“This Government... has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet Military buildup on the island of Cuba,” John F. Kennedy informed his fellow citizens during an October 22, 1962, primetime address. “Unmistakable evidence,” the president warned, “has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”
Given the grisly logic of our Cold War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, such a Soviet first-strike would be met in-kind. The nuclear age had reached a crescendo and for 13 climatic days in October 1962, this Cuban missile crisis brought a frightened nation to the precipice of the unthinkable.
So, stock up those bomb shelters cold warriors. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
On October 14, a U-2 spy plane flying in the stratosphere over Cuban airspace, gave the CIA aerial photography of six Soviet ballistic missile sites under construction near Havana, some ninety miles off the Florida coast.
Kennedy convened his Executive Committee of the National Security Council for what would become nearly around the clock, top secret meetings over the next week and a half to formulate America’s response. These missiles – capable of hitting east coast cities – simply must be removed. On that much ExComm agreed, however, the means of removal was hotly debated in the White House, complicated by incomplete intelligence. Were the missiles already operational?
The president charted a measured course: a naval quarantine of the island to halt the buildup, coupled with diplomacy… failing that, military escalation.
President Kennedy appeared live on all three television channels to alert the American people to the confrontation.
His calm delivery on that October 22 belied the severity of the single most frightening address ever given during the Cold War. He rebuked Nikita Khrushchev while deliberately presenting the communists with a stern ultimatum in front of a worldwide audience. Withdraw all offensive weapons in Cuba… or else.
Eleven times the Commander in Chief used the word “nuclear,” but none more unnerving than when declaring that America would consider [and I quote, without the Boston accent] “… any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Yet, Soviet destroyers and submarines joined cargo ships approaching the Caribbean blockade line. Fidel Castro’s soldiers dug in and waited for an estimated invasion force of 300,000 American troops. The Pentagon scrambled interceptor aircraft armed with nuclear weapons. And for the first and only confirmed time in the nation’s history, the Strategic Air Command moved to DEFCON 2, one step removed from all-out war.
Standing face-to-face, we braced as events threatened to spin out of control. Then the communists appeared to blink. Their ships stopped dead in the water and turned back.
Desperate for a way out diplomatically, Kennedy and Khrushchev struck a deal to resolve the crisis: Soviet missiles would be withdrawn and never reintroduced in exchange for an American pledge to not invade Cuba (along with a secret assurance that American warheads in Turkey would similarly be removed). A direct “hotline” was installed between Washington and Moscow. And a new carol penned during the standoff, “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” encouraged the world to pray for peace everywhere.
