THE ART OF THE DEAL

Excerpts from an NPR interview with Fred Kaplan, author of "The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War"  

Please note the frequent ellipses. This is NOT a transcript. I have edited for brevity but have not changed the direction of the interview.

Read these excerpts with 2020 vision.

"In 1962, Kennedy faces a real crisis - The Soviets [were] building nuclear missiles in Cuba [...] So Kennedy and advisers had to figure out what to do and whether the wrong move would trigger a nuclear war. 

[...] Even now the real story is not that well-known. [...] On the third day of the [...] 13-day crisis, Kennedy is kind of mulling. He's saying, Khrushchev seems to have got himself in a trap. Maybe we need to give him a face-saving gesture. Maybe we should trade the missiles that we have in Turkey for his missiles in Cuba. Nobody pays any attention to this.

On the Saturday, on the last day of the crisis, Khrushchev issues a telegram proposing a deal - we'll get rid of our missiles in Cuba; you get rid of your missiles in Turkey. And Kennedy says, well, this seems like a fair trade. And everybody around the table is against this - not just the generals but all the civilians. Bobby Kennedy, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy - all these reasonable people, they're all against it. [...]

Kennedy lets them talk. And he says, well, you know, [...] it seems to me that once [...] we start doing 500 sorties a day against the missile sites and then invade the island, [...] then the Russians would grab Berlin. [...] Well, the argument goes on. Kennedy secretly sends Bobby to make the deal with the Soviet ambassador. 

[...] Not known at the time - that the Russians had already installed nuclear warheads on some of those missiles. It also turned out that the Russians had secretly deployed 40,000 troops to the island of Cuba to stave off a potential American invasion.

So if Kennedy had succumbed to all of his advisers and said, yeah, you're right, we can't take this deal, and gone ahead with the airstrikes, gone ahead with the invasion, the Russians might very well have launched one of those missiles [...] and the small invasion force going into Cuba would have found themselves being repelled by 40,000 Soviet troops. In other words, we would have been in a war with the Soviet Union. 

So, you know, one lesson of this is that who you elect as president really does matter sometimes. [...] The fact that you have a lot of smart advisers doesn't necessarily seal the deal."