Panel discusses lessons learned from Cuban Missile Crisis

Fifty years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union faced a nuclear weapons standoff in the cold waters near Cuba.

In the time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, students of history have uncovered many hidden details about the events surrounding the 13-day confrontation, but more secrets are left to unravel, according to expert Peter Kornbluh.

Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, gave the keynote speech at the Graduate School of International and Public Affair’s Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies’ daylong event titled “Cuban Missile Crisis: 50 Year Anniversary”.

In his role with the National Security Archive, Kornbluh directs the Cuba, Chile and Brazil Documentation Projects, which aim to open formerly secretive documents surrounding foreign affairs for public consumption. He participated in the conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the presence of American, Soviet and Cuban leaders, and specifics about the historical event continued to be revealed.

Phil Williams, the director of the Ridgway Center, introduced Kornbluh as an “incredible fountain of knowledge.”

“Fifty years down the road, we are still learning new things about the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Kornbluh told an audience of about 40 people.

He revealed that historians have discovered that the crisis was much more dangerous than U.S. officials understood at the time.

Kornbluh stressed that officials kept certain aspects of the Cuban Missile Crisis secret, which led historians and the public to draw skewed conclusions from the event, but 50 years later, with more evidence, we can come to a more complete determination.

For instance, he described the deal President John F. Kennedy made with Soviet leaders to remove United States missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of missiles in Cuba. Kennedy did so without the majority of his advisers’ approval, and the deal was kept a secret and even left out of the president’s book, which was perceived as containing the most accurate depiction of the crisis.

Kornbluh acknowledged that diplomacy often cannot be open to the public at the time of such crises and “in this day and age, we see secret diplomacies going on all the time,” but in the context of history, officials need to reveal such details for the world to learn from them.

Historians frequently list dumb luck as a factor in the peaceful resolve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Kornbluh disagreed with this analysis.

“Looking at the entire record, luck had little to do with the resolution,” he said.

He chose instead to focus on Kennedy’s commitment toward ending the crisis as a major factor in the peaceful outcome.

Kornbluh concluded his speech with the remark, “We all were the winners of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” and proceeded to answer questions from the audience, which allowed him to expand on his understanding of the role Fidel Castro played in the crisis, the causes that lead to the event and the multiple facets of diplomatic secrecy.

In addition to Kornbluh’s keynote speech, the conference included several speeches by experts on the crisis, including Pitt faculty members, and a concluding panel discussion, which scrutinized the crisis, the context of recent research surrounding the crisis while also focusing on ways the information derived from the crisis can be used in the future.

Before giving Kornbluh the stage, Williams touched on 21st century aspects that could affect the nature of any future crisis of international affairs. He pointed to concepts such as the larger number of players on the world stage, the level of improved communication, the vast amount of potential battle spaces and the change in codes of conduct to explain how a crisis in the present might differ from the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Williams still stressed the importance of examining the past.

Kornbluh conveyed the importance of creative diplomacy in resolving the crisis and pointed out that the “lessons drawn [from the Cuban Missile Crisis] have been the wrong ones” and “compromise and negotiation need to be understood as opposed to coercion.”

During the conference’s concluding panel, participants Charles Gochman, Dennis Gormley, Ryan Grauer, Peter Karsten, Forrest Morgan, Williams and Kornbluh grappled with what lessons people can take away from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Grauer, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said one lesson stresses the need for both the military and civilians to unite in resolving crises.

“Sometimes political needs and the military’s needs don’t align, but civilians and militants need to work together,” Grauer said. “There needs to be better cross-fertilization of ideas.”

Kornbluh suggested that students read Kennedy’s speech from 1963 at American University to understand the lesson he learned from the crisis.

“We need to work toward peace among all our neighbors,” Kornbluh said. “That’s clearly what [Kennedy] took away from the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

This conference was particularly insightful for those audience members who lived through the Cold War themselves, such as Martin Staniland, the director of GSPIA’s International Affairs Division. He recounted his experiences while he was a student at Cambridge during the conflict.

“If you didn’t live through the Cold War, you are blessed,” Staniland said. “You knew in a few moments, you could be dead.”

Assistant News Editor Gwenn Barney contributed to this report.