One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali John Murray 420pp, £25 in UK
The roadway from here to the end of the 20th century is lined with the decaying or dismembered statues of former heroes. John F. Kennedy's is one of them, and this fascinating book leaves his effigy rocking even more unsteadily on its plinth. Khrushchev comes out marginally better. Castro, the only survivor of the three protagonists, remains in some sense as much an enigma as he was then to both his protector and his adversary.
It is more than thirty years now since the events it describes, but this narrative by two senior historians, one Soviet and the other American, has a freshness and immediacy which make it compulsive reading for anyone who lived through that crisis and for all who are interested in the modalities of political power.
Although it unfolded with bewildering rapidity in October 1962, it had been in the making for much longer. Castro had taken power in Havana in 1959 and, as American suspicion of his motives matured into hostility, Kennedy seized on the Cuban issue to help him win the 1960 presidential election. A year later, his inexperience and indecisiveness led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which wounded US pride deeply. Imperial hubris led in turn to the rejection of a peace initiative by Guevara. Interpreting it as a sign that the Cuban economy was faltering, Kennedy and his strategists responded with highly publicised war games in the Caribbean, covert initiatives that would have looked jejune in a Bond novel, and what the authors describe as "manic plotting".
In a less well-researched work, this verdict would seem overblown; but the chapter and verse of the documentation, much of it from archive material, revealed here for the first time, shows that for most senior American policymakers at the time, Cuba had become less of an issue, more of an obsession. The long-term significance of the Bay of Pigs incident was that although Cuba was essentially a foreign policy issue, it was impossible thereafter to detach it from the domestic American political agenda. And not the least of Kennedy's pre-occupations was the fear that the issue which had helped to elect him in 1960 might, if he got it wrong, help to unseat him in 1964.
The failed invasion also triggered off vital Cuban and Soviet reactions. The Cubans knew that American aggression was for real, and wanted to protect their country. Guevara, reviewing a Mayday parade in Red Square, divined that Soviet missiles would be the best guarantor of Cuban security. By May 1962 Khrushchev, who had already agreed to shore up Cuban defences with a massive array of conventional weapons, had come to the conclusion that stationing nuclear missiles on Cuban soil would be the best possible guarantee, not only for Cuban security, but for the Soviet role in the Caribbean.
It was no coincidence that he made this decision while on a visit to Bulgaria, next door to Turkey where, since the 1950s, the US had been stationing Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads. The decision on the Cuban missiles, therefore, had the advantages of following a US-made precedent, and levelling the nuclear playing field. It was a gamble, certainly, but, at the height of the Cold War, certainly not the act of a madman.
Initially, everything went well for Khrushchev, and US intelligence failed to find out what was going on, not least because of a well-organised plan of deception which kept several important players, including even the Soviet ambassador in Washington, partially in the dark. When Kennedy found out in October what had been going on, the balloon went up. Harsh words were followed by strong actions, and the American blockade of Cuba was instituted. The world felt it was on the brink of nuclear war.
This book shows that there were good grounds for the general fear of nuclear war at that time, although to some extent exaggerated by public ignorance of the measures that were being taken behind the scenes to defuse the crisis. In the end, the rapprochement between the American and Soviet leaders led to the ending of the blockade and the removal of the missiles, a semi-secret decision by Kennedy to remove the Jupiters from Turkey, and a non-invasion pledge by the US which Kennedy made, one suspects, with his fingers crossed.
In all of this, the role of the Cubans was central and sometimes anomalous. Fuelled by national pride as much as by ideology, they resented the assumption that they were Moscow's puppets as much as they feared the very real threat of American invasion. One social event at the Soviet Embassy in Havana almost imploded when Cubans present tried unsuccessfully to propose a joint toast to Castro and Stalin. Castro even asked Khrushchev, on October 27th, to launch a nuclear strike from Cuba against the US. The Soviets, for their part, regarded the Cubans, in Mikoyan's words, as "nervous, high-strung, quick to explode in anger, unhealthy apt to concentrate on trivialities", and people for whom "bitter feelings often overcome reason".
The relationship between the superpowers eventually moved on to new and more promising territory. But Cuba remained, like Banquo's ghost. It was the shadowy presence in the consciousness of Lee Harvey Oswald as he pulled the trigger of his rifle in November 1963, and the invisible ally of the plotters who removed Khrushchev from power in 1964. It is still there, quarantined by the US, forgotten by its old mentor, obstinate and different. Castro has outlived by decades the leaders who nearly went to war over him, but the bombs which went off in Havana within the past few weeks demonstrate, with a sudden sense of deja vu, that the Cuban chapter is still far from closed.
John Horgan's biography of Sean Lemass will be published shortly