The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Perspectives THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS REVISITED BY JOHN ?. ROCHE I don't want to sound churlish, but the rehash of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis by the fraternity brothers on both sides is...
...For a quarter of a century I have been intrigued by certain aspects of the crisis, particularly President John F. Kennedy's reluctance to admit a problem even existed...
...Third, the missiles actually emplaced in Cuba did not have the range to hit Washington, so McNamara really didn' t have to worry about seeing his last sunset...
...Despite warnings by CIA director John McCone, Kennedy treated Republican charges, notably by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, as fantasies...
...The first "spy satellite," Discoverer, had already gone over the Soviet Union and spotted less than 20 SS-7 railmobile ICBMs on spurs of the Trans-Siberian Railroad...
...Perspectives THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS REVISITED BY JOHN ?. ROCHE I don't want to sound churlish, but the rehash of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis by the fraternity brothers on both sides is getting out of hand...
...The intermediate-range ballistic missiles with the ability to hit northern cities, code-named "Sandals," were en route and—much to the Navy's chagrin—were spotted by a special group of Strategic Air Command B-52s equipped for long-distance reconnaissance...
...Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's "Mongoose" project was working away at providing explosive cigars to Fidel Castro and other bizarre expediencies, but President Kennedy was much too concerned about Berlin to get involved in a serious Caribbean side show...
...Had there been, the press would have been all over it...
...Admittedly Keating was wrong when he first stated that Soviet missiles were in Cuba, but he merely used an inaccurate tense...
...This was prudent at the time, but the historical record should be opened...
...Second, we were not in 1962 under the impression that the Soviets had deployed 75 ICBMs...
...The Soviet ships hove to at the news of our Cuba Quarantine and then returned to the Black Sea...
...Since I was then working in the White House, and such requests from top Presidential aides are seldom ignored, about a week later I got a comprehensive two-hour briefing...
...Somewhere in the Defense Department files there should be a "contingency plan" for invading South Africa...
...Elizabeth's Hospital...
...There are additional matters of detail, like the early October 1962 positioning of Soviet SA-2 antiaircraft missiles to protect what seemed to be jungle clearings, and the presence around those clearings of the crack Soviet 11 th Guards Division—the 50,000 men the Soviets now admit they deployed were not merely service troops...
...I'm surprised someone hasn't turned up a Pentagon paper-trail on this and proclaimed that President Lyndon B. Johnson was planning to invade South Africa...
...In any case, in trying to put together the pieces I have come up with a summary of events that expands the one set out in these pages by Daniel Schorr ("Washington Notebook," NL, February 6...
...But enough is enough...
...The Kennedy Administration, presumably to maintain the sense of emergency both here and in Latin America, generated the myth that we were all in the target zone...
...invasion in the fall of 1962, and others have since been competing for the fatuity prize...
...They were medium-range ballistic missiles, code-named "Skeans," with a reach of roughly 750 miles...
...For starters, if in October 1962 anyone in Washington thought the Soviets would send out missiles without nuclear warheads, he must have babbled that to his psychiatrist at St...
...This ended "the missile gap," which had been created largely by NikitaS...
...Let's drop the subject until 2012, the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and hope that by then some historian will have gathered all the pieces of the puzzle...
...In 1967, when the vicarious heroes on the Left were demanding that we "take real action" against the wicked Afrikaners, I asked for a broad-brush briefing on what meaningful action (i.e., force) would require...
...As far as a real invasion of Cuba in 1962 is concerned, there was no evidence of any mobilization of landing craft and the immense logistical stocks that would be needed for so large an undertaking...
...Last fall it was suggested that perhaps the Soviets had no nuclear warheads in Cuba, recently former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara allowed that maybe the Russians had an understandable fear of a U.S...
...Khrushchev's boasting that the USSR was turning out ICBMs "like sausages...
...Any testimony on a planned invasion by CIA operative Edward Lansdale has to be considered absurd until proven sensible...
...Fourth, if "planning" is taken to include contingency plans, the answer to the question of whether we planned an invasion of Cuba before the missiles were spotted is probably Yes...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 5
