Nikita Khrushchev on the Cuban Missile Crisis

¶ … Nikita Khrushchev on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Inner Workings of the Soviet Government and the Party's Criticism of Him

An Analysis of the Impact of Nikita S. Khrushchev on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Inner Workings of the Soviet Government and the Party's Criticism of Him

Many people today simply do not realize just how close the world came to nuclear war when John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev squared off for 13 tense days during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. What actually transpired during those fateful days in October 1962 is just now filtering out the American general public, and it remains unclear whether the people of the former Soviet Union have ever been told the complete story either. Given the highly secretive nature of the Soviet regimen during this period in history, it is unlikely that many average citizens were aware of what was taking place during this fateful 13-day period in history. Despite these constraints, much has been learned since 1962 about what took place behind closed doors in Moscow and Washington, and this paper will seek to investigate this information to determine what part Nikita S. Khrushchev played in negotiating the compromise, and the response of the Soviet leadership of the day. A summary of the research will be provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview. In his essay, "Averting the 'Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings," Jeffrey W. Taliaferro reports that since October 1962, the deliberations of President John F. Kennedy and the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) have been the focus of countless books, articles, documentaries, and films (1). "With the John F. Kennedy Library's 1996 release of the secret recordings of the ExComm meetings and the subsequent publication of Ernest May and Philip Zelikow's The Kennedy Tapes, it appeared that we had the 'definitive' account, at least on the U.S. side. Is there anything new to learn about the Cuban missile crisis? The answer evidently is yes."

According to Max Frankel, there is indeed much to be learned on both sides concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis because much of what is widely accepted as being factual about the crisis is simply wrong:

For most Americans who experienced it or relived it in books and films, the Cuban Missile Crisis is a tale of nuclear chicken -- the Cold War world recklessly flirting with suicide. We remember a bellicose Soviet dictator, who had vowed to bury us, pointing his missiles at the American heartland from a Cuba turned hostile and communist. We remember a glamorous president, standing desperately against the threat, risking World War III to get the missiles withdrawn. We remember the Russians blinking on the brink, compelled to retreat by a naked display of American power, brilliantly deployed, unerringly managed. The crisis was real enough, but for the most part, we remember it wrong (emphasis added).

Today, the Cuban Missile Crisis is generally remembered as lasting for just thirteen days (from October 16-28), beginning with the point at which Washington discovered that active construction was taking place in Cuba to install launch facilities for Soviet medium-range missiles, to the day the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Khrushchev, publicly and formally agreed to withdraw missiles from Cuba.

As part of the eventual compromise that was reached, President Kennedy guaranteed that the United States would not invade Cuba. More comprehensive accounts of the missile crisis extend beyond these immediate 13 days to include the period from October 28 to November 20 as well, when intensive negotiations were conducted that more fully set forth and codified the agreements had been reached, the period when the U.S. naval blockade was lifted, and the special alert status of the military forces of both countries had ended.

The respective Soviet and Cuban reports about "Caribbean crisis" portrayed a drastically different picture than what was being delivered in the West in general and the United States in particular. For example, Garthoff points out that the Soviet and Cuban versions tended to emphasize the continuing American hostility to Castro's rule in Cuba in the form of economic sanctions, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion by American-armed Cuban emigres in April 1961, as well as an alleged continuing American threat to invade Cuba. According to Garthoff, "The more immediate crisis itself is seen as beginning, not on October 16, but on October 22, with President Kennedy's announcement that the Soviet Union was installing medium-range missiles in Cuba and his demand that they be removed, accompanied by a naval quarantine to prevent any further shipment of offensive arms to Cuba."(2)

The political maneuverings that took place during the initial 13-day period as well as subsequently have naturally been the focus of much attention, and the point that continues to recur in the literature is that both sides were faced with a wide range of unknown variables when the Cuban missile crisis did take place, but enough was known about each other to create an atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion.

In his book, The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle over Policy, Roger Hilsman says the Soviet perspective was vastly different than what many Americans were being told about the other major superpower in the world. "Consider the view from Moscow when President Kennedy took office in January of 1961," Hilsman says, "18 months before the missile decision. In the Soviet Union, the domestic situation was good. Work was proceeding on the party program and on the 20-year plan for increasing domestic production."

The United States had also suffered an enormous political defeat when the Soviet Union beat them into space: "The world situation was also good. First and foremost, the Soviets were still basking in the afterglow of the Sputnik success, and the world generally assumed that the military and strategic balance had significantly shifted in the Soviets' favor."

Therefore, at the time, the United States was struggling to maintain hegemony with the Soviets in the race for space as well as in Europe and Southeast Asia, and it was still unclear who the winner was going to be; nevertheless, the Cuban missile crisis was certainly not the first such confrontation between the Soviets and the United States following World War II. "The missile crisis was not an isolated event, Hilsman says. Rather, "It was the most dangerous of a series of crises that threatened the peace between the superpowers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The origins of the Cuban missile crisis illuminate the dynamics of superpower rivalry and the ways in which conflicting interests, mutual insecurities, and threat-based strategies can provoke war-threatening confrontations."

Certainly, these dynamics have not gone away in the 21st century, but the Cuban missile crisis did help to highlight many of the inadequacies in a system that was intended to prevent, rather than cause, a nuclear holocaust. According to Hilsman, "The Cuban missile crisis is also important because of the influence it had on subsequent American thinking about national security. It spawned or confirmed lessons about crisis prevention and management that continue to shape American thinking and policy. The most important of these is the belief that resolve discourages aggression and accommodation invites it."

The manner in which the missile crisis was ultimately resolved also seems to indicate that Khrushchev may have been more insightful into the thought processes of his American counterpart than many have believed.

According to Lebow and Stein, the missile crisis' origins were attributed variously to President Kennedy's failure to sufficiently demonstrate his resolve in the matter; his self-imposed restraint at the Bay of Pigs, his performance at the Vienna summit, and his failure to interfere with the construction of the Berlin wall; all of these issues were believed to have convinced Khrushchev that he would encounter with no resistance if he deployed missiles to Cuba. Likewise, Kennedy's apparent resolve during the crisis that followed has long been credited with convincing Khrushchev that he would have to withdraw the missiles; however, new evidence challenges these fundamental interpretations.

The growing body of evidence suggests that Khrushchev's determination to send missiles to Cuba was not the result of his low estimate of Kennedy's resolve; rather, he decided to deploy them secretly out of respect for that resolve. "His decision to withdraw the missiles was conditioned almost as much by the expectation of gain as it was by the fear of loss. Kennedy made an important concession to Khrushchev through a secret 'back channel,' and considered a further concession if necessary to end the crisis. "The 'hidden history' of Cuba also reveals that the efforts of both sides to manipulate the other's perception of its interests and resolve were largely unsuccessful. These findings challenge some of the most fundamental axioms of the American approach to crisis prevention and management."

There have also been some profound revelations about how the crisis was managed within the Kremlin over the past 50 years that have contributed to contemporary analysts understanding about what took place during those fateful 13 days in 1962; these issues are discussed further below.

The Role of Nikita S. Khrushchev. The pudgy little man in the wrinkled, ugly suit was not a very impressive figure for a world leader when he appeared on American television at the United Nations, but most Americans of the day still assumed that Khrushchev was, nevertheless, the undisputed overlord of a burgeoning Soviet empire, while nothing could have been further from the truth. Certainly, Khrushchev held the office, but the Soviet Union was in fact also managed by an enormous bureaucracy. According to Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, the political machine inherited by Khrushchev remained solidly in place during the missile crisis, and it would seem that the party leader's ability to maneuver in this environment was seriously constrained despite the Western perceptions of a totalitarian state wherein a single individual wielded all of the power. The authors point out that although Khrushchev had ended Stalin's practice of conducting business meetings after midnight, not much else had changed: "Otherwise the pattern of bureaucratic life was little changed," they say, and "Members of the Presidium set all of the rules. If and when they decided to see you, you jumped. You might be told to expect a call, which might not come through for days. Or you might have no idea that you were expected at a meeting until a call came through an hour or so before the event" (emphasis added).

In his essay, "How Foolish Khrushchev Nearly Started World War III," Arnold Beichman of the Washington Times reports that, "There were five chronological successors to Joseph Stalin after his mysterious death in 1953 - Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. Of these, the most dangerous to world peace was Khrushchev, a quasi-master of brinksmanship" (emphasis added).

This assessment was made a half a century after the fact, of course, and the observers of the day -- including the American public -- could not possibly know what to expect from the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The Russians were on a roll, after all, and despite their not insignificant social and economic problems, it seemed reasonable to assume that the Soviet Union would be the power to contend with in the foreseeable future, at least well into the 21st century.

A good reflection of how the Western press viewed Khrushchev in this regard even a decade and a half later is provided by Zhores A. Medvedev, who wrote in 1976 that, "an astonished world watched him pound a UN lectern with his shoe during a speech delivered by the Spanish delegate, but this outburst was described in Izvestia (whose editor, A. Adzhubei, was his son-in-law) as an heroic feat."

At the time, Khrushchev wrongfully accused UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold of abetting a conspiracy against Patrice Lumumba, the pro-Soviet leader of the Congo. When Lumumba was murdered, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would refuse to recognize Hammarskjold as Secretary-General or to have any dealings with him. Not only was this a violation of the UN charter, it was inconsistent, since Hammarskjold's candidacy for the post had been strongly supported by the Soviet Union. Only Hammarskjold's tragic and untimely death in a plane crash in the Congo forestalled the UN crisis that was about to erupt as a result of Khrushchev's about face. Again, his sudden shift was praised in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev twice fomented a "Berlin crisis," the second one ending with the construction of the Berlin Wall -- but even this did not undermine his domestic or international prestige. He received full approval as the peacemaker for the Cuban missile confrontation in 1962, even though he had actually capitulated to President Kennedy. Not only in foreign affairs, but also at home, Khrushchev practically had carte blanche to act in whatever way he chose. He was of course sustained by the aura of infallibility that still clung to orders emanating from the First Secretary of the Central Committee/Chairman of the Council of Ministers. In addition, the rapid and constant rotation and reappointments of senior officials prevented the formation of an opposition bloc. The speed with which Khrushchev carried out his programs allowed no one time to forecast or evaluate possible results. Furthermore, almost any plan proposed by the leader of the Party was assured of broad public support in "nationwide discussions."

Even the scheduled plenums of the Central Committee, which had an important decision-making function in 1953-1957, were transformed into enormous rallies held in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Thousands of prominent people, Party workers and former activists, were invited to attend; this could hardly facilitate the raising of serious objections. With such popularity and political acumen, how and why was Khrushchev ousted?

In the Western press, Khrushchev's "fall" was frequently characterized as being the result of a traditional "struggle for power" -- much like those that removed Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, or others; however, this was an incomplete, inexact, and incorrect version of events. "Such an interpretation coincided with Khrushchev's own point-of-view," Medvedev says. "Until the end of his life he was incapable of recognizing that his own misjudgments had driven him from office. At last there came a time when every action was no longer uncritically accepted as a 'great achievement' -- it even became possible to apply the term 'mistake.'"

The unpredictability of the situation only added to the problems with negotiations, with even the United States' commander in chief stating categorically at the time that the likelihood of war was estimated to be "somewhere between one out of three and even"; and Khrushchev reporting equal pessimism about the outcome of the missile crisis. According to Richard Ned Lebowa and Janice Gross Stein, "A week after the crisis, he [Khrushchev] told newsmen in Moscow that 'we were on the edge of the precipice of nuclear war. Both sides were ready to go.'"(3)

Raymond Garthoff, the deputy undersecretary for politico-military affairs in the U.S. State Department, pointed out at the time that not only did the United States have a superior advantage over Khrushchev, Khrushchev knew it as well; the only danger involved was that Washington might miscalculate and underestimate its own strength.: "I am increasingly disturbed over indications that in all of our planning for the development of the Cuban crisis we have to our peril neglected one particular contingency: that the Soviets would react mildly and with great caution," he said.

In his assessment of Max Frankel's retrospective analysis of the Cuban missile crisis, the third Soviet-American confrontation (having been preceded by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Berlin blockade in 1948), was that "Khrushchev the Shoe-Pounder simply had no idea of what American politics was all about" (emphasis added).

In this regard, though, the current situation in North Korea is reminiscent of the environment in 1962 with the Soviet Union and the United States; both countries were attempting to gather as much useful and timely intelligence about the other as possible, but much of what was known was either obsolete or inaccurate. According to Lebow and Stein:

At critical junctures of the missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev judged each other's resolve largely on the basis of misleading evidence. Khrushchev's assessment of the probability of an American attack against Cuba was inversely proportional to the real threat. The risk of an air strike or invasion was greatest in the week before Kennedy announced the quarantine. For much of that week, the air strike was the preferred option of most of the Ex-Comm [the Executive Committee of the National Security Council]. The president was also initially attracted to a surgical strike. While the debate raged between advocates of an air strike and a blockade, Khrushchev lived in a world of illusion; he was sublimely confident that American intelligence would not discover the missiles before he revealed their presence to the world in the middle of November (emphasis added).

The events that followed in the White House have become familiar to many Americans as the result of a number of popular documentaries in recent years, but the inner workings of the White House were not discernible to the Soviet leadership at the time and Kennedy could not anticipate with any degree of accuracy the nature of the Soviet response to a blockade of Cuba. "After the announcement of the quarantine," Lebow and Stein note, "Khrushchev became increasingly fearful that the United States would attack Cuba. To prevent an attack, he sent a conciliatory message to Kennedy on Friday and, on Sunday afternoon, broadcast his acceptance of Kennedy's Saturday proposal."

From the Soviet's perspective, many hardliners believed that if the Americans were pressed hard enough, they would eventually back down and the missiles could remain firmly in place in Cuba as a bargaining chip for future negotiations. Just as the Americans were uncertain about what to expect from the Kremlin, though, the best information available to Khrushchev at the time seemed to convince him that the United States was firmly prepared to follow through on its stated non-negotiable course of action. Had the Soviet intelligentsia been more in tune with what was actually taking place though, they might have been able to provide Khrushchev with a more accurate assessment of the American position and the outcome of the missile crisis could have been dramatically different as a result. According to Lebow and Stein, "Khrushchev did not realize that Kennedy had become increasingly opposed to either an air strike or invasion during the course of the week because of his concern that they would provoke further, perhaps unstoppable, escalation. One of the ironies of the crisis is that Khrushchev rushed to make an agreement at the same time that Kennedy contemplated a further concession" (emphasis added).

This inability to provide their national leader with timely and accurate intelligence was not restricted to the Soviets though; Michael G. Wessells says there was an "immense perceptual gulf that separated the John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Castro teams during the crisis."

With so much at stake, one of the clear lessons that have been learned as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that effective communication is the key to successful international negotiations. In the aftermath of the missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union both took steps to help avert such crises in the future. As a result, even more incompetent Soviet leaders than Khrushchev could manage to avoid future confrontations while Nikita's efforts took place when such initiatives were not in place. According to Beichman, "Had Andropov been a well man when he took over in December 1982, and had he lived a little longer past 1984, he might have been an even greater danger than Khrushchev. After all, it was on Andropov's watch that in August 1983, without warning, a Soviet fighter plane destroyed a Korean jumbo jetliner with 269 passengers and crew aboard. That tragedy did not unleash World War III, but Khrushchev's 1962 actions in Cuba might well have" (emphasis added).

There was also a lot on the line personally for both Kennedy and Khrushchev during the missile crisis negotiations and those that followed.

Today, the perception that a major adversary will behave one way or another based on past experiences is no longer a valid approach to resolving international conflicts that have numerous actors and far-reaching global implications. Nevertheless, both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized that they had to adopt a hard line -- at least at first -- just to keep their jobs. "Had Harry Truman wilted before the Stalin-ordered Berlin blockade," Lebow and Stein point out, "he would without doubt have been impeached and probably removed. John F. Kennedy knew (and said so) that if he had surrendered to Khrushchev on Cuba, he too would have been impeached."

While the consequences of the Cuban missile crisis could have been enormously worse, the fact remains that things became as bad as they did in the first place primarily because of one person: Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Khrushchev's previous antics in the United Nations and his mismanaged attempts to resolve a highly volatile international crisis were only made worse by a political bureaucracy that became increasingly disenchanted with him as the crisis unfolded and in its immediate aftermath as well. According to Beichman, many believed that "Khrushchev was a fool, a dangerous fool: dangerous because he was a practicing sociopath, protected, he thought, by the shield of Leninism and thousands of nuclear weapons. When he was finally ousted in October 1964, he was denounced by his onetime subordinates for his 'hare-brained schemes.' Meaning despite his boastful rantings that 'we'll bury you,' in the end he buried himself" (emphasis added).

Given the perceptual gaps that existed on both sides, though, Khrushchev undoubtedly felt justified in making such boasts. Just prior to the missile crisis, Konrad Kellen wrote that, "Khrushchev's Achilles heel is that he does not understand the Western world. This weakness is compounded by the fact that he thinks he does. Armed with the 'science' of Marxism-Leninism, he has, like every Communist, an answer to everything, including everything Western."