Now that the
Cold War is over, its history has become a growth industry,
though in truth there was no great shortage of historical
analysis even while the war was going on. Today, however,
one finds a certain generational divide as perhaps the
salient characteristic of the enterprise. Mostly younger
scholars clustered around the Cold War International History
Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center—including James Hershberg,
Vladislav Zubok, Chen Jian, Kathryn Weathersby, Mark Kramer,
Csaba Bekes, and Hope Harrison—have pioneered the integration
of sources from the "other side" of the Cold War
into a nuanced, contextual, and truly international version
of our recent past.
Acutely aware of the contingent nature of
the new sources, these young historians avoid entanglement
with any of the old, ideologically divided schools of
Cold War history. To oversimplify drastically, the orthodox
school of Herbert Feis and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., blamed
the Cold War on the Soviet Union. The revisionist school
of William Appleman Williams blamed American economic
expansion for frightening the Soviets. The "postrevisionists,"
typified by John Lewis Gaddis, attempted an empirically
based amalgam of the two sides, only to meet with criticism
from revisionists who called this approach "orthodoxy
plus archives." The postrevisionist retort was to dub
the three schools "hawks," "doves," and "owls."
A few senior scholars already established
in these debates have also dared to grapple with the new
evidence—none to greater effect than the leading owl himself.
Gaddis, a historian at Ohio University now moving east
to Yale, has produced a fascinating, provocative, and
in no small measure endearing revision of Cold War history
up through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The work
is endearing because, in exposing the errors of past histories,
Gaddis focuses frequently on his own. The careful reader
of footnotes may judge this book to be the foundation
of a new school of Cold War history: autorevisionism.
Hardly anyone in either the older or younger
generation of Cold War scholars will agree with all of
Gaddis's judgments. For example, is it truly explanatory
to call Josef Stalin a "brutal romantic" when all Soviet
leaders were brutal and Nikita Khrushchev retired the
romance trophy? The book's grand sweep is beyond the reach
of this review, but its penultimate chapter on the Cuban
Missile Crisis may provide a lens through which to glimpse
the extraordinary work that is going on in this field—especially
when considered in tandem with a remarkable new history
of the crisis based on Soviet sources.
The most enduring phrase summing up the
Cuban Missile Crisis—the climax of the Cold War and the
closest the world ever came to nuclear Armageddon—belongs
to Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "We're eyeball to eyeball,
and I think the other fellow just blinked." Thus
was born the myth of calibrated brinkmanship—the belief
that if you stand tough you win, and that nuclear superiority
makes the difference in moments of crisis. This myth,
midwifed by the Kennedy family and its hagiographers,
had untold consequences for the planning of the Vietnam
War and the nuclear arms race.
A different story began to emerge in 1969,
when Thirteen Days, the posthumous memoir of Robert
F. Kennedy, revealed that the resolution of the crisis
(Khrushchev's withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba) came
after a series of secret meetings in which RFK offered
the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin not threats of
nuclear retaliation but an old-fashioned diplomatic deal:
a pledge of no U.S. invasion of Cuba, plus the withdrawal
of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The terms, according
to the memoir, were that this could not be an explicit
quid pro quo and that the deal would never be publicly
acknowledged by the United States. Further revisions of
the myth emerged in the early 1980s, when former Kennedy
aides Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, alarmed by what
they saw as President Ronald Reagan's embrace of brinkmanship,
warned the public that the Cuban Missile Crisis had not
been resolved by America's nuclear superiority but by
its conventional superiority in the Caribbean, which enabled
restraint and the quarantine of Cuba.
Next came a trickle of declassified U.S.
government documents in the mid-1980s, including notes
and transcripts from the meetings of John F. Kennedy's
top advisers, in which the president appears not as the
fastest draw at the OK Corral but as a peacenik. As soon
as the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that they could
not guarantee the destruction through air strikes of all
the Soviet missiles in Cuba, JFK decided to do whatever
he could to avoid an invasion of Cuba and a war over what
he called "some obsolete missiles in Turkey." In 1987
Rusk himself revealed JFK's willingness, had the crisis
persisted much longer, to propose a public Turkey-Cuba
trade through the United Nations—a willingness, in short,
to blink.
Since then, the revisions have mounted as
the documents have flooded out. Theodore Sorenson has
admitted that while editing Thirteen Days he cut references
in RFK's diary to an explicit Turkey-Cuba deal. Despite
JFK's dismissal to reporters of any such deal as a weak-willed
option floated by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson,
we now know, on the basis of a declassified cable from
Dobrynin (published in the Cold War International History
Project Bulletin), that RFK made the deal explicit even
as he handed back the formal Soviet letter recording it
His comment to Dobrynin was that such a document "could
cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future."
Many of these revelations first saw the
light of day at a series of conferences organized by James
Blight and janet [sic] Lang of the Thomas J. Watson, Jr.,
Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Held between 1987 and 1992, these "critical oral history"
sessions included Kennedy aides, Soviet participants,
and finally Cuban veterans (among them Fidel Castro),
and they produced more revelations: that along with intermediate-range
missiles, the Soviet arsenal in Cuba included tactical
nuclear warheads that might have been used if the United
States had invaded; and that Cuba was very much an actor
in its own right Castro at one point telling an increasingly
alarmed Khrushchev to "use 'em or lose 'em."
On the Soviet side, the Blight-Lang sessions
were forced to rely on the largely uncorroborated memories
of aging veterans and their children (such as Khrushchev's
son) rather than on solid documentation. As recently as
September 1994, when I presented the Russian archives
with a set of Kennedy audiotapes and a 1 5,000-page microfiche
of declassified U.S. documents related to the missile
crisis, the archives had released only 700 pages on the
subject. One may therefore imagine the jubilation among
Cold War historians at the appearance of "One Hell of
a Gamble," by the Russian scholar Alexandr A. Fursenko
and his Canadian collaborator, Yale University historian
Timothy Naftali.
It is a treasure-trove of a book, studded
with quotations and citations from still-secret archives
in Moscow, woven together with the new U.S. documentation.
It is also a dramatic and highly readable narrative, the
most authoritative to date, of the six-year period from
the Cuban Revolution through the aftermath of President
Kennedy's assassination and the October 1964 coup that
ousted Khrushchev. The title comes from a recently declassified
Oval Office audiotape in which 1FK told a belligerent
congressional delegation that invading Cuba during the
crisis would be "one hell of a gamble." To his everlasting
credit, JFK was not willing to roll those dice.
The new Soviet evidence falls into three
categories: Soviet intelligence and embassy reporting
from Havana to Moscow, a similar flow from Soviet agents
and officials in Washington, and internal Politburo and
Khrushchev office records. The first category alone makes
this book essential reading for any serious analyst of
U.S.-Cuban relations. It yields extraordinary insights
into the personalities of Castro, his brother Raúl,
Che Guevara, and other leaders, as well as abundant information
about Cuban military and intelligence capabilities. Perhaps
most striking is evidence of the Cubans' unrelenting fear,
before and after the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, that
a U.S. invasion was imminent. The authors' evocative rendering
of the resulting paranoia suggests that when Khrushchev
claimed that the missiles were there to defend the Cuban
Revolution, he was not just scoring a propaganda point.
(He also, as Gaddis points out, succeeded in this aim.)
Equally fascinating is the second category,
Soviet reporting from Washington. For example, summaries
of reports from a personable military intelligence officer
named Georgi Bolshakov reveal that he hit it off with
RFK and met with him on a backchannel basis some 51 times
during 1961-62. There were also some woeful intelligence
failures: the KGB station chief Alexandr Feklisov reported
in March 1962 that he had at least three well-placed sources
whose names "the Russian government continues to protect."
Yet despite these alleged penetrations, during the October
crisis the KGB fell back on (inaccurate) invasion tips
from a bartender at the National Press Club.
The Holy Grail for Cold War historians is,
of course, the third category of evidence: notes of Politburo
meetings, Khrushchev memos, and reports intended for the
highest levels of the Kremlin. As cited by Fursenko and
Naftali, this evidence adds rich new detail to our understanding
of Khrushchev. Perhaps most astonishing is the degree
to which the Soviet premier acted as his own intelligence
analyst. So closed was Khrushchev's inner circle that
he rarely consulted with the KGB about decisions regarding
the United States. Instead, he would summon whatever prominent
Americans happened to be in Moscow. On the occasion of
his deliberations over whether to place tactical nuclear
weapons in Cuba, the visitor dropping into Khrushchev's
dacha for a chat was the poet Robert Frost!
As with all such exclusive scholarly arrangements,
the strength of Fursenko and Naftali's book is also its
weakness. Very few of the KGB, Politburo, and military
intelligence (GRU) documents cited here are available
to other scholars. Moreover, the authors' acknowledgments
and source notes give little indication of what sorts
of conditions were attached to their exclusive access—a
discouraging omission, indeed. Some citations are reassuringly
precise, while others read simply "spravka (summary),
GRU." What were those conditions? Did the authors select
the materials they wanted from complete lists and finding
aids, or were their searches directed by the staffs of
these still-closed archives? That said, if the authors
had not pushed for whatever access they obtained, our
understanding of the Cold War would be demonstrably the
poorer. As Gaddis does through his assessment, Fursenko
and Naftali through their narrative arrive at a new definition
of heroism on the part of national leaders—what Gaddis
calls "a new profile in courage." We now know that the
Cuban Missile Crisis arose from a certain degree of adventurism
on both sides—Kennedy's covert actions against Castro
and Khrushchev's secret missile deployment—and that it
was resolved only because both men were willing to risk
humiliation rather than Armageddon.
In one of the great counterfactuals of history,
we might ask, What if Khrushchev had only held out another
day or two for a public Turkey-Cuba trade? Without the
"Russians blinked" version of history, might the American
officials who planned the Vietnam War have had less faith
in their calibrated brinkmanship? Might Khrushchev have
survived the October 1964 coup plot, in which his adventurism
in Cuba was one of the indictments? President Kennedy
later estimated the odds of nuclear war during the missile
crisis as having been one in three. Bundy guessed lower,
at one in 100. But as Bundy added, "In this apocalyptic
matter the risk can be very small indeed and still much
too large for comfort."
THOMAS BLANTON is the director of the National
Security Archive at George Washington University, coauthor
of The Chronology (1987), on the Iran-contra affair,
and editor of White House E-Mail (New Press, 1995).