John F. Kennedy Participation on The Cuban Missile Crisis

Acting on these upgrade fears and suspicions, in 1961 the US trained and equipped 1,500 Cuban exiles in the hope that this force could invade and overthrow Castro; a dramatic failure, the Bay of Pigs invasion that resulted was a humiliation for the Kennedy administration and the US, and exacerbated tensions betwixt the US, Cuba, and the USSR. Fearing future attacks by the US, Castro's reliance on his Soviet benefactors became to a greater extent than military in nature. By 1962, the Soviet Union was supplying bombers and ground-to-ground missiles to her Cuban ally. The stage had been set for the Cuban missile Crisis (Thorpe & Staerck 29). On October 14, 1962, an American U2 plane spotted the new Cuban missiles. curtly the Kennedy Administration was faced with a Cuba that was allied with the Soviet Union, violent to the United States, and capable of delivering nuclear missiles to targets along the entire eastern seaboard (Thorpe & Staerck 29). This situation was unacceptable and demanded immediate action. But what should be d one(a)?

The delivery of missiles to Cuba by the Soviet Union be a significant quarrel to US security. To ignore this challenge would be to put American lives at risk. On the one hand, it was understood that the situation demanded retaliatory action from the United States; the closely severe reaction would involve the use of military style in the form of an invasion. This course, however, appeared certain to e

Time was of the essence. JFK created the Executive Committee (ExComm) to weigh the options, and this body met repeatedly for thirteen days. As a formal model of leadership, the ExComm was a crisis management committee. Consisting of twelve advisers, Kennedy sat at the helm and relied upon his team to provide him with detailed information and expert analysis (Staerck 34).

include in the ExComm were Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and lede Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff (Staerck 34). In spite of its exceedingly high-ranking membership, the ExComm was nonetheless an advisory board. JFK made the decisions that were ultimately carried out. In this, the ExComm functioned more like a committee than as an emergency response team; though a "fire" was certainly alight(p) in Cuba, the ExComm had the tenuous luxury of an extended debate, and was not unavoidable to spring into immediate action to douse the flames. Also, the ExComm was created precisely because at that place were no "procedures" in place for dealing with this brand of threat. conflicting a traditional emergency response team, the ExComm did not concord a code or a manual to solicitation to on matters such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. For these reasons, the ExComm was unique, and it is a testimony to JFK and his leadership that it was created and utilized with such success.

Thorpe, Keir & Staerck, Gillian. "The Cuban Missile Crisis." Modern History Review. Nov 2000. Vol 12 (2): 28.

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