Robert Dalleck’s new book (http://slate.msn.com/id/2083136/) on the JFK Presidency is a nice re-telling of the Camelot legend without much legend and with a lot of common sense conclusions about a man in much pain who handled some deft maneuvers of the international sort and may have been killed for it.  We don’t and won’t ever know, but it is a good story.

 

Any tale of JFK hinges on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was held up as a gold standard example of how to defy the bullies of the world.  In this case, by calling Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s bluff, Kennedy allegedly saved the world from nuclear war.  If you lived it – and I lived it – it was genuinely terrifying for a day or two.  Had we known the truth, it would have been more so.

 

Kennedy threatened to attack and destroy Soviet missiles in Cuba because the United States, and in particular the United States’ military, could not handle having medium range missiles only one hundred miles away, and certainly could not defend against them.  We still cannot, and that’s why the thought of North Korea with a very quiet sub that could surface and unload or fire a nuke torpedo outside New York does not thrill us.  They have the sub.  They have the bomb; well, soon anyway.

 

In any case, in 1962 you can imagine our horror facing the Soviets.

 

It was later revealed, according to histories of the 1980’s, that the United States hadn’t stood tough at all, but had removed its own missiles from Turkey to compensate the loss to the Soviets in Cuba.  Because our missiles were already there and the Soviets were just then setting theirs up, the Cuba Missile Crisis is now revealed to have been an American macho defeat, hardly a thrilling tale of the Good standing up to the bullying Bad.  We were the ones who had surrounded the Soviet Union with short range missiles, and they compelled us to withdraw some of them.

 

What Dalleck contends is that Good against Bad is exactly the way it should be told, except that it was Kennedy, a man who - after a childhood with a father who tried to sleep with his son’s girlfriends among other charms - had a pretty good handle on manhood and the plusses and minuses.  By any of the Playboy standards then revered, Kennedy was a player of the first rank (although we now know his intense physical pain probably distorted his conceptions of fun to that which didn’t hurt much) and he was increasingly unimpressed by the Harvard brain trust and the military strutters about him.  Virtually his entire Cabinet along with the Joint Chiefs wanted to invade Cuba.   None wanted to cut a deal with the Soviets; especially his brother Robert.   Kennedy stood up to them, including Robert.  He cut a deal with Khrushchev and both countries got rid of their missiles.  It was a good move.

 

Ironically, Kennedy added the caveat that the Soviets had to keep it all secret.  The Soviets, for the most part kept it so secret that the uninformed held it against Khrushchev for caving in and they threw out the man who had stood up to and faced down the United States.

 

I keep coming back to Dalleck’s contention that this was all revealed in the early 1980’s, twenty years after the fact of the missile exchanges.  I find that weird because I knew about it in the late 1970’s in a book by British ex-patriot Alistair Cooke called Six Men.   In with Chaplin and Mencken and Edward VIII was a chapter on Adlai Stevenson, a man to whom Cooke paid the wholly accurate compliment that Stevenson, who had died in 1965, was too good a man to be President (and probably would not have been a successful one), and we should not totally decry his two losses to Eisenhower.

 

But in this chapter, it is revealed that it was Stevenson, not Kennedy, who conceived of and pushed this solution.   Stevenson was Kennedy’s Ambassador to The United Nations and he simply annihilated the Soviet Ambassador when he confronted him and the Security Council with the photographs of missiles in Cuba the Soviets, at first, claimed did not exist.  The Soviet Ambassador spoke English, but requested translation to stall for time.  Stevenson was cold, composed, cool beyond measure: “I’m prepared to wait until hell freezes over, Mr. Ambassador….” he said to the hushed and terrified chamber.  Partial compensation for the U2 fiasco.  (And by the by?  When you think about ditching the UN, rerun that sequence.  The UN gave the Soviets and the US a method to avoid war.) 

 

The Kennedys to this point despised Stevenson as an egg head and wishy-washy sop to an effete upper class of Democratic losers.   And he’d just lost two Presidential elections.  He wasn’t weak, but image is all and he looked the part and spoke with the flourishes of a past time.  How he managed to convert the then President must be a story.  That he was never credited (and to this day) speaks volumes.

 

One wonders if Stevenson broke ranks and told Cooke or if Cooke had sources or if it is true at all.  This way, if it hadn’t worked, the tough Kennedys could have blamed the little bald man at the UN.  But it did, probably because Stevenson understood diplomacy and foreign temperament better than Kennedy did at the time.

 

I have other hesitations about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  With what would the Soviets have fought such a supposed nuclear war? 

 

The military claimed the Soviets had a huge missile advantage in ICBMs that could hit the United States and fleets of bombers and…..well, you know the drill.  Turns out, in the cold sight of history, that the Soviets had four (4) missiles that conceivably could have hit the United States somewhere.  Like their US cousins, the Soviet missiles would have had to cross the North Pole to do so.  Until the day of the satellite positioning system, missiles were launched and fell based on gyros and compasses.  For obvious reasons, they could not be tested across the Poles where all these electronic weather patterns happened and a magnetic pole actually moved around.  Accurate nuclear warfare was an iffy thing even in concept till recently. 

 

All missiles were liquid fuelled.  It took about a day to load the fuel at the launch site.  Where they were highly visible to bombers, which the United States had in spades.

 

The Soviets didn’t have a bomber that could even make it to the United States, deliver its load, and return until the late 1980’s.  Even then it was such a bad plane that chances of return were questioned.  In the 1960’s their planes were to bomb the United States and then …? 

 

They could attack and probably conquer Europe, although the Europeans were not thrilled about that and would have fought.  The Soviets could never trust Poland or much of Eastern Europe and could not have been happy about a land war there. 

 

And recall: they were going to do this over Cuba?  I have severe problems with that.  I do.  I don’t think Castro thought they’d go to war for him either.

 

And in general, there is something very weird about these self congratulatory former diplomats and enemies sitting around saying how dangerous it had been and how sharp they were to get us out of that mess.  And weirder still for us to believe it without question.