Cuba 20 Years Later

The ultimate game of chicken commenced on October 22, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy grimly etched a line 700 miles off the coast of Cuba. Kennedy promised a war that no one wanted if Nikita Krushchev did not call back his battleships and remove his missiles from the island. The Kremlin remained silent. B-52 squadrons scrambled: the Soviet fleet steamed ahead.

"People of New York and San Francisco," droned a Radio Moscow announcer in a broadcast beamed across the United States the next day. "The Pittsburgh steel smelter, the California farmer...and the Harvard student, you may be drafted and sent to the front." No other American university was mentioned in the ominous warning which continued: "The flames of war may creep in from the Caribbean and engulf your home too."

"You can imagine the reaction to this whole thing," says Faye Levine '65, a sophomore at the time. "You had people getting into cars and heading for Vermont and New Hampshire."

Few among the faculty and students who were at the University during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis recall the Soviets' singling out Harvard in official propaganda. Most recollect a campus just as confused and frightened as the rest of the country by the blur of cryptic news reports: U.S. blockade, 80 million potential American victims, rockets in Turkey, the threat to Berlin.

Armageddon notwithstanding, undergraduate politicos immediately split into opposing camps. The majority praised Kennedy's dramatic response, while a small but vocal leftist camp portrayed "a spiral of hostility" willfully accelerated by the White House.

The baffling speed with which events unfolded remains a vivid memory, even for those who can't recall the excitement on campus. Professor of Government Samuel H. Beer, for example, remembers only his relief over the blockade plan plan, "considering that at first people had talked of bombing the hell out of Cuba....Things came across so fast that there really wasn't time to react."

Knowledge of what was actually going on in Washington was a rare commodity. For some, it provided the confidence that conflict would be avoided; for others, inside information only added to their apprehension. Undergraduates lacked any such special insights, and emotions in the dorms fluctuated with the tone of each day's news reports. "We were up and down," says Frederic L Ballard Jr. '63, who was president of the Crimson. "We would hear a report about the confrontation of ships and just have to wait to hear if that was going to be it."

Kennedy saw his first U-2 photographs of what appeared to him to be "football fields" in the countryside adjacent to San Cristobal, Cuba on Tuesday, October 16. The Central Intelligence Agency informed the President that these were make-shift Soviet missile bases. For the next seven days, "even those in the White House didn't know what was going on," says Dan H. Fenn '44, then a staff assistant to Kennedy and now the director of the Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston. As the President and his inner circle of national security advisers struggled toward a decision to blockade Cuba, government continued as usual on the surface, adds Fenn, who was not himself aware of the secret debate underway in the Cabinet Room until the 22nd.

Announcing the "quarantine" on national television. Kennedy said, "We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced."

Hendrik Hertzberg '65 watched the initial Kennedy speech with fellow Crimson editors in the newspaper's Plympton St. building. "Everybody was scared to death, literally scared to death," he recalls. "There was a lot of fear that this was going to lead to, well, that the moment had come."

Undergraduates during the early Sixties had grown up with civil defense drills--"ducking under the desk at the flash, and so on," as Hertzberg puts it. But the former campus reporter, president of the Harvard Liberal Union and current editor of The New Republic is one of several Harvard students of his generation who recalls almost no contemplation of the actual consequences of a nuclear explosion: "It was rather more general than that, a fear that we would somehow end up in nuclear war, but not exactly what would happen in that war." George B. Kistiakowsky, a retired chemistry professor who helped develop the first atomic bomb, argues that then as now people forced themselves not to think about the horrors of nuclear war, preferring to discuss the threat in theoretical terms. Himself overwrought with concern. Kistiakowsky cancelled his classes at the peak of the crisis.

Not interested in waiting around near a major population center to debate the possible drift of fall out a small number of Harvard students joined a contingent from Yale heading for family vacation homes in Northern New England. Faye Levine, who has included the incident in a novel she is writing on college life in Cambridge from 1961 to 1964, remembers" a lot of feeling that we were on the verge of annihilation."

Across the nation, "no issue in...memory had evoked the concern and discussion that monopolized life yesterday in American colleges," the Crimson reported on Wednesday, October 24, basing its assessment on a survey of campus newspaper editors. "Students were worried about the draft and thought war was very possible in the near future," the Crimson added.

Travelling in Virginia that week, Ford Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences David Riesman '31 visited Mary Baldwin College, a women's school, where "the students were telephoning their fathers on nearby Air Force and Army bases, asking if they should go home." These undergraduates feared that their particular country would be targeted by the Soviets because Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a vehement anti-communist spokesman, had once attended an adjacent military academy, Riesman explains.

Among the faculty back at Harvard, most were somewhat less frantic, says Adam B. Ulam, the director of the Russian Research Center. The foreign policy expert "personally was rather skeptical of war breaking out, but there was a great deal of discussion and concern. "The day after Kennedy's quarantine speech, two professors sponsored a Quincy House foreign affairs table and 300 worried students attended. In the ensuing discussion, which focused solely on the Caribbean situation. Professor Stanley H. Hoffmann pointed out that the blockade gave the Soviets "face-saving options" and that an American invasion of Cuba would "push the Soviets to the wall." Taking a more bellicose stance in response to undergraduate questions, then Professor of Government Henry A. Kissinger '50 scorned the Soviets for a "double miscalculation": challenging a resolute United States on American home waters.

Kennedy and Kruschev began their celebrated exchange of personal letters on Tuesday, October 23, while Soviet warships continued on course toward Cuba. What might have become a tragic complication evaporated 24 hours later, when the Soviet ships Gagarin and Komiles, accompanied by a submarine, stopped just short of the American blockade. Other ships turned around and headed away from Cuba.

"We were scared of war throughout," recalls Douglas C. Dillon '31, then Secretary of the Treasury and a member of the ad hoc White House committee formed to advise the President. A longtime Harvard visiting committee member and former president of the Board of Overseers, Dillon adds that the two-week ordeal consisted of a series of optimistic surges and crashing depressions.

On Thursday the 25th, new U-2 photos showed that construction of Soviet bombers was continuing at an increased pace. Cuban United Nations representative Mario Garcia-Inchanstegui told Crimson reporters in an exclusive interview that his nation would not negotiate with the United States under any circumstances.

While one Kennedy corresponded with Kruschev in the fall of 1962, another one ran for his first term in the U.S. Senate Edward M. Kennedy '54 participated in an all-Harvard campaign against Republican George Cabot Lodge '50 and Independent H. Stuart Hughes, a professor of History. The seat went to the President's brother in a runaway, but the Hughes crusade, which focused on the scholar's leftist international politics aroused substantial interest on campus during the missile crisis.

More than 900 spectators attended an October 24 Cuba forum in Lowell Lecture Hall sponsored by the national disarmament group, Tocsin. The gathering featured Hughes, who lambasted JFK for creating "a contrived and theatrical atmosphere" of military confrontation rather than relying primarily on peaceful United Nations intervention. History Professor Stephan A. Thernstrom, then a first-year instructor and a Hughes organizer, recalls that Tocsin sympathizers "had a horrible sinking feeling everyone would rally around the flag and move us closer to war." The Crimson agreed, editorializing that Kennedy should have dealt more directly with Cuban leader Fidel Castro rather than flying "on wings of war into an ambiguous 'quarantine'" against the Soviets. "I really thought at the time that this was part of Kennedy's macho-jocko routine to prove American resolve," says Thernstrom. But he adds that his political views were not widely held on campus. Several petitions actually circulated in favor of JFK, and Hertzberg of the Liberal Union formally endorsed the blockade, saying, "Action is now necessary." Almost every anti-war event Tocsin or Hughes organized that October met with mainstream opposition.

Enjoying a brief period of relative strength, the Harvard Young Republicans Club endorsed a strong American response in an unusual show of support for Kennedy Danny J. Boggs '65, vice president of the conservative organization at the time, recalls that amid all of the excitement, his group received a notable boost from a visiting scholar from Columbia named Zbigniew Brzezinski. The one time Harvard professor and national security advisor under President Jimmy Carter told an International Relations Club audience on Thursday, the 25th. "I would initiate an intensive air strike on the missile sites, which are still comparatively few."

"The attention did very well for our club," remembers Boggs, who now serves as a domestic policy aide in the Reagan Administration.

White House officials faced the absolute nadir of the confrontation on October 27, "Black Saturday," as Kennedy's assistant appointments secretary, David Powers, still calls it. The White House had received a combative letter from Khrushchev which seemed to contradict an earlier message indicating a willingness to compromise. That night, the President and Powers, long-time personal friends, shared a late dinner of chicken, in the Oval Office while Kennedy silently weighed his options.

"The President," Powers recalls, "said to me at one point, 'Dave, you are eating that chicken and drinking that wine like it's your last supper.' I told him, 'Mr. President, I'm not sure that it's not.' It was difficult to have hope, even though we had faith in the President."

McGeorge Bundy, who left his position as dean of the Faculty here to become Kennedy's chief national security advisor, describes the missile crisis in familiar terms: "the most dangerous moment in the nuclear confrontation because of the degree to which things could get out of control." But Bundy, who now teaches history at New York University, adds that there was a huge discrepancy between the public's impression of the missile crisis and what was actually going on. "One advantage of being inside the government process was that you knew what was not going to happen, and in that sense there wasn't one night when we went to bed and assumed that would be the last time."

Dan Fenn recalls a tense meal with fellow aides in the White House mess sometime late in the second week of the crisis: "Pierre Salinger [the White House press secretary] came sauntering in...and we all asked him what was new, had anything happened. He cocked his ear to the skies, waited a second or two, and said, 'Still quiet, so I guess nothing.' That's what you call gallows humor."

The White House did not have formal institutional ties to specific college faculties for consulting purposes in 1962, Bundy says, but several Harvard professors had access to inside information through official and unofficial sources. Kistiakowsky, for example, remained in contact with members of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, which he had headed under the Eisenhower Administration. He attributes his decision to cancel classes at the peak of the crisis to the gloomy reports he received: "I just couldn't make myself prepare the lecture, so I went in and said I was not going to lecture," he explains.

Paul M. Doty, also a chemistry professor, served formally on the science advisory board in 1962 while retaining his academic position. He speaks of "two levels of perception" inside and outside government and amplifies Bundy's assertion that nuclear conflict remained "a long ways away," despite very real concern in the White House. Doty recalls that "half the people at lower levels of government were packing their station wagons to leave with their families for their homes in Vermont." He was also aware of disturbing logistical details: for example, that the B-52s constantly landing and taking off at Logan Airport during the week after Kennedy's first speech were crammed full of nuclear bombs.

On the advice of his brother Robert, the Attorney General, JFK decided late Saturday night to ignore Khruschev's more belligerent letter but warned that if the missiles were not withdrawn by Sunday, invasions or air strikes would follow. The next day, Khruschev announced the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles, saying, "We are confident that reason will triumph, that war will not be unleashed, and peace and security of the peoples will be insured."

Those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis agree that it brought into better focus the danger of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff. Some attribute the successful drive for the 1963 partial Test Ban Treaty to the concern aroused in October 1962. But the Caribbean confrontation did not itself produce significant new critiques of American government and foreign policy among students and professors. "Students were very little activated politically," says Adam Ulam. "The mood of Vietnam had not yet emerged, and there was nothing like the interest in political issues that came to exist."

Less than a week after the Crimson front page had been filled with speeches on the apocalypse and calls for U.S. invasions, the stories on student government and debates over General Education returned. "The lasting memory is one of fear followed by relief," says Frederic Ballard. "We were all just so relieved that there wasn't warfare." By election day, missiles and surgical air strikes were all but forgotten. "Cliffies Endorse Teddy Kennedy As Sexiest Candidate for Senator," proclaimed a page-one headline. Stuart Hughes received a grand total of 50,000 votes for his anti-war campaign, and three days after JFK had removed the last blockade ships, Harvard beat Yale, 14-6, at Soldiers' Field.Photo Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy LibraryIntelligence officials showed President Kennedy this U-2 photograph of the Soviet ship Poltava.