“The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Kennedy declared in his inaugural address. Its chief task was to stop the spread of communism. While Eisenhower had relied on the nation’s nuclear arsenal to intimidate the Kremlin, Kennedy proposed to challenge communist aggression whenever and wherever it occurred. “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” Kennedy intoned. A new breed of cold warrior, Kennedy called on young men and women to serve in the Peace Corps, an organization that he created to mobilize American idealism and technical skills to help developing nations. His was a call for commitment—and action.
Perhaps seduced by his own rhetoric, Kennedy blundered almost immediately. Anti-Castro exiles were eager to organize an invasion of their homeland, reasoning that the Cuban people would rise up against Castro and communism as soon as “democratic” forces provided the necessary leadership. Under Eisenhower the CIA had begun training some 2,000 Cuban exiles in Nicaragua. Kennedy was of two minds about the proposed invasion. Some in his administration opposed it strongly, but his closest advisers, including his brother Robert, urged him to give his approval. In the end he did.
The invaders, 1,400 strong, struck in April 1961. They landed at the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s southern
"Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner), Kennedy declared from a balcony in West Berlin in June, 1961, and his words brought a roar of approval from the West Berliners. Gesturing toward the Berlin wall, he called it "the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system.”
Coast. But the Cuban people failed to flock to their lines, and soon Castro’s army pinned the invaders down and forced them to surrender. Because American involvement could not be disguised, the affair exposed the United States to all the criticism that a straightforward assault would have produced, without accomplishing the overthrow of Castro. Worse, it made Kennedy appear impulsive as well as unprincipled. Castro tightened his connections with the Soviet Union.
In June, Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Khrushchev in Vienna. Furious over the invasion of Cuba, Khrushchev blustered about grabbing West Berlin. In August, he abruptly closed the border between East and West Berlin and erected the Berlin wall—a barrier of concrete blocks and barbed wire across the city to stop the flow of East Germans into the noncommunist zone. At the same time, the Soviets resumed nuclear testing. Khrushchev ordered detonation of a series of gigantic hydrogen bombs, including one with a power 3,000 times that of the bomb that had devastated Hiroshima.
Kennedy followed suit: He announced plans to build thousands of nuclear missiles, known as Minutemen, capable of hitting targets on the other side of the world. He expanded the space program, vowing that an American would land on the moon within ten years. The president called on Congress to pass a large increase in military spending.
In secret, Kennedy also resolved to destroy Castro. He ordered military leaders to plan for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. (One of the training maneuvers was code-named ORTSAC—Castro spelled backward.) He also instructed the CIA to undertake “massive activity” against Castro’s regime. The CIA devised Operation Mongoose, a plan to slip spies, saboteurs, and assassins into Cuba. Although never officially endorsed by the president, Mongoose operated under the oversight of Robert Kennedy. Its attempts to assassinate Castro failed.
In 1962 Khrushchev precipitated the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. To forestall the anticipated American invasion of Cuba, he moved tanks, heavy bombers, and 42,000 Soviet troops and technicians to the island. His most fateful step was to sneak several dozen guided nuclear missiles into the country and prepare them for launching. The missiles could have hit most of the eastern United States with nuclear warheads.
On October 14 American spy planes spotted the launching pads and missiles. The president faced a dreadful decision. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he could not again appear to back down to the communists. But if he invaded Cuba or bombed the Soviet bases and missile sites, Khrushchev would likely seize West Berlin or bomb U. S. missile sites in Turkey. Either action might lead to a full-scale nuclear war and millions of deaths.
On October 22 Kennedy addressed the nation on television. The Soviet buildup was “a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo.” He ordered the American navy to stop and search all vessels headed for Cuba and to turn back any containing “offensive” weapons. Kennedy called on Khrushchev to dismantle the missile bases and remove from the island all weapons capable of striking the United States. Any Cuban-based nuclear attack would result, he warned, in “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
For days, while the world watched in horror, Soviet ships steamed toward Cuba and work on the missile launching pads continued. An American spy plane was shot down over Cuba. Khrushchev sent a desperate telegram, suggesting that he was near the breaking point. Robert Kennedy and others engaged in frantic negotiations through intermediaries. Then Khrushchev backed down. He recalled the ships,
This photograph, taken by an American U-2 spy plane and released during the Cuban missile crisis, shows the installation of liquid-fueled Soviet missiles. Khrushchev expected that the missiles could be kept secret. ”Our military specialists informed us that strategic missiles can be reliably concealed in the palm forests of Cuba,” one of Khrushchev's advisers recalled. Khrushchev, who assumed that the missiles would be harder to spot if they were in a horizontal position, ordered them to be placed in an upright position only at night. This was a mistake: The U-2 was easily able to detect the missiles in their horizontal position.
Withdrew the missiles, and reduced his military establishment in Cuba to modest proportions. In response, Kennedy lifted the blockade. He also promised not to invade Cuba, thus ensuring Castro’s survival; Kennedy further agreed to withdraw U. S. missiles from Turkey, though this latter concession was not made public at the time.
Immediately the president was hailed for his steady nerve and consummate statesmanship; the Cuban missile crisis was widely regarded as his finest hour. Yet in retrospect it appears that he may have overreacted. The Soviet nuclear threat had been exaggerated. After Sputnik, the Soviet long-range missile program flopped, though this was not known at the time. By the summer of 1962 a “missile gap” existed, but it was overwhelmingly in favor of the United States, whose nuclear forces outnumbered those of the Soviet Union by a ratio of seventeen to one. Khrushchev’s decision to put medium-range missiles in Cuba signified Soviet weakness rather than impending aggression. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were sobered by the Cuban missile crisis; afterward neither spoke so glibly about superpower confrontation. They signed a treaty outlawing nuclear testing in the atmosphere. But Khrushchev’s bluff had been called— a public humiliation from which he never recovered. Within two years, hard-liners in the Kremlin forced him out of office. He was replaced by Leonid
Brezhnev, an old-style Stalinist who inaugurated an intensive program of long-range missile development. The nuclear arms race moved to new terrain, uncertain and unimaginably dangerous.
World History
