In his eulogistic introduction to Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, Harold MacMillan, the English politician, reminds us that crucial questions about that memorable October confrontation in 1962 between Russia and the United States remain unanswered. Why did the Soviets place missiles in Cuba? Why did they challenge the United States in its own backyard, and then withdraw the missiles? If the Russian goal was to weaken the United States, why did Khrushchev not retaliate at another sensitive point—Turkey, for example? Unfortunately for the student of the Cold War, Kennedy never asks these questions.
Instead, he provides his version of how the Russians deliberately attempted to deceive the American government in order to place missiles in Cuba that, in the opinion of the Kennedy brothers and their advisers, threatened the security of the United States. Nowhere does Kennedy discuss the confrontation with a view of Cuba’s legitimate defense needs which, in terms of past American diplomacy that included a Bay of Pigs, demand thoughtful consideration, especially if Cuban fears of another impending invasion of their homeland were justified. While Robert Kennedy acknowledges that Khrushchev defended his actions by saying that he sent the missiles to prevent another effort to topple “the Cuban government, as the U. S. had actively attempted to overthrow the Communist government in the Soviet Union after their revolution” (p. 88), he makes nothing of this cardinal issue. Indeed, if the United States had hostile designs on Cuba, the Russian response takes on a new dimension and the role of Fidel Castro, which Kennedy ignores almost completely, assumes major proportions because, if the Kennedy brothers and their cohorts projected an attack on Cuba, Castro would have logically taken steps to employ his Soviet ally to thwart it. From this perspective, the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba appears as a direct outgrowth of American policy, and it seems possible that the defensive measure originated with Castro rather than the Russians.
Despite Kennedy’s eloquent silence on the issue of United States responsibility for Cuban distrust, he does offer one more insight into what motivated his brother’s diplomacy. Clearly he stresses the threat to American security (though not American interests in Latin America). Yet, equally interesting, Robert Kennedy confesses that his brother, who faced a war-minded Congress and a military eager to invade Cuba, had also acted for political reasons: out of fear that he “would have been impeached” (p. 67) had he not defied Khrushchev. Thus, the world stood on the brink of nuclear disaster partly because President Kennedy lacked the determination to stand up to the war-hawks in his country.
Robert Kennedy believes that his brother’s blockade of Cuba averted war with the Soviet Union and won a major diplomatic victory for the Americans. Still, his version of the final negotiations that led the Soviets to dismantle their missile sites in Cuba seriously weakens his initial premise. His account makes clear that the President, in order to get the Russians to remove their weapons, may well have promised not to invade Cuba. If fear of such an invasion moved the Russians to enter Cuba in the first place, the outcome represents a major triumph for both Cuban and Soviet diplomacy. Further, the Russians had not only saved Cuba but had done so, as John Kennedy remarked, “in our part of the world” (p. 67).
