Cuber Missile-Crisis Veterans Fault Bush on Iraq.<G>
Last Updated: October 11, 2002 10:30 PM ET
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Former U.S. and Russian officials and military officers met Friday to study the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and gave President Bush bad marks for his handling of present-day events involving Iraq.
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other aides to then-President John F. Kennedy, protagonists in the 13-day crisis that edged close to nuclear war, are participating in the three-day conference, attended by Cuban President Fidel Castro.
McNamara praised Castro, Kennedy and former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for good judgement and the cool-handed resolution of one of the Cold War's most dramatic moments.
"We avoided nuclear catastrophe by the narrowest of margins. I hope we can draw lessons that will assist in preventing nuclear wars in the future," McNamara said.
Wayne Smith, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana in the late 1970s, contrasted it unfavorably with events 40 years later. "There was no cowboying," he said. "Today's crisis is not being handled in the same careful, prudent way."
INVOKING CRISIS
Bush, a Republican, invoked the Cuban missile crisis in a speech Monday to justify a possible pre-emptive attack on Iraq, suspected of hiding weapons of mass destruction. After Bush spoke, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy replied that his brother, also a Democrat, avoided a pre-emptive strike on Cuba by imposing a naval quarantine.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, both Kennedy White House aides, said Bush had taken Kennedy's words out of context and was misreading history.
The White House rejected the criticism. Spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The reason the Cuban missile crisis was resolved peacefully was because President Kennedy, like President Bush, displayed strength and was indeed willing to use force pre-emptively.
He said, "If Khrushchev and Castro didn't back down, do you think John F. Kennedy would not have used force? Of course he would have. He said so."
Schlesinger disagreed. "Bush is absolutely wrong. The quarantine was an alternative to military action, not a form of military action," he told Reuters.
"By claiming that the peaceful pressure was equivalent to a military pressure, clearly Bush did not think it through," Schlesinger said.
The majority of Kennedy's civilian and military advisers recommended an attack on Cuba after U-2 spy planes discovered the Soviets installing missile bases on the island 90 miles from Florida, McNamara said Thursday.
McNamara proposed a "quarantine" to stop Soviet freighters transporting the weapons to Cuba, and the crisis ended when Moscow ordered the missiles' withdrawal.
"We called it a quarantine because blockade is a word of war, and the purpose of the quarantine was exactly the opposite," he said. "It wasn't at all clear that a quarantine would postpone war. But it was not pre-emption. It was the reverse of pre-emption."
KHRUSHCHEV MISLED KENNEDY: CASTRO
Communist-run Cuba maintains it allowed the missile bases on the island for defensive purposes only, to deter U.S. attempts to oust Castro's fledgling revolutionary government.
"Our commitment is to contribute to historical truth," Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Fernandez said at the opening session of the conference organized by the Cuban government and the nonprofit National Security Archive in Washington.
Castro, 76 and in power since 1959, partly blamed Khrushchev for the missile crisis in an interview with ABC television presenter Barbara Walters.
"He misled Kennedy. That was his main ... flaw," Castro said in the interview aired on ABC's "20/20" Friday night.
Thousands of pages of declassified U.S., Cuban and Russian documents are being discussed at the conference. One released by the National Security Archive is a 54-page chronology of events leading to the crisis prepared for Kennedy by the CIA.
The document shows that, as late as August 1962, U.S. intelligence agencies were underestimating Soviet intentions to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, an intelligence failure akin to that now being debated in the United States over the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks |
