The Cuban missile crisis is a pivotal event in modern history. Learning about the crisis—what happened, what might have happened, and what it might mean for current US foreign policy decisions—is a challenge for all of us. But it is that much more difficult for anyone who has grown up in the 80's and 90's. The missile crisis occurred in 1962. It is ancient history—a chapter in a history book, like World War II or World War I, or events from the Middle Ages.
But it is more than that—and it must always be more than that. For the missile crisis is the only time in our history when we were at the brink of a nuclear war, a war that would not just devastate countries, as all wars do, but a war that could mean the end of civilization, the end of all nations.
The missile crisis is a singular event. And it must stay a singular event. We do not want more repetitions of that dangerous time. We escaped one close call; we may not escape another. So one thing we must do—all of us must do—is to look carefully into this event, get as good a sense as we can of the texture of the event, to try to understand as best we can what it was like when the risk of nuclear war was so palpable you could almost feel it. How did we get ourselves into such a fix and what can we do to try to never walk that way again?
As academics, we turn to “the literature.” By the mid-80’s, the Cuban missile crisis had already generated what some people called “a cottage industry.” Dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the event had already been written. In fact, Eliot Cohen, then at Harvard’s Government Department, wrote an influential piece in 1985 entitled, “Why we should stop studying the Cuban missile crisis.” The substance of the piece was “enough already!”
But Jim Blight, research professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown, looked at that research and disagreed with Cohen. The story was not complete; two very important things were missing. The research was packed with studies that tried to explain the missile crisis by making use of political, psychological, and even sociological theories. Jim asked a different question. Instead of trying to explain the missile crisis, he wanted to first describe the missile crisis. What was it like—at the highest levels of political and military decision making—to go through such an event?
But simply asking key people about their experiences was tricky. Memories are fragile. Our minds are not like video cameras where we can just re-run the tape and see what happened. Memory doesn’t work that way. Instead, some things stick out in our memories; other things fade; we distort the order of things sometimes. And also—and this is key—during such events, we are stuck with incomplete and partial information, and sometimes with information that is downright wrong.
So, what Jim Blight did, to try to get as close as possible to an accurate description of what really happened during the missile crisis was to invent a new way of doing research, a new way to get information about important historical events. He invented “critical oral history.” Critical oral history has three key components:
- First, high level decision makers from the event. These are the people who had the experience. These are the people who had to work to manage the event when they had no clue as to how it would turn out. Since 1987, key decision makers in the US, Russia, and Cuba have participated in 7 conferences on the critical oral history of the missile crisis (including two conferences on the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, the event that set in motion the events leading to the missile crisis).
- The second component of critical oral history is documents—documents from the time of the event that can now help the policy makers re-live those events. De-classified documents tell part of the story of what was going on at that time. But they only tell part of the story, for documents are written for all kinds of reasons, and so the policy makers are key in helping us understand which documents were part of their decision making and which—for better or worse—were not.
- The third component is scholars of the event. These are folks who have devoted their professional lives to understanding the event. They come to their study already knowing how the event turned out, and so their knowledge of the event is qualitatively different from that of the policy makers. But they have mastered the available literature, and so they can act as “deterrents” to memories that might wander away from the facts.
These are the constituents—policy makers, declassified documents, and scholars. Put them all together in a conference setting and extraordinary things happen. For example, in January 1992, in Havana, Cuba, at a critical oral history conference, here, nearly 30 years after the event, senior US decision makers, including Robert McNamara who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, first learned that there were Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba—tactical nuclear weapons that would have been used against a US invasion force. Not only did President Kennedy and his closest advisors not know during the crisis that there were tactical nuclear weapons on the island—they never even considered the possibility of such a thing. So imagine making decisions about what to do, with this key piece of information—that your opponent has tactical nuclear weapons—not just missing from your calculations, but not even on your list of things to consider.
This example illustrates the other major gap in research into the missile crisis prior to the late 1980’s. 99.9% of it was US-centered. It all focussed on Washington. Washington was where the action was. Moscow was simply the enemy and Cuba was no more than a parking lot for the missiles.
But by the late 80’s and early 90’s, with major changes in the Soviet Union—including the liberalization of the country and the release of formerly classified documents, it became possible to look at the missile crisis through the eyes of all involved. What was it like not just to be a member of President Kennedy’s EXCOMM, but what was it like in the Kremlin in Moscow during the crisis, and what it was like in the theater of operations, in Cuba. The politics of the late 80’s and early 90’s allowed Jim Blight and janet Lang (co-organizer of these conferences) to expand the goals of critical oral history to help us understand not just US decision making, but international perspectives on the missile crisis.
This is international critical oral history, and it has yielded a wealth of information about the crisis—all of which tells us that the events of October 1962 were more dangerous than most people thought they were in real time.
