CAMBRIA, CA--Here we go again. The new movie treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Thirteen Days, is just out, and beyond the ritual celebration of the great Kennedy administration the film will serve as yet another vindication of the “crisis management” approach to international relations. For the Cuban Missile Crisis is still
regarded as a great triumph of American statecraft. Theodore Sorensen, keeper of the Camelot flame, says
the filmmakers “demonstrated that the restraint and leadership exercised by President Kennedy prevented
what we now know would have been a nuclear exchange. The movie demonstrated that negotiation and
communication are essential during a military confrontation and can sometimes find a peaceful solution.”

To be sure, as Churchill put it, “talk-talk is better than war-war.” However, the conventional “lesson,” that
we “won” the crisis, has more lives than a cat but could not be more incorrect. In fact, the Cuban episode
was an American defeat, and it contributed powerfully to the thinking that led to the Vietnam quagmire.

In the conventional narrative, President Kennedy’s guarantee that the U.S. would not invade Cuba was seen
as a small political victory for the Soviet Union, but on balance the outcome was represented as a military
humiliation for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The Kennedy White House heavily spun the outcome that way,
even to the point of concealing for a time that Kennedy had also agreed to remove American Jupiter missiles
from NATO countries.

Kennedy and his circle approached the crisis as though it were a “misunderstanding” that needed to be worked
out through “communication” based on the new strategic doctrine of “flexible response.” In fact, Khrushchev
had calculated correctly that he could bluff the U.S. into giving a non-intervention guarantee for Cuba and a
trade of Soviet missiles in Cuba for NATO missiles in Turkey. Kennedy and his grandmasters thought they had
“won” because they had avoided war, even though the Soviets were never prepared to engage in warfare at the
time. The crisis ended with Cuba being secured as a political and military asset for the Soviet Union. Some
“victory.”

The best and brightest of the Kennedy-Johnson administration were so self-deluded with their “success” that they decided to apply the same strategy of “flexible response” in Vietnam. Cyrus Vance, who was a Deputy Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon in 1962 and who later served as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, confirmed this view: “We had seen the gradual application of force applied in the Cuban Missile Crisis and had seen a very successful result. We believed that if this same gradual and restrained application of force were applied in South Vietnam, that one could expect the same result.” Not!

We have seen many sequels to the thinking that guided the U.S. in the Cuban Missile Crisis, not only in
Vietnam but also in several of Bill Clinton’s foreign escapades such as 1999’s Kosovo campaign, where a lucky
outcome has reinforced bad ideas once again. The one exception in recent decades was the Gulf War, where
old-fashioned war-fighting doctrines held the field. Let’s hope the new administration recalls this, and
resists the temptation to engage in the social-engineering school of diplomacy.

- By Steven Hayward