Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962 when the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began placing offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba, just miles off the U.S. coast. Traditionally, historians have contended that Khrushchev began placing the missiles in Cuba from a position of strength intended to defy a weak foe, President John F. Kennedy. They emphasized the apparent resolve Kennedy showed in dealing with Khrushchev, essentially portraying Kennedy as a man who finally became presidential during a military crisis that brought his country the closest it had ever been to nuclear war. More recently, however, historians have revisited their ideas about the nature of the crisis as well as the particular skill-set on which Kennedy relied to diffuse the crisis. Today, historians are far more likely to categorize the missile crisis as a political crisis and to praise Kennedy's political shrewdness and strategy for creating a space in which both countries could step back from the brink of a terrible misunderstanding.
On October 22, 1962, President Kennedy announced that the United States was placing a "quarantine" on Soviet ships carrying weapons heading for Cuba (Pious, 2002, p. 81). Six days later, on October 28, the Soviet Union announced it would remove ballistic missiles it had placed in Cuba in return for the United States' pledge that it would not invade Cuba or undermine its communist regime (Pious, 2002, p. 81). The days in between were a time of great fear in the United States and around the world. During this time, President Kennedy appeared on national television, nominally speaking to the American people, but truly speaking to Khrushchev in Russia. Kennedy announced that it would 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 S...