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JFK's On-The-Brink Leadership Lessons

This article is more than 9 years old.

Fifty-two years ago, yesterday, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. For the preceding thirteen days, the world had teetered on the brink of the ultimate horror: nuclear war.

How did things get to such a pass? The simple answer: a failure of leadership. President John F. Kennedy had ordered the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961, and it was a complete disaster. Then a few months later, Kennedy's response to the Berlin Crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall was weak. To put it mildly. His opponent, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, was convinced that he could do whatever he wanted to do, anywhere he wanted to do it.

Kennedy had failed to establish himself as a strong leader, and Khrushchev decided the time was right to place intermediate-range missiles in Cuba—missiles capable of hitting Washington, DC with nuclear warheads. Once the installation of the missiles began, the entire planet held its breath as the Cold War threatened to go hot.

But as we all know, nobody pushed a launch button. There was no nuclear war. Just as important to the United States, the missiles were withdrawn from Cuba. What were Kennedy's leadership lessons in averting this catastrophe? Well . . .

- No Panic. The military's top brass and a number of the players in national security felt that America needed to bomb the missile sites in Cuba. Fast. As if bombing wouldn't have begged for retaliation from the Soviet Union. Kennedy refused to accept that option as his best plan of action. Instead he made it a worst-case scenario option and refused to be rushed into it by his military advisers.

- Never Lose Focus. Kennedy never lost track of his priority: Get the missiles out of Cuba peacefully. No matter what kind of aggressive advice he received from his inner circle, or what kind of belligerent messages were sent by Khrushchev, the president stayed focused.

- Thought Before Action, If There's Time. Kennedy refused to let the hotheads around him—and the Soviet hotheads opposing him—rush him. It would have been natural to feel he had to act instantaneously. After all, the world was about to end. But Kennedy took time to:

  • analyze his options,
  • utilize the public theater of diplomacy at the UN,
  • use a Naval quarantine of Cuba (it was a blockade, but that word couldn't be used because a blockade can be an act of war),
  • look for hidden meanings in Soviet messages,
  • communicate through back channels deploying his brother Robert to negotiate with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin.

Kennedy knew that even in an unprecedented crisis like the Missile Crisis there's always time for a bit of thinking.

Kennedy would only have been human if he had cracked under the pressure. If he had allowed the memories of the Bay of Pigs and Berlin to overwhelm him. If he had listened to those who howled for preemptive military action.

But he refused to be overwhelmed. Instead, he proved himself one of the greatest crisis managers of all time.