Introduction
For
thirteen days in October of 1962, the world stood and watched as individual superpower
leaders moved toward a political abyss that history books claim nearly resulted
in nuclear destruction when U.S. intelligence planes recorded photos of Soviet nuclear
missile technology in Cuba. The intelligence
revelation not only threatened to shift the bipolar balance of power between
the United States and the Soviet Union, and on a larger scale between international
capitalism and communism, it threatened military escalation between the two
great nuclear powers of the Cold War period which, without solution, could have
had irreversible ramifications to the entire globe. In retrospect, a possible nuclear holocaust
was not diverted by the efforts of multilateral international alliances nor was
the possible conflict diverted by the domestic mechanisms within the state structure,
neither Council of Ministers nor Congress.
Instead, the eyes of the world, from the young to old, were on three individual
human leaders: President John F. Kennedy
of the United States, Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro of
Cuba. The decisions and leadership
styles of these individual men during the Cuban Missile Crisis, especially
Kennedy and Khrushchev, would avert possible world nuclear disaster.
The
Cuban Missile Crisis culminated through a series of events that, as previously
mentioned, began with the identification by U.S. intelligence of Soviet missile
technology in Cuba. The alarming
revelation resulted in U.S. demands on the international stage for the removal
of Soviet missiles from Cuba and the implementation of a U.S. naval blockade of
Cuba to prevent, as Kennedy claimed, the importation of further Soviet missiles,
which Khrushchev declared would bring Soviet retaliation should any U.S. ship attack
Soviet ships destined for Cuba. The
leadership styles utilized by the involved state leaders during the
negotiations of October 26, 1962 brought the crisis to a peaceful resolution
and it is important to analyze those leadership traits in the form of
Khrushchev and Kennedy’s private and public letters of communication.
Foreign
Policy Objectives
During
the period between the end of the Second World War and the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis, the three state leaders involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis were heads
of states with very different policy objectives and those objectives played
heavily into leadership decisions and actions as the 1962 crisis bloomed. The main Cold War foreign policy objective
for the United States was the containment of communism, heavy efforts on limiting
Soviet influence on the international stage, and the extension and protection of
western international capitalism through the creation and utilization of NATO
as a military containment mechanism. The
Soviet Union, on the other hand, “felt threatened by a rearmed Federal Republic
of Germany (West Germany), by the United States alliance system encircling the
Soviet Union, and by the West's superior strategic and economic strength” (Zickel,
1989, p. 87), in addition to U.S. missiles in Turkey, and sought to improve Soviet
negotiating power within the international balance of power. While the policies of the two Cold War global
powers are clearly political positioning on the balanced international stage, the
Cuban state was an unstable state entity that had recently underwent an armed
regime change with the forced exile of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel
Castro as leader. It must be noted that
the Cuban Revolution was not communist based and that “organized labor, whose
ranks were heavily influenced by the Communist Party (PS), opposed the July
26th Movement until almost the very end” (Prevost, 2012, p. 21). The Bay of Pigs event in 1961 documents U.S. CIA
operations providing “money, weapons and training” (Mooney, 2006, p. 18) to exiled
opposition guerrilla fighters training in Central America with the goal of
overthrowing Castro in favor of a more capitalist-friendly Cuban leader or the
possible return of Batista. Being under the
rifle scopes of a neighboring superpower, it was only natural for Castro to
seek closer economic and military relations to the Soviet Union, which would
later result in the Soviet purchase of 2.7 million tons of sugar (Prevost,
2012, p. 14), to bolster and secure the longevity of his newly established
regime and the state of Cuba.
Individual
Leadership Styles
In
their theoretic discussion on the effects of individual leadership, Hermann and
Preston offer four leadership styles that categorize how leaders react
differently to political situations based on how leaders respond to constraints,
openness to information, how the leader focuses on a political situation at
hand and the political relationships surrounding the problem (2001, p. 95). Fidel Castro, while certainly not a major
player in the negotiation phase of October 26, 1962, is easily identifiable as
a crusader-styled leader due to his “political
career engaged in trying to export the socialist revolution in Latin America”
(Hermann and Preston, 2001, p. 96), but the actions of Khrushchev and Kennedy
during the Cuban Missile Crisis negotiations are more difficult to narrow down
and would seem to fall between the categories of strategic and opportunistic,
which stress openness to information, challenging constraints, and respecting
constraints (Hermann and Preston, 2001, p. 96).
Both
Khrushchev and Kennedy showed strategic and opportunistic leadership styles
during the Cuban Missile Crisis build-up and negotiations, and the outcome of the
crisis could have been much different had either of these leaders acted in
another role such as the crusader or the pragmatist. Both Khrushchev and Kennedy acted as
strategic leaders during the build-up to the culminating negotiation by
challenging constraints and remaining open to information, and later during
negotiations assumed opportunistic leadership styles. In the build-up period, Khrushchev challenged
constraints by approving the Cuban request for missiles, since Soviet diplomatic
relations had opened with Cuba after Castro’s successful revolution, while
Kennedy had challenged constraints by allowing the CIA to train exiled fighters
in order to return Fulgencio Batista, or a capitalist-friendly leader, back to
power. An argument can actually be made
that the Cuban missile request to the Soviet Union was in response to the U.S.
Bay of Pigs failure. Both leaders, and their
respective states, were incremental in using maneuverability and flexibility
while engaging others, the Soviets with Castro’s government and the U.S. with Batista
exiles, during the process. During the
same time window, both leaders were open to information from each other, as is
evident by the letters dated over the thirteen days in October 1962, and the communication
lines between the Soviet Union and the United States had been, and remained,
open. Khrushchev had even visited the
United States while Eisenhower was in the White House, just a year prior to
Kennedy’s election.
Something
interesting occurred as the situation acuminated toward possible military
confrontation and escalation. Both
Khrushchev and Kennedy changed leadership styles to fit the opportunistic
model. Both leaders worked with and
respected the constraints of the United Nations under newly posted Secretary-General
of the UN, U Thant, and open communications between the two leaders drastically
increased. Both leaders became reactive
in order to assess what gains were possible under the problematic situation,
and both leaders became accommodative in the political relationship. In the exchange of letters between Khrushchev
and Kennedy, available on the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian
website, Khrushchev hinted on U.S. missiles in Turkey and the protection of Cuba
from possible U.S. invasion while Kennedy followed Khrushchev’s lead and made
subtle promises to remove the naval blockade if the Soviet weapons in Cuba were
destroyed under the auspices of the United Nations, while also quietly agreeing
to remove U.S. Missiles from Turkey.
In
closing, while the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis were clearly the result
of Castro’s successful Cuban revolution and the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow
the Castro government, along with the initiation of diplomatic relations between
the Soviet Union and the new Cuban government under Castro, it was the flexible
individual leadership styles of Khrushchev and Kennedy that worked rationally to
bring a peaceful resolution to the matter without international conflict or
possible nuclear strikes.
References
Gary Prevost. 2012. “Fidel
Castro and the Cuban Revolution” Headwaters: The Faculty Journal of the
College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University 24 (4): 19-33. Accessed on January 25, 2014. http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=headwaters
Margaret Hermann and Thomas
Preston. 2001. Who leads matters: the effects of powerful Individuals. International Studies Review 3, no. 2
(Summer): 83-132.
Matthew Mooney. 2006. “On
the Brink: From the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis.” California: University of California,
2006. Accessed on January 25, 2014. http://www.humanities.uci.edu/history/ucihp/resources/11th%20grade%20for%20website/11.9%20HOT%20On_The_Brink.pdf
Raymond Zickel. 1991. Soviet Union, a country study. The Library of Congress, 1991. Accessed on January 25, 2014. https://archive.org/details/sovietunioncount00zick
U.S. Department of State, Office
of the Historian. “Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges: Kennedy-Khrushchev
Exchanges.” Accessed January 25,
2014. http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/comp1
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