768 Chapter 29 From Camelot to Watergate: 1961–1975
withdrew the missiles, and reduced his military estab-
lishment in Cuba to modest proportions. In response,
Kennedy lifted the blockade. He also promised not to
invade Cuba, thus ensuring Castro’s survival;
Kennedy further agreed to withdraw U.S. missiles
from Turkey, though this latter concession was not
made public at the time.
Immediately the president was hailed for his
steady nerve and consummate statesmanship; the
Cuban missile crisis was widely regarded as his finest
hour. Yet in retrospect it appears that he may have
overreacted. The Soviet nuclear threat had been exag-
gerated. After Sputnik, the Soviet long-range missile
program flopped, though this was not known at the
time. By the summer of 1962 a “missile gap” existed,
but it was overwhelmingly in favor of the United
States, whose nuclear forces outnumbered those of
the Soviet Union by a ratio of seventeen to one.
Khrushchev’s decision to put medium-range missiles
in Cuba signified Soviet weakness rather than impend-
ing aggression. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were
sobered by the Cuban missile crisis; afterward nei-
ther spoke so glibly about superpower confrontation.
They signed a treaty outlawing nuclear testing in the
atmosphere. But Khrushchev’s bluff had been called—
a public humiliation from which he never recovered.
Within two years, hard-liners in the Kremlin forced
him out of office. He was replaced by Leonid
Brezhnev, an old-style Stalinist who
inaugurated an intensive program
of long-range missile development.
The nuclear arms race moved to
new terrain, uncertain and unimag-
inably dangerous.JFK’s Vietnam War
Truman’s attempt to prevent Ho
Chi Minh’s communist insurgents
from seizing Vietnam failed when
the French army surrendered to
Ho’s troops at Dien Bien Phu in- Eisenhower, equally unwill-
ing to accept a communist victory,
then supported creation of an
anticommunist South Vietnam,
headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, a
Vietnamese nationalist who hated
the communists. While the United
States poured millions of dollars
into strengthening Diem’s South
Vietnam, and especially its army,
Ho Chi Minh consolidated his
rule in North Vietnam. Those
Viet Minh units that remained in
the South—they came to be known as Vietcong—
were instructed to form secret cells and bide their
time. During the late 1950s they gained in strength
and militancy.
In May 1959 Ho decided that the time had
come to overthrow Diem. Vietcong guerrillas infil-
trated thousands of villages, ambushed South
Vietnamese convoys, and assassinated government
officials. Soon the Vietcong controlled large sections
of the countryside, some almost within sight of the
capital city of Saigon.
By the time Kennedy took office, Diem’s govern-
ment was tottering. As a senator, Kennedy had
endorsed Diem and the attempt to build a noncom-
munist South Vietnam. He called it the “cornerstone
of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in
the arch, the finger in the dike.” After the Bay of Pigs
debacle, furthermore, Kennedy worried that his credi-
bility with Khrushchev had been damaged. “If he
thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts,” he told
an aide, “we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have
to act.” Vietnam, he added, “looks like the place.”
Kennedy sharply increased the American military
and economic commitment to South Vietnam. At the
end of 1961 there were 3,200 American military per-
sonnel in the country; within two years, there were
more than 16,000, and 120 American soldiers had been
killed. Despite the expanded effort, by the summer of
This photograph, taken by an American U-2 spy plane and released during the Cuban missile
crisis, shows the installation of liquid-fueled Soviet missiles. Khrushchev expected that the
missiles could be kept secret. “Our military specialists informed us that strategic missiles can be
reliably concealed in the palm forests of Cuba,” one of Khrushchev’s advisers recalled.
Khrushchev, who assumed that the missiles would be harder to spot if they were in a horizontal
position, ordered them to be placed in an upright position only at night. This was a mistake: The
U-2 was easily able to detect the missiles in their horizontal position.