Like all great events, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 left a mark in the lessons its contemporaries drew from it. The affair was seen, with some justice, as an American triumph: a Soviet challenge rebuffed, crisis diplomacy conducted with courage and finesse. Such an event was bound to take on a mythic quality. Beyond this, the Kennedy administration felt that the crisis had an “extraordinary pedagogical importance,” as the National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, put it in a speech to the Harvard Club of Boston the following spring. More “intellectual” than most American administrations, the Kennedy team drew specific conclusions not only about crisis management but about military strategy and doctrine and Soviet-American relations in the thermonuclear age; naturally, it found vindication for certain of the main lines of its foreign and defense policies.

These interpretations of the Cuban missile crisis played a role in shaping subsequent decisions both of the Kennedy administration and of administrations to come. Indeed, in the intellectual aftermath of Cuba can be found the seeds of much of the history of the next twenty years.

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I

The events of the missile crisis can be briefly recapitulated.

Through the late summer and early fall of 1962, reports from Cuban refugees and other sources indicated unusual Soviet military activity in Cuba, including the construction of missile installations. When Republicans in Congress made an issue of these reports, the Kennedy administration responded that our intelligence had detected only antiaircraft missiles, which it considered “defensive,” rather than “offensive” intermediate- or medium-range ballistic missiles that could threaten cities in the United States. “Were it to be otherwise,” the White House warned on September 4, 1962, “the gravest issues would arise.” The Soviet Union replied with a Tass statement on September 11 that the USSR had no need to deploy its nuclear weapons outside Soviet territory; it warned the United States to halt its “aggressive” threats against Cuba.

On October 14, a reconnaissance overflight by an American U-2 aircraft discovered the construction of nine new missile sites in Cuba with launching positions for 24 Soviet medium-range (1100-mile) and 12 intermediate-range (2200-mile) ballistic missiles. In addition, there were 42 Ilyushin-28 Beagle tactical bombers (600-mile range), still unassembled. The Kennedy administration correctly saw this as a blatant challenge, and an attempt to shift the global military and political balance of power.

Between October 16 and 22, the President and his key Cabinet and White House advisers deliberated in secret. They considered a range of options, including a surprise air attack to destroy the missile sites, an invasion of Cuba, a blockade, or diplomatic moves. An invasion or air strike was soon ruled out, partly for reasons of practical difficulty and partly on moral grounds: in the view of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, it would be a “Pearl Harbor in reverse.” Eventually the President and his colleagues settled on a naval blockade, which they renamed a quarantine, to halt further Soviet military shipments to Cuba and to symbolize the military pressure we were prepared to use in forcing the removal of Soviet missiles.

On Monday evening, October 22, the President spoke on radio and television to break the news and announce his quarantine decision. There followed a week of public crisis, filled with diplomatic moves and countermoves and a series of public exchanges between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The day after the President’s speech, the council of the Organization of American States gave unanimous backing to the U.S. quarantine. Our European allies, including the usually recalcitrant Charles de Gaulle, likewise gave strong support. In the UN Security Council, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson silenced doubters by displaying aerial photographs of the missile emplacements.

The Soviet Union avoided a direct challenge to the blockade; it slowed its ships en route to Cuba and sent through only civilian cargoes (which were permitted). The United States postponed boarding a Soviet ship for as long as possible, allowing some to proceed after aerial inspection. After several days of hesitations and denunciations of the “piratical” American blockade, the Soviets proposed a trade: removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba in exchange for the removal of American Jupiter medium-range-ballistic-missile bases in Turkey—these were obsolete missiles which, ironically, President Kennedy had earlier ordered removed since American missile-carrying submarines were on duty. The administration refused, taking the position that to remove NATO weapons unilaterally and under duress would undermine NATO confidence in the United States.

The United States then mobilized its military power in a visible manner to convey its determination to escalate from a blockade to the use of force if necessary to remove the missiles. The First Armored Division was dispatched from Texas to the Atlantic coast; two Marine battalions were sent to reinforce Guantanamo naval base. An invasion force, numbering 100,000 men and 1,000 aircraft, was assembled in Florida. American and allied troops in Europe went on alert, as did the U.S. Strategic Air Command. These moves were disclosed through the media in a mounting campaign of psychological pressure as the week proceeded.

Finally, on Friday evening, October 26, a long and rambling personal message arrived from Khrushchev, expressing fear of a drift toward war. Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles if the United States pledged not to invade Cuba. Other Soviet contacts confirmed that the missiles would be removed under UN inspection. There was a scare the next day when a more formal Soviet communication arrived which again demanded withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey, and when an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba. But the United States quickly signaled its acceptance of the Friday night message from Khrushchev, and early Sunday morning the Soviet Union announced its agreement. In the meantime, Robert Kennedy had met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and, in an informal “backchannel” communication, assured the Soviets that Jupiter missiles in both Turkey and Italy would be removed within a short time. The crisis was over.

American public statements were conciliatory, but for a time the United States renewed its pressure in order to obtain the withdrawal of the Ilyushin-28 bombers as well; the Soviets claimed these were a gift to the Cubans (unlike the missiles, which had always been under Soviet control). After intense negotiations, it was agreed on November 20 that the bombers would be withdrawn. President Kennedy immediately lifted the blockade.

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II

The calculations and miscalculations on both sides that produced the Cuban crisis have been much studied, as has the conduct of the crisis itself. But the end game and the aftermath—the Kennedy administration’s approach to resolving the crisis—have their own interest.

The administration was eager to bring the crisis rapidly to a settlement. As it did so, it explained its reasoning in many public statements in the days, weeks, and months following, pointing out lessons which it felt the crisis held for the American people in the nuclear age. Four themes were evident.

One was that the key to American success had been the self-imposed limits to our objective. Our aim was the removal of the offensive missiles from Cuba—not the removal of defensive weapons or, indeed, the removal of the Castro regime. This constituted our bargaining advantage.

A second theme, almost by analogy to the first, was that our capability for limited war—that is, our supremacy in conventional and naval forces—had more to do with the successful outcome of the crisis than our overwhelming superiority in strategic nuclear weaponry.

A third theme was that the settlement in Cuba presented an opportunity for a significant turn toward peace with the Soviet Union. This was a particular reason for giving the Soviets an honorable way out, a reason not to press for their total humiliation.

The final theme was the utility of controlled, limited escalation of force as a way of conveying American determination. By a combination of firmness and restraint, we could achieve our objectives without actual resort to overwhelming violence. This was a most important lesson for crisis management in the nuclear era.

All these themes, mutually reinforcing, helped shape decisions during the crisis and its aftermath. All had consequences in the foreign policy of the United States in the years to come.

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III

At the President’s first meeting with his advisers after discovery of the missiles, there were reportedly some who thought one American aim in the crisis ought to be removal of Castro. The policy that quickly prevailed, however, was to restore the status quo ante, that is, to remove the offensive weapons.

When the President spoke to the nation on October 22, he declared:

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

This established the Soviet Union as the antagonist in the crisis, not Cuba. The direct challenge to Moscow effectively signaled American determination. At the same time, by ignoring Cuba and its status, we put a ceiling on American objectives.

This self-limitation, the administration felt, offered a major advantage. Harlan Cleveland, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, wrote in Foreign Affairs the following July that “Lesson No. 1” of the Cuban missile crisis was: “Select your objective carefully, for if it is limited enough you are quite likely to achieve it” (emphasis in original). The premises of American policy were expressed eloquently in a letter sent to the New York Times by three sympathetic academics, Roger Fisher of the Harvard Law School, Morton H. Halperin of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, and Donald G. Brennan of the Hudson Institute. Their letter, written on October 26 and published on October 28, praised the President’s approach:

The President wisely defined the purpose of America’s present effort in narrow and specific terms. On the specific issue of elimination of long-range weapons from Cuba, we have widespread political support in this hemisphere and elsewhere. On this issue limited force could succeed. . . . The United States has skillfully demonstrated its limited objective by permitting Soviet tankers to go to Cuba while seeking to prevent long-range missiles. We can conceive of circumstances in which missile bases might be destroyed by force, but talk of an all-out invasion of Cuba or of eliminating Castroism from Latin America obscures the limits which give us an advantage. [emphasis added]

Thus, once the Soviets promised removal of the missiles, the United States was prepared to bring the crisis rapidly to a close. On November 2, the President hastened to announce on radio and television that “the Soviet missile bases in Cuba are being dismantled, their missiles and related equipment are being crated, and the fixed installations of these sites are being destroyed.” He lifted the blockade immediately when informed that the Ilyushin-28 bombers, too, would be removed. The administration apparently held the view that world opinion, which had been so supportive, was bound to turn against the United States if we kept the crisis boiling too long.

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There is reason to believe, however, that the Soviets had a different assessment. Khrushchev, too, was eager for a rapid resolution of the crisis—fearing, apparently, that prolonged tension only perpetuated Soviet vulnerability. He evidenced this fear in a speech to the Supreme Soviet on December 12. Conscious that a strategic retreat is one of the riskiest of all maneuvers, Khrushchev stressed that it was “not in the interest of peace to tarry with the completion of the settlement of the crisis in the Caribbean area. . . .”

During the week of the crisis, the United States had wisely shown restraint in its implementation of the blockade and in leaving Khrushchev an alternative to desperation. After October 28, however, when the situation still remained fluid, was it really necessary for the administration to limit its new pressure to removal of the obsolescent Ilyushin-28s and thereby to forswear additional opportunities for shaping the outcome of the crisis?

For the Soviet Union, in the wake of the crisis, was going through an agonizing reappraisal of its whole Cuban policy. Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan flew to Cuba and remained there for 24 days, nineteen more days (as Theodore Draper noted) than it had taken him to clean up after the Hungarian upheaval of 1956. Mikoyan was subjected to numerous petty delays and humiliations during his Cuban stay. Communist-bloc sources indicated in early November that the Soviet Union was considering removal of all equipment and technicians from Cuba.

Cuban-Soviet ties began to be salvaged, albeit slowly, only after it became clear that the United States was not exerting further pressure. In December, a new Cuban-Soviet economic agreement was signed in Moscow, but it was not regarded as a triumph for the Cubans. In his speech on December 12, Khrushchev affirmed vaguely: “Revolutionary Cuba will not remain defenseless.” Yet by February 22, 1963, Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky was warning that an American attack on Cuba would mean a third world war; the New York Times saw this as “the most direct” public pledge made by Moscow to intervene in Castro’s defense.

When Castro balked at UN inspection of Cuba—one of the explicit provisions of the U.S.-Soviet understanding—American officials indicated that we would henceforth settle for aerial reconnaissance. By the end of Mikoyan’s lengthy visit to Cuba, the USSR, instead of accommodating Castro to the accord it had struck with the United States, had accepted Castro’s original “Five Demands” against the U.S. (an end to economic sanctions, to subversive activities, to “piratical attacks” on Cuba, and to violations of Cuban air space, and an American withdrawal from Guantanamo) and had agreed to another: UN inspection of Florida!

A diplomatic opportunity for the United States to weaken the bonds between Cuba and the USSR had been presented in a proposal by the government of leftist President João Goulart of Brazil. On October 27, during the crisis, Brazil suggested a compromise based on the neutralization and denuclearization of Cuba in return for an American pledge not to invade. The result, as a Latin diplomat put it, could have been the “Finlandization” of Cuba, leaving the island in the same status vis-à-vis the U.S. as Finland is vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

The Brazilian proposal was never pursued by the United States—but that such an idea was advanced by a champion of the Left in Latin America shows the degree of revulsion in the hemisphere at Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union. It is a sign of how isolated and vulnerable the four-year-old Castro regime was at the close of the crisis.

Such reflections are almost painful twenty years later, when Cuba remains one of the most loyal members of the Soviet bloc, has a major influence throughout Latin America, sends expeditionary forces all over Africa, is a dominant force in the global movement of nonaligned nations, and presents a perennial challenge to American interests. One cannot help wondering how much of this could have been avoided if, in the aftermath of the missile crisis, the American advantage had been pressed with more ingenuity and vigor.

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IV

If limitation of objectives was a crucial component of the Kennedy administration policy, limitation of means was also considered a key to success in the missile crisis. Thus McGeorge Bundy told the Harvard Club of Boston the following spring:

Those who believe in the importance and relevance of conventional weapons on the spot conclude—as I think many of us do in Washington—that what was most important here was not the strategic nuclear balance, but the immediate and effective operational impact of the conventional forces of the United States in the Caribbean.

Similarly, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball explained to a conference of NATO parliamentarians in Paris on November 16, 1962:

Why were we able to modulate and attune our responses so closely to the degree of our need? Surely it was because we had the ability to deploy as required a very large variety of land, sea, and air forces in the fashion necessary to accomplish the task at hand. Because we had clear superiority of conventional forces, we were never confronted with the awful dilemma of having to utilize major nuclear weapons or to retreat from our objective.

And Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told a group of NATO Ministers in early 1963:

[P]erhaps most significantly, the forces that were the cutting edge of the action were the non-nuclear ones. Nuclear force was not irrelevant but it was in the background. Non-nuclear forces were our sword, our nuclear forces were our shield.

The Kennedy administration had come into office criticizing the “massive retaliation” policies of the Eisenhower administration—the reliance on strategic nuclear forces to deter all challenges and to save money in the defense budget. The new administration saw, correctly, that growth of the Soviet nuclear arsenal would blunt the Western threat to resort to strategic war; challenges would now be more likely to appear on the conventional level, and we needed greater flexibility to meet such challenges directly. It was in line with this perception that the United States strengthened its conventional forces in Europe during the Berlin crisis of 1961 and began trying to persuade its allies of the virtues of a strategy of “flexible response.” The new strategic doctrine was resisted by those Europeans, such as de Gaulle, who saw it as a sign of a diminished American willingness to defend Europe. The administration eagerly seized on the Cuban crisis, therefore, as proof of the value of conventional forces.

De Gaulle was not convinced. To the contrary, in a news conference on January 14, 1963, he repeated his view that American nuclear weapons, “which are the most powerful of all,” remained “the essential guarantee of world peace. This fact, and the determination with which President Kennedy used it, came into full light out of the Cuban affair.”

In truth, at the time of the crisis the United States enjoyed unquestioned superiority in both categories. Our Atlantic fleet and the troops and aircraft based in the continental United States or at Guantanamo gave us an overwhelming capability for any mission: enforcing the blockade, striking against the missile bases, or invading the island. At the same time, in strategic weapons the U.S. enjoyed a superiority over the USSR of more than five-to-one in ICBM launchers and more than eight-to-one in intercontinental bombers.

This luxury of superiority in both the strategic and conventional dimensions meant that the United States could not possibly have failed: it was fruitless for the Soviets to persist in the face of such crushing odds. But it was also fruitless then and it remains fruitless today to debate which of the two elements of power was the more decisive. Theoretically, the side facing defeat at the conventional level should have the option of escalating to the strategic level; since the Soviets faced annihilation at the higher level as well, their backing down was a foregone conclusion. There is no doubt that local superiority was an enormous advantage, and that it remains so in an age of nuclear parity. But dogmatic claims that conventional superiority was sufficient do not seem supportable.

Eventually, the administration eased its advocacy and settled on the reasonable notion that both elements were important. Thus McGeorge Bundy in a Foreign Affairs article of April 1964 came to the view that “all kinds of military strength were relevant” in the crisis. But the intellectual predisposition to downplay the importance of strategic forces may have had its effect. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations expected the Soviet Union to resign itself to strategic inferiority, as if the strategic arms race were over. Secretary McNamara told U.S. News & World Report (April 12, 1965) that the Soviet leaders

have decided that they have lost the quantitative race, and they are not seeking to engage us in that contest. . . . There is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours.

This, of course, was a terrible misjudgment. It cannot be proved whether, or to what extent, the missile crisis played a role here. Suffice it to say that the Soviet interpretation of Cuba was not the same as the one fashionable in Washington. Khrushchev’s assessment of the significance of nuclear weapons was made vivid in his speech of December 12, in answer to those who attacked him for backing down in the crisis:

If [imperialism] is now a “paper tiger,” those who say this know that this “paper tiger” has atomic teeth. It can use them and it must not be treated lightly.

In the second volume of his memoirs, Khrushchev reiterated that for him, Cuba highlighted the importance of building long-range nuclear missiles. Indeed, the deployment of medium-range missiles in Cuba had almost certainly been undertaken in the first place precisely to make up for the humiliating imbalance in ICBM’s.

Khrushchev and his successors, in any event, did not trouble themselves over the intellectual problem of which forces had been the more important in Cuba. They began a massive program of rearmament in all categories of military power.

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V

This leads us to the question of whether the settlement in Cuba brought about a turn toward peace with the Soviet Union. The missile crisis had hardly passed its climax when theories began to appear seeking to explain the various twists and turns of Soviet policy in the preceding week. The press was filled with speculations—no doubt stimulated by similar speculations within the U.S. government—about an “internal crisis” in the Kremlin. “Khrushchev must have been under very heavy pressure, to take the risk he took” in placing missiles in Cuba, a presidential aide told the journalists Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett. “He is still under that pressure, and it may become heavier.” Indeed, the administration decided to keep secret Khrushchev’s conciliatory letter of October 26, to spare him embarrassment.

In a televised interview on December 17, 1962, President Kennedy expressed the opinion that Premier Khrushchev “realizes how dangerous a world we live in,” and therefore that the U.S. was “better off with the Khrushchev view” than with the more militant policy represented by Communist China. The theory seemed to be that we should protect Khrushchev from his dangerous rivals by refraining from humiliating him further. Thus, James Reston reported in the New York Times on October 29 that the President viewed the crisis settlement “not as a great victory, but merely as an honorable accommodation.” Max Frankel reported in the Times on November 1: “The inclination here is toward moderation.”

The inclination, in fact, was to use the crisis as an opportunity to seek a settlement on broad issues. McGeorge Bundy wrote in Foreign Affairs in April 1964: “It was and is the central meaning of this affair [the Cuban crisis] that a major threat to peace and freedom was removed by means which strengthened the prospects of both.”

The exchange of letters between Khrushchev and the President on October 28 revealed a mutual interest in pursuing arms-control measures. The President stated publicly on receipt of Khrushchev’s letter:

It is my earnest hope that the governments of the world can, with a solution of the Cuban crisis, turn their urgent attention to the compelling necessity for ending the arms race and reducing world tensions.

Khrushchev returned to the question of a nuclear test ban, in particular, in a letter of December 19. The President replied on December 28 that he was “very glad” to hear Soviet views, and asserted: “Perhaps only those who have the responsibility for controlling these weapons fully realize the awful devastation their use would bring.”

This sense of almost personal rapport contributed as well to the conviction that American objectives in the crisis should remain limited. The President’s reply of December 28, while it emphasized the American concern for verification of a test-ban treaty through on-site inspection of the U.S. and USSR, made no mention of the promised on-site inspection of Cuba to verify removal of the missiles.

The theory of “moderates” under pressure from “hard-liners” in the Kremlin is a hardy perennial. Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that Khrushchev was pressured into the Cuban adventure by the Chinese or by hard-line military men. Idle speculation in this regard provoked even so sympathetic an observer as Max Frankel into writing a caustic article (the Reporter, November 22, 1962) mocking the tendency he saw among American policy-makers to sympathize with Khrushchev’s plight:

Even if it were wise to “help” him in his hour of distress—out of fear that any other Soviet leader would be worse—how could we? By playing down our victory in the Cuba showdown until he is persuaded that he had ventured and lost nothing with his stealthy and reckless maneuver? Or by dismantling some Western bases and devising other “compromises” that would allow him to argue that his Caribbean caper had been productive?

According to Frankel, Washington was “almost immobilized by its success, by the gnawing guilt that it may have seriously injured the very forces that have always advocated doing us in gently and politely.”

The aftermath of the missile crisis indeed saw an unprecedented series of steps toward East-West cooperation: the installation of a Moscow-Washington “hot line” for emergency communications; a U.S.-Soviet accord renouncing the use of outer space for military purposes; a limited nuclear test-ban treaty; and a sale of American grain to the Soviet Union. President Kennedy’s adviser, Theodore Sorensen, was not the only one to conclude from all this activity that there had indeed been, as he wrote in his memoirs, a “reshuffle” of Soviet priorities, a decision by Khrushchev to “forgo trying to win the arms race” and to “remov[e] conflict with the West from the top of his agenda.” The dominant trend in the West was to assume that the missile crisis had ushered in a period of Soviet restraint and conciliation. The Soviets, particularly in contrast with the obstreperous Chinese, now seemed like people with whom one could do business.

Once again, however, the Soviet interpretation of Cuba seems to have been far different. It is summed up in the famous remark of First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov to John McCloy during their negotiations over removal of the Ilyushin-28’s from Cuba: “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again!” As we have already seen, the Soviet Union thereupon began a systematic and long-term expansion of its military power in all categories—strategic and theater weapons, nuclear and conventional, air and naval. Whereas in the mid-1960’s the United States, confident that the Soviets would not challenge our superiority, decided to halt missile construction at a fixed number, the Soviets built and built until they reached numerical parity in strategic forces about 1970—and then continued to build.

The Cuban crisis thus indeed turns out to have been a historic turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations, but not for the reasons some Americans assumed.

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VI

Finally there was another lesson drawn by the Kennedy administration about crisis management and the diplomatic uses of power. The gradual escalation of American military pressures during the week of the crisis—verbal warnings backed by menacing and well-publicized troop deployments around the Caribbean—seemed an attractive example of how, in the nuclear age, one could apply power without actually having to use it. It vindicated the sophisticated reasoning of academic strategists and bargaining theorists like Thomas C. Schelling of Harvard, who had written in The Strategy of Conflict (1960) that strategy, properly conceived, was “not concerned with the efficient application of force but with the exploitation of potential force.” Thus in the nuclear age a strategy of deterrence was “a theory of the skillful non-use of military forces” (emphasis in original).

George Ball saw as one lesson of Cuba “the wisdom—indeed the necessity—of the measured response.” Instead of launching an immediate air strike, the President had seen the efficacy of gradually escalating pressures which gave flexibility to American policy. The President, as Ball put it in his address to the NATO parliamentarians (November 16, 1962),

chose . . . a more limited response—a quarantine. . . . Through that choice we could avoid resort to an immediate use of force that might have led the United States and the Soviet Union, and with them their allies, up an ascending scale of violence.

That choice enabled the President to gain time—time to consult with our allies about the future steps we should take, time also to seek a political solution.

Lastly, it enabled him to keep—and he still keeps—an option for further pressure if the situation should require it.

Similarly, Secretary McNamara told the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 20, 1963, that the “power of escalation” had been an important component of the “controlled response” which signaled to the Soviet Union our determination to achieve our objective in the Cuban crisis. Harlan Cleveland, in his Foreign Affairs article on crisis diplomacy in July 1963, cited Cuba as an example of the maxim: “Creep Up Carefully on the Use of Force.” The benefit of controlled escalation was that it conveyed the “latent threat of more force” even while exercising restraint. In terms reminiscent of Schelling’s bargaining theory, Cleveland explained:

The use of force in a dangerous world demands adherence to a doctrine of restraint—the cool, calm, and collected manipulation of power for collective security—and the sophisticated mixture of diplomacy with that power. For until the ultimate thermonuclear button is pressed . . . force is just another manner of speaking—with a rather expensive vocabulary. But if force is to be a persuasive form of discourse, its modulations must carry not only the latent threat of more force but equally the assurance that it is under the personal control of responsible men.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his memoir A Thousand Days, praised the President’s “combination of toughness and restraint, . . . so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world.”

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Of all the interpretations of Cuba so far noted, this had perhaps the most interesting later history. It played a role in our unfolding involvement in Vietnam.

David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest writes that the analogy of the Cuban missile crisis—the “slow, judicious” use of power “signaling clearly and cautiously their intentions”—was vivid in the minds of Secretary of Defense McNamara and others in early 1965 as they developed the plan of gradually escalated bombing that marked our first direct military involvement in Indochina. Thus also Bill Moyers, in an interview published in the Atlantic in July 1968:

[T]here was an unspoken assumption in Washington that a major war was something that could be avoided if we injected just a little power at a time. There was an assumption that the people in Hanoi would interpret the beginning of the bombing and the announcement of a major buildup as signals of resolve on our part which implied greater resistance to come if they did not change their plans. . . . There was a confidence—it was never bragged about, it was just there—a residue, perhaps, of the confrontation over the missiles in Cuba—that when the chips were really down, the other people would fold.

The Pentagon Papers bear this out. A memorandum from Walt W. Rostow, then head of the State Department planning staff, to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on November 23, 1964, spoke of the need to convey some “decisive signal” to the North Vietnamese that we were prepared to prevent their conquest of Indochina. Rostow recommended an initial introduction of U.S. ground forces and retaliation against North Vietnam coupled with the same kind of “determination and staying power” that we had shown in Cuba.

Even where Cuba is not mentioned, the same conceptual apparatus recurs with unmistakable frequency in the Pentagon Papers. Thus McGeorge Bundy, en route home after a visit to Saigon, wrote a lengthy memorandum to President Johnson on February 7, 1965, recommending a bombing strategy of “graduated and continuing reprisal” in which the “level of force and pressure” would “begin at a low level” and “be increased only gradually.” Its aim was not to “win” an air war in the North but to “influence the course of the struggle in the South.” Our ambassador to South Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, similarly favored “a measured, controlled sequence of actions” against North Vietnam for the purpose of giving Hanoi’s leaders “serious doubts as to their chances for ultimate success.” Admiral U.S.G. Sharp, our Pacific commander, also endorsed a “‘graduated pressures’ philosophy” which conveyed “steady, relentless movement toward our objective of convincing Hanoi and Peiping of the prohibitive cost to them of their program of subversion, insurgency, and aggression in Southeast Asia.” President Johnson cabled to Ambassador Taylor on February 8, 1965, that he had approved a plan for “continuing action” against North Vietnam “with modifications up and down in tempo and scale in the light of your recommendations . . . and our own continuing review of the situation.”

Thus began the initial bombing campaign over North Vietnam known as Rolling Thunder. One of its purposes, Admiral Sharp wrote in a summary report in 1968, was “to drive home to the North Vietnamese leaders that our staying power was superior to their own.” This of course is precisely what it did not do. The fine-tuned, constrained, and demonstrative uses of force, which according to sophisticated rationales were to convey our willingness to commit overwhelming power, implied in fact the opposite: that we were not really eager or willing to engage ourselves more fully. If the hope was to avoid a major commitment of American troops and American power, as indeed it was, then the North Vietnamese were as capable of discerning this strategy as we were of devising it.

At the beginning of January 1967, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong gave New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury his own assessment of the relative staying power of the two sides. The escalation of our bombing had made no decisive military difference, said the Premier. North Vietnam had adjusted to the early difficulties and was now prepared to outlast us—to fight on for ten years, twenty years, as long as needed. Pham Van Dong turned out to be right.

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It was not the Cuban missile crisis that enmeshed us in Vietnam. But analogies with Cuba were one element in the thinking of those in office during both crises. More precisely, certain preconceptions which the American administration had seen vindicated in Cuba turned up again in exactly the same vocabulary when basic decisions were being made over Vietnam. Whatever historical weight one chooses to place upon it, the “Cuba connection” left its mark here, as in other dimensions of our national-security policy, with important consequences for America’s global position today. Altogether it is another intriguing testimony to the power of ideas, or perhaps to the capacity for self-delusion among those in the grip of “sophisticated” thinking about political and military realities.