At the Miller Center, professor barbara perry, who is going to anchor the panel. Barbara is herself a noted scholar of the 60s and of the kennedy era and the kennedy clan. She is also the director of president ial studies here at the Miller Center. She is a very seasoned expert oral historian as well as a written historian, and for many years she helped lead the Oral History Program here at the Miller Center, which was one of the signature undertakings that we do in interviewing the leading members of president ial administrations from the four years on up until the present. Or at least i should say the recent past. We have completed oral histories under her leadership and russel rileys leadership of every administration through the george w. Bush administration and we are planning to lay siege to the Obama Administration and well find out what the Trump Administration what their attitude is towards being interviewed about oral history when we get to that place. In any case, barbaras going to take us forward in this panel and ill turn things over to her. Barbara . Thanks so much, will. And of course to mel and stephanie for conceptual easing and organizing and executing such a timely yet historybased battle conference this year. And of course this is the very essence of Miller Center scholarship and programming. I am delighted to moderate this 11 00 panel. Well go to about 1 00 and well do this in two halves. The first half of our discussion will feature my Miller Center colleague mark selverstone, an associate professor of president ial studies here at the center and he chairs the president ial recordings program, which analyzes, transcribes, edits and annotates the secret white house tapes. If you watch the ken burns vietnam series, you will have seen marks name and our colleague ken hughes name prominently displayed in the credits of each episode because they were crucial to providing the clips from particularly the nixon and the johnson years, but some of the kennedy tapes as well. Mark is a Foreign Policy historian of the first order, focussing on the cold war, and especially one element of the hot war, vietnam, in that era. And particularly the kennedy and johnson policies towards it. My favorite of his many publications is his book a companion to john f. Kennedy, which sounds like it might be about some of the girlfriends of the president , but it is meant itself to be a companion, and some of that story is covered in that volume. Yes. But very seriously, this is a major work that mark edited. It is has seminal historical essays on virtually every topic related to jfks life, his career and particularly his presidency and i rely on it almost exclusively as im preparing to speak about president kennedy. And i think of tim naftali as my colleague, even though he proceeded me at the Miller Center by several years, where he served here as the director of the Miller Centers kremlin decisionmaking project, and then tim after serving as director of the Nixon Library has become a clinical associate professor of history and also of Public Service at nyu. Hes the coauthor among many books, but one particularly pertinent for todays topic called khrushchevs cold war. If like me you are a fan of cnn documentaries, you will rhode island recognize tim as the star of many of them. I highly recommend to all of you here today if you havent read them already the four essays for this panel. They are all informative, they are very accessible and compelling. And i want to begin with mark, and actually begin with the end of his essay, which is a set of conclusions that he draws on jfks role and behavior in the cuban missile crisis and most importantly for our conference here over these several days. To draw out the lessons of jfks role and behavior in the cuban missile crisis for current issues. Then after mark does that, well turn to tim and hell offer some lessons as well from the khrushchev side, from the russian side. So with that, let me turn to mark. Sure. Thanks. Good morning. Good late morning to everybody and thanks again to mel and to will for the opportunity to participate in this. Look thing out at the audience, there are any number of people who have written Copious Amounts on the cuban missile crisis and i have not so ive learned from all of you, but i appreciate the opportunity to try to disuntiti what i have learned and offer some lessons on how that may bear on contemporary matters. John f. Kennedy had already learned some important lessons by the time he had to confront moscows deployment of Nuclear Missiles to cuba. Several of these lessons involved matters related to personnel and process, and they would be immensely useful during the missile crisis in october of is the 62. Many of them grew out of kennedys earlier crisis over cuba, the failed operation at the bay of pigs, which meant that these lessons were especially hardearned. They were not without qualification, but by and large, they ended up serving him, the country and the world pretty well. Before highlighting these lessons, which may or not be applicable to contemporary u. S. Russia relations, i wanted to touch on the earlier history of the kennedy presidency which the president did not translate into useful insight and which contributed to the onset of the missile crisis itself. The first of these lessons involved not the more constructive ones related to personnel and process, but to the negative ones related to policy and actually policy pronouncement to be excessive eliterative, i suppose. Planning for the overthrow of fidel castro gained a full head of steam, kennedys rhetoric at the tail end of the 1960 president ial Campaign Came pretty close to his language in 1960 which called for aggressive action to undermine the cuban regime might have helped him win votes less than three weeks later. He certainly needed it. But it raised the political cost of cancelling what would welcome the bay of pigs operation where he had to have done so had he become when he became president. So heres the first case in the trajectory towards october 1962, where i think words really mattered. While this public pronouncement narrowed kennedys room for maneuver on cuba, once he became president , the failure of his administration to consider more creative policy measures stemmed from the absence of a searching conversation about the relative dangers that cuba posed. Was castro really a dag toger t the heart or more a thorn in the flesh as Senate Foreign relations chair had suggested . That conversation never really took place. While kennedy did whole a series of meetings large and small with those planning the bay of pigs operation and Senior Administration and military officials, they revolved largely around matters of tactics as opposed to the strategic implications of the operation or the assumptions alluded to. Both pronouncement and policy, statements about the necessity of moving against castro as well as the policy that was to affect it made it more likely that kennedy would mount some aggressive operation to undermine the castro regime once he became president. The persistence of that policy and even the intensification of it after the bay of pigs would later contribute to the onset of the missile crisis itself. As i mentioned in the paper and as tim and others here at the conference have documented so well, it was hardly the only reason for the missile deployment and the crisis that it sparked. But by the fall of 1961, Fidel Castros commanding more and more attention from the Kennedy Administration, which was devoting increasing resources to undermine the cuban regime. As those methods at subversion and sabotage came to look more menacing to both havana and to moscow, they helped push khrushchev towards action that might protect the cuban revolution with one of those actions being the deployment of Nuclear Missiles to the island. In the course of that deployment, kennedys overt rhetoric as well as the continuation of covert action would again complicate his presidency and again raise the stakes of not following through on his stated intentions. In an effort to once more derive political benefit from a policy statement on cuba, kennedy declared in september 1962, two months before the midterm elections, that the introduction of offensive weapon systems to the island would result in the gravest of circumstances. Effectively, establishing a public red line for all to see. So both Administration Policy and pronouncements about it continued to heighten the drama surrounding cuba, which helped to shape khrushchev and then kennedys responses to developments on the island. But if kennedy failed to recognize or to consider how these statements and activities might box himself into situations that created real risks for his presidency as well as for the nation and the world, he nonetheless took positive steps to ensure that the way he managed National Security policy gave him at least a better shot at getting good advice and making wiser judgements. Those measures included changes in personnel and process and both proved helpful in resolving the october missile crisis. For one, the aides he trusted most, particularly his brother robert, the attorney general, would come to play larger roles in National Security policy making and bobby would serve as chief conduit for the president s private conversations with moscow. As tim highlighted, those back channel conversations were not all to the good but they certainly helped to convey key bits of information at key moments of the crisis. Kennedy would also system ties National Security policy making more effectively, helping to improve the flow of information into the white house. And in an effort to really scrub the options for addressing the soviet missile deployment, kennedy encouraged extended conversations among his senior civilian and military aides shielded from public view before settling on an approach that gave himself and his adversary to time to reflect on the magnitude of what laid before them and to figure out how they might untie the knot of war. But perhaps of paramount importance was the judgement of the president himself, who are lurching towards a military response considered its less than ideal chances for success, its potential impact on allies and adversaries and the zealotry of those around him, particularly in the military, who supported it as virtually the only acceptable option. So if there is to be a heroic narrative to harken back to yesterday within the cold war about leader whos took chances, faced down the hawks calling for war and ultimately preferred that his kids be red rather than dead, kennedy should take at least one turn in that starring role, which id say he continued to earn through his subsequent efforts at arms control and his attempts to modulate the cold war, at least rhetorically through this American University address. So can elements of this heroic narrative spawn another one . How can this history provide useful lessons for contemporary u. S. Russian relations . Here are a few thoughts. On the matter of rhetoric, as i mentioned in my written piece and briefly this morning, red lines can be trouble. They were for kennedy, who felt constrained by the Politics Associated with them. Perhaps President Trumps wholly different posture towards russia means hes less likely to make them with regard to developments in ukraine or the ball baltics. Its easier to see him doing so with regard to north korea or iran, with syria he essentially acknowledged obamas red line and acted upon it. Given his lack of rhetorical discipline, his disdain for convention and his freewheeling use of new media, its probably more likely than not hell deliver this kind of an ultimatum before long, arguably he may calculate the political costs of doing so very differently than kennedy did. On playing for time and keeping the conversation going, these lessons from the missile crisis are particularly relevant for crisis situations. Though theyre suggestive of the value of maintaining contact and of cultivating relationships more broadly. Jawjaw is better than wawa as churchill is ladies and gentlemen of the juried alleged to have said. Which preand post dates the cold war, i would hope the virtues of diplomacy, enhancing ones capacity for empathy, another quality that we associate with kennedy and the missile crisis, would commend themselves to leaders on both sides. Finally on the matter of combining that diplomacy with force, it certainly complicates the narrative, the heroic narrative, if you will, that weve heard for awhile. To acknowledge that khrushchev had agreed to pack up the missiles and ship them home before hearing that jfk was willing to make the missile trade that khrushchev called for on the 12th day of the missile crisis. That shouldnt negate the value of the cuba for turkey missile swap, for khrushchevs own purposes, for allowing him to paper over his having to reverse course on his exceedingly risky maneuver, but it does suggest that the prospect of a military engagement prompted khrushchevs initial offer to remove the missiles in turn no a noninvasion pledge and to forego his public call for a missile swap when it seemed that war really was imminent. That said, this kind of brinksmanship could easily have resulted in Armed Conflict and potentially nuclearArmed Conflict, as many here as well as mike dobbs have written. So while kennedys mobilization of force really does seem to have made his diplomacy more effective, well need to be much more granular in outlining in what form, in what strategic context and with what implications it should be similarly mobilized if its to play a role in a more contemporary scenario in which americans and russians find themselves eyeballtoeyeball. Thanks. [ applause ] well, tims essay is has an especially evocative title. It is called grab god by the beard khrushchev and the kennedys. Thanks, barbara and thanks, mel, for inviting me back. Its nice to be home. In part because i drink a lot of espresso. But in part because im going to play on a word that my former colleague and friend, present friend mark mentioned which is granular. What we have for the 60s is a granular understanding of this period, both because of the american side, the tapes which i spent some time with here, and on the soviet side. So we have the capacity of understanding the International Politics and domestic politics of that period in a way that is not true of every period in International Politics. So were going to as youve just benefitted from that and listening to mark, im going to try to do the same on the soviet side. Now, to lay to lay the basis for this period, i want to mention or remind you of a few things. Because of the structure of this conference, we sort of jumped over korea. I believe that the korean war is fundamental to understanding the militarization of the cold war and that absent korea, you want to talk as jeremi mentioned, you want to talk about possibilities, you dont have the korean war and i think there is a change in the nature of the competition between the soviets and the United States. So perhaps in the q a we can talk about korea. Korea is extremely important. But there are two other things that are extraordinarily important that are happening in the world that are going to shape the environment that kennedy and khrushchev are seeking to manage. One is the decolonization of the what i guess mao first called third world and the developing world. Thats a very important event and that is an independent variable from the u. S. Soviet relationship, but it opens up the possibility for the soviets and khrushchev to khrushchev sees it as a source of opportunity. The other is a soviet achievement, and thats sputnik. And that changes the nature of the strategic relationship between the United States and the soviet union. As frank mentioned, once the American Homeland gets threatened, that raises questions about the extent to which extended deterrence is real. Real americans, as frank said, will americans actually put new york at risk for the sake of paris . And that happens because of sputnik. So you have these two destabilizing events that happen that are happening in the 50s and its that world that khrushchev and kennedy are seeking to manage. Now, khrushchevs approach to that world is not what americans anticipated. The sense that kennedy has coming into office is that there is so much Nuclear Danger about that why statesmanship involves reducing the threat of nuclear war, but as we will as we see with khrushchev, khrushchev is all about disruption. He is a disrupter. He is interested in crisis. And its why hes interested in crisis that i think is the essence of understanding his behavior, not simply in 1961, but in 1962. So let me let me talk to you about a summit conference in 1961 that people dont talk abou about. The one that everybody talks about is vienna. Im working on a book about kennedy. I want to apd tdd the 5,300th b on kennedy. Why not . For me, the more interesting conference is the gull kennedy conference because de gaulle and kennedy are very explicit about their understanding of the world and they share a lot. And de gaulles argument is and its an argument that has a relevance today. His argument is when you deal with a disrupter, you should ignore them. He says let khrushchev hyperventilate about berlin. Hes going to do nothing. He doesnt have the power to do anything, and the only thing you can do is actually increase his desire to disrupt by engaging him. Engagement is a mistake with a disrupter. And kennedys argument is, well, i cant take that chance. Hes already threatened us in 58, and if he does it again, it means hes seeking so