Diplomacy and the Cuban Missile Crisis
Introduction
The Cuban Missile Crisis (16 October 1962 to 20 November 1962) began with the discovery by US intelligence of Soviet missile launch facilities in Cuba. The threat of an attack on US soil was made clear to President Kennedy by his Joint Chiefs of Staff, who urged Kennedy to take aggressive counter-measures. Kennedys main concern was that aggressive action on his point could lead to even more aggressive retaliation on the part of the Soviet Union and ultimately to nuclear war. Largely seen as exercising coercive diplomacy to avoid a military confrontation, Kennedys diplomatic efforts in the Crisis have been praised as a defining moment in the Cold War. The reality of the situation is, however, that behind the scenes Kennedy engaged in quid pro quo diplomacy to satisfy Khrushchev and avert a war.
Background
Throughout the latter half of 1962, campaigns for the upcoming Congressional elections laid the Democrats open to charges from Republicans that the Democratic President was not taking seriously the threat in Cuba. In the summer of that year, Khrushchev and Castro had met to discuss the building of missile launches off the coast of Florida. Republicans looking to win more seats in Congress contended in public that Kennedy was not doing enough to counter the Soviet-Cuban alliance. Republican Congressman Kenneth Keating from New York that summer gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he accused the White House Democratic Administration of gross negligence in ignoring the construction of a Soviet military base in Cuba (Congressional Record, 1962). Democrats controlled the Senate, 64 seats to the Republicans 36. Republicans were intent on gaining seats by denouncing the Democrats as do-nothings on international matters of grave importance, including national security. Kennedy was thus faced with political pressure at home. From his perspective, the Cuban Missile Crisis represented an existential crisis to his partys control in the Senate. If he acted wrongly, the public could punish Democrats at the voting booths in the upcoming November elections. Kennedy was already distrustful of his military advisors, and so he entrusted diplomacy on this matter to a select few that he believed could help him achieve a peaceful solution that would satisfy all (Mullins, 2013).
From the Soviet perspective, the erection of missile facilities in Cuba was meant to close the missile gap between the US and the Soviet Union (Allison & Zelikow, 1999). The US had…
