Kennedy Cuban Missile Crisis Analysis

On October 16th, 1962, the American security officials presented the president, John F. Kennedy, with ominous news. American intelligence gathered from U.S. spy planes provided photographic evidence of the presence of Soviet missiles and missile silo construction in Cuba. A nuclear arsenal on the island nation less than 150 kilometers (approximately 93 miles) from Florida potentially posed a major security threat to the United States. Based on U.S. knowledge during the crisis, the Soviet missiles on the island could have targeted the American Southeast as well as much of the Eastern seaboard. President Kennedy and his advisors feared that the Soviet military presence in Cuba reflected the hidden bellicose nature of the USSR. Anxious over
These publications reflected the increasing diversity and complexity of critical understandings of President Kennedy’s impact on the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was, however a resurgence in the support (or at the very least not contempt) for President Kennedy’s leadership during the crisis, with many scholars portraying Kennedy in an apologetic manner. However, unlike their earlier counterparts, books like Raymond Garthoff’s 1987, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and James Blight’s and David Welch’s 1989 book Cuba on the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis, benefitted from the ever increasing sources of once confidential documents and information hidden by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuban governments since the missile crisis in 1962 as well as Khrushchev’s memoir Khrushchev Remembers, published in
Some view his actions as heroic whilst others believe that Kennedy’s actions only served to heighten tensions in a crisis that would have caused no actual strategic imbalance between the Soviet Union and the United States. Early traditionalists perceived the conflict as dangerous and unavoidable, but safely averted from a nuclear conflict due to Kennedy’s actions. Critical revisionists perceived the crisis as an issue blown out of proportion by Kennedy’s administration. Revisionists believe that Kennedy’s response only increased the chance of a nuclear conflict that otherwise would never have occurred. Post-revisionist supported Kennedy’s decisions and supported the idea of the devastating effect of nuclear weaponry on geopolitical strategy. Historians in the period following the Hawk’s Cay Conference however, revised their analyses leading towards a greater consensus of the conflict as more nuanced and places a collective responsibility for the crisis not on one side alone, but on all of the involved