Cameloss of Courage

"HOW did it all happen?" the German ex-Chancellor Prince von Bulow asked his successor at the outbreak of the First World War.

"Ah, if we only knew," Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg replied.

Why do wars start? The thousands of books and articles on the Widener shelves are a stark testament to the frustrations of generations of scholars working away at the origins of this or that war.

But we know even less about why wars never happen at all. For the last 40 years we have lived in a bipolar international system with hegemonic powers competing for territory, goods and prestige. Judging by many theories about great powers and international conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union should have gone to war by now. They have had many opportunities--the closest being the Cuban Missile Crisis--where the two countries could have initiated a general war, but didn't.

Twenty-five years after the Crisis, a large number of new writing and scholarly meetings have commemorated the world's closest brush with thermonuclear war. Even in 1988, the Cuban Missile Crisis held its own as a key factor in the debate over strategic issues and superpower relations--even to the point of coloring current arguments over the INF and START treaties. Politicians, scholars, and journalists have turned to the Crisis to draw out lessons about nuclear weapons, diplomacy, and crisis management. The publication of surprising evidence in this winter's International Security--a transcript of secret tapes which recorded the meetings of top Kennedy Administration advisers during the Crisis--shows that most interpretations of the October 1962 event have been wrong.

THE common view of the Crisis has been that President Kennedy "stood eyeball to eyeball" with Khrushchev and that "the other guy blinked." By placing a naval blockade around Cuba and by gradually increasing the military pressure, Kennedy and his advisers took the Soviets to the brink of nuclear war and forced the Kremlin to back down. The missiles were removed at no cost to the United States and a period of detente soon began between the superpowers. Or so the popular theory goes.

Unfortunately, our understanding of the Crisis has relied on the memoirs of Kennedy Administration advisers. No such as Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Theodore Sorenson, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., have spread the view that Kennedy's skillful use of flexible response--meeting Soviet moves with an equal amount of force--and the American superiority in conventional strength allowed the United States to prevail. But the transcripts of October 27, 1962 reveal a different picture.

Instead of calmly gauging how to pressure the Soviets, Kennedy and his men were confused and very willing to make several concessions to Khrushchev. Scared by the prospect that Khrushchev would escalate any conflict, the White House was afraid that any move against the Soviets would touch off a nuclear holocaust. Eventually, a dovish Kennedy pledged never to invade Cuba and implicitly agreed to Khrushchev's demand that American nuclear missiles in Turkey be removed in exchange for a withdrawal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba. The transcripts show that the United States did not "win" the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that Kennedy gave in as much as the Soviets did to end the confrontation.

The most astonishing revelation of the transcripts is the sharp contradiction between the hard historical evidence and the statements of Kennedy's former advisers. While a certain allowance must be made for the failings of memory, these disparities are too stark and too shockingly recurrent to be explained away. The good men of Camelot have deliberately altered the public record of the Crisis to create an image of President Kennedy as a cool, tough leader who saved the Free World from the encroachments of communism--instead of a dovish Kennedy who sought the easiest way to resolve the Crisis.