THIRTEEN DAYS

March 2001
		Nearly 10 years after the end of the Cold War, are nuclear weapons still a threat? What can be learned from the dramatic events of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara responds to your questions.

Forum introduction What was the makeup of President Kennedy's inner circle? How much did news reporters know and relay about the events of the crisis? Was Kenneth O'Donnell as big a part of the real events as he is in the movie? Didn't the U.S. remove missiles in Turkey in exchange for moving Soviet missiles out of Cuba? Didn't the Bay of Pigs invasion help stir Cuban resentment? How much did the government learn about the crisis after it was over? How would today's military react to a similar crisis?     Online Special Media Watch Feb. 22, 2001 Three experts discuss the new movie "Thirteen Days." Online Special: Coverage of the Missile Defense Debate Extended Interviews: Undersecretary of Defense Jacques Gansler Pentagon Official Philip Coyle August 9, 2000: Whether or not to build a defense system. Browse the NewsHour's full coverage of the Military and the media     Thirteen Days -- the movie The National Security Archive

Pedro Marti of Caguaas, Puerto Rico asks: My mom is Cuban and she lived there during the crisis. Don’t you think U.S. hostility in the Bay of Pigs was behind the determination for the Cuban government to press the missile situation? Robert McNamara responds: That’s a very, very good point, and, frankly, I think there were actions on both sides with unintended consequences. If you go back to Castro’s overthrow of Batista in 1958, initially my guess – and I’m not entirely sure that I’m correct in this – but my guess is that Castro was a liberal, perhaps even a radical young man in Cuba protesting against what he thought was an autocratic dictatorship that failed to be sensitive to the economic and social welfare off the mass of the Cubans. And, therefore, he in a sense led an attack to overthrow Batista [and] was successful. At that time I’m inclined to believe he was not a committed Communist in the sense of a committed associate of Stalin and the Soviet Communists. But after he came into power and then he acted in ways that led to friction with the U.S., he took over some U.S. properties, he began to feel a need for – I’m hypothesizing now -- he began to feel a need for support, and he began to get closer and closer to the Soviets. And then, at some point, he invited them to provide him military support, and he also undertook subversion of established governments within the Western Hemisphere. In particular, I think, he was seeking to overthrow Betancourt, perhaps assassinate Betancourt, a popularly elected president of Venezuela at the time. And he thought to subvert other established governments in the hemisphere. Now, as a result of all that, there were efforts by the U.S. under presidents – at least I believe there were efforts the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s indicated there were efforts by the U.S. under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to assassinate Castro, and Castro was aware of those efforts. Moreover, there were frequent statements by major public figures from the Congress and elsewhere in the U.S. that Castro was a Communist; we couldn’t allow Communists to begin to take over the hemisphere -- and it was essential that he be removed. There were many such efforts. There was then the Bay of Pigs, an effort that had been started under Eisenhower and carried out under Kennedy, a miserable failure, but after it failed, it was said it failed because President Kennedy refused to provide overt U.S. military support to this allegedly covert operation by ex-Cuban citizens to overthrow Castro. And there were many statements by public figures at the time that that had to be followed by an overt U.S. military invasion. So all of those things were going on. And then in addition to that there was a covert action program designed to weaken the Cuban government – it has since become public – it was known as the Mongoose Operation directed by a man named General Lansdale and supervised by a committee chaired by Bobby Kennedy – and that too was known to Castro, so you had actions by both sides, by the Soviets and the Cubans on the one side and by the U.S. on the other -- that were being interpreted on the other side, as I think being focused on more violent factions than either side contemplated initially. But I suspect – and I don’t know this for a fact – but I suspect that the movement of the missiles by the Soviets into Cuba was in part motivated by those unintended consequences of these series of actions extending back into 1958.