Everything You Wanted To Know About The Cuban Missile Crisis | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"One of the things that had happened before the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the Kennedy administration developed contingency plans to attack Cuba. The origins of this planning go back to the Eisenhower years. But those plans were updated during the Kennedy presidency. Now, it's not easy to gauge the significance of them. The US has contingency plans for everything. I think as one historian once put it, you know, they probably have contingency plans for, you know, what would we do if we invade Canada? These things are not likely to happen...
John Kennedy had this reputation in the White House as being a sort of intellectual, a cultured man, a sophisticated man. He's very intelligent, educated, but that really wasn't him. It was his wife who was very cultured and sophisticated. And in fact, John Kennedy's fav, favorite literature, his favorite novels were the James Bond stories. He loved the James Bond stories. And, and he met Ian Fleming. During the 1960 campaign, he was in Washington. And the author of the James Bond stories, Ian Fleming was in a car driving down the street with someone who knew Kennedy and the car stopped, and that's when Kennedy was introduced to Ian Fleming. And Fleming was invited to dinner that night.
So this extraordinary, extraordinary event or episode during the 1960 presidential campaign where you have a Presidential Candidate John Kennedy, talking to the author of James Bond and soliciting his advice on how to handle Castro. He says to Fleming, you know, how would you handle Castro? How would you get rid of him? And Fleming comes out with all of these extraordinary stories, or policy suggestions like right out of a James Bond novel or film as to how to get rid of Castro.
Two months into his presidency, Kennedy is asked by a magazine to name his top 10 favorite books. One of them is a James Bond book. And actually at that point, the sales of James Bond books skyrocket. I mean, Fleming should have paid Kennedy royalties, in part of the extraordinary popularity of James Bond is due to Kennedy's endorsement of them. What's interesting is, of course, it turns into a film franchise. What's the first film? Doctor No. With Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. And what’s Dr No about? It's about a Cold War crisis in the Caribbean with a sort of despot Dr No who is building sort of rockets...
‘If it is a US invasion of the island, I want you to respond by carrying out a nuclear attack. It seems incredible. But that is what Castro said to Khruschev. If Kennedy invades, you must start a nuclear war. I think the general assumption is that this increased Khrushchev's sense that the crisis was spiraling out of control, and that he better bring about a peaceful settlement of the crisis quickly.
As for the ending of the crisis, Castro was furious. He was absolutely enraged. We have an account of this. He basically felt like he'd been betrayed by Khruschev, that Khruschev had been weak, he basically saw it as humiliation. So in terms of how, you know, the Cuban leadership responded, Castro responded, it was with unrestrained fury, rage and a sense of sense, a sense of humiliation. And just in a practical sense, Castro did think I mean, the early part of his government, he was concerned that the US was going to overthrow him and his rule of Cuba would prove to be ephemeral, short lived. Once the missiles were deployed, that increased Castro's sense that his regime was secure. So the removal of the nuclear missiles, I think, increased a sense of vulnerability.’...
'In 1975, the US Senate carried out an investigation. A committee in the US Senate carried out an investigation into alleged assassination attempts by the CIA against various foreign leaders, including Castro. What the investigation established was that at least eight assassination plots had been devised by the CIA to kill Castro, many of them during the Kennedy years. Now we're not certain, absolutely certain that [Kennedy] knew about them, or was it the CIA doing on its own initiative? And this is because of a practice known as plausible deniability. If a President was briefed about an assassination attempt, this was never written down, so that the President's knowledge was plausibly deniable'"
"War Plan Red was one of the color-coded war plans created by the United States Department of War in the late 1920s and the early 1930s to estimate the requirements for a hypothetical war with the United Kingdom."
