by Max Hastings
Yes, we really were on the brink of The Abyss.
The book in a sentence (or two):
Max Hastings delivers a dramatic account of the few days that had the world teetering on the brink of the abyss. The author details with equal candor and insight the strengths and inequities of the players in the 1962 drama.
About the author:
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings (1945) is an award-winning journalist and author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict. His career highlights include serving as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and later as editor of the Evening Standard. Hastings, who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary Fellow of the King’s College in London, was knighted in 2002.
My quick take on The Abyss
Max Hastings, like Robert Caro, has the ability to combine exceptional scholarship with a story-teller’s penchant for suspense, wrapped in wonderful prose. He takes some of the historical shine off JFK, while still assigning him the respect due for his level-headed handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; something lacking in the Bay of Pigs. Hastings gives us the principle characters and moves they took that moved us back and forth, teetering on the edge of the abyss in the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Overview and Analysis:
Khrushchev: ”But he determined to exploit Western popular terror of such a [nuclear] conflict, to bluff his way to tactical success abroad. Nuclear threats became his default weapons of choice” (87). And it was that kind of bullying that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis (See pages 73, 89, 136). One official described his political survival skills with these words: “the only man capable of walking across Red Square in the rain without getting wet” (136). That he could “shackle the fortunes of the USSR to so wild an ally, so woolly a country” (150) and never have planned for alternative solutions speaks to how close the world came to the abyss (167). His “irresponsibility was breathtaking” (217).
JFK: Well-read. Well-traveled. Not the best Civil Rights leader. Wanted to be seen by Americans as “tough on Communism” (208). Considered more style than substance early on. Lacked a reference point. “Had not done anything very successful” up to that point. (117-18, 344) “Our gratitude for Kennedy’s handling of the Missile Crisis, and respect for his memory, must be increased by recognizing that less than half of his successors as America’s commander-in-chief could have been relied up on to make the same calls. He adopted a strategy that emphasized his own and his nation’s resolve, while rejecting courses that might have precipitated Armageddon” (452). In 1951 he was a congressman. On a world trip he jotted down these lines from Andrew Marvell: But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. “JFK was the best-read, most widely traveled president in US history” (115). He displayed an acute cultural sensitivity unlike any president that preceded him (237, 239-40).
Castro: “It is an anomaly of history that the Cuban leader, incomparably the smallest and least admirable of the three men who dominated the missile saga, prospered for decades the longest, having become its big winner. The Cuban people proved thus its big losers, because they remained victims of the Fidel’s disastrous economic and brutal repressive policies” (460). “Castro’s attainment of heroic status was his own achievement, but his retention of it reflected American clumsiness. The power of his personality was indisputable, but it would have been a long stretch to characterize him as either an admirable human being or a successful father to his people” (45).
Robert McNamara: Described as “the greatest menace to the safety of the United States that’s ever been in Washington” (Col. Jerry Page, USAF deputy director of plans, 437). Hastings comments about McNamara are interesting: “He was not, however, a flexible thinker. Once he made up his mind; decided upon the rational response to the evidence as he saw it, he was hare to shift. He was not good at acknowledging that ‘facts’ were not always fact” (110).
RFK: “RFK nonetheless had some common sense, terrific energy, together with a confidence rooted in intimacy with the president, and another virtue uncommon in politics: he was willing to change his mind. In 1962, however, the attorney general was habitually viewed as his brother’s hitman, licensed thug, who used four-letter language as if he meant every obscenity” (111).
A different perspective (necessary corrective?) on US/Cuban relations: “The US had created the conditions for the new [US/Cuba] impasse, by almost everything it had done to the island since 1898. Cubans were then, as they remain today, exasperated by America’s claim upon their historic gratitude for having allegedly ‘given’ independence to their country” (53). The US balks at missiles in “its back yard” while white rioters protest James Meredith’s entrance into the University of Mississippi. Hmmm!
The crux of the October Crisis: Khrushchev’s aim was to test US resolve — but without risk of a war; Kennedy’s task to convince the Soviet leader that the risk of the war was there without triggering it (197).
My Takeaways:
The dangers of hubris (personal and cultural): A theme, whether or not the author intended it, is the danger posed by hubris, whether personal (JFK - see pages 9, 357), national (“The American people cherish a myth that, unlike the old European powers, they have never been imperialists”) (24). Hastings tagged this “national myopia” that has dogged the US since Jefferson (198). As for Khrushchev, he insisted on flying to the US in the Soviet Tu-114 airliner. Proud of its imposing height, no one dared tell him it was necessary to protect the plane’s engines from ingesting debris from their “ill-swept runways” (90).
Be careful about who you endorse before you get to know the person: Ed Sullivan on Fidel Castro in 1959: “You know this is a very fine young man and a very smart young man, and with the help of God and our prayers, and with the help of the American government, he will come up with the sort of democracy down there that America should have” (27). Click here for the video. By 1960 opinions turned sour, one editorial denouncing him as “a spoilt brat with a gun” (52).
The real story behind the press clippings: Even as the world watched in wonder and American shuddered in fear at Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, the reality was that his mission was fraught with failure both on ascent and descent. “When he finally landed in a potato field near the Volga, the world’s first cosmonaut was obliged to borrow a horse to get to a phone to summon rescuers” (59). Though people feared the Soviet advance, “In the decade that began with Stalin’s death, Soviet industry produced just a hundred thousand private cars a year, barely a week’s output from US auto plants” (61). See also pages 98f on US/Soviet disparities. On the apparent “missile gap” that “favored” the Soviet Union, the US was actually "drastically” ahead (131).
Times have changed: On the cusp of the sixties the average marriage age of American girls was twenty. Fourteen million were engaged by age seventeen, a reflection of the fact that only thus would many, or even most, agree to go to bed with a guy—and a guy was what a gal’s partner was almost certain to be. A British teacher at Tulane University was nonplussed one day to be requested by one of his female students to sign her certificate of virginity (102).
Soft answers still win: JFK took a tongue-lashing by Khrushchev in June 1961. JFK’s silent strength helped prepare him for future interactions with the unstable Soviet leader, and perhaps helped keep him from moving past the brink (125).
Leaders must carry on with a calm: Once JFK and the Americans discovered that Soviet foreign minister Gromyko was lying — and then playing political poker with the foreign minister (and winning big), JFK had to participate in a Democratic campaign and carried on as if there were not a care in the world (246). In a similar vein, after debating whether to bomb Cuba (and possibly risk war), JFK spent forty-five minutes visiting with the Ugandan Prime Minister, Milton Obote. Hastings tags this, “Kennedy’s extraordinary discipline,” and Obote, when he found out, “felt a sense of respect, indeed awe, which never afterwards faded” (269, 271).
Expect opposition: The US caught silent criticism from PM Macmillan in his diary. Additionally, sixty British academics (the “rollcall of egghead dissidents”), which eventually swelled to 600, voiced their disapproval (299).
JFK’s Masterful Moment: When Bertrand Russell fawned over Khrushchev and then pointedly criticized JFK, Kennedy responded: “I think your attention might well be directed towards the burglar rather than to those who caught the burglar” (300). See page 406 for JFK’s finest hour: “The maturity of the president’s conduct stands in stark contrast to the impulsiveness of some of those around him. Indeed, there is a good argument that Kennedy displayed quite as much courage in resisting the Excom voices demanding early violent action - especially that of Bundy - as in facing down Khrushchev” (406).
Understand the object of the present exercise: Dean Rusk to JFK at a crisis moment in deliberations re the Cuban blockade: “Mr. President, I do think it is important in our present procedures — of course, these may change later — but for us to make it, to be quite clear what the object of this present exercise is. And that is to stop those weapons from going to Cuba” (333).
The importance of communication: There are multiple lessons on the importance of communication (the narrative, cross-cultural, technical, lack of speed), which, was very suspect in that day. Example: pages 391, 397, 428.
The author piqued my curiosity about these books:
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman. JFK read it in 1962.
Words to ponder:
JFK takes the rap for Operation Zapata (1961): What could I have said that would have helped the situation at all? That we took the beating of our lives? That the CIA and the Pentagon are stupid?” (19).
Successful organizations: The tools for successful administration are order, process, planning. (Hastings’ commenting of Cuba’s woeful leaders, 47)
The poor: “The troubles of the poor are always the same” (Margarita Rios Alducin).
What leaders want: Of one of her British ministers, Margaret Thatcher said: Other people bring me problems. He brings me solutions” (108).
Brevity of time: But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (Andrew Marvell, 115).
Let’s see what would happen: Khrushchev’s favorite maxim (167).
JFK’s classic error: Expecting his adversary to think and act like himself. He assumed that the Kremlin would be deterred from shipping offensive weapons because of JFK’s strong rhetoric and the USSR’s weak nuclear position (181).
Confidence and cockiness: General LeMay, dubbed “iron ass” by his subordinates. “Legend held that a sergeant once remonstrated with the general when, pipe and all, he climbed into the fuselage of a bomber being refueled, saying, ‘Sir, it could ignite gas flames.’ LeMay responded: ‘Son, it wouldn’t dare’” (249, 327).
LeMay one-liner: “‘Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can now only lessen defeat’ . . . ‘To err is human, to forgive is not SAC policy’” (250). These were the kinds of men with whom JFK had to contend, some trigger happy even if it meant world war. See page 251 for JFK’s calm under pressure.
How close was it? “Our commanders in the field could have started a nuclear war if they wanted to, because we didn’t have PALs [Permissive Action Links]” (Robert McNamara, 328, 369-70, 401).
Failure: “The American people will forgive almost anything but failure” (Hastings, 360). This reveals what Kennedy and his team were up against.
Conclusion:
Hastings’ early summary on the three leaders:
“Thus, three leaders and their nations marched towards a fateful rendezvous in the Caribbean, with hapless allies such as the British trailing behind. Fidel Castro was driven by a craving to secure for his small country a celebrity and importance to which it could lay claim only by promoting sensation and even outrage. Nikita Khrushchev cherished no desire for war, but was happy to to use the treat of it as a means of asserting the Soviet Union’s right to be viewed on the world sage as the equal of the United States. . . . John F. Kennedy was one of the most enlightened men ever to occupy the presidency . . . . But his instinct towards moderation and compromised, fostered by sophistication and international experience, stood at odds with the conservative worldview of a substantial proportion of his fellow-countrymen, who demanded that America should be seen to be strong” (132-3).
His thoughts on the leaders in the White House:
“But the world has reason to recall with respect the leaders around the table s in the White House during the Crisis about to unfold - even the ones who called it wrong” (192).
There were not two goats — just one! Ukraine Communist Party secretary Petr Shelest considered the conduct of Kennedy and Khrushchev to that of two goats who meet on a narrow cliff path. They refuse to give way to each other and consequently both fall into the abyss. Hastings notes this was not the story. Actually, the winner was common sense and levelheadedness shown by the President, even when his opponent and his subordinates failed to display it.
Hastings shows similar levelheadedness in recounting this history. What a great read!
