The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of those landmark crises of the 20th century that Americans should be familiar with. One need not have been alive in 1962 to appreciate that the world was on the brink of a catastrophic conflict. Indeed, even if someone wasn’t familiar with the historic record, the Cuban Missile Crisis has been the subject of contemporary books and movies.
And yet, the president’s chief spokesperson doesn’t know anything about it.
Still looking for that last-minute Christmas gift for White House press secretary Dana Perino? May we recommend a gift certificate for the forthcoming book on the Cuban Missile Crisis by our colleague Michael Dobbs, “One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War,” due out next summer?
Appearing on National Public Radio’s light-hearted quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me,” which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — and she didn’t know what it was.
“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”
So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’ “
The “Bay of Pigs thing”? She’s “pretty sure” the crisis “had to do with Cuba and missiles”? Seriously?
As it happens, I’d argue that this is more than just a minor embarrassment for a senior White House official. The significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis is probably greater now than at any point in the post-Cold War era.
Indeed, the event has been a fairly significant part of the public discourse lately, in part because so many of us wonder what might have happened if a reckless and irresponsible president — say, George W. Bush — had been in office at the time. Just a couple of months ago, Hardball host Chris Matthews touched on this at an event in DC:
Matthews left the throng of Washington A-listers with a parting shot at Cheney: “God help us if we had Cheney during the Cuban missile crisis. We’d all be under a parking lot.”
On a related note, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an analysis of Bush’s foreign-policy worldview that incorporated a similar assessment.
This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t. However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin’s attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba. (emphasis added)
Who’s willing to argue that Bush and Cheney would reject similar advice about a pre-emptive war now?
Indeed, the contemporary utility of the Cuban Missile Crisis is fairly broad (at least in condemning the current president). As the emergency was unfolding, Kennedy dispatched his Secretary of State to Paris to meet with DeGaulle to discuss the crisis. Before even being shown photographic evidence of Soviet missiles approaching Cuba, DeGaulle waved the pictures off and said, “No, the word of the president of the United States is good enough for me.”
Today, is there a country on the planet that would accept the president’s word on faith when it comes to an international security crisis?
By most standards, JFK was a bit of a “hawk” when it came to foreign policy, but when faced with his greatest challenge, he achieved his greatest triumph by bucking the brass, avoiding a catastrophe, and allowing cooler heads to prevail.
Perino might want to read up on the story — it has a surprising salience 45 years later.