflicted this dreadful humiliation on the United States. But of course in those days at the time the missile crisis, Vietnam, it was only just getting

going. And most of the people around the White House table, they were convinced that Vietnam could be won. And the hubris, the confidence of America at that time, that America, here it was, the victor of World War II, as you said, the sort of victor of career, the nation that had achieved, this awesome, the greatest economic success the world had ever seen. How could Americans not believe that anything was possible for them at that time? And in particular, the idea that a load of raggedy-ass Cubans was going to tell them what they were going to do was just beyond their ken. Of course, the great irony is Fidel Castro continues on for decades after and never leaves power at all in the end. Oh, he was the big winner from the missile crisis. Yes. Sir Max Hastings, your new book is a

Biss, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, I've not read a more readable account, a more accessible account to these complex events in my time, which has a great bearing on my own lifetime. So I hope many who are like me will pick up this book as soon as possible. Thank you very much for all you've done. Thank you so much, Dol. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.