Papers Show Missile Crisis Never Formally Resolved Kennedy Had Change Of Heart On Pledge Not To Invade Cuba
To defuse the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy promised not to invade the island nation, but newly declassified documents show he later retreated from the pledge, fearing Cuba could become an “invulnerable base.”
The change of heart meant that the U.S.-Soviet understandings that resolved the 1962 crisis were never made permanent.
When the crisis eased, Kennedy predicted in an Oct. 28 letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that the two sides could complete final arrangements “within a couple of days.”
But, while both countries took some steps to implement the agreement, including Soviet removal of offensive missiles, attempts to reach a formal agreement ended in failure.
The crisis was triggered by the U.S. discovery in the fall of 1962 that Moscow had sent missiles to Cuba. The disclosure sent the two superpowers closer to nuclear war than at any time in their 46-year Cold War rivalry.
The tradeoff that ensured a peaceful outcome involved a Soviet promise to remove the missiles in exchange for an end to a U.S. quarantine of Cuba, coupled with a U.S. no-invasion pledge.
New details about the abortive effort to negotiate a final settlement are spelled out in the “Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath,” a 934-page State Department compilation of documents from that era, virtually all of which were originally classified.
In the decades after the missile crisis, successive U.S. administrations were vague about whether the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement was legally binding. The documents strongly suggest it wasn’t because there was no formal settlement.
Less than a month after the late October agreements were announced, Kennedy’s uneasiness about an unconditional no-invasion pledge were reflected in a message he wrote to Khrushchev: “There need be no fear of any invasion of Cuba while matters take their present favorable course.”
In a Nov. 21, 1962, telephone conversation with George Ball, the State Department’s third-ranking official, Kennedy said he was worried about how a no-invasion pledge would affect the U.S. ability to respond if Cuba undertook a major arms buildup, shot down U.S. planes or attacked a pro-American country, such as Guatemala.
In response to the latter scenario, Ball said the United States had a right to take action under the Rio Pact, the common defense treaty of the Western Hemisphere. It authorizes collective action in cases of aggression. Kennedy agreed that a no-invasion pledge could not supersede U.S. rights under the Rio Pact.
And in early December, Kennedy was quoted as telling another NSC meeting that the United States was “not going to rat on an agreement with the Russians but we were not going to tie on to a no-invasion pledge in a way which allowed Castro to operate from an invulnerable base.”
The promise of a Soviet removal of ground forces from Cuba was not enough to sway Kennedy.
“It’s better for the United States to have Soviet units in Cuba than to give a formal no-invasion assurance,” he said at another point.
Not surprisingly, the Soviets strongly objected to Kennedy’s attempt to renege on his pledge and invoke the Rio Pact.
Top U.S. officials who spent 5-1/2 hours with Soviet diplomats at the United Nations in early December wrote an “eyes only” memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk saying the Soviets interpreted it as an effort to give the U.S. commitment a “conditional character and hence is unacceptable.”