The Cuban Missile Crisis
* As said before, John Kennedy's reputation as both an advocate for civil rights and a peacemaker on the US-Vietnam War are false and undeserved. (See Section Eleven.) Even leaving those aside, some admirers point to the Cuban Missile Crisis and believe Kennedy prevented a nuclear war. Had this been true, the number of lives saved could easily be in the hundreds of millions.
* The roots of the crisis began under Eisenhower. Ike ordered the overthrow of Fidel Castro, the revolutionary who defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista was supported by the US for decades. Ike ordered Castro's overthrow supposedly because he was Communist. In fact, Fidel Castro was not, not yet. The revolutionary movement was a wide coalition. Of the four major leaders, only his brother Raul Castro and Che Guevara were Communists. Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos were not. (Cienfuegos died in a mysterious plane crash.)
* Not only that, the Communist Party of Cuba was actually allied with Batista, who gave the party control of Cuba's unions. Castro early on made an effort for good relations, even trying to buy planes from Britain and arms from Belgium. The US blocked the British sale and Belgian arms were destroyed in a mysterious explosion. Cuba was then forced to buy arms from the Soviet Union. This gave Ike an excuse to overthrow Castro. Ike's real motive was to reclaim US companies' “property” reclaimed by the Cuban government.
* The plan was the notoriously bungled Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA recruited about 1,400 Cuban-Americans, mostly well off with little military training, called Brigade 2506. By the time the plan was ready, Kennedy was president. Kennedy, the CIA, and the Brigade deserve equal blame for the invasion's failure. The CIA deceived Kennedy, telling him 2506 were highly trained and could hide in the hills if the invasion failed. Kennedy reduced the number of US Air Force bombings of Cuba. Members of Brigade 2506 openly talked about the invasion in Miami. Both the bombings and 2506's loose talk meant Cuban forces knew in advance and easily defeated 2506. Most Brigade members were captured, then exchanged for tractors from the US.
* The invasion was a disaster in so many ways. Castro became stronger, with most Cubans rallying behind him. He declared himself and Cuba to be openly Communist for the first time. If anything, he became the most radical of Communists in the world, with Cuban troops eventually fighting in Angola and Ethiopia and also helping to defeat apartheid in South Africa and other white minority racist governments in Mozambique and Rhodesia.
* In the short term, Castro was driven closer to the Soviet Union. His biggest decision was looking for a way to make sure the US would not invade again by asking for Soviet missiles to be stationed in Cuba. US intelligence discovered the missile sites before most missiles had been sent. Kennedy almost immediately announced the discovery, and demanded the missiles be removed, implying that not doing so would lead to war.
* But the entire crisis was unnecessary. Kennedy complained that Soviet missiles would be able to reach almost anywhere in the US. But the Soviets faced something very similar for years. There were US missiles based in Turkey, and they could reach almost the entire USSR. Soviet missiles could have stayed in Cuba and little would change, except politically. Kennedy and the Democrats would have suffered losses in the elections and been accused of being soft on Communism. Thus Kennedy needlessly endangered the entire world just to avoid being seen as weak.
* Both Kennedy and the Soviet leader Khrushchev stumbled along during the crisis. Had either one made the mistake of going to war, many of us would not be here. How Kennedy resolved the issue is often overlooked. Kennedy agreed to remove US missiles from southern Italy and Turkey some months later, never admitting publicly he backed down. Kennedy also pledged the US would not invade Cuba again.
* Some Soviet leaders felt Khrushchev had been humiliated and forced him out of power two years later. Castro was angry that the US and Soviets decided the end of the crisis without him, and determined to do as he wished without listening to the USSR. The crisis affected how Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, fought the US-Vietnam War. Johnson worried about another crisis, and so ordered the US troop buildup and bombing campaign to be gradual.
* As for Kennedy, his murder allowed the Democratic Party and liberals to reinvent him. Kennedy was turned into a man he never was. The hardline anti Communist and bumbler who started a nuclear war crisis to avoid losing elections was remade into a skilled diplomat who avoided war. There is often a tendency to not want to speak ill of the dead. Much like Reagan, JFK's admirers use his death give him credit for things he never did, and for being a man he actually was not.