The Munich Analogy - The cuban missile crisis

The 1960s provided a classic situation in which the Munich analogy was called into play.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy pointedly used the analogy
in his speech of 22 October 1962, when he announced that he would implement a
quarantine on communist Cuba in response to the discovery that the Soviet Union had
been placing offensive weapons there. Explaining his decision, the president reminded
the nation that "the 1930s taught us a clear lesson: Aggressive conduct, if allowed to
grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war." The transcripts of the
Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExCom) show that the Munich
analogy was extensively used in governmental discussions during the crisis. In a
meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at which the president explained that he was
leaning toward implementing a blockade rather than more aggressive military action,
General Curtis LeMay exclaimed: "This blockade and political action, I see leading into
war. I don't see any other solution. It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the
appeasement at Munich." The president was at a loss for words.
The lessons of Munich had particular meaning for Kennedy. His father, Joseph
Kennedy, had been Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain at the time of the Munich
Conference, and John Kennedy had been a twenty-one-year-old university student. The
elder Kennedy had been a longtime supporter of Britain's policy of appeasement and
continued to be throughout the war. John Kennedy, however, formed his own beliefs
with the coming of World War II. He disagreed with appeasement so fervently that his
honors thesis at Harvard was entitled "Appeasement at Munich." This was published
after his graduation under the title Why England Slept (1940) and became a bestseller.
The book argued that appeasement was a weak policy that the United States should
avoid at all costs. One can therefore imagine the effect on Kennedy of being labeled a
"Municheer."
This damaging term was also applied to Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations,
Adlai Stevenson, in the wake of the crisis. There had been a confrontation during talks

before the crisis on what to do about the Soviet threat. Stevenson had suggested that the
president "should consider offering to withdraw from the Guantnamo naval base as
part of a plan to demilitarize, neutralize and guarantee the territorial integrity of Cuba
[and offer] to remove the Jupiter [missiles in Turkey] in exchange for the Russian
missiles from Cuba." Kennedy vehemently disagreed with these proposals, saying that
this was not the right time for concessions that could divide the allies and sacrifice their
interests.
Stevenson's suggestion met with a strong reaction from other members of ExCom,
leading to the subsequent charge that Stevenson had "wanted a Munich." This
accusation appeared in a postmortem article by the journalist Joseph Alsop, who
attributed the statement to a "nonadmiring official." It turned out that President
Kennedy was actually the "non-admiring official" whose comments were used to
discredit Stevenson. As a result, the article made Stevenson's arguments for trading the
Turkish bases seem less rational than they really were. This charge of being a
"Municheer" was especially damaging to Stevenson's political reputation. The irony, of
course, was that the Jupiter missiles did play a secret role in resolving the crisis.

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How John F. Kennedy's Appeasement

Strategy Averted a Nuclear Holocaust
Wikimedia Commons

Fifty Octobers ago, the world faced a nuclear war that would have left this planet a very
different place. The danger was every bit as it appeared. Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet leader

who had secretly deployed 90 nuclear missiles in Cuba, had a back-up plan should the
United States attack the weapon sites.
I knew the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them, he
wrote in his memoirs. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survivedeven if only one
or two big ones were leftwe could still hit New York, and there wouldnt be much of New
York left.
The U.S. never tested Khrushchevs dire resolve. We never attacked his missiles. Instead,
President Kennedy improvised a jerry-built policy that included an embargo on further
shipment of Soviet missiles and a demand that all such weapons in Cuba be removed.
Khrushchev turned back his cargo ships and removed his missiles. In this eyeball-to-eyeball
conflict, he appeared to blink while his counterpart, President John F. Kennedy stood
firm.
The full truth, which would only get out years later, is that the American president, dreading
nuclear war and fearing a miscalculation that would trigger it, made an under-the-table
deal. He gave Khrushchev precisely what he needed : something to get the hawks off his
back. He agreed to remove the nuclear missiles we had deployed in Turkey, to do so in a
short period of time but quietly, out of the glare of mediaand Republicanattention. He
did what was necessary, proffering a deal he knew he couldn't sell to his fellow countrymen.
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This is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis that gets overlooked but should be the key to
all future confrontations with a dangerous enemy: Always leave the other side a way out.
Otherwise, they will only have a way in.

TAKING OFFICE IN 1961 as the countrys youngest elected president, John F. Kennedy
inherited two potent legacies, each in conflict with the other. One was the real prospect of a
catastrophic World War III. The other was the well-cultivated memory of what had
triggered WW II: appeasement at Munich.
To many of us growing up in the early Cold War, a nuclear war was taught as a real
possibility. On a regular basis, the Sisters of Mercy at St. Christophers drilled us on it,
ordering us to squeeze ourselves under our desks. Fifteen minutes, we were told. That

would be the time it took for the missiles to drop, the warning wed each get to say our
prayers. Next would come the flash of light that would mark the greatest and no doubt
final conflagration in the history of mankind: the end of the world. Americans of all ages
shared a presumption that sooner or later the two nuclear powers would go head to head
and that one first, then the other, would use the best weapon they had. World War II had
taught that the most unthinkable catastrophes could easily become reality if one wasn't
careful.
But World War II in Europe also taught another lesson: that shows of weakness could be
responsible for starting such conflagrations. If the British and French had possessed the
fiber to confront Adolf Hitlers grab for German-speaking territory of Czechoslovakia, the
Sudetenland, he would never have gotten out of hand. What Winston Churchill would
christen the most unnecessary war would have been averted.
So all Kennedy had to do in the Cuban Missile Crisis was (a) avoid a nuclear war and (b)
avoid a second Munich, another concession that would delay war but also make it
inevitable. Fortunately, Kennedy had the temperament needed to thread the needle. He
understood the limits of what he could afford to do, but also the extent of what he might be
able to get away with doing and not get caught.
One reason for this strategic clarity was his cold indifference to the emotions and passions
of those close by, a detachment that could send a chill through those who happened across
it. Chuck Spalding, one of his lifetime girl-chasing pals, noticed it at Jacks wedding in 1953.
Watching his friend that glorious Newport day, he saw two personalities at work: one was
Jack as groom, the other was this figure he also recognized observing everyone in the large
gathering studying what everyone was up to. That, too, was Jack.
This is the coldly-calculating American president who sat in the Oval Office in those 13 days
of October 1962. Kennedy had no problem assessing the positions of those surrounding him.
Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay was joined by his own national security advisor
McGeorge Bundy and Cold War veteran Dean Acheson in pushing for an immediate air
attack on the Cuban missiles. All around Kennedy were men arguing that the only safe
action by the United States once the nuclear missile sites were discovered was to destroy
them.
Gradually, Kennedy, his brother Robert and others were able to see the necessity for an
alternative response. But cold calculation was not enough. He also needed to isolate in his
mind the precise pressures on his opposite number in the Kremlin. What was it that pushed
Khrushchev to make such a dangerous gambit in the first place? Why did the Russians feel

the need to place missiles in Cuba when they had all those ICBMs pointed at us? And what
did he need to take those missiles back?
Kennedy knew that he needed, in addition to a promise not to invade Cuba, to approve some
sort of concession. He needed to add a dash of Neville Chamberlain to the Churchillian
courage he was displaying. He needed to appease, to give the other side something it
wanted.
Because the alternative was a nuclear holocaust. Kennedy believed and said so to those he
trusted that nuclear weapons, if contained in a countrys arsenal, would eventually be used.
And he had first-hand reason to believe that Khrushchev was just the man to pull the
trigger. At their meeting in Vienna the prior year this has been made stunningly clear. I
talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes, he
later told Times Hugh Sidey, and he just looked at me as if to say, So what? My
impression was that he just didnt give a damn if it came to that.
And thats why he was willing to offer Krushchev a trade. If the Russians removed their
missiles from Cuba, Kennedy told Krushchev that he would remove American missiles
stationed in Turkey. Kennedys calculation paid off. Khrushchev accepted the trade.
Yet Kennedy still had a huge hurdle to overcome. How could he sell a policy involving a
give-away of missiles, a quid-pro-quo, an admission of moral equivalency of this historic
caliber, an appeasement? It was a step that he knew threatened to render him finished
politically.
He did it anywayhe just insisted on keeping the deal a secret. He was ruthless enough to
do what was necessary, even if it meant fooling the American people big-time, and risking a
PR fiasco if the news ever leaked. If he hadnt done this all the other gutsy steps of those
valiant 13 days wouldnt have avoided war. It was not enough that JFK didn't blink when
the Soviet ships neared the quarantine line patrolled by the U.S. Navy; it was Kennedy's
willingness to cut a deal, under the table, with the enemy that saved the day and, really, the
planet.
Fortunately, we did not have a Dick Nixonor a Dick Cheneycalling the shots, men who
for all their mental capability saw such conflicts as that in October of 1962 as tests of
toughness, opportunities to act on an existing grievance, or, worse yet, a metaphor for some
moral test of whos right. Kennedy didnt see the Cuban crisis as a test of his manhood. He'd
already passed such a test back in the Solomons as a sailor in World War II when he swam

for four hours with a badly-burnt engineer on his back, when hed kept his crew alive after
his PT boat had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer.
Kennedy's policy in the Cuban Missile Crisis may have involved appeasement, but the
outcome would not ever be mistaken for Munich. Chamberlains acquiescence to Hitler led
to his grabbing the rest of Czechoslovakia. Kennedys deal with Khrushchev would lead to
the first treaty of the Cold War: the 1963 limited nuclear test ban treaty.
Kennedy had seen something in Krushchev's eyes when they met in Vienna in 1961. What
he saw was a hardness that would not be budged by the prospect of mass death. His
surmise was borne out in Khrushchev's memoirs, where he coldly contemplated hitting New
York with nuclear weapons. I dont mean to say everyone in New York would be killednot
everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out , Krushchev wrote. And
it was high time that America learned what it feels like to have her own land and own people
threatened.
The real lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis wasnt at all that the two nuclear powers had
gone eyeball to eyeball and one side had knuckled under to the other. It was that both sides
were able to get their eyes wide open to the consequences of what was being risked and both
sides were able to deliver us from the worst human-made disaster in history.
Chris Matthews is the host of Hardball and the author of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.