Forget the film, it was American military muscle that resolved the Cuban missile crisis
FRANK JOHNSON Hollywood's new film on the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, Thirteen Days, is like exciting thriller fiction. Which is what it is. It is the tale of a rational, liberal president, Kennedy, overriding aggressive generals and admirals. He ensures that the crisis is resolved peacefully. But the film shows a different crisis from the one that happened.
Does it matter? It is only a film. But that is why it matters. Most people now seem to take most of their history from the screen, small and large. The film will encourage generations of cinema-goers, including politicians present and future, to believe that generals and admirals, in most democracies, but especially the United States, are warmongers. The only reason why they do not plunge the world into more wars is that they are overridden whenever a democracy, especially the United States, is lucky enough to have a liberal head of government.
Thirteen Days is another example of the post-Vietnam reversal of Hollywood's military policy. Once we used to complain that the makers of Hollywood films were American nationalists. We in Britain were especially amused, and a few of us outraged, when Errol Flynn, not the British, was shown as defeating the Japanese in Burma. Once, America's soldiers were Hollywood's heroes; now they are its villains.
The 13 days in question began with President Kennedy being told that the Soviet Union was putting nuclear missiles into communist Cuba. They ended with Washington and Moscow announcing that the missiles were being withdrawn in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island. It is by now perhaps the most studied, and written about, crisis of the 20th century; more so even than Sarajevo in 1914. This has been so since the end of the Cold War enabled Soviet archives to be consulted. Khrushchev put missiles into Cuba because the Soviet Union did not have enough intercontinental ballistic missiles to equal those of the United States. He believed that Kennedy would do nothing about it.
In the film, once American aerial photography has spotted the missiles, Kennedy is shown doing what he indeed did: constitute in secret a small committee to advise him. It includes generals, admirals, airmen, the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, the defence secretary, Robert McNamara, and the president's brother Robert (attorneygeneral). The military recommend that the missiles be removed by air-strikes on their launching sites, followed by an American invasion of the island.
Horrified, Kennedy and his brother go away and brood. The president rejects their advice and chooses instead a naval blockade of the island. The US navy is to stop and, if necessary, search Soviet ships approaching Cuba to ensure that they are not carrying missiles. As in real life, Kennedy goes on television to address the world.
In due course, Secretary of State Rusk brings an ABC television journalist, John Scali (now dead), to see the Kennedys. Scali has a KGB contact in Washington who knows Khrushchev. This contact seems to be hinting that a deal is possible. The Kennedys authorise Scali to tell him that, in return for the missiles' removal, the United States would promise not to invade Cuba. The United States would also privately promise to remove its missiles from Turkey. This is the deal which ends the crisis. The Soviet ships turn back from Cuba. The Kennedys' liberalism has triumphed over militarism; America's, that is.
In reality, the crisis was resolved by America's then superior military power — including its nuclear weapons — and Khrushchev's realisation that, in assuming that Kennedy would do nothing about the missiles, he had made a terrible miscalculation, which two years later was to be a reason for his fall. Recent scholarship has told us a lot of what was said during the meetings of Kennedy's secret committee. Much of the proceedings was taped. Not all the participants knew that at the time.
Kennedy did not exclude either airstrikes or invasion. He was prepared for both. The film shows Mr McNamara, who is still alive, as heroically restrained throughout in the face of the bellicose military. But his first reaction to the Soviet missiles is not shown, perhaps because it was too restrained. He was asked how they would affect the strategic balance. The tapes have him saying: 'Not at all.' He tells Kennedy: 'I'll be quite frank. I don't think there is a military problem.' But a few days later, before Kennedy had decided on blockade, Mr McNamara is for a 'limited air-strike'. That is not in the film either.
The journalist Scali, and his KGB acquaintance, are shown in a Washington restaurant agreeing the deal which the Russian is to put to Khrushchev, Their conversation is confined to no-invasion-inexchange-for-missiles-withdrawal. The film omits Scali's telling him: 'We are absolutely determined to get those missiles out of there. An invasion of Cuba is only a matter of hours away' (quoted in Closing Pandora's Box, by Patrick Glynn, 1992, p.91).
Then there was American superiority in strategic nuclear weapons. Khrushchev could have responded to the blockade by putting pressure on West Berlin, where he had local superiority just as Kennedy did in the sea around Cuba. Khrushchev did not. The United States went on full nuclear alert during the crisis. The Soviet Union did not. True, Khrushchev could have waited until he had put enough missiles into Cuba to lay waste the United States. But the Soviet Union would also have been lain waste. He put the missiles there with the intention of scoring a propaganda triumph, convincing the uncommitted world that history was going the Soviet Union's way, not with the intention of using them. Finally, from at least four books on the crisis, and probably more which I have not read, we now know that Khrushchev's conciliatory letter to Kennedy, making it clear that he wanted the crisis quickly ended, was sent after Soviet and Cuban intelligence warned him that an American invasion was imminent.
In the months after the crisis, Kennedy — to protect himself from Republican attack — was anxious to depict himself as having been hawkish, which comparatively he was. He arranged for a friend, the journalist Charles Bartlett, to write a Saturday Evening Post article setting up Adlai Stevenson, UN ambassador, as the irresolute one. But, since politicians decided in the spring of 1968 that the Vietnam War was electorally unpopular, successive Kennedys have preferred to depict themselves as doves. In that cause, Robert Kennedy, just before his death, wrote a book on the Kennedys' liberal version of the Cuban crisis. It was called Thirteen Days. With this film, a Kennedy from beyond the grave influences the 21st century. But it is the Robert of 1968, not the Jack of 1962.
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