Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Sheldon M. Stern was the Historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library from 1977 to 1999. He is author of Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford University Press, 2003).

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The Week the World Stood Still

Stanford University Press

Contents

1 The JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes..................................................................12 The Making of the Cuban Missile Crisis..............................................................11The Cold War: JFK's Crucible..........................................................................11The Cold War and Cuba.................................................................................14Nuclear Confrontation in Cuba.........................................................................18The Kennedy Paradox...................................................................................23Key Members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council...............................293 The Secret Meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.....................37Epilogue: The November Post-Crisis....................................................................205Conclusion............................................................................................213Notes.................................................................................................219Selective Bibliography................................................................................231Index.................................................................................................235

Chapter One

In the summer of 1973, the nation was captivated by the televised "Watergate" hearings into charges of illegal activities in Richard Nixon's White House. On July 16, presidential aide Alexander Butterfield revealed that President Nixon had installed a voice-activated taping system to secretly record his meetings and discussions. Congress subpoenaed the tapes but the president refused to comply. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered their release—and the rest is history.

A day after Butterfield's revelation, the John F. Kennedy Library disclosed that audio recordings of presidential meetings and telephone conversations had also been made during the Kennedy administration. These tapes included most of the secret meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The "heroic" version of the Cuban missile crisis had already become well established by the 1970s. This view, encouraged by JFK himself, popularized by the writings of journalists and Kennedy administration insiders, and dramatized in the 1974 film The Missiles of October, depicted the courageous young American president successfully resisting nuclear blackmail by the Soviet Union and its puppet regime in Cuba and winning a decisive victory over communism. And, according to this viewpoint, after his sobering experience on the nuclear brink, Kennedy reached out to his adversaries and began the process of détente—reflected in 1963 in his American University speech urging a rethinking of Cold War beliefs, the establishment of the Moscow-Washington Hot Line, and the ratification of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

This heroic viewpoint, however, did not last. In the wake of opposition to the Vietnam war and the declassification of key foreign policy documents from the 1960s, critical historians (often called "revisionists") uncovered new details about JFK's "secret war" against Cuba, particularly Operation Mongoose, that included sabotage and subversion against the Cuban economy, plots to overthrow and/or assassinate Castro, and "contingency plans" to blockade, bomb, or reinvade Cuba.

In addition, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, new evidence available from Soviet archives suggested that Nikita Khrushchev's original explanation for shipping missiles to Cuba had been fundamentally true: the Soviet leader had never intended these weapons as a threat to the security of the United States, but rather considered their deployment a defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from American attacks and as a desperate effort to give the U.S.S.R. the appearance of equality in the nuclear balance of power.

JFK's covert war against Cuba had clearly contributed to instigating the missile crisis. Nonetheless, as the ExComm tapes reveal, when faced with the real likelihood of nuclear war, Kennedy used all his intellectual and political skill to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. The president helped steer American policy makers and the two superpowers away from a nuclear conflict. A hawk in public, he actually distrusted the military, was skeptical about military solutions to political problems, and was horrified by the thought of nuclear war. The confrontational JFK depicted by the revisionists is all but imperceptible during the secret ExComm meetings. The president measured each move and countermove with an eye toward averting a nuclear exchange—which he somberly declared would be "the final failure."

The published transcripts of these secret tapes provide essential insights into the ExComm decision-making process, but they also reflect the flaws in the tapes themselves: frequent interruptions, garbled and rambling exchanges, baffling noises, overlapping comments, conversational dead ends, and a great deal of repetition. By their very nature, transcripts must endeavor to present all the words and can be dense and impenetrable to the non-specialist. However, the condensed interpretive narrative in this book, about half the length of the original full-length version, seeks to bring these discussions to life as a clear, coherent story, making the essence of the discussions completely understandable to general readers and especially to young people.

The narrative format aims to transform a complex and often redundant primary source, the ExComm tapes, into a more usable secondary source by concentrating on essentials and citing only the indispensable material. Readers can follow themes, ideas, issues, and the role of specific individuals as never before possible. The key moments of stress, doubt, decision, resolution—and even humor—are, in effect, emphasized by separating them from the background chatter and repetition of the unedited tapes, helping the reader to grasp as completely and accurately as possible the meaning, intent, and human dimension of these spontaneous discussions. The participants, obviously, did not know how this potential nuclear showdown would turn out, and their uncertainty, strikingly captured in narrative form, often gives the discussions the nerve-wracking quality of a work of fiction. But, of course, this unique story—permanently documented on audiotape—is not fiction.

My experience with presidential tapes began soon after I became historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in 1977. I initially edited some of the president's recorded telephone conversations—my first in-depth experience listening to White House recordings. Then, in the early 1980s, as part of my preparation for conducting a series of oral history interviews on foreign policy in the Kennedy administration, I began listening to the Cuban missile crisis meeting tapes. The Kennedy Library was preparing for their eventual declassification, and I was almost certainly the first non-member of the ExComm to hear precisely what happened at all these meetings;...