As the head of the intelligence section of the State Department in 1962, Roger Hilsman offers an insider’s view of the Cuban missile crisis. Predictably, he paints a flattering portrait of how the Kennedy administration handled the most serious of all Cold War confrontations.
His account raises questions about two of the most controversial aspects of the crisis: the question of Soviet motivation and the issue of a swap of American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet ones in Cuba. Hilsman argues persuasively that Nikita Khrushchev put offensive missiles in Cuba in a desperate effort to redress the strategic nuclear balance, which, by 1962, in contrast to the earlier missile gap myth, heavily favored the United States. Dismissing the Soviet explanation of a desire to defend Cuba against an expected U.S. effort to overthrow Castro, the author argues that the United States made one significant mistake: failing to realize that the Soviets would use an abundance of medium- and intermediate-range missiles to achieve a quick fix in Cuba while they embarked on a long-range program of expanding their ICBM forces to overcome the U.S. lead. In retrospect, Hilsman’s only regret is that the Kennedy administration did not anticipate this move and give the Soviet Union a prompt and clear warning of the consequences.
The author is on less-firm ground in his analysis of the Jupiter missile issue. While admitting that these IRBMs were obsolete and slated for removal, he defends Kennedy’s apparent determination not to be forced into a deal to remove them under duress. In reality, the president was always prepared to sacrifice the missiles in Turkey to avoid a nuclear showdown. He preferred, however, to use the huge U.S. strategic advantage to force the Soviet Union to back down without making such a missile swap and thus gain a major political victory. Although Kennedy privately assured the Soviets that the Jupiters would soon be gone, he was able to force the removal of the missiles from Cuba without making such a public concession.
What Hilsman fails to discuss is the alternative policy suggested by U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Instead of forcing a public confrontation over the Cuban missiles, Stevenson suggested a private negotiation aimed at a swap of the Jupiters for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy ruled out this course, and Hilsman condemns columnist Walter Lippmann for proposing it at the height of the crisis. A more cynical observer could argue that the proposed missile deal would have prevented the president from using the U.S. nuclear lead to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union.
Finally, it is difficult to accept Hilsman’s conclusion that the U.S. handling of the crisis helped lead to detente and the eventual end of the Cold War. In the short run, at least, Kennedy’s hawkish policy led to a massive Soviet buildup of ICBMs and a U.S. MIRV response that, by the mid-1970s, gave both nations the capacity to destroy each other many times over. The legacy of the Cuban missile crisis was not a lessening of tension but rather an intensified nuclear arms race.
