Nearly two years ago, Wisconsin voters decided they had had enough of the phony maverick, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D–Wisconsin). Perhaps half of this state’s voters simultaneously noticed they weren’t really being represented either by Wisconsin’s other senator, Herb Kohl, nobody’s senator but his.
Feingold’s replacement, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, got a lengthy interview in the Wall Street Journal:
The plain-spoken Oshkosh businessman stands out in the Senate, and not merely because he’s unaffected. As Mr. Johnson pointed out in one campaign ad, the Senate in 2010 included 57 lawyers (Mr. Feingold was one) but zero manufacturers and just one accountant. With Mr. Johnson, the Senate gained a manufacturer and an accountant. …
Upon arriving in Washington in November 2010 for Senate orientation—the first time he had ever visited the nation’s capital—the political neophyte expected to be enormously frustrated, he says, “but it’s that and then some.” Mr. Johnson may be an outsider, but he wants to work within the system to get things done. That is proving harder than he imagined.
For starters, he says, Congress doesn’t operate with anything close to the efficiency of a business: “If you’re going to compete against an organization, Congress would be the perfect one to compete against.” …
The senator believes the 2012 election is seminal not only because he thinks it’s our last chance to make a U-turn on the road to serfdom—”this election is literally about saving America”—but also because it offers Republicans a singular opportunity to educate the public about the country’s problems, and in doing so, earn a mandate for fixing them.
“People understand that we’re really at this fork in the road. We’ve actually already forked. We’d better hop on over here while this path is still in sight, while we can still hop back on this path, and people get that,” he says. But “far too many Americans have either forgotten—or I’d argue were never taught—the foundational premise of this nation, what our founders did.”
Sounding like he’s channeling the spirit of Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, he adds: “The government isn’t here to solve our problems. We need government. It’s necessary. But by and large, it’s something to fear because as it grows, our freedoms recede. And as a result, way too many are trading their freedoms . . . for a false sense of economic security.”
At this the senator whips out a batch of PowerPoint slides that he has been presenting to audiences in Wisconsin. He refers to these visits, especially his stops at businesses, as “force multipliers” since they can help inform workers, which “our education system isn’t going to do.”
First up is a line graph that illustrates how federal spending has exploded to 24% of GDP from 2% a century ago. Next, a chart that plots spending and revenue over the past 50 years. Spending has averaged about 20.2% while revenue has trended around 18.1%—regardless of whether the top marginal tax rate was 90% or 28%. “The variation around that mean is tight. We’ve only gone above 20% four times,” he notes.
Then come slides dispelling Democratic myths such as the ones about how Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan blew up the deficit. The tax cuts and war budgets account for just $1.2 trillion of the $5.3 trillion in deficits the Obama administration has run in four years. Republicans during the Bush administration might have been “spending like banshees,” he says, but “they did get the deficit down to $162 billion. Far too high for me, but quaint in comparison to Obama’s record.”
As for the “draconian cuts” that Republicans now supposedly want to inflict, spending even under Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget would be $1 trillion higher in 2022 than it is today.
And the idea that asking the wealthy to “pay their fair share,” whatever that is, can solve the deficit? The president’s so-called Buffett Rule to establish a minimum tax rate of 30% for millionaires would raise about $5 billion a year, while allowing the Bush rates to expire for the wealthy might bring in an additional $67 billion. (“I would like to do a Buffett Rule,” Mr. Johnson deadpans. “Just for Buffett.”)
The tax revenue would be a pittance, given that the deficit this year is $1.1 trillion and the national debt is $16 trillion—which, Mr. Johnson notes, will explode under ObamaCare. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the health law will cost $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years. The senator says that’s a lowball estimate and that the gnomes at the CBO are underestimating the incentive for employers to drop their workers onto government-subsidized exchanges. …
The November election offers a clear choice, he says, between “Mitt Romney, who is committed to fixing the problems and willing to take the risk of picking Paul Ryan—who’s willing to take risks,” and Mr. Obama, who “either doesn’t understand” the problems, “which is possible, or he just thinks he can continue to sell the snake oil and hoodwink the American public.” …
Mr. Johnson is optimistic that in the election Republicans can take the Senate, and if they do, he sees a real opportunity to pass Medicare reform a la Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan, as well as move Medicaid to block grants and undertake a Social Security overhaul that includes some means-testing.
Does he really hope to do all three entitlement reforms at once? “As long as you’re doing it, rip the Band-Aid off, get it over with,” he says.
Such reforms will be a heavy lift even if Republicans pick up in the best-case-scenario seven Senate seats, bringing the GOP total to 54. But what if Republicans stay in the minority and, heaven forbid, Wisconsin’s Madison liberal Tammy Baldwin and Massachusetts’ warrior princess Elizabeth Warren win their races?
Mr. Johnson can’t bear to contemplate the prospect. But Republicans will have to work with the other side and build a political consensus regardless of how many Senate seats they win—much like Ronald Reagan did with his 1986 tax reform. …
Hence, the senator thinks it’s crucial that Republicans use the November election to educate the public about economic growth, which as he says, is “the fun way” to reduce the deficit.
“It’s the unpainful way. It’s what President Obama doesn’t have a clue about. I think Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan know about that. And besides that, I think both men are inherently optimistic, which would be helpful. Don’t you think?”
Today in 1963, the Beatles played two shows in Sundstavagen, Sweden, to begin their first tour of Sweden. The local music critic was less than impressed, claiming the Beatles should have been happy for their fans’ screaming to drown out the group’s “terrible” performance, asserting that the Beatles “were of no musical importance whatsoever,” and furthermore claiming their local opening act, the Phantoms, “decidedly outshone them.”
Three thoughts: Perhaps the Beatles did have a bad night. But have you heard a Phantoms song recently? It is also unknown whether the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” was intended as revenge against the Swedes.
One year later, a demonstration of why the phrase “never say never” holds validity: Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show.
A riot broke out in the CBS studio, which prompted Sullivan to say, “I promise you they’ll never be back on our show again.” “Never” turned out to be May 2, 1965, when the Stones made the second of their six performances on the rilly big shew.
One year ago I wrote about our 19th anniversary. Three hundred sixty-six days later, today’s our 20th anniversary.
Read last year’s column (while adding the number 1 to every year reference), and all I’ll add is that in a world where divorce seems more common than marriage, I should say in public: I love my wife.
The Washington Times noticed something from last week’s presidential debate:
[Mitt] Romney was trying to make the point that both his and [Barack] Obama’s investment funds probably include investments in China–something the president has attacked Mr. Romney for.
“Mr. President, have you looked at your pension?” Mr. Romney said.
“You know, I don’t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours, so it–it doesn’t take as long,” Mr. Obama retorted. His reply prompted laughter in the debate hall where the two men were squaring off–but across the way in the separate room where the press was stationed, a brief round of applause broke out.
You hear a lot about “income inequality,” but most people don’t particularly care. Last year’s effort to begin a mass movement around the question was a whimpering failure, yet it got hyped to the sky at first because it played into powerful class resentments–on the part not of poor or low-income working people but of academics and journalists, which is to say intellectuals.
Now, academics and journalists are not exactly downtrodden. Although life as an adjunct or a freelancer can be a challenge, a professor with tenure or a journalist at a major media outlet makes a good enough living to make him affluent. Affluent people with elitist pretensions often have a strong distaste for the wealthy, especially those, like Romney, who earned their riches by being successful in business. If you want to find bitterness against “the 1%,” don’t look at “the 99%.” Instead, focus in on the 98th percentile.
“It’s common for eggheads to nurture ressentiment against fat cats,” as we observed in July. “Intellectuals are apt to hold a self-serving belief in cognitive meritocracy, in the idea that the brightest are also the best. They envy the rich because wealth is a concrete measure of status that is out of proportion to what the intellectual believes to be true merit. If they’re so rich, how come they’re not smart?”
Barack Obama is no scholar, but he has the quintessential egghead’s arrogance. That came across most clearly in this passage from the infamous “You didn’t build that” speech:
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there.
Some of those smart people are right there in the press room. Where’s their fair share of Mitt Romney’s millions?
That’s an interesting additional insight to the theory I’ve had for years why reporters are more often than not anti-business. Journalists who are not at major media outlets generally don’t make enough to be considered “affluent,” because there are so many of them already, and journalism schools keep turning out graduates every year. The competition for jobs in the traditional print and electronic media keeps down reporters’ and editors’ salaries. The people who make better money in the media are managers, because managers make more than the people they manage (duh), and sales people, because the more they work (that is, the more advertising they sell), the more money they make.
I’ve also said that media workplace environments put the word “fun” in “dysfunction.” (Someone who like me has worked in the media on the side pointed out last week that companies supposedly in the business of communication often have the worst internal communication. He’s right.) I’ve only worked in one full-time workplace that I felt met the level of “dysfunctional,” but I’ve heard enough about others from my media colleagues, and I experienced enough in my media relations past to be occasionally happy that I didn’t get jobs I’d applied or interviewed for over the years.
New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin thinks Obama indeed hates Romney, but not just Romney:
Here’s my view: the president has been totally corrupted by power. His already excessive self-regard has grown out of control thanks to an entourage of yes men, a fawning press and the presidential bubble. He actually believes in the messianic cult of the “black Jesus” that surrounds him, and has a Nobel Prize to authenticate his personal exceptionalism.
The result is that Obama is no longer capable of dealing with ordinary disagreement and difference. He can only demonize it as unworthy and illegitimate. Honest disagreements are beneath him. Thus, Romney is a “liar.”
We the people disappoint him, too. His desire for “more flexibility” reflects a desire to be freed from our messy democracy, as did his comment that it would be easier to be president of China. The Constitution, he complained, is too limiting, signaling he doesn’t like the Founders’ whole point of limited government.
Another sign of irritation is his constant boasting and use of the word “I.” This is more than a bad habit. Whether from deep insecurity or narcissism, or both, he views his election as a blank check for power that he constantly tries to cash. Think czars and end runs around Congress, along with a public scolding of the Supreme Court.
Tellingly, he rejected Republican suggestions over the stimulus with a conversation-stopper: “I won.” And his decision to leak the details of how he personally decides who will live and die during drone attacks reeks of madness. The program put him as close to absolute power as a man can get, but instead of humility, he pounds his chest.
These are not stray episodes. His politics are intensely psychological and the key to his governing. People who have met with him report that he doesn’t listen or engage in substantive conversations. His ideas are immutable to facts or fresh thinking. “A stubborn worldview” is how one Democrat described it.
Romney, in so many ways, embodies Obama’s worst nightmare. His life story explodes Obama’s crude assumptions of the wealthy, which is essentially that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Romney did build his fortune.
Romney also has the nerve to challenge the president’s statist philosophy. By attacking dependency and government power, and promoting individual opportunity and capitalism, Romney might as well be arguing that the world is flat. …
As for Obama’s news media allies, they are being, in the opinion of Georgetown University Prof. Bradley Blakeman, literally unpatriotic:
You would think [MSNBC’s Chris] Matthews would know what is in the Constitution and what is not.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it set forth that a president of the United States is above the people and cannot and should not be challenged. Is that not what a presidential election is all about – challenging an incumbent president on his record?
The Founding Fathers specifically limited the powers of the president and did not exempt a president from abiding by the laws of the land in the same manner and to the same extent as the average citizen.
America was founded because of our dissatisfaction with a monarchy run by kings and queens who were above the people. The problem is that Matthews thinks that not only he is above the people but President Obama should be as well.
The president of the United States in the Oath of Office swears to the following:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Prior to the debates mainstream media bigs could craft the coverage of the race as they saw it and in the manner they wanted to communicate it. The problem for them now is that they cannot tell the people what to think when they watched the debates themselves in real time and formed opinions without the need for explanation or editorializing. Their “power” over the people has been marginalized and the liberal media can’t stand it.
I have news for Matthews: there is no greater responsibility a president has than to preserve, protect and defend the Constitutional protection of a citizens’ freedom of speech — presidents are neither immune from it nor protected from it.
Among the lessons of these events, which many consider the closest we came to a nuclear exchange during the Cold War, is that our intelligence community can be badly informed. Our technical capabilities for gathering information are much improved since a half-century ago, but this lesson remains true — even regarding the possibility of a renewed threat to the United States of a nuclear attack from the south, courtesy not of the Russians but of Iran.
Indeed, even as Israel seems sure that Iran will not gain a nuclear-weapons capability in the next few months, others doubt that we really know Iran’s capabilities so precisely — and they warn that Iran could pose an imminent threat not only to Israel but also to the United States. …
For example, Reza Kahlili is a counterterrorism expert who served in the CIA’s directorate of operations as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board authorized by Congress. He warns of an October surprise that could affect our upcoming election. Last year, he noted that when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it will already have the tested ballistic-missile capability needed to launch it from a ship off our coasts, including from the Gulf of Mexico.
So we potentially could again be rudely awakened by a nuclear attack from a few miles off our coasts. As I have previously argued, this is an existential threat, because the associated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a high-altitude nuclear burst could lead to the ultimate death of two-thirds or more of all Americans, as reported to Congress by the congressionally mandated EMP Commission.
Thus, we could, in the near future, confront a modern Cuban Missile Crisis — produced by the threat of a nuclear attack either from a ship off our coasts or from Venezuela, which Iran is supporting with important technology and know-how. We are totally vulnerable to this threat.
While our missile-defense site in Alaska provides a limited defense against long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from Iran, it is totally ineffective against this threat from the sea or from Venezuela. An additional East Coast site, as advocated by some in Congress, is a worthy objective to improve our defense against Iranian ICBMs, but it would not end our total vulnerability to Iranian missiles launched from ships off our coasts.
Whatever the uncertainties in 1962, President Kennedy knew he was dealing with an adversary that could be deterred from carrying out an existential threat to America. Today we confront an Iranian regime that is dedicated to destroying the “Great Satan,” America — and may even seek an “end times” catastrophe to hasten the “return of the Mahdi.”
It is not at all clear that they can be deterred. Indeed, many of their actions — and words — suggest that they are quite prepared to commit suicide to kill a multitude of Americans and destroy all we hold dear.
A horrible irony today in 1964: A plane carrying all four members of the group Buddy and the Kings crashed, killing everyone on board. Buddy and the Kings was led by Harold Box, who replaced Buddy Holly with the Crickets after Holly died in a plane crash in 1959:
Today in 1976, Chicago had its first number one single, which some would consider the start of its downward slope to sappy ballads:
Imagine turning on your TV for a speech by the president this Monday night and watching this:
This is on film, not video, which is why President John F. Kennedy isn’t looking at the camera. The video looks like this:
This speech, 50 years ago tonight, was the first the American public knew about what was percolating east of Florida.
What became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis started well before Oct. 22, 1962. Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista at the beginning of 1959. By the end of 1960, Castro had aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, which put the Soviets in essence in the middle of the southeastern U.S. (Cuba is between Florida and Puerto Rico.)
Recall last week that John F. Kennedy was a fan of Ian Fleming’s Bond. James Bond. Kennedy apparently inherited more than one plot to reinvoke the Platt Amendment, which gave the U.S. control of Cuba from 1901 until 1934. Kennedy pledged on April 12, 1961 that the U.S. would not invade Cuba, five days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, a covert attempt to, yes, invade Cuba. Seven months later, the Kennedy administration hatched Operation Mongoose, the next attempt to overthrow Castro through sabotage.
Six months after that, in late May 1962, a Soviet delegation to Cuba suggested installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Castro announced in late July that Cuba was taking measures that would make any direct U.S. attack on Cuba the equivalent of a world war, with help, he said, from the U.S.S.R. U.S. Sen. Kenneth Keating (R–New York) announced in the Senate Aug. 31 that evidence existed of missile installations in Cuba. (Keating’s reward was to be defeated in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy.)
The missile and launcher parts began arriving in September by freighter, but were not discovered by the Americans until a U-2 flight Oct. 14, 1962, four days after Keating announced Cuba had six missile sites. After the missiles were identified as medium-range surface-to-surface missiles, Kennedy’s morning Oct. 16 began with news of the missiles being installed in Cuba. (Interestingly, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy knew about the missiles one day before Kennedy did.)
Kennedy formed an executive committee of some of his cabinet and others, none of whom were named Lyndon Johnson. The committee met for a week while Kennedy made various campaign appearances outside Washington, and met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, without telling Gromyko what the U.S. knew. Kennedy then broke off his trip and returned to Washington, according to Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, because of a cold.
Truth be told, the cold war was in danger of getting radioactively hot. Kennedy decided on a quarantine of Cuba because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he could not guarantee that an air strike could not guarantee destroying all the missile sites. He spoke to the country a day after asking the press (and you’d never see this today) to report nothing until the speech, and after meeting with congressional leaders. (Another thing you’d never see today: No leaks.)
If Kennedy’s speech alarmed the public, their panic didn’t compare to how the public should have felt. The day of Kennedy’s speech, Castro announced a war alert. One day after the speech, the U.S. proceeded with an atomic bomb test in the South Pacific. (Perhaps in retrospect that should have been rescheduled, along with the Atlas missile test at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.) One day later, on Oct. 24, U.S. forces were upgraded from Defense Condition 3 to DEFCON 2, their highest alert level in history. (DEFCON refers to how imminent a nuclear attack is; even though U.S. forces are in harm’s way overseas, we’re at DEFCON 5 now. The U.S. was at DEFCON 3 during the 1973 Yom Kippur war and on Sept. 11, 2001. If we ever reach DEFCON 1, you’ll probably be hearing air raid sirens, and that will not be a test.)
I think you will understand me correctly if you are really concerned for the welfare of the world. Everyone needs peace: both capitalists, if they have not lost their reason, and all the more, communists — people who know how to value not only their own lives but, above all else, the life of nations. WE communists are against any wars between states at all, and have been defending the cause of peace ever since we came into the world. WE have always regarded war as a calamity, not as a game or a means for achieving particular purposes, much less as a goal in itself. Our goals are clear, and the means of achieving them is work. War is our enemy and a calamity for all nations.
In contrast to the tone of the letter, one day later, more aerial photos showed the Soviets had not slowed down on their missile site work, and were beginning to camouflage the sites. Meanwhile, Castro wrote a letter to Khrushchev:
From an analysis of the situation and the reports in our possession, I consider that the aggression is almost imminent within the next 24 or 72 hours.
There are two possible variants: the first and likeliest one is an air attack against certain targets with the limited objective of destroying them; the second, less probable although possible, is invasion. I understand that his variant would call for a large number of forces and it is, in addition, the most repulsive form of aggression, which might inhibit them. …
At this time I want to convey to you briefly my personal opinion. If the second variant is implemented and the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it, the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.
I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness is extremely dangerous and if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through tan act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.
Khrushchev reportedly read the third paragraph as Castro’s suggesting that the Soviet Union launch a first nuclear strike.
That same day, United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson spoke to the UN:
That same day, ABC-TV reporter John Scali got a request to meet with Aleksandr Fomin, a top Soviet intelligence officer in Washington. (I guarantee you that doesn’t happen at weekly newspapers.) Fomin proposed to Scali that the Soviet Union would dismantle the Cuban missile bases if the U.S. publicly pledged not to invade Cuba.
A day later, on Oct. 27, a U-2 plane was shot down by Soviet orders over Cuba, and its pilot was killed. Another U-2 in Alaska got too close to Soviet airspace and was nearly intercepted by Soviet fighters. Kennedy reportedly ordered an attack on Cuba to begin Monday morning, two days from then.
That same day, though, Kennedy got a letter from Khrushchev repeating Fomin’s offer. Kennedy then got another, more bellicose, letter from Khrushchev, demanding the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey, and hinting of a possible coup attempt in the Kremlin. It must have taken some nerve to decide to respond to the first, more conciliatory letter, and pretend the second letter didn’t exist. (Kind of like pretending you didn’t read that email.) Kennedy wrote a letter pledging that the U.S. wouldn’t invade Cuba, and a day later Khrushchev announced on Moscow Radio that the Soviet Union would pull the missiles out of Cuba, without, incidentally, consulting Castro on the issue.
Our October 27 message to President Kennedy allows for the question to be settled in your favor, to defend Cuba from an invasion and prevent war from breaking out. Kennedy’s reply, which you apparently also k now, offers assurances that the United States will not invade Cuba with its own forces, nor will it permit its allies to carry out an invasion. In this way the president of the United States has positively answered my messages of October 26 and 27, 1962. …
With this motive I would like to recommend to you now, at this moment of change in the crisis, not to be carried away by sentiment and to show firmness. I must say that I understand your feelings of indignation toward the aggressive actions and violations of elementary norms of international law on the part of the United States. …
Therefore, I would like to advise you in a friendly manner to show patience, firmness and even more firmness. Naturally, if there’s an invitation it will be necessary to repulse it by every means. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to be carried away by provocations, because the Pentagon’s unbridled militarists, now that the solution to the conflict is in sight and apparently in your favor, creating a guarantee against the invasion of Cuba, are trying to frustrate the agreement and provoke you into actions that could be used against you. I ask you not to give them the pretext for doing that.
Castro’s response was to issue his own conditions for resolving the crisis, including ending the U.S. trade embargo, ending U.S. support for attempts to overthrow Castro, the end of violations of Cuban naval and air space, and the return of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay to Cuba. The U.S. told Castro to go jump in Guantanamo Bay, so to speak.
The conventional wisdom, promoted heavily by the JFK propaganda machine, was that this was a victory for the U.S. The Associated Press pokes more holes in the conventional wisdom that the U.S. prevailed in the crisis:
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: The crisis was a triumph of U.S. brinkmanship.
REALITY: Historians say the resolution of the standoff was really a triumph of backdoor diplomacy.
Kennedy resisted pressure from aides advising that he cede nothing to Moscow and even consider a preemptive strike. He instead engaged in intense behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the Soviets, other countries and the U.N. secretary-general.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador on Oct. 27 and conveyed an olive branch from his brother: Washington would publicly reject any invasion of Cuba, and Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from the island. The real sweetener was that Kennedy would withdraw Jupiter nuclear missiles from U.S. installations in Turkey, near the Soviet border. It was a secret pledge known only to a handful of presidential advisers that did not emerge until years later. …
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: Washington won, and Moscow lost.
REALITY: The United States came out a winner, but so did the Soviet Union.
The Jupiter missiles are sometimes described as nearly obsolete, but they had come online just months earlier and were fully capable of striking into the Soviet Union. Their withdrawal, along with Kennedy’s assurance he would not invade Cuba, gave Khrushchev enough to feel he had saved face and the following day he announced the imminent dismantling of offensive weapons in Cuba.
Soon after, a U.S.-Soviet presidential hotline was established and the two nations initiated discussions that led to the Limited Test Ban treaty and ultimately the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“The major lesson is the necessity of compromise even when faced with a crisis like that,” said Robert Pastor, an international relations professor at American University and former national security adviser for Latin America under President Jimmy Carter. …
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: It was an intelligence coup for the CIA.
REALITY: Along with being a day late on the turnaround by Soviet ships, the CIA missed several key developments that would have helped Kennedy and his advisers navigate the crisis.
The CIA learned late in the game about the ballistic missiles’ presence in Cuba, and they were already operational by the time Kennedy was informed of their existence.
The agency was also unaware of other, tactical nuclear missiles in Cuba that could have been deployed against a U.S. attack. The Soviets had even positioned nuclear-tipped missiles on a ridge above the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in preparation for an invasion. …
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: The crisis lasted just 13 days.
REALITY: This myth has been perpetuated in part by the title of Robert F. Kennedy’s posthumous memoir, “Thirteen Days,” as well as the 2000 movie of the same name starring Kevin Costner.
Indeed it was 13 days from Oct. 16, when Kennedy was first told about the missiles, to Oct. 28, when the Soviets announced their withdrawal.
But the “October Crisis,” as it is known in Cuba, dragged on for another tense month or so in what [Cuba analyst Peter] Kornbluh dubs the “November Extension,” as Washington and Moscow haggled over details of exactly what weapons would be removed.
The Soviet Union also had problems dealing with Fidel Castro, according to a Soviet document made public this month by Svetlana Savranskaya, a Russia analyst for the National Security Archive.
Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan traveled to Cuba that Nov. 2 and spent 20 days in tense talks with the Cuban leader, who was angry the Soviets had reached a deal without consulting him. Castro lobbied hard but unsuccessfully to keep the tactical nuclear weapons that the Americans had not learned about.
An interesting, though not necessarily accurate, perspective about how the Soviets and Cubans saw the crisis comes from Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Secret Struggles with the Superpowers after the Cuban Missile Crisis, excerpted on HistoryofCuba.com:
In reality, Kennedy was both more flexible than the early postmortems suggested and more sensitive to the Soviet need to salvage something positive from the crisis. In order to buy some time and avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets, on October 25 he permitted a Soviet tanker (the Bucharest) to proceed through the quarantine. On October 28 the president instructed the ExComm members, as Robert Kennedy recalled, “that no interview should be given, no statement made which would claim any kind of victory. [President Kennedy] respected Khrushchev for properly determining what was in his own country’s interest and what was in the interest of mankind.” Perhaps most importantly, he offered up removal of the U.S. missiles in Turkey and was prepared to accept a public trade of the missiles if that was necessary to prevent a conflagration. The appropriate lesson that should have been drawn from this behavior, then, is that flexibility, compromise, and respect for an adversary’s calculus of its vulnerability is essential for the peaceful outcome of a crisis. Instead, the traditional view of what is needed in a crisis-toughness and inflexibility-seemingly has guided U.S. officials for decades, in confrontations from Vietnam to Iraq.
A second lesson of the crisis emerged from the plaudits given to Kennedy for the way he handled the crisis. Arthur Schlesinger captured this lesson-that crises can be managed-in his elusive observation that the world escaped a nuclear war and the United States achieved its aims because of the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.” A clearer way of stating this lesson, though, might be that nuclear crises can be managed only when several unlikely conditions are present: leaders have sufficient time away from the glare of the media to learn about each other’s positions and interests; good fortune at that moment provides each of the adversaries with leaders who have adroit political skills, the political will to limit their objectives, and sufficient self-confidence to reject advice from forceful advisers; and unforeseen events and unanticipated behavior by any of the thousands of people involved does not set off an uncontrollable chain reaction.
Since then, there have been many critiques of the view that the United States can act with blithe confidence that nuclear crises can be managed, though none is more poignant than the one articulated by Robert McNamara, who originally had embraced the traditional view. He noted that, had the Soviets launched any of their nuclear weapons in 1962, “the damage to our own [country] would have been disastrous.” Then he added,
“But human beings are fallible. We know we all make mistakes. In our daily lives, mistakes are costly, but we try to learn from them. In conventional war, they cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. But if mistakes were to affect decisions related to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no learning period. They would result in the destruction of entire nations. Therefore, I strongly believe that the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of a potential nuclear catastrophe.”
Notably, this was the lesson the Soviets took away from the crisis. For them, it was not the threat of force that ended the crisis. They saw U.S. threats-in the form of Gilpatric’s speech and seeming plans to invade Cuba-as the cause of the crisis. Though some in the Kremlin may have derived a lesson similar to U.S. policymakers-that superior U.S. force led to a humiliating withdrawal that they would avoid in the future by building up their military forces.-the Soviet leadership believed the crisis ended because both Soviet and U.S. officials realized they were at the brink and that the crisis was threatening to destroy humankind. They did not fear only for their immediate safety and were not worried merely about losing a battle in Cuba. That kind of fear is of a personal nature, where one’s own safety is at risk. That is the kind of fear evoked by the image of leaders going eyeball to eyeball. But a leader whose decisions may result in the deaths of thousands of others may experience a second kind of fear that is not common, the fear of deciding the fate of so many others, even civilization itself. Leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union experienced the second kind of fear during the missile crisis, which in fact was what enabled them to reach a peaceful solution. …
Cuba viewed the crisis from the vantage point of a small power, for whom an invasion by conventional means would be as threatening as a nuclear confrontation would be to a superpower. The Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement seemed to place Cuba in a perilous situation. It had been transformed into a strategic U.S. target when the Soviet Union placed missiles there. But then Soviet withdrawal of the missiles in the face of U.S. pressure made Cuba even more vulnerable. The Soviet Union’s acquiescence suggested that it would not come to Cuba’s assistance were the United States to attack the island. The Soviet posture, in Cuba’s view, had created a new set of conditions that would encourage hard-liners in the United States to press for an invasion.
The Soviets did not seem to comprehend this perspective, and so they did not appreciate fully why the removal of the IL-28 bombers was so significant to the Cubans. Mikoyan tried to explain to Castro that the Soviets were leaving other weapons in Cuba that were superior to the IL-28s. But the Cuban leader saw the withdrawal of the bombers as tantamount to inviting a U.S. invasion, because it demonstrated to the United States that the Soviet Union would not stand with Cuba in the face of U.S. threats. “We realized,” Castro explained to the 1968 Central Committee, “how alone we would be in the event of a war.” In the same mode, he described the Soviet decision to remove all but 3,000 of its 42,000 military personnel from Cuba as “a freely granted concession to top off the concession of the withdrawal of the strategic missiles.”
The primary lesson Cuba drew, then, was that neither superpower could be trusted. It viewed U.S. guarantees as ploys and Soviet promises as hollow. Both countries ignored Cuba during the crisis, and Castro’s suspicion that the Soviets were treating Cuba as a bargaining chip were confirmed early in 1963 during his trip to the Soviet Union. He learned inadvertently then about the secret agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev to exchange U.S. missiles in Turkey for Soviet ones in Cuba.
Though the United States posed the immediate menace to Cuba in 1962, Castro was concerned about Cuba’s relationship with the other superpower. Given the Soviet arrogance and lack of concern about Cuba’s fundamental rights, joining the Soviet camp as a subservient member posed a potential long-term threat to Cuban sovereignty and independence.
If that does indeed show the Soviet perspective, then this is one of those rare instances of history being written by the losers. Kennedy was assassinated a little more than a year later, Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, and the Soviet Union died a completely unmourned death in 1989. Castro has managed to delay his permanent residence in Hell by a half-century.
So was the Cuban Missile Crisis a triumph for the U.S.? Obviously it succeeded in that no nuclear war occurred and the Soviets removed the nukes from Cuba.
On the other hand, the Cold War went on for nearly three more decades before the Soviet Union and the Communist governments in the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The Soviet Union is responsible for the deaths of upwards of 70 million people, nearly 7 million of them after Joseph Stalin’s death. The Soviet Union helped North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, various Marxist governments in Africa, and opponents of Israel in the Middle East. Perhaps having survived the Cuban Missile Crisis without losing their Cuban allies emboldened Soviet leadership to engage in other international adventures. And that’s all in addition to the massive Soviet arms buildup that was not even slowed down by the 1963 test-ban treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and SALT II (which the Senate rejected).
Relativists who believe there is no moral difference between the U.S. and any other country might not care. Those who believe that, flawed as we are, the United States remains the last, best hope of democracy on this planet, might think an American response short of taking out Castro and his government (which also funded the Sandinistas and the aforementioned African Marxists) was insufficient. An invasion of Cuba eventually would have eliminated the Castros; the question is at what cost, and not just for Cubans.
The crisis was made into an ABC-TV movie, “The Missiles of October,” which I recall my parents allowed me (a student at, yes, John F. Kennedy Elementary School) to watch despite its late hour:
One interesting thing to me as a media history geek is pondering how the broadcast networks would have covered this had more of what was going on been publicly known. Kennedy’s assassination 13 months later ushered in the era of breaking TV news, but the coverage of Kennedy’s assassination (as you have seen on this very blog) was definitely learning on the fly, with multiple technical snafus, inaccurate information being reported (you didn’t know Johnson had been shot and had had a heart attack? That was news to him too), and other things that happen in writing the first draft of history live, in color and in HD.
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred a year before Kennedy’s death; it also occurred nearly a dozen years before Watergate. It’s not that reporters weren’t professionally cynical before Watergate, but since then the guiding principle that politicians lie has been embedded into reporters’ DNA. (The embedding process gave me an ear infection, weirdly enough.) I’ve read for the past few weeks speculation about the October Surprise, or even November Surprise, of a military nature that the Obama administration is supposedly going to spring upon voters just in time to win reelection Nov. 6. Whether or not you buy that, I think it highly likely that a Cuban Missile Crisis-style crisis, sprung, as is the case right now, two weeks before national elections would be met with a great deal of cynicism, even if the crisis were real.
A press blackout of the kind Kennedy requested before his speech 50 years ago tonight is impossible today. Moreover, you’d get claims that the president was lying, or exaggerating, or that the president was springing a “Wag the Dog” incident to take attention away from something else.
For fun reading (if you enjoy reading about nuclear war, that is), read this version, or this version, of what could have happened.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 