The Cuban Missile Crisis: Once More Unto the Breach

Print

 

 

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game
Theodore Voorhees, Jr.
University of Michigan Press. 380 pp. $85

 

[Editor’s disclosure to readers: In 2017, the author, Theodore Voorhees, Jr. contacted the reviewer, Sheldon M. Stern, one of the most prominent scholars of the Cuban missile crisis, and asked Stern to read his manuscript-in-progress. Stern concluded that the work added an important and fresh perspective to Cold War scholarship, offered limited editorial advice, and then, together with Professor Martin Sherwin, assisted in finding a receptive university press.]

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    The standard view of the Cuban missile crisis is engraved in our historical memory. My own books reflect that outlook, describing those iconic thirteen days as the most dangerous episode of the nuclear era and the thirteenth day, October 27, 1962, as the most perilous twenty-four hours in human history. That view is so widely shared in missile crisis literature that it was startling to read a book in which that interpretation was all but relegated to the status of “the conventional wisdom.”

    Theodore Voorhees, Jr., senior counsel at the Washington, DC law firm of Covington & Burling LLP, concludes “that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was posturing and that neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war.” Voorhees begins by dissecting the October 1961 confrontation along the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie when some sixty Soviet and US tanks faced each other “across a tense Cold War border.” His conclusion, however, is that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were personally determined to avoid escalation. Indeed, in a matter of hours, they maneuvered to assure that the confrontation evaporated without violence or casualties.

    One year later, a vastly more dangerous crisis arose when US surveillance aircraft discovered that the Soviets had secretly placed medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. How Voorhees asks, did the rival leaders resolve the crisis “with lightning speed?”[1]