School of War - Ep 81: Max Hastings on the Cuban Missile Crisis

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Max Hastings, journalist, military historian, and author most recently of Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, joins the show to talk about the world’s brush with World War III.  ▪️ Times      •    01:41 Introduction      •    01:59 From journalism to history     •    07:06 Recollections     •    09:40 Castro and the Bay of Pigs     •   19:46 Overflights      •    26:46 Quarantine and blockade      •    33:45 Russian floundering     •    35:52 Dealmaking      •   40:07 Uncomfortable proximity      •    42:36 Spheres of influence Follow along on Instagram

The Cuban missile crisis brought the United States and the USSR to the brink of war, and it concluded in a mutual climb down. The Soviets pulled their missiles out of Cuba, while we pulled some of our own strategic assets out of Turkey, and proclaimed that we were stepping back from a policy of regime change for Havana. With recent reports that the People's Republic of China is building robust espionage facilities in a still hostile Cuba, the consequences of those tense days in the autumn of 1962 are, clearly very much still with us. So what actually happened? And did Kennedy actually do a good job? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am absolutely delighted to be joined today by Max Hastings. Mr. Hastings is the author of 28 books, most recently books like Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose, All Best Sellers, and then very most recently, a book called The Abyss, Nuclear Crisis, Cuba, 1962.

Max, thanks so much for joining the show. My pleasure, Howard. Maybe you could tell us a bit, you know, in addition to being an author of books about security and military history, you're obviously a journalist, you were editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard. Tell us a bit about your career and how you move from journalism to history writing. Even when I was a kid, I was always fascinated by history and by wars. And I grew up in a household, like quite a few rather lucky households, which all the men, first of all, had survived World War II,

but had managed to enjoy the experience of World War II. They had exciting times, and they did interesting things. And I grew up with ridiculous ideas about wars, the result of this, I was fascinated by us, And my father sort of convinced me that I was terribly unlucky to have missed the Second World War. Now, when I was a teenager, I thought about becoming a soldier. And I got as far as doing the parachute course with the British Army parachute regiments and spent some time with them. But then after a while, I realized I was not cut out to be a soldier.

First of all, I'm six foot five tall and incredibly badly coordinated. And after I'd done a big exercise in Cyprus with one of our parachute battalions, I just decided I had a place at Oxford to read history, and I decided I was going to go and be a student rather than try to be a professional soldier. And I would like soldiers, which a lot of people of my generation in my calling doubt. But I remained fascinated, and I wanted to write about these things. And when I became a journalist, which was after I left Oxford in the mid-1960s, there were a hell of a lot of wars going on in the world, and those were the big stories. And I reported, I think 11 walls all told, including, I suppose, for my generation, the big one was always Vietnam.

And I learned a lot. First of all, I learned that everything my family and my father had told me about what fun war was, was crazy. And I really spent most of the last 40, 50 years, trying to understand the reality of wars, which, of course, these are terrible things. And one reason one feels such a rage towards George W. Bush, were going to Iraq, towards Vladimir Putin for up going into Ukraine, is because these people, one felt they had no comprehension. These were politicians who'd never experience wars, and they had no conception

of the unspeakable horrors that they were unleashing. And I guess my whole sort of life story has been about trying to understand some of the realities. Now, that doesn't make me a pacifist. On the contrary, the old cliche is true that in wars you find that people do You see the very best of human nature, and you see the very worst. But, go, the bad bits are pretty awful. And in many ways, the people who have the least terrible experience of wars, this may sound crazy to say, are the soldiers, the professionals, the soldiers and the flyers and the sailors, because the professionals who are mostly fit young men are doing stuff that a lot of cases

they want to do, the people who really, really suffer, are civilian populations. And when I first started writing that one thought the soldiers were the important part of wars, well, of course they're important in one sense because they decide outcomes. But more and more of my books, and especially in my book, All Hell Left Loose, which is called Inferno in the United States, I was trying to get around the fact that by far the overwhelming proportion of the casualties in World War II were civilians, and especially women and children. and it was realizing, I think to me, it was a very important step in writing about war to understand that if you're going to write these things, you've got to talk about what happened to them

as well as what happened to the soldiers. So my whole life has been a learning process, and I guess it still is a learning process. And I've had the good fortune when I was younger. And not only, yes, I think being a reporter in the 60s and 70s from a lot of battlefields, I did learn quite a bit about what it's like at the sharp end. And secondly, also, when I started writing about the Korean War, about Vietnam, about the Second World War, one had the opportunity in those days to meet a lot of the veterans, both men and women, both Americans and Chinese and Japanese and Germans and British,

and gosh, you do learn an enormous amount from listening to these people. I don't believe everything they say that all old soldiers, sailors and airmen, they spin a yarn as well as saying important things. But I certainly remember some of the conversations I've had over the last 40, 50 years, and they've been enormously valuable in the informing my book. So I've had a terribly sort of fortunate life, and I always regarded the years of the newspaper editor as an interruption, a very exciting interruption, and of course a very privileged interruption. but it was really an interruption in my real business of being a historian and chronically in conflict. Now, before we come to your research and writing on the Cuban Missile Crisis, what are your personal recollections of it? You would have been, what, a young teenager?

Yeah, well, I was, yeah. I was 15 and 60 at the time of the missile crisis. And what's so awful, I think I was mostly thinking about how to try to get out of football when I was at school. And we were also, when you're that young, you are fantastically responsible and you don't think so much about the big things. Although one of those stories I tell in my book when I was writing the Missile Crisis book, that a former R.F pilot who had been at school about the same age as me in Kent in South East England during the missile crisis, and he described how before a math class that he and the other kids in his class all about 16. 17 were discussing what was going to happen if there was nuclear war and if there was a sort of form of a warning that they were all going to be incinerated. And he told me in his letter, he said a very pretty girl named Gilliam. She said she and some of her friends had decided

what they were going to do with their last few minutes with some extremely fortunate boys. But she said, gosh, she said, if the warning turns out to have been a false alarm, some of us girls are going to sound pretty stupid. So the memories, I think, for a lot of people of that age, when you're a teenager, you're very irresponsible. And some of it was very funny, but some of it was also very serious. I mean, another friend of mine, same age as me, he said he sincerely believed that they were going to die.

And so I think it was that teenage phase in 62. It was the first experience of our lives of being. faced with crisis personally. Oddly enough, a year later, I was with a parachute regiment in Cyprus. When the news came through in an olive grove, somewhere in the middle of Cyprus, the President Kennedy had been shot. And all I remember, age 17, was in the middle of a long, incredibly arduous exercise in which I was utterly exhausted, half dead with thirst.

And all I could think about in that olive grove that day was how unhappy I was, and I could scarcely get my mind around, President Kennedy stuff. So, I don't know, kids, when you're a kid, you're not very smart, are you? Teenagers don't seem to change much, I agree. So let's talk about the crisis, but maybe what we could start with is, if you wouldn't mind, paint a bit of a picture of the situation that exists between the United States and Cuba before the introduction of strategic weapons and everything else that goes along with them onto the island. You know, So what was it about Fidel Castro that's so aggravated Americans? What was the Bay of Pigs?

Just tell us the scene that would have been common knowledge in 1962. I've said in my book that I think especially when you're talking about America's leaders of those days, the Kennedy administration, you don't talk about BC and AD. I talk about BV and A-D, and A-V, meaning before Vietnam and after Vietnam, that before Vietnam, which changed a lot and did terrible damage to the self-confidence of America's leadership. That what had really formed America's leaders and, indeed, the American people, was the experience of World War II, which ended an absolute victory, and with the United States coming out of the war, feeling that not only had it been supremely virtuous in its role in

World War II, but it had won an absolute victory, and since that victory, it had achieved an economic dominance such as the world had never seen. And not too surprisingly, a vast number of Americans, including some in Washington, D.C., they really sincerely believe that God was on their side, and they sincerely believed that God had made them the arbiter of a large part of the world. And America's allies, based in the Cold War with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, was so grateful and so desperate for that American nuclear umbrella that they sure as hell were not going and challenge that sense of American supremacy and America's rightness. Now, in the middle of all this, when you, at a time when Americans were feeding incredibly

good about themselves and also incredibly prosperous, and you get this little punk on the island 90, 100 miles from the United States, Fido Castro, who's starting to start. saying unbelievably rude things about America and its leadership and appropriates huge American assets, including banana plantations and the electricity industry and the oil industry and heaven knows what on the island. And although Americans always like to think that the United States has not been a colonial power, of course it has, that America has dominated, that those days had dominated the whole Latin America for many decades. It had ruled of Philippines, had he given here over a large part of the world. And to find this pispot little

island in the middle of nowhere is suddenly saying that they are challenging the United States and they are refusing to go along with the United States and they are insulting American ambassadors and Americans are not up for this. And in those days, there was no doubt in the minds that most of the people in D.C., Castro got to go. Well, first of all, of course, post-Isaid, then when Kennedy took over from him, Kennedy mandated the CIA to launch an invasion of Cuba led by exiles based in Florida and handed over tens of millions of dollars to fund this enterprise. Now, actually, it was a crazy idea. They were only able to recruit about 1,500, 1,500 exiles, whom they trained in whether down in Central America to land in Cuba. But they were so competent

that the Cuban people would be thrilled to be liberated from Castro and his friends and Jay Guevara that Kennedy very rashly let this invasion go ahead in April 1961, and when it turned into a complete fiasco and a lot of the Cuban exiles were killed and those that weren't imprisoned and had to be ransomed eventually by the United States. The humiliation for America and, of course, for the CIA in particular, was enormous. And a lot of Americans, including the Kennedy brothers, felt a sense of rage towards Castro. Although they weren't going to launch another exile invasion and a great rush, that they were absolutely determined to get back at Castro somehow.

Now, in the middle of all this, there is Christchof, and Akita Christchop, the leader of the Soviet Union. And while communists sitting in Russia keep telling the world that communism is going to rule the world, At that time, it didn't look that way because there were Americans eating steak and watching television, and there were people in Christchof's country, this vast country living in abject poverty. There was still bread rationing in parts of the United States that, if you were lucky enough to have a black and white television, a tiny set in the Soviet Union, you had to watch it through a water-filled magnifying glass. Things were pretty bad. And however often, Pristov, who was not a fool, he was a highly intelligent man, I think, many ways, much more

enlightened one than is Vladimir Putin today. And Christchov, although he kept telling the world that the United States and capitalism were doomed and the Soviet Union and communism were going to raid, Christchof knew better. He knew how bad things were. He knew that people were desperately hungry out there. He'd, in that summer of 1962, he had to deal with industrial uprisings in protests against food shortages and wage cuts in the Soviet Union. So he was desperate for a big, showy success that would make the Americans look stupid.

And he decided that he could achieve this in Cuba. And he developed this crazy idea that although his generals had told him that the United States had enormous superiority in nuclear weapons, 17 to 1 in warheads. His generals told him that they could level the score if they placed some of their short and intermediate range missiles in Cuba, and the generals said they could hide them under palm trees. Now, if this sounds crazy, it was crazy, it was that crazy, and it was fantastic. They went ahead with this. argued he was going to get a two-way win. But first of all, he was going to make the Americans look ridiculous, because in November he was going to go and address the United Nations,

he was going to tell the United Nations, we have strategic missiles in Cuba pointed straight at the heart of the United States. And secondly, he was going to make Cuba invincible from another invasion like the Bay of Peaks. Now, although quite a few other people around him thought all this was crazy, They didn't, well, one or two of them had the nerve to say so, but a lot of them didn't. And the Soviet ambassador in Cuba, who was pretty smart, even an old KGB hand, and he didn't worry too much about this crazy idea because he said, oh, well, Castro will never allow it anyway. Castro will never be crazy enough to host Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, because he realized he's a precipitated crisis. Well, the ambassador was wrong when Russians

went to Castro and how would you like to have some nuclear missiles in Cuba? Castro thought about this, and he said, well, it's a big proposition, and we're not too sure about this, but Soviet Union is a huge, enormously experienced superpower. Presumably you guys know what you're doing, and we feel we've got to aid the cause of socialism. And so Castro gave the nod, and through the spring and summer of 1962, that ships were sailing constantly in a shuttle from the Soviet Union to Cuba, carrying personnel, carrying missiles, and carrying all sorts of weapons to arm Cuba to the teeth. And this went unnoticed in the White House for quite a few months. And one person who did notice, believe that this was going on, was the head of the CIA,

the serious right-winger, who Kennedy didn't like, and that was probably one of the reasons that he was unwilling to take a notice of what he said. But most of the CIA people took the same view that the people in the White House took, which was that the Russians would be crazy to think they could put missiles and Cuba, so they wouldn't do it. But all through that spring and summer, the shuttle went on until it late summer that suddenly they start to get intelligence reports in Washington about something fishy going on in Cuba, a lot of people, a lot of ships arriving with blank manifests, a lot of ships arriving with manifests

that don't stack up. And then, very late in the day, I think very honorably, the U.S. Secretary of State, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara as Defense Secretary, and remember all this is still before they were disgraced in Vietnam, but these were still very smart, serious guys, And they said, we're not going to do a lot of U2 high-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba because we don't want to start a diplomatic incident. We just want to keep it all cool. And they went on doing this even when the head of the CIA was bleeding for overflight. And it was only at up the beginning of October the successful overflight finally took place,

which revealed to the White House that it was indisputable evidence that nuclear missiles were being placed in Cuba. And this, of course, unleashed a hell of a crisis. But I just want to ask you to expand on something you just said, characterizing that the resistance of Ruska McNamara to overflights as honorable, given that it was overflights that ultimately revealed the nature of what we were dealing with on the island. So just say more about that. Wouldn't have been better for the administration to know a few months earlier the nature of what was occurring?

It would, but one has to remember there have been a major crisis in the Eisenhower administration when a U-2 over-flight over Russia, you two have been shot down by the Russians, and Major Gary Powers had been captured by the Russians. And this had been a colossal diplomatic embarrassment to the United States, which had also made the mistake of lying about the over-flights ahead of time. Well, of course, in the age now, very soon after the missile crisis, suddenly the same satellite age really comes of age, and after that, of course, everybody was using satellites, look at everything. But in those days, high-level photography was still the best way to get a good

look at what was going on. But I think after the missile crisis, there was bitter criticism, which extends today to some historians about the refusal of Rusk and McNamara to authorize U-2 overflights earlier. But I think their anxiety of the day taunt, their desire to see if the Russians could be made to behave reasonably. I think it deserved respect. And I don't think it's so easy. It's like people now who say that the United States and the West should have armed Ukraine and President Zelenskyy before the Russian invasion was launched last year.

I don't agree. I think that today, because of the outrageous way in which the Russians have behaved, We can all see that it's impossible to deal reasonably with President Putin, that he can only have been met with force. But I do think you have to try the other way. I think it was right to try the other way in 1962 to try and parley with the Russians, even however badly they were behaving. And I also think it was right to try more recently to parley with Putin.

And very few reasonable people today doubt that. that Putin is just beyond the pale. And in 1962, yes, the United States paid a price for not having conducted those overflights earlier, but I personally think that it was a price that was diplomatically worth paying because for the time the missiles were exposed, the world could see absolutely clearly just how monstrously unreasonable the Soviet behavior was. There's another very important point about those early days, which everybody, I think, agrees about. And that is, there were five days, slightly more than five days, between President Kennedy

and the White House being handed those photographs showing up the missile sites in Cuba. And Kennedy broadcasting to the American people and to tell them about this and announcing his decision to launch a blockade of Cuba. And during those days, there were, of course, incredibly intense discussions around the table of the White House. And we have the transcripts of those discussions, and they're absolutely rooting. If anybody who's interested in this crisis, it's worth buying the book of the transcripts because they're just so fabulous. They reveal, first of all, the high quality of the talk around the White House table. It's so impressive to see the high quality of these people who were doing the talking. Sure, some people said some very stupid things,

Quite a few of them in uniform. But most of the people were really smart people, and you just feel of respect for the leadership of the United States at that era and think how lucky we all were, who were teenagers of that time, had that quality of leadership. But the second point that's so important is that both Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy said after the crisis, if they'd been obliged to make the decision about what to do about Cuba in the first 24 hours, they almost certainly would have made a different call from the one they did and a worse call.

The first thing Kennedy said when the pictures were brought to him in the White House mansion early on the first morning, he said to his national security adviser, I guess we're going to have to bomb them. And that was the first feeling. And then you had the U.S. chiefs of staff still in this sort of victory mode from World War II, still thinking victory, which I think is a world almost all rebound these days in discourse, they were saying, we got to invade, we got a bomb and then invade, they wanted to send not only the US cavalry, but the whole shooting match into Cuba and take over the island,

which would almost certainly have been a political and diplomatic disaster. And also, the intelligence was still very poor. They did not know that not only did the Russians have strategic massaging Cuba, they had also placed tactical nuclear massaging Cuba with 43,000 troops. And while I personally believe, Sharpe, the U.S. Air Force and the Marine Corps of the U.S. Army could have almost certainly prevailed in the end in Cuba. I think it would have been a bloodbath, far more so than anybody understood. And I personally, in those days, there were no technical safeguards on the tactical nuclear weapons. I do not believe those Russians on the military weapons. I do not believe those Russians on the island would have taken a hammering at the hands of the US armed forces

and not used some of those tactical nuclear weapons. And God only knows where that would have ended up. So the point of all this and the relevance to today, it was a sort of miracle that the secret of what the White House was talking about was kept for five or six days in a way that a lot of people have asked me since my book was published. Could the secret be kept today? And I've said, no. in the age of social media, when the whole world is so leaky, everything is so leaking,

I don't believe that in Washington, D.C. or in London or anywhere else, a secret of that kind could have been kept. And as soon as it's all out in the open, with all the hysteria that would have resulted, then it becomes much more difficult to take cool, calm, rational decisions. So the Kennedy brothers, I think, were absolutely right in thanking the Lord that they had those five or six days in which to work things out in secrecy. And a lot of decisions, it's not fashionable to say this now, but an awful lot of decision making is best done in secret for everybody to be able to have their say around the table before you have to go public. And nowadays, that's very hard to do. So the range of options in this period of time where they have some initial information

about the strategic weapons, but obviously lack the full picture. So a range of options. So a range of from full-scale assault, ground and air, naval together, to, you know, air strikes, to blockade, which they ultimately opt for, and then presumably there are other, you know, you can, of course, accept it that is theoretically an option, though I imagine it wasn't particularly popular among them at the time. What is it about the so-called quarantine, the blockade that leads it to prevail as the course of action out of that period? Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, who I've had some letters from Americans since my book with published saying, how can you have such respect for Kennedy when he behaves so appalling to

women? And I said, I'm terribly sorry, but although I wouldn't for a moment defend his appalling behavior to women, and the fact remains, Kennedy was a highly intelligent, remarkable man who did some pretty good stuff as present to the United States. And again, I think the world has caused to be very grateful to him at that time. And really, it did come down to, well, there There were three options at that point. And Curtis LeMay, the pretty crazy chief of the US Air Force, he was absolutely held bent from the beginning on, he said, you've got a bomb and you've got to invade. He said, I think any sort of diplomatic response is going to be considered pretty weak.

And he talked at the White House table, two of the president, with incredible contempt and rudeness. He said, you're in a pretty bad fix to Kennedy. And Kennedy, not really believing what this tinpot general was saying to him. He said, what did you say? And Lamey doubled down. He said, you're in a pretty bad fix. To which Kennedy, and another of the things one admires him for, even in the midst of this crisis, he was able to make jokes.

And he thought for many, and then he just responded to Lamee. He said, well, that's true. You're right in there with me, personally. But it was extraordinary that LeMay, who LeMay made no secret, and furthermore, I mean, some of the fascinating documents I researched for the book are all the transcripts of interviews with senior service personnel, especially USAF personnel about the crisis. And even after it was over and the Russians have backed down and take the missiles out, a lot of senior service people headed by LeMay were still saying we should have bombed, we should

We'd invade it. We got to take Nark Castro. We'd have no more trouble with the communism in Latin America for a generation, and they thought the president had been incredibly weak and had the chance for what they described as a great victory over the Russians instead of just cutting a deal. And of course, I disagree profoundly. I think that I'm a passionate believer that you've got to see where you can get to with diplomacy. And I think what I think was important, and actually this is very important.

is that it would be naive to think that in the end, the Soviets backed off, Khrushchev backed off just because he'd been found out and just because he knew Kennedy was angry. He backed off because he could see that the United States was absolutely determined that if talking got nowhere, that the United States were willing to fight, that all the huge forces were being assembled in Florida and along the southeast coast of the United States,

these forces, they would invade Cuba, maybe within hours, certainly within days, if Christop didn't back off. So it's very important to remember that the threat of force, and also the belief in the Kremlin that the White House was willing to use force, were terribly important to a resolution of crisis. So it would be wrong to say that the crisis was eventually resolved just by diplomacy or by the blockade. What the blockade did was it bought time. that once there were these warships out there in the open sea, and Christop immediately didn't tell the world this, but Christop was seriously heard that the Americans were enforcing a blockade, and he knew the United States had overwhelming regional dominance by sea and air,

and he knew he couldn't challenge this. So he almost immediately gave orders to ships bound for Cuba carrying weapons of people to stop and turn back. But in Washington, They didn't know this. One of the things that kept the crisis going is that Christchop realized within hours of Kennedy broadcasting to the American people on a week after, just under a week after the crisis started, he knew he was going to have to give way. But the world didn't know this. Because he, Christchov, kept making defiant public noises, that the understanding in Washington,

they thought right up to the war that the Russians, might be proposing to tough this out. And again, another lesson of this crisis, which is fascinating, is that intelligence is, here you've got this huge intelligence machine on both sides, and yet both sides in the missile crisis, and indeed today, they keep misreading each other. That intelligence and satellite photography can show you what Russian troops are moving. It can show you what tanks are where and so on. He can't tell you about people's intentions, about the mindset.

of people in the Kremlin. And they got this wrong on the almost just before the end on the Saturday, the day before Khrushchev announced she was quitting. That a U-2 over Cuba was shot down by a Russian missile. And when the word

eventually, hours later, only hours later, gets through to the White House, somebody at the White House table says, they fired the first shot. And everybody assumed them were going to be a lot more shots. Now, in fact, Christop was appalled when he heard about this, that the decision to shoot down the missile, to shoot down the U-tooth, been taken by a Russian

officer who was just fed up with the Americans on his own initiative, sitting in the middle of Cuba. But nobody in Washington grasped this, they thought that this was something that had been decided on the Kremlin's. And again, one of the hardest things I think in all these big superpower crises, including today, is to figure out, first of all, to figure out what. the other side knows and also what the other side's going to do. And I mean, even today, I mean, some conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic say, oh, well, Putin's only bluffing about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Well, maybe years, but it's not something I, for one, want to see us

better planted on. It seems hard to imagine, given the speed with which you described Khrushchev's realization that he's been a bit trapped by Kennedy's. response. It seems hard to imagine that Christchof and Soviet leadership did not anticipate in advance that there was going to be a strong American response of some sort, you know, that that was going to be the next move made on the board. You would think so. You would think so. And so they're going to have to respond and they would have some plan to play that iteration. There was no plan. There was no plan. How do you account for that? One of the things that was going on all through the crisis was every time the Russians made a move that in the White House,

So they'd sit around the table trying to figure out what clever wheeves the Russians were up to this time. And there was no clever wheeves. The Russians dug themselves into a fantastic hole and were just sort of crumbling around, desperately trying to figure a way out of it. And nobody in the White House could possibly believe that the Russians had in fact behaved as stupidly as in fact they had. And again, this often happens. And it's incredible. When I was writing about the Vietnam War,

it was fascinating that he had Henry Kissinger, one of the cleverest people on the planet, and Richard Nixon, who right to the end in Vietnam, they always believed that all the Russians had to do was pick up the telephone to Hanoi until the North Koreans to pack it in and the war would be over. They did not know that the Russians, by the later stages of Vietnam War, were as fed up and felt as trapped by having to be arms-provided. for these completely intractable comedists in North Vietnam, that the Russians were as fed up as were the Americans,

and that the Russians had absolutely zero power to bring this whole thing to an end party, of course, because the Chinese came into the story as well. But again, you had really, whatever you want thinks of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, these are, again, very smart people, and yet they read Vietnam wrong in the same way that people read. So again and again in these great crises, you see people reading things wrong and making

mistakes. You can't really believe. So talk a bit about this sort of second public phase of the crisis, I guess, more or less the second half of the 13 days. So Khrushchev, you say, concludes pretty quickly he's going to have to back down. What is the actual mechanism of that? He exacts concessions from the Americans. There is a deal here, right?

It was a deal. This was, and Kennedy lied after it was all over. Kennedy, at a very early stage, figured that one thing he could offer in exchange for the Russians removing their missiles was to promise that the United States would never again launch another military intervention against Cuba. And that was the easy part. But Bobby Kennedy also gave through the Soviet ambassador in Washington at the very end a private undertaking, which he said would be off the table if anybody disclosed it, that

American missiles in Turkey pointed that the Soviet Union would be removed after a decent interval a few months, as indeed they were removed. And after the crisis ended, after the Russians, started removing their missiles from Cuba. And again, repeatedly, everybody from President Eisenhower downwards, asked Jack Kennedy, well, was there any sort of secret deal? And Jack Kennedy said to the President died, now down the telephone. No, there wasn't. And he was lying. And in the same way, of course, the Republicans put enormous pressure that the Republicans were livid, that Kennedy came out of the crisis, smelling of roses, and his rating soared, because everybody perceived, I think rightly, that he played it very well. But did he tell the truth? Again and again,

the Republicans pressed him, both in Congress and around the country, about, first of all, secret deals also about the whole reconnaissance thing, about why the US intelligence had not got the word on the missiles much sooner. And again, they lied. They did not tell the truth. They did not admit that it was because figures within the administration, notably Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara had vetoed U-2 over flights during the summer and so. So not everybody told the truth, but there were other, I mean, the same way the other people

who didn't tell the truth, America's allies, including the British. The British were appalled by the crisis, and British Prime Minister Harold McMillan. He gave total public support to Jack Kennedy and the United States because the European allies were desperate not to do anything that might shake American support for Europe in the middle of the Cold War. But privately, Macmillan and others in his cabinet, they thought the Americans had gone mad. They thought the Americans were obsessed with Cuba, and they didn't think that anything in Cuba was worth the risk of nuclear war. So there was always a tension of Harold Macmillan down the telephone to Jack Kennedy during

the missile crisis, saying you're doing a great job there where we're all so impressed with you and we're backing it all the way. And actually, in private, the British in London, and of course there were thousands of demonstrators out the street storming the American embassy. And there was enormous opposition across Europe because they felt the key question that was never a good answer to was why is it okay for the United States

to have nuclear missiles facing the Soviet Union in Turkey, in Italy, and in Britain, and not for the Soviet Union to have missile. in Cuba. And everybody, including the Kennedy White House, knew that there was no very comfortable answer to that. And Kennedy had earlier, before the crisis, suggested taking the missiles out of Turkey, because they told him that America's nuclear arsenal based in the United States was so powerful that the Turkish missiles contributed nothing and were just a diplomatic embarrassment. And the only reason they hadn't taken them out was because it was thought that it might upset the Turks who valued having them there. But not everybody told the truth all the way through,

but what one has to remember, I don't think it's any good in international affairs, expecting anybody to pay perfectly. All I know is I think the world has caused to be enormously grateful for the way that the United States administration handled the missile crisis. And as one who was alive there and might have been dead, if it had been all handled differently, I'm one of those who's grateful. I suppose the British horror at American, you know, in their perception overreaction about Cuba, there's probably something important in that about the difference between American and British strategic perceptions of the world when you're a Brit. You're used to, you know, as it were, looking across the channel or over the North Sea

and seeing your adversaries right there. In the United States, this was an uncomfortable innovation. I've used to the book a cartoon of a British woman saying to her, husband, as she's memorying. He said, I suppose that one has to feel sorry for the Americans, because Cuba's not that much further from Washington than London is from Moscow. And of course, that's how McMillan did say to Kennedy during the missile crisis, we've got used to having Soviet missiles pointed at us at close range for years. But again, I come back to spin this business of how Americans felt about themselves in those years. America was overwhelming

the most powerful nation on earth, the great victor of World War II, Americans were used to having the game their own way. And in that sense, that's something that's always been different for the British. The British, we're always aware of being a small country, where we value in obviously being a close ally of the United States, but we know just how small we are in the scheme of things. And we tend to be a lot more cautious, whereas the United States in those years, was accustomed to having the game its own way. Let me, one last question for you, sir, on this theme. You know, I take it the popular perception of the outcome of the crisis.

It's basically, and certainly at the time, you know, success for Kennedy and a humiliating back down for Christchiff. But these, you know, the secret deal regarding removal of missiles from Turkey was obviously, you know, substantive, though it's complicated from a point of view of actual nuclear use and we could argue the details of it. But I wouldn't pass over so lightly this commitment to not, you know, to essentially to leave Cuba beat, which was certainly not American policy up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is essentially the sanctioning by an administration of a communist partner of the Soviet

Union in the Caribbean in a way that could absolutely be a big problem, you know, if there were to be a general war between the United States and the Soviet Union, which at the time, of course, seem like a very realistic possibility one day. So is it, my last question to you, is it, you know, is it quite so clear that this was an American success and a Soviet failure? Why you're talking in a spirit that Vladimir Putin would go along with because Vladimir Putin, one of his most important themes in launching his invasion of Ukraine, is that he will not tolerate a big neighbor next door to Russia, which is friendly to the West, possibly maybe. member of NATO and possibly a member of the EU. He says, we won't do that in our backyard.

And if you believe in spheres of influence, if you believe the great powers have that right to decide what happens in the backyard, then you're singing Putin's song in a way that some of us would say, I would say, and what one has to remember, I've said in my book, the real losers in the war were the Cuban people, because I personally believe that if, Castro was obviously a catastrophe with the Cuban people, I mean, that Cuba has been a a basket case ever since that crisis. And I believe that if the United States had not been engaged in a historic confrontation with Castro's Cuba all these years, then the whole gig would have been up years ago for the communist regime in Cuba. And God knows that Cuban people would have been

far better off. But yeah, it's, unless you believe, which I do not believe, that great powers are entitled to decide what their neighbors do and what sort of governments they have, then, yeah, it was a catastrophic call. But again, I mean, I believe Castro could never have come to power if the United States had knocked back to disastrous dictatorship for many years before that, and which made America so unpopular in Cuba. But the real losers were the Cuban people.

But I've no answer. If you believe that the United States is entitled to make decisions about who runs Cuba and against, some Americans, the founding fathers, quite a few of them thought that Cuba ought to be part of the United States. I'm sure Cuba today would be a hell of a lot more prosperous if it was. But as it is, the Cuban people went one way and they've gone in one direction. And I just don't think you can decide on other nations' policies. But there's another point that is very important, that is it was possible for the United States to prevail in the missile crisis

because it happened on America's patch well within the range of overwhelming American sea and airpower. What we're seeing with Ukraine, and one reason I should be very pertinly surprised, if we get a decisive Western victory in Ukraine, I think we'll get some sort of dirty deal in the end, is that Ukraine is next door to Russia, and we're a long way from Ukraine, and it's very difficult for the West and specifically for the United States to make its will prevail when Ukraine's right on Putin's doorstep within easy rocket range. And one of the things that Christov realized about Cuba, that when Kennedy called him, when Kennedy called his bluff,

and that Christoph knew that he simply could not make the Soviet unions will prevail 90, 100 miles out from the U.S. mainland. I take your point. I do feel sort of honor-bound to respond to the claim of my, my, Putin-esque thinking. And I suppose the difference would be, no, I'm curiously your response here and I'm enjoying our discussion. I suppose the difference would be that Putin's notion that Ukraine will be a launch pad for a,

you know, a NATO war of aggression and regime change in Russia is a paranoid fantasy, whereas a Kennedy administration's concern about a Soviet, the Soviet contemplation of actual literal world domination was not a fantasy. as crazy as it might have seemed and as crazy as it might have been, it was a, you know, a contemplated objective of Soviet policy to rule the world. That's not. That's simply, I'm afraid, Aaron, that is not. There wasn't.

There never was a Soviet plan to rule the world. And you're talking from the viewpoint, which God knows, in the days when I was in Vietnam, you have a confidence that we're the good guys. And not everybody goes along with that view. And, I mean, I met some very very. very, very good Americans. Sure, there were some very bad Americans of Vietnam, but also some very good Americans.

One thing that was always so striking about the good guys is they were absolutely committed to trying to make Vietnam a better place for the Vietnamese. And one of the things I try to do in my book is to make plain that there were some fine people out there from the United States who were really trying to change things for the better for the Vietnamese. But in the end, the confidence that you are the good guys,

We, the West generally, and the United States particularly, is not always good in understanding other cultures. And so often with these global struggles, which go on to this very day, and this goes in Iraq, it goes in Afghanistan, it's the problem. You can win all the firefights you like, but you have to somehow have the capability to accomplish terms with other cultures in a way that we are not great out, always. and I'm terribly aware when I'm in far-flung places, not what I do nowadays, but when I was young and I spent a lot of time in far-flung places, a lot of these people, regardless as Martians,

and a lot of them are not too keen on Martians. Oh, I've had similar personal experiences, and I don't mean to litigate and defend every aspect of American Cold War policy. We could do a whole other episode on what Soviet attention is actually. Let me have the one last word I'll have. Please. I have said in my book, one of the things we who belong to the West, and are not, but the American. We should never lose sight of the fact that we are phenomenally lucky that the United States

was on our side and that our side won. Max Hastings, author of The Abyss, Nuclear Crisis, Cuba, 1962. Thank you so much for joining the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.