John F. Kennedy: Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

When Kennedy delivered a televised address from the Oval Office on October 22, 1962, to reveal that U.S. intelligence had proof that the Soviets were building nuclear missile bases in Cuba, people around the world experienced one of the most frightening moments of the cold war. Cuba had been an inflammatory cold war concern since Fidel Castro had seized power in early 1959. Castro denounced the United States for supporting the dictatorship he had overthrown and for exploiting the Cuban economy, and he turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military aid. During his campaign for the presidency, Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing the Soviets to establish a Communist satellite less than a hundred miles from Florida.

What Kennedy did not know was that Eisenhower had authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to train an invasion force of anti-Castro Cubans. The invaders were not ready to take action when Eisenhower left the White House in January 1961, but the agency informed Kennedy that they were prepared in April 1961. The ensuing Bay of Pigs invasion proved a disastrous failure. Republicans began criticizing Kennedy for his inability to keep Soviet influence from increasing in Cuba, and Kennedy then authorized secret new initiatives, including assassination attempts, to get rid of Castro. In May 1962, Khrushchev made a stunning and reckless decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba to protect Castro from a U.S. invasion and to gain a dramatic advantage in the nuclear arms race. American reconnaissance planes found evidence of the Soviet nuclear arms in October, before the bases were complete. After days of meetings with his advisers, Kennedy decided to make a televised speech to demand that the Soviets withdraw their missiles. More than 100 million Americans—the largest audience for a presidential address to that point in U.S. history—heard Kennedy reveal the news of a grave nuclear crisis.

In the first part of his speech Kennedy explains the kinds of weapons that the Soviets were installing in Cuba and the dangers they posed to the United States and other American nations. He uses clear, factual language, avoiding technicalities or complications so that every citizen would understand how these new weapons could inflict “sudden mass destruction” on cities from Canada to Peru. In the nuclear age, nations that waited to ensure their security until they faced actual attack could suffer catastrophic losses from which they might never recover. Kennedy states that he is taking action now, before the Soviets were able to launch their weapons, because “nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.”

Kennedy frames the crisis as the result of provocative, deceptive, and unjustified Soviet action in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and at odds with the security of the United States and other members of the world community. He does not mention the Bay of Pigs invasion, and he dismisses any notion that the missiles serve defensive purposes. He asserts that the crisis at hand is not a conflict with “the captive people of Cuba” or even expressly with the “puppets and agents of an international conspiracy” who rule them. It is rather a Soviet-American confrontation, one in which U.S. policy would be “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response.” Even as Kennedy announces a blockade of Cuba—which he calls a “quarantine,” since a blockade is an act of war under international law—he declares that American diplomats were prepared to discuss proposals to reduce cold war tensions. Such conversations, however, could not occur “in an atmosphere of intimidation,” and so he demands that Khrushchev “move the world back from the abyss of destruction” by withdrawing the nuclear weapons from Cuba.

For the next six days the two nations were “eyeball to eyeball,” in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, until the Soviets announced on October 28 that they were dismantling the missile sites (Dallek, p. 562). Kennedy won praise for resolute leadership that produced compliance with U.S. terms without either side's resorting to war. Yet neither the Soviet nor the U.S. government disclosed to the public all the provisions of the agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis. The president's aides assured Soviet diplomats that the United States would remove nuclear missiles that it had based in Turkey, but it would wait several months to do so and would never acknowledge any secret deal. Kennedy seemed to have won a clear victory, but both sides made concessions to avoid what might have been an unimaginable catastrophe.