Cool Crisis Management? It's a Myth. Ask JFK.
By Michael Dobbs
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Imagine a President McCain or a President Obama receiving the following top-secret briefing from his national security adviser: "Iran has successfully developed a nuclear warhead and may have already mated it with a medium-range Shahab-3 missile targeted at Israel. A preemptive strike could trigger a nuclear exchange. What do we do, Mr. President?"
After a week in which the campaigns duked it out over national security, it's reasonable to wonder how either man would react to such an emergency. Chances are that in such a bind, our next commander in chief will want to consider how one of his predecessors dealt with the ultimate crisis, the 1962 standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles secretly placed in Cuba. Both sides in the presidential race have already invoked the image of President John F. Kennedy going "eyeball to eyeball" with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War: the McCain camp to emphasize the need for firmness in dealing with America's enemies, the Obama camp to praise JFK for opening a dialogue with the Soviets.
But it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from the missile crisis. The history of those 13 terrifying days when the world stood at the nuclear precipice has become encrusted in mythology and riddled with basic errors of fact.
To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president's cool resolve under fire. Camelot's court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that "there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management."
In fact, crisis management is an art, not a science. I have spent thousands of hours over the past three years assembling a minute-by-minute chronology of the crisis, combing through archives and interviewing American, Soviet and Cuban participants. I was startled to discover that the debates inside the White House (secretly tape-recorded by JFK) were often out of sync with events in the rest of the world. Much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations during the crisis rested on flawed intelligence reports and assumptions. Far from being an example of "matchlessly calibrated" diplomacy, the Cuban missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the limits of crisis management -- and the importance of the ever-present screw-up factor in world affairs.
(Continued here.)
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Imagine a President McCain or a President Obama receiving the following top-secret briefing from his national security adviser: "Iran has successfully developed a nuclear warhead and may have already mated it with a medium-range Shahab-3 missile targeted at Israel. A preemptive strike could trigger a nuclear exchange. What do we do, Mr. President?"
After a week in which the campaigns duked it out over national security, it's reasonable to wonder how either man would react to such an emergency. Chances are that in such a bind, our next commander in chief will want to consider how one of his predecessors dealt with the ultimate crisis, the 1962 standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles secretly placed in Cuba. Both sides in the presidential race have already invoked the image of President John F. Kennedy going "eyeball to eyeball" with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War: the McCain camp to emphasize the need for firmness in dealing with America's enemies, the Obama camp to praise JFK for opening a dialogue with the Soviets.
But it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from the missile crisis. The history of those 13 terrifying days when the world stood at the nuclear precipice has become encrusted in mythology and riddled with basic errors of fact.
To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president's cool resolve under fire. Camelot's court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that "there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management."
In fact, crisis management is an art, not a science. I have spent thousands of hours over the past three years assembling a minute-by-minute chronology of the crisis, combing through archives and interviewing American, Soviet and Cuban participants. I was startled to discover that the debates inside the White House (secretly tape-recorded by JFK) were often out of sync with events in the rest of the world. Much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations during the crisis rested on flawed intelligence reports and assumptions. Far from being an example of "matchlessly calibrated" diplomacy, the Cuban missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the limits of crisis management -- and the importance of the ever-present screw-up factor in world affairs.
(Continued here.)
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