An Assault of Lies

President Kennedy started to circulate a misleading account of how the crisis had ended just hours after Khrushchev’s radio address on the morning of October 28 announcing his order to dismantle and repatriate the nuclear missiles. Kennedy’s phone calls to his three surviving predecessors—Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Herbert Hoover—about how the crisis was resolved were recorded by his covert White House taping system. According to missile crisis historian Sheldon Stern’s book Averting “the Final Failure,” he misled Eisenhower by asserting that “we couldn’t enter into that [Turkey] bargain.”

He lied to Truman, saying that “they came back with and accepted the prior proposal” [on the non-invasion commitment] and that “we refused that” about Khrushchev’s public demand for the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Kennedy lied to Hoover when he stated that the Soviets had returned to “their more reasonable position” regarding a non-invasion.

The president discussed Khrushchev’s unexpected letter regarding the missile swap with his brother the following day and determined there shouldn’t be any documentation of the covert arrangement. Kennedy’s top-secret record of their meeting states that Robert Kennedy told Ambassador Dobrynin, “President Kennedy and I did not feel correspondence on our conversations was very helpful at this time.” He understood what we were saying; therefore, in my opinion, nothing more was required.

Present problem

The president then started promoting media narratives that would exonerate him of any notions of a trade-off. He authorised his closest friend, Charles Bartlett, to write the inside account of the decisions that brought about the end of the conflict for The Saturday Evening Post. Bartlett collaborated with another Kennedy confidant, Stewart Alsop, to pen the contentious piece “In Time of Crisis,” which first appeared in Washington in early December 1962. Kennedy had used Bartlett as a covert emissary to Soviet intelligence officials during the missile crisis.

The Saturday Evening Post article provided the official account of how the missile crisis was resolved. The article’s opening line, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other person just blinked,” credited to Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the time of the crisis, instantly became the evocative summary of how the world was spared the doom of nuclear Armageddon. Kennedy had firmly won the nuclear chicken game with the Soviets by threatening to attack Cuba; Nikita Khrushchev had “blinked,” withdrew the missiles and given America a significant Cold War triumph. The piece’s authors declared that Rusk’s statements “epitomise a brilliant moment in American history.”

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The piece also included a vicious political slander on UN Envoy Adlai Stevenson, portraying him as “soft” toward the Soviets for preferring political negotiations before military action. Even worse, he was a peacemaker. Adlai desired a Munich, according to an “unadmiring official” cited by Alsop and Bartlett. He wanted to exchange American bases for Cuban bases. A press release, “The Controversial and Hitherto Unrevealed Role Played by U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson During the Height of the Cuba Crisis”, was used by The Saturday Evening Post editors to start distributing the item to the New York and Washington media before it was published. President Kennedy must have anticipated the political uproar the attack on Stevenson would cause.

In his widely read memoir A Thousand Days, Kennedy White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled that on December 1, the president called him into the Oval Office and informed him that a forthcoming piece “accused Stevenson of supporting a Caribbean Munich.” The president claimed that because of Kennedy and Bartlett’s strong friendship, “everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House.” He instructed Schlesinger to inform Adlai that “this item does not represent my views” and that “I never talked to Charlie or any other reporter regarding the Cuban problem.”

Kennedy had spoken with Bartlett as the article was being produced; it reflected his opinions, or at least his political objectives, since he had covertly revised the piece and planned the assassination of Stevenson to disassociate the White House from how the missile crisis ended. The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington by historian Gregg Herken revealed that Kennedy himself was the “nonadmiring official” in reality.

Herken drew on interviews with Stewart Alsop’s family members and correspondence between Alsop and the executive editor of The Saturday Evening Post, Clay Blair Jr. These letters were published in full for the first time—60 years after the missile crisis—by my organisation, the National Security Archive. “The president had pencilled in the ‘Munich’ line when he annotated a typescript of the draught article,” Herken wrote. When his editor pushed him to publish a “tell-all” about President Kennedy’s involvement in the article’s drafting, Alsop wrote to Blair four months after Kennedy was slain in Dallas that the president’s role “must remain Top Secret, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading, and so on.” According to Alsop, Kennedy received the manuscript page containing the president’s handwritten words in 1962 and destroyed it. I gave the manuscript to Him as a Christmas gift via Charlie [Bartlett]. It was long since turned to ashes,” wrote Alsop. “At the very least, it would have been a fascinating footnote to history.”

Keeping the President’s Supposed Toughness Myth Alive

Despite knowing about the covert agreement, Kennedy’s senior advisors continued to propagate the legend of the Cuban missile crisis years after his killing. Early autobiographies by former officials, like Theodore Sorensen and others, omitted any mention of the missile trade. Robert Kennedy’s crisis diary includes a thorough account of his pivotal conversation with Dobrynin on the quid pro quo on October 27, 1962. However, specific chapters were skipped over when the diaries were posthumously published in 1969 as the bestselling book Thirteen Days. Twenty years later, Sorensen acknowledged that he had covertly removed the references to the missile deal at a symposium in Moscow on the missile issue. He said, “I edited Robert Kennedy’s book. And although it was still a secret at the time, even on the American side, his diary was very plain about [Turkey] being a part of the arrangement. I, therefore, decided to remove that from his journals.

The cover-up was finally exposed in 1988 when former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy stated, “There was no leak,” in his book Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. I’m unaware of any of us telling anyone else what had transpired. In every venue, we refuted the existence of any contract. The whole tale of the diplomacy, bargaining, and compromise that ended the missile crisis didn’t come to light until the late 1980s and early 1990s. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library started making declassified transcripts of the secret tapes of Kennedy’s discussions with his advisors during the dispute available in 1987. They showed the president debating whether to trade missiles to prevent a nuclear war. The Russian Foreign Ministry archives revealed vital records after the Soviet Union fell apart, including Dobrynin’s dispatches to Moscow detailing his contacts with Robert Kennedy. The recorded history of how the potentially dangerous nuclear confrontation began—and ended—was significantly advanced by a series of international conferences, including 30th and 40th-anniversary gatherings in Havana that brought together surviving Kennedy White House officials, former Soviet military commanders, and Fidel Castro.

Russia’s threatening to use nuclear weapons in its aggression against Ukraine makes that historical record still urgently relevant today. It is still unclear to what extent the past lessons are appropriate to the present. But 60 years ago, on October 28, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev sent President Kennedy a letter in which he foresaw the need for peace in a nuclear age: “Mr. President, the crisis that we have experienced may recur again. Therefore, we must address the problems that include excessive explosive material. However, we cannot put off finding a solution to these problems because doing so will increase the risks and uncertainties.

Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network