Author Michael Dobbs writes in the Washington Post that the version of the Cuban missile crisis that JFK and his spinmeisters spun was not quite so heroic. At the same time, JFK’s background in the military and his understanding of history made him the right man for the moment.

…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.

Lest anyone think that faulty intelligence started with the Bush administration, let me say that I uncovered numerous examples of bad information flowing into and out of the Kennedy White House — beginning with the celebrated “eyeball to eyeball” episode on Oct. 24, 1962, when JFK was led to believe that Soviet freighters transporting missiles toward Cuba had reached the U.S. blockade line around the island and turned around at the last moment.

Declassified U.S. and Soviet records show that the Soviet ships were 500 miles from the closest U.S. warship at the moment when then-secretary of state Dean Rusk famously declared, “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” The incident never happened, at least as depicted by Kennedy aides, Harvard professors and Hollywood moviemakers. Khrushchev had ordered his ships to return to the Soviet Union more than 24 hours earlier.

JFK was, like any president, at the mercy of his intelligence services. Some of the things Kennedy didn’t know during the crisis:

  • an American U2 spy plane had wandered into Soviet airspace, aggravating tensions
  • there were 43,000 heavily armed Soviet troops in Cuba, not 6,000-8000 technicians as they thought
  • the CIA had photographs showing where the nuclear warheads were stored, but misinterpreted what they saw